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- [00:04]
Ben Shansfield
This summer.
- [00:05]
John Finch
Serve up the cookout classics craft Mayo and dressing.
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Ryan Purcell
Toss green salads with delicious ranch dressing or zesty Italian. Serve smooth, craveably creamy potato salads with mayo. We all know it's not a cookout
- [00:17]
Matthew Passard Joseph
without craft Study and play come together
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Ryan Purcell
on a Windows 11 PC and for
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Ben Shansfield
a limited time, college students get the
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Ryan Purcell
best of both worlds.
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Ben Shansfield
Get the Unreal college deal everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more@windows.com studentoffer while supplies last ends June 30 terms@ aka mscollegepc when you
- [00:50]
Matthew Passard Joseph
finally find your thing, you want the
- [00:52]
Ryan Purcell
whole world to know about that thing. So you use a thing called Canva to make it an even bigger and better thing. Whether you want to create flyers for that thing thing, make presentations for that thing, or design merch for that thing, you can do anything so people can see your thing, feel your thing, love your thing. The next thing you know, it's a thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing. Motor City 1958 A 14 year old Diana Ross and her family move into the Brewster Douglas housing projects in the east side of Detroit. The Brewster Project and the Frederick Douglass Apartments were built between 1935 and 1955 and for a period of time were the largest residential housing campus owned by the City of Detroit. It was on these steps and street corners that a young Diana Ross connected with Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard, forming a group that would call the Primettes.
- [01:54]
Kristin Sylvian
Started my life in an old cold run down tennis line. My father left. He never even married Mom, I shared the guilt. My mama knew.
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Ryan Purcell
Detroit in the late 50s and early 60s was a hub for talent. The city gave life to the soulful expressions of Marvin Gaye, Mary Wells, the Marblelettes, the Temptations, Stevie Wonder and even Aretha Franklin. And the Brewster Douglas homes specifically raised many notable figures including actress Lily Tomlin, boxer Joe Louis, and significantly for Diana Ross at that time, William Smokey Robinson Jr. The lead singer of the Miracles. Robinson would soon be signed by the local record company startup called Tamala Records, owned by songwriter Barry Gorey who founded the company after quitting his job as an assembly line worker at the local Lincoln Mercury plant in 1957 to produce music full time with the Miracles. In five years this indie startup would become a pop music powerhouse that would define the soundscape of America Motown. When Ross arrived at the Brewster Douglas Homes, she asked Robinson to help her group land an audition at Berry Gordy's studio that he confidently called Hitsville usa. As a trio, Ross, Wilson and Ballard went on to become one of the most notable pop groups of the 20th century, even rivaling the Beatles in popularity during the 1960s. And as a solo artist in the following decades, Ross achieved even greater celebrity. But what happened to the Brewster Douglas Homes? The steps in the street corners that fostered social connections and collaborative opportunities that enabled the group's success? Once a proud symbol of black community and successful public housing, the Brewster Douglas Homes fell into disrepair through the 1970s and 1980s and were eventually demolished in 2014, marking as much an end to an era of public housing as it did to an era of popular music. Yet the sounds that came from those projects continue to make us move. The sounds of the Supremes, the quintessential pop girl group of the 1960s, was a product of American public housing in the post war era. I'm Ryan Purcell and this is Soundscapes. 2025 marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the U.S. department of Housing and Urban Development, or otherwise known by its acronym hud. This is a federal agency birthed in the wake of the civil rights movement and embedded at a time with a strong bipartisan commitment to cities and the people who live in them. HUD represented the federal government's attempt to shape cities from above, while on the ground people shaped and documented life in the cities from below with music, art and culture. Housing policy and music unfolded side by side in the same neighborhoods, impacting the same lives. Yet what did it look like a federal agency tried to take responsibility for fostering strong, integrated, mixed income neighborhoods? And how and why did this idealistic vision change over time? Moreover, where did music fill in to sustain joy and perseverance as life in cities got tougher? I first became interested in this history when I moderated an academic event commemorating HUD's 60th anniversary. I was struck by the federal government's robust commitment to cities at the time of HUD's founding, the ideal that a government had responsibility to improve the lives of low income people and and how this contrasts with our country today, when many federal departments are being slashed and downsized or seeing their missions radically changed. In this special episode of Soundscapes nyc, we'll learn about how HUD was impacted by political and economic constraints that ultimately offset its impact. We'll hear from housing historian Kristin Sylvian, who has studied and written extensively on early HUD programs that dream that President
- [05:40]
Kristin Sylvian
Kennedy came into office of having this kind of urban studies approach to hud, and that HUD really would be an agency that would engage in research, it would engage in collaboration.
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Ryan Purcell
We'll then turn our attention to how programs and policies played out on the neighborhood level in New York city during the 1970s and how their impact on not only the built environment, but the people who lived and documented their experiences there in their art. We'll see how policy experts didn't have the last word in telling the truth about what was going on in the city's neighborhoods. We hear from Bench Ansfield, author of a recent book, Born in Flames, about the dynamics behind the arson crisis in specific areas of New York during the 1970s and 1980s.
