The ability of urban music scenes to reproduce themselves is subject to constraints imposed by seemingly unconnected powers largely outside of their influence (they are not, of course, unconnected, but operate from a remote location relative to the everyday functioning of a music scene). This is not to say that scenes are completely at the mercy of those powers, which would risk taking the argument in a crudely deterministic direction, but many analyses
170 Hadfield, Bar Wars, 132.
171 See for example Brenner & Theodore; also Peck & Tickell.
172 Ray Hudson, ‘Rethinking change in old industrial regions’, Environment & Planning A, 37 (2005), 581-596, 590.
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of such social formations arguably overemphasise the local agency that can be exerted in pursuit of self-determination and reproduction. As Krims points out, ‘just as a historical situation can only be inferred from many acts and products of agency, so does any given agency take its shape, force and meaning from the historical situation in which it is
conceived and executed’.173 The agency of any musician will always be subject to constraints, simply because musicians do not (usually) hold power. Grassroots cultures such as
underground music scenes will always find ways to do the things that motivate them, hence the term ‘grassroots’: a piece of ground may be concreted over, but eventually grass and other plants will find ways through the cracks that inevitably appear over time.174 Left unattended, nature will eventually reclaim it, meaning constant maintenance is required to keep unwanted organisms in check. If this idea is translated to the maintenance of order in human society by those who wish to control it, there are various means by which this can be achieved.
As Hadfield observes, ownership and control of property and land use are powerful tools for the moulding of urban human ecologies,175 but on their own these can be challenged and even overcome. The squat / free party scene described by Chatterton and Hollands176 is a good example of spatial appropriation by resistant or subversive elements of grassroots urban music culture. However, in the decade or so that has elapsed since the time of that writing, such strategies have been actively undermined, in some cases even criminalised, by numerous legislative changes. Many of these have been specifically designed not only to aid private sector control of urban life and the pursuit of profit, but also to curtail the agency of any potentially subversive, or simply undesirable groups.
Much like the enclosure acts of the early nineteenth century, then, erecting fences or passing laws would not by themselves have been sufficient. Such an extensive program of class appropriation required a complete system to succeed; that is to say, the fencing off of land could only succeed when backed up by the combined forces of legal, ideological and physical power. In the neoliberal era, the subjection of local authorities to market logic has been accompanied by widespread deregulation, the most pertinent to this thesis being those of planning and licensing laws; the increasing privatisation of urban public space and
173 Adam Krims, Music and urban geography (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), XL.
174 Thanks to Dr. Adam Behr for this analogy.
175 Hadfield, Bar Wars, 132.
176 Chatterton & Hollands, Nightscapes.
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city management, and attendant physical / technological measures to control the social use of city space (such as private security, design features in the built environment, for example
‘anti-homeless spikes’ and deliberately uncomfortable seating, and CCTV). Also of great significance is the deregulation of the financial sector, which has allowed the most world’s powerful companies to acquire undue influence over the direction of urban development, culture and everyday life.
In addition to all this, the personal opinions and prejudices of ‘gatekeepers’, such as judges and magistrates, the police, landlords and venue managers, local or otherwise, can act as further obstacles to the reproduction of music scenes. Newcastle serves as a particularly acute example of all the processes mentioned here, due to several peculiarities. Its geographical isolation meant that very insular, class-bound local cultures were able to develop over many centuries.177 More recently, national trends such as music have
traditionally taken much longer to reach the area than, say, Manchester or Leeds. The small, compact city centre, now privately managed, leaves little room for grassroots culture and non-mainstream provision, for example retail. This, combined with the region’s slow and still far from complete recovery from deindustrialisation, arguably accentuated the degree to which Newcastle has been transformed by the commodification of the urban environment relative to many other UK regional capitals.
As well as legal and economic power, the corporate appropriation of city space has been aided by the symbolic and ideological power of marketing and branding. These mechanisms are designed not only to attract investment capital and consumer spending, but also, as Robert Shaw argues, to ‘mould and govern subjectivities’.178 Minority groups such as non-mainstream music scenes are often marginalised by exclusion from the ‘brand image’, which, as the contemporary mode of marketing cities, necessarily ignores or suppresses any conflicting subjectivities. Minority voices, it could be argued, then effectively recede in the popular consciousness, thus diminishing their presence. An example of this might be the degree of popular support garnered by a grassroots campaign to save a music venue, which will probably not be much if most people have been convinced that a leisure mall will be of more benefit to the city.
177 See for example Benwell Community Development Project, The making of a ruling class (1978); also Hudson.
178 Robert Shaw, ‘Alive after five: Constructing the neoliberal night in Newcastle-upon-Tyne’, Urban Studies 52/3 (2015), 456-470, 457.
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This is perhaps the most sinister side of the Party City marketing campaigns, which worked simultaneously not only to marginalise and suppress the type of musical activity that the council’s cultural strategy was ostensibly designed to enable, but also to mask that process.
One might even go as far as to position city branding as a relatively recent addition to the array of ‘ideological state apparatuses’, with elements such as private security and CCTV functioning as the corresponding ‘repressive state apparatus’.179 If corporate power has, as some have argued,180 usurped the state as the predominant controlling power of our time, then this would surely not seem too far-fetched; marketing could certainly then be seen as a form of indoctrination, having taken the place of organised religion as the most prominent form of the moulding of collective subjectivity by elites. To return to Shaw, whose study of
‘constructing the neoliberal night’ in Newcastle focuses on this aspect of neoliberalisation,181
‘people need not just to be encouraged to act in a certain way, but to be co-opted into believing that neoliberal policies will benefit them’.182
The preceding paragraphs are intended to highlight the ways in which various forces, not explicitly connected to music, come to bear on urban music scenes through what Lefebvre terms ‘the production of space’.183 The processes outlined above all had profound spatial effects which helped to propel the consumption-orientated Party City image to saturation point, until the changing requirements of capital began to lead the city’s development in a different direction