Cohen 2012 Bubbles Maps Borders and Lines-2

Journal of the Royal Musical Association
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Bubbles, Tracks, Borders and Lines: Mapping Music

and Urban Landscape
Sara Cohen
To cite this article: Sara Cohen (2012) Bubbles, Tracks, Borders and Lines: Mapping Music
and Urban Landscape, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 137:1, 135-170, DOI:
10.1080/02690403.2012.669939
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Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 137, no. 1, 135170
Bubbles, Tracks, Borders and Lines:

Mapping Music and Urban Landscape
SARA COHEN
Introduction
THIS article explores the relationship between music and material urban environ-
ments by drawing on ethnographic research conducted with rock and hip-hop
musicians in Liverpool, a port city situated on the north-west coast of England, and
within the wider Merseyside region.1 The first of the articles three sections begins by
explaining the ways in which the research was conducted and the particular
combination of methods involved, which included the use of conceptual mapping. It
then introduces a few of the musicians who participated in that research and the
maps they drew to illustrate their music-making activities and experiences in the city.
The second section of the article compares and contrasts these hand-drawn maps and
their various lines and patterns, and in so doing highlights similarities as well as
differences in the ways in which the musicians conceptualized music and urban
space. These differences are explained by relating the maps to two particular factors,
one being music genre and the other being the particular social, economic and
historical circumstances through which the citys material environments were shaped
and distinguished.
The third and final section of the article explores the broader implications
of this research and mapping for conceptualizing and understanding the relationship
between music and material environments, by drawing on insights from anthro-
pological, sociological and musicological research. It starts off by considering notions
of articulation and mediation, and their usefulness for understanding relations
between music and material urban environments. It then explores these no-
tions further by returning to the hand-drawn maps. Focusing on the maps detailed
lines and patterns, it describes how music and music-making are mediated by
material urban environments, a process involving the navigation of journeys and
boundaries and the forging of multiple relations along the way (relations between
people, practices, sounds, genres, material sites, and so on). The article concludes by
E-mail: sara@liv.ac.uk
1
For the purposes of this article material urban environments refers to the physical surroundings that
provide a focus or setting for urban music activity, whether they be natural (trees, rivers, etc.) or built
(roads, buildings, etc.).
ISSN 0269-0403 print/ISSN 1471-6933 online

# The Royal Musical Association
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02690403.2012.669939
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136 SARA COHEN
bringing together the main points of the discussion and relating them to the concept
of musical landscape, and by reflecting on the potential of conceptual mapping as a
tool in music research.
1. Mapping rock and hip-hop in Liverpool

Between 2007 and 2009 I conducted a two-year project on music and urban en-
vironments with a research associate, Brett Lashua.2 One of our main aims was to
examine musical creativity and local distinctiveness in a context of urban
regeneration and through ethnographic research, and the project focused on amateur
rock, pop and hip-hop musicians, and involved a case study on music-making in
Liverpool. We were interested in how musicians interacted with material urban
environments for the purposes of music-making: the places they played in, for
example, and their journeys to and from those places. We were also interested in
places represented through music and the ways in which musicians experienced and
thought about the city and about urban change. During the project, we interviewed
around 60 musicians, and participated in and observed their music-making activities.
Brett, for example, collaborated with musicians on the composition and recording of
music in a local recording studio, and also joined them live on stage as a drummer in
clubs and at festivals. In addition to this, we accompanied musicians on their regular
routes around the city and places within it, including buildings, streets and
neighbourhoods connected with music rehearsal, performance and recording.
Whilst participant observation and interviews provided the foundation of our
methodological approach, the project also involved archival research and the use of
maps and mapping. In civic and music archives we consulted historical maps, as well
as photographs, architectural drawings, newspaper articles, leaflets and other
documents that helped us to situate the research within a historical context.
We also created our own maps through which we could share our research findings
with musicians and others.3 They included maps of the walking tours we had
undertaken with musicians; digital, multimedia and interactive maps of local music
sites and sounds; and maps created through Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
2
I would like to thank Brett for his contribution to the project; the Arts and Humanities Research
Council UK (Landscape and Environment) for supporting it; our project partners, English Heritage,
National Museums Liverpool and Urbeatz; and all the musicians who participated in the project and
gave their permission for us to use their maps and lyrics. In addition, I would like to thank the
organizers and participants of seminars and conferences at which Brett and I presented papers on
aspects of the research, but above all the Royal Musical Association, which gave me the opportunity to
present a keynote conference address (Boundaries, RMA Annual Conference, University College
London, 17 July 2010) that provided the basis for this article. My thanks are also due to David Horn
for his comments on drafts of that address, and to Michael Spitzer and the two anonymous reviewers
who commented on the version that was submitted to JRMA.
3
Sara Cohen, Urban Musicscapes: Mapping Music-Making in Liverpool, Mapping Cultures: Place,
Practice, Performance, ed. Les Roberts (London, 2012).
BUBBLES, TRACKS, BORDERS AND LINES 137
mapping technology, a digital means of storing spatial information that allows for
the display of multiple layers of information searchable via various themes, and also
for the interrogation of research data. Most importantly, once we had got to know
musicians, we invited them at appropriate points during our conversations to draw
us their own maps illustrating their music-making routes and routines.
These kinds of hand-drawn map (also commonly referred to as cognitive,
conceptual or sketch maps) have long been used to study the ways in which people
describe places and remember what is where; peoples subjective sense of space and
place; and differences between people in terms of their spatial knowledge and
understanding. Back in the 1950s, for example, Kevin Lynch interviewed residents in
Boston, Jersey City and Los Angeles, and asked them to draw maps of their everyday
routes within the city centre in order to gather perspectives on the city from
ordinary residents as opposed to city planners, and explore different ways of using
and moving through the city.4 Scholars involved with a broad range of disciplines
have since made use of conceptual maps in various ways and for different purposes,
including not only geographers such as Yi-Fu Tuan, but also cognitive psychologists,
archaeologists, cultural-heritage researchers and social anthropologists.5 One recent
example is provided by Efrat Ben-Zeev, an anthropologist who during 2009 and
2010 asked 200 university students in Israel to draw maps of that country, and then
interviewed a sample of them to discuss the meaning of the maps that were drawn.
This revealed that among the Jewish-Israeli students the country was often drawn as
a floating entity, with little reference to, or evident knowledge of, Israels borders and
the Occupied Territories. Among the Palestinian/Arab-Israeli students, however, the
Occupied Territories and its boundaries were clear, and there was good knowledge of
the students place of birth and locale.6
During our project we used maps and mapping, including this kind of hand-
drawn conceptual mapping, as a methodological and analytical tool, although maps
are in many ways problematic. Doreen Massey points to the way that maps
flatten, deaden and silence peoples, places and cultures, portraying them as being in
place, without trajectories; we can no longer see in our minds eyes the stories that
they, too, are telling, living out, producing.7 Yet, whilst drawing their maps,
musicians talked to us about their music-making activities and experiences and some
of the sites involved. In doing so, they showed how at particular moments, and
within particular circumstances, the act of mapping can prompt memories and
stories of music and place; hence, in the words of Marc Auge, a map can act as a
4
Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA, 1960).
5
Yi-Fu Tuan, Images and Mental Maps, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 65 (1975),
20513.
6
Efrat Ben-Zeev, Mental Maps and Spatial Perceptions: The Fragmentation of Israel-Palestine,
Mapping Cultures, ed. Roberts.
7
Doreen Massey, Travelling Thoughts, Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall , ed. Paul Gilroy
et al. (New York, 2000), 22532 (p. 228).
138 SARA COHEN
memory machine.8 Drawing the maps helped musicians to express musical