- [06:25]
Ben Shansfield
Every other disco song has to mention fire or heat or fever like it's or burning like it's like kind of this central trope of the genre.
- [06:35]
Ryan Purcell
We'll also hear from Matthew Passard Joseph, whose writing has explored how various musicians and musical genres transcended racial divides.
- [06:44]
Matthew Passard Joseph
We have pretty good receipts that punk and hip hop began as we know them today in New York City. We need to understand the birth of those genres through the lens of the fiscal crisis of 75.
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Ryan Purcell
I can't wait to deliver this dynamic and riveting story structured by these fascinating experts. Let's dive in. Chapter 1 the Rise of HUD this
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John Finch
is a very rare and very proud occasion.
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Ryan Purcell
It's September 9, 1965 and President Lyndon B. Johnson is signing the Department of Housing and Urban Development act into law, creating the U.S. department of Housing and Urban Development.
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John Finch
When our nation was born, the only departments of government were State and Treasury and War. Our country and our government have grown greatly since that time.
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Ryan Purcell
As a cabinet level agency, its goals included improving housing conditions, promoting fair housing, supporting urban development, and expanding access to affordable housing for low and moderate income Americans.
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John Finch
America has become a highly urbanized nation and we must face the many meanings of this new America.
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Ryan Purcell
And Johnson's commitments at the signing signal that HUD's ambitious mission is not just about bricks and mortar, but about fostering moral virtue in modern urban life.
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John Finch
In the next 35 years, we must literally build a second America, putting in place as many houses and schools and apartments and parks and offices as we have built through all the time since the Pilgrims arrived on these shores.
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Ryan Purcell
Though technically part of the Great Society programs of Johnson's era, HUD actually subsumed multiple legacy agencies and authorities from the New Deal era and before, including the Housing and Home Finance Agency, which included the Public Housing Administration. John Finch, who served under the first HUD Secretary and had a career in HUD spending 40 years, describes the importance of these two predecessor entities and their missions.
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John Finch
The Public Housing Administration and Federal Housing Administration go back to the third. And they thought of themselves as independent bureaus. Public housing was, you know, going to, you know, solve. It's going to be a safety net and a housing of last resort. But it was also going to have a social point of view of mixing different income levels. FHA thought of themselves as the largest insurance company in the world, which they were, by the way. 15 million people when I was still at HUD, claim that they got their homes through FHA. A lot of it in the suburbs and a lot of it flight, flight from the cities. But that's what was happening in the boom years of Post World War II and just a lot of history there.
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Ryan Purcell
Kristin Sylvian is a housing historian and the director of the Graduate Program in public history at St. John's University here in New York. I talked with her about the sweeping vision that shaped HUD during the Kennedy years.
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Kristin Sylvian
That dream that President Kennedy came into office of having this kind of urban city studies approach to hud. And that HUD really would be an agency that would engage in research, it would engage in thinking, it would engage in collaboration, it would work with universities, it would work with the private sector, it would work with nonprofits like the Ford foundation, for example, and fix housing. But it wasn't just housing. It was the cities.
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Ryan Purcell
HUD's first secretary was Robert Weaver. Weaver was already a nationally respected economist and housing expert at the time of his appointment, but even carried a greater weight. He was the first black Cabot member in U.S. history, and his appointment symbolized a federal commitment not only to cities, but to civil rights. As a Cabinet Level Agency, HUD's Mission and Programs were clearly a priority for Johnson. Here, John Fitch describes his excitement about interacting with President Johnson as he looks at an archival photo of Johnson signing the 1968 Housing Act.
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John Finch
I came up in March of 68. I was immediately put on a task force to rewrite urban renewal policies and procedures. I don't know if anybody ever read them after that, but we did that. And the second one was the Neighborhood Development Program, which was in the housing act of 68. So, yeah, I was excited that the President was coming. I was in heaven. I was among all the VIPs that I had ever seen in the news and cared about much in terms of Housing and Urban Development.
- [11:27]
Ryan Purcell
Whereas the Housing and Urban Development act in 1965 created HUD act of the same name in 1968 spurred HUD's mission into action, activating billions of dollars of federal funding specifically for public programs in cities and public housing. But the late 60s were a tumultuous time for American cities and this created even greater momentum for HUD's mission. Here again, Kristen Sylvian the so called
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Kristin Sylvian
urban crisis years of 19 that will extend all the way until 1968. I mean I think that those were absolutely pivotal actions in prompting Congress to take the measures that it did in prompting LDJ to make this effort known as the United States Housing and Urban development act of 1968 which followed the Fair Housing act of that year brings this whole new era of housing.
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Ryan Purcell
Although we now might associate HUD's founding with civil rights and progressive ideals, it was still actively embraced in the transition to a Republican administration. With the Michigan Governor George Romney taking over as secretary from the founding secretary
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John Finch
Robert Weaver In 1969, George Romney was central casting. He was probably one of the most presidential looking secretaries maybe we had and he, he carefully cultivated his image. He had some of the best official portraits that I can remember.
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Ryan Purcell
Though the two secretaries had different political backgrounds and strengths as leaders, they maintained allegiance the same then bipartisan mission of hud. John Finch's colleague at hud, Kent Watkins, who also served under Secretary Weaver and has worked with 18 HUD secretaries, agreed that Weaver and Romney had a great relationship.
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John Finch
The Weber staff and the Romney staff were like peas in a pod. We had very similar worldviews.
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Ryan Purcell
Through the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, the Department of Housing and Urban Development maintained a unified vision of supporting the need for affordable housing in America and in aiding urban populations. Despite election cycles and political turnover, HUD staff firmly believed that urban affairs lay at the root root of civil rights issues in this country and indeed constituted the future growth of America economically, socially and politically. Okay, let's take a step back and analyze how the era's music reflected the optimism of the civil rights movement. The same kind of optimism that brought HUD to life. This is a track called Keep on pushing, released in 1964 by the Impressions led by Curtis Mayfield. An anthem of the civil rights movement, it gives a sense of hope and uplift without being expressly political. Upon its release, this track rose to number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts and became an ear worm for social justice warriors of the time. Now maybe someday I'll reach that higher
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Kristin Sylvian
goal I know I can make it
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Ryan Purcell
with just a little bit of soul While Keep on Pushing illustrates the optimism for a better tomorrow preceding the passage of the Housing and Urban Development act of 1965. Irene Reed's recording of We're Gonna make it for Barry Records in 1968 maintains that Bright spirit through a soulful funky style with a healthy dose of social realism, spotlighting hardship on the road to progress. Progress.
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Kristin Sylvian
We have to stand in the welfare line I got your love and you know you got mine and we're gonna
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Matthew Passard Joseph
make it oh, yeah.
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Ryan Purcell
Chapter 2 Operation Breakthrough. Perhaps the most stunning example of HUD's early ambition was the Operation Breakthrough program. The goal of Operation Breakthrough was to produce affordable housing at scale, using technology and innovation and to produce fully racially integrated prototype communities with opportunities for minority contractors and training for minority construction workers. One of the communities created by Operation Breakthrough was lacled town in St. Louis, which would replace the historically black Mill Creek Valley community, which had been raised as what was referred to in the 1950s as slum clearance.
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John Finch
Laclede Town, of course, was Milk Creek Valley in St. Louis. I worked for three.
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Ryan Purcell
The vision behind Laclede Town was a federally funded, racially integrated mixed income urban utopia. And initially it succeeded with 1,400 apartments on 65 acres and more than 4,000 residents.
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John Finch
By that time I was assigned chair of the Pruitt Igoe working group within the Secretary's office and was out for that.
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Ryan Purcell
Here Kent Watkins is referring to Pruitt Igoe, the notoriously failed public housing project nearby laclede town in St. Louis, famous for its 1972 demolition symbolizing the collapse of modernist urban planning. Lockleet Town was a separate urban renal project featuring mid rise buildings in contrast to the high rise towers of the Pruitt Igoe projects. And by contrast, Lockleadtown was more successful in providing the kinds of opportunities and quote unquote bohemian community feel than Pruitt Igoe. Locklead Town was a planned community in the truest sense of the term. Lockleadtown had a town square where residents enjoyed Shakespeare, live arts. The residents came from all walks of life with artists, activists and academics among residents.
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John Finch
There were great hopes for Mill Creek Valley, the first non segregated urban renewal project ever. And Clotilde Smith, a famous architect from who did a lot of the renewal, did a number of these townhouses. So everything went well for a wonderful time. It was a fabulous new town in town. Millstone, however, was cooking the book, so to speak speak in a positive way. They were subsidizing the community programs that were wonderful and there was a real sense of a town culture there.
- [18:14]
Ryan Purcell
However, the development unfortunately fell into decline due to funding issues and transformations in the political currents at the federal level.
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John Finch
But as things went on, HUD came in and did an audit. They pretty much kicked Millstone out. It got sold to another developer and another one, and another one and another one and event. Finally everything else was torn down. But that was the rise and fall of a beautiful concept.
- [18:50]
Ryan Purcell
Okay, let's take another break to look at what's going on within music. Released in 1972, People make the World Go Round by the Stylistics, the track draws parallels between the struggles of everyday people and the broader social and economic conditions that face the country at the time. The song makes observations like trash not getting collected and sanitation workers fighting for higher wages. It was a decidedly more political tone than Keep On Pushing by the impressions in 1964, and a tone that is less idealistic than the civil rights era soul. Despite its more politically incisive content, the song nonetheless reached number 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1972.
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Kristin Sylvian
So they can help down but that's what makes the world go round the up and downs of carousel changing people stairs around go under from young man People make the the world go round.
