Scapes of Escape
Elizabeth KowalchukJersey-born musicians are known for producing self-deprecating yet romantic songs about their home state. These songs claim that “Gina dreams of running away” or desperately plead that “we gotta get out while we’re young,” and evoke a desperation for escape. The musical representation of New Jersey echoes its reputation as a place to pass through along one of its many highways, preferably as quickly as possible, A (somehow) ubiquitously suburban-industrial-highway-covered-swampland that creates the angst necessary for its rock music production.
The animosity and near disgust toward the Garden State seem to be universal and collective distaste of the state is inherent to its identity. Having chosen the state as a subject for a photography project, French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson defended his choice by remarking that he had done so “not because it feels like nowhere, but because it feels like anywhere,” it’s density and diversity “a kind of shortcut through America.” Thus, representations of New Jersey could be understood as representations of the United States.
New Jersey references can be found across all genres of music from the past century, and serve to represent individual stories, places, and people. Viewing these songs as Cartier-Bresson viewed his photographs, they can be used to map a cultural landscape of the New Jersey experience. A cultural landscape uses physical evidence to reveal the cultural values of a time or place. Analyzing songs from various genres, decades, and types of people accounts for “motion” across time, genres, and attitude with multiple simultaneous narratives.
The research for this project began years ago when the soundtrack to my childhood and teenage years included Bruce Springsteen, the Lumineers, Bleachers, and the local bands I could see for cheap in Asbury Park. Listening to these artists, all from New Jersey, it is almost impossible to misunderstand the references to our shared home state. This passive data collection turned into a database of more than one hundred songs that comment on New Jersey. The database standards borrow from Kelly Baum’s 2013 “New Jersey as Nonsite” exhibit at the Princeton University Art Museum–“It was not enough for the art [in this case, song] to have been made in New Jersey, or for an artist to have lived here. Of particular interest were works that bear an indexical or necessary relationship to the site, works that self consciously parade their ties to NJ.”
The soundscape of New Jersey is as diverse as the state itself. Particularly noticeable is the range of attitudes represented, from suffering (“My mamma’s in the house tonight / Trying to break free of New Jersey”) to loving affection (“Tonight I'm gonna take that ride / Across the river to the Jersey side . . . When you're in love with a Jersey girl,”), to a paradoxically simultaneous hatred and love (“Everything dies, baby, that's a fact / But maybe everything that dies someday comes back / Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty / And meet me tonight in Atlantic City”). This mirrors Baum’s observation that the state “seems to have inspired wonder and admiration that bordered on revulsion” and that “many found New Jersey both dismal and fascinating (fascinating for being so dismal).” This innate contradiction is integral to the state’s cultural landscape, and nowhere is it depicted better than in the auditory soundscape.
The soundscape also shows changes in attitude over time. Songs from the earliest time period (1950-1969) maintain an overwhelmingly affectionate tone toward the state. In the 1970-1999 period, many depict both suffering and affection simultaneously. In the 2000s, nearly all of the songs tracked depict suffering. New Jersey has served as “a stage for national politics, migration to suburbs, deindustrialization, urban blight, renewal, and environmental crisis” and these attitudes align with these shifts. Similarly, Baum observes that “optimistic, self satisfied articles such as ‘I’m from New Jersey,’ published in 1960[,] would have been inconceivable in 1976 when the state was grappling not only with the fallout from the civil insurrection in Newark in 1967 but also with rising unemployment and post industrial decline.” As Zach Helfand writes about 1975, “Bruce Springsteen was agonizing over what would become ‘Born to Run’ . . . conjur[ing] mythology of asphalt and steel, operatic death on dirty streets, traps and escape. In a way, 1975 was Jersey’s birthing year.”
The research focuses on songs that have place-based references to New Jersey. While many times they are explicit references (“And if you ever get back to Hackensack, I’ll be here for you,”), many songs also contain references to fictional places or non-specific images of natural landscapes and political geography, including Springsteen’s references to “over the rise,” “the edge of town,” and “the swamps.” These generic “places” represent feelings and attitudes, but also form a clear image of the physical landscape from his childhood in central Jersey. As Baum states, “geography . . . is a valuable mode of analysis, provided we allow ‘geography’ to operate with as much ambiguity as it did for the artists themselves.” Using this sentiment as guidance, the generic geographic scenes depicted in songs became the main organizing tool for the soundscape database.
It was useful to use two lenses of place-based analysis. The first recognizes the reference to a specific geographic type (“the highway,” “the swamps,” “the boardwalk,” and “the hometown”) within a song. These site specific references are “discrete, independent, concrete, and autonomous.” The opposite lens was of a “nonsite.” These songs reference New Jersey as an idea and become an auditory collage of the above sites. These “nonsite” references are “dispersed, contingent, equivocal, and heteronomous.”
