Double Groove, Triple Time: On Josh Kun’s “Musical Urbanism”

What can music teach us about urban displacement?

It’s no secret: code, cash, and creativity are the new laws of the left-coast metropolis. Renewal is the new black, middle class the new broke, CS the new boom. Where our current political Twilight Zone stultifies, the hum of silicon innovation rends, disproportionately displacing people of color in San Francisco, Oakland, and elsewhere. And as cultural historian Josh Kun reveals in his latest, many musicians heard it coming.

On a recent visit to Stanford from the University of Southern California, Kun—Professor of Communication and recipient of a 2016 MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship—shared a snippet of a new, broad, deftly interdisciplinary research project entitled “Sound, Race, and the City: Musical Urbanism in Los Angeles and San Francisco.” Identifying a need to uncover stories that map how cities like LA and SF have changed over the last forty years—to amplify the b-sides of soaring rents, virtual gold rushes, and rapid exodus—Kun shared the beginnings of a large, multi-platform project spanning academic writing, museum exhibits, public talks, and artist collaborations. He revealed soundtracks of the race-class interface of gentrification, of the market tantrums of twinkling avenues. He sketched, in a phrase, a sonic history of urban displacement.

Anchored in crate digging, careful listening, and artful storytelling, Kun gave his audience a sense of this history by presenting, among a trove of examples, the work of California band Harvey: an eighties power trio of (literal) black brothers—Regi, Doni, and Chris Harvey—native to San Francisco and concerned about its future. As Kun shared, Harvey’s concerns found form in a defining record, Survivor: Population 3: eight tracks of black Bay Area hair metal preserved in wax and bearing the leather-clad likenesses of glam punk’s finest. (A rebellion in itself, as the face of those spit-rock rebellions—excluding game-changing acts like 24-7 Spyz, Living Colour, and Bad Brains—was virtually always white.)

As Kun pointed out, Harvey, in concert with other bands, was using music to think through the issue of black displacement. And they were prescient—even prophetic—“in a way they couldn’t have predicted.” To wit: “when the record was made in 1985,” Kun explained, “the black population of San Francisco was hovering around 38%. Now, that number is estimated to be down to 13%.” Churning riffs, hard-earned lyrics, and wildly inventive cover art became the tools for this band and others to respond to a rapidly changing urban geography—to comment in earnest, to survive in sound.

This survival—both Harvey’s record and the struggles it represents—foreground the musical and racial dimensions of the city’s changing demography. The story of survival also helps fill in, as Jeff Chang describes it in his recent We Gon’ Be Alright (2016), not only the pressing issue of gentrification, but also a larger narrative of resegregation.

Resegregation, for Chang, frames caffeine-crazed gentrification as symptomatic; it acknowledges that today’s displacements are “only the visible side of the larger problem,” only the latest turn in a “new geography of race that has emerged since the turn of the millennium” (Chang 71–72). The current race for the city, in other words, grinds atop a history of race in the city. And as Kun relayed during his Stanford visit, “resegregation describes a huge part of the transformations happening in San Francisco that I believe Harvey, like so many other musicians, were trying to think through and respond to in direct and indirect ways.”

This new work Kun is pursuing builds on his impressive track record of grappling with what he once called the “audio-racial imagination”: “the extent to which meanings and ideas about race, racial identity, and racialization within the United States have been generated, developed, and experienced at the level of sound and music” (Audiotopia 26). Key to the enterprise is close, critical listening—a practice that is as much an ethical-political effort as a historical methodology. To listen, for Kun, is to search for the double grooves in local cultures, to seek scenes writ “noisy” by the droning new finance, and to map, as he put it, “the relationship between music and redevelopment, revitalization and renewal.” Or, bigger, louder: to chase the music in cities, “to hear cities as music.”

As Kun explained, “There’s something about the urban form that is inherently musical. And, there’s something about the musical form that gives us a model for how cities can function: through sociality, mutual listening, collaborative work, desire, energy.” Contributing today to a growing body of scholarship on what he calls “musical urbanism”—and offering volumes to a running dialogue among musicologists and urban theorists, cultural historians and sound hounds—Kun chases the ways music and its constitutive elements trace “the politics of freedom” in our urban wonderworlds: hotbeds of collision and conflict, coordination and collaboration, memory and erasure. Thinking about cities this way, Kun argues, equips us to hear something crucial: where each live show, jam session, and recording slot contribute to a rich database of a city’s self-portraits, every act of listening mobilizes, connects, traffics, transforms. To listen is to excavate, to embrace, to enact.

This autumn, Kun’s Musical Interventions—a series of six live musical events featuring Chicano Batman, João Donato, The Mexican Institute of Sound, and bandleader/arranger Alberto Lopez of Jungle Fire—will celebrate unsung Latinx heroes of Los Angeles’s musical past, adding a specialrichness to the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. The series will also be accompanied by a new essay collection: The Tide Was Always High: The Music of Latin America in Los Angeles (UC Press 2017). Both projects are the products of collaboration, tributes to close listening; both celebrate what’s possible to learn from a city by queuing up its vibrant soniverse.  

And ultimately, it’s here—by the stage, in the booth, at the archive, near the heart—where Kun begins and ends. “All the work starts with an object,” he says. “Usually a piece of music that takes physical form through an LP.” Unlocking that object’s sounds makes music a collective story. The wattage of youth culture becomes the gift of black glam. The calculus of urban life becomes the clarity of falsetto creeds. The hardships and harmonies of yesteryear become “literal records of who we’ve been and where we’re going.” And listening carefully, keenly, as Kun demonstrated in his talk, becomes key to remapping our glinting cities, our fever dreams.