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Ryan Purcell
Now compare the Stylistics People make the World Go around with Living for the City, Stevie Wonder's indictment of white supremacist power dynamics. Part of the incredible Intervisions album, which reached number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 charts in 1973, this is a track that historian Kevin Gaines has called in an unreleased manuscript the Sound of Black Power in the way that the soundscape that Stevie Wonder creates embodies the social critiques of the black radical movement.
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John Finch
He's almost dead from breathing in air
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Kristin Sylvian
pollution he tried to fall but to him that just enough, just enough yeah I hope to hear inside my voice of sorrow and I motivate you tomorrow this is true no have to be much colder if real change the world will turn me over Living just enough Stop giving just enough.
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Ryan Purcell
Chapter 3 a shrinking mandate.
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Kristin Sylvian
From the moment the public housing program was created, the private home building sector, the private mortgage banking sector, were determined to reverse that and to end direct public building of housing. And they got their way.
- [21:55]
Ryan Purcell
In HUD's early years, production of low income housing jumped from 226,000 units in 1970 to 472,000 in 1971, but then back to 380,000 in 1972 in just one year.
- [22:08]
Kristin Sylvian
As much as I love and admire LBJ, he certainly contributed greatly to the diminishment of direct build public housing and did all he could to channel aid, the public aid into the hands of private developers who begin to do things like these turnkey programs that come out of the 1950s actually, but become much more broadly applied in the 1960s.
- [22:43]
Ryan Purcell
Although HUD survived the transition to Republican administration under Richard Nixon, the beginning of this conservative political turn in the United States shifted HUD away from housing production and more towards market based solutions, especially subsidizing the private housing market through a specific channel of housing policy known as
- [23:00]
Kristin Sylvian
Section 8, where we have private sector builders and they are building the housing that will formally have been a public housing development formerly, you know, a public housing project.
- [23:17]
Ryan Purcell
The historian Keyaga Yamat Taylor has written extensively about the role of HUD programs in shaping urban and black communities. In particular, in her work she reflects on this part of HUD's history, specifically in this more conservative shift in the American political climate. But that transformation didn't end with Nixon. More major cuts to affordable housing began with the Reagan administration in the early 1980s, with public housing hit especially hard, many programs were block granted, meaning that they provided funding but leave planning and decision making to the local jurisdictions. As Jonathan Mahler comments on his 2025 book the Gods of New York, the tumultuous 80s from Donald Trump to the Thompson Square Riots. From Reagan's pro free market perspective, housing was best built by the private industry, not government. Rather than sending more money to New York and other cities suddenly confronting homelessness crises, Reagan cut the national public housing budget by 78%. Reagan's own inaugural address summed up this ideology. Government is not the solution to our problem, he said. Government is the problem.
- [24:16]
John Finch
To get government back within its means
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Ryan Purcell
and to lighten our punitive tax burden.
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John Finch
And these will be our first priorities.
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Ryan Purcell
And on these principles there will be no compromise. After its foundational period, HUD was reorganized many times at the cost of the unified Federal vision for cities. Kent Watkins reflects.
- [24:49]
John Finch
HUD lost a lot of its UD as soon as they moved into the new building. And that was Urban Mass Transportation Administration. And so once I moved across the street, HUD was not HUD anymore and it never has been. We lost Fannie Mae, we lost fema, we lost Community Facilities Administration. So HUD is a skeleton of what it was in the beginning.
- [25:21]
Ryan Purcell
John Finch felt that the agency's size made it a target.
- [25:24]
John Finch
At the time when HHFA was, before it was elevated to cabinet status, There were some 7,000 employees there. We, we went to double that almost overnight, once the department was created, I think we hit a high water mark at about 17,500 employees. And then it went down sharply, including during the Clinton administration, which through reinvention, which seemed to be another name for downsizing. Many of us would think fondly of those days when we're not as much in the bullseye, we're leaner, meaner, and as Kent points out, we had Fannie Mae, we had Jeannie Mae, you know, this was a full service operation.
- [26:06]
Ryan Purcell
Housing historian Kristin Sylvian provides more insight into the reasons HUD's missions continue to fade and how the agency came under increasing criticism, leading to funding cuts in successive federal administrations under President Lyndon Johnson.
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Kristin Sylvian
The new communities, for example, his initiative, the Section 108 experimental housing that was built during literally the last days when LBJ was in office, those unfortunately never kind of panned out. But I think the kind of collective weight of all of these tricks tried and in the eyes of many Americans kind of failed housing programs, you know, kind of opened HUD up for a great deal of political, you know, criticism.
- [27:02]
Ryan Purcell
Here Sylvia explains how underfunding diminished HUD's ability to reach its ambitious goals and how this impacted local communities from the outset.
- [27:11]
Kristin Sylvian
HUD does not have the money that it needs to fulfill its original mandate, never mind help the nation realize the wildly ambitious national halting goal of 26 million units in 10 years that was built into the Housing and Urban Development act of 1968. So HUD was starved for money from the beginning and then it in turn starved the local housing developments that owned and built the public housing and never supplied them with the funds they needed to do basic maintenance and upkeep.
