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Just got 413.

This page features digital rips of obscure 45s in this micro-genre. It is a fantastic resource. The Lonely Beat captures a period–specific set of images, motifs and themes associated with the modern, post–War American city. It is a world in sound that was based in reality as well as reconstructed within the media and pop culture. American cities reflected a changing socioeconomic and cultural reality in the post–War decades. The pursuit of home ownership following World War II meant an acceleration of a white demographic's relocation from the city to its mushrooming suburbs, a shift that would exacerbate economic disparities and urban segregation, especially for black populations. Even as their economic fortunes began to founder, however, cities remained a center of media, publishing and advertising as well as fashion, design, architecture and entertainment. Moreover, the American city – in this case most clearly identified with, though not necessarily limited to, New York City – would attract a new cohort of artists, becoming in the process a crucible for new visual and performance art, dance, the literary arts, music, theater and film. Many aspects of mid–century city life and culture were remade and romanticized in pop culture, a hard–boiled, bohemian version of the city in particular developing in novels, short stories and television and film dramas. This was the version of the city that became seated in the popular imagination, the city that was a sort of labyrinthine nexus of underworld forces, exotic lifestyles and minority populations. The potency of this confabulation would only increase as white populations retreated further into the suburbs. Popular music became a major vector for this image of the city. Music sustained an idea of the city as sexy and stylish, dangerous and decaying. It was the foreboding Metropolis, gangland Gotham, the Naked City, the Asphalt Jungle, bohemia, the mean streets. It was a place of after-hours intrigue and rendezvous - it was a place of crime, juvenile delinquency, corruption, lurking evil - and men who sought to stop these forces. As portrayed in music, the city was at its most mysterious and atmospheric; there was a romance in its solitude. It was skyscrapers, streets, wharfs, fogs, smoky nightclubs. Crucially, too, the city was where black communities lived, along with ethnic populations of every stripe. In this sense there was, like exotica, an element of the Other about the city, some world that aroused Middle American anxieties and fantasies.  All of these images, motifs and clichés are evident in post–War popular music. https://exoticaproject.com/2/ https://exoticaproject.com/2/about.php

Thom Bell!

Joe Cocker, Thom Bell, Cyndi Lauper, and Soundgarden all made marks. And although I totally get Carol Kaye's point...she definitely made her mark.