The title of Adam Krims's latest book, Music and Urban Geography, announces the author's ambitious scope. The cover features a stunning photograph of Frank Gehry's Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago's Millenium Park. Yet Chicago itself rates only a brief mention in Krims's text, and live musical performance does not feature prominently in his arguments. Despite this mismatch introduced by the cover designer, both picture and title will surely catch the eye of any prospective reader browsing either at a ‘total cross-marketed environment of urban retail’, such as Borders (139), or the more specialized setting of a conference book fair. In Music and Urban Geography, Krims aims to create a comprehensive theoretical, and at times historical, approach to the study of contemporary urban life through an invigorated understanding of music's role in the creation and experience of the (urban) world around us. In the process he makes several compelling statements about how the changing nature of cities worldwide, particularly in the Western world, has altered the form and function of music.

Adroitly jumping from musicology to the field(s) of urban geography, Music and Urban Geography is an interdisciplinary endeavour at heart. Krims writes primarily with the general music audience in mind, specifically those interested in what he calls ‘music studies of the present (with music studies embracing music theory, musicology, and ethnomusicology)’ (xli). He also ensures that readers interested in geography, urban sociology, and urban planning could learn much from this book – the sections of specialized music analysis are brief and well framed. However, some of the strongest sections present central urban studies topics for the uninitiated musicological audience. This slim book reads like a collection of essays rather than a sustained series of arguments about its themes. And although Krims never directly states this in the Preface, I assume that this format reflects the author's approach to the publisher's new focus on the textbook market.

What the title does not reveal is Krims's commitment to what he calls ‘Marxist music analysis’. In the Introduction (‘Changing Cities and the Music Studies of the Present’), he begins by surveying how shifts in capitalism have altered urban form and the urban experience. Krims summarizes, in list form, the central characteristics of post-Fordism, which he repeats in greater detail in Chapter 4, ‘Marxist Music Analysis After Adorno’ (xxiii; 95). Why Marxist music analysis and not, say, ‘Adorno and Music Analysis after Marxism’? Krims is an enthusiastic Marxist, writing that ‘nothing has bequeathed us more powerful tools than […] [Karl Marx's mapping of capitalism] for sensing the spatial contours that surround us’ (60). This allegiance appears in his intellectual approach and choice of vocabulary: cities and their populations don't get richer, they accumulate capital. (Western academics wary of his embrace of Marxism must acknowledge the importance of the intellectual history he discusses in this chapter.) While not exclusively Marxist, post-Fordism encompasses changes in cities in the past several decades – what might elsewhere be called, less specifically, post-industrialism. Krims's discussion certainly argues strongly for its inclusion in any study of music and (recent) urban geography.

In addition, ‘Marxist Music Analysis After Adorno’ provides a well-reasoned entry point into the larger theoretical groundings of the field of (Marxist) popular music studies. Echoing the Frankfurt school's Freud-influenced Marxism, Krims identifies Adorno's writings on mass production and standardization as ‘the popular music scholar's scene of primal trauma’. He reviews Adorno's role in the current shape of music scholarship and isolates how many scholars conflate ‘his name with the entire broad and diverse field of Marxism’ (92). This thorough discussion makes Chapter 4 an important contribution to popular music studies, particularly for those rooted in cultural and subcultural studies (perhaps ironically, considering Krims's own disdain for this field). It follows from Krims's discussion that today's Marxist music analysis must look at the role of urban geography in music creation and reception.Footnote ¹

This chapter also contains the most compelling music analysis in the text. Krims writes that ‘changes in cities wrought by reorganization of urban production […] implant themselves in patterns of sound’ (94). For me, this was exciting stuff, the idea that changes in cities can be embedded, heard even, in music. Krims expands upon some of the ideas he first sketched in his book Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity to demonstrate how this might happen.Footnote ² He returns to the hip-hop sublime, which features ‘dense combinations of musical layers’ self-consciously ‘out of tune’ with one another. As the layers accumulate, one on top of the other, they erode ‘the conceptual boundaries and unifying descriptions in our categories of pitch combination’ (111). This hip-hop sublime accounts for the menacing and aggressive soundscape of much hip-hop in the mid-1990s. Just as significantly, it ‘encode[s] musically the urban conditions of community devastation and danger that the lyrics in the genre most [sic] described’ (112). Such hip-hop artists communicated aspects of the lived experience of the (minority) inner city with this musical representation of its pleasures, fears, and sublime contradictions.

Krims's scholarship shares little with the studies of the locality long present in more sociological studies of music cultures. He elaborates on this distinction in Chapter 2, ‘Space, Place, and Popular Music in Curaçao and Elsewhere’, explaining what he sees as a need for a space-oriented approach to music and urban geography, one that would complement the already place-oriented approach found in much scholarship across the disciplines. For Krims, space ‘represents coercive forces of social constraint’, allowing music scholars to explore the ‘mechanisms by which music partakes in wider aspects of social change’ (32). In an interesting turn, he then explores the very specific musicking environment of Willemstad, Curaçao, and the genre tumba, which is deeply connected to the Carnival celebrations of that city.Footnote ³ After working hard to separate ‘space’ and ‘place’ early in the chapter, Krims concludes that place, and its pleasures, ‘have now become unified with the structuring force of global space’ (54). In other words, place is space (59). Perhaps the inclusion of other approaches to these ideas – I am thinking especially of Henri Lefebvre's workFootnote ⁴ – might assist Krims in further reframing the terms of the debate.