- [27:54]
Ryan Purcell
Adding to these challenges was that HUD's fair housing mandate was being opposed by an increasingly conservative political zeitgeist.
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Kristin Sylvian
Romney was really driven out of Washington D.C. on one level by his repeated clashes at first with Nixon insiders and then Nixon over his willingness to basically ignore federal law and you know, not compel equal opportunity or fair, as it used to be called, open housing in the suburbs, because that's where Nixon saw his greatest political support would be, is in the kind of blue collar white homeowners that those will be the people that he counted on to support him in his re election bid in 72. And therefore he wasn't going to upset them further with any kind of threats that the suburbs were going to be desegregated anytime soon.
- [29:04]
Ryan Purcell
Chapter 44 1970s New York in our collective consciousness New York city in the 1970s was dangerous and deteriorating, with many wealthier residents departing to the suburbs, leaving only low income residents in desperate conditions. The city's fiscal crisis took a toll on municipal workers, its services and infrastructure, to the point where many popular movies portrayed New York as the ultimate urban dystopia. Consider Soylent Green, 1970, an urban dystopian thriller starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson. In his final film appearance, New York City in the year 2022. Nothing runs anymore. Nothing works. But the people are the same and the people will do anything to get what they need.
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John Finch
This is the police.
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Ryan Purcell
What they need most is Soylent Green. The next year, audiences witnessed a lawless New York. In Death Wish, 1974, violent crime persists unmitigated, except for the efforts of a vigilante architect.
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John Finch
Enjoy a typical afternoon in New York City. Groceries, man. This is the story of a man who decided to clean up the most violent town in the world.
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Ryan Purcell
Then of course, there's the Warriors, 1979, depicting the city awash with violent criminals. And these are the Warriors.
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Kristin Sylvian
We know about the Warriors. They're a heavy outfit.
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Ryan Purcell
They're from Coney Island.
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Kristin Sylvian
Warriors. You guys are the big dudes, huh?
- [30:45]
Ryan Purcell
Now they're in the Bronx going back 27 miles behind enemy lines. It's the only choice we got. Between them and safety stand 20,000 cops and 100,000 sworn enemies.
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Kristin Sylvian
I want them all.
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Ryan Purcell
And finally, Escape from New York. 1981. A Vision of the future of New York in which the entire island of Manhattan has been walled off into a mass security prison. 1988. The crime rate in the United States rises 400%. 1991. The United States Police Force is formed. 1997. New York City is a walled maximum security prison. John Carpenter's Escape from New York. So many of these images were due to a pattern of arson that destroyed whole blocks of urban neighborhoods, particularly in the Bronx. Ben Shansfield's new book, Born in Flames, tells the complex story of this period, including the role of the insurance industry in the wake of the passage of the Housing and Urban Development act in 1968.
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Ben Shansfield
So when, when the uprisings of the 60s coursed across US cities, they sent insurers into a panic, really a racialized panic. And they just started abandoning American cities altogether. And so when LBJ, when Lyndon Johnson convened the Kerner Commission in 1967, in response to the uprisings, they created a, a separate kind of offshoot to that Kerner Commission that was only focused on the insurance problem. And it's kind of an entire purview was just trying to solve the insurance crisis. And their establishment led to the sudden injection of fire insurance into neighborhoods that had previously been redlined. So they succeeded by that one measure. But that sudden infusion of insurance access was occurring alongside ongoing redlining by banks and mortgage lenders, and then all of the cutbacks and disinvestment that accompanied the more general urban crisis of the late 60s and into the 1970s, putting landlords in a position where it was really in their best interests, they found, to set their buildings on fire, like they found they could make more money by torching their buildings and collecting this insurance money, rather than renting them out or selling them. And part of the dynamic here was that these insurance plans, these fair plans, they were offering something that we could kind of think of as subprime insurance. The insurance was really expensive, and it didn't protect against a lot of very serious risks like liability or theft. So it was more of a bailout of the insurance industry than it was, you know, a genuine anti redlining measure.
- [34:06]
Ryan Purcell
As much as it might seem as though federal policies were to blame for perversely incentivizing landlords to burn their own buildings, Ansfield doesn't agree with that narrative. In fact, the book points to the New York housing authority public housing as being the safest housing during this period. In terms of the fires, NYCHA housing
- [34:23]
Ben Shansfield
was virtually untouched by the artisan wave. And this is significant because NYCHA is, you know, after all, the largest landlord in New York City. And so the fact that it experienced almost none of these fires is really telling. In parts of the south Bronx, nearly every building on a block would burn down, right? Every building besides those owned by the state. And this fact that public housing was the only housing spared by the firestorm, I think is really clarifying that the safest place to live in these years ended up being social housing, ended up being NYCHA housing, which cuts against, you know, everything that we, you know, that we're told about public housing in the late 20th century and into the 21st, where it's, you know, always and everywhere deemed a failure. But here, at least in this one, you know, by this one standard, it was actually the safest place to live. This is actually the opposite of what we're told. Right. It was actually the only refuge that there was from these fires.
