Épisodes

  • Lost Women of Disco

    Lost Women of Disco
    Jul 22 2025
    Women have been central to the evolution of dance music culture since its earliest days, yet their contributions have often been overlooked. From Régine Zylberberg's pioneering work in creating the modern discotheque in 1950s Paris to Sharon White's trailblazing presence at New York's legendary venues in the 1970s, female DJs have shaped dance floors worldwide. Sharon White broke barriers as a Black queer radio DJ, finding her way into the booth at the Paradise Garage in 1975. She became the first female DJ to play at the revered Saint club and spun records at Studio 54. Her influence can be seen in later pioneers like London's Smokin' Jo, who emerged from the British acid house scene to become one of England's most celebrated DJs and the only woman to be awarded DJ of the Year in DJ Magazine's Top 100. In the second episode of Season Two of Soundscapes NYC, hosts Ryan Purcell and Kristie Soares welcome DJ, academic, and journalist Lulu Le Vay to explore the often-untold stories of women in dance music culture. Le Vay, who holds a PhD in Sociology from Goldsmiths and performs as DJ Lulu Levan, represents a new generation of "PhDJs" combining academic inquiry with dance floor experience. From writing for publications like The Face, i-D, and The Guardian to spinning at festivals like Lovebox and Bestival, she documents club culture from multiple perspectives. Currently working on a documentary about women DJs with director Sonja Phillips, Le Vay is also part of Love Underground, a new collaboration with producer Tommy D whose new single "The Journey Part 1" is out on Chillifunk records. Through her podcast Where Love Lives and her work preserving dance music history, Le Vay continues celebrating the women who built the foundations of club culture. Contact Soundscapes NYC Here Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music
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    50 min
  • Kelefa Sanneh, "Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres" (Penguin, 2021)

    Kelefa Sanneh, "Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres" (Penguin, 2021)
    Jul 20 2025
    Kelefa Sanneh was born in England, and lived in Ghana and Scotland before moving with his parents to the United States in the early 1980s. He was a pop music critic at the New York Times from 2000-2008, and has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since then. His first book, just released on Penguin, is called Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres. The book refracts the entire history of popular music over the past fifty years through the big genres that have defined and dominated it—rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance music, and pop—as an art form (actually, a bunch of art forms), as a cultural and economic force, and as a tool that we use to build our identities. Sanneh shows how these genres have been defined by the tension between mainstream and outsider, between authenticity and phoniness, between good and bad, right and wrong. Throughout, race is a powerful touchstone: just as there have always been Black audiences and white audiences, with more or less overlap depending on the moment, there has been Black music and white music, constantly mixing and separating. Sanneh debunks cherished myths, reappraises beloved heroes, and upends familiar ideas of musical greatness, arguing that sometimes, the best popular music isn’t transcendent. Songs express our grudges as well as our hopes, and they are motivated by greed as well as idealism; music is a powerful tool for human connection, but also for human antagonism. This is a book about the music everyone loves, the music everyone hates, and the decades-long argument over which is which. Franz Nicolay is a musician and writer living in New York's Hudson Valley. His first book, The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar, was named a "Season's Best Travel Book" by The New York Times. Buzzfeed called his second book, Someone Should Pay for Your Pain, "a knockout fiction debut." He teaches at Bard College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music
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    1 h et 3 min
  • Jubilee (1978)

    Jubilee (1978)
    Jul 19 2025
    In the ninth episode of Soundscapes NYC, host Ryan Purcell traces the trans-Atlantic movement of artists associated with punk culture in New York and London. In conversation with British cultural historian Matt Worley, we follow New York-based artists like Jayne (née Wayne) County, Johnny Thunders, Jerry Nolan, and others to the U.K. where they embedded themselves in a growing music-based subculture. As the punk aesthetic expanded internationally it diversified in form incorporating elements of fashion, literature, and cinema like Derek Jarman’s apocalyptic masterpiece JUBILEE (1978). Matt Worley is a Professor of Modern History at the University of Reading and author of numerous books that cover modern British history with a special focus on music and the British Labor movement. His book No Future: Punk, Politics and British Your Culture, 1976-1984 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) explores the evolution of punk as a fashion, a musical form, an attitude, and an overall aesthetic. Setting punk culture against a backdrop of social fragmentation, violence, high unemployment, and socio-economic change, Worley recaptures punk's anarchic force as a medium through which the frustrated and the disaffected could reject, revolt, and re-invent. Contact Soundscapes NYC Here Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music
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    49 min
  • Megan Volpert, "Why Alanis Morissette Matters" (University of Texas Press, 2025)

    Megan Volpert, "Why Alanis Morissette Matters" (University of Texas Press, 2025)
    Jul 18 2025
    The first critical biography of iconic musician Alanis Morissette, creator of Jagged Little Pill. The 1990s hardly saw a bigger hit than Jagged Little Pill. Alanis Morissette's defining album won Grammys, dominated the Billboard charts, and sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. It left a deep mark on the psyches of countless listeners. Three decades later, Megan Volpert checks in with Morissette, probing her rich and varied post-JLP career and bearing feminist witness to the existential anger that ties her recent work to enduring classics like "You Oughta Know," "One Hand in My Pocket," and "Ironic." Why Alanis Morissette Matters (UT Press, 2025) builds a bridge from Jagged Little Pill to the fascinating life and subtle intellect of its creator, exploring how the artist's philosophical interests and personal journey are reflected in each track. Morissette's struggles with censorship, mental health challenges, and Catholicism; her queer allyship, spiritual skepticism, zealous fandom, and philanthropic passions--all are carefully observed by a critic whose own life was touched by Jagged Little Pill. In the album's wake, Morissette has evolved as an artist and global citizen. With sensitivity and a profound love for the music, Volpert guides readers through the case for Morissette's enduring cultural relevance and creative impact. Megan Volpert is the author or editor of over a dozen books on popular culture, including two Lambda Literary Award finalists and an American Library Association honoree. She is the author of Straight Into Darkness: Tom Petty as Rock Mystic and she won Georgia Author of the Year for Boss Broad. She teaches at Kennesaw State and Reinhardt Universities. Megan Volpert on Facebook. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) and Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming book is U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, October 2025). Bradley Morgan on Facebook and Bluesky. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music
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    57 min
  • Triauna Carey, "The Revolution Will Be Spotified: Music As a Rhetorical Mode of Resistance" (Lexington Books, 2024)