experience and knowledge in spatial terms, and provided them with a means of
connecting music to memories of material urban environments and associated
identities, emotions and relationships.
At the same time, the maps helped us to learn about the city from the perspective
of musicians, prompting us to consider what mattered to musicians and why, what
made places distinctive and gave them value, and how those places might have
changed. The stories of the musicians fleshed out the maps, helping to bring their
patterns to life and make them fluid. The discussion that follows focuses on just four
of those maps, all of them created during meetings and conversations in various
Liverpool cafes and pubs, and discussed here in varying detail and depth.9
Map 1
The first map (see Figure 1) was created for us by the lead singer-songwriter of a
white rock band, an articulate, engaging and energetic man in his mid-forties who
had an excitement and passion for music and music-making that continually burst
through his conversation, along with a sense of his own personal musical history and
achievement. This musician had been singing and performing on guitar in public
since the late 1980s, and explained to us: Ive never done anything else. Ive always
been a musician and a band leader. Im never going to stop now [. . .] Im always
going to be a musician. We asked him how he had started out and progressed as a
musician and where he played. He told us that he grew up on the Wirral, on the
other side of the River Mersey from Liverpool, and described how he constantly
looked across the river at this amazing place where the Beatles came from, and the
magic, until he eventually decided he wanted to be at the centre of things and
moved over to Liverpool:
I know the place inside out, you know. I was coming here three or four times a week when
I was younger, and then to move across and be here all the time its a different feeling
altogether, actually belonging here. I really love it. Its the most amazing place.
The musician then began to describe his experiences of music-making in the city,
and as he talked he marked the relevant sites on his map. The map can thus be read
as the journey of his career, highlighting the performance venue where he made a
start (MacMillans); the particular performance event (gig) when he knew he had
made it as a musician (at the Royal Court Theatre); and venues where, at one time,
8
Marc Auge, In the Metro (Minneapolis, MN, 2002), 4.
9
Two of the maps are discussed in brief elsewhere, the first in Brett D. Lashua and Sara Cohen,
Liverpool Musicscapes: Music Performance, Movement and the Built Urban Environment, Mobile
Methodologies, ed. Ben Fincham et al. (London, 2010), 7184; the third in Brett D. Lashua, Sara
Cohen and John Schofield, Popular Music, Mapping, and the Characterisation of Liverpool, Popular
Music History, 4 (2010), 12644.
Figure 1. The map drawn by a rock singer-songwriter.
getting a gig meant that you were on the right track to success (for him it was the
Cosmos). The map features legendary Liverpool rock venues of the 1980s and 1990s,
including theatres, ballrooms and concert halls, many of which had since closed,
moved or disappeared completely. The wavy line marking the River Mersey on one
side of the double-page spread, the arrow pointing towards the University of
Liverpool on the opposite side, and the circle at the bottom left-hand corner marking
the new Liverpool One retail development all help to frame and position those
venues along the citys central thoroughfares.
The musician was chatting as he drew the map, and at one point during the
conversation he suddenly realized that he had forgotten to include the Picket, a
music-performance venue that had once stood directly across the street from the pub
in which he was sitting and drawing. Clearly surprised by this omission, he added the
Picket to his map, drew a circle around it, and exclaimed:
Fucking hell! How could I miss the Picket out? The Picket is central to this entire story
[. . .] out of all of these venues I come out of the Picket. How I forgot it I dont know.
Yeah, thats my heritage, the Picket, really [. . .] so the Picket is absolutely central to the
story.
Established in a resource centre for the unemployed, the Picket started out as a live
music-performance venue and music-information service, later incorporating a
140 SARA COHEN
recording studio. During the 1980s and 1990s it was an important venue for local
and visiting rock musicians, and for this musician it was absolutely central to his
story because of the way in which it had shaped him as a performer and the sense of
personal heritage with which it had provided him. His last-ever performance at the
Picket had been particularly memorable, he explained, because so many people in the
audience had started jumping up and down as they were playing that the venue
manager kept having to come in and shout play something slow the place is going
to fall down!
The act of mapping undoubtedly prompted this musician to remember the
Picket and the fact that it no longer occupied the premises he so fondly remembered.
It also prompted memories that he could attach to other music venues and box up
like an archive to help construct a sense of what it meant to be a musician, and of
personal musical identity and heritage. They included memories of particular
musicians and performance events, and notable on-stage performances, whether
by him and his band or by visiting musicians that he and his fellow musicians
had either supported on stage or gone along to see. They also included memories of
the people who owned, managed and worked in such venues, and particular
characteristics that had made the venues shit, horrible or magical places in
which to perform. In this sense those venues could be described as landmarks
associated with memories of events, relationships and experiences from the musical
past, and also as soundmarks, given their association with particular musical
sounds and styles. The histories of musicians, and their experiences of perform-
ing music, are thus closely intertwined with the histories of the places in which
they perform, and as this musician drew he illustrated Tim Ingolds notion of
people threading their individual biographies within the material urban
landscape.10
Map 2
The second map (see Figure 2) was drawn for us by another white rock musician, an
affable and unassuming man in his early twenties who had been performing on bass
guitar with rock bands for the past decade or so. His current band had been together
for a couple of years, but he explained that the band members had known each other
for a lot longer, and the band had emerged out of the ashes of two former bands.
The map follows the Northern Line of the Merseyside railway network that runs
from Southport to Liverpool, and in doing so it traces a musical journey that is again
both spatial and biographical. Towards the top of the map the musician has drawn a
circle representing the neighbourhoods of Crosby and Formby, north of Liverpool,
where he first started out as a musician and where he went to school, joined his first
band and began performing in small neighbourhood venues. His fellow band
10
Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (London, 2007), 75.
Figure 2. The map drawn by a bass guitarist and rock-band member.
members were from the same area, and two of them had attended the same school.
After finishing university they had all moved back to the area to live with their
parents. The larger circles at the end of the line and at the bottom of the map
represent nested musical zones within Liverpool city centre: the university area,
where musicians and students live and hang out, and an inner-city core of
performance venues, rehearsal spaces and recording studios. The three smaller circles
in between represent landmark sites situated along the train line and the citys
northern docklands, two of them commercial rehearsal studios where he and his
bands had rented rooms, and the third a pub venue known as the Atlantic, where he
had first seen musicians perform live on stage.
142 SARA COHEN
Map 3
The third map (see Figure 3) was drawn by a 22-year-old black hip-hop MC named
Pyro, a contemplative and sharply observant musician who had been rapping in
public for around five years, and whose reflections on life were delivered hesitantly
but with a tone of gravity and wisdom that belied his young age.11 The map is of his
south Liverpool neighbourhood of Wavertree, which he had renamed, as a pun,
Shake-a-bush (as opposed to Wave-a-tree). It is populated with the domestic homes
(referred to as cribs) of Pyro and his fellow musicians, in which they created and
recorded their music, as well as local gathering spots such as the football pitch and
corner shop. Other sites, such as the city centre, record shop and college seem worlds
apart.
On his map, Pyro has clearly drawn a place marked as Bingo along the border of
his neighbourhood, a place he also referred to as the Pivvy. The Pivvy is a
colloquial term for the Pavilion, which opened in 1908 as the last of several new
music halls built outside the city centre in Liverpools fast-expanding suburbs. It later
became a variety theatre, and the Beatles performed there once in 1962. Following a
fire, part of the building was reconstructed, and the Pavilion is now a bingo hall. As
he drew this place, Pyro explained:
Theres not one entrance to each borough, but theres key points where its like, past this
mark youre in this place, past this mark youre in that place. For me thats my crib. Ill
probably come up this road, and walk down that road and then around here thats the
bingo . . . thats entering Toxteth.
Just beyond the Pavilion lies Toxteth, or Liverpool 8, which has a different postcode
from Pyros turf in Wavertree (Liverpool 15). In many UK hip-hop and grime-music
scenes, postcodes and home territories matter, and gang wars have been fought over
these boundaries, boundaries that musicians involved with other local, genre-based
musical cultures might not notice or might attend to or care about in alternative
ways.12 Pyro told us of a dramatic increase in local gang rivalries over the previous
five years, a phenomenon that he attributed to urban deprivation, and of the
palpable web of invisible borders that criss-cross the city so that you just know
when you have crossed a line. Thus, to some the Pivvy represents one small part of
the Beatles story in Liverpool; to others it represents an older, bygone era of music
hall; to a young musician like Pyro it marked a dangerous edge.
11
MC is an acronym for Master of Ceremonies that originates from the dance halls of Jamaica, where
the Master of Ceremonies would introduce the different acts, make announcements and deliver a
toast in the style of a rhyme. It is commonly used to refer to a rapper, that is someone engaged in
the performance and rhythmic delivery of rhyming lyrics. Rapping is closely associated with hip-hop
music and also commonly referred to as emceeing or MCing.
12
Grime is a style of music influenced by hip-hop and various other musical styles, such as UK garage,
breakbeat and punk.
Figure 3. The map drawn by Pyro, a hip-hop musician and crew member.
Whilst drawing his map, Pyro explained: I dont venture too far from my crib. I
dont even go out much. Its not my map, its my bubble [. . .] Thats me isnt it? Me
extended family, me football, and the roads. As he continued talking, he referred to
his dysfunctional life at home and a lack of support at school, and how he had
recently gone to college to try to escape the path to destruction that so many of the
young people around him were on young people for whom faith and hope has
disappeared. According to Pyros map, Wavertree was thus a bubble (and he labelled
it as such) that encompassed his everyday social world, and in a faltering voice he
described that place and world thus:
144 SARA COHEN
Down here, there is not, there is not a lot of light. So when people are down, like, if you
fall off track from when you are young, youre pretty much, aint no help, that youre
pretty much done. Do you know what Im saying? Thats probably universal to a lot of
slums and to a lot of places, but its just, for me, growing up in Liverpool, its just, its just
fucked.
Map 4
In many ways, Pyros situation and the way in which he describes it suit somewhat
cliched notions of hip-hop that associate the genre with urban environments that are
disadvantaged, dangerous and hopeless. Yet hip-hop is by no means organically
related to such environments, and it is also a genre that is global and wide-ranging.
Hip-hop subgenres are thus multiple and diverse, as are the kinds of urban
environments in which they are produced and performed. The fourth map (Figure
4), for example, was created by a musician involved with a style of hip-hop that is
quite different from the style produced by Pyro, and with a hip-hop crew consisting
of three white musicians in their early twenties from the north end of Liverpool and
the Wirral. These musicians referred to each other using their MC names, which are
also used here, and the map was drawn by one of them, Amp, as he huddled around
Figure 4. The map drawn by Amp, a hip-hop musician and crew member.
a cafe table with his close friend and fellow crew member Byro to discuss the shape
the map should take. (Despite the similarity in their MC names, Byro is not the
same person as Pyro, who drew the map of Wavertree in Figure 3).
Amp and Byro had formed the hip-hop crew with Smoke, their friend and the
third crew member. They had both been rapping for around five years and
recording their music since they had first met a year and a half previously; one of
them had studied music technology at a local college, and the other was about to
embark on a six-month course in sound recording at a local training centre. They
called their hip-hop crew ATM, an acronym that had two different meanings. First,
they explained, ATM was an allusion to an A[utomated] T[eller] M[achine], a
cash-dispenser, because as MCs they dispense lyrical flows. At the same time,
however, ATM also stood for Across The Mersey and the tunnel bus route
(marked by the arrows on the map) that linked Amp and Byro to Smoke, and
enabled the three of them to travel to and from each others homes in order to
rehearse and record.
The river Mersey thus runs through the centre of the map, and on either side of
it Amp has marked the crews home neighbourhoods and domestic recording
studios. Smoke lived in Nocky, a nickname for the Noctorum neighbourhood
located on the Wirral, and Amp explained that he was marking this area rather than
the adjacent area of Birkenhead, which he thought had a less respectable image, cos
Smoke will kill me if I put Birkenhead. Amp lived in Fazakerley, whilst Byro lived
with his mother in Bootle, just north of Liverpool, and had recently converted his
bedroom into a recording studio in the house that he and his mum shared (marked
on the map as ATM studio), a development made possible by the advance payment
he received after being made redundant from his job at a local asphalt plant.
Liverpool city centre is also marked on the map in the form of a rectangle, similar
in style and size to those marking the other neighbourhoods. Just south of the city
centre, and marked with a circle, is the site of the Hub, an annual festival of Urban
Music and street culture (including skateboarding, BMX biking and graffiti arts)
launched as Liverpool City Council and other official organizations prepared the
bid for Liverpool to become European Capital of Culture 2008, and as part of their
efforts to demonstrate support for cultural events targeted at young people. As he
was finalizing the map, Amp explained: Its not advanced, but tells you every bit of
information you need to know [. . .]. It kind of looks like a bus map.
2. Music genre and urban environments

