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bopinion · 3 years

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Album of the month / 2020 / 12 December

I like listening to music - gladly, all the time, everywhere. That's why I would like to share which music (or which album, after all I'm still from the vinyl generation ;-) I enjoy, accompanies me, slides up my playlists again and again...

Stadtaffe

Peter Fox

Dancehall / 2008 / Downbeat Records (Warner Music Group)

Usually it's rather rarely the same music that makes it into the charts and into my personal favor. But there are exceptions: one of the top albums from 2008 is still one of my all time favorites.

In 1998, the 11-member band Seeed was founded in Berlin. Following the concept of the "marching band", the group called itself a "mobile reggae special task force" and combined reggae with hip-hop and dancehall. A combination that even achieved success in Jamaica. A highlight of the international attention was their performance at the opening ceremony of the Soccer World Cup in Munich in 2006, which was seen by nearly 1.5 billion people. When Seeed took an artistic break in 2008 (today they are active and successful again), one of their masterminds, frontman Peter Fox, apparently couldn't sit still. He actually wanted to implement ideas that had been buzzing through his head for some time as a producer for another musician, but soon realized that he would dominate unduly and took flight with a solo album.

Peter Fox was born as Pierre Baigorry in West Berlin on September 3, 1971. No idea why, with a name like that, he decided to go with a stage name after all. In the early 1970s, West Berlin was considered the front post of the Cold War, the city without a curfew, a slightly anarchistic island of the West in the midst of communism, a melting pot of cultures, a place of longing for hedonists, a destination for eternal travelers. And magnet for stranded artists' souls, such as Iggy Pop, Brian Eno and, of course, David Bowie. Perhaps it was because of this atmosphere that Fox was virtually destined to become what he became: Big-city poet, experimental bohemian, musical border crosser, typical Berliner, bound to his hometown in a deep love-hate relationship.

I've always had a hard time with music that is very simplistic. Bands, where every song sounds the same, can score with me just as little as lyrics that tell an interchangeable love talk - and in his native language, you just can not hide. This (so far only) solo album by Peter Fox meets both of these requirements without compromise.

Musically, Fox falls back on the successful recipe of the Seeed mixture of dancehall, reggae and hip-hop. But he adds percussion and drumlines. And electric guitars and keyboards. And brass sections and string arrangements with orchestral instrumentation. In the studio and live he was therefore accompanied by the US-American drumming group "Cold Steel" and the Babelsberg Film Orchestra. So it's no coincidence that he himself calls his music "film music for dancing" - or simply "pop". But whoever has heard, for example, how perfectly he implements a string arrangement by Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich, this designation is simply too simple.

The album's lyrics are mostly about Fox's self-reflection and life in Berlin. So he works off his everyday life without it becoming ordinarily everyday like. His ambition, he says, was "to make a pop record with German language that is cool in all respects." He undoubtedly succeeded in doing so - presumably because he completed it together with his friend and producer Daffy, alias David Conen, mostly in a beer garden. He also gave the lyrics such a high priority because he wanted to conceal his, in his opinion, average vocal qualities in terms of content. They should be "well flowing, appealing in content and aptly rhymed, but still kept pleasantly simple".

Fox refers to the title of the album "Stadtaffe" ("City Monkey") to people his age who are "no longer teenagers, but still more young than old" and who "often behave in a very silly way. This monkey-like behavior manifests itself, for example, in the inconsistency of their actions: City monkeys are "people who are annoyed by noise, but make noise themselves. People who are annoyed by the dirt and who throw things on the street themselves." So somehow the middle of society after all.

In 2009, "Stadtaffe" was the most successful music album in Germany in terms of sales figures. Over 1.3 million copies sold is a remarkable figure for a German-language album. Most critics were also very positive. Praise was primarily given for the intelligent lyrics and the innovative musical accompaniment. Two years after its initial release, Rolling Stone elevated the work to the canon of the best German albums. An anonymous listener sums it up in a post: "To become a legend with only one album - you have to manage that first". And in the Google score, the album lands at 99% - and the 1% must have clicked false by mistake. Somehow it is a pity that it has remained the only album of Peter Fox solo. But Fox is still active with Seeed, so that's comforting.

