Nowhere man
urban life and the virtualization of popular music
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v4i2.220Keywords:
heritage, monument, non-place, performance, placelessness, recording, virtualizationAbstract
Music is not a physical thing, but an event and an action, and since modern urban and posturban ‘places’ are fragmented, topological and often virtual, the attempt to monumentalize popular music seems misguided. The monumental sense of place is based on concepts of tenure and ownership that are challenged by the fluidity of modern urban life. Rapid transport and the media of instant communication have created a non-Euclidean sense of place, and the development of recording and other audio media over the last 130 years has been integral to this process, emphasizing time axis manipulation over the fixity of location. This paper does not seek to refute the connection between music and place, but rather to see both making and listening to music as involving a dynamic construction of place which is necessitated by the ephemeral, kinetic nature of music itself.
References
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Connell, John, and Chris Gibson. 2002. Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity, and Place. London: Routledge.
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—2009b. ‘The Library of Babel: Origins of the World Wide Web’. In Defining Moments: Dramatic Archaeologies of the Twentieth Century, ed. John Schofield, 123–34. Oxford: Archaeopress.
—forthcoming. ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’. In Heritage CHAT, ed. Sefryn Penrose. Oxford: Archaeopress.
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Hewison, Robert. 1986. Too Much: Art and Society in the Sixties 1960–75. London: Methuen.
Hosokawa, Shuhei. 1984. ‘The Walkman Effect’. Popular Music 4: 165–80. doi:10.1017/ S0261143000006218
Ingold, Tim. 1987. The Appropriation of Nature: Essays on Human Ecology and Social Relations. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
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Kasson, John. 1990. Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America. New York: Hill and Wang.
Katz, Mark. 2004. Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Kittler, Friedrich. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Lanza, Joseph. 1995. Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-listening, and Other Moodsong. London: St. Martin’s Press.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1971. Everyday Life in the Modern World. Harmondsworth: Allen Lane.
Ling, Rich. 2004. The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone’s Impact on Society. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.
Malins, Steve. 2006. ‘CD booklet notes’. Systems of Romance. Ultravox.
Marinetti, F. T. 1909. ‘The Futurist Manifesto’. Le Figaro, 20 February.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1965 [1964]. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Melly, George. 1989. Revolt into Style. London: Oxford University Press.
Meyrowitz, Joshua. 1985. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behaviour. London: Oxford University Press.
Milner, Greg. 2009. Perfecting Sound Forever: The Story of Recorded Music. London: Granta.
Muir, Hugh. 2006. ‘Blue Plaque Marks Flats that Put Marley on Road to Fame’. The Guardian, 27 October.
Mumford, Lewis. 1940. The Culture of Cities. New York: Secker and Warburg.
Musil, Robert. 2006. Posthumous Papers of Living Author. London: Archipeligo.
Pattison, Louis. 2009. ‘Pick and Mixtape’. The Guardian, 30 May.
Penrose, Sefryn. 2007. Images of Change: An Archaeology of England’s Contemporary Landscape. Swindon. London: English Heritage.
Proust, Marcel. 1992 [1920–21]. Sodom and Gomorrah: In Search of Lost Time, vol.4, trans. John Sturrock. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Ralph, Julian. 1892. Harper’s Chicago and the World’s Fair. New York: Harper & Bros.
Roseman, Marina. 1998. ‘Singers of the Landscape: Song, History and Property Rights in the Malaysian Rain Forest’. American Anthropologist 100, no. 1: 106–21. doi:10.1525/aa.1998.100.1.106
Schofield, John. 2006. ‘Constructing Place: When Artists and Archaeologists Meet’. Diffusion. http://diffusion.org.uk/liquid/D_LG_Schofield_A4.pdf.
Seabrook, Thomas Jerome. 2008. Bowie in Berlin: A New Career in a New Town. London: Jawbone.
Shattuck, Roger. 2000. Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time. London: W.W. Norton.
Snowden, Collette. 2007. ‘Reporting by Phone’. In Residual Media, ed. Charles R. Ackland, 115–32. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Taylor, Timothy D. 2001. Strange Sounds: Music, Technology, and Culture. London: Routledge.
Thornton, Sarah. 1995. Club Cultures. London: Polity.
