Living with Noise
Image by Flickr User Bill Selak
[O]ne of the chief values of living with music lies in its power to give us an orientation to time.– Ralph Ellison, “Living with Music” (1955)
Early this past fall, my wife and I moved back to Brooklyn after three years in central New York State. We spent two of those years on a back street in a mostly rural area of Cortland, NY, where are there are more dogs than people and more cows than dogs. Those dogs were probably the most intrusive neighborhood sound—a barker would get going and that’d set off a chain reaction from yard to yard, like a real life version of the “Twlight Barking” from 101 Dalmations. Still, I could get used to it, ignore it, zone out. The only other sounds that penetrated our home were the nearby freight trains, but their sounds are almost soothing—the rhythm of the clacking rails like Paul Simon singing “Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance. . .” or a relaxation tape.
Now back in New York City, I am very aware of the different degree, frequency and quality of sounds I am subjected to while in my living space. Reconsidering living with noise put me in the mind of Ralph Ellison’s 1955 essay “Living With Music” from High Fidelity magazine. Like the living situation Ellison describes, our new place is a rear-facing apartment and we get the sound of echoing voices, car horns or yowling cats (fighting and/or making more cats) bouncing off the back wall of a garage on the next street. However, as most city-dwellers know, it is our neighbors that provide the most persistent and profound sonic disturbances. Ellison himself was disturbed at an upstairs neighbor’s overzealous singing, vocalizing “[f]rom morning until night.” In our case, another four-family apartment house abuts ours and through the two brick walls sandwiched by two layers of plaster, we can frequently hear the shrill cries of teenage anguish. The violent screaming between teenaged siblings or between one or more of them and their parents can shake the walls. It is difficult to ignore.
The noise of children in New York City apartments was a topic of a New York Times feature a couple of years ago, but in that article the age of the children makes it easy to sympathize with the parents and to cast the complainers as insensitive villains. Little children cannot be expected to regulate their own crying or the seemingly ceaseless energy that is so easily transformed into cries of glee or the galloping of those baby shoes. In the case of my neighbors, it harder to sympathize when the sound is from near-adult children screaming about how life isn’t fair, or getting forced into frequent violent disagreements with a similarly aged sibling with which they must share a tiny part of an already tiny space—a New York City apartment.
It is easy to get angry when they get going. A teenager is not a chorus of barking dogs, a small crying child, or even some jerk honking his horn a block away who doesn’t realize how far the sound can travel, but ostensibly someone developing into a functional adult. The things they are screaming about can often seem beyond ridiculous to older people, and thus their need to scream about them is particularly offensive when I am simply trying to enjoy a evening of catching up on Mad Men or (more importantly) an afternoon writing my dissertation. As my wife often asks, “Why don’t their parents regulate?” But I try to remind her, it is the attempt to regulate their behavior that often starts the screaming matches. Like a 2-year old testing the range of her voice, these teens are exploring their own boundaries. Furthermore, unlike the class entitlement permeating the NYT Real Estate section feature, the economic reality of living in row houses in Bensonhurst changes expectations regarding the living experience.
The sonic disturbances often come when I am trying to get some writing done, so it is not hard to think about Ellison’s essay, since writing was also what he endeavored to do when bedeviled by his neighbor’s practice of “bel canto style.” The way noise can carry in these apartments creates a form of anonymous intimacy. Think of Duke Ellington’s “Harlem Airshaft,” a musical representation of just that urban intimacy.
As he said of the apartment airshaft that inspired that piece,
You hear fights, you smell dinner, you hear people making love. You hear intimate gossip floating down. You hear the radio. An air shaft is one great loudspeaker, you hear people praying, fighting and snoring.
While I don’t know my neighbors better than a polite nod of hello when I pass them sitting on the stoop, I am ear-witness to their dramas, and more than that I am sometimes drawn into them, finding myself banging the wall with a forearm and calling through the wall “enough already!” Or spending time discussing the family’s private affairs with my wife, speculating about the arguments. Similarly, Ellison’s trepidations about trying to silence his neighbor come from how her practice makes him intimately aware of her aspirations, even as that same intimacy drives him to build a stereo to blast at her in an attempt to conquer their shared sonic space.
