Mixing Pop and Politics

Political Dimensions of Popular Music in the 21st Century

Catherine Hoad, Geoff Stahl, Oli Wilson, Catherine Hoad, Geoff Stahl, Oli Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000556674
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The political has always been part of popular music, but how does that play out in today's musical and political landscape? Mixing Pop and Politics: Political Dimensions of Popular Music in the 21st Century provides an innovative exploration of the complex politics of popular music in its contemporary formations.Amid the shifting paradigms of power in the 2020s, the chapters in this book go beyond the idea of popular music as protest to explore how resistance, subversion, containment, and reconciliation all interact in the popular music realm. Covering a wide range of international artists and genres, from South African hip-hop to Polish punk, and addressing topics such as climate change and environmentalism, feminism, diasporic identity, political parties, music-making as labour, the far right, conservatism and nostalgia, and civic engagement, the contributors expand our understanding of how popular music is political.For students and scholars of music, popular culture, and politics, the volume offers a broad, exciting snapshot of the latest scholarship on contemporary popular music and politics.

1Navigating a neoliberal cityExperimental music-making in Aotearoa/ New Zealand’s ‘cultural capital’

Geoff Stahl

DOI: 10.4324/9780429284526-2

Introduction

While COVID-19 has had a devastating effect on live music scenes and the venues which serve them since it first appeared, prior to that many cities around the globe were already witnessing a precipitous decline in live performance spaces (see, for example, Whiting and Carter, 2016; Webster et al., 2018; Green and Bennett, 2019; van der Hoeven and Hitters, 2020). The disappearance of live performance spaces, though for reasons that may vary in cities around the world, often includes some combination of lock-in laws, rent increases, noise control issues, gentrification and/or policies, and militating against noisy or aggressively drunk patrons. A number of these cities have been home to well-known and highly regarded musical cultures, recognised locally and many internationally, and some have drawn on this aspect of their cultural life to class themselves as ‘creative cities’ and, more recently, ‘music cities’. In select cities, music scenes are mobilised as a semiotic resource, a sign and index of urban vitality – taking the form, on the one hand, of policy buzzword and, on the other, a lived experience for those who create and populate these cultural spaces. The latter generate the creative and social energies urban cultural policy makers reference as part of a suite of strategies aimed at promotion, branding, development, and investment, targeting not only local interests but also the lucrative tourist and real estate investment markets, often creating an adversarial relationship with those directly involved in the very scene being packaged and promulgated. In this fraught context, as Janet Wolff reminds us, it is important to consider artistic practice as multidimensional, as ‘situated practice, the mediation of aesthetic codes, what Bourdieu calls the “cultural unconscious,” and ideological, social and material processes and institutions’ (Wolff 1993, p. 137).

The contemporary ‘creative city’ and its refashioning of culture within neoliberal frameworks that have positioned it as central to urban branding strategies makes Bourdieu’s comment seem even more salient at this particular juncture. Using the example of Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand, in this chapter I explore how the cultural spaces of the city are ‘situated’ by two small-scale facilitators and incubators of musical practice and distinctive sociomusical experiences: the performance venues Caroline (2014–2019) and The Pyramid Club (2014–present). Their respective, and often shared, aesthetic politics lend more specificity to the multidimensional aspects of musical practice in Wellington, and, as outlined in what follows, in their own way point to the manner in which two intertwined national(ised) discourses, neoliberalism and do-it-yourself (DIY), shape how and where musical practice gets ‘situated’, doing so in often uneasy and contradictory ways. As will also be suggested, Caroline and Pyramid Club exemplify the complicated micro- and macro-entanglement of what Greg Nielsen (2007), with specific reference to Quebec, had called an ethos and ethnos. In relation to neoliberalism and DIY, in Aotearoa/New Zealand this entanglement has carved out a space in that variegated terrain in complicated ways. Both venues inhabit, concomitantly, national discourses as well as localised discursive regimes that require a certain degree of nimble navigation, having to work within different neoliberal frameworks; as Peck, Theodore, and Brenner (2009) note, these operate at different scales, from the individual, the municipal, and the national:

(N)eoliberalism is very much a multi-scalar phenomenon: it reconstitutes scaled relationships between institutions and economic actors, such as municipal governments, national states and financialized capital; and it leads to the substitution of competitive for redistributive regulatory logics while downloading risks and responsibilities to localities.

(pp. 50–51)

Caroline and Pyramid Club straddle a number of these discourses, which circulate through everyday life and the media, inform national and municipal cultural policies, and are central determinants shaping the evaluative frameworks for national funding regimes aimed at supporting cultural projects.

