Interrogating Popular Music and the City Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series

How does popular music influence the culture and reputation of a city, and what does a city do to popular music? Interrogating Popular Music and the City examines the ways in which urban environments and music cultures intersect in various locales around the globe. Music and cities have been partners in an often clumsy, sometimes accidental but always exciting dance. Heritage and immigration, noise and art, policy and politics are some of the topics that are addressed in this critical examination of relationships between cities and music. The book draws upon an international array of researchers, encompassing hip hop in Beijing; the city favelas of Brazil; from Melbourne bars to European parliaments; to heritage and tourism debates in Salzburg and Manchester. In doing so, it interrogates the different agendas of audiences, musicians and policy-makers in distinct urban settings.

1. Introduction: Interrogating the Music City

Shane Homan, Catherine Strong, Seamus O’Hanlon and John Tebbutt

Part I Conceptualising the Music City

2. Locating the City Limits: Examining Overlapping and Competing Policy Concerns in the Management and Promotion of ‘Music Cities’

Adam Behr

3. The Night Mayor at Work

Shane Homan

Part II Intersections of Music and Nationalism in the City

4. Beijing Hip Hop: From Banal Cosmopolitanism to Nationalism in the Synchronisation with the West

Anthony Fung and Qian Zhang

5. The Birth, Death, and Revitalisation of Chinese Popular Music in Shanghai

Mengyu Luo and Wenyu Zhong

6. Other Melodies in a Modern City: The Thai Regime of Sound and Literary Imagination of Ghostly Thai Classical Music in Bangkok

Wanchana Tongkhampao

Part III Movements and Music in the City

7. The Voice of the City: Hong Kong Cantopop in the Future Continuous Tense?

Yiu-Wai Chu

8. Decolonial identities and DIY Music as Political and Social Resistance in the Global South

Paula Guerra

9. Beyond ‘Pub Rock’: Immigration, Multiculturalism and the Changing Face of Melbourne’s Live Music Scene

Jennifer Rose and Seamus O’Hanlon

Part IV Heritage and Music Cities

10. Missing the Beat: The Role of Intangible Heritage for Western Urban Policy

Beate Peter

11. “Before They Come and Pull the Place Apart”: Venue Loss and Heritage Value in Melbourne’s Music Scenes

Catherine Strong and Sam Whiting

12. Ground-Truthing DC Punk History in Adams–Morgan

Tyler Sonnichsen

13. Screening Teenagers: Modernity and Music Television in 1960s Melbourne

John Tebbutt

Shane Homan is Head of the School of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University, Melbourne. He has published five books and many book chapters and journal articles on cultural policy, particularly intersections between the music industries and national cultural policy.

Catherine Strong is an Associate Professor at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include cultural heritage and history, and gender issues in popular music. She is the co-editor of the journal Popular Music History.

Seamus O’Hanlon teaches contemporary urban, social and cultural history at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His most recent publications include City Life: the New Urban Australia and Music City Melbourne: Urban Culture, History and Policy co-authored with Shane Homan, Catherine Strong and John Tebbutt.

John Tebbutt has a PhD in History (University of Sydney). John is Associate Professor (Honorary), School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, and at the Faculty of Social Sciences, City University of Hong Kong. He is managing editor with Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies.