Pop culture - Geographies of music Flashcards
Why do geographers study music?
Cultural mediator.
Embedded into everyday life.
Expression of identity.
Spatial performance - Audiencing.
Production and consumption of places.
Spatially situated through globalisation.
How do we place culture?
White and Day, 1997:
A ‘culture region’ approach to analyse listening practices across country music radio.
Targets certain audiences through culturally segregated forms of radio stations focusing on specific genres in specific regions.
Notions of ‘tradition’ and ‘region’ have been globalised e.g. Mexican and Scottish stereotypes. This can save some cultures. This can also renegotiate local and regional identities.
Example: The Worzles - Regional identity. Versions of identity can get bound up in understandings of a place by the performance of place based music.
Placing culture
Example: The Beatles and Penny Lane.
Features as a part of the walking talk. However, the ‘penny’ of penny lane was a wealthy slave trader. Place based contexts, create a messiness to the forms of identity and how they are understood. How that matter to different groups differently.
How does music influence national identity?
Perpetual negotiations between perceived traditions and contemporary trends e.g. national identity.
Example: Scotland and the bagpipes with military dress.
- Flower of Scotland (national anthem) is about beating England.
- National anthems get adopted and continually performed and reperformed at big occasions.
- Can get folded into other national identities e.g. wearing tartan, bagpipes being played. Evokes a sense of belonging.
Adoption of globalised pop-culture, re-imagined.
Example: K-pop.
- Manufactured through what a specific form of music can be. Arguably an adaptation of other globalised music.
- Lack of clarity with how they are associated with particular forms of national identity. Re-signified and re-understood, causing them to lose the specificity of a national identity.
Negotiations of identity play out in bodily performances and the adoption of (inter)national symbols.
Example: Diaspora of Caribbean heritage in St Pauls carnival, Bristol. - Get adopted and reimagined depending on context.
Music and national identity
Example: Bangalore.
Pop music, driving fast and attempting to perform globalised culture as the ‘everyday’ (Saldanha, 2002).
Aspire to have the trappings of the pop starts in the music videos. Attempt to perform a globalised culture as your everyday. Similar lifestyle of the people in the videos.
How do we consume music?
Internalised place of escape rather than topographic topological. Recapturing memories of what you may have seen performed.
Lack of choice - Many of the everyday spaces we occupy are effected by sound. Exposed to forms of music that are not our taste e.g. background noise, elevator music.
Soundscapes. e.g. Shops to curate a particular feeling. Can effect your sensory experience. e.g. creating a playlist to evoke specific feelings such as a running playlist to have energy.
How does music influence emotions?
Music also stimulates bodily responses and emotions, or can pacify a listener, all through sound, pitch, rhythm etc (see Anderson, 2004).
Affective responses e.g. waiting for the beat to drop. Manipulated by music e.g. music in films and tv to create suspense and drama.
How do fandoms form identities?
Example: One Direction.
Example: One Direction - Identity of young females. Editorial decisions of the programme.
Identity through:
- Participation - Have to be at the spaces they are, recordings of concerts at cinemas.
- Valuation - An economy of ‘likes’.
- Micro-celebrity - People who know something about the band that others do not.
How does music create a space?
Example: Hedonism.
Electronic dance music has a focus on the dance floor: a space where a disparate group of people come together for a finite period. (Fraser, 2012)
Generating feelings in a specific place. A temporary community being formed whilst music is being created.
Letting off steam and association in the 90s and 2000s with drugs e.g. ecstasy with the UK club scene to create a nexus and altered consciousness with music crafted to create specific feelings.
How does music influence gender performance?
Example: Taylor swift ‘the man’ video.
Always being judged as a female artist.
Nuanced awareness of this in music videos, lyrics providing an ongoing cultural commentary that is unique.
Very American sense of identity that she is providing commentary on. Globalised phenomena.
How does music influence nationality?
Example: Buena Vista Social Club.
‘a loving portrait of a master class in Cuban music?
Album and documentary driven by Americans e.g. Ry Cooder. Post colonial power. Insipient hierarchy. Imply that they could not do it by themselves. Exoticisation.
Imaginative geography of Cuba as exotic, left behind. Obscuring what is not. Post revolutionary issues e.g. human rights and the sanction where the country is in a constant state of poverty.