Urban sonic intimacy is tightly tied to Ellison’s assertion regarding music and our orientation to time. However, Ellison’s observations can be expanded beyond music, because remember one person’s music is another person’s noise, as Scott Poulson-Bryant discussed in his Sounding Out! post on music and New York City apartment life in “The Noise You Make Should Be Your Own” (August 2010). A noise can likewise orient me in time: the sound of freight trains will bring me back to my time in Cortland, and more profoundly, that teenaged screaming brings me back to my own volatile adolescence, asking me to reconcile that version of me with the one I am now.
In Ellison’s essay, he arrives at two conclusions regarding music. The first is the above-mentioned orientation to time and the second is deep sympathy that arises from that realization, as he associates his upstairs neighbor’s intrusive singing practice with his own childhood attempts to master the trumpet. The orientation to time he discusses is not only a matter of looking back and making associations with a younger self’s relationship to music, but also comes from an adult understanding that there were those “who were willing to pay in present pain for future pride. For who knows what skinny kid. . .might become the next [Louie] Armstrong?” The anonymous intimacy of city-living has made me reflective regarding these screaming matches and I have begun to develop a sympathy that lets me tolerate the disturbance, to understand it in a context of living and growing. For how do I know that those volatile teenaged emotions might not develop into the sensitive and thoughtful adult attitude I try to have in my own life? There is no need to imagine that these kids will grow into anyone special (though the world could certainly use a couple more Louis Armstrongs or Ralph Ellisons), but their noise is a signal for the need for empathy, to remember our own ability to make noise not only through simply living but in trying to grow, to become. . .
Ellison may have thought that “the enjoyment of music is always suffused with past experience,” but I think enjoyment is just the tip of an iceberg of sonic experience, because it also holds out the possibility for an affective relationship with sound that can shift from annoyance to understanding without actually having to enjoy. It is not just music, but noise that “gives significance to all those indefinable aspects of experience, which. . .help to make us what we are.” Noise transforms in the cramped urban setting from a residue of life into a connective tissue that signals a challenge to boundaries, requiring greater empathy and patience. The very noise that endangers our peace is also a reminder of how close and alike we really are. It is only time that separates me from the screaming of a teenager and it is only time that stands between me and a screaming teen of my own.
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Osvaldo Oyola is a regular contributor to Sounding Out! and ABD in English at Binghamton University.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Summer Soundscapes, East Coast Style–Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman
The Noise You Make Should Be Your Own–Scott Poulson-Bryant
Sound-politics in São Paulo, Brazil–Leonardo Cardoso
“I’m on my New York s**t”: Jean Grae’s Sonic Claims on the City
Hellooooooo, Cyberspace! Are you ready to rock??? Welcome to our February Forum on “Sonic Borders,” a collaboration with the IASPM-US blog in connection with this year’s IASPM-US conference on Liminality and Borderlands, held in Austin, Texas from February 28 to March 3, 2013. Expertly organized by Sounding Out!’s Managing Editor Liana Silva and IASPM’s Web Editor/Webmaster Justin Burton (and curated for SO! by yours truly), the “Sonic Borders” forum is a Virtual Roundtable cross-blog entity that will feature six Sounding Out! writers posting on Mondays beginning today and running through February 25, and four writers from IASPM-US, posting on Wednesdays starting February 6th and ending February 27th. We envision plenty of excitement and cross blog commenting from authors, audiences, and IASPM-US conference attendees. Consider this your ticket to the show, so please come on in and mix it up!
And what will we be talking about across our platforms? The “sonic borders” between sound studies and popular music studies. . .where their methods, objects of study, and approaches overlap, where they rub raw, where they challenge the people on either side to do do better, and where they meet to generate some of the finest scholarship in the contemporary humanities.
And who will you be hearing from over here at Sounding Out!?: Liana Silva, SO! regular Regina Bradley, Marcus Boon (York University, The Wire), Daphne Brooks (Princeton), Tavia Nyong’o (NYU), and Art Jones (film-maker, photographer, artist, mixer, raconteur, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).
And what topics do you have a front row ticket for? Some real New York shit. Django. Body-regenerating vibrations on the dance floor. Cabaret, jazz, and funk/soul, plus musical memory, dance, performance art, race, gender, sexuality, and politics. Sound gatherings in Pakistan.
Feel free to camp out and shine your cell phone lights at each day of our Forum, because we’re turning it up to 11 over here at Sounding Out! and IASPM-US!—Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, Editor-in-Chief
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If you had to guess whether the singers of the following lyrics were male or female, how would you fare? Click on the lyrics to hear the song and find out who’s the rap artist.
