The Globalization of Musics in Transit

Music Migration and Tourism

Simone Krüger, Ruxandra Trandafoiu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136182082
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

This book traces the particularities of music migration and tourism in different global settings, and provides current, even new perspectives for ethnomusicological research on globalizing musics in transit. The dual focus on tourism and migration is central to debates on globalization, and their examination—separately or combined—offers a useful lens on many key questions about where globalization is taking us: questions about identity and heritage, commoditization, historical and cultural representation, hybridity, authenticity and ownership, neoliberalism, inequality, diasporization, the relocation of allegiances, and more. Moreover, for the first time, these two key phenomena—tourism and migration—are studied conjointly, as well as interdisciplinary, in order to derive both parallels and contrasts. While taking diverse perspectives in embracing the contemporary musical landscape, the collection offers a range of research methods and theoretical approaches from ethnomusicology, anthropology, cultural geography, sociology, popular music studies, and media and communication. In so doing, Musics in Transit provides a rich exemplification of the ways that all forms of musical culture are becoming transnational under post-global conditions, sustained by both global markets and musics in transit, and to which both tourists and diasporic cosmopolitans make an important contribution.

Part I
Music and Tourism

1 Heritage Rocks!

Mapping Spaces of Popular Music Tourism

Sara Cohen and Les Roberts

The online blog of the UK travel company Thompson Holidays includes an interactive map entitled ‘How Music Travels: The Evolution of Western Dance Music’ (Khan 2011). The map features styles of electronic dance music and draws on information from Wikipedia and other sources to show when and where these styles emerged and how they interacted and developed. The blog is headed by the following statement:

Music tourism (visiting a city or town to see a gig or festival) is on the rise. But why stop at gigs and festivals? Why not visit the birthplace of your favourite genre and follow the actual journey various music genres have taken as one style developed into another. (Khan 2011)

Comments posted on the blog show that the map prompted discussion and debate, but it also provided a marketing device for the company, which has specialized in package holidays to Ibiza and other Mediterranean locations targeted at young adults. The map suggests that music is a perfect example of a global ‘traveling culture’ (Clifford 1992), and that one of the UK’s leading travel companies has recognized the commercial appeal of mapping the flows, routes, and mobilities of popular music cultures, which is testament to the growing importance attached to music geographies and ‘musicscapes’,¹ whether locally, nationally, or, as with the Thompson example, as a feature of global and transnational tourism mobilities.

Drawing on the twofold mobilities tied up with the recognition that ‘people tour cultures; and that cultures and objects themselves travel’ (Rojek and Urry 1997, 1), the Thompson map provides a salient point of entry into the subject of music and tourism not just on account of its making explicit the ties between popular musicscapes and the tourism industry. More importantly for the purposes of this chapter, its significance also lies in the fact that these ties are presented in the form of a map. This chapter explores the relationship between popular music, place, and tourism through a focus on maps, which, in their different ways, mark sites of UK popular music heritage. The maps that we discuss were produced or planned by businesses and organizations concerned with music, heritage, and tourism in the UK, and were referred to or discussed during interviews we conducted in 2011 with some of the people involved. These interviews were conducted as part of an ongoing international and collaborative research project on popular music heritage, cultural memory, and cultural identity.²

Using the maps to explore broader issues surrounding popular music heritage in the UK, methodologically and critically our attention is drawn to the ways in which maps ‘do’ different things, and work or ‘perform’ in different ways (Wood 2012). In particular, we discuss how maps work and function across various discursive and institutional contexts; perform different notions of music, place, and heritage; and offer different forms of spatial engagement. Insofar as they conform to a loosely defined spatial logic, and in terms of the trajectory of our analysis, the maps we discuss are compared and contrasted according to the degree to which they enable users to ‘zoom in’ to significant aspects of ethnographic or cartographic detail. Reflecting on this, we consider how the maps might contribute to or inhibit fine-grained understandings of music, tourism, and place. The first of the chapter’s three sections focuses on ‘official’ maps that are interactive but designed largely for symbolic and place-branding purposes rather than to provide users with much detail of particular musical sites and localities (whether regions, cities, or neighborhoods). The second section discusses more localized maps of popular music heritage. It begins with maps designed to be not just interactive but used in situ, and as part of journeys around, and experiences of, the various sites involved. It then moves on to consider maps created by users that chart vernacular spaces of memory, lived and everyday musical pathways, and which exemplify what we have elsewhere described as ‘heritage-as-praxis’ (Roberts and Cohen 2012). The third and final section of the chapter draws together some of the threads of discussion and reflects on the role and significance of maps for research on music, place, and tourism.

