The
Bush Tetras, "Too Many Creeps," and New York City
By Caroline Polk
O'Meara
It is not in the heartbeat that the pulse of society is
to be measured, but in the choreography of its footsteps.
R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape
In the 1970s, America's most emblematic modern city, New York, experienced
a series of widely publicized fiscal and social crises, narrowly avoiding
bankruptcy in 1975. It became a national and international symbol of the
failure of the modern city. Yet the 1970s and early 1980s in New York were
also, in the words of historian Josh Kun, "a watershed period in American
popular music that witnessed the explosive convergences of Anglo punk and
new wave and African American and latino/a disco, salsa, and hip-hop." New
music and musical styles were created in neighborhoods where the previous
decades' physical and social disintegration had taken the greatest toll,
areas of New York ignored or even discarded by the city's leaders. For residents
of this New York in 1980—those living in neighborhoods like the south
bronx and the lower east side—this "explosive convergence" of musical
styles was part and parcel of the discordant soundscape of their city. One
local band was frequently mentioned in reviews and concert announcements
as capturing well the sound and feel of the lower east side during this
moment: The Bush Tetras. In the early 1980s many found the music of the
Bush Tetras to be particularly characteristic of this urban zone.
Indeed, Robert Christgau, longtime music editor of the Village Voice,
later wrote that the Tetras' first album "summed up the lower east
side circa 1980."
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