A true artist always lives for his work to inspire others, to live on as an inspiration. So it's almost logical that in 2014 Fox, together with Bryan Little, founded "BÄM!", the first Berlin drumline school, to teach children and young people this tradition of US high schools and colleges. Weapons of mass percussion!

Here's a clip of the title track live - in Berlin, of course:

https://youtu.be/zBfkYjlWe38

youtube

#music #album #album review #peter fox #seeed #berlin #dancehall #reggae #hip hop #drumline #stadtaffe #warner music group #Youtube

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megwcitycourse · 4 years

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The Double Life of a College Town

From 2010 until 2018 (with the exception of 10 months in 2012-2013 when I studied abroad in Barcelona) I lived in Urbana, Illinois, USA. This (unremarkable to most of the world) small city has an estimated population of 42,214 (U.S. Census Bureau, Urbana) but sits attached to Champaign with another 88,909 (U.S. Census Bureau, Champaign). While I lived almost exclusively in Urbana, the truth is that the two cities mostly behave as one, whether you call it Champaign-Urbana or Urbana/Champaign or Chambana or Bubble City, etc. (That last one is mostly a gimmick name used for events. Champaign - Champagne - get it?)

Cronin (2006) links his micro-cosmopolitanism to fractal differentialism. He explains, “This term expresses the notion of a cultural complexity which remains constant from the micro to the macro scale. That is to say, the same degree of diversity is to be found at the level of entities judged to be small or insignificant as at the level of large entities” (15).

Champaign-Urbana is mostly known for being the home of the main campus of the University of Illinois, which is my alma mater (I’m told that’s a very American phrase). A large research university of over 50,000 students (“UIUC”), it dominates the twin cities while simultaneously being somewhat discrete from the surrounding area. Champaign and Urbana are technically two cities - Champaign-Urbana is also two cities in a more figurative sense. You have students, and you have townies. You have Campustown, and you have downtown Champaign or Urbana (on either side). I’ve always kind of straddled the two - I joined a group soon after coming to the University that was comprised of both students and townies and I made friends with both. Went to parties off campus and attended classes on. While I was a student, I lived in both Champaign-Urbanas.

I cited Cronin above to highlight the reason why I gave the population sizes of Champaign and Urbana in the first paragraph. I wanted to illustrate that, despite its significantly smaller size than any of the world’s major cities, Champaign/Urbana exhibits many of the same tensions we would expect from places like Toronto, Chicago, London, Tokyo, etc. We can even find some of these tensions just within the University’s campus.

In “Serendipitous City: In Search of an Aleatory Urbanism,” Mervyn Horgan (2014) gives us the “city of birds” and the “city of worms,” two representational modes accounting for different methods in urban studies. Of the city of birds, he writes, “the urban is treated as an object to be described and known through accurate and complete description of what is objectively available and analyzable” (64). By contrast, “In the city of worms, the urban is treated as a subject to be interpreted and understood.” Put another way, “Where the city of birds is populated, the city of worms is peopled” (67). From the city of birds, we get disciplines such as urban planning and demography, whereas the city of worms gives us ethnography and literature (69).

For about a year, I was majoring in Computer Science (until I realized I was not very good at it and did not, in fact, want to spend the rest of my working life doing it). I was also taking German at the time, and between the two classes, I had a bit of a walk across campus, from the southeast corner of the Main Quad to the east side of the Engineering Quad (map below - the Foreign Languages Building, or FLB, is crudely circled in blue and the Siebel Center for Computer Science in red).

(Google Maps)

I took this walk up Mathews Avenue a couple of times a week, and at some point I realized that there was a noticeable demographic shift as I moved from the Main Quad (housing primarily the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences) to the Engineering Quad. Slowly but surely, the students I passed by trended more male. An unfortunate side effect of the (improving, but still prevalent) dominance of men in the engineering disciplines. I was never the only woman in my computer science classes, but it was usually in the single digits, and it showed when I crossed Green Street to arrive on the engineering side of the U of I campus. I see this experience as a meeting of Horgan’s “city of birds” and “city of worms.” In a small city like Champaign-Urbana - in an even smaller “city” like the UIUC campus - you can see how the demographic makeup shifts on just a ten-minute walk.

