Corner, Garage, and Basement

Abstract This essay considers three forms of American music named and forever identified with the ordinary spaces where they arose: the street corner, the garage, and the basement. It cuts critical dispositions from musicology and sound studies together with the historical study of vernacular architecture, questioning the affordances of anonymous, serialized building and landscape types to forms of dissident reuse that their designers could not have foreseen and likely would have sought to curtail. Each reciprocity of space and sound proves differently diagnostic of the racially divided American city as remade after the Second World War: downtown, through Urban Renewal’s bulldozer-led clearance and redevelopment; at and beyond the city’s edge, through the elaboration of bulldozer-graded, automobile-oriented suburban landscapes of enclosure, both above and, significantly, below ground. The essay reimagines the stadial historical geography of the American metropolis in terms of music and sound, and it reconsiders musical genre in terms of its spatial genesis. It provokes meditations on the sonic ontology of the built environment, and it suggests ways to overhear, in these resonant scenes set in train by large-scale demolition, clues to how America’s underdetermined urban forms have harbored—and may yet disclose—the forces of their own unmaking.