David McCarthy

David McCarthy is a writer, musician, and community organizer based in Lansing, where he runs programming for youth and elders as the Generational Programs Manager for the Allen Neighborhood Center, a place-based nonprofit serving Lansing's Eastside neighborhood. Previously he served as the inaugural director of the Michigan State University Arts Living-Learning Community, an undergraduate residential option devoted to socially engaged art. In that position he helped to develop a student-directed program for arts-based collaborations among MSU students and faculty, guest artists, and court-involved youth. He is the founder and lead janitor of the New Music and Arts Forum, a mutual aid society devoted to experimentalism across the arts in Lansing, currently in its fifth event season. 

McCarthy's scholarship focuses on sound, music, and technology in contemporary capitalist societies. His current book project examines the so-called party record, a genre of LP record popular in the 1970s based upon innovative recordings of Black nightclub entertainment by such artists as Rudy Ray Moore, Jimmy Lynch, Lady Reed, and Big Brown. Often marketed as comedy records and widely referenced by early hip-hop artists, the genre developed through the late 1960s and early 1970s as Black artists and entrepreneurs grappled with the mass destruction of Black-owned nightclubs, racial integration and the emergence of a new sort of Black middle class, and new creative and commercial possibilities opened by the LP medium. 

A practicing multi-instrumentalist, McCarthy is currently preparing an album of original songs and hosts an annual Christmas sing-along party featuring songs in numerous languages and styles beyond the typical North American Christmas repertoire. For recreation, he enjoys practicing cartwheels in the park with his niece and other movement-based activities.