The buildings around me also changed on this little walk - noticeably more money has been spent on the engineering programs on campus compared to the liberal arts. You can see it in the more modern buildings full of metal and glass and new, functioning equipment, compared to FLB, a building I had most of my courses in and later worked in for about a year and a half, a brick building with a chilly basement and old carpeting, and three usually-working laptops that I had to loan out to grad students who didn’t have their own. Granted, computers are slightly less important to non-computer science students, but, in this day and age, only slightly. More on this dichotomy a bit later on.

Even more stark than the shift in gender demographics from one side of campus to the other was the shift between on and off campus demographics. I moved into an apartment off campus in 2011 and got a car around the same time. Experiencing Champaign/Urbana by car was a whole different world from on foot. Though the areas closest to campus were still dominated by students, the farther away I got, the more variety I saw in the age range of the pedestrians. I also noted a drop in the number of pedestrians overall (this was the reason I frequently stated that I hated driving on campus), as well as a decline in how pedestrian friendly the streets were. Interestingly enough, despite the abundance of crosswalks on campus, jaywalking seemed equally rampant just about everywhere. (Keep jaywalking in mind - I’m going to mention it later on.)

The types of cars I tended to see also changed depending on whether I was in Campustown or elsewhere. Campustown, being prime real estate for proximity to the main campus as well as to bars and restaurants, was (increasingly, as the years went on) full of expensive high rises boasting as many amenities as possible to students who could afford to take advantage. I pulled the image below from the 309 Green website (this was one of the high rises that has been there since I moved to town - several others cropped up later):

(“309 Green”)

I won’t say all of the buildings in Campustown had a pool, but most of them had advertising materials that looked roughly like this. With most off campus apartments, you’d be lucky if they had their own website with more than a couple of photos, and they certainly didn’t come with high-speed internet, central A/C, washer and dryer, fitness center, etc. And while I drove in Campustown only a few times a month, every time, I could tell exactly where I was by both the number of pedestrians and the luxury cars that surrounded my humble Honda.

According to Myria Georgiou (2014), top-down (or hegemonic) cosmopolitanism “represents the project of the neoliberal city… enabled through the close collaboration of local and national government and corporate interests.” On the other hand, “Vernacular cosmopolitanism is about hospitality, which, though conditional… makes the urban landscape’s history and present always a history-in-the-making, a history of newcomers” (65).

I’ve seen echoes of this dichotomy both on the UIUC campus and in Champaign-Urbana more broadly. Near the afore-mentioned FLB is a row of buildings on Nevada Street referred to as the “cultural houses”. Here’s why:

(Google Maps)

That brick one on the right is the Native American House, the pale yellow one on the left is La Casa Cultural Latina. The Departments of Gender and Women’s Studies, Asian American Studies, and African American Studies are also on this street. The idea here is that students of all kinds feel welcome, have a “home” (never mind the graffiti that started showing up outside of La Casa right around, oh, 2016 or so). There’s a bit of irony in having a “Native American House” right in the middle of Kiikaapoi, Miami, Peoria, and Očeti Šakówiŋ lands, but that’s a another post ("Native Land”). (Spoiler alert: the U of I doesn’t have a great history [or present] when it comes to respecting indigenous peoples.)

Then, we have the Siebel Center:

(Ngo 2014)

It’s a hulking mass of a building compared to those cultural houses, full of the kind of money the University and its donors are willing to spend on the Computer Science program (one of the top ten in the country). These buildings and the university departments associated with them serve as UIUC’s “neighborhoods,” and in them we can see the way a city’s tensions play out on a more micro scale. The examples I’ve given here are by no means exhaustive, but I believe they provide a taste of the unique experience of living in a college town.

Off campus, we have a perhaps more traditional, obvious example of hegemonic vs. vernacular cosmopolitanism: the two malls. First, in northern Champaign, there is the Market Place Mall, a traditional shopping center with stores like Bergner’s, JC Penney, Claire’s, Hot Topic, Kay Jewelers, etc. The fact that it is exactly the kind of mall you can find in most US towns makes it, much like Westfield Stratford City, as discussed by Georgiou, “mediated, controlled, commodified.” She says, “Westfield Stratford City is both indistinguishable from other spaces of global consumption and a very specific place…” (54) Indistinguishable though it may be from other places of this type, the Market Place Mall remains a destination for locals and people from the surrounding towns to shop, meet, and eat – much like any other mall.

