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"Soundscapes NYC," the podcast exploring how music has shaped New York City's history and culture, has debuted its second season. The bi-monthly podcast, which examines how the city has served as an incubator for musical innovation throughout its history, has been signed to New Books Network, an academic podcast network, and is projected to reach 10,000 downloads in its first month.

Kristie Soares

Season two turns its focus to the disco era, funded in part by the University of Colorado's President Fund for the Humanities. The season emerges from the research of co-host and co-producer Dr. Kristie Soares, associate professor of women and gender studies at É«½ä³ÉÈËÖ±²¥. Soares is also at work on a book project titled "Macho Man: Performances of Latinidad in the Disco Era." Soares joins podcast creator Dr. Ryan Purcell, who serves on the editorial board at the Gotham Center for New York City History at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

"Soundscapes NYC" offers listeners an immersive journey through the symbiotic relationship between New York's musical landscape and its urban development, revealing how sound and city have continuously shaped each other across generations. The podcast's academic rigor combined with engaging storytelling has established it as a distinctive voice in music and cultural studies.

This second season extends in part out of Soares' aforementioned book project, which examines how Latinx performers, DJs and musicians navigated the complex terrain of authenticity and belonging during the 1970s disco boom in New York City.

Through close analysis of queer Latino performers such as Monti Rock III and Felipe Rose, the book reveals how these artists were paradoxically deemed "too disco for disco"—marked as excessively inauthentic even within a genre celebrated for its artifice. Moving from individual performance to collective organizing, the book analyzes how Latino DJs created alternative community structures through record pools such as the International Disco Record Center, challenging both colorblind and market-driven models of cultural belonging.Ìý

Finally, examining the contested musical borderlands between salsa and disco through sonic analysis and industry discourse, the book demonstrates how Latino musicians deployed "sonic disidentification" to create hybrid sounds that defied existing categories of authentic/inauthentic and Latino/American.Ìý

By centering Latinx contributions to disco culture, this book challenges dominant narratives that have marginalized Latinx innovation in American popular music, revealing how questions of authenticity functioned as mechanisms of racial and sexual exclusion while Latinx artists developed creative strategies for cultural survival and artistic expression that anticipated contemporary discussions of Latinx identity as inherently hybrid and resistant to categorical boundaries.

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