Corner, Basement, Garage: Reused Spaces and Vernacular Sounds in Metropolitan America, 1945–1985

Keywords: cultural geography, urban geography, historical geography, sound, music, vernacular architecture
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 22

Abstract

How might we retell well-worn urban histories of postwar abandonment, flight, and enclosure in terms of music and sound? How, in turn, to think those sounds in terms of the minute and intimate built environments in which they emerged — vernacular buildings and landscapes that became musical only through their reuse, and then according to urges and imperatives that their builders could likely never have envisioned? This paper, a critical historical geography of American sound and/as landscape, traces lines of flight that transect three postwar genres named, and identified, in ways that remain entirely coupled to their spaces: the urban “street-corner” (and “barber-shop”) singing, especially Black and Black-adjacent, of the immediate postwar aftermath; the suburban, strikingly White “garage rock” of the middle 1960s; and the culture of “basement shows,” from 1980 constellated around hardcore punk scenes in some of the very same suburbs but aggregating into larger, putatively resistant national and transnational networks. In each case, space, race, and sound articulate in highly specific formations, both above and below ground, at the scale of the lot, building, room, and body. In each case, the geographer must confront how buildings’ and landscapes’ physical affordances give rise to politics and relations unplanned for but never entirely uncontained by the site. The street corner, the garage, and the basement — so often the quiet ephemera that decorate undertheorized studies of vernacular architecture — emerge as unruly, undetermined sonic spaces that have undergone, and must still harbor, radical reuse.