The Lincoln Square Mall, in downtown Urbana, is much more vernacular in its cosmopolitanism. Aside from several empty storefronts, it is filled with local businesses and organizations including a small art supply store, an organic food co-op, a record shop, a church, and several martial arts/fitness studios. The few restaurants are locally owned – not a Panda Express or Auntie Anne’s Pretzels in sight. Unfortunately, it is clear that Lincoln Square does not benefit from attracting patrons from the surrounding towns in the way that Market Place does. This is not a mall that people go to just to hang out or browse. If you’re at Lincoln Square, it’s probably for a specific reason (the food co-op and the gym are the most popular destinations) and you aren’t likely to spend time just walking around the way you might at a more typical mall. However, it seems to keep itself afloat by engaging with the community. Events such as Pridefest are hosted there each year, and during the warmer months, you can visit the Urbana Farmers’ Market (another example of the vernacular) in the parking lot.

“...what most vividly characterizes the colonial city is its spatial segregation. Such separation is a powerful visual illustration of the ‘paradoxical unity’ of cities, where populations mingle on the streets and yet lead culturally separate lives” (Simon 2006, 22).

At the beginning of this essay, I alluded to the separation between students and townies. “Town-gown” relations are known to be troubled in many college towns, though some universities have taken steps to address the problem. Joshua J. Yates and Michaela Accardi studied this problem in 2019 and published their findings as the “Field Guide for Urban University-Community Partnerships.” While they identified ten universities with innovative community engagement programs (23), they also note that only 16 out of the 100 universities surveyed have a “governance structure inclusive of community members” (21). Regrettably, data for individual universities was not included in the guide, so I am uncertain of where the U of I falls in their evaluation. However, speaking from personal experience, I can say that I do not feel that the University encourages its students to engage with the Champaign/Urbana community. I did because I joined a mixed group soon after becoming a student there, so I straddled the line between students and townies for a long time. (I would say I went “full townie” after I left that group in 2015.) That said, the only time I was ever required to do community service (which is not, by any means, the end all be all of community engagement) was during my brief stint in the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps.

Price (2019), citing Abdelhafid Khatib, writes, “...social location and how you are identified matters in how you move, where you move, with what safety or danger, and that, in turn, has consequences for what you see and perceive” (76).

I’m going to get a bit political here and talk about 2016 and its aftermath. When the US presidential election took place, ending with the election of Donald Trump, Champaign/Urbana was a city divided (and you could hear it on local public radio the next morning). While it is, overall, a dot of blue in a sea of red (those are swapped from what they mean in Canada), the surrounding rural area’s influence can be seen outside of campus (as can the influence of the wealthy white Chicago suburbs that send students to UIUC). At the time, I was working for a local academic publisher and conference producer in what is called Research Park. Research Park is technically part of the U of I campus, though it is not near any residential or academic buildings. It houses both startups and branches of larger companies and is mainly tech-oriented. The company that I worked for skewed very millennial, female, and liberal, and the whole office took on a somber mood in the days following the election. That first day was a mess of tears, ranting, and not much work getting done. Our bosses made a point of checking in on how we were holding up. This was a place where everyone at least appeared to be on the same page, politically, and we all felt a little safer because of it. Personally, because I felt that visibility was important, I chose this time to start being a little more open about being a queer person, and I found it to be a non-issue among this set of coworkers.

Unfortunately, because there are plenty of things aside from politics that can make a job turn sour, I left that company towards the end of 2017 and had to head back to the retail world to make ends come anywhere near meeting. What I found there, in northern Champaign, near the Market Place Mall, was a world very different from the one in which I had been living for the past seven years. Though I wasn’t vocal about my political leanings, I didn’t lie about them either, and that earned me a fair amount of “jokes” and “teasing” (none of which seemed especially funny) from some of my superiors. They, in their positions of power over me, did not seem to understand why such behavior might be inappropriate, and it made more than one day at that job feel nearly like a hostile environment. It never escalated to a point where I felt like any potential retribution I might face was worth a report to Human Resources, but it was the closest I came to facing the urban/rural dichotomy of Champaign/Urbana head-on. By contrast with my publishing job, I did not feel safe outing myself as queer with the majority of these coworkers.

But then, by focusing on my own experience, I am still missing something. In his discussion of translation-as-tuning-in, Price talks about experience-near and experience-distant concepts. He explains, “If you try and reach for a person’s own schema, then you are focused on... ‘experience-near’ concepts; if you go for the abstract, disciplinary categories, and concepts foreign to what a social agent would recognize, then you are using ‘experience-distant’ concepts” (71).

