Constrained Frequencies: <i>The Wire</i> and the Limits of Listening
2010; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 52; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/crt.2010.0049
ISSN1536-0342
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
ResumoThe Wire aND the LIMItS oF LISteNINg adrienne Brown "the first thing that music is doing, rather than highlighting emotion, it's creating a sense of place.If it's a scene with Michael's crew standing on the corner, we need hip-hop to go in there."these are the words of Blake Leyh, music supervisor for The Wire during the five seasons it aired on hBo between 2002 and 2008. 1 Much has been written about The Wire's use of music and whose music it uses, from critic Jeff Chang's liner notes for the show's first soundtrack in 2008 to the numerous print and radio interviews with Leyh. 2 and the show's music certainly merits this interest:The Wire featured an estimated six hundred separate pieces of music during its five-season run. 3 Further fueling interest in the show's musical practices was the real-life feedback loop that occurred between The Wire and local Baltimore musicians.While the show prided itself on its attention to the specificities of the local, The Wire rarely included any Baltimore hip hop or house music in any of its scenes during its earliest seasons.Despite this slighting, local musicians and producers eagerly expressed their appreciation for The Wire through their music, culminating in the local release of a series of mixtapes titled hamsterdam (2005), a nod to the show's third-season experiment in "legal drug-trafficking zones."Upon hearing these mixtapes, the show's writers attempted to make amends by both incorporating the work of local musicians into its final two seasons and releasing a second official soundtrack titled Beyond hamsterdam: Baltimore Tracks on "The Wire" (2008) to publicize the Baltimore urban music scene, which, despite some high-profile wrangling amongst the pop-music literati about its authenticity and the ethics of its ever-eminent, if perpetually delayed, crossover, had never broken through to the mainstream. 4the eventual use of Baltimore-based music on the show and its soundtracks, according to Leyh, provided "one more way 'the Wire ' [could] give back to Baltimore." 5
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