- [35:34]
Ryan Purcell
All right, let's turn to a soundscape Now. Ben Shansfield traces a continuum of cultural references to arson, from burn baby burn, a slogan that was associated with the 1965 Watts riots, to the ubiquity of Fire, references found in popular music from the 1970s into the 1980s. For example, here's Ohio Players Fire, the title track from their Mercury records release in 1974. It's a stylistic crossover from funk into disco that relies on the concept of. Of fire to animate the dance floor.
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John Finch
The way you walk.
- [36:34]
Ryan Purcell
Then there's the Disco Inferno. Released by Atlantic Records 1976. The track gained much greater recognition the year later when it was included in the soundtrack for the hit film Saturday Night.
- [36:54]
Ben Shansfield
Raining.
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Kristin Sylvian
When the boogie start explode I heard somebody say,
- [37:09]
Ben Shansfield
Every other disco song is saying, like, has to mention fire or heat or fever. Like, it's burning. Like, it's like kind of this, like, central trope of the genre. And even the like, like, Disco Dance Floor with its strobe lights and its smoke machines, which were brand new at the time. So you have these intense lights, all of this smoke everywhere, all these undulating bodies. And I argue that it's kind of like a simulacrum of a fire. Right? And actually many of these discos did. They weren't actually fireproof at all, unlike many of the residential buildings. And a number of them did burn, not just in New York City, but across the country. So there's all these different ways in which they are wrapped up in this history.
- [38:04]
Ryan Purcell
And finally released in 1984, the Roof is on Fire by Rockmaster Scott in the Dynamic 3 from the Bronx. Sounds at first listen like an anthem party song, but it also emerged from a landscape that was literally often in flames. In some ways, it could be said that this song represents a will to celebrate in spite of everything. Or even a hint at dark humor around a crisis.
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Kristin Sylvian
We don't need the water Let the motherfucker burn Burn, motherfucker burn.
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Ben Shansfield
You know, you can't understand this song, this anthem, without putting it in its place. Even though, like, the name for the wild dance moves that get unleashed by these new styles of DJing. Before they were called Breakdown, they were called Burning. Right? A name that's inextricable from the blazes across the built environment of the Bronx. So when Rockmaster Scott and the Dynamic 3 sing, the roof is on Fire, when they're yelling that at the end of the song, I think we need to hear that as being unnervingly literal. They're actually just describing what they're seeing. In the South Bronx, there were 30 fires every night, so you could not miss it.
- [39:39]
Ryan Purcell
Chapter five Born in Flames. Trisha Rose is the author of a book universally regarded as the first study of The History of Hip Hop, Black Rap Music, and Black Culture in Contemporary America, released in 1994 by Wesleyan University Press. Rose is currently the Chancellor's professor of Africana Studies and the Director of the Systematic Racism and Resilience Project at the John Nicholas Brown center for Advanced Studies at Brown University. And in that foundational text she writes, hip hop culture emerged as a source for youth of alternative identity formation and social status in a community whose older local support institutions had been all but demolished, along with large sectors of the built urban environment. And in the post industrial urban context of dwindling low income housing and a trickle of meaningless jobs for young people, mounting policy brutality and increasingly draconian depictions of young inner city residents, hip Hop style is black urban renewal. Some early rap, like the Message by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, made explicit commentary on urban conditions and the struggles for living poor in the city. Other early rap, while not expressly documentarian or political, was still what Rose calls public displays of counter presence and voice where young people could inscribe their identities, she says, on an environment that made legitimate avenues for material and social participation inaccessible. Furthermore, hip hop produced internal and external dialogues that affirmed the experiences and identities of the participants. Even as portrayals of urban life grew darker, New York City's art scene was vibrant. As hip hop culture took root in the Bronx, a thriving underground art scene downtown launched a generation of New York punk bands now saluted as having resuscitated rock and roll. Matthew Passar Joseph is an assistant professor of act, African American and Diasporic Studies at Vanderbilt University, and Joseph has written extensively about the power of music in cities during the middle of the 20th century. His dissertation, Syncopating Segregation Music Cross Pollination in Post World War II New York City, won the Urban History Association's best dissertation prize. It describes how various musicians and musical genres were able to transcend racial division and bring people together from different backgrounds throughout New York City. In particular, this dissertation, now under contract as a manuscript with Duke University Press, looks at the South Bronx and Lower Manhattan as largely ignored by increasingly neoconservative national, state and local governments, and how this neglect created the conditions that helped birth hip hop and punk respectively, and even contributed to the cross pollination in these two genres.
- [42:11]
Matthew Passard Joseph
We need to understand the birth of punk and hip hop. I mean, to the extent we can trace the birth of anything to any one place, we have pretty good receipts that punk and hip hop began as we know them today in New York City. And we need to understand the birth of those genres through the lens of the fiscal crisis of 75. Because what happens is that this is a shift in the city's emphasis on social welfare away from municipal democracy, away from social safety nets and towards a more neoliberal, laissez faire notion of what the city is.
