Decline Renewal And The City In Popular Music Culture Beyond The Beatles

How is popular music culture connected with the life, image, and identity of a city? How, for example, did the Beatles emerge in Liverpool, how did they come to be categorized as part of Liverpool culture and identity and used to develop and promote the city, and how have connections between the Beatles and Liverpool been forged and contested? This book explores the relationship between popular music and the city using Liverpool as a case study. Firstly, it examines the impact of social and economic change within that city on its popular music culture, focusing on de-industrialization and economic restructuring during the 1980s and 1990s. Secondly, and in turn, it considers the specificity of popular music culture and the many diverse ways in which it influences city life and informs the way that the city is thought about, valued and experienced. Cohen highlights popular music's unique role and significance in the making of cities, and illustrates how de-industrialization encouraged efforts to connect popular music to the city, to categorize, claim and promote it as local culture, and harness and mobilize it as a local resource. In doing so, she adopts an approach that recognizes music as a social and symbolic practice encompassing a diversity of roles and characteristics: music as a culture or way of life distinguished by social and ideological conventions; music as sound; speech and discourse about music; and music as a commodity and industry.

How is popular music culture connected with the life, image, and identity of a city? How, for example, did the Beatles emerge in Liverpool, how did they come to be categorized as part of Liverpool culture and identity and used to develop and promote the city, and how have connections between the Beatles and Liverpool been forged and contested? This book explores the relationship between popular music and the city using Liverpool as a case study. Firstly, it examines the impact of social and economic change within that city on its popular music culture, focusing on de-industrialization and economic restructuring during the 1980s and 1990s. Secondly, and in turn, it considers the specificity of popular music culture and the many diverse ways in which it influences city life and informs the way that the city is thought about, valued and experienced. Cohen highlights popular music's unique role and significance in the making of cities, and illustrates how de-industrialization encouraged efforts to connect popular music to the city, to categorize, claim and promote it as local culture, and harness and mobilize it as a local resource. In doing so she adopts an approach that recognizes music as a social and symbolic practice encompassing a diversity of roles and characteristics: music as a culture or way of life distinguished by social and ideological conventions; music as sound; speech and discourse about music; and music as a commodity and industry.

Relocating Popular Music uses the lens of colonialism and tourism to analyse types of music movements, such as transporting music from one place or historical period to another, hybridising it with a different style and furnishing it with new meaning. It discusses music in relation to music video, film, graphic arts, fashion and architecture.

Music and Heritage provides new thinking about the diverse ways people engage with heritage. By exploring the relationships that exist between music, place and identity, the book illustrates how people form attachments to place and how such attachments are represented by sound and music-making. Presenting case studies and perspectives from across a range of genres, the volume argues that combining music with heritage provides an alternative and productive opportunity to think about heritage values and place attachment. Contributions to this edited collection use a diversity of methods, perspectives, cues and genres to reflect critically on issues related to these and other interconnections in ways that encourage new thinking about the character, meaning and purpose of cultural heritage, and the various ways in which people can interact with it through sound – thus re-encountering the supposedly familiar world around them. Taking heritage studies, musicology and place-making research in new directions, Music and Heritage will be of interest to academics and students engaged in the study of heritage, history, music, geography and anthropology. It will also be relevant to those with an interest in how music relates to place-making and place attachment, as well as to practitioners and policymakers working in the planning, design and creative sectors.

At times it appears that a whole industry exists to perpetuate the myth of origin of the Beatles. There certainly exists a popular music (or perhaps 'rock') origin myth concerning this group and the city of Liverpool and this draws in devotees, as if on a pilgrimage, to Liverpool itself. Once 'within' the city, local businesses exist primarily to escort these pilgrims around several almost iconic spaces and places associated with the group. At times it all almost seems 'spiritual'. One might argue however that, like any function myth, the music history of the Liverpool in which the Beatles grew and then departed is not fully represented. Beatles historians and businessmen-alike have seized upon myriad musical experiences and reworked them into a discourse that homogenizes not only the diverse collective articulations that initially put them into place, but also the receptive practices of those travellers willing to listen to a somewhat linear, exclusive narrative. Other Voices therefore exists as a history of the disparate and now partially hidden musical strands that contributed to Liverpool's musical countenance. It is also a critique of Beatles-related institutionalized popular music mythology. Via a critical historical investigation of several thus far partially hidden popular music activities in pre- and post-Second World War Liverpool, Michael Brocken reveals different yet intrinsic musical and socio-cultural processes from within the city of Liverpool. By addressing such 'scenes' as those involving dance bands, traditional jazz, folk music, country and western, and rhythm and blues, together with a consideration of partially hidden key places and individuals, and Liverpool's first 'real' record label, an assemblage of 'other voices' bears witness to an 'other', seldom discussed, Liverpool. By doing so, Brocken - born and raised in Liverpool - asks questions about not only the historicity of the Beatles-Liverpool narrative, but also about the absence o

Popular music scholars have long been interested in the connection between place and music. This collection brings together a number of key scholars in order to introduce readers to concepts and theories used to explore the relationships between place and music. An interdisciplinary volume, drawing from sociology, geography, ethnomusicology, media, cultural, and communication studies, this book covers a wide-range of topics germane to the production and consumption of place in popular music. Through considerations of changes in technology and the mediascape that have shaped the experience of popular music (vinyl, iPods, social media), the role of social difference and how it shapes sociomusical encounters (queer spaces, gendered and racialised spaces), as well as the construction and representations of place (musical tourism, city branding, urban mythologies), this is an up-to-the-moment overview of central discussions about place and music. The contributors explore a range of contexts, moving from the studio to the stage, the city to the suburb, the bedroom to festival, from nightclub to museum, with each entry highlighting the diverse and complex ways in which music and place are mutually constitutive.

It has taken Liverpool almost half a century to come to terms with the musical, cultural and now economic legacy of the Beatles and popular music. At times the group was negatively associated with sex and drugs images surrounding rock music: deemed unacceptable by the city fathers, and unworthy of their support. Liverpudlian musicians believe that the musical legacy of the Beatles can be a burden, especially when the British music industry continues to brand the latest (white) male group to emerge from Liverpool as ’the next Beatles’. Furthermore, Liverpudlians of perhaps differing ethnicities find images of ’four white boys with guitars and drums’ not only problematic in a ’musical roots’ sense, but for them culturally devoid of meaning and musically generic. The musical and cultural legacy of the Beatles remains complex. In a post-industrial setting in which both popular and traditional heritage tourism have emerged as providers of regular employment on Merseyside, major players in what might be described as a Beatles music tourism industry have constructed new interpretations of the past and placed these in such an order as to re-confirm, re-create and re-work the city as a symbolic place that both authentically and contextually represents the Beatles.

There is a growing awareness around the world of the pressing need to archive the material remnants of popular music so as to safeguard the national and local histories of this cultural form. Current research suggests that in the past 20 or so years there has been an expansion of DIY heritage practice, with the founding of numerous DIY popular music institutions, archives and museums around the world. This edited collection seeks to explore the role of DIY or Pro-Am (Professional-Amateur) practitioners of popular music archiving and preservation. It looks critically at ideas around "DIY preservationism," "self-authorised" and "unauthorised" heritage practice and the "DIY institution," while also unpacking the potentialities of bottom-up, community-based interventions into the archiving and preservation of popular music’s material history. With an international scope and an interdisciplinary approach, this is an important reference for scholars of popular music, heritage studies and cultural studies.