BRITAIN ROCKS! MUSIC, TOURISM, AND PLACE MARKETING

Music tourism is defined in various ways and related to a broad range of music practices. It is nevertheless commonly associated with visits to live music performance events, such as concerts, festivals, and carnivals, or to sites of music heritage, such as places associated with well-known musicians and music scenes and sounds. These events and sites have been studied in various parts of the world and across many academic disciplines, and they involve diverse music genres and styles, including classical art musics and traditional, folk, and world musics. The focus here is on Anglo-American popular music and tourism and heritage in the UK. Over the past three decades, official and commercial interests in popular music heritage and tourism has grown in the UK and beyond, evident in the proliferation of monuments and plaque schemes, tours and trails, maps and museums connected to a broad range of styles, from jazz to techno (Gibson and Connell 2005; Cohen 2012b; Roberts and Cohen 2012). European rock and pop museums, for example, include the Beatles Story museum in Liverpool, the ill-fated National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield, and the more recent British Music Experience (BME) in London, as well as the museum Rockart in Hoek Van Holland, the Irish Music Hall of Fame in Dublin, the Rockheim museum in Trondheim, and the Beatles museum in Hamburg. Similar initiatives have emerged in places that are not so widely known for popular music, such as the small coastal town of Karvana, now officially branded ‘the rock capital of Bulgaria’.

This turn to popular music heritage has been prompted by various developments, including the marketing of popular music history and nostalgia by the music industries as a response to a decline in record sales from the mid-1980s, and the use of culture and the cultural or creative industries as a tool for remodeling cities and regions as part of a wider process of restructuring, governed by the politics and economics of neoliberalism.³ It has involved, among other things, the development of cultural tourism and the use of cultural heritage for place marketing and urban regeneration, and it is illustrated in this first section of the chapter by two examples of ‘official’ cartographies and discourses of popular music as national heritage: a 2007 tourist marketing campaign conducted by Visit Britain, and the BME, an interactive museum of popular music heritage that opened in London in 2009.

Visit Britain

Over the last two decades, Visit Britain, a government-funded national tourism agency, has established a reputation as a leading player in film-related tourist marketing initiatives, working alongside major film companies to exploit the iconographic potential of UK film locations. These locations are promoted in Britain and overseas through the publication of movie maps, web-based marketing campaigns, and related tie-in products designed to market Britain as a visitor attraction, as well as the films in which these locations are represented (Roberts 2010, 2012a). Over recent years, similar initiatives have sought to exploit the economic potential of music-related tourism, such as the British Tourist Authority’s music tourism guide ‘One Nation Under a Groove: The Rock & Pop Map of Britain.’ This free pocketsize map unfolded into a poster featuring Britain in the shape of an electric guitar and nearby Ireland as an amplifier. It was launched by a government minister at Madam Tussaud’s Rock Circus in London in 1998. It was part of the so-called Cool Britannia marketing initiative of a new Labour government keen to develop ‘the creative industries’ for the purposes of national economic development, and to associate itself and the nation with images of vibrant, youthful, commercially successful creativity. ⁴

Visit Britain also produced printed and online maps featuring a selection of sites marking Britain’s rock music heritage as part of the more recent marketing campaigns Britain Rocks! and England Rocks! (2007). These maps were produced in collaboration with the British music company EMI and incorporated information on British artists, highlighting places linked to those artists. The England Rocks! campaign, for example, was aimed at achieving maximum impact within a specified timeframe but also involved an online interactive map of ‘English’ music landmarks that could be accessed via Enjoy England’s website until 2011. Users were presented with a pale green map of England surrounded by blue, and featuring colorful dots to mark locations across the various regions. The map was positioned against a backdrop that had been designed to look like an urban brick wall, which was adorned with graffiti and colorful posters, featuring information about the musical landmarks of various cities and regions marked on the map. Clicking on some of these sites enabled access to a larger poster that provided a list of relevant facts and information. Across the top of the map was the map logo with the words ‘England Rocks!’ picked out in red, white, and blue using a font similar to that associated with British mod culture of the 1960s and 1970s and the rock band The Who, and a white plectrum featuring the Enjoy England logo in red. Underneath was a banner proclaiming ‘From the Animals to the Zutons and every place in between.’

