ATL Rap Map

I'm probably not the right person to post this given that my knowledge of Atlanta Hip Hop is basically limited to Outkast (upper left corner),

and my knowledge of Adult Swim where creator Joseph Veazy is a senior designer, is even more limited. Nevertheless the Atlanta Rap Map is a charming, hand painted map with lots of nice details relevant to that city's vibrant hip hop scene. Details like this horse on pink roller skates riding towards Bone Crusher's Bankhea(ddd)d.

Here is some downtown detail for your enjoyment.

Outkast makes their appearance below just north of East Point, just north of the airport, the only place I've been to in Atlanta - so far.

You can buy the poster here  - proceeds will be donated to HOPE Atlanta, an agency dedicated to fighting homelessness in the area.

The Bronzeville Map

When I was in Chicago a couple of months ago I made a pilgrimage to the South Side to see the Bronzeville map. This is a bronze relief map created by artist Gregg LeFevre detailing the history of Chicago's African-American community.

I have not been able to find an image of the entire map online so I took pictures of various sections to give a sense of some of the many details. Quoted from the text below the map-the lower left of the image above:

"Depicted here are some of the geographic, cultural and historical features of this area - the “Black Metropolis” of Chicago. In the period after the First World War, an African-American community of vitality and influence developed along these streets. The mixture of people here since the late 19th Century and those drawn here during the Great Migration of the 20th Century produced a new force in Black America: an urban home distinguished for its accomplishments in business, the arts and community life. Particularly notable was a flowering of great music - jazz, blues and gospel - that has enriched American culture from that time forward. Today the Bronzeville legacy lives on in a community that looks with pride to its past and with confidence to its future."

There is a lot to unpack in this map including many maps within the map. Here is a section detailing the railroad history of the Great Migration.

A zoom in on the Illinois Central Railroad map.

A more close-up view shows the bronze relief.

There is a tribute to the many records that came out of this community,

as well as residences of famous musicians, recording studios and clubs. The feet represent walking tour routes.

 On the left below is the Vendome Theatre marquee, on the right is its site.

A tribute to the NAACP and other activist groups.

and a program from a Negro Leagues game between the Chicago American Giants and the New York Cubans-unfortunately I did not get the whole thing in the picture.

Here is the southeast corner of the map with the title block.

Finally, a bit of the lakefront area with my foot stupidly in the picture providing some scale. Nice waves!

The map can be found in the median of Martin Luther King Drive at 35th St.

Woodstock in Maps

While watching a documentary on PBS about the Woodstock Festival on its 50th Anniversary, I noticed an intricate site map. The site was spread out and I imagine one could get lost easily-especially if under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
This appears to be an official map - via the Woodstock Preservation Archives.

I dig the legend - it's groovy! Also, good to know where the barbed wire is.

Here is another map that was used at the festival.It came from an underground magazine called "Rat" and is available at WorthPoint.

The map has a "Survival Guide" printed on the side and many nice details,

in addition to another carefully done legend. It even shows the outhouses though that may be a generous description of the porto potties on the site.

Finally, here is the cover of the East Village Other showing a nice, fanciful map of the area and some nice psychedelic details like birds with instrument heads and women being squeezed out of Gleem toothpaste tubes - via Barron Maps.

Global Hip Hop

Global Hip Hop is an interactive globe that lets you travel the world of rap music.

Choose a city or country and pick an artist to listen to.

The music is in the language of the country but the time period and styles are all over the place. It's interesting to see how some artists use elements from their local culture while others sound like rap music everywhere. I'm not sure how they was chosen but there you can suggest your favorite music. One of the authors is Jules Grandin who was featured here previously with ThingsMaps.

Explore here.

The Origins of Hip Hop

Last week I highlighted a map from the colon-heavy You Are Here: NYC : Mapping the Soul of the City. Another good map (by RJ Beals) shows the origins of Hip Hop. Due to copyright restrictions I do not have the final map but an early version is on photobucket via OldSchoolHipHop.

 

The lower right corner of the updated version contains a short history of how DJ Kool Herc threw a party at the 1520 Sedgwick Avenue recreation center (Herc's family's apartment was also in this building) and introduced a new DJ style. This involved playing the same part of a song from two identical records on two turntables to extend the instrumental breaks. Here is a detail showing the rec center and other Bronx locales.

