The Seventies was a calamitous decade, a low point in the history of New York City. City Hall continually failed to balance budgets and turned to austerity, privatization, and sheer negligence when it came to running city services. Roads disintegrated, buildings and overpasses collapsed, garbage piled high, and crime ran rampant. The city literally crumbled under the weight of austerity.
At the same time, underground culture surged with energy, from subway graffiti to experimental theater and gay bars. Musical artists embedded in the urban fabric turned to their craft with gusto. They formed loose networks of like-minded artists who made and appreciated particular styles of music. Their world during this period, at times, reflected the disintegrating cityscape. At other times, their music celebrated the social constraints let loose in a time of crisis, when the city seemed to be falling apart.
Soundscapes is a podcast about how music created in New York has shaped the history of the city and how the city itself has been an incubator in which music has blossomed throughout its history. Soundscapes is a bi-weekly podcast series in which historian Ryan Donovan Purcell talks with artists, music industry professionals, and scholars about NYC music history.
About the hosts: Ryan Donovan Purcell is a professor of modern American History at Sarah Lawrence College while serving on the editorial board at the Gotham Center for New York City History at the CUNY Graduate Center. Soundscapes draws from his book Sounds of the City Collapsing, forthcoming with Columbia University Press.
Kristie Soares is an Associate Professor of Women & Gender Studies and Co-Director of LGBTQ Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Author of Playful Protest: The Political Work of Joy in Latinx Media (2023), Soares is currently conducting an oral history project that explores the role of Latinx disc jockeys in the development of dance music in 1970s New York. This is part of a larger book project entitled Macho Man: Performances of Latinidad in the Disco Era.
IG: @soundscapesnyc
Tt: @soundsacpes.nyc
Gotham Center: https://www.gothamcenter.org/
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The Seventies was a calamitous decade, a low point in the history of New York City. City Hall continually failed to balance budgets and turned to austerity, privatization, and sheer negligence when it came to running city services. Roads disintegrated, buildings and overpasses collapsed, garbage piled high, and crime ran rampant. The city literally crumbled under the weight of austerity.
At the same time, underground culture surged with energy, from subway graffiti to experimental theater and gay bars. Musical artists embedded in the urban fabric turned to their craft with gusto. They formed loose networks of like-minded artists who made and appreciated particular styles of music. Their world during this period, at times, reflected the disintegrating cityscape. At other times, their music celebrated the social constraints let loose in a time of crisis, when the city seemed to be falling apart.
Soundscapes is a podcast about how music created in New York has shaped the history of the city and how the city itself has been an incubator in which music has blossomed throughout its history. Soundscapes is a bi-weekly podcast series in which historian Ryan Donovan Purcell talks with artists, music industry professionals, and scholars about NYC music history.
About the hosts: Ryan Donovan Purcell is a professor of modern American History at Sarah Lawrence College while serving on the editorial board at the Gotham Center for New York City History at the CUNY Graduate Center. Soundscapes draws from his book Sounds of the City Collapsing, forthcoming with Columbia University Press.
Kristie Soares is an Associate Professor of Women & Gender Studies and Co-Director of LGBTQ Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Author of Playful Protest: The Political Work of Joy in Latinx Media (2023), Soares is currently conducting an oral history project that explores the role of Latinx disc jockeys in the development of dance music in 1970s New York. This is part of a larger book project entitled Macho Man: Performances of Latinidad in the Disco Era.
IG: @soundscapesnyc
Tt: @soundsacpes.nyc
Gotham Center: https://www.gothamcenter.org/
On July 12, 1979, Chicago’s Comiskey Park erupted into chaos during what was supposed to be a quirky baseball promotion. Shock radio jock Steve Dahl’s “Disco Demolition Night” incentivized listeners to bring disco records to a White Socks doubleheader, where, between games Dahl promised to blow them up in center field. Instead, the event descended into a riot, forcing the team to forfeit. On the surface, the incendiary event looked like a wild publicity stunt gone wrong — but in hindsight, it was tantamount to a book burning. In retrospect, the destruction of thousands of disco records was a symbolic rejection of the social meanings the sounds held, particularly for queer communities of color. The night marked not just the literal destruction of vinyl but a cultural turning point when disco’s dazzling reign collapsed under backlash. Or did it? In this episode, we explore how a stadium stunt revealed the deeper racial, sexual, and generational tensions shaping American music at the dawn of the 1980s.
In episode seven, host Ryan Purcell and Kristie Soares talk with Gillian Frank is a historian of gender, sexuality, religion, and politics in the twentieth-century United States at Trinity College, Dublin. He is a managing editor of NOTCHES: (re)marks on the history of sexuality and co-host of the podcast Sexing History, which explores how the past shapes contemporary debates about sex. Frank’s scholarship has appeared in leading academic journals and edited volumes, and he has held research fellowships at Princeton and other institutions. His current book project examines the history of child adoption and foster care in the U.S., tracing how religion, race, and politics shaped family formation in modern America.
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Soundscapes NYC
The Seventies was a calamitous decade, a low point in the history of New York City. City Hall continually failed to balance budgets and turned to austerity, privatization, and sheer negligence when it came to running city services. Roads disintegrated, buildings and overpasses collapsed, garbage piled high, and crime ran rampant. The city literally crumbled under the weight of austerity.
At the same time, underground culture surged with energy, from subway graffiti to experimental theater and gay bars. Musical artists embedded in the urban fabric turned to their craft with gusto. They formed loose networks of like-minded artists who made and appreciated particular styles of music. Their world during this period, at times, reflected the disintegrating cityscape. At other times, their music celebrated the social constraints let loose in a time of crisis, when the city seemed to be falling apart.
Soundscapes is a podcast about how music created in New York has shaped the history of the city and how the city itself has been an incubator in which music has blossomed throughout its history. Soundscapes is a bi-weekly podcast series in which historian Ryan Donovan Purcell talks with artists, music industry professionals, and scholars about NYC music history.
About the hosts: Ryan Donovan Purcell is a professor of modern American History at Sarah Lawrence College while serving on the editorial board at the Gotham Center for New York City History at the CUNY Graduate Center. Soundscapes draws from his book Sounds of the City Collapsing, forthcoming with Columbia University Press.
Kristie Soares is an Associate Professor of Women & Gender Studies and Co-Director of LGBTQ Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Author of Playful Protest: The Political Work of Joy in Latinx Media (2023), Soares is currently conducting an oral history project that explores the role of Latinx disc jockeys in the development of dance music in 1970s New York. This is part of a larger book project entitled Macho Man: Performances of Latinidad in the Disco Era.
IG: @soundscapesnyc
Tt: @soundsacpes.nyc
Gotham Center: https://www.gothamcenter.org/
