Constrained Frequencies: The Wire and the Limits of Listening
use of music and whose music it uses, from critic Jeff Chang's liner notes for the show's first soundtrack in 2008 to the numerous print and radio interviews with Leyh.2 And the show's music certainly merits this interest: The Wire featured an estimated six hundred separate pieces of music dur ing its five season run.3 Further fueling interest in the show's musical practices was the real life feedback loop that occurred between The Wire and local Baltimore musi cians. While the show prided itself on its attention to the specificities of the local, The Wire rarely included any Baltimore hip hop or house music in any of its scenes during its earliest seasons. Despite this slighting, local musicians and producers eagerly expressed their appreciation for The Wire through their music, culminating in the local release of a series of mixtapes titled Hamsterdam (2005) a nod to the show's third season ex periment in "legal drug trafficking zones." Upon hearing these mixtapes, the show's writers attempted to make amends by both incorporating the work of local musicians into its final two seasons and releasing a second official soundtrack titled Beyond Hamsterdam: Baltimore Traces on "The Wire" (2008) to publicize the Baltimore urban music scene, which, despite some high profile wrangling amongst the pop music literati about its au thenticity and the ethics of its ever eminent, if perpetually delayed, cross over, had never broken through to the mainstream.4 The eventual use of Baltimore based music on the show and its soundtracks, according to Leyh, provided "one more way 'The Wire' [could] give back to Balti "5 more.