Relocating Popular Music

The purpose of this collection is to shed the light on the relations between music and place. Of specific interest to its editors and authors is the idea of relocation of popular music, which can mean many different things: transporting music from one place or historical period to another, hybridising it with a different style, placing it in a new context or furnishing it with a new meaning. On many occasions, this involves discussing music in relation to visual media, most importantly music video, but also film, graphic arts, fashion, and architecture. In our introduction we will present this approach against a background of the existing body of research on place and space in humanities at large, and popular music in particular. This steadily growing research can be seen as a reflection of what we propose to label a ‘spatial turn in humanities’ and a ‘spatial turn in the study of popular music’.

Turkey stands on the periphery of the dominating centre of Europe, straddling the East and West politically, culturally, and geographically. Oppositional Turkish voices come from the periphery of Turkey itself, challenging the government’s political Islamist centre. ‘Özgün’ (authentic protest) music is one such voice of protest. With its roots in Anatolian musical traditions, it also borrows liberally from Western musical styles, instrumentation and even harmonies raising fears of cultural imperialism where the West is seen to dominate the rest. This chapter argues that it is useful to think of this borrowing in terms of relocating semiotic resources from both the West and Turkish culture to construct spaces of resistance. Other than musical traditions, representations of place and people in places in music videos are also relocated into a semiotic package of subversion (meaning to undermine principles and corrupt). These representations are powerful, affecting our understanding of places, reinforcing myths, and providing listeners with a sense of identity (Forman 2002). In song, analysis of settings are ‘highly revealing about the world being communicated’ (Machin 2010: 92), and ‘can be used to understand broader social relations and trends, including identity, ethnicity, attachment to place, cultural economies, social activism, and politics’ (Johansson and Bell 2009: 2).

Baile funk¹ is the first manifestation of Brazilian electronic dance music (Palombini 2010: 103; Sá 2007) to emerge from the slums area of Rio de Janeiro in the late 1980s.² In terms of its cultural impact, this genre offers a strong sense of place: a pictorial place of art and dreams, a meaningful place of action and, finally, a utopic place for thousands of socially excluded youths living in harsh conditions in Brazilian shanty towns. The utopian dimension in baile funk music is articulated through its multilayered musical nuances including proibidão, regarded as a way to celebrate prohibited powers or romântico, which exalts a utopic world of romanticism and more recently, the utopian is represented in funk ostentação (funk ostentation). I approach the phenomenon of baile funk as a manifestation of a postmodern ‘loss of the real’ in the way its narrative can be read as a way to disconnect with the real condition of the favela. Through the process of transnational relocation of music, the genre can also be seen as a postcolonial conjointment in the way, baile funk ‘writes back’ (to borrow Ashcroft’s concept) to Europe and the USA to affirm its own sense of place, and to claim ‘the right [as a cultural product] to represent [itself] by juxtaposing colonial inscriptions’ (Fiedler 2007: 275).

A South African group Die Antwoord, which in Afrikaans means ‘the answer’, began their international career almost immediately after the recording of their first album $O$ (2009). The music they perform, defined by them as ‘zef style’, is a mix of rave and rap juxtaposed with the overwhelming visuality of their videos.¹ The phenomenon of their rapid popularity seems to be the result of a striking contrast provided by their street music and the sophisticated visual brut aesthetics that is inspired by the most prominent contemporary African artists.

In this chapter I address the ways in which popular music genres have been recycled in the Serbian post-socialist political landscape. Specifically, I analyse how Western-styled music production was relocated, both spatially and temporally, from being a vehicle of purported ‘freedom of expression’ in socialist Yugoslavia, to operating as a mechanism of Serbian banal nationalism. During the 1990s, Serbian nationalism emerged as an antagonistic force playing a crucial and dominant role in the violent breakup of Yugoslavia and aiming to retain control of vast swathes of land which were (in Serbian nationalistic discourse) perceived as parts of Serbian national territory. The aggressiveness of Serbian nationalism was reflected in various popular music genres, not least in the infamous turbo-folk. Thus, it is important to trace the mechanisms whereby certain products of popular music, through processes of spatiotemporal relocation, were employed in order to banalise the ‘hot’ Serbian nationalism, and represent it in a different, Westernised light. I will show how the pop and rock music became engrafted into seemingly innocuous representations of Serbian patriotism, or ‘civic nationalism’, through widely accepted practices which were even perceived as ‘above the political’ in the everyday jargon.

In this chapter I discuss the relationship between two musical minimalisms: the minimal techno which developed in Detroit during the early 1990s and the more ‘classical’ form of minimalism belonging to composers in downtown New York, especially Manhattan, during the 1960s. Initially, by returning to the early manifestations of each, now seen as ‘classics,’ I demonstrate how these two traditions intertwine at their roots, before examining their subsequent interaction, as more mature and diverse artforms, in the 1990s and later. By looking at the reworkings by techno DJs of classical minimalist works, and vice versa, I aim to bring into relief cultural differences between the different performance media, spaces, and geographical heritages of each. I document the tension between the universalist hopes of minimalist artists of various kinds, on the one hand, and the persistence of genre distinctions on the other. The latter remain relevant due to the continuing use of critical concepts which contribute to the maintenance of hierarchical boundaries between the classical and techno spheres and corresponding modes of consumption.