- [43:02]
Ryan Purcell
Joseph explains how cuts to social welfare programs and education in the city's low income neighborhoods gave rise to hip hop and punk cultures.
- [43:11]
Matthew Passard Joseph
These mean develop out of parts of the city that are most disproportionately affected by these cuts. In both the Lower east side and the Bronx in general, these are places where basic firefighting services are cut, where education funding is cut and where which have already experienced a tremendous this wave of unemployment and lack of blue collar jobs that once sustained these neighborhoods.
- [43:44]
Ryan Purcell
Joseph explains that these tough conditions forced low income kids to create their own creative outlets.
- [43:51]
Matthew Passard Joseph
What that looks like in practice for hip hop and you know, a lot of people have written about this for hip hop. Trisha Rose most notably was that what was hip hop? It was educational. It was a form of after school arts education in cities where or in parts of the city where those had been cut. It was a community center. That's what outdoor jams were at a time when those were under funding restrictions. It was music programs when those didn't exist either. So it was the creativity of kids basically, in essence recreating some of those, some of the after school activities or in school activities that had been cut by laissez faire policy.
- [44:40]
Ryan Purcell
It wasn't long before the kids uptown and their counterparts downtown got curious about one another's scenes.
- [44:46]
Matthew Passard Joseph
Part of the kinship, the shared kind of desire to collaborate among punks and hip hoppers at this time is that they both see within their particular parts of town, overlaps with the other. So those kind of overlaps of arson, of deteriorating services, of benign neglect, which again are designed to, in essence designed by city officials to keep poor populations segregated, keep them within their quote unquote slums in this case has the opposite effect because they like each other's music and they feel a creative and social kinship in the kinds of places that they're living. Again, punks choose to live there. They're transplants, mostly middle class. Whereas most South Bronx and Bronx residents don't have a lot of choice where they live. But nonetheless the overlaps are there for them.
- [45:47]
Ryan Purcell
Alright, let's take a step back and explore the soundscape that that we've been illustrating. Let's start with Blondie's rapture off of the Auto American Album 1981 songwriters Chris Stein and Debbie Harry turned to music to bridge the social divides that they saw around them. And there are few better examples to see that philosophy and practice than in this song.
- [46:23]
Matthew Passard Joseph
The lyrics themselves become kind of hip hop's stealth debut in mainstream America. It is the first song with rapping in it to hit number one on the Billboard charts. And it debuted on MTV at a time when, as we know, MTV was still a deeply segregated station. So this was many white people's first experiences with anything approximating hip hop culture. It was kind of a way in, despite the fact that compared to a song like Genius of Love by TomTom Club, the members of. Recorded by the members of the Talking Heads, minus David Byrne, which also has rapping in it, that was a song that was picked up and was on heavy rotation. It was recorded, it was released right after Rapture. The songs were recorded contemporaneously and that was a song with rapping in it. In this case, Tina Weymouth rapping Another white blonde woman. Where that got Heavy Rotation on wbls, the black radio station in New York. And most folks didn't know the band was. Was white. With Rapture, most people knew that the musicians were white. And I think a lot of people thought it was fairly corny. And by people here, I mean uptowners, black and brown hip hoppers.
- [47:48]
Ryan Purcell
Now check out Planet Rock Rap by Africa Mambada and the Soul Sonic Force. Produced by the legendary Arthur Baker for Tommy boy Records in 1982 for Matthew Joseph. This track represents another merging of two musical styles, hip hop and punk and the bridging of social and racial differences in New York.
- [48:26]
John Finch
Or Pay our world is free Be what you be.
- [48:32]
Matthew Passard Joseph
In this case, Bambaata had been playing downtown for punk audiences. He had been invited to play at spots like the Mud Club for white punk audiences. But. And he was always the most eclectic of the first wave of hip hop DJs in terms of what he sampled. You know, he would famously spin things by the Monkeys and the Rolling Stones and then, you know, laugh at his. At his uptown dancers or kind of poke fun at them when he. They found out that they were dancing to songs recorded by a bunch of white boys. And so punk records were just the logical next step for Bambada, a person who by 1982, who had kind of ditched his afro and adopted a decidedly punk mohawk. But what's interesting about Planet Rock, it is hip hop artists trying to figure out what punk might sound like without having a deep grasp of what it sounds like. So for Bambaata punk is kraftvirk, Gary Newman, Japan's Yellow Magic Orchestra and Spaghetti Westerns by Ennio Morricone. That's not what I think a lot of punks would necessarily think punk was, but it's a feeling out process here. It's two genres of music and its devotees who see deep similarities in what they do, but they don't know exactly what the other side does yet. They're feeling each other out. And it's a particularly kind of. Of good time to do this because, you know, the punk venues, I call them punk venues, but places like the Negril Danceateria, the Roxy, and they are. They're spinning not just punk, they're increasingly obviously spinning hip hop, but they're also spinning new wave, no wave, some disco songs. So it's a moment of sonic experiment that bridges racial differences. And that's what Planet Rock is. You know, the lyrics are asking people to socialize and get down. You know, it's hard to imagine more inclusive lyrics that would speak across boundaries of race, class and sexual orientation than that.
