New Books in Music

In 2025, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) marked its 60th anniversary. Created amid the optimism and urgency of the civil rights era, HUD embodied a bipartisan commitment to building stronger, more integrated, and equitable cities. How did that vision unfold alongside the music, culture, and politics that shaped urban life?

Street Level, a special audio documentary episode of Soundscapes NYC, explores the intertwined histories of urban policy, housing, and popular culture in the years following HUD’s establishment. Through archival recordings, immersive sound design, and music drawn from the neighborhoods most affected by federal housing decisions, the documentary traces how government policies shaped city life—and how residents responded through creativity, resilience, and community.

Featuring insights from historian and author Bench Ansfield, author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Born In Flames, senior career HUD staff members Kent Watkins and John Finch, and public history scholar Kristin Sylvian, Street Level connects policy decisions to lived experience, revealing how federal housing initiatives shaped the urban landscape—and how music and culture helped sustain joy, identity, and perseverance when city life grew more difficult. Part history, part cultural exploration, and part sonic journey, Street Level offers a powerful new perspective on the forces that have shaped America’s cities.

HOST/PRODUCER: Ryan Purcell

WRITER/PRODUCER: Shelagh Little
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It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and today we react to Olivia Rodrigo's new album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love. We analyze the lyrics and the aesthetics of the album, including the notable influence of The Cure and 80s British New Wave in particular. We offer an appreciation of Rodrigo's commitment to song craft and to live performance. And we note with pleasure that, perhaps unusually for a contemporary pop release, this album works as a coherent set of songs placed in an intentional order and with a defined narrative.
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The premiere of Oklahoma! in 1943 is commonly called a
“turning point” in the history of the Broadway musical. Often
characterized as the first integrated musical―meaning that the songs and
other elements of the show are integrated into the story―James O’Leary
offers a different interpretation of Oklahoma! and other musicals at the beginning of Broadway’s Golden Age in The Middlebrow Musical: Between Broadway and Opera in 1940s America
(Oxford University Press, 2025). Contextualizing his discussion within
debates among US critics, O’Leary argues that the negotiation between
operatic and popular music, and between frothy comedy and more serious
themes mark the musicals he analyzes as examples of the middlebrow.
Through detailed archival work, O’Leary uncovers the crucial critical
networks that originally theorized a middlebrow approach to culture,
beginning in the literary circles of Van Wyck Brooks and Archibald
MacLeish, and radiating outward to major theater and music critics
including Brooks Atkinson and Olin Downes. These writers believed
American culture had splintered into factions, which in turn divided
American audiences: highbrow art, which they regarded as obscure and
elitist; folk art, which they found provincial and alienating; and
popular culture, which they considered merely commercial. Blending these
kinds of art, they argued, could draw together a fractured society into
mutual understanding (if not necessarily agreement) by situating the
most sophisticated ideas within longstanding expressive traditions,
accessible to all. O’Leary finds in Oklahoma!, Beggar’s Holiday, and Street Scene a new kind of musical comedy that embraced American politics and weighty stories in ways not seen before 1943.
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There is no shortage of books on music and politics, but Anna Harwell Celenza explores an interesting premise in her book On the Record: Music that Changed America (Norton, 2026). Each of the twelve chapters discusses a different instance when music, as Celenza writes, “sparked debates in the halls of Congress.” Arranged basically chronologically, Celenza tackles some of the most powerful and contentious issues in twentieth and twenty-first century American politics. From censorship to copyright law; from the Civil Rights Movement, to foreign policy during Apartheid, Celenza traces the extraordinary moments when music moved Congress, challenged power, and united people around shared ideals. The stories Celenza tells are just as much about music including the intertwined histories of “The Star Spangled Banner” and “Lift Every Voice and Sing” or the making of Paul Simon’s album Graceland, as they are about US legislation or American politics. She offers readers a history of America heard through the songs and compositions that changed its course.
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How the sound of the female playback voice impacts Bollywood's cultural, musical, and cinematic environment.

Drawing on sound studies and performance theory, scholar Shikha Jhingan explores the discursive nature of the female playback voice in Bombay film songs in The Female Playback in Bombay Cinema: Voice, Body, Technology (Wayne State UP, 2025). Mapping the production, circulation, and reception of the voices of singing stars—notably Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle—Jhingan situates the singing voice as a cinematic object with limitless possibilities of distribution and dispersal. She employs the perspectives of a diverse range of listeners across a vast media landscape to illustrate how the affective charge of the female playback voice, combined with developments in audio technology, has led to a gradual expansion of opportunities for women in film, popular music, and media and audio production. With nuanced exploration of the way the human voice becomes intertwined with devices such as the microphone, radio, cassettes, and digital technologies, Jhingan argues for the sonic excess of the female voice beyond the narrative and visual. The Female Playback in Bombay Cinema is an authoritative addition to the field of sound studies with implications for gender studies, performance studies, and cinema studies.
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