Topping, Alexandra. 2009. ‘Music Industry Back on Right Track, Says Report’. The Guardian, 19 July.
Townley, Simon. 2009. Train Tracks. BBC Radio 4, 13.30 pm, 25 August.
Vygotsky, Lev S. 1986. Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wark, M. 1994. Virtual Geography. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Williams, Orlo. 1923. ‘Times and Seasons’. Gramophone 1: 38–9.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso.
Auslander, Philip. 1999. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London: Routledge.
Bacon, Tony. 1999. London Live. London: Balafon.
Barker, H., and Y. Taylor. 2007. Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music. London: Faber and Faber.
Barnes, Anthony. 2008. Killer Bs. BBC Radio 4, August 12.
Barwick, Linda. 2000. ‘Song as an Indigenous Art’. In The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, ed. S. Kleinart and M. Neale, 328–35. London: Oxford University Press.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Becker, Howard S. 2008. Art Worlds. 2nd edn. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 1999 [1968]. Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt. London: Pimlico.
Berman, Marshall. 1982. All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London: Verso.
Berry, David M. 2008. Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Open Source. London: Pluto Press.
Bey, Hakim. 1985/1991. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. New York: Autonomedia. http://www.hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html
Binford, Lewis R. 1981. ‘Behavioural Archaeology and the “Pompeii Premise” ’. Journal of Anthropological Research 37: 195–208.
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 1998. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Brown, Bill. 2004. Things. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Brown, Janelle. 2000. ‘The Jukebox Manifesto’. Salon.com. http://www.salon.com/tech/ feature/2000/11/13/jukebox/
Chanan, Michael. 1995. Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music. London: Verso.
Chatwin, Bruce. 1986. The Songlines. London: Cape.
Connell, John, and Chris Gibson. 2002. Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity, and Place. London: Routledge.
D’Andrea, Anthony. 2009. Global Nomads: Techno and New Age as Transnational Countercultures in Ibiza and Goa. London: Routledge.
Davis, John. 2007. ‘Going Analog: Vinylphines and the Consumption of the “Obsolete” Vinyl Record’. In Residual Media, ed. Charles R. Ackland, 222–38. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511489433
Elias, Norbert. 1994. The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization. Oxford: Blackwell.
Enigbokan, Adeola. 2009. London Calling. http://archiving thecity.com/2009/01/09/ london-calling
Eno, Brian. 1996. A Year with Swollen Appendices: The Diary of Brian Eno. London: Faber and Faber.
Foley, R. A. 1981. ‘Off-site Archaeology: An Alternative Approach for the Short-Sited’. In Pattern of the Past: Essays in Honour of David Clarke, ed. Ian Hodder, Glynn Isaac and Norman Hammond, 152–84. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Forty, Adrian. 1999. ‘Introduction’. In The Art of Forgetting, ed. Adrian Forty and Susanne Kuchler, 1–18. Oxford: Berg.
Frith, Simon. 1996. Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music. London: Oxford University Press.
Gatewood, John B. 1985. ‘Actions Speak Louder than Words’. In Directions in Cognitive Anthropology, ed. Janet Dougherty, 199–219. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
du Gay, Paul, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay and Keith Negus. 1997. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. London: Sage.
Gibson, Chris. 2005. ‘Recording Studios: Relational Spaces of Creativity in the City’. Built Environment 31, no. 3: 258–73 [special issue, Music in the City]. doi:10.2148/benv. 2005.31.3.192
Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Pelican.
Goodwin, Andrew. 1990. ‘Sample and Hold: Pop Music in the Digital Age of Reproduction’. In On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, 220–36. London: Routledge.
Gould, Glenn. 1966. ‘The Prospects of Recording’. High Fidelity 16, no. 4: 46–63.
Gracyk, Theodore. 1996. Rhythm and Noise: Aesthetics of Rock. London: I.B. Tauris.
Graham, Bill. 1988. ‘Interview’. Calendar Magazine, 1 March.
Graves-Brown, Paul. 2000. ‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’. In Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, ed. Paul Graves-Brown, 155–65. London: Routledge.
—2009a. ‘The Privatisation of Experience’. In Contemporary Archaeologies, ed. Cornelius Holtorf and Angela Piccini, 201–15. Oxford: Peter Lang.