I have so far explained the use of hand-drawn maps in our research on music-making
in Liverpool, and presented four examples of those maps. The maps and
accompanying conversations prompt reflection on the relationship between music
and cities, and on the micro-topographies of local music-making. They show how
musicians interact with material urban environments through memory, mapping and
146 SARA COHEN
storytelling, and highlight ways in which musicians not only think about and reflect
on those environments and make them meaningful, but also inhabit and experience
them. Material urban places and venues are thus sites of musical memory, mythology
and imagination, as well as of music-making and social interaction. At the same
time, comparison between the four hand-drawn maps and their various lines and
geometric patterns (the positioning and clustering of dots and squiggles, circles
and squares, and so on) suggests differences as well as similarities in the micro-
topographies of music-making and in how musicians categorize and conceptualize
music and urban space. This second section of the article explores and explains
these differences by relating them first to music genre, and secondly to urban
environments shaped and distinguished by particular social, economic and historical
circumstances.
Music genre
Musicians performing hip-hop, rap, rhythm & blues, and grime (styles now
encompassed by the broader marketing category known as Urban Music) tended to
produce maps of Liverpool that differ from those of rock musicians. Pyros map of
the south Liverpool neighbourhood of Wavertree, for example, draws on the social
and ideological conventions of rap and hip-hop culture, where spatial categories
and identities have been a central component. The various subgenres of hip-hop
represent urban environments in different ways, but a spatial concept that has been
fundamental to the genre is the hood, a shortened version of neighbourhood and a
more localized version of the ghetto, a concept promoted through 1970s soul and
funk music. Scholars such as Murray Forman and Tricia Rose have examined how
rap and hip-hop have taken cities and depressed inner-city neighbourhoods as their
creative foundation.13 Along with the street, the notion of the hood has become a
key site for the construction and commercial marketing of hip-hop authenticity, and
through hip-hop both street and hood have been commonly associated with images
of urban discontent, of crews and posses, and of social, economic and racial divisions.
Dan Sicko, for example, describes certain styles of Detroit hip-hop as an extreme,
almost parodied version of inner-city life, which he links to the extremities of urban
decline in that city.14 Hip-hop crews such as Insane Clown Posse and Esham and (to a
lesser extent) the multi-platinum-selling Eminem draw on horror-themed lyrical
content and imagery, or on shocking (and blatantly over-the-top) narratives to give an
exaggerated, almost cartoon-like, version of urban deprivation in Detroit.
13
Murray Forman, The Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Middletown,
CT, 2002); Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America
(Middletown, CT, 1994).
14
Dan Sicko, Bubble Metropolis, Shrinking Cities, ed. Phillip Oswalt, 2 vols. (Berlin, 20056), ii,
10815 (p. 111).
These genre conventions help to explain the way in which Pyro described his life
in Liverpool in terms of marginality and clear boundaries marking divisions of class,
age and territory, as well as the references to lines and tracks in the verbal narrative
that accompanied his mapping, and also in his musical compositions. The lyrics to
Pyros songs refer to a hard life in a particular urban neighbourhood (the hood), as
illustrated by the first verse of a song entitled On and On:
Yo, this is that real-life stuff that we all go through, all of us.
I lost a friend to a car crash, another to a stab wound.
Both young men didnt have to go that soon.
I grew up fast, before I left the classroom,
A bit of fist and a lot more attitude,
No gratitude, I couldnt see my future.
Pyros lyrics typically involved an emphasis on storytelling, and they were generally
accompanied by a basic looped beat and the kind of drum timbres that Justin
Williams identifies as the most unifying sonic thread within hip-hop, and as
originating from 1970s funk.15 Moreover, the use of breakbeat samples within
Pyros songs illustrated a borrowing of digital sounds from other recordings
(whether from choruses, beats, vocals or other elements) that has also been a central
component of hip-hop. In addition to this, some of Pyros compositions feature
dense combinations of musical layers and dissonant, out-of-tune pitch combin-
ations. Adam Krims associates such elements with the category of Reality Rap, and
argues that they help to anchor its reality in sound, accounting for the musics
hardness and encoding musically the urban conditions of community devastation
and danger that the lyrics in the genre describe.16 He distinguishes this from other
styles of rap and hip-hop, but also points out that since the mid-1990s such styles
and their alternative mappings of the city have changed significantly, and many
more styles of hip-hop have emerged, including hybrid styles that combine hip-hop
with other genres.
Pyros style of hip-hop was certainly quite different from that of ATM, who
distinguished their music from what they referred to as the usual boom bap style of
hip-hop and described it as experimental, and as breaking down the boundaries
that confine most other rap acts. Like Pyro, they rapped in distinctive regional
accents, but at a much faster tempo, whilst the accompanying beat was more
energetic and changeable. Their music incorporated elements of soul and Motown,
dubstep and rock, in addition to synthesized sounds from electronic dance music.
15
Justin Williams, Musical Borrowing in Hip-Hop Music: Theoretical Frameworks and Case Studies
(Ph.D. dissertation, University of Nottingham, 2009), Bhttp://etheses.nottingham.ac.uk/1081/1/
JustinWilliams_PhDfinal.pdf (accessed May 2011).
16
Adam Krims, Marxist Music Analysis without Adorno: Popular Music and Urban Geography,
Analysing Popular Music, ed. Allan Moore (Cambridge, 2003), 13157 (p. 146).
148 SARA COHEN
The accompanying lyrics were less about violence and urban deprivation than those
of Reality Rap, and more witty and upbeat, but they nevertheless engaged with
various social issues. The ATM map drawn by Amp (Figure 4) was also quite
different from Pyros map of his Wavertree neighbourhood in that it covered an area
much larger in scale, but it was nevertheless still very much a map of neighbourhood
and home. Moreover, like Pyro and many other hip-hop musicians, the members of
ATM described their music as a reflection of reality. Amp, for example, described
hip-hop as being about whats happening on your doorstep, so people can relate to
it. For Pyro, hip-hop was the voice of young people and a commentary on the
reality of their everyday lives. This, he explained, is what made hip-hop so relevant
for him, and he expanded on this by telling us that through listening to the music of
hip-hop musicians he was able to find out what was going on in other parts of the
UK. With regard to his own music, he said: Im giving you a real real picture of how
it is for me in the neighbourhood Im from its just real. The songs of these
musicians thus point to musical as well as hand-drawn and discursive mappings of
the city, and Forman provides an illuminating account of how particular cities and
urban neighbourhoods have featured in the names, lyrics and visual imagery of US
rap acts, as well as in their song and album titles and their musical sounds. In hip-
hop, he states, The city is an audible presence, explicitly cited and digitally sampled
in the reproduction of the aural textures of the urban environment.17
In contrast to Pyros bubble, the map of the rock singer-songwriter concentrates
on Liverpool city centre and features some of the citys best-known and most iconic
venues for live performance. A focus on live public-performance venues has been
conventional within rock culture, where such venues have played an important social
and symbolic role. Participation in live performance (whether going to a gig or
playing a gig) has been central to the discourses, practices and experiences involved
with rock culture and the creation of rock scenes, communities and identities.18
Thus rock histories are commonly structured around mythological accounts of
legendary performance venues, and those venues have provided a focus for the
promotion of rock as local heritage.19 This conventional emphasis on venues and live
music performance helps to explain how the two rock musicians mapped and spoke
about their experiences of music and the spatial trajectories that had shaped their
careers and identities as musicians. Their maps feature a circuit of venues that they
had performed in over the years in other words, a particular group of venues in
which they had performed on a regular basis and in sequence.
One of those musicians described in detail the various venues in which he had
performed as a member of several bands, and categorized them into different types,
17
Murray Forman, Represent: Race, Space and Place in Rap Music, Popular Music, 19 (2000),
6590 (p. 67).
18
Barry Shank, Dissonant Identities: The Rock n Roll Scene in Austin, Texas (Hanover, NH, 1994).
19
Sara Cohen, Cavern Journeys: Music, Migration and Urban Space, Migrating Music, ed. Jason
Toynbee and Byron Dueck (London, 2011), 23550.
carefully assessing the merits of each. His map (Figure 2) illustrates his journey from
a few small suburban venues (including a former post office in Crosby) to the density
and diversity of venues in Liverpool city centre. His intention, he explained, was to
use the map to highlight the distance between the locations at either end of that
journey, not in any simplistic sense of spatial and temporal distance, but because he
wanted to draw attention to the issue of access. With regard to places like Crosby, he
explained, In terms of venues there isnt too much there, and he contrasted such
places with the musical hub of Liverpool. In addition to this, he continued, owing
to restrictions of geography and transport, Its quite an effort to do something
because [. . .] its a physical thing to get to Liverpool to practice. He expanded on
this by describing the difficulty of getting to rehearsal studios and performance
venues that were located in the city centre, or at certain points along the way, if you
were unable to drive to those places and had to rely on the train. Membership of
amateur rock bands typically involves carrying a lot of heavy equipment, and he and
his fellow band members had to carry their equipment back and forth between
homes and railway stations, rehearsal spaces and performance venues. Comparing his
experience as a musician based in Crosby (the other end of the line) with the
experience of musicians based in the city centre (this end of the line) he therefore
concluded: A lot of the bands we know, people whove grown up like this end of it.
It seems like its more inclusive and accessible to them.
This musician described his four-piece band as a guitar band even though it also
involved synthesized keyboards and an accordion, and he described the bands music
as indie. This was partly because they released recordings of their music themselves
and thus independently of other commercial record labels, and partly because indie
is a term commonly used to refer to music perceived as offering an alternative to
mainstream rock and pop. The band produced a style of indie music that was
variable in tempo and did not depend on a regular 4/4 beat. The sound of many
songs was stripped down, partly because it involved a minimalist style of drumming
and a drummer who liked to switch instruments every now and then in order to
perform arpeggio accordion and backing vocals. Another band member also
alternated between keyboards, bass and guitar, and the lead vocalist did not have a
loud voice, so the volume of the accompanying instruments was lowered accordingly.
Meanwhile, the singer-songwriter who drew the other rock map (Figure 1) performed
songs on acoustic guitar and sang in a strong and slightly rasping voice and a notable
regional accent. Some of his songs involved a conventional rock beat, whilst others
were more wistful, lamenting or anthemic and involved an emphasis on storytelling.
They included a song about Liverpool and Merseyside which, like his map and
interview, conveyed a strong sense of local history, and provided a lyrical mapping of
landmarks, people and events from the local past.
Like many other rock musicians to whom we spoke, these two musicians related
their music and maps to the notion of a Liverpool rock scene and sound. This helps
to illustrate what John Street refers to as a rhetoric of the local that has also been
150 SARA COHEN
conventional to rock culture and involves an emphasis on the distinctiveness and

