New York authorities criminalized spontaneous public music as an offense

Evidence

McReynolds cited Allen Ginsberg’s paraphrasing of Plato’s Republic: “When the mode of music changes, the walls of the city shake.” He was not thinking of Ornette Coleman or Sun Ra but rather an unnamed young Trinidadian who celebrated his graduation from high school by leading a steel band through the streets of the Bronx—a crime for which he was hauled into court and admonished against any such further such expression of “public joy.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 98

Categorization

• XREF: This reverses the common assumption that mid-century New York was culturally permissive; directly relevant to the reader’s test of what conditions (repression included) enable invention density.
• SEED: Angle: the prosecution of a steel band for ‘public joy’ as a case study of the avant-garde-as-involuntary-political — celebration itself criminalized.
• CANDY: A 1959 high schooler was taken to court in the Bronx for the crime of leading a steel band in celebration — genuinely surprising and tweetable.