Brunvand Urban Legend

In a book written by urban legend specialist Jan Brunvand, “The Vanishing Hitchhiker,” there is a trilling chapter about the theme of contamination in different urban legends. Whether it is about food or body contamination, those legends of contagion have been in place for quite some time, but not always exactly in the same form. The way those legends are infiltrated in our culture can tell us a lot about their importance and their evolution. The two legends “Alligators in the sewers” and “Spider in the hairdo” survived because of how they were portrayed in both cinema and music.

Evolution of medium in culture

The two legends of contamination’s survival were possible because of the evolution of their medium of transmission in culture over
During medieval times, being clean and pure was so important that there were similar legends of “Spider in the Hairdo” about proud ladies trying to meet the beauty standards at the time (Brunvand, 78). Later on, the alligators’ legend moved on to be portrayed in real newspaper, like Brunvand brought up with an article about “Alligators in New York City” (Brunvand, 96). At the time, the urban legend was treated as a “true” story by journalist. After society continued to grow and became more sophisticated, the contamination urban legends moved into children’s books. Children’s books being more subjects of fantasies and storytelling, this shift indicates the changing view of legends more as stories than as facts. There were indeed traces of the “Alligators in the sewers” legend in Peter Lippman’s The great escape and in The Sewer Story, both published in 1973. In those two books, the celebration of the return of the New York City alligators to Florida is characterized by them dressing as tourists and going back tot he jungle (Brunvand, 98). We can see clearly with Lippman’s tales made for children the general fascination of society for what is hiding in the sewers of big cities. Since nowadays most
The fact that “Alligator in the Sewer” and “Spider in the hairdo” survived in culture can give an insight on the importance of those urban legends for people. Since the horrific times of epidemics, contamination and medical concerns have always been present and the presence of urban legends in culture is a way to propagate the general anxiety (Brunvand). Art forms in general such as music are kind of doing the same process of contamination, by getting songs stuck in one’s head over and over again. By propagating, music spreads moral messages, sometimes using urban legends. According to researcher Ian Inglis, one of the reasons why urban legends are so present in music is because of their vagueness of them allows the musicians to really appropriate the legends for themselves and add details depending on their intentions. Having urban legends in music has some specific social functions, which are the reasons why they still are in the picture today. First, they are indeed conversational topics to assist and maintain social relationships. Connecting urban legends to music allows further social interactions and is a popular subject of discussion. Second, they can be considered as modern variants of deeper often religious myths about legendary places, people, texts such as Jesus Christ, Atlantis, Camelot, Siddartha Gautama, and more. Third, they allow the public