Music, Space and Place

Popular Music and Cultural Identity

Andy Bennett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351217804
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Music, Space and Place examines the urban and rural spaces in which music is experienced, produced and consumed. The editors of this collection have brought together new and exciting perspectives by international researchers and scholars working in the field of popular music studies. Underpinning all of the contributions is the recognition that musical processes take place within a particular space and place, where these processes are shaped both by specific musical practices and by the pressures and dynamics of political and economic circumstances. Important discourses are explored concerning national culture and identity, as well as how identity is constructed through the exchanges that occur between displaced peoples of the world's many diasporas. Music helps to articulate a shared sense of community among these dispersed people, carving out spaces of freedom which are integral to personal and group consciousness. A specific focal point is the rap and hip hop music that has contributed towards a particular sense of identity as indigenous resistance vernaculars for otherwise socially marginalized minorities in Cuba, France, Italy, New Zealand and South Africa. New research is also presented on the authorial presence in production within the domain of the commercially driven Anglo-American music industry. The issue of authorship and creativity is tackled alongside matters relating to the production of musical texts themselves, and demonstrates the gender politics in pop. Underlying Music, Space and Place, is the question of how the disciplines informing popular music studies - sociology, musicology, cultural studies, media studies and feminism - have developed within a changing intellectual climate. The book therefore covers a wide range of subject matter in relation to space and place, including community and identity, gender, race, 'vernaculars', power, performance and production.

Introduction

For any student of popular music, and I would include here performers, practitioners, and researchers, the biennial conferences of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) highlight the advances made in scholarship over the last decade. Now in its 24th year, the association has nourished its members worldwide with a forum for debate and networking, and is thus the most important source of communication for those with a real interest in contemporary research into popular music. While the international reputation of many of its members is evidenced by the number of books that dominate library shelves and catalogues devoted to popular music, its very real strengths lie equally in recognizing the research abilities of its younger members, those who are working on their Ph.D.s, or who have recently become university lecturers. It is this vitality that continually challenges outdated concepts and which demands a fresh appraisal of debates that seemed, somehow, settled and part of the commonsense of popular music discourse.

It is curious, then, that IASPM has produced no series of books to draw on the expertise of its members and front those debates that characterize the cutting edge of popular music research. We are thus grateful to Professor Derek Scott, General Editor, Ashgate, and himself a member of IASPM, for encouraging us to produce our first book – one that explores contemporary debates on music, space and place; rap and hip hop: community and cultural identity; and musical production and the politics of desire. The editors, Sheila Whiteley (Publications Officer, IASPM), Andy Bennett (Chair of the UK and Ireland Branch of IASPM) and Stan Hawkins (Chair of the Norwegian Branch of IASPM) have been responsible for framing the debates, and the chapters are written by colleagues from IASPM whose research interests largely reflect their own ‘space and place’ across the globe.

To an extent, their respective chapters point to the authors’ position as interpreters of popular music, constructing historical significance for a cultural form that is everyday, ubiquitous, recent and personal. Significant moments are shaped through personal experience as well as by an awareness of broader changes, in the organization of leisure, in commercial production, and in changing media technologies. Not least, the more recent insistence on excavating the ‘discursive architecture of the text in search of the ideological interests behind the natural-seeming assumptions which support dominant interpretations’¹ has provided new insights into the socially marginalized – whether defined in terms of race or sexuality – not least in the sonic and heavily gendered space of the studio.

What draws the debates together is the recognition that musical processes take place within a particular space and place, one which is inflected by the imaginative and the sociological, and which is shaped both by specific musical practices and by the pressures and dynamics of political and economic circumstances.

Part 1: Music, Space and Place

This debate is concerned with exploring discourses concerning national culture and identity. As an increasing number of popular music researchers now acknowledge, the search for social and cultural meanings in popular music texts inevitably involves an examination of the urban and rural spaces in which music is experienced on a day-to-day basis. As well as providing the socio-cultural backdrop for distinctive musical practices and innovations, urban and rural spaces also provide the rich experiential settings in which music is consumed. In each case, music becomes a key resource for different cultural groups in terms of the ways in which they make sense of and negotiate the ‘everyday’ (DeNora, 2000). Both as a creative practice and as a form of consumption, music plays an important role in the narrativization of place, that is, in the way in which people define their relationship to local, everyday surroundings. Such is the story of contemporary western popular musics, such as punk (Shank, 1994), metal (Harris, 2000) and hip hop (Mitchell, 1996; Bennett, 2000), but it is also true of many nonwestern popular music forms which do not enjoy the same level of global circulation and popularity, notably Papua New Guinean Stringband music (Crowdy, 2001) and Algerian Raï (Schade-Poulson, 1999).