Herc, though considered the father of Hip Hop is an often overlooked character in this history. The Twilight Zone was his first professional DJ job. He also had jobs at the Sparkle Club, PAL and Hevalo. Burger King is on the map because they used to unscrew the tables from the floors and have DJ parties there.

The map is cleverly designed to look like the soles of a sneaker - the final version has "Sneakers Uptown Shoes Down!" added as a subtitle. 

For more info see the message board page at OldSchoolHipHop or buy the You Are Here book

Freak Out!

I missed this earlier in the year but 2016 was the 50th anniversary of "Freak Out!" - the first album by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. Early pressings of the album contained a fake ad for a "Freak Out Hot Spots Map" for visitors to Los Angeles.

This map is an extremely rare collectors item and there are not many good images online. RecordMecca once had a copy, but it is listed as sold. Here's a more clear detail  from their page.

It is a basic street map annotated with popular restaurants and clubs as well as areas of police activity or in Zappa's words:

"where the heat has been busting frequently, with tips on safety in police terror situations." 

"See the hapless trustees in their stenciled shirts washing HIS cars. Hear bold Aryan operatives rave about longhair freakos and the last John Birch meeting at 720 N. San Vincente Blvd"

 Other details include the Freak Sanctuary in Laurel Canyon, various numbered ghettos and the cultural desert-an area that roughly corresponds to the Mid-Wilshire neighborhood but may be meant to include the rest of the LA metro area. Also, those weird symbols that look like chess pieces to me are supposed to be atomic blasts and they represent busts by the LAPD. A full listing of the numbered locations on the map can be seen in the Frank Zappa Newspaper.

The Album Covers of New York

A few years ago I did a post on maps on album covers - and a follow-up based on reader suggestions. Here is a map of the locations shown on album covers from Uebermaps, a collaborative platform that lets you create and share maps with others.

The above parts of Manhattan and Queens cover all kinds of stuff from West Side Story to Nas. A close-up of the Lower East Side takes in Bob Dylan, Foghat, the Rolling Stones, Velvet Underground and Led Zeppelin.

Another user created a map just for places mentioned in Bob Dylan songs. There is a clear spatial pattern of his wanderings.

Uebermaps showcases various other public maps, many in Europe such as this one showing record stores in Hamburg.

You can create your own account, take pictures and make your own maps. You can also embed them into your own site like this.

Musician Inspired by Population Map

Vienna Teng's new album Aims features this map on the cover. It shows population migration within the Detroit metropolitan area.

The map is from Stephen Von Worley's Data Pointed blog. I'm not sure why the colors look so washed out in Teng's cover. The original is much more "pretty"

The inspiration comes from digging beyond the typical narrative of population flight from the inner cities (red is population loss) to see that there hope in the small patch of blue located near downtown. This is not really a new story, people have been moving into downtown areas for several decades now. Still, it's a good reminder that our cities still have much to offer as places to live. There are lots of other striking images of various US metropolitan areas to see on Von Worley's blog post, most of them showing a similar pattern.

Song Maps

Two years ago I did a couple of blog posts about Maps on Album Covers. Last year the British band Saint Etienne came out with this album cover for the somewhat unimaginatively named "Words and Music by Saint Etienne"

The band was taken with the Dorothy art studio's Music Map (below) and asked them to make a special edition for their cover.

Band members chose the song titles for the Saint Etienne edition. The map is loosely based on Croydon, where the band is from. Cyprus Avenue is the Croydon Flyover and Ventura Highway is Wellesley Road. The album cover does not show the full map and this detailed image from Dorothy shows an area that is mostly not on the cover. I don't have the CD so I don't know if the rest of the map appears in the album's artwork.

Bob Dylan's World

A couple of weeks ago Slate honored Bob Dylan's 72nd birthday with an interactive map of every place mentioned in one of his songs.

Many musicians would show a pattern based on where they are from. In Dylan's case the only pattern is the unusually high number of points in northern Minnesota. However, there are also lots of points in New Mexico, where he sometimes pretended to be from. 