uniqueness of local rock communities and histories.20 As Will Straw points out, this
emphasis is reproduced in the rock cultures of different localities, thus contributing
(ironically) to their sameness.21 Yet the labelling of local scenes and sounds tends to
be a highly contested process that generates considerable debate. Whilst drawing his
map, the singer-songwriter explained that he used to resent the way in which
journalists and record-company representatives categorized his music by relating it to
the Liverpool Sound of the 1960s associated with the Beatles and other so-called
Merseybeat groups, thus fixing it in a particular place and time, but that he
had since learnt to accept that sound as a source of pride and inspiration. Journalists
and music and media corporations have a dominant influence on the classification
and marketing of musical sounds and genres, and, like other musicians to whom we
spoke, this particular musician also resisted genre labels imposed on him and his
music. Music critics had categorized his music, for example, as a melodic blend of
folk and punk, and as folk rock, but he preferred the broader, catch-all label pop
music. The other rock musician also told us how much he resented the way in which
some people compared his band with other Liverpool bands, and how he and his
band try to get away from the Liverpool Sound thing.
Pyro, meanwhile, described his music not as hip-hop but as a mesh of many
different styles, yet at the same time associated himself with a local hip-hop
community and spoke of the need for people like him to contribute to that
community and help to build it up. Liverpool is not generally known for hip-hop,
and since the early 1990s hip-hop musicians in that city have complained about the
difficulty of performing in the city centre owing to policing and access or door
policies operated by club, bar and venue managers and local authorities, who
automatically assume that hip-hop events will attract drug-taking and violence.22 In
fact this situation is by no means peculiar to Liverpool, but is replicated in other
parts of the UK, as is illustrated by Phil Kirbys account of hip-hop in Manchester.23
Gun crime has been a growing problem in major UK cities, and scenes based around
hip-hop, grime and other forms of Urban Music have suffered from being associated
with such crime. In London, for example, hip-hop and grime have been affected by
the risk-assessment strategy of the Clubs Focus initiative, which demands that club
owners and promoters pass the names of musicians and MCs to the police several
weeks in advance of their appearance at a club. The police often advise against the
20
John Street, (Dis)located? Rhetoric, Politics, Meaning and the Locality, Popular Music: Style and
Identity, ed. Will Straw et al. (Montreal, 1995), 25564.
21
Will Straw, Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music,
Cultural Studies, 5 (1991), 36888.
22
Sara Cohen, Decline, Renewal and the City in Popular Music Culture: Beyond the Beatles (Aldershot,
2007), 27.
23
Phil Kirby, The Regulation of Urban Music in Manchester (MA dissertation, Liverpool University,
2009).
appearance of certain performers and against certain types of club nights. As a result
of this initiative, even commercially successful performers such as Dizzee Rascal and
Roll Deep have enjoyed fewer opportunities to perform live.
Amp and Byro described hip-hop to us as something you live and you just do, all
the time, but said that they were keen to promote their music through live public
performance, which they simply loved. However, most clubs and bars in Liverpool
hosted a mix of pop and house music, whilst live stage performance was dominated
by rock.24 Thus, according to Amp:
Its a lot different being an MC than being a drummer or in a rock band. Its a lot harder
[. . .]. Theres loads of MCs who dont really try to get themselves out there. Out on the
streets you see bands with guitars and they get lots of gigs but were in minority [. . .].
Thats why we often find ourselves doing gigs for nothing, for free, so its kind of a hard
life but it drives you and keeps you going.
Byro nodded in agreement and complained: Hardly any places like hip-hop. Theres
been a few promoters that have asked what kind of music it is and theyve then said
No, we dont want to do that. There were nevertheless one or two notable
exceptions, such as the annual Hub festival of Urban Music at which both Amp and
Byro had performed and marked on their map, and events organized by Urbeatz, a
Liverpool-based Urban Arts company. Clearly, however, the members of ATM and
other hip-hop musicians felt that their music was marginalized by the strong
association of Liverpool with white, rock, guitar-based music, and one of the best-
known local hip-hop musicians had composed a song about this situation that
included the following lines:
Its like they dont want to see us fly!

Yo, yo, just trying to make a name for myself and build me a future
But the industry in the Pool is fucked
They dont want to see a young dude make bucks
Just because I dont strum a guitar and shit
I make hip-hop, its not what I do, its who I am
And my plan is to get to the top
But its so damn hard when the door is locked
But I knock so hard on all of the venues, sorry, no hip-hop thats what they say
If I did indie or played dance music, theyd let me and my crew through the door all day
Because the reason, could it be treason? Inside forces trying to be evil?
No, I dont think so, more like stereotypical views of the people that come,
The ones that take time to show their support, just flying to the music, just wanna have
fun.
Theres a few bad seeds and I aint gonna lie, but show me a club on a Saturday night that
doesnt have violence, doesnt have beef, doesnt have wannabes just trying to cause grief.
24
House is a style of electronic dance-music.
152 SARA COHEN
The song highlights an interplay between rock and hip-hop that is by no means
specific to Liverpool, and is described by Antoine Hennion in terms of a conflict
between stage and record, whereby hip-hop destroyed the centrality of stage
performance in favour of another musical truth: where you live, where you hang
out.25 This juxtaposition of stage and record is clearly illustrated by the four hand-
drawn maps, pointing to the influence of genre on the ways in which musicians
inhabit and represent cities for music-making purposes.
Urban environments
The hand-drawn maps and accompanying conversations suggest the relevance for
understanding the relationship between music and material urban environments, not
only of music genre but also of specific socio-economic circumstances that shape and
distinguish cities and urban neighbourhoods. This includes a combination of
circumstances that has been peculiar to Liverpool, as well as global and historical
trends influencing the restructuring of Liverpool and other cities within a wider
political economy.
Whilst creating their maps, for example, the musicians drew on local narratives of
music and place, including familiar stories of river-crossings and the tunnel bus, and
of the distinctiveness of Liverpool, its neighbourhoods and other places within the
city. During the nineteenth century, the port brought Liverpool great wealth, but it
depended upon a large and unskilled workforce, and brought into the city destitute
immigrants fleeing from hardship elsewhere. The fortunes of the port fluctuated
throughout the twentieth century, but those circumstances shaped the geography of
the city, producing distinctive patterns of local settlement, strong neighbourhood
identities and territorial boundaries of class, ethnicity and religion.26 This may help
to explain how Pyro described Wavertree and related the neighbourhoods troubled
borders to urban deprivation and its negative impact on the lives of the young people
around him, and to geographical centres and margins. He spoke to us, for example,
about the official marketing and regeneration of Liverpool as European Capital of
Culture 2008 and how they had misrepresented the city. He described Liverpool as a
city that had been left behind in terms of urban regeneration, offering to take us on
a walk around the streets of Wavertree to show us the real Liverpool. He had
devoted one of his recent songs to that topic and to exposing what lay behind the
official celebrations of Liverpool as European Capital of Culture. The songs lyrics
and accompanying video invite the listener to accompany the singer on a tour of the
citys streets, describing Liverpool as a capital of drugs and crime, and juxtaposing
images of the struggles and hardship of everyday life in the marginalized hood with
images of the privileged city-centre enclaves of the urban elite.
25
Antoine Hennion, Music and Mediation: Toward a New Sociology of Music, The Cultural Study of
Music: A Critical Introduction, ed. Martin Clayton et al. (London, 2003), 8091 (p. 88).
26
See John Belchem, Merseypride: Essays in Liverpool Exceptionalism (Liverpool, 2000).
Pyros concerns are supported by a 2010 UK government report showing that,