“We gon’ hold it down for Illadel for life
Came through made a name, nigga nailed it tight
An’ now we shine, been knew, shit, it was about time
Switched from streets, the beats, platinum lines
Used to struggle in the hood just to brodie the mic
Took the fame ’cause they ain’t give it us, now we excite
The biggest crowds an’ they screamin’ loud, “Philly the shit”
“They hear Brooklyn, and we up to no good
Well, here we come, so there goes your neighborhood
Timbos scuffed up, sess bein’ puffed up
Mess with the wrong one, kid, you get ruffed up”
“My city do it best, whether it’s East or West
We feelin’ good fine, love it when it’s summertime
Detroit in summertime, summer time in Detroit,
Detroit in summertime, summertime in Detroit”
Although it is somewhat unfair to judge the gender of a rapper by the lyrics of a song, it is commonly thought that if a rapper is talking about the city, they are more than likely a man. Are there borders in hip hop around the content that men or women can address?
Case in point: several years ago I wrote a paper on representations of the city in hip hop songs. It gave me the opportunity to look closely and write extensively about some of my favorite hip hop artists and songs. However, most of the songs I tackled in the paper, actually most of the songs that occurred to me, were written and sung by male rappers. When I realized this, I couldn’t believe my oversight. Surely there had to be female rappers invoking the city in their songs. Men couldn’t be the only ones claiming the city. So, over the years I have been on the hunt for songs by female emcees that talk about the city. (I recently started a Spotify playlist, but several of the songs I have come across are on mix tapes that don’t show up on Spotify. If you have any suggestions you’d like to add to this collaborative playlist, please add them or mention them in the comments!)
“Jean Grae” by Flickr user ultra5280 under Creative Commons 2.0 License
One of the female emcees that stands out most is Brooklyn-based Jean Grae. Born in South Africa in 1976, she moved to the United States with her parents shortly after she was born and grew up in New York City. In a 2006 interview with Robert Walsh for the academic journal Callaloo, Jean Grae reminisces about how hip hop culture was inescapable for a teen in New York City in the early nineties:
It was a thing when kids finally realized that you could put out your music yourself and you didn’t have to wait around and get signed. It was possible to learn for yourself and be able to put out music on your own or on an underground level. It was kind of unavoidable to be a part of it, I guess. (216)
After a brief stint as a DJ, she opted for rapping, as she was already writing (even if not necessarily rhyming). She took a hiatus from the hip hop scene in 2008 but later that year returned to performing and finally released a new mixtape named Cookies or Comas in 2011.
In hip hop, cities are often represented as masculine–what with the number of male rappers dropping stories about how things go down on the street–and Jean Grae complicates that representation. In Jean Grae’s version of Busta Rhymes’ “New York Shit,” she opens a door to thinking about female rappers and urban space, and her sonic intervention into Busta Rhymes’ narrative in his version of “New York Shit” illustrates how female rappers claim the city as well. I read her track as an act of urban homemaking: rapping about the city (and subverting the male voice that initially sung on the track, Busta) becomes a practice to claim the city as her home. In fact, it is not just through her lyrics but also through her voice that Jean Grae makes her presence felt.
Jean Grae’s version of “New York Shit,” a collaboration with rapper Talib Kweli, is an alternate version of Busta Rhymes’ hit track “New York Shit” from his 2006 album The Big Bang, although both songs use the same sampled loop and constantly repeat the phrase “New York Shit.”
The track that “New York Shit” samples is from the opening of a 1976 song titled “Faded Lady” from The Soul Sensation Orchestra (featuring Douglas Lucas and The Sugar Sisters, who sing together throughout the whole song). The song itself tells the story of a “faded lady” who seems to have lost her hopes, dreams, and connection to the world around her. “New York Shit,” both the Busta Rhymes and the Jean Grae/Talib Kweli version, samples approximately the first 13 seconds of the song, so that in their version the voices are erased; all that is left is the even thump thump of a drum, a bass, and a guitar, with the clash of a top hat and the bass in between, finally rising up to a climax with what sounds like a flute or clarinet until it drops back into the thump thump. The loop invokes the soundtracks of blaxploitation films, several of which were set in urban locations. The sample choice then places “New York Shit” in an urban soundscape.