The director of marketing at Visit Britain showed us a series of annotated sketches that had been produced by the marketing company hired to design the map. They featured various black ink doodles created during the initial brainstorming exercise, and illustrating efforts to come up with a logo (or ‘scamps’) using generic items of rock and pop iconography. On the notes, these images were supplemented by scribbled phrases such as ‘coat of arms’, ‘heritage of rock’, ‘band typefaces’, ‘resonates across all target audiences’. The words ‘urban’ and ‘distressed’ also appeared, suggesting, along with the brick wall, an effort to relate English music heritage to notions of ‘the street’ as opposed to the museum. There was also a list of decades and associated artists that could provide a semiotic trigger to evoke them: 1950s—Cliff R[ichard], 1960s—Stones/Beatles, 1970s—Queen, 1980s— Joy Division, 1990s—Robbie [Williams].’ In view of the range of performers that could have been chosen, it is a somewhat arbitrary selection that reflected the personal tastes and memories of the marketing staff involved. As we have discussed elsewhere (Roberts and Cohen 2012), the influence, habitus, and personal background of those motivated to establish forms of popular music heritage, or lobby for their ‘official’ recognition, plays an influential role in shaping dominant ideas of what music is categorized as heritage, and whose memories and identities are represented.

When we interviewed the marketing director of Visit Britain about the England Rocks! and Britain Rocks! campaign and maps, he referred to the National Brand Index,⁵ which showed that a high percentage of international audiences associated the UK with music (telephone interview with Lawrence Bresh, conducted by Les Roberts, March 25, 2011). The director explained that the maps were primarily a PR exercise aimed at rebranding Britain as an exciting country with a rich and diverse music heritage ‘from heavy metal to pop and everything in between.’ The maps were thus intended to be broad in their coverage but the emphasis was, the director continued, on performers that ‘have stood the test of time, bands that have had a huge following rather than more ephemeral pop acts,’ and on tangible sites, such as plaques erected as a tribute to particular performers and places that could be visited. This involved sites largely associated with white, male, rock musicians; hence, the map promoted an image of England and Englishness that strikes a somewhat dissonant chord with a sense of national cultural identity that reflects the social, cultural, and ethnic diversity of England’s popular music heritage. The marketing team at Visit Britain compiled an initial list of music landmarks and edited it down to provide a short list of locations that were, in the first instance, conducive to sightseeing, touristic consumption practices, and the exploitation of established tourism and heritage resources. They included locations represented through songs, album covers, and existing tourist attractions, such as museum exhibits. London and Liverpool featured prominently on both maps, partly because of their density of music tourism sites, their appeal to overseas visitors, and the fact that the maps were produced in association with regional and national music tour operators, as well as EMI. Other familiar visitor attractions featured on the maps included Ely Cathedral, which appears on the cover of Pink Floyd’s 1994 progressive rock album The Division Bell, and Hatfield House, a stately home where the post-punk band Adam and the Ants filmed their ‘Stand and Deliver’ video (Liverpool 08 2007).

The hard copy and online versions of the England Rocks! map were distributed widely. One BBC radio program promoted the maps as ‘website of the week’, while the British tabloid newspaper the Sun declared: ‘This week, tourism bosses launch England Rocks!, a campaign showing how you can discover our rich musical heritage on holiday’ (Sun 2007). According to Visit Britain, the maps were successful in boosting domestic or national tourism, and in generating interest from Europe, parts of Asia, and particularly the US. According to the New York Times:

Everyone knows that Jim Morrison’s grave is in Paris, but who knew that Dusty Springfield’s grave, above right, is in Henley-on-Thames or that the grave of the former Rolling Stone Brian Jones, above left, is in Cheltenham? Now, thanks to a free downloadable England Rocks map . . . music fans can learn everything there is to know about more than 100 English sites associated with rock ‘n’ roll and then make a pilgrimage that goes far beyond the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Touristic and Migrating Musics in Transit
• PART I Music and Tourism
• PART II Music and Migration
• Contributors
• Index