Listening to Urban Rhythms: Soundscapes in Popular Music

Abstract

In Spaces of Hope, Lefebvrian urban thinker David Harvey notes the way in which Marx had “grounded his ontological and epistemological arguments on real sensual bodily interaction with the world” and proposes that “The contemporary rush to return to the body as the irreducible basis of all argument is, therefore a rush to return to the point where Marx, among many others began” (2000, 101–102).¹ Harvey’s discussion—unsurprisingly if the reader has been attentive to the ways in which his Marxism differs in emphasis, but not in its foundation, from Lefebvre’s own Marxian thought—turns quickly to political economy and to notions of class, labor, and production. While Harvey provides valuable insights, it is instead Lefebvre whose Marxian development of the themes of embodied being under capitalism lends itself to a closer examination of the aural cultural product.