Busta’s original song weaves images of New York as the birthplace of hip hop, as the location of great sports teams, and expensive taste around this soulful, smooth loop. The chorus of the song (“If you’re from New York, stand up right now, If you’re from New York, hands up right now”) calling forth New Yorkers. In the song, Busta also pays homage to some of the big names in hip hop who come from New York: Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Notorious BIG, Big Pun, Jam Master Jay, while the video includes cameos from people like Q-Tip, RZA, Slick Rick, and Big Daddy Kane. In this way, the song celebrates their contributions to hip hop, but also recreates a narrow, gendered view of who is part of that musical history.
However, the sonic picture Busta Rhymes paints is one that is devoid of women. Before the loop starts, Busta Rhymes’ voice emerges from the quiet: “DJ Scratch you’re sick for this one,” which acts as the signal for a chorus of male voices. Some of them whoop, some of them whistle, and some of them sing. Eventually they make way for Busta Rhymes to serenade listeners with his tales of New York life. His voice sounds gruff and aggressive, a contrast with the smooth vibe of “Faded Lady.” In fact, it seems as if the “faded lady” of the title is not just faded but erased–the women in the city become the faded ladies whose erasure makes possible for this problematic representation of urban space.
Enter Jean Grae.
“talibjeangrae” by Flickr user HDShootsPhotos under Creative Commons License 2.0
In 2006, she and Talib Kweli released their version of “New York Shit” in a mixtape titled Hip Hop Docktrine: The Official Boondocks Mixtape which responds to Busta Rhymes’ sonic tribute to New York. (It also appeared on the mixtape Talib Kweli Presents Blacksmith the Movement.) Busta Rhymes’ song comes immediately to mind when listening to Jean Grae’s sixteen bars, especially when she starts with “Some of y’all forgot what New York is,” and in that vein it is hard not to hear Jean Grae’s track as a response to Busta Rhymes’.
Whereas Busta Rhymes’ song is ushered in by a chorus of disparate men’s voices, Talib Kweli and Jean Grae’s version starts with Talib Kweli’s introduction, followed by Jean Grae’s rapping. Talib Kweli’s introduction tricks the listener into thinking this version is just an echo of the original by Busta Rhymes (especially since the loop is virtually unchanged) until Jean Grae pops up by responding to Talib Kweli’s “I went for mine” with her “Go for yours, man.” The back-and-forth of the male and female voices, laid upon the same loop, acts as a subversion of Busta Rhymes’ male New York chorus.
But Jean Grae’s rapping is the most subversive element of the song. Jean Grae’s first line, “I’m on my New York shit,” calls forth Busta Rhymes’ song, even in her tempo. However, her verses take a swift turn from what Busta Rhymes puts forth in his song; at first listen, Busta Rhymes’ snappy, aggressive repetition of the phrase “New York [plus noun]” at the end of each verse is absent from Jean Grae’s rapping. Her voice seems to float on top of The S.S.O. loop, picking up speed when the loop reaches a climax, and dropping an octave or two (and slowing down a tad, too) when the climax of the track drops and loops back to the beginning. The resulting effect is that Jean Grae’s voice merges with the soulful flow of the song whereas Busta Rhymes’s voice is at war with it. Through her voice, Jean Grae disrupts Busta Rhymes’ sonic portrayal of a men’s-only New York. In fact, by subverting the vocal pattern Busta Rhymes sets up in the original version, Jean Grae creates a space in this New York hip hop narrative for female rappers to claim New York City as their own.
“New York City at Night” by Flickr user Alyssa L. Miller under Creative Commons License 2.0
In her verses, Jean Grae depicts a New York that is not glamorous or glitzy, like the one in Busta Rhymes’ song. Instead she talks about a “cement jungle,” and men who “struggle to their feet”; she also invokes the perils of gentrification when she talks about the Starbucks that pop up around the block (an indication of the white middle class coming to the neighborhood). But what catches my ear from this song is that Jean Grae mentions toward the end of her bars, “I just want to write and give back to the city that I’m a factor of.” Writing and rapping become a way for Jean Grae to practice her New York citizenship, an act of urban homemaking.