The site-specific lens creates what Robert Smithson might call an “allegorical landscape.” These specific references to a geographical site can be abstracted to represent the attitudes, emotions, and historic connotations of a site with multiple songs creating a collage of experiences. Mapping these overlaps creates a document of the collective experience of that specific typology of New Jersey.
The non-site lens creates collages reminiscent of Smithson’s Nonsite sculptures. These works contain rocks, sand, broken concrete, and other elements he collected at various sites in New Jersey, displayed with photographs from the same location and map fragments. These collages “displace the site several times over,” and create an abstraction of the place, capturing its spirit rather than its specific truths. The songs of New Jersey act in the same way. Through decontextualization, framing, and abstraction, the everyday is curated into something much greater.
The songs that reference the banal, commonplace elements of the state often prompt the greatest response, giving space for the listener to project their own experiences. Dan Graham’s “Homes for America” provides a useful framework for understanding why these songs are so effective. Graham made the commonplace into poetry through a series of repetitive, almost obsessive analyses of the homes in Bayonne and Jersey City, calling to attention the things observers may have missed or might have never thought worth noticing at all. Doing so gives them time and space to consider these homes mindfully. The songscape does the same thing, allowing for an understanding of individual experiences by stripping them down to their most common. This allows an understanding of these experiences in their most pure states rather than in romanticized and dramatized forms. Paralleling Tony Smith’s transformative experience on the New Jersey Turnpike, which “did something . . . that art had never done…There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it,” the songs that seem to have the strongest representation of New Jersey simply reveal it. A line like “I’ve never felt so strange, standing in the Jersey rain. . .” leaves much open to interpretation but also allows the connotations of the state to flood the listener, framing the song in relation to what they already know.
Abstracting the New Jersey Soundscape into a series of landscape elements permits an understanding of the emotional baggage that is tied to these physical forms. These abstracted landscapes then become emblematic of the New Jersey experience and, therefore, the experience of the country as a whole.
Elizabeth Kowalchuk has a Bachelor of Architecture from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. This essay was originally prepared for ARCH 543 taught by Gabrielle Esperdy in Spring 2023.
This essay was published as part of Transect Volume 5: Pedagogy (2024), Jacob Swanson, Daniel Girgis, Dhruvi Rajpopat, Fatima Fardos, Jimenna Alcantar, Elizabeth Kowalchuk, eds.
1: Bon Jovi. “Livin’ on a Prayer,” Track 3 on Slippery When Wet. Mercury Records, 1986.
2: Bruce Springsteen. “Born to Run,” Track 5 on Born to Run. Columbia Records, 1975.
3: Zach Helfand, “Why New Jersey? A groundbreaking photographer’s last project,” New Yorker, February 13, 2023, 62-71.
4: Charles A. Stansfield, “The Cultural Landscape,” in A Geography of New Jersey: The City in the Garden (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 85-95.
5: Kelly Baum, New Jersey as Non-Site (Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), 12.
6: Bleachers. “Stop Making This Hurt,” Track 6 on Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night. RCA, 2021.
7: Tom Waits. “Jersey Girl,” Track 5 on Heartattack and Vine. Asylum, 1980.
8: Bruce Springsteen. “Atlantic City,” Track 2 on Nebraska. Columbia Records, 1982.
9: Baum, New Jersey as Non-Site, 13.
10: Karen Rosenberg, “Seeing New Jersey as a State of Inspiration,” The New York Times, December 6, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/06/arts/design/new-jersey-as-non-site-at-princeton-university-art-museum.html.
11: New Jersey as Non-Site.
12: Helfand, “Why New Jersey?”
13: Fountains of Wayne. “Hackensack,” Track 4 on Welcome Interstate Managers. S-Curve Records, 2003 .
14: Marya Morris, “From ‘My Hometown’ to ‘This Hard Land’: Bruce Springsteen's Use of Geography, Landscapes, and Places to Depict the American Experience,” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 9, no. 1 (2017), 3-18, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41209972.
15: New Jersey as Non-Site.
16: Baum, New Jersey as Non-Site.
17: Baum, New Jersey as Non-Site.
18: Robert Smithson, “The Monuments of Passaic,” Artforum 6, no. 4 (1967).
19: Phyllis Tuchman, “Robert Smithson, ‘A Nonsite (Franklin, New Jersey)’ 1968,” Holt/Smithson Foundation, May 2020, https://holtsmithsonfoundation.org/robert-smithson-nonsite-franklin-new-jersey-1968.
20: Baum, New Jersey as Non-Site.
21: In Dan Graham’s New Jersey, edited by Craig Buckley and Mark Wasiuta (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2012).
22: Samuel Wagstaff, “Talking with Tony Smith,” Artforum 5, no. 4 (1966).
23: The Gaslight Anthem. “The Patient Ferris Wheel,” Track 7 on The ‘59 Sound. SideOneDummy Records, 2009.