nationally, the gap between rich and poor had increased substantially since the
1970s, and whilst a succession of regeneration programmes had transformed parts of
Liverpool, some of the citys neighbourhoods continued to be classified as among
the most deprived in Europe.27 Nevertheless, the award to Liverpool of the title
European Capital of Culture 2008 marked the city authorities embrace of culture as
a resource for urban regeneration.28 In Liverpool, across Europe and beyond, efforts
have been made to use culture to remodel cities as part of a wider process of social
and economic restructuring governed by the politics and economics of neo-
liberalism.29 The global economic recession of the 1970s, resulting from a crisis in
the capitalist economy based upon so-called Fordist methods of mass production,
provoked dramatic changes in Liverpool and in many other port and industrial cities.
Amongst other things, traditional manufacturing industries collapsed, encouraging
a process of de-industrialization and depopulation that gave rise to intense debates
about the future of such cities and their role and significance within the global
economy.
As a means of compensating for and overcoming such problems, many cities
launched programmes of economic restructuring and turned to more specialized,
post-Fordist systems of production involving new information technologies and
knowledge-based industries, and more flexible and decentralized labour processes
targeted at markets that were more specialized or niche. There was a parallel
emphasis on the rebranding of such cities and on their physical regeneration
involving strategic economic development targeted at specific urban areas. Increas-
ingly, attention was also paid to the contribution that culture and the so-called
cultural or creative industries could make to that process. This has involved
initiatives aimed at branding cities as centres of consumption; attracting investment
into them from corporate capital and property developers in addition to the
spending of city visitors and young, middle-class professionals; encouraging the
development of residential properties in newly gentrified city-centre locations and in
27
An Anatomy of Inequality in the UK, The National Equality Panel ( January 2010).
28
The European City of Culture competition was launched in 1985, and in 1999 it was relabelled the
Capital of Culture competition. Since 2007 the award has been made to two cities each year.
Nominations are submitted to the European Parliament and must include a cultural project of
European dimension. These nominations are judged by a selection committee established by the
European Commission, and each winning city must organise a programme of cultural events
highlighting its own culture and cultural heritage as well as its place in the common cultural heritage,
and involving people concerned with cultural activities from other European countries with a
view to establishing lasting cooperation ( Bhttp://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/other/l29005_
en.htm , accessed July 2011).
29
David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (New York, 2001); Urban Futures:
Critical Commentaries on Shaping the City, ed. Tim Hall and Malcolm Miles (London, 2003);
George Yudice, The Expediency of Culture (Durham, 2003); Sharon Zukin, Cultures of Cities
(Oxford, 2005).
154 SARA COHEN
tandem with the development of the night-time economy; and using the arts and
cultural activity as a stimulus for regeneration initiatives based on the development of
retail sales and tourism.
In Liverpool, these developments have led, amongst other things, to an increasing
privatization, regulation and surveillance of city-centre areas, and concerns about the
exclusion of youths and other groups from those areas.30 At the same time, black
musicians have pointed us to racist policing and licensing policies that regulated and
constrained black music-making throughout the twentieth century, restricting it to
particular areas of the city.31 Until the 1980s a so-called colour bar had also
operated informally in some city-centre clubs and performance venues in order to
prohibit entry to black audiences. Given such circumstances, it is perhaps not
surprising that a young black hip-hop musician such as Pyro from the run-down
district of Wavertree would represent his life and music in terms of a bubble and
social and cultural marginalization. However, racism was not something Pyro
mentioned to us explicitly, and differences between the rock and hip-hop maps
cannot be attributed to race or ethnicity, given the mix of black and white musicians
involved in the mapping of hip-hop in Liverpool, but might rather be inflections
from a combination of previously more race-based sets of policies and contemporary
representations of hip-hop.
Meanwhile, for the rock singer-songwriter, mapping his journey as a performer
around the city centre prompted narratives of continuity and change that suggested a
shifting landscape featuring performance venues connected to sites of absence,
dereliction and redevelopment. His mapping also involved a process of both
remembering and forgetting. He forgot to map the Picket venue, for example,
perhaps because it had moved from its previous location across the road from the
pub in which he was sitting and drawing his map. Music venues are thus part of the
land and musicians journeys through and across it, but can also be on the move, and
have their own journeys and biographies.32 The Picket had been threatened with
closure after the building it occupied was put up for sale in the run-up to Liverpools
year as European Capital of Culture. Following a successful and high-profile Save-
the-Picket public campaign, the venue was eventually relocated to a new cultural
quarter known as the Independents District and occupying a docklands area
adjacent to Liverpool city centre.
Clearly, therefore, music-making in Liverpool can be related to the citys position
within the global political economy, and to events and trends that have influenced
the restructuring not only of Liverpool but also of cities in other parts of the world.
30
Henry A. Giroux describes how in US cities neo-liberal policies have intensified the political, social
and economic problems faced by young people, and encouraged a view of youth as a threat to be
feared and a problem to be contained (The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse
of Democracy (Boulder, CO, 2004), 85).
31
Cohen, Decline, Renewal and the City, 269.
32
Cohen, Cavern Journeys.
As Sharon Zukin and others have shown, the association of many urban areas with
culture and creativity has made them a focus for physical regeneration. Property
developers and city planners, for example, have sought to capitalize on the bohemian
image and artistic reputation of certain areas by developing them into residential
districts and cultural quarters targeted at young professionals wanting to be based in
a city-centre location and to benefit from its proximity to bars, restaurants, clubs and
entertainment venues. Yet those developments have commonly resulted in the
gentrification and privatization of such areas, and subsequent increases in rental rates
and surveillance practices have commonly resulted in the exclusion from those areas
of the artists, small cultural businesses and young people who had made them so
attractive for development in the first place.33 Thus city planners execute plans about
how cities should be which create contradictions, anomalies and gaps: people and
places that do not fit the plan.34
3. Music genres, mediation and urban environments

I began this article by presenting four examples of music maps drawn by musicians,
and I then compared and contrasted those maps and explored some of the differences
between them. This third part of the article builds on that discussion to consider
what the maps suggest about the relationship between music and material urban
environments. So far, the discussion suggests that this relationship must be understood
in terms of complexity. First, it has shown how the maps relate to particular material
sites (including streets, neighbourhoods, homes, venues) and to urban landscapes that
are continually being shaped and transformed by the organization and reorganization
of urban space within a wider political economy. Secondly, it has shown how those
material sites are related to music events and practices (including music performance,
sound recording and songwriting), which are in turn related to particular music genres
(in this case rock and hip-hop) and to various subgenres and sounds described by the
musicians involved in terms of musical hybridity and local specificity. Finally, it has
shown how the material sites and associated music practices, sounds and genres are
related to various social groups, including rock bands and scenes and hip-hop crews
and communities, and to larger groups distinguished by age, class and locality.
In order to examine this complexity, and the kinds of relations involved, the
following discussion draws on insights from anthropological, sociological and
musicological research. It begins by considering notions of homology, articulation
and mediation, and their usefulness for understanding relations between music and
material urban environments. It then explores some of these ideas further by
33
Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (New Brunswick, 1989); Cohen,
Decline, Renewal and the City.
34
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA, 1988), 94.
156 SARA COHEN
returning to the detailed lines and patterns of the hand-drawn maps and the stories
they tell, and considering their broader implications.
Music genres, social groups and urban environments

Both genre and urban environments have been fundamental for understanding
popular music and how it is practised, categorized and conceptualized. Keith Negus,
for example, provides an in-depth account of how genre has operated as an
organizing factor for music corporations involved with the production and
dissemination of music recordings, as well as a way of organizing audience
expectations of music as sound.35 Other scholars have focused on those audiences
and how particular music genres have been embraced by, and been seen to represent,
various audience groups. Genre has thus provided a basis for the development of
musical cultures and identities, as illustrated by studies of youth subcultures, scenes
and tribes, and the work of Fabian Holt.36 In addition to this, Ruth Finnegan
illustrates how important genre is for understanding the work that musicians do,
whilst numerous scholars have examined the influence of genre codes and
conventions on musical composition.37 At the same time, music scholars and critics
have commonly explained popular-music genres by relating them to cities and urban
settings, as illustrated by the titles of classic books about popular music such as The
Sound of the City and Urban Rhythms.38
Within such music scholarship, relations between music genres, social groups
and urban environments have been conceptualized in various ways, and this section
considers the work of scholars who have argued that music either reflects or produces
social structures, or does both. In doing so, it illustrates differences between scholars
in terms of how far they see music as shaped and constrained by social structures and
processes, or as the outcome of collaborative interaction, human agency and the
ability of people to create and transform the world.
Music and structural and environmental determinism

Music scholars, journalists and audiences have commonly discussed ways in which
musical sounds and practices are influenced by social groups and genre-based
35
Keith Negus, Music Genres and Corporate Cultures (London, 1999).
36
Andy Bennett, Subcultures or Neo-Tribes? Rethinking the Relationship between Youth, Style and
Musical Taste, Sociology, 33 (1999), 599617; Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual, ed. Andy
Bennett and Richard A. Peterson (Nashville, TN, 2004); Fabian Holt, Genre in Popular Music
(Chicago, IL, 2007).
37
Ruth Finnegan, The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town (2nd edn, Middletown,
CT, 2007); Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Boston, MA, 1998);
David Brackett, Interpreting Popular Music (Berkeley, CA, 2000); Jason Toynbee, Making Popular
Music: Musicians, Aesthetics and the Manufacture of Popular Music (London, 2000).
38
Charlie Gillett, The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll (London, 1983); Iain Chambers,
Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture (Basingstoke, 1985).
cultures, and by particular urban environments. Hip-hop and punk music, for
example, have been closely related to post-industrial cities, and the film Once Upon
a Time in New York provides just one illustration of this.39 Using a cartographic map
of New York as a central motif and narrative device, the film traces the chronological
and spatial development of hip-hop, punk and disco in and across that city. In
particular, it focuses on how the three genres emerged from specific New York
neighbourhoods during the mid- to late 1970s, a period of post-industrial urban
decline. It describes how those neighbourhoods provided the social, cultural,
economic and material conditions necessary for the emergence of particular kinds of
youth cultures related to the three genres, and how they also provided musicians with
a source of creative inspiration. This is illustrated through interviews, archival film
footage and accounts of legendary punk bands such as the Velvet Underground,
New York Dolls and Ramones, and disc jockeys such as Kool Herc, Grandmaster
Flash and Afrika Bambaataa, who have often been credited by journalists and fellow
musicians as the founding fathers of hip-hop.
By suggesting that music tells us something about cities at particular historical
moments, this film supports the work of Adam Krims on music and urban
geography.40 Krims argues that whilst different kinds of musical representations of
the city exist at any one time, and whilst those representations and images change
over time, there are nevertheless limits to this. In order to explain those limits he
introduces the notion of the urban ethos, a regime of representation that interacts
significantly with the structures of real cities; thus the spatial restructuring of cities
imposes limits of musical possibility, and changes in the structure of cities are
accompanied by changes in how cities are represented musically.41 Krims illustrates
this argument by contrasting two particular songs. The first is the classic pop song
Downtown, released by Petula Clark in 1964 and inspired by New York, which he
describes as a cheerful, enthusiastic and upbeat song that celebrates downtown as a
place of affluence, fun and adventure.42 Krims argues that in the early twenty-first
century this kind of musical representation of the city is no longer possible, and
instead alternative representations of the city have emerged, such as the rap song In
My Hood by 50 Cent. Krims describes that song as a relentlessly bleak and
nightmarish image of city life that would be unimaginable to contemporary
audiences of Petula Clarks Downtown, and as an example of how the vision of a
worry-free, hospitable city life had disappeared.43 According to Krims, therefore,
1990s hip-hop, with its dense combinations of musical layers self-consciously out of
tune with one another, provides an example of how changes in cities wrought by
39
Once Upon a Time in New York: The Birth of Hip-Hop, Disco and Punk, dir. Ben Whalley, exec.
producer Mark Cooper (BBC, 2007).
40
Adam Krims, Music and Urban Geography (London, 2007).
41
Ibid., 8.
42
Ibid., 2.
43
Ibid., 4.
158 SARA COHEN
the reorganization of urban production have implanted themselves in patterns of