Neoliberalism and Aotearoa/New Zealand

In order to better understand how those behind Caroline and Pyramid Club engage with these logics and their discourses in relation to the city’s music-making, and the wider DIY and neoliberal regimes which they navigate, some brief contextualising notes are necessary, for both the city itself as well as the larger discursive envelope within which these two cultural spaces are contained. Neoliberalism took hold in the early 1980s in Aotearoa/New Zealand, implemented through the Fourth Labour government (1984–1990), helmed by Prime Minister David Lange, and was put into place principally through the economic policies of his Minister of Finance, Roger Douglas (the policies are often referred to colloquially as ‘Rogernomics’, echoing the American version of neoliberalism, ‘Reaganomics’), privatising many state-owned and operated industries and institutions as well as overhauling much of its social welfare policies and related infrastructures. Over the ensuing decades, this policy regime has sedimented out in such a way as to become a fundamental organising logic shaping social, cultural, economic, and everyday life in the country. Jane Kelsey (1999) sums up the deleterious effects of neoliberalism in Aotearoa/New Zealand, particularly the cultural deficit, in its earlier phase, in what is sometimes referred to as the ‘New Zealand experiment’:

Within a decade, the country and the lives of its people were turned upside down. This right-wing revolution – bloodless, but devastating for those who became its victims – had been prosecuted in the name of ‘the nation as a whole’. Constant references to national wealth, national well-being, and national self-interest sought to submerge deep inequalities into an amorphous whole. Along the way, the nation in whose name the experiment was carried out was irreversibly changed, raising vital concerns about identity, sovereignty, and foreign control.

Successive governments, on both sides of the political spectrum, have continued to implement variations on neoliberal ideas, such that they have become the backdrop against which Aotearoa/New Zealand has understood and defined itself for nearly four decades. “Some time” after the global financial crisis (GFC), for example, Kelsey notes that Aotearoa/New Zealand remains committed to the neoliberal project, suggesting that it works to ‘neutralise what they variously called “the commitment problem,” “political slippage,” and despotic democracy’, and to embed their new regime as deeply as possible (Kelsey 2014, p. 121). The national imaginary, as well as individual senses of self, referred to in Kelsey’s commentary, inform how a particular ethos articulates to and through a specific ethnos by becoming embedded infra- and inter-structurally. Neoliberalism does this by insinuating its way into industries and institutions (manufacturing, agricultural, educational, and cultural, among others), giving form to an ethnos, taking root in Aotearoa/New Zealand in part because of an extant sense of identity, an ethos, around a well-entrenched DIY culture. A pragmatic orientation marked by a certain resourcefulness in the form of DIY, what is colloquially referred to as ‘kiwi ingenuity’, then becomes a national mantra. This is best summed up in a local advertising for the hardware chain, Mitre 10, whose slogan is ‘DIY: It’s in our DNA’, declaring that DIY is embedded, embodied, or in the discourse of the ad ‘encoded’, into the very genetic matrix of all New Zealanders. DIY and its innateness thus become an accomplice to and an alibi for neoliberalism. A DIY ethos makes a neoliberal ethnos both possible and plausible, mutually reinforcing one another. This particular ethos predates neoliberalism, with Aotearoa/New Zealand long imagining itself at the edge of the world, a new frontier in the form of a settler colony, far removed from the imperial centre, where the project of nation building was ad hoc, piecemeal, and against the elements. As a settler colonial nation, the zeal with which the country formed itself established a set of precedents – ways of being that were extrapolated and abstracted into collective archetypes and attitudes, a kind of lo-fi heroism – that persist through to today, a national, sociohistorical metanarrative of entrepreneurial zeal stretching from what Paul Callahan has referred to as from ‘wool to Weta’ (Callaghan, 2013). These archetypes that populate this national story are typically masculine and most often white European (‘Pākehā’ is the te reo Māori term), but espouse a sense of getting on with things, with little fuss, a kind of rugged, individuated stoicism that privileges triumphing over adversity, overcoming the tyranny of distance, and controlling and radically reshaping the country for agriculture means (principally through expropriating Māori land) as founding historical markers of the nation’s character and sensibility (see Bogardus 2013; Mackay & Perkins 2017). This pervasive and ingrained DIY ethos goes some way to explaining how neoliberalism became another iteration of colonisation, this time enacted from the 1980s onward through government policies, institutional and industrial practices, ideologies, and discourses that trickled down through to culture and became part of the rhetoric of everyday life, a localised habitus. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, the DIY ethos abetted the entrenchment of neoliberalism, as an alibi for and accomplice to it, over the past forty years stealthily naturalising the articulation of an individualised ethos to the national ethno-imaginary (see Scott 2011; Stahl 2011).

Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand

Wellington, the capital of Aotearoa/New Zealand, sits at the lower end of the North Island, with a population of just over 200,000 (Wellington Population Forecast 2020). It has two universities, among other educational institutions, with the result that a large portion of the inner-city population is made up of young people. The city’s demography is also shaped by university staff, as well as the many government employees and civil servants who make up the capital city’s workforce. It is also the home to Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post Studios and Weta Studios, where many international blockbusters are produced (mainly through post-production), which for years has been relying on local and, primarily, international coders, programmers, and other members of the ‘creative class’ to make up their labour force (Florida 2005). These diverse constituencies in Wellington have been framed by some in the media and local government as together making up the nation’s ‘creative capital’, a place where a combination of creative and social energies have fuelled a vision of Wellington as a dynamic creative hub, with many still referring to The Lonely Planet’s now-dated 2010 nomination as the ‘coolest little capital’ (Wood 2010).

As is the case with many places framed through policy and media discourses as ‘creative’ cities, there is often a disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality. At the same time that many continue to make claims that Wellington is the cultural capital of the country, the city’s live music scene has atrophied significantly. Over the last fifteen years, the stochastic rhythms of the city’s musical culture have been marked, on the one hand, by a vitality and vibrancy and, on the other, as a city where live music venues close with increasing frequency, with fewer cropping up to replace them. That latter downward trend has come to dominate the city’s metanarrative arc, with the scene a locus of a great deal of soul searching among venue owners, musicians, and fans (see Stahl 2018). Caroline and Pyramid Club have been sites of resistance to this narrative of decline, as well as cultural spaces that have negotiated with neoliberal imperatives, albeit in different fashions. They are the latest exemplars of how DIY culture fits (or does not fit, as the case may be) into Wellington’s neoliberalised urban and musical imaginaries. Their persistence, particularly the Pyramid Club, has much to do with their aesthetic politics and their place, ideologically and physically, in Wellington, and where they fit into this imaginary, or at the very least how they point to the limits of that imaginary’s horizons.

Caroline

Caroline (2014–2019) was a club that sat well at the margins of the city’s primary cultural arteries, Courtenay Place and Cuba Street, situated nearer the Central Business District (CBD) at the corner of Boulcott Street and Manners. It could be found along the route taken by many students to those other entertainment clusters, as it was close to a number of student dormitories. It occupied an old commercial space, a repurposed venue amid a number of other commercial buildings (with very little residential space nearby). Towards the end of its existence, it made local news when a band was denied a gig because they did not meet the bar’s requirement that at least one member of one of the bands performing that night be non-male. There were a number of misunderstandings of this policy, which had been in effect for some years (also in place at its sister venue, Meow). The result was a series of debates and discussions online and elsewhere evidencing how a certain neoliberal discourse had become part of a culture which had long imagined itself outside of the mainstream, where market values are often deemed to be a corrupting influence.

In response to a selection of regular attendees at Caroline, one of the bookers outlined their approach to being more inclusive in the local newspaper, the Dominion Post:

Our policy when booking shows is to ask that there is at least one woman in an event’s line-up, in our aim to foster diversity and representation in Wellington’s music scene. … We welcome all-male bands, and we often book such acts. We just ask that, over the entire evening’s event, there is one woman or non-male performer across the number of acts booked. They may be a part of a support act, if not in the headline act.

(Stewart, 2018)

The online article fuelled a number of comments in response, some commending the venue owners for their attempt to widen the diversity of people represented on stage, but the majority were in opposition to this stance by the venue, many along the lines of the following three comments.

The world runs on indi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Mixing pop and pandemics
• 1 Navigating a neoliberal city: Experimental music-making in Aotearoa/ New Zealand’s ‘cultural capital’
• 2 Sharing languages through contemporary song in the third space: A case study of intercultural collaboration between Indigenous Australian, Polynesian, and Melanesian women
• 3 African popular music, race, and diasporic heritage in Australia
• 4 Resisting through music under the neoliberal-authoritarian regime: Political themes in Turkish rap songs
• 5 Rapping about our history, imagining our future!: The Great Legacy project in the Korean variety show Infinite Challenge
• 6 Yes, indeed: Trap and politics
• 7 Looping alone, together: Music, community, and environmental self-sustainability in Aotearoa/New Zealand
• 8 ‘Half-Moghul, half-Mowgli’: The representation of South Asian diasporas in hip hop music
• 9 Locating labour subjectivities in contemporary popular music texts
• 10 Beyond hegemony: Siksa and the politics of affect
• 11 ‘A message etched on broken ships’: Radical environmentalism and extreme ecometal
• 12 Good citizenship, telethon, and benefit concert: The politics of the achievable
• 13 Solidarity as strategy: Anti-racism and feminism in the work of Titiyo
• 14 Nostalgia, anti-victim discourse, and neoliberalism in early 1990s pop: The postfeminist approach of Wilson Phillips
• 15 White skin, black masks: Die Antwoord, post-apartheid South Africa, and global hip hop studies
• 16 ‘I am the cause to all your problems’: Brand New, tattoo coverups, and (im)permanence
• 17 Neon-Nazis: A fascist foray into vaporwave’s synaesthetic world
• Afterword
• Index