Even though Jean Grae busts her way into this narrative of urban masculinity, she is still a lonely female voice in the “New York Shit” repertoire. According to Wikipedia, there are several versions of the song, but Jean Grae is one of only two women to take on “New York Shit.” (Brooke Valentine has a version titled “H-Town Shit,” but I am limiting myself to the versions that look at New York City.) In that sense, Jean Grae’s female voice doesn’t necessarily fill a void in hip hop but rather points to it. On the other hand, her voice can be read/heard as highlighting a tradition of women rapping about the city. Whereas many rap songs invoke cities and urban locations, oftentimes these are portrayed as the sites of male dominance, normalizing a sonic cityscape that consists solely of men However, Jean Grae’s vocal track resists to that sonic cityscape, and that resistance too is an act of urban homemaking by virtue of claiming her space.
I continue to look for more tracks by female rappers and MCs that talk about U.S. cities, and this post has brought to mind more questions that I need to address. For example, what does it mean for a woman to rap about the city? Are there certain themes that echo throughout the songs (or throughout certain periods or subgenres)? Are there certain samples that are repeated? Do the sounds vary from city to city? These are questions that can be addressed by looking at a broader sample, but a close reading of one track can go a long way into thinking through these issues. Female rap artists like Jean Grae remind listeners that, to signify on Jay-Z, there is love in the heart of the city.
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Featured Image of Jean Grae performing in New York City on August 26, 2006, Courtesy of Flickr User MrMoneda
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Liana M. Silva is co-founder and Managing Editor of Sounding Out!
Hearing “Media-Capitalism” in Egypt
As I began researching my first book Ordinary Egyptians, a study of Egyptian culture from the 1870s until the eve of the 1919 revolution, sounds and early sound media were the last thing on my mind. However, When I dug more deeply into the historical sources, I realized the importance of music and the comedic theater in the urban culture of turn of the century Egypt. This made me expand the scope of my research to incorporate the vernacular culture of Egypt as an entire media-system, which as I showed in my book, was instrumental in constructing a modern Egyptian national identity. Music, songs, plays, chants, speeches, conversations and chatter, were very influential in forming an Egyptian national culture at the end of the nineteenth century, especially in a society with low literacy rates. By incorporating performance and sound media–especially the rising record industry–my book strives to expand the historical study of this period beyond just the visual and the printed to include sound, and aural/oral expressions of culture.
“Muski Street, Cairo, 1903.” Source: William Herman Rau. From Library of Congress Prints and Photograph Division.
Ordinary Egyptians also engages with some of the theories of nationalism and tests their applicability to Egypt and the Arab world. It introduces the concept of “media-capitalism,” which expands the historical analysis of Egyptian nationalism beyond just print and silent reading, through the incorporation of audiovisual, sound, and performance media. By integrating these new media, especially the burgeoning record industry, my book attempts to make room for both the “ear” and the “eye”—for the aural and oral alongside the visual—and in the process provides a more comprehensive explanation for how individuals and communities digest and embody cultural information. As this excerpt explains, cultural productions, in any form, are not socially relevant unless they are communally and socially activated; they must be discussed, breathed, and animated in the routine of everyday life.
The following is an excerpt from Ordinary Egyptians, with thanks to Stanford University Press. Notes have been included in the text to conform to Sounding Out!‘s style sheet.
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Mundane Nationalism
Egypt’s new mass media reflected on relevant everyday political, economic, and cultural concerns, and amplified them on the national stage in a comprehensible, locally pertinent and entertaining form. The repeated themes of many of these media included: bemoaning the lack of economic opportunities for native Egyptians, portraying the economic exploitation of Egyptians by foreigners, warning of perceived declines in national “morality,” satirizing and at times insulting British and native officials, and rousing patriotism and a sense of collective national solidarity.
