The Brooklyn Rail

In New York, with the average rent costing more than three thousand bucks a month, it’s hard to find the balance between making enough to survive while dedicating time to make music inspired by what Pearl S. Buck called “the overpowering necessity to create … so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of beauty and meaning, his very breath is cut off from him.” In the US—a country led by a perverted billionaire whose first order of business was to slash arts funding—underground music is perhaps not so much the soundtrack of quixotic, countercultural ideals as it is the dedication to making music in the first place: to not eschew the zero sum game of this grim iteration of the capitalist machine, but to survive within it. A spectrum of five musicians I interviewed on how they support themselves reveals what I call underground music economics: what we’re willing to trade when it comes to making music a part of our lives.

Josh Couvares, known as Couvo, is a crooning rock guitarist whose sound rests somewhere between Bruce Springsteen and Something Corporate. He regularly plays across the city. True to his inspiration, he insists on maintaining a certain standard of living as an account executive at a tech company, and seems unconcerned with bucking normative living. “Also,” he says, “what’s counterculture when there’s no longer really a monoculture to speak of? What is it even running counter to anymore?” Couvo works in his field because, straight-up, “It pays the bills. Without it, I wouldn't be able to pursue anything creative at any capacity. The only way I survive as a musician is by having a day job.” While his musical output continues to grow, he doesn’t seem to feel a strong call to break out his present work-play balance.

André Lira, a DJ and producer known as Doctor Jeep, isn’t willing to sacrifice his standard of living for music, either. “I’ve always had a day job for financial support and never tried to make it as a full-time DJ,” he explains, “and it was always a hobby or side career for me. I'm thirty-six now, and I have a certain standard for quality of life, and—living in New York—it would be near impossible to meet this standard as a full-time DJ unless I was DJ'ing two to three times a week in town and traveling for gigs every weekend.” While he has a creative personal ethos (he’s toured around the world and is considered a genre-bending tastemaker in rave music), Doctor Jeep fulfills it with his job working as a postgraduate researcher at NYU. He says it’s “spiritually fulfilling” and allows him to pursue visual artistic projects as well. In his own words, this is where he puts most of his energy now.

But Adam Tendler has dedicated his life to music since embarking on his post-graduation, DIY, fifty-state tour of the US (and publishing the experience as his memoir 88x50). A new music pianist whose area of specialization is pushed to the back of classical music archives, Tendler’s perspective on how classical stands in stark relief to the anti-intellectualism of American society casts it as a somewhat antagonistic art form. “Traditional classical music,” he explains, “so often framed as elite and rarified, or contemporary music, often framed as ‘weird’ and indiscernible, are countercultural because both are outside of the mainstream.” As a piano instructor at NYU, he sees being a musician as a flexible career, “a title that involves a variety of roles from day-to-day, and sometimes in a single day.” He adds that he “can’t honestly say that living has ever felt comfortable for me as a New Yorker,” although that might have changed for him since his brilliant, emotional, archaeological dig of an album, Inheritances (New Amsterdam), earned him a 2026 Grammy nomination for Best Classical Instrumental Solo.

Jinjoo Yoo is also a pianist (and one New York’s hidden jazz gems—her glassy, elegant, playful touch is as achingly in-the-pocket as a ripely spare koan), but strictly believes that being a full-time musician means supporting yourself from performance alone. Yoo expresses that she “wants to free up more time and energy to focus on composing, practicing, and rehearsing,” but laments that “you have to take gigs you don’t feel connected to—for me, that can mean playing pop music, and that sort of kills my soul.” Teaching provides a balance in the meantime, because, for her, the point of playing jazz is simple: authentic creative expression, no more and no less. “I’ve seen many people focus on becoming famous,” she recalls, “making more money, or getting ‘bigger’ gigs. But the jazz artists I’ve always admired appeared to value a different path, even when they could have had it all. And that’s the kind of path I want to follow.”

Then there’s Chris “Parnhash Nakovsky” Carr, a rapper who actively upholds and defines underground principles more than most anyone. Chris not only performs across the country, but organizes the annual Brooklyn Wildlife music festival; authored the scathing, incisive book Thoughts of an Angry Black Man; hosts a podcast; co-founded the grassroots organization Black Land Ownership; and ran a crystal shop in Greenpoint called GAMBA Forest, where he put on shows boasting only indie artists. In our conversation about what motivates him to make music, he notes:

When products are put on the market, it totally alters their purpose. Asking a friend why we weren’t making any money, I realized it’s about finding a way to do something that no one else knows how to do: to fulfill a need. So then the question becomes, “Is there a need for art? Is there a need for music?” And then the purpose shifts: I just have this emotional feeling that I want to share with people. We don’t have to try to figure out this need-based system with this idea of having to exchange it for something.

Or, as he put succinctly in one of his freestyle performances, “I rap for the love and the relationships, and less for the money and the patronage.” And while Carr may not be rich, money has always worked out for him, as it has for all of the other musicians who—for whatever reason—loosened their grip on the siren song cooing its “quality of life” chorus.

So it’s ironic that the musicians here playing styles that once symbolized rebellion are living the least “underground” lives. And it makes sense that classical lay somewhere between ether and archive, and that the musicians playing jazz and hip-hop—two Black forms of music that, Yoo articulates, “express the painful history of African-Americans and is grounded in collective creativity, intelligence, and the desire for freedom and resistance against oppression”—are arguably the most dedicated to embodying countercultural values that emphasize creativity over capital (I’m reminded of the Louis Armstrong quip, “What we play is life.”). But the other portrait emerging from these experiences is that New York creatives have no choice but to interface delicately and strategically with economics. This is an enormous challenge that, to Couvo’s point, can detract from creative impulse altogether. Yet within this lies the more subtle truth that committing to both creativity and community can provide enough, a subjective concept, as Tender explains thus: “I may make less in some ways, but I feel like I live with more.” As his own persistence indicates, it’s almost as though karma itself rewards us for making it work in lieu of working, especially for, say, the AI overlords. In underground music economics (as opposed to free market economics), even making rent is an act of creative resistance. New York grinds you down, but gives you infinite opportunities to rebuild as you see fit.