musical sounds.
Krims supports his argument about the relationship between music and urban
environments by adopting an approach that nicely combines detailed micro-analysis
of lyrics and musical sounds with a macro-perspective that situates music within a
context of urban change and restructuring, and thus in relation to the historical
development of cities within the global political economy. He also provides a subtle
account of how music genres offer metaphorical mappings of the city through
sounds, lyrics and music video, mappings that are often tied to notions of origin and
authenticity.44 At the same time, however, he deliberately ignores the practices and
perspectives of music-makers and audiences, and questions of individual agency (an
absence highlighted both by Krims himself and by Philip Bohlman), and this
contributes to an overemphasis on how music is determined by urban environ-
ments.45 For Krims, the urban ethos poses a set of basic stances concerning
the relationship of subjects to their urban setting: who can go where and do what?
Who is constrained by the city, and who is freed by it?46 Yet to appreciate the
complexities of that relationship, and the musical possibilities and constraints
involved, requires a focus on people and their music practices. The maps, songs and
verbal narratives of Pyro and other musicians certainly point to ways in which music-
making in Liverpool is influenced by genre-based musical cultures as well as by local
circumstances and local/global relations. However, to suggest that music is
determined by those environments would be to undermine the agency of the
music-makers involved, as well as the ways in which relations are routed through
people and created through interactions between people themselves, and between
people, sounds and material things (including physical, geographical and built
locations and venues for music practice and performance).
Homological relations between music genres, social groups

and urban environments
Jason Toynbee tries, in his work on music-making, genre and creativity, to account
for the agency of musicians.47 Before explaining Toynbees approach, however, it is
important to note that he positions it in relation to studies of British youth
subcultures of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly the classic studies of mods and
rockers, hippies and biker boys, and punks.48 Those studies argued that there was a
44
Krims, Music and Urban Geography, 1618.
45
Ibid., xl; Philip Bohlman, review of Krims, Music and Urban Geography, Music and Letters, 90
(2009), 3224 (p. 323).
46
Krims, Music and Urban Geography, 13.
47
Toynbee, Making Popular Music.
48
Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of Mods and Rockers (London, 1972);
Paul Willis, Profane Culture (London, 1978); Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style
(London, 1979).
homological relationship or fit between the style of the subcultures (including styles
of music, dance and fashion) and the nature of the social groups involved. The
studies focused in particular on working-class male youths and the ways in which
they engaged in subcultural practices as a response to their marginal position within
the British class system and economic structure (in relation to that of the older
generation), and in response to the break-up of traditional working-class
neighbourhoods and communities resulting from post-war urban regeneration.
The subcultural practices that emerged presented a symbolic challenge to the
dominant-parent culture that involved resistance at the level of ritual and style.49
The music genres and styles taken up by the subcultures, such as punk and early rock
n roll, were thus seen to reflect the social position of these young working-class men
and their dissatisfaction with the British class system, and the social and economic
divisions and power inequalities involved.
This notion of homology has been widely critiqued. Scholars such as Dave Laing
and Richard Middleton, for example, point out that it was music, and particular
musical genres and styles, that provided the initial impetus for the formation of
subcultures, and that those genres and styles have appealed to diverse international
audience groups inhabiting very different kinds of local and urban environments.50
Consequently, it was argued that music produces social groups and identities rather
than reflecting pre-existing ones. More recently, as noted by David Hesmondhalgh,
scholars such as Jason Toynbee and Georgina Born have tried to steer a middle path
between the homology model, in which music is seen to reflect social identity, and
the process model, in which music is seen to construct social identity; and also a
middle path between structure and agency.51 The arguments of these scholars will
now be outlined in brief, in order to consider their implications for understanding
the relationship between music and material urban environments, as reflected in the
hand-drawn maps of music-making in Liverpool.
Multiple articulations between music and urban environments

Toynbee highlights the ambiguous position of musicians: on the one hand they are
creative agents, and on the other they are constrained by generic codes and the
expectations of communities.52 To explain the relationship between music-making,
genre and community, Toynbee uses the metaphor of articulation. He is
49
Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, ed. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson
(London, 1993).
50
Dave Laing, One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock (Milton Keynes, 1985); Richard
Middleton, Studying Popular Music (Milton Keynes, 1990), 162.
51
David Hesmondhalgh, Subcultures, Scenes or Tribes? None of the Above, Journal of Youth Studies,
8 (2005), 2140; Toynbee, Making Popular Music; Georgina Born, Music and the Representation/
Articulation of Sociocultural Identities, Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation, and
Appropriation in Music, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley, CA, 2000), 316.
52
Toynbee, Making Popular Music, 128.
160 SARA COHEN
particularly drawn to the ways in which John Clarke and others, on the one hand,
and Stuart Hall, on the other, developed the notion of articulation to account for
complexities in the relationship between culture and social class.53 Toynbee notes
how music genres can be connected to a sense of community and communal
experiences of urban life, but emphasizes that at the same time other kinds of
connections are also possible, so music can have multiple articulations to the social.
Using the example of hip-hop and rap, he points out that whilst rap musicians make
conscious use of communal experience in the post-industrial city, Hip hop
homologies constitute just one level of articulation in the symbolic practice of
rap. To illustrate this, he refers to the work of Tricia Rose, which shows how hip-
hop incorporates and parodies white mainstream media, such as horror films, as well
as referencing previous African American musics and other aspects of African
American culture.54
Toynbee thus critiques Franco Fabbris description of music genre as a static
system of classification.55 Building on the work of Stephen Neale, and on Pierre
Bourdieus concepts of field and habitus, he describes genre instead as constituting
a radius of musical creativity.56 This radius is governed by recognizable and
relatively stable genre conventions and musical traditions and parameters, but it also
offers music-makers possibilities for exploring the limits of repetition and thus for
destabilization, transformation and innovation.57 It therefore involves the regulation
of tensions between repetition and difference. For Hesmondhalgh, Toynbees work
shows that although music scholars have put the metaphor of articulation to use in
such different ways that its usefulness has become limited, when combined with the
key concept of genre it nevertheless provides a promising way of thinking about the
relationship between music and the social.58 In this way Toynbee also provides a
promising means of accounting for the complexities of the relationship between
music and material urban environments in Liverpool and the multiple articulations
that this involves. Yet his use of articulation to conceptualize relations between
musical creativity, genres and social groups could be further developed with the help
of Borns work on musics mediations.
53
John Clarke et al., Subcultures, Cultures and Class: A Theoretical Overview, Resistance through
Rituals, ed. Hall and Jefferson, 359; Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,
Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. Kuan-Hsing Chen and David Morley
(London, 1999), 26275.
54
Rose, Black Noise ; Toynbee, Making Popular Music, 11415.
55
Franco Fabbri, A Theory of Musical Genre: Two Applications, Popular Music Perspectives, ed.
David Horn and Philip Tagg (Gothenburg and Exeter, 1982), 5281.
56
Toynbee, Making Popular Music, xxi; Stephen Neale, Genre (London, 1980).
57
Ibid., 106.
58
Hesmondhalgh, Subcultures, Scenes or Tribes?.
Music, environment and mediation

Hesmondhalgh suggests that Toynbees approach has much in common with that of
Born, who seeks to account for the fact that music can variably both reflect existing
social identities and produce new ones.59 More recently, however, Born has sought
to develop such an account through Hennions sociologically informed notion of
mediation.60 Music, she argues, can be understood only in terms of its mediations,
and in an article on music listening, mediation and event she supports this argument
by reviewing various sociological and anthropological studies of music.61 She uses
these studies to show how focusing on music experience, rather than on narrower
categories such as music listening, allows questions of the encultured, affective,
corporeal and located nature of musical experience to arise in a stronger way than
hitherto.62 The studies also illustrate the benefits of an approach that focuses on
music events, and that takes into account human subjectivity and agency as well as the
social and historical conditions of musical experience, its material circumstances and
transformations, and the multiple relations and influences that it brings into play.
One of the main studies Born discusses is Steven Felds seminal book on the Kaluli
people of the tropical rainforests of highland Papua New Guinea.63 In that book,
Feld shows how musical expression is woven through many different aspects of
Kaluli life, and how music experience is embedded in and constitutive of their
cosmology, environmental ecology, social relations, rituals, and collective experience
of emotion, space, time and labour.64 Kaluli musical experience thus has to be
understood in relation to the complex sonic world in and through which the Kaluli
live, and how they describe and experience that world. Feld illustrates this through
detailed accounts of how the Kaluli engage with the sounds of birds and water, and
how those sounds relate to the songs they compose. In doing so, he describes, as
Ruth Finnegan puts it, how music is interwoven into all the associations that Kaluli
learn to feel between birds, weeping, poetics and song.65
Born uses Felds work, as well as the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Tia DeNora and
others, to illustrate how music experience both results from and engenders
mediation.66 She describes this process in terms of
59
Ibid.; Born, Music and the Representation/Articulation of Sociocultural Identities, 32.
60
Hennion, Music and Mediation.
61
Georgina Born, On Musical Mediation: Ontology, Technology and Creativity, Twentieth-Century
Music, 2 (2005), 736; eadem, Listening, Mediation, Event: Anthropological and Sociological
Perspectives, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 135, special issue 1 (2010), 7989.
62
Ibid., 89.
63
Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics and Song in Kaluli Expression (Philadelphia,
PA, 1982).
64
Born, Listening, Mediation, Event, 82.
65
Ruth Finnegan, Music, Experience and the Anthropology of Emotion, The Cultural Study of Music:
A Critical Introduction, ed. Martin Clayton et al. (London, 2003), 18192 (p. 184).
66
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Boston, MA, 1987); Tia
DeNora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge, 2000); Born, Listening, Mediation, Event, 87.
162 SARA COHEN
a series or network of relations between musical sounds, human and other subjects,
practices, performances, cosmologies, discourses and representations, technologies,
spaces, and social relations. Music is never singular, but always a multiplicity; it exists
only in and through its multiple and changing mediations, in the guise of such
assemblages. There is no musical object or text whether sounds, score or performance
that stands outside mediation.67
Borns approach thus has much in common with that promoted by Finnegan in an
earlier publication.68 There, Finnegan argues for abandoning the notion of music
text because it directs attention away from experience and multiplicity, and from
peoples diverse experiences back into that limiting approach of locating emotion in
the work.69 Like Born, therefore, Finnegan argues for a focus on experience and
social difference. Furthermore, she too draws on Felds study of the Kaluli, as well as
other studies, to argue for a situated, relational, empirical approach to research on
how people engage with music, and how those engagements are variously practised
and conceptualized in different contexts.
The journeys and boundaries of music and music-making

