#188: More Songs About Buildings and Food

“Almost everything of interest in New York City lies in some degree of proximity to music,” Luc Sante declares in the opening line of his autobiographical essay about the city’s culture in the 1970s, before launching into a frenetic first-person tour of the local zeitgeist that lurches from record stores to punk venues to underground newspapers to radio fragments emanating from boomboxes and “hazy orally transmitted lore of dubious provenance”—the downtown cross-pollination of punk, reggae, disco, hip hop, the demise of the ‘60s, and the palpable sense of an emerging Now that was strikingly different from what had preceded it. “The bass these days is often physically present, issuing from bars and passing cars and pizzerias and record stores and clothing shops, but it is always in your head because it is indelible.” Today—a half century later—we still inhabit the landscape that was coalescing in Sante’s account, but it’s no longer quite true that everything of interest is adjacent to music. Music is everywhere, of course—more so now than it was then—but that ubiquity has made it into a decorative backdrop, a form of sonic wallpaper, at least in the situations where music doesn’t occupy the foreground. It has been naturalized and assimilated and somewhat defanged in the process. In 1998, when this transition had already reached a mature phase, Richard Meltzer wrote that rock music "was possibly once needed, but that was before it was everywhere—when you didn’t hear it in supermarkets or coming out of every Mercedes at a stoplight—before ‘rock-surround.’ What we need now is to turn it off.”

Rock-surround was enabled by the technological infrastructure of music, which transformed it from a set of discrete events into a freely flowing aether that could fill any available space—a metamorphosis that almost all analog information similarly underwent (we call it content now). In Sante’s description, music always had a physical presence: It was not just the bass that you felt in your body but something still elusive and housed in specific locations. One had to hunt it down in record stores and small clubs and discover it by reading obscure publications and talking to cool people, or by hearing it on the street. Now, as Meltzer said, that music is just everywhere, and we’re as likely to crave silence, which is more scarce. When Spotify uses the term “discovery,” it’s code for force-feeding you more of what you’re already overeating. The technological evolution of music not only made music more prevalent but minimized the physical infrastructure needed to transmit it: nearly everything Sante describes, except for live performance, eventually migrated online. Headphones, meanwhile, have privatized individual listening while shielding us from a public soundscape that they reframe as a nuisance. Music has deurbanized, in other words, decoupling from the spatial environments that birthed it—still present throughout the city but less fundamental to its physical fabric.

If music is no longer the common thread that runs through everything interesting in a city like New York, then what is? Maybe food. Still unavoidably physical, the culinary sphere seems to have expanded to fill the void left by the dematerialization of other cultural domains. Our sensory experience of the city is defined by whatever physically imprints itself on the landscape, and right now that is restaurants and bars. My friend TW Lim, who writes about the culture and business of food, recently published a short essay describing his pilgrimage to a well-known restaurant in the English countryside, a disappointing dining experience he subsequently redeemed with a visit to a pub called the Hind’s Head: “Everyone was drinking alone, but the drinkers were also all involved in a single conversation that occasionally engulfed the bartender, and, naturally, any strangers who happened to wander in.” The bar’s customers, Lim observed, were what made it great, forming a quasi-community that the establishment itself could not have engineered. On further reflection, however, he realizes that this community is somewhat artificial, a product of wealth-gated homogeneity: “Restaurants are not characterized by their guests, but by their regulars, and to be a regular, you not only have to be able to afford to eat somewhere, but to live near it.” Food, music, or any other core element of the physical urban fabric are not just rewards of city life but also sources of value, and the process of capturing that value and even incubating it grows more sophisticated all the time. Sante’s essay ends on an ominous note, looking ahead to the gentrification he knows is coming in hindsight. “The weird are turning pro. The pros are moving to more discreet zip codes. We realize we are absolutely unprepared for any of this, which as far as we know was brought about by the music.” Now we know with more certainty: If the music didn’t bring it about, something else would have.

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