Outside the discussion of tumba in Chapter 2, what I often missed while reading Music and Urban Geography was the specifics of space and place. I felt this absence most strongly in Chapter 3, ‘Mourning the Impossible Libidinal City in Boogie Nights’. The chapter includes compelling discussions of musical details within the 1997 Paul Thomas Anderson film Boogie Nights. Krims frames these sections with the argument that, in the late 1990s, disco music became a metonym for the changes in urban life since the 1970s. Disco in the 1970s possessed ‘the image of an urban public space of collective pleasure and libidinal exploration’ (73). While I agree with Krims, and others, that Boogie Nights memorializes the seventies as a lost utopia, he never convinced me that Anderson encodes this as particularly urban. (While reading this chapter, I was constantly reminded of Woody Allen's depiction of Los Angeles in Annie Hall.) Yes, the San Fernando Valley is a (largely residential) part of Los Angeles, the quintessential Western post-modern city. However, Boogie Nights is a movie of interior scenes, and many of these occur in the very suburban-looking home of Burt Reynolds's Jack Horner. In his film Anderson represents the anonymous suburbia of the late 1970s, the valley's most common signifier in films from the past three decades, playing either itself or thousands of imaginary filmic suburbs. A closer analysis of the San Fernando Valley would address this concern.

Krims opens the Introduction with a discussion of the Dutch record and video store Fame. (For this American reader, his description brought to mind a large, now-defunct Tower Records Store, either the one in New York's SoHo, or the one in the suburban strip-mall near where I went to college.) He describes how the layout of the store marks off classical music, arguing that at Fame ‘classical music is specifically a manner of experiencing urban geography’ (xv). When I first read this, I was perplexed, especially so soon after admiring the exterior urban vista on the cover. How is walking through a record store a particularly axiomatic example of urban geography? Krims never directly explains this example, but his discussion in the final chapter, ‘Music for the Design Intensive City’, covers the assumptions behind his opening in great detail. He explains that ‘design-intensive’ production is the result of increasingly sophisticated automated production in manufacturing, a characteristic of post-Fordism. Only then does Krims argue that music operates in the design-intensive production of the self in our urban environments.

In his analysis, some recent classical recordings – my favourite was Beethoven: Forever by the Sea – have become accessories for a particular kind of lived and imagined urban life. These classical recordings, sold at Victoria's Secret or Starbucks, ‘[invoke] the goal of private, indoor listening and [take] that situation as its exemplary location’ (144, emphasis original). They represent non-existent natural environments. Krims argues that they also ‘rejoin the urban practice of design-intensive production […] [wherein] one encounters the design-intensive production of the self’ (139). Classical music, in the examples Krims isolates, amplifies certain desirable characteristics of interior urban spaces, such as the expensive, attractive European stereo one might play it on. He concludes that characteristics of these playback locations (whether Starbucks or your loft/condo) themselves have become a commercial force (146). It is classical recordings (as opposed to classical music) that now reflect this repurposing of interior (designed) urban spaces (157). In this chapter, as elsewhere in the book, Krims moves deftly between micro and macro discussions, suggesting ways in which music scholars can understand the social role of ‘classical music’ in the new millennium.

In reading this final chapter, I wanted Krims to return to the idea of the ‘urban ethos’ developed in the first chapter (‘Defining the Urban Ethos’). What he calls the ‘urban ethos’ includes the ‘range of urban representations and their possible modalities’ and ‘publicly disseminated notions of how cities are generally’ (7).Footnote ⁵ This broad, intentionally non-specific notion of the urban – on the next page he describes it as a ‘structure of feeling’ – might be Krims's answer to my desire for more geographical particulars in his later discussions of place and space. If so, I wish he would return to its potentials in his later discussions, especially since it seems that his goal is to fashion a flexible theory that can be applied to music across time and place. Finally, it seems to have become de rigueur to mention in reviews of some recent Routledge texts the quality of the editing (more specifically, the perceived lack thereof).Footnote ⁶ This reviewer understands that a book imagined as a textbook might not return to important concepts outlined in previous chapters. Nonetheless, Krims's presentation of the ‘urban ethos’ and the ‘design-intensive city’/ ‘design-intensive production of the self’ are powerful, and deserve further connection and analysis.

Music and Urban Geography is an opening salvo in a promising new subdiscipline of music research, and Krims leaves much work for future scholars to sink their teeth into. Other authors might explore how the specifics of place in Los Angeles, New York, or Atlanta (for example) influence the shape and experience of the hip-hop sublime in music. Surely the lived experience of cities – and their neighbourhoods, blocks, and highways – impact on all perceptions of urban life and urban geography. Perhaps one way to bring together the urban ethos and the design-intensive city would be to study how the presence of large, often Frank Gehry-designed, performance halls in American inner cities shape our experience of classical music, socially and sonically. How, then, might a space like Chicago's Pritzker Pavilion be compared to the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Disney Hall? How do the specifics of design and the urban ethos shape these buildings' role in their communities? Krims's wide-ranging text is an intellectual achievement spanning an impressive range of musical cultures and ideas. It is just the beginning of an exciting and promising new interdisciplinary endeavour.