Abstract

Using music and cinema as a methodology, this paper traces a form of «call and response» between New York City and Naples in the 1970s and 1980s. It foregrounds the importance of the «blues» in the traffic of sound, images, and oppositional ideas between these two cities located on the same geographical parallel. The blues here is understood as a musical style, feeling, and «epistemology» as well as an affect of trauma, loss, memory, and an intimate relationship that artists and activists established with their city spaces in the age of the so-called «urban crisis».