Popular Music Scenes and Cultural Memory: 2016 (Pop Music, Culture and Identity)

This volume explores the ways in which music scenes are not merely physical spaces for the practice of collective musical life but are also inscribed with and enacted through the articulation of cultural memory and emotional geography. The book draws on empirical data collected in cites throughout Australia. In terms of understanding the relationship between music scenes and participants, much of the existing popular music literature tends to avoid one key aspect of scene: its predominant past-tense and memory-based nature. Nascent music scenes may be emergent and on-going but their articulation in the present is often based on past events, ideas and histories. There is a noticeable gap between the literature concerning popular music ethnography and the growing body of work on cultural memory and emotional geography. This book is a study of the conceptual formation and use of music scenes by participants. It is also an investigation of the structures underpinning music scenes more generally.

Andy Bennett is Professor of Cultural Sociology in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University, Australia. A leading figure in sociological studies of popular music and youth culture, he is author and editor of numerous books including Music, Style, and Aging, Music Scenes (co-edited with Richard A. Peterson) and Remembering Woodstock. Ian Rogers is Lecturer of Popular Music in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. He is the author of numerous articles on musician ideologies, music policy and local music history and is an accomplished musician and critic.