From the text on the web page:

Bob Dylan’s music, it’s often said, happens in a world of its own—where the highway is for gamblers and you’re always 1,000 miles from home. It’s a surreal, ethereal realm, lawless but for chance, allusion, and rhyme.

You can pan and zoom as desired or use one of their choices at the bottom- World, U.S., Europe, Asia, NYC or New Orleans.

The Geography of Pop Music, 2012

From The Atlantic Cities:

UCLA urban planning doctoral candidate Patrick Adler took a look at the geography of two lists of the year's best music: Pitchfork’s Top 100 Tracks and Billboard’s Hot 100 Songs.

Locations are based on the current residence of the artist - not necessarily their hometowns. For example Stratford, Ontario (Justin Bieber) misses out in favor of LA.

Here is the Billboard Hot 100. This chart reflects commercial success.

By contrast, the Pitchfork Top 100 reflects artistic merit according to music critics.

LA dominates the commercial list, but New York slightly edges it out among the critics. London is third on both lists. The critics don't seem to like country music very much as Nashville goes from second place on Billboard to nonexistent on Pitchfork. The article mentions the "globalization" of music several times but these maps still have a lot of empty space.

See the Atlantic Cities article for more "takeaways" and Adler's summary.

The Geography of Pop and Country Hits

Early this year the good folks at Very Small Array did these maps showing locations in song titles of hit songs. The maps enable us to compare the geography of pop music (mostly urban) to that of country (Wolverton Mountain represent!)

Here are the pop hits. I'm not sure what Wiz Khalifa (as listed above the map title) has to do with this - he doesn't seem like the #1 hit type. Sorry the blogger templates won't let me post larger, more readable images but you're just a click away from the original content.

Here is country music.

While country hits are less international in scope they do get points for Japan and (apparently) multiple mentions of Waterloo. "Turning Japanese" wasn't a #1 hit? They must repeat song titles for each week they appear as a #1 hit. Are there really that many other songs about Folsom Prison?  How many country songs about Saginaw are there?

Map of the Week Miscellany for September, 2011

There's a lot going on this week and if I only didn't have to work I could devote more time to these posts and make them more meaningful but be careful what you wish for. Anyway here are a few interesting items I've found this week:

An Army Corps of Engineers map of the flood control structures in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania.

 The manual this map appears in describes how the levees in Wilkes Barre and across the river in Kingston can form a bottleneck and make flooding worse for communities downstream. In 1972 these walls were too short to contain the flow from Tropical Storm Agnes and the city was flooded. The water stored from this flooding helped spare downstream places like Sunbury. Since then the levees have been raised, partially sparing Wilkes Barre from this weekend's floods (though water did get in by seeping under the levees.)

This sent more water to downstream places like Bloomsburg, where record setting flooding occurred.


Below is a map from the AP showing the some of the worst hit places.

Daniel Huffman's wonderful river schematic map shows how these places interconnect.

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Other Miscellaneous Notes:
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Tomorrow night (September 15th) David Byrne will squish an inflatable globe under the High Line in New York City. It will be there until October 1st. To sort of quote one of his songs "this was a parking lot, now it's all covered in globe." More information is available from New York Magazine.

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From LA Taco ("Celebrating the taco lifestyle in Los Angeles") comes this chart showing the population growth of the largest cities in the USA. 

Map of the Week-Mexico City's Subway Station Icons

When Mexico City designed it's subway system in the 1960's there was widespread illiteracy (not so anymore.) They came up with a solution of visual signs such as colors and icons. Each station has a unique logo or icon based on local points of reference, history, nature, etc.

For example the Pino Suarez station icon depicts an Aztec pyramid that was discovered during the construction of the station.

Salto del Agua shows a local fountain and Merced shows a box of apples because it's located adjacent to one of the largest outdoor markets in the city. The stories behind most of these icons can be found by clicking the station name from this wikipedia page.


The image above is a detail from this image from Wikipedia.

I discovered these icons when I was working on my Maps on Album Covers project. One of my favorite "Rock en Espanol" bands Cafe Tacvba (not a typo) put a fake subway diagram with fake icons on their Cuatro Caminos album. The album is named for a real subway station, but the others on this map appear to be whimsical creations.

Here is the real area around Cuatro Caminos - the geodesic dome is a former bullfighting arena.