However, the most effective way that national identity and a sense of nationhood was ‘absorbed’ was not only through these overstated themes and methods, but through the mundane media portrayals and representations of everyday “national” life and the internalization of these modes in actual practice. As Michael Billig describes in Banal Nationalism, nationalist ideology “might appear banal, routine, almost invisible,” however, these “subconscious” matter-of-fact representations create a common sense “naturalness of belonging to a nation” (15-16). Billig explains that often there is “continual ‘flagging’, or reminding, of nationhood,” as on a daily basis, citizens are reminded of their national identity. This reminding however, is “so familiar, so continual, that it is not consciously registered as reminding” (8). Mundane and unstated representations of Egyptian-ness abounded in most forms of mass culture, where “Egyptians” distinctively spoke and acted and were clearly, though tacitly, differentiated from non-Egyptians. Most of the media examined in this study implicitly addressed their listeners, viewers and readers as members of an Egyptian “nation.” To be sure, the most influential aspect of vaudeville and the satirical press were not necessarily the outwardly nationalistic messages of many of their articles, cartoons, and dialogues, but the recurring and mundane representations of colloquial Cairene as the de-facto dialect of all Egyptians, and the implicit understanding that flawlessly speaking and understanding it was the basic marker of a “modern” Egyptian national identity. Only an “authentic” ibn or bint al-balad (son or daughter of the country) would employ Egyptian Arabic and grasp its multiple meanings and nuances and hence participate in this new mass-produced colloquial culture. In fact, many of the comedic dialogues depicted in political cartoons and vaudeville repeatedly contrasted the mispronunciations of foreigners—who often played unsympathetic or villainous roles—with the “correct” pronunciation of affable Egyptian characters. This repeated portrayal of Cairene as the only “authentic” Egyptian accent reified it as an unofficial dialect of all Egyptians, even if back in the villages and towns of the Sa‛id more localized modes of expression were employed. By way of media-capitalism, Cairo’s dialect and culture was overwhelming—colonizing, if you will— the multitude of other localized dialects and cultures in Egypt. Thus, paradoxically, Cairene Arabic was the primary tool for nationalist, anti-imperialist discourse, and simultaneously, through internal-colonialism, it imposed its own culture on the “nation” [Note: This is very similar to what was happening in France during roughly the same time period. See Eugen Weber's Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914, 486-88].
“Egyptian crowds with Italian flag during 1919 Revolution.” Source: From L’Illustration (Paris), May 3, 1919.
The Sensorium and the Public Sphere
The efficacy of the new mass media and its potential for mass mobilization was best demonstrated during times of national crisis. The 1906 Dinshaway Incident and the 1919 Revolution in particular reveal how all forms of mass media functioned together to effectively document, memorialize, celebrate, and mobilize on a national scale. The growth of popular Egyptian mass culture, articulated almost exclusively in colloquial Egyptian, was the pivotal factor in the popularization and dissemination of an Egyptian national identity. The evolution and universalization of a colloquial Egyptian middle culture, made possible especially through the utilization of sound and audiovisual media, allowed for a shared and “uniquely” Egyptian cultural landscape. It is primarily within this non-official web of colloquial Egyptian mass culture, driven in large part by media-capitalism, that Egyptian national identity was widely disseminated and popularized.
One crucial aspect of this study was the critical role coffee shops played as cultural hubs, where differing mass media from newspapers to recorded music were publicly merged, negotiated, and digested. Many of the songs initially written for musical and comedic plays were recorded and played, or performed by street musicians at coffee shops and even in the streets and sidewalks. The role of the thousands of urban cafés and other public meeting areas in the broadcasting and reception of these new cultural productions is central to understanding the potency and effectiveness of this developing nationwide culture. Indeed, coffeehouses, as Peter Burke has remarked in A Social History of the Media, “inspired the creation of imagined communities of oral communication” (30).
“Egyptian newspaper boy yelling out the latest headlines, Cairo, 1907.” Source: From Douglas Sladen, Oriental Cairo (London: 1911), 64.
However, as discussed in previous chapters, this was never a one way conversation, as writers of these vernacular media were plugged into the streets and public squares through these very same cafés. As we have observed in this study, it can be said that the entire vaudeville theater industry arose out of the cafés on ‘Imad al-Din Street, where most of the vaudeville theaters were housed [Note: See Ibrahim Ramzi, Masrahuna ’Ayyam Zaman wa Tarikh al-Fananin al-Qudama’ (Cairo: Matba‘at al-Salam (1984), 25. There were at least three major cafés in Imad al-Din Street that were frequented by actors, singers, writers, and musicians— Qahwat al-Fan (The Arts Café), Qahwat Barun (The Baron Cafés), and Qahwat Misr (The Egypt Café)]. It was through these dialogical “physical” interactions with the people in the streets, market places, and cafés that the writers, musicians and performers of these media (re)calibrated with the subtleties, textures, and flavors of everyday Egyptian life. As Mikhail Bakhtin cautions in The Dialogic Imagination, we must not ignore the “social life of discourse outside the artist’s study, discourse in the open spaces of public squares, streets, cities and villages;” for it is in these public spheres that Egyptian mass culture is embodied into everyday life, acquiring its socio-economic, political relevance, and more importantly perhaps, its perceived authenticity, and contemporaneity (259). Indeed, access to any form of knowledge— be it visual, aural, tactile, gustatory or olfactory—is corporally mediated and is acquired through a living dialogical engagement. Or as Bakhtin elaborates in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, “the single adequate form to verbally expressing authentic human life is the open ended dialogue . . . In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life, with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, within his whole body and deeds” (293). In other words texts alone are meaningless when viewed in isolation of the socially embodied realities of their production, and more importantly perhaps, their reception on the street. It is in their interrelationship with social life that texts become meaningfully activated and authenticated as genuinely reflecting popular concerns and realities. As we have seen throughout this book, colloquial Egyptian culture is better equipped in engaging in this dialogue with the everyday, and hence guaranteeing its circulation and popularity.