    Triauna Carey, "The Revolution Will Be Spotified: Music As a Rhetorical Mode of Resistance" (Lexington Books, 2024)
    Jul 18 2025
    The Revolution Will Be Spotified: Music As a Rhetorical Mode of Resistance (Lexington Books, 2024) investigates the rhetorical strategies present in mainstream popular music and how those strategies are implemented to empower resistance. Case studies across the genres of popular music in the West are surveyed throughout the book to consider the power of music as a rhetorical tool during cultural flashpoints and times of crisis. Carey analyzes songs such as “This is America” by Childish Gambino, “Alien Superstar” by Beyoncé, “Thought Contagion” by Muse, and more to consider the impact of contemporary music on culture and social justice movements. Scholars of rhetoric and composition, communication, cultural studies, and ethnomusicology will find this book particularly interesting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music
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    50 min
  • Rock 'N' Roll Resurrection

    Rock 'N' Roll Resurrection
    Jul 12 2025
    In the eighth episode of Soundscapes NYC, host Ryan Purcell talks with music history professor Steve Waksman about the social and stylistic transformation of the New York rock scene during the mid-1970s. The introduction of new bands clashed with the old guard, culminating with a violent altercation between artists in CBGB in March 1976. In 2024, Waksman accepted the Leverhulme International Professorship in Music in the Department of Media, Humanities, and the Arts at the University of Huddersfield (UK) where for the next five years he will conduct a comprehensive study of how music and culture have developed since the invention of sound amplification. Waksman is the former Elsie Irwin Sweeney Professor of Music and American Studies at Smith College, and the author of numerous books on music history including Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (Harvard University Press, 1999), This Ain't the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (University of California Press, 2009), and Live Music in America: A History from Jenny Lind to Beyoncé (Oxford University Press, 2022). Contact Soundscapes NYC Here Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music
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    55 min
  • Neil Gregor, "The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

    Neil Gregor, "The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
    Jul 12 2025
    A new history of how the musical worlds of German towns and cities were transformed during the Nazi era. In the years after the Nazis came to power in January 1933 and through the war years all aspects of life in Germany changed. However, despite the social and political upheaval, gentile citizens were able to continue leisure activities such as attending concerts. In this book, historian Neil Gregor surveys the classical concert scene in Nazi Germany from the perspective of the audience, rather than institutions or performers. Gregor delves into the cultural lives of ordinary Germans under conditions of dictatorship. Did the ways in which Germans heard music in the period change? Did a Nazi way of listening emerge? For audiences, Gregor shows, changes to the concert experience were small and often took place around the edges. This, combined with the preserved idea of the concert hall as a space of imagined civility and cultivation, led many concertgoers and music lovers to claim after the war that their field and their practice had been innocent--a place to retreat from the vicious violence and racism of the Nazi regime. Drawing on untapped archival sources, The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany reveals that the true history was one of disruption but also of near effortless adaptation. Through countless small acts, the symphony concert was reframed within the languages of strident nationalism, racism, and militarism to ensure its place inside the cultural cosmos of National Socialist Germany. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music
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    32 min
  • Andrew S. Berish, "Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)

    Andrew S. Berish, "Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)
    Jul 10 2025
    Andrew S. Berish. 2025. Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse. (U of Chicago Press, 2025) Some good words from the inside flap: “ A deep dive into the meaning behind the hatred of jazz.A rock guitarist plays four notes in front of one thousand people, while a jazz guitarist plays one thousand notes in front of four people. You might laugh or groan at this jazz joke, but what is it about jazz that makes people want to disparage it in the first place?Andrew S. Berish’s Hating Jazz listens to the voices who have denounced, disparaged, and mocked the music. By focusing on the rejection of the music, Berish says, we see more holistically jazz’s complicated place in American cultural life. Jazz is a display of Black creativity and genius, an art form that is deeply embedded in African American life. Though the explicit racial tenor of jazz jokes has become muted over time, making fun of jazz, either in a lighthearted or aggressive way, is also an engagement with the place of Blackness in America. An individual’s taste in music may seem personal, but Berish’s analysis of jazz hatred demonstrates that musical preferences and trends are a social phenomenon. Criticism of jazz has become inextricable from the ways we understand race in America, past and present. In addition to this form of criticism, Berish also considers jazz hate as a form of taste discrimination and as a conflict over genre boundaries within different jazz cultures.Both enlightening and original, Hating Jazz shows that our response to music can be a social act, unique to our historical moment and cultural context—we react to music in certain ways because of who we are, where we are, and when we are. “ Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University nathan.smith@yale.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music
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    1 h et 16 min