The significance of space and place in relation to the musicalization of everyday life (Shank, 1994) has been dramatically illustrated in relation to issues as varied as the construction of national identity (Bailey, 1994), the development of local cultural industries (Wallis and Malm, 1984), the trans-local cultural exchanges occurring between displaced peoples of the world’s many diasporas (Lipsitz, 1994; Slobin,1993) and the gendering of space and place (Cohen, 1991). Moreover, as existing research illustrates, the mapping of the relationship between music, space and place demands an understanding of the ways in which the various component aspects of this relationship overlap and intertwine. Thus, for example, work on local music-making processes has demonstrated how the act of music-making becomes invested with a series of rich discourses concerning the impact of local cultures on collective creativity, even to the point that the actual sounds and timbres produced by musicians in given local settings are deemed to result from their sharing of particular forms of local knowledge and experience. This point is illustrated in Cohen’s description of the way in which Liverpool musicians attempted to account for the style and sound of locally produced music:

Some attributed it to the influence of the Beatles or to the absence of students from the music scene, who tended to favour more ‘alternative’ types of music. Some suggested that the lack of ‘angry’ music or music of a more overtly political nature reflected the escapist tendency of the bands that produced instead music of a ‘dreamy’ and ‘wistful’ style. Others pointed out that Merseysiders had understandably grown cynical about politics and therefore avoided writing about it.²

Such observations begin to demonstrate how locally produced music interacts with the ‘local structure of feeling’ (Bennett, 1997). The anecdotes and commentaries offered by individuals in relation to music emanate from a common stock of understandings concerning music’s relationship to the local. Such understandings, in turn, crucially inform notions of collective identity and community in given regions and localities. As Lewis observes: ‘People look to specific musics as symbolic anchors in regions, as signs of community, belonging, and a shared past.’³

Music, then, plays a significant part in the way that individuals author space, musical texts being creatively combined with local knowledges and sensibilities in ways that tell particular stories about the local, and impose collectively defined meanings and significance on space. At the same time, however, it is important to note that such authorings of space produce not one, but a series of competing local narratives (Bennett, 2000). The contested nature of space and place in late modernity has been accentuated in recent decades by increasing global mobility. According to Appadurai, such are the global flows of people and ‘culture’ that contemporary urban spaces are most effectively conceptualized as ethnoscapes, that is ‘landscape[s] of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guestworkers and other moving groups and persons.’⁴ As Smart observes, the concept of ethnoscapes ‘allow[s] us to recognise that our notions of space, place and community have become more complex’.⁵ Indeed, during recent decades, urban spaces in different parts of the world have become increasingly contested terrains, the contestation of space and marking out of cultural territory being facilitated considerably through musical innovations and practices. Notable examples of this include local variations in rap music (Mitchell, 1996; Bennett, 2000) and the increasing significance of bhangra and post-bhangra styles for the youth of the south Asian diaspora (Banerji and Baumann, 1990; Huq, 1999; Bennett, 2000).

The significance of music in relation to the articulation of notions of community and collective identity, grounded in physically demarcated urban and rural spaces, is matched by its role in the articulation of symbolic notions of community, which transgress both place and time. This quality of popular music genres and texts has been extensively examined in relation to diasporas, forged communities of displaced people forced to leave their countries and regions of origin through a variety of factors, including slavery or, more recently, economic motivation or the need to escape persecution. The world’s major diasporas originate from Africa and the Indian sub-continent, although recent sociopolitical developments have given rise to new diasporic trends, notably in the ‘new Europe’, which has seen an increasing number of people from former Eastern bloc countries seeking new lives in the economically more secure countries of the European Community.

Research on the role of music in relation to notions of collective identity and community among different diaspora populations has revealed much about the connective properties of music. Music, it has been illustrated, can bond displaced peoples, effectively bridging the geographic distance between them and providing a shared a sense of collective identity articulated by a symbolic sense of community. This view is supported by Lipsitz’s assertion that music functions ‘as a device for building unity between and across immigrant communities.’⁶ Lipsitz goes on to suggest that, because of its status ‘as a highly visible (and audible) commodity, [music] comes to stand for the specificity of social experience in identifiable communities when it captures the attention, and, even allegiance of people from many different locations.’⁷ According to Gilroy, much of music’s effectiveness in this respect relates to its utility in the complex synthesizing of locally acquired experiences with commonly shared memories and/or collectively held views, opinions and images relating to traditional culture, heritage and, ultimately, a shared point of origin. The ability of music to [encapsulate and] organize memories and experiences in this way is effectively captured in Gilroy’s observations concerning the role and significance of reggae in articulating a shared sense of community among the globally dispersed peoples of the African diaspora. According to Gilroy, the appeal of reggae music