The notions of articulation and mediation explored above help to conceptualize
the relationship between music and material urban environments in ways that
move beyond divisions of reflection and production, structure and agency.
They also help to address the complexities of that relationship, avoiding simplistic
notions of music on the one hand and material environments on the other, in
order to attend instead to the multiple relations between material sites, music
practices, sounds, genres and social groups. The following discussion explores
these relations further by returning to the maps of music-making in Liverpool
and their various lines and patterns, and by focusing on the mapping process, a
process that prompted, and was accompanied by, stories of music and place. Peter
Turchi thus notes that to ask for a map is to say tell me a story, and draws out the
parallels between the making of both maps and stories, including its selective and
subjective nature.70 The maps of music-making in Liverpool are not objective
representations of reality, but they nevertheless reveal something about the
practices, experiences and understandings of those who created them. Returning
to those maps will help to relate notions of articulation and mediation to the
journeys and boundaries of music-making and the events, experiences and stories
involved.
67
Born, Listening, Mediation, Event, 878.
68
Finnegan, Music, Experience and the Anthropology of Emotion.
69
Ibid., 189.
70
Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer (San Antonio, TX, 2004), 11.
Journeys
Maps can help people to know and navigate cities, but they represent partial views
and they immobilize peoples, places and cultures.71 For Iain Chambers, The very
idea of a map, with its implicit dependence upon the survey of a stable terrain, fixed
referents and measurement, seems to contradict the palpable flux and fluidity of
metropolitan life and cosmopolitan movement.72 Yet the maps of music-making in
Liverpool were in some ways all about movement. They show how musicians
interacted with material urban environments through mapping and through
memories of their music-making practices and experiences, and as they mapped
and remembered, the musicians moved pen across paper with their hands and
engaged in dialogue and storytelling about the lines they were drawing. The lines
helped to move the conversation along, and the musicians connected them to people,
social groups and material sites, and to music practices, sounds and genres. In his
innovative and thought-provoking Lines: A Brief History, Tim Ingold describes this
kind of mapping and storytelling as wayfaring and going along.73 Moreover, he
distinguishes sketch maps and their gestural lines from printed cartographic maps
that feature disconnected points and dots, and thus break the link between manual
gesture and inscriptive trace, fragmenting lines and shoring off the movement that
gave rise to them.74
The maps of music-making in Liverpool feature lines that represent not only the
journeys of musicians across a page and through memory and verbal narratives and
stories, but also their spatial and biographical journeys. The hip-hop maps, for
example, draw attention to mundane, everyday, circular routes and routines within
and across urban space, such as the regular river-crossings of one hip-hop crew, and
Pyros journeys around the houses of his fellow musicians and the neighbourhood
street corner. The rock musicians, meanwhile, mapped the trajectories of their
musical careers, thus showing us something of where they had come from as
musicians and where they were going. In these ways the maps highlight pathways
forged by musicians across space and through time. In her seminal book on amateur
musicians in the English town of Milton Keynes, Finnegan adopts this metaphor of
pathways in order to reconceptualize the notion of bounded musical worlds.75 She
begins by describing genres such as classical music, rock and pop and country and
western as musical worlds distinguishable not only by musical style, but also by
71
Massey, Travelling Thoughts, 228.
72
Iain Chambers, Cities without Maps, Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. John
Bird et al. (London, 1993), 18899 (p. 188).
73
In doing so he draws on the work of the artist Paul Klee, who described in his notebooks the line that
develops freely and goes out for a walk. Paul Klee, Notebooks, ed. Jurg Spiller, 2 vols. (London,
196173), i: The Thinking Eye, 105, quoted in Ingold, Lines, 73.
74
Ingold, Lines, 75, 85.
75
Finnegan, The Hidden Musicians. The metaphor is inspired by Howard Beckers notion of art
worlds (Art Worlds (Berkeley, CA, 1984)).
164 SARA COHEN
collective and conventional ways of structuring and organizing music-making, as well

as shared understandings of music. However, by comparing and contrasting music-
making across these genre-based worlds she shows that the boundaries between them
are of course not fixed. Musicians participate in different worlds at the same time
and with varying degrees of involvement, and these worlds overlap and intersect, and
are also bound into complex relationships with music institutions and events
elsewhere, thus extending beyond local boundaries.
Consequently, Finnegan abandons the term world, with its implied sense of
immersion and enclosure, and explores alternative ways of describing local music-
making:
One way of looking at peoples musical activities is therefore to see them as taking place
along a series of pathways which provide familiar directions for both personal choices and
collective actions. Such pathways form one important if often unstated framework for
peoples participation in urban life, something overlapping with, but more permanent and
structured than, the personal networks in which individuals also participate. They form
broad routes set out, as it were, across and through the city. They tend to be invisible to
others, but for those who follow them they constitute a clearly laid thoroughfare both for
their activities and relationships and for the meaningful structuring of their actions in
space and time.76
Musical pathways thus comprise a series of known and regular routes that people
take through life and across urban space; routes that extend through time and criss-
cross the city.77 They are pathways that people choose to form and re-form through
their music-making activities and all the hard work and commitment that this
involves, and they also provide settings in which relationships could be forged,
interests shared, and a continuity of meaning achieved in the context of urban
living.78 Some pathways are narrow, highly individual and particularistic, whilst
others are wider, well-trodden and more familiar.79 Moreover, people can forge new
and innovative paths whilst also maintaining paths that are older, established and
traditional.80 These musical pathways are just some of the many pathways in peoples
lives, and they can be left and rejoined.
By describing music-making and music genres in terms of pathways rather than
worlds, Finnegan thus adopts a metaphor that is more open and dynamic, and
more suited to the flux and flow of local music-making. In this sense, although she
has been criticized by Holly Kruse and others for concentrating on music-making in
just one particular town, her approach nevertheless complements a more general shift
in social theory over the past three decades, a shift away from fixed and bounded
76
Finnegan, The Hidden Musicians, 323.
77
Ibid., 317.
78
Ibid., 306.
79
Ibid., 324.
80
Ibid., 3067.
notions of place and culture and encouraged by globalization.81 The work of many
anthropologists has contributed to that trend by showing how place and culture are
created and recreated through movement and everyday practice, and are thus always
in process of becoming, and by emphasizing the openness and fluidity of culture and
inter-cultural exchange. This is evident in the language of mobility and in-
betweenness that such scholars have used to describe contemporary global culture,
a language of travel, mixing and hybridity, border-crossings and borderlands.82
Arjun Appadurai, for example, provides a seminal account of how modernity
involves deterritorialized global and cultural flows or scapes of people, images,
products and so on.83
As a highly mobile cultural form, music provides an excellent example of this
process. Musicianship is commonly spoken and written about using metaphors of
mobility: musicians go out on the road and on tour, and around club or performance
circuits. Musicians tours have also played a significant part in mythological accounts
of popular music that have been circulated and recycled through films and the music
press, whilst the value of musicians within a particular locality is often connected to
their ability to make it and thus leave and escape from that locality, moving up the
ladder of success and beyond, and the ability of their music to transcend local
boundaries, occupy translocal worlds and appeal to heterogeneous audiences.84
Meanwhile, music also involves the movement of sounds through time; musical
sounds and products are disseminated across space through music and media
technologies, including new mobile technologies; and descriptions of those sounds
tend to be suffused with metaphors of movement.85
The work of Ingold helps to relate this emphasis on movement back to the hand-
drawn maps and lines.86 Ingold argues that people do not live on the spot or in
places, but along paths, thus inhabiting a world that consists, in the first place, not
of things but of lines.87 According to Ingold, therefore, what is significant
about Felds study of the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea is that it shows not just
how the Kaluli engage with their natural environment, but how they do so whilst
moving through that environment: For the Kaluli, every place lies on a path (tok) so
81
Holly Kruse, Subcultural Identity in Alternative Music Culture, Popular Music, 12 (1993), 3341
(pp. 378).
82
James Clifford, Traveling Cultures, Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg et al. (New York,
1992), 96116; Ulf Hannertz, Flows, Boundaries and Hybrids: Keywords in Transnational
Anthropology, Working Paper WPTC-2K-02, Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm
University (1997).
83
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN,
1996).
84
Sara Cohen, Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making (Oxford, 1991); eadem, Decline,
Renewal and the City.
85
Lashua and Cohen, Liverpool Musicscapes, 71.
86
Ingold, Lines.
87
Ibid., 5.
166 SARA COHEN
that the naming of places is always a part of a remembrance, in speech or song, of