—2009b. ‘The Library of Babel: Origins of the World Wide Web’. In Defining Moments: Dramatic Archaeologies of the Twentieth Century, ed. John Schofield, 123–34. Oxford: Archaeopress.
—forthcoming. ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’. In Heritage CHAT, ed. Sefryn Penrose. Oxford: Archaeopress.
Harrison, Rodney and John Schofield. 2010. After Modernity. London: Oxford University Press.
Hewison, Robert. 1986. Too Much: Art and Society in the Sixties 1960–75. London: Methuen.
Hosokawa, Shuhei. 1984. ‘The Walkman Effect’. Popular Music 4: 165–80. doi:10.1017/ S0261143000006218
Ingold, Tim. 1987. The Appropriation of Nature: Essays on Human Ecology and Social Relations. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Innis, Harold A. 1950. Empire and Communications. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Jones, Graham. 2009. Last Shop Standing: Whatever Happened to Record Shops? London: Proper Music.
Kasson, John. 1990. Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America. New York: Hill and Wang.
Katz, Mark. 2004. Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Kittler, Friedrich. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Lanza, Joseph. 1995. Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-listening, and Other Moodsong. London: St. Martin’s Press.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1971. Everyday Life in the Modern World. Harmondsworth: Allen Lane.
Ling, Rich. 2004. The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone’s Impact on Society. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.
Malins, Steve. 2006. ‘CD booklet notes’. Systems of Romance. Ultravox.
Marinetti, F. T. 1909. ‘The Futurist Manifesto’. Le Figaro, 20 February.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1965 [1964]. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Melly, George. 1989. Revolt into Style. London: Oxford University Press.
Meyrowitz, Joshua. 1985. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behaviour. London: Oxford University Press.
Milner, Greg. 2009. Perfecting Sound Forever: The Story of Recorded Music. London: Granta.
Muir, Hugh. 2006. ‘Blue Plaque Marks Flats that Put Marley on Road to Fame’. The Guardian, 27 October.
Mumford, Lewis. 1940. The Culture of Cities. New York: Secker and Warburg.
Musil, Robert. 2006. Posthumous Papers of Living Author. London: Archipeligo.
Pattison, Louis. 2009. ‘Pick and Mixtape’. The Guardian, 30 May.
Penrose, Sefryn. 2007. Images of Change: An Archaeology of England’s Contemporary Landscape. Swindon. London: English Heritage.
Proust, Marcel. 1992 [1920–21]. Sodom and Gomorrah: In Search of Lost Time, vol.4, trans. John Sturrock. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Ralph, Julian. 1892. Harper’s Chicago and the World’s Fair. New York: Harper & Bros.
Roseman, Marina. 1998. ‘Singers of the Landscape: Song, History and Property Rights in the Malaysian Rain Forest’. American Anthropologist 100, no. 1: 106–21. doi:10.1525/aa.1998.100.1.106
Schofield, John. 2006. ‘Constructing Place: When Artists and Archaeologists Meet’. Diffusion. http://diffusion.org.uk/liquid/D_LG_Schofield_A4.pdf.
Seabrook, Thomas Jerome. 2008. Bowie in Berlin: A New Career in a New Town. London: Jawbone.
Shattuck, Roger. 2000. Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time. London: W.W. Norton.
Snowden, Collette. 2007. ‘Reporting by Phone’. In Residual Media, ed. Charles R. Ackland, 115–32. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Taylor, Timothy D. 2001. Strange Sounds: Music, Technology, and Culture. London: Routledge.
Thornton, Sarah. 1995. Club Cultures. London: Polity.
Topping, Alexandra. 2009. ‘Music Industry Back on Right Track, Says Report’. The Guardian, 19 July.
Townley, Simon. 2009. Train Tracks. BBC Radio 4, 13.30 pm, 25 August.
Vygotsky, Lev S. 1986. Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wark, M. 1994. Virtual Geography. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Williams, Orlo. 1923. ‘Times and Seasons’. Gramophone 1: 38–9.
Published
2010-11-16
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Graves-Brown, P. (2010). Nowhere man: urban life and the virtualization of popular music. Popular Music History, 4(2), 220-241. https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v4i2.220