- [50:55]
Ryan Purcell
And finally, Punk Rock Rap by the Cole Crush Brothers, released by Tuff city records in 1983, Will rap because we got it, like we can do it and so can you. It only takes you a minute or
- [51:14]
John Finch
two, Start dancing to the punk rock rap.
- [51:40]
Matthew Passard Joseph
The Cold Crush Brothers, who like kind of Bambaata and the Soul Sonic Force dressed in punk leather. One of them, jdl, also had a mohawk like Bamba. This song kind of went nowhere and it again doesn't sound anything like what we think of as punk, aside from kind of a brash in your face attitude. When I interviewed Grandmaster Kaz about this, he said that this was what he thought punk sounded like. And in essence, it ends up being more reminiscent of Planet Rock than it does of any sort of punk song. And Grandmaster Kaz himself called Planet Rock Hip hop's punk. So it still evokes kind of a new, exciting and inclusive moment that's centered around punk and hip hop's collision. But it doesn't sell any records. I think it's more evocative of a time and a place and a desire to transcend racial, ethnic and class boundaries than it is any sort of a musical success. But as such, it's kind of an important artifact from this era and one that. Whose title at least, least defines kind of the very movement I think we've been talking about.
- [53:05]
Ryan Purcell
Chapter 6, the legacy of HUD and the end of a beautiful concept from HUD's founding. Through ambitious programs like Operation Breakthrough to the fiscal challenges of the 1970s and the rise of hip hop as urban expression. We see the intertwined stories of policy, culture and city life where federal programs faltered or withdrew following a tide of political conservatism. In American history, music persisted. Music documented lives, documented the struggles and resilience of people on the ground. And HUD's legacy reminds us of the possibilities and limits of government, while hip hop reminds us that the persistent creativity and agency of communities keeps those neighborhoods alive to close us out. I want to bring it back to housing historian Kristen Sylvian, who has a tremendous perspective on the history of HUD as a federal agency.
- [53:53]
Kristin Sylvian
There's so much more that HUD can do, should do, that the United States is in the position to do. And I think that that kind of dream that came out of the late 1960s and early 1970s, that there can be this public private cooperation. And that doesn't mean the socialization of housing. It means that the private sector is going to be, if necessary, sticks will prod, but ideally carrots will entice the private sector to build adequate supplies of housing that can be reasonably afforded by wage earners in the United States. We have spent too much time trying to shore up the economic and political fortunes of the private commercial for profit housing sector, and we have sadly, sadly neglected our not for profit housing sector.
- [55:09]
Ryan Purcell
And finally, back to Ben Shansfield.
- [55:11]
Ben Shansfield
This is a really opportune time to remember why HUD was created, something that I think current, the current administration could really learn something from. I wonder how many podcasts there will be about the 60th anniversary of saying happy birthday to HUD. And it's really cool that it's happening on a podcast that also cares about music and pop culture. Like a cool. That's a cool mashup.
- [55:40]
Ryan Purcell
Recent federal actions have once again shifted HUD's mission and mandate dramatically, with implications for fair housing enforcement and funding to address homelessness, among other changes. As we've been tracing the soundtrack of HUD's history on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the agency is worth reflecting on the actual ideals and complex realities and on the ways policy and culture continues to shape our cities. Happy Birthday, hud. At this time I just want to give a few shout outs. First to the Gotham center for New York City History at the CUNY Graduate center in Midtown Manhattan. Thanks also to Fordham University, where I teach American Studies and US History, thanks to the generous support of the Urban History Association. I also want to give a huge thanks to our cast of guests for this episode, longtime HUD employees John Finch and Kent Watkins housing historian Kristen Sylvian Ben Shansfield, author of Born in Flames and Matthew Passard Joseph, a cultural historian at Vanderbilt University. Finally, a huge thanks to our new producer and writer Sheila Little, who has guided success Soundscapes through the rapid waters of audio storytelling. I want to flag that several of today's ambient soundscapes were created originally by the enigmatic audio producer Tony Schwartz, an American sound archivist active in New York city throughout the second half of the 20th century. Tony Schwartz will be the subject of a special episode of Soundscapes in the future. Before we go, a quick request if you've enjoyed this documentary about the 60th anniversary of HUD, please consider supporting Soundscapes and y. You can help us create more stories about New York's past by becoming supporters on Patreon. And if Patreon isn't for you, sharing this episode with a friend, a colleague, a fellow history lover makes a huge difference. Thank you for listening and thank you for supporting independent public history. I'm Ryan Purcell. Until next time.
- [57:42]
Kristin Sylvian
They can't no take that stand But I think we still could yeah well I think we still could Cuz all this time while I will be patient I'll be singing along to the radio station over One day you'll come around and you'll see yeah you're coming back to me A back to me a back to me.