EMI Studios, Abbey Road, London NW8 was renamed Abbey Road Studios by EMI in 1970 after it was made iconic by the eponymous Beatles long-playing record (LP) with its famous cover of the four group members on the zebra crossing before the building. In this chapter I use Urry and Larsen’s concept of ‘the tourist gaze’ to discuss the changing meaning of Abbey Road Studios over the course of several decades and a wider relationship between the work of the Beatles and tourism. I will examine the processes through which the development of the music the group recorded at the studio in the period 1965— 1969 became symbolic of wider social and cultural change and argue that some of the songs prefigure the leisure and tourism activities and structures of later decades. In relation to its promotion as an object of the tourist gaze, I note that EMI and the Beatles’ company Apple exploited Abbey Road Studios in the 1980s during a period when there was an increased emphasis on national heritage. I conclude by arguing that the coinciding of an aggressive rebranding of ‘The Beatles’ in the mid-1990s with the retro-aesthetic of the newly named ‘Britpop’, reinforced the notion of a British rock tradition and lineage. This is seen to elevate Abbey Road Studios into a cultural symbol, giving it further appeal as a tourist destination.

Due to its geographical position between Russia and Western Europe, Estonian history is one of a so-called ‘border state’. Over time, the country has been colonised by both its Western and Eastern neighbours. Nevertheless, its modern cultural identity, initially constructed during the National Awakening in the nineteenth century, is firmly situated in the West, and in particular in the Germanic sphere of influence. When Soviet Russia annexed Estonia and the other Baltic states during the Second World War, an era of enduring cultural conflict began, characterised by a struggle of the locals to resist Russification, and to an extent to come to terms with the inevitable presence of this powerful ‘savage coloniser’. From the very beginning, the Baltic countries became a ‘Western oasis’, the Soviet West, serving as a desirable destination of internal tourism, as well as a showcase of ‘progressive’ Soviet culture. In particular, the Estonian capital city of Tallinn, and more precisely its well-preserved medieval Old Town, now a UNESCO world heritage site, became an interesting place for negotiations between conflicting ideologies and (national) identities, and an important arena for (re)presentations of power, resistance, and adaptation.

The purpose of this chapter is to analyse the motif of tourism, as a form of exploring foreign places, in the work of Austrian singer and song writer Falco. In order to do so, I will refer to two concepts: ‘tourism’ and ‘heterotopia’, both used in the discourse on popular music. ‘Music and tourism’ covers such phenomena as promoting specific locations through the lyrics and music of the songs and pilgrimages to sites related to famous musicians such as Memphis, the site of memory of Elvis Presley or music festivals (Gibson and Connell 2005). However, not much is written about musicians engaging with the discourse on tourism, adopting the role of critical travellers which, I will argue in due course, is the case with Falco.

‘It so happens’ writes Michael O’Brien, ‘that a disproportionate amount of American popular culture […] is southern. Jazz, blues, rhythm and blues, rock music, country and western, much in those genres is southern or part of a southern cultural diaspora’. He goes on to mention the omnipresence of depictions of the South in film and television, the influence of Southern literature before claiming that ‘to know the South is indispensable to understanding America’ (O’Brien 2007: 11). It was not always thus: James Cobb argues that the late arrival of Southern music — especially country music — to the rest of America occurred at a time (1970s) when the nation was adjusting to the ‘twin shock of defeat and disillusionment previously only associated with the experience and heritage of the Southern states’ (Cobb 1999: 78). It is worth noting that Southern music — hillbilly music — was not simply unknown previously, it was actively reviled for it was seen as the noise made by the primitive half of the US. If New England was understood as the ‘genesis and crystallization of “American civilization”’, argues Larry Griffin (2006: 7), then the South was ‘America’s opposite, its negative image, its evil twin’.

The scene in Los Angeles described above, could hardly be further from the music’s place of origin in the north of England where, due to the autobiographical character of much of his song writing, the music of the Mancunian songwriter Morrissey features multiple references to localities drawn from his native city. Morrissey rose to fame during the 1980s with his band the Smiths and subsequently pursued a solo career. Despite living for many years in Los Angeles and Rome, he is forever conflated with the city of Manchester. Indeed Morrissey’s association with Manchester, referred to by O’Hagan (2007) as ‘poetic provincialism’, exemplifies the use of location as a source of identification. In addition to numerous allusions within song lyrics, the Smiths’ record cover art also included signifiers relating to Manchester and northern England.