It is one thing for me to recognize that a person of color or a disabled person or a trans person (especially one using a name and pronouns other than their legal ones) might have had an even more hostile experience at that retail workplace (and even, to an extent, at the predominantly white publishing company), and it is quite another for me to “tune in” to the everyday reality of such existences. I could say the same of my experiences as a student at the University. I felt safe there most of the time. How did my Latinx classmates feel when “Build the Wall” chalkings started appearing on campus in 2016 (including right outside of La Casa Cultural Latina - a deliberate act of intimidation)? How did my indigenous classmates feel when being asked to root for the “Fighting Illini?” (Illini refers to the Illinois Confederation, representing about a dozen indigenous tribes from the area [”The Illinois”].) Or when, nearly 15 years after the retirement of Chief Illiniwek (a “mascot” that involved a white student dressing in pseudo-ceremonial garb and performing a pseudo-ceremonial dance), local news outlets still stir up the debate on a regular basis via social media? What about the fact that Black people make up 16% of the population in Champaign/Urbana but the vast majority of arrests (yes, arrests) for jaywalking (88% in Champaign and 91% in Urbana) (Rosen 2012)?

Reaching for these experiences and trying to internalize them is something you might not expect a person from a small town to have any need to do, but, as I cited Cronin near the beginning of this post, the diversity that you see at the macro level also exists at the micro level. Champaign/Urbana has tensions between urban and rural, students and townies, racial tensions, gender disparities, and socio-economic divides, despite containing fewer than 150,000 people, compared to the millions in some of the biggest cities. College towns are their own unique animal with a double life unlike any other kind of city.

References

“309 Green.” 2020. Apartments Near UIUC | 309 Green | Champaign, IL. American Campus Communities. Accessed August 13, 2020. https://www.americancampus.com/student-apartments/il/champaign/309-green#amenities.

Cronin, Michael. 2006. “Translation and the New Cosmopolitanism.” In Translation and Identity, 6-40. London: Routledge.

Georgiou, Myria. 2014. “Consumption: The Hegemonic and the Vernacular.” In Media and the City: Cosmopolitanism and Difference, 44–65. Chichester: Polity Press.

Google Maps. Google. Accessed August 3, 2020. https://maps.google.com/.

Horgan, Mervyn. 2014. “Serendipitous City: In Search of Aleatory Urbanism.” In Cartographies of Place: Navigating the Urban, edited by Michael Darroch and Janine Marchessault, 55–76. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.

“The Illinois: Identity.” 2000. MuseumLink Illinois. Illinois State Museum. http://www.museum.state.il.us/muslink/nat_amer/post/htmls/il_id.html.

“Native Land.” n.d. Map. Native Land. Native Land Digital. Accessed August 3, 2020. https://native-land.ca/.

Ngo, Johnny. 2014. “Computer Science - Rise in Popularity and Plagiarism.” Uloop. Uloop Inc. October 5, 2014. https://www.uloop.com/news/view.php/138163/Computer-Science---Rise-in-Popularity-and-Plagiarism.

Price, Joshua Martin. 2019. “Taking Sides: Urban Wandering as a Decolonial Translation Practice in the Americas.” Tusaaji: A Translation Review 7 (1): 68–83. doi:10.25071/1925-5624.40385.

Rosen, Rebecca J. 2012. “In Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, 89% of Those Arrested for Jaywalking Are Black.” The Atlantic, August 24. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/08/in-champaign-urbana-illinois-89-of-those-arrested-for-jaywalking-are-black/261522/.

Simon, Sherry. 2006. Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

“UIUC Student Enrollment by Curriculum and Student Level Fall 2019.” 2019. University of Illinois Division of Management Information. September 9, 2019. https://www.dmi.illinois.edu/stuenr/class/enrfa19.htm.

U.S. Census Bureau. 2019. “U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts: Champaign City, Illinois.” 2019. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/urbanacityillinois.

U.S. Census Bureau. 2019. “U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts: Urbana City, Illinois.” 2019. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/champaigncityillinois.

Yates, Joshua J., and Michaela Accardi. 2019. Field Guide for Urban University-Community Partnerships. Charlottesville: Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.

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