Launched in 2024, Soundscapes N.Y.C. is a podcast about how music created in New York has shaped the history of the city and how throughout its history the city itself has been an incubator for new music. It is a bi-monthly podcast series in which Sarah Lawrence College historian Ryan Purcell, talks with artists, music industry professionals, and scholars about New York City music history. The podcast will be organized into five seasons, each focusing on a distinct genre of music: punk rock, disco, hip-hop, salsa, and techno.
The first season, which debuted in September 2024, includes a wide variety of guests commenting on Punk Rock. Some are important historical figures, like Tony Zanetta (President of MainMan, David Bowie’s rights management company), and A-list literary celebrities like Lucy Sante. Others, like Jesse Rifkin, the founder of Walk on the Wild Side Tours LLC, highlight the relevance of this music history as its traces remain in New York City streets. The Metropole sat down with Purcell, the podcast’s host and founder, to discuss its trajectory.
How did the idea for Soundscapes N.Y.C. come together? How did you come to collaborate with the Gotham Center on this project?
Soundscapes N.Y.C. started as an American Studies lecture course that I teach at Sarah Lawrence College called American Soundscapes. My course is based on Fordham University history professor Mark Naison’s class on popular music called From Rock to Hip Hop, but I introduce the soundscape framework to highlight historical interactions at the intersection of race, popular music, and urban space. In conjunction with the lecture, I produce a semi-annual concert series where student participants contribute performances under themes such as “music and social justice” (Spring 2024) and I invite esteemed scholars like Naison to deliver plenary speeches. The popularity of both the lecture and the music festivals have led to the Soundscapes N.Y.C. podcast that I currently produce. The show draws from historical material, scholars, and frameworks that I employ in the course. Guests on the show often visit my lectures too.
I view the podcast as an extension of my work at the Gotham Center for New York City History at the City University of New York Graduate Center. In 2021, I was appointed as an Associate Editor of the Gotham Center’s blog, and in this capacity I edit original submissions and book reviews for publication. Soundscapes N.Y.C. expands upon the Gotham Center’s digital publications by offering original interviews with leading scholars of music and urban history, thereby contributing to conversations about the cultural and social meanings of music in New York City’s history. Soundscapes N.Y.C. adds to the Gotham Center’s vibrant stable of podcasts including shows like Sites and Sounds (produced in collaboration with Open House New York), and New Books in NYC History (produced in collaboration with the New Books Network).
It seems like after being maligned for decades, the 1970s has really received a lot of attention from historians in the 21st century. What is it about that period that draws in historians like yourself?
In 2015 the great writer Edmund White wrote a piece in the New York Times called “Why Can’t We Stop Talking About New York in the Late 1970s?” White identified a kind of paradox of collective memory: the Seventies were some of the bleakest years in the city’s history, yet in the early 21st century, White found in contemporary arts and literature an enduring fascination with the decade. In part, White attributes this to a strong current of nostalgia, even among those who never lived through the era, for what today might seem an edgy and dangerous place and time to experience. But White then suggested that this nostalgia represents a craving for a city that even at its worst was also more democratic and accessible than today. It was a time when “rents were low, when would-be writers, singers, dancers could afford to live in Manhattan’s (East, if not West) Village, before everyone marginal was further marginalized by being squeezed out to Bushwick or Hoboken…In the ‘70s creative people of all sorts could meet without plans, could give each other tips or discuss burgeoning theories or markets or movement.”[1] In a way scholarly fixation on that decade in New York is a means of understanding the city today.
I am also reminded of my conversation with British historian Matt Worley, which will be released as a podcast episode on January 18th. In that conversation Worley suggested that scholarly interest in the Seventies could have something to do with the sense that the decade seems to be a historical juncture; the end of something and the start of something else. And whatever started then (many describe it as “neoliberalism”) seems to be unraveling in the age we live in now. “The Seventies,” Kim Phillips-Fein suggests in Fear City, “marked the moment before the rise of neoliberal New York, the emergence of Donald Trump, the stock market’s climb—a time when New York (and America) still felt open, when one could dream of a different future in a way that no longer seems possible.”[2] And things are changing and mutating again today. I share Worley’s suspicion that we are on the cusp of a new period or epoch where things like social definitions, political traditions, even the basic market economy are again in flux. In other words, exploring the 1970s is an attempt to understand our present historical circumstance.
One of the themes over the first few episodes is this attempt to reconceptualize what many call “the punk movement” of the late 1970s, notably in terms of gender and sexuality. How did this line of thought develop as you prepared for the podcast?
Soundscapes N.Y.C. attempts to queer the history of Punk Rock by demonstrating the connections between the local New York rock scene and the grassroots push for gay liberation in New York during the 1970s. Since the mid-1960s, absurdist theatrical companies like John Vacarro’s Play-House of the Ridiculous had utilized cross-gender casting, drag performance, and absurdist antics to critique society by highlighting the plasticity of gender constructs. Decades before Judith Butler wrote about gender as performance these actors played it on stage. The careers of musicians like Patti Smith, David Johansen, and Jayne County are key. Before they fronted punk bands these singers acted in such radical queer theater companies. Some, like Jayne County, were active in the Stonewall uprising and demonstrated. In the podcast I show how these figures carried satirical theater over to their bands in the early 1970s. It was a brief period of heightened gender fluidity. Bands celebrated gender exploration in song and in effect, reflecting a sea change in society. By the end of the Seventies the gender-nonconforming impulse in New York rock had evaporated or morphed into other forms, like the band Kiss. The genderqueer aspect of New York rock has since been obscured or whitewashed by subsequent histories.
What have been the biggest obstacles or challenges? In other words, what would you warn prospective podcasters about?
There was a learning curve with understanding the technology behind podcasting. In the summer of 2024, I conducted an intense process of self-education to understand the programs, conventions, and workflow to create a podcast series. I consulted experts like Anne Heppermann, a Peabody award-winning audio journalist who has worked on numerous shows including This American Life, Radiolab, 99% Invisible, and Studio360, among others. Heppermann teaches a course on podcasting at Sarah Lawrence College, and she gave me confidence by suggesting that if her undergrads could make a podcast then I could definitely make one.
With more technical queries, such as specific audio production programs, I relied on online tutorials. But mostly I learned from my students. As I mentioned above, the Soundscapes N.Y.C. project is tied to a lecture course. It was my students in that lecture who urged me to make a podcast. I have also had the privileged position of hiring student Production Assistants who have helped drive the project forward. My PAs have been instrumental in conducting marketing communications, audio engineering, social media content creation, and event planning around the podcast. In return, PAs get a stipend from the college, and hands-on experience with producing a digital humanities project.
Soundscapes N.Y.C. feels like it’s in dialogue with a rash of books and documentaries about the punk movement over the past 25 years including works like Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain or American Hardcore by Stephen Blush, films like Velvet Goldmine, and documentaries such as Don Letts’s The Clash: Westway to the World and Julien Temple’s The Filth and the Furry. However, as noted you seem to be in dialogue with but not necessarily reifying the arguments or narratives from those works. How accurate is this observation?
One of the new narratives of New York punk that I hope to introduce in Soundscapes N.Y.C. is how the local rock network served as a vector of trans visibility. This narrative is unique because it highlights a moment of resistance at a time when trans people were being alienated from gay rights organizations as a means of appealing to the political establishment in the pursuit of legislation to protect gays rights (a Gay Rights Bill was introduced to New York City Council in 1971, but did not pass until 1986). The work of organizations like Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.) laid an important foundation for trans rights in New York during the 1970s. But the movement had sonic and cultural dimensions as well. The early days of punk illustrate a strange synergy of trans activism and experimental arts that begs scholarly exploration.
In the course of researching and recording the podcasts, did you reevaluate any of your positions on the themes or issues of the era? Did you find it confirming your priors, challenging them, or some combination of both?
The concept for the Soundscapes N.Y.C. podcast comes from my graduate work in the History PhD program at Cornell University. The guest list for the show comes directly from the bibliography of my dissertation (now my book). So, researching topics and recording conversations with guests confirmed my perspective on how the rock circuit in New York City was connected to radical queer arts and activism during the 1970s. However, this process further revealed the extent to which this was true.
Despite these confirmations I discovered new aspects of this history while producing the podcast. I was surprised to learn how much what we might call the “punk movement” was actually disjointed and resulted out of happenstance. The congregation of rock bands at gritty bars like CBGB, for example, occurred because of the dearth of venues willing to take a chance on artists who were unsigned with record labels. Punk may appear today like a “movement,” perhaps because bands in the 1970s had only a few choices when it came to venues. It happened on a small scale. Even if they did not know each other on a first-name basis, artists and fans were familiar faces, and recognized one another on the street and subways. The podcast illuminates the sonic diversity of bands that fall under the umbrella of “punk” in 1970s New York. For example, while bands like the New York Dolls and the Ramones articulated a power-pop sound, bands like Television and Dead Boys had a more hard rock sensibility.
Finally, I underestimated the degree of nihilism that influenced downtown artists of all stripes during the Seventies. In many cases, it was not a pleasant experience to live and work in New York City during that decade. It was a low point in the history of New York City. City Hall continually failed to balance budgets and turned to austerity, privatization, and sheer neglect when it came to running city services. Roads disintegrated, buildings and overpasses collapsed, garbage piled high, and crime ran rampant. This city was a mess which engendered a bleak outlook shared by many. These conditions spoke to punk exhortations like “no future” among others which articulated frustrations due to a stagnant economy and the failures of liberal democracies during a capitalist crisis. Yet from this nihilistic point of view, punks saw possibilities for reimagining the city and society through their art. That’s what my book is about, and that’s what I try to get across in the podcast.
For folks looking to dig into this subject more deeply what works (books, podcasts, films, etc) would you recommend interested parties pursue?
Many of the episodes in the first season of Soundscapes N.Y.C. feature scholars and critics who have written books and essays on the subject of rock ’n’ roll as it relates to New York City during the 1970s. Conversations begin with those books and branch out from there. So, interested parties should dig into those texts in addition to those I recommend in the podcast.
If there is one suggestion for further reading, this would be it: Kembrew McLeod, The Downtown Pop Underground: New York City and the Literary Punks, Renegade Artists, DIY Filmmakers, Mad Playwrights, and Rock ’N’ Roll Glitter Queens Who Revolutionized Culture (Abrams, 2018). McLeod does an incredible job illustrating the various connections between creative circles that culminated in what we call punk rock in New York City during the 1970s. I build upon McLeod’s thesis in my own book, tentatively titled Sounds of the City Collapsing: Punk Rock and Urban Crisis in New York City (Columbia University Press, 2025). My podcast borrows interpretive frameworks, and even excerpts from my book.
There are great podcasts about music and history streaming today. But few of them dive deep into music with an attention to specific historical circumstances of one city. This focus guides Soundscapes N.Y.C. Tim Lawrence, a British cultural critic and academic, does something similar in his podcast, Love Is the Message. I would highly recommend that podcast.
Where do you see this sort of historical podcasting going in the future? What place in the burgeoning digital humanities does it occupy?
The world has been opening up for Soundscapes N.Y.C. since its debut. The show has been recognized by the Bruce Springsteen Archive and Center for American Music at Monmouth University, the Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas, and the American Historical Association. Jim Ambuske, the co-head of R2 Studios at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, has been a tremendous champion of this project. I am grateful for his support. As the first season wraps up, I am looking for opportunities to partner with humanities institutions and podcast networks where the project can grow further.
Production for the second season (Spring 2025) on Disco and New York City history is already in production. Soundscapes N.Y.C. will continue to be a forum for interdisciplinary exchange in digital humanities by making nuanced and esoteric academic conversations accessible for public audiences. I will be co-hosting with Kristie Soares, Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado and author of Playful Protest: The Political Work and Joy in Latinx Media (University of Illinois Press, 2023). We have a dynamic schedule of content planned including visits to historical disco spaces in New York, as well as a list of guests that include artists like Gloria Gaynor and others. I am very excited to share this work with our audiences.
For the second season, I am conceiving a video dimension of the Soundscapes N.Y.C. project. This could be a YouTube channel and an active TikTok account. Representing the project across multiple platforms will expand awareness, and listeners have expressed interest in putting faces to the voices they hear on the podcast. Again, my students have been a tremendous source of inspiration and education.
Ryan Donovan Purcell is an urban historian at Sarah Lawrence College. He is finalizing the manuscript of his debut book entitled Sounds of the City Collapsing for the History of Urban Life Series from Columbia University Press, which explores the genderqueer roots of punk rock in New York during the 1970s. In addition to his academic work, Purcell has consulted on public programs and exhibitions at the New-York Historical Society and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. He serves on the editorial board at the Gotham Center for New York City History at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
[1] Edmund White, “Why Cane Stop Talking About New York in the Late 1970s?,” New York Times, September 10, 2015.
[2] Kim Phillips-Fein, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and The Rise of Austerity Politics (NY: Metropolitan Books, 2017): p. 307