travelling the tok along which they lie.88 Ingold uses this to argue that the
knowledge we have of our surroundings is forged in the very course of our moving
through them, in the passage from place to place and the changing horizons along
the way.89 Knowledge is thus acquired as people go along, and through paths of
movement through the world.90 Referring to James Gibsons argument that people
perceive the world along a path of observation, Ingold suggests that as we go
along things fall into and out of sight, as new vistas open up and others are closed
off .91 Relations should therefore be conceptualized in terms of lines, and the
subject of inquiry should consist not of the relations between organisms and their
external environments but of the relations along their severally enmeshed ways
of life.92
Boundaries
The lines of the hand-drawn maps thus help draw attention to the journeys taken
by musicians as they mapped their music-making activities and experiences in
Liverpool, as they talked about what they were mapping, and as they traced their
musical pathways. In addition, they point to relations between music genres, social
groups and material urban environments that were forged through this process
and as the musicians went along. Yet the maps feature lines suggesting that music
and music-making should be understood not just in terms of journeys and
movement but also in terms of boundaries, and that descriptions of culture as
flow can thus make things seem rather smooth and easy.93 These lines included
those marking concentric circles and musical centres and margins, such as the
different zones of musical performance on one of the rock maps; lines of musical
difference and division, such as the river running through the centre of one hip-
hop map and the rather removed and distant-looking city centre marked on the
other; lines that appear like meeting points scattered across the page, including
those marking the borders of individual music venues and domestic recording
studios; lines that mark edges, such as the arrow-shaped road pointing towards the
dangerous border-crossing from Wavertree to Toxteth; lines that mark barriers or
bridges between one place and another, such as the arrows marking the river-
crossing bus route and the trainline separating Crosby from Liverpool city centre;
and lines suggesting boundaries (and bubbles) of social and musical inclusion and
exclusion.
88
Ingold, Lines, 89; Feld, Sound and Sentiment, 103.
89
Ingold, Lines, 88.
90
Ibid., 89.
91
Ibid., 87.
92
Ibid., 103.
93
Hannertz, Flows, Boundaries and Hybrids.
Such boundaries differ from one musician and musical group to another, and
they are generated and shaped by particular moments and circumstances. Pyro, for
example, described his music as a hybrid mesh, yet he also placed it in a spatial
bubble, the boundaries of which were rather ambiguous. At certain points in our
conversation about his life and music the bubble seemed to suggest an enclosed,
isolated and protective space, but at others it suggested limited opportunities,
restricted movements and curtailed freedoms. Thus whilst Massey described how
cartographic maps flatten culture and leave people stuck and silent, stuck and
silenced is how people sometimes feel and/or are.94 Clearly, therefore, the
boundaries of music-making are socially constructed, multiple and complex, and
they may be created by individuals, groups or institutions and have social, cultural,
moral or economic significance. They include, for example, boundaries that are
generic, legal, aesthetic, geo-political and so on. Some of these boundaries are created
by musicians to facilitate their music-making practices and discourses, but musicians
also confront and push against boundaries that lie outside their control, such as those
that prevent access to musical places and resources and are enforced and maintained
by strategies of policing and surveillance. This suggests that some boundaries are
less permeable and easily crossed or dissolved than others, although Ingold points
out that the structures that confine, channel and contain are not immutable.95
For Martin Stokes, music provides an arena for contesting and pushing back
boundaries, exploring the border zones.96 The categorization and labelling of
musical places, sounds and genres provide one example of such contested
boundaries, as illustrated by the contentious categories of folk rock and the
Liverpool Sound referred to by the rock musician as he drew his map. What matters,
as Stokes points out, is not the content of such categories but how they are defined,
mobilized and negotiated in particular situations and contexts, and the interests they
serve. Elsewhere, for example, I have discussed how during the 1980s musicians
engaged in debates over the existence and distinctiveness of the so-called Liverpool
Sound. These debates involved the marking of distinctions between the sounds of
Liverpool and Manchester, north Liverpool and south Liverpool, this side of the river
and the other side, and so on. They illustrated how symbolic boundaries created
through the classification and labelling of musical sounds were transformed into
spatial boundaries marking unequal relations between social groups, particularly
inequalities of class and wealth. This categorization of sound can thus be described
as a relational process involving boundaries that play an important part in the
construction of social and cultural difference.97 Likewise, the mapping of the
94
Massey, Travelling Thoughts, 228.
95
Ingold, Lines, 1023
96
Martin Stokes, Introduction, Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place, ed.
Stokes (Oxford, 1994), 127 (p. 24).
97
Sara Cohen, Mapping the Sound: Identity, Place and the Liverpool Sound, Ethnicity, Identity and
Music, ed. Stokes, 11734.
168 SARA COHEN
hip-hop musicians prompted stories of music-making in which boundaries between

rock and hip-hop occasionally surfaced, as those musicians sought to highlight the
differences between the two genres in order to make particular points. At other
moments, however, the boundaries appeared to dissolve, as when musicians sought
to describe their music as a hybrid mesh and present themselves as open to various
and multiple musical influences.
In Western modernity, music has been commonly thought of (much like the
notion of place) as a bounded object, product, text or thing with a fixed and
definable essence, as suggested by the notion of the music itself . Yet the mapping of
music-making in Liverpool suggests that music should be thought of instead as a
dynamic process involving the negotiation of boundaries. Boundaries are part of the
everyday lives of musicians, and to understand music-making is to understand how
musicians live and engage with them; how they remember and imagine them and
make them meaningful.
Conclusion: music and urban landscape

To conclude, I want to bring together the main points that have been made in
this article, including those relating to the previous section on the journeys and
boundaries of music-making and musics mediations. The article has explored the
relationship between music and material urban environments through ethno-
graphic research on amateur rock and hip-hop musicians in Liverpool and the use
of conceptual mapping. This involved focusing in micro-sociological detail on
particular music maps and their various lines and patterns, on the process of
mapping music and the stories involved, and on music practices and perspectives
in specific localities. At the same time, however, that focus was integrated with
discussion on global trends and urban change, and on theoretical approaches to
people, cultures and environments drawn from anthropological, sociological and
musicological research. The first of the three sections of the article presented
examples of four maps drawn by musicians to illustrate their music-making
activities and experiences in the city. The drawing of these maps was accompanied
by conversations with and between musicians, and it prompted stories about
music-making in the city, stories also told by the maps lines and patterns. The
second section then compared and contrasted those maps, whilst the third
explored the broader implications of the maps for conceptualizing the relationship
between music and material environments. On the basis of this, three
general points can be made, each corresponding to one of the articles three
main sections.
The first point is that musicians interact with material environments to create and
recreate musical landscapes. This approach to landscape is influenced and supported
by the work of numerous anthropologists who have studied how landscapes are
lived in and through, and experienced and embodied, rather than just observed,
attended to and represented.98 The article illustrated this by focusing on landscapes

created through conceptual mappings of music-making and the material sites and
experiences involved, and through music-making practices such as songwriting,
sound recording and live performance. These musical landscapes matter to musicians
and are shared by them. They emerge through music practices that are regular,
routine and collaborative, as well as through the individual and collective memories,
stories and imaginations of musicians.
The second point is that these musical landscapes are diverse and contested, multi-
layered and intersecting. This was illustrated through comparison between the hand-
drawn maps, which helped to highlight landscapes shaped not only by individuals
and personal situations and circumstances, but also by music genre and by urban
conditions connected to the global political economy. More specifically, it showed
how the maps featured material sites that were related to music events and practices,
and to urban landscapes that were being continually transformed, and how those
events and practices were in turn related to musical sounds and genres and to various
social groups. This highlighted the complexities of the relationship between music
and material urban environments. To try to account for this complexity and the
kinds of relations involved, the article turned to studies of music informed by social
anthropology, sociology and musicology before returning to the hand-drawn maps
and their detailed lines and patterns. This led to the third and final point, which is
that the concept of musical landscape helps to show how music and music-making
are mediated by material urban environments, a process involving the navigation of
journeys and boundaries and the forging of multiple relations along the way
(relations between people, practices, sounds, genres, material sites and so on).
Despite notable exceptions, such as the work of Finnegan,99 it is surprising that
more research on amateur rock music-making and the practices and perspectives of
the musicians involved has not been carried out. Given the rich, insightful and wide-
ranging body of research on popular music as urban culture it is also surprising that
the relationship between popular music and cities has not provided a focus for more
critical research, although here again there have been important exceptions,
particularly the work of Chambers, Forman, Krims and Derek Scott.100 Finnegan
notes the extraordinary breadth and diversity of urban music-making, and this
music-making has influenced how people think about and imagine cities, and their
98
Michael Jackson, Paths toward a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry (Indiana,
IN, 1989); The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space, ed. Eric Hirsch and
Michael OHanlon (New York, 1995); Senses of Place, ed. Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (Santa
Fe, NM, 1996).
99
Finnegan, The Hidden Musicians.
100
Chambers, Urban Rhythms; Forman, The Hood Comes First ; Krims, Music and Urban Geography;
Derek Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New
York, Paris, and Vienna (New York, 2008).
170 SARA COHEN
related hopes and fears, desires and dreams.101 This is evident across different music
genres and styles, as illustrated by the inner-city hoods of hip-hop, the urban
dystopias of industrial music, the post-punk portrayals of urban decay, the nostalgic
urban landscapes of Britpop, the celebrations of sophisticated urban nightscapes by
1950s crooners such as Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, and so on.
Further research could deepen understanding of amateur music-making and urban
landscape, and this article has argued for research that focuses on what people do
when they engage in music-related practices and on the processes involved, and for
an approach to music that is situated, relational and comparative. Most importantly,
the article has made a case for the contribution of maps and mapping to music
research. Whilst acknowledging the problematic nature of maps, it has nevertheless
shown that, when combined with ethnographic research, maps can provide a useful
methodological and analytical research tool. In particular, the act of mapping can
prompt memories and stories of music-making, and the maps detailed lines and
patterns can tell us something about the spatial aspects of that music-making, and
about how and why music matters.
ABSTRACT
This article explores the relationship between music and material urban environments by
drawing on ethnographic research with rock and hip-hop musicians. The first of its three
sections introduces some of the musicians who participated in that research and the maps
they drew to illustrate their music-making activities in the city. The second compares these
hand-drawn maps and their various lines and patterns, and relates their differences to music
genre and particular urban conditions. The final section of the article explores the broader
implications of the maps for conceptualizing the relationship between music and material
environments. It starts by considering notions of articulation and mediation and their
usefulness for understanding relations between music and material urban environments.
Focusing on the maps detailed lines and patterns, it then describes how music and music-
making are mediated by material urban environments, a process involving the navigation of
journeys and boundaries and the forging of multiple relations along the way.
101
Finnegan, The Hidden Musicians.

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Journal of the Royal Musical Association

ISSN: 0269-0403 (Print) 1471-6933 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrma20

Bubbles, Tracks, Borders and Lines: Mapping Music

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02690403.2012.669939

Published online: 24 May 2012.

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Bubbles, Tracks, Borders and Lines:

ISSN 0269-0403 print/ISSN 1471-6933 online

1. Mapping rock and hip-hop in Liverpool

memory machine.8 Drawing the maps helped musicians to express musical

Figure 1. The map drawn by a rock singer-songwriter.

Figure 2. The map drawn by a bass guitarist and rock-band member.

2. Music genre and urban environments

conventional to rock culture and involves an emphasis on the distinctiveness and

Its like they dont want to see us fly!

Pyros concerns are supported by a 2010 UK government report showing that,

3. Music genres, mediation and urban environments

Music genres, social groups and urban environments

Music and structural and environmental determinism

the reorganization of urban production have implanted themselves in patterns of

Homological relations between music genres, social groups

Multiple articulations between music and urban environments

Music, environment and mediation

The journeys and boundaries of music and music-making

collective and conventional ways of structuring and organizing music-making, as well

that the naming of places is always a part of a remembrance, in speech or song, of

hip-hop musicians prompted stories of music-making in which boundaries between

Conclusion: music and urban landscape

attended to and represented.98 The article illustrated this by focusing on landscapes

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