London Underground : The multicultural routes of London dance cultures

Popular music plays a powerful role in people's lives. The centrality that it takes in the individual and collective lives of social actors appears to be in inverse proportion to their social, cultural and political power: relatively powerless groups have historically used music as a way to organise themselves and their understanding of the world, a way to speak in public, and speak about, among other things, the forces they believe conspire to keep them powerless. This thesis is concentrated on the cultures that have emerged around a series of genres collectively described as 'dance music' in London in the past two decades. It takes as its starting point the most promising theoretical models developed to understand cultures around music, the 'subcultural studies' of the 1970s, but it places these alongside theoretical perspectives that pay more attention to the politics of space, in particular new developments in cultural geography, and the work on transational cultures of Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy. Combining a theoretical approach based on Manual Castell's notion of a 'network society', with ethnography interviews and participant observation data gathered over 3 years at the end of the 1990S - and case studies of specific dance music genre-networks - Rare Groove, 'Acid House' and 'Jungle' - the thesis traces the evolution of London dance cultures in relation to immigration, the changing racial and political geography of the city, and the emergence of multicultural space and practice. The thesis traces patterns of continuity and change across different dance genres, to argue that the African diaspora, and particularly the 'discrete cultural unit' defined by Gilroy as the Black Atlantic rather than the Nation, or an idea of English particularity, continue to be the appropriate contextual frame for understanding dance music activity in Britain. Some of the underlying questions to which this thesis provides the answer are: what role have London's migrant and non-white populations played in the cultural and economic life of the city? What are the mechanisms of multiculture, and what role has Afro-diasporic music played in these mechanisms? What is the relationship between the development of musical subcultures and 'the Nation'

Valuing Tradition: Mali’s jeliw, European publishers and Copyright

The issue of how copyright works for the musical traditions of Africa has been steadily growing in importance since the 1990s, pushed to the fore by the increasing visibility of African artists in the world music market, the neoliberalisation of African economies that is pushing intellectual property (IP) issues into the centre of state creative industry policies, the ubiquity of illegal forms of reproduction, physical and increasingly digital, and the processes by which immaterial goods and cultural traditions are becoming reimagined as commodities. Recent scholarly discussions of this issue moves the debate significantly beyond the simple notion of copyright as a Eurocentric imposition on vulnerable African cultural heritage and instead considers how IP issues are addressed differentially in specific local contexts across sub-Saharan Africa. This article examines these issues in relation to how Mali’s Mande griots (jeliw) work with European publishers. Based on a series of sixteen interviews with jeli musicians and European publishers and others in the world music industry, its main finding is that while it is necessary to reconsider what we mean by composition in relation to Mali’s jeliw and their musical practice, copyright can and is being adapted by publishers working with traditional musicians to provide much needed revenue to jeli composers and plays a role in sustaining a vital, but vulnerable, tradition

The Politics of Everyday life: Why We Still Need Cultural Studies

Article for New Humanist magazine marking the deaths of Stuart Hal and Richard Hoggar

It's A London Thing: How Rare Groove, Acid House and Jungle Remapped The City

This book is a record of the Black music