… was facilitated by a common fund of urban experiences, by the effect of similar but by no means identical forms of racial segregation, as well as by the memory of slavery, a legacy of Africanisms, and a stock of religious experiences defined by them both.⁸

As the above observation illustrates, part of music’s role in facilitating such a collective sense of identity and feeling of community among dispersed diasporic populations is achieved by spiritually transporting them to a common place – an imagined ‘spiritual’ homeland. This point is made very effectively by Hebdige in his seminal work on the meaning and significance of dub reggae for British youth of African-Caribbean origin during the late 1970s. According to Hebdige, dub provided a powerful means of ‘communication with the past, with Jamaica, and hence Africa [that was] considered vital for the maintenance of black identity.’⁹

In this section of the present book, the issue of reggae and its symbolic significance for the African diaspora is further investigated by Daynes. In a critical examination of the work of Gilroy and Hebdige, Daynes argues that descendants of African peoples around the world can no longer be accurately described as existing in a state of diaspora. Rather, she suggests, such peoples are now in ‘quasi-diaspora’. The ‘Africa’ which links globally dispersed African peoples, observes Daynes, exists not as a homogeneous centre but rather as a series of ideal constructs, a utopia which serves as the symbolic anchoring of a shared past and an imagined future. Daynes then goes on to consider the cultural process through which the symbolism or ‘idea’ of African becomes a cultural frame of reference for peoples of African origin as they negotiate issues of identity, place and belonging in different urban and socio-political contexts around the world. Centrally important here, argues Daynes, is the symbolic transformation of the reggae text. Focusing on the rhetoric of oppression central to reggae lyrics, Daynes suggests that this is re-read in ways that make sense in particular local contexts. Thus, she argues, while reggae music talks it is also talked to: audiences for reggae actively work on the text, taking the key themes and issues explored in reggae songs and symbolically transforming their meanings in ways that make sense in the context of their own everyday lives.

Inevitably perhaps, the power that can be invested in music as a statement of identity has also led to music becoming an instrument and expression of nationalism. The most obvious example of music being used in this way are national anthems which, in combination with flags and emblems, ‘serve as an identification of states and state representatives at political meetings, sports competitions and other international gatherings.’¹⁰ Similarly, music can become a strong marker of national pride and identity during times of war and internal socio-economic crisis.¹¹ Popular music forms have also become the voice of nationalistic concerns. For example, across western Europe, the punk-derived ‘OI’ music of far-right skinhead bands is used as a musical platform for neo-Nazism and its radical views on contemporary socio-political issues such as asylum seekers and the use of foreign labour (guestworkers) (Funk-Hennings, 1995). A parallel trend can be seen in contemporary dance music, the hardcore techno-based style known as GABBA attracting similar support from neo-Nazi and other far-right factions.

If certain popular music styles have become aligned with extreme forms of nationalism, others have been criticized for their alleged undermining of the national culture. At its most extreme, such criticism has assumed the form of officially authorized censorship and sanctions against musicians and their supporters. An example of this is provided in Willet’s study of the Swing Jugend (Swing Kids) of Hitler’s Germany who rebelled against Nazi attempts to curb the influence of ‘undesirable’ foreign cultural influences by listening and dancing to banned American jazz and swing records at illegally organized events. As Willet observes, the Swing Jugend met with a hostile reaction from the German authorities, for whom swing music was symptomatic of the alleged ‘“degenerate” culture and sleaziness [engendered by] American casualness.’¹² A similar example is seen in Easton’s account of the attempts made in the former Soviet Union to officially censor music by the Beatles and other western rock groups. As Easton notes, this was done partly on the pretence of maintaining public order but also in the interests of keeping Soviet society free of any potentially corrupting influences from the west. Rock music ‘was seen as a bourgeois, decadent genre that represented the decay in capitalist countries.’¹³

This ‘fear of the other’ and the cultural élitism that it often incorporates need not necessarily be directed against the threat of corrupting influences from the ‘outside’. On the contrary, similar forms of cultural élitism are often used within national and regional populations where tensions exist due to the presence of different ethnic groups and/or religious faiths. Again cultural associations built around music often serve as a barometer for more widely pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Music Examples
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• General Editor's Preface
• Introduction
• Bibliography
• Index