(Ordinary Egyptians, p. 170-172)
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Featured Image: View 042: Egypt – Street in Native Quarter, Cairo., n.d., T. H. McAllister, Manufacturing Optician. 49 Nassau Street, New York. Brooklyn Museum Archives (S10|08 General Views_People, image 9785).
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Ziad Fahmy is an Assistant Professor of Modern Middle East History at the department of Near Eastern Studies. Professor Fahmy received his History Ph.D. in 2007 from the University of Arizona, where his dissertation “Popularizing Egyptian Nationalism” was awarded the Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award (2008) from the Middle East Studies Association. His first book, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture (Stanford University Press, 2011), examines how, from the 1870s until the eve of the 1919 revolution, popular media and culture provided ordinary Egyptians with a framework to construct and negotiate a modern national identity. His articles have appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies and in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Professor Fahmy is currently beginning another book project tentatively titled, Listening to the Nation: Sounds, Soundscapes, and Mass Culture in Interwar Egypt. In 2011-2012, he was a Faculty Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, where the focal theme was “Sound: Culture, Theory, Practice, and Politics.”
Park Sounds: A Kansas City Soundwalk for Fall
Fall refuses to stay put in Kansas City. The past month Kansas City temperatures have skyrocketed to 70 comfortable degrees fahrenheit and plummeted to 20 chilly degrees. I decided to partake of a wonderfully mild Sunday afternoon last Thanksgiving weekend to do another one of my Kansas City soundwalks, this time the fall edition. Fortunately the weather was cooperating, and I didn’t have to worry about how long I could resist standing in the cold.
Even though the weather was wonderful for a soundwalk, I couldn’t choose where to go. I have blogged about three soundwalks so far, and for each of them the choice seemed more organic: for my first soundwalk, in 2010, I wanted to walk around my new neighborhood and begin to understand it from an aural point of view. For my second soundwalk (in 2011) I went to one of my favorite places in Kansas City, the Country Club Plaza, and provided a snapshot of the sounds of spring in this busy area of Midtown. On my personal blog, in time for World Listening Day 2011, I talked about sounds from my own porch for a summer edition of my KC Soundwalks series, in order to think about the soundscape where I live. However, for this fourth soundwalk my only requirement was that it be a place I had not been to before. I wanted to venture out to somewhere new and encounter it not just with my eyes but also with my ears. Technically, I could go anywhere in Kansas City and do a soundwalk, but that was the one thing keeping me from doing a soundwalk: I couldn’t choose.
View of Kansas City Midtown Skyline from Southwest Boulevard by Liana Silva.
Last Sunday I decided I had to just get in the car and go. I had planned (and postponed) several soundwalks up until that day (I had even tweeted that I was leaving the house, in hopes of that forcing me to commit), so that day I planned to finally take some time to do my soundwalk before I went back to work. I got in the car with my daughter, destined for the West Bottoms neighborhood. I figured I’d take the long route instead of the quick and easy highways. As we drove along the side streets, I saw a park—a park neither of us had been to before, Jarboe Park—and I figured we could stop there, play for a while, and then drive off for my soundwalk. In any case, she might be good and tired by the time we arrived at our final destination, and I could put her in the stroller while I recorded and took notes.
That’s not what happened.
Once we arrived at the park, a moment of inspiration hit when I saw some musical instruments of sorts as part of the jungle gym, something I hadn’t seen before.
LISTEN: Walking_to_Jarboe_Park._Cars_coming.
When we arrived, Jarboe Park was deserted. The bare trees didn’t make it any more inviting, but the park is in newly minted condition and full of bright colors. It showed no signs of life, or wear and tear; in fact, the jungle gym and the swings seemed new. (According to The City of Kansas City, MO’s website, this park was remodeled in 2011.) Jarboe Park is located in a residential neighborhood, across from Primitivo García Elementary School. During the semester it surely gets more use. Perhaps it was too early on a Sunday for families to be out and about at the park. Coincidentally, a family appeared about an hour after we arrived, but they went to the basketball court across the street.
Jarboe Park swings, still. Picture by Liana Silva.
LISTEN: Swings._A_Child’s_Laughter._
The first thing that caught my attention at the park was the presence of musical instruments set up at the entrance. I do not remember seeing anything similar before at a children’s jungle gym. There was a set of bells, a xylophone, some rainmakers, a whistle, and a drum set. Their presence seemed to indicate that making sounds/music/noise was also part of the experience of being in the park as well as part of the experience of growing up. Sound, specifically making sounds, became part of play, in this context.
Bells. By Liana Silva
Xylophone. By Liana SIlva
Rainmaker. By Liana SIlva
Drum kit. Picture by Liana Silva
In the quietude of the noon time the sounds these instruments made felt a little sad instead of happy; the fact that there was only one child (ok, two, including myself!) playing with these instruments made their sounds stand out more, in relation to, say, the sounds of the trains and the highways (which I will discuss below). At the same time they drew attention to the fact that they were the only sounds that the park was making. If the park were busy, the sounds of the instruments would probably fade into the soundscape instead of being the loudest sound. However, the fact that we were playing with these instruments–versus playing instruments–made the park seem less lonely. We were part of the sounds, we were making sounds, and that seemed to distract me from the fact that we were the only people there making sounds. Although the plastic and metal instruments were not like traditional instruments, I wondered what their purpose in the jungle gym were. If the spider web and the swings are meant to exercise certain parts of the body and practice certain ways of socializing, what did the instruments teach? Perhaps the instruments are meant to teach children that instruments produce sounds, and they produce them in different ways. Lastly, the instruments and the act of creating sounds must use a different part of the brain–and my daughter was quite excited to play with the drum set!
LISTEN: Playing_musical_instruments_at_Jarboe_Park
Other than the sounds of the instruments, I also noticed the sounds of the highway and the train. I found a corner of the park where I could stand and record the sounds of the city:
If you look at the bottom of the V-shaped branches, you can see train cars. Picture by Liana SIlva
LISTEN: Train_whistles._Miss_E_calls._
Kansas City is intersected by train tracks, and it almost feels like if you pay close attention, you can hear a train in the distance at any corner of the city. In fact, in the dead of a lazy afternoon or the quiet of the wee hours of the night I can hear the trains’ whistles, announcing their passing through the city, from my neighborhood of Rosedale in Kansas City, Kansas. If soundwalks can be a sonic ethnography of a city, my soundwalks have so far revealed that the sound of trains are an essential part of the KC soundscape as well as a reminder of the city’s history: the Kansas City Stockyards. I could also hear the low buzzing of the cars on the highway, another sound I’ve come to recognize as uniquely Kansas Citian, or at least part of my soundsscape. The murmur of the traffic ways is like the sound of Kansas City’s blood coursing through its veins.
In between the branches, Interstate 670. Picture by Liana Silva.
LISTEN: Hum_of_the_highway._A_car._Train._
This spur-of-the-moment soundwalk made me think of how listening and sound can prompt reflection about the identity of a neighborhood and of a city. As I wrote down notes, I wondered: how do parks add to a community’s soundscape? The sounds add to the community’s identity as a residential area as an area that is amenable to the presence (physically and in aural terms) of other people. Soundscapes are connected to our ideas of what constitutes a neighborhood, and specifically how important common spaces like parks are, with all the sounds that may ensue. On a broader level, my Kansas City soundwalks are helping me piece together a soundscape of Kansas City, and to think through sound as a way to understanding the urban culture of this city, with its music, its fountains, its sports, and its trains, among other things. I feel like my listening practices are directly tied to my developing connection to this Midwestern city.
Postscript: I never did make it to the West Bottoms that Sunday. But it’s still on my list of KC spots to visit.
Featured Image: “Downtown from Top of Liberty2″ by Wikimedia user Hngrange, under Creative Commons 3.0 license.
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Liana M. Silva is co-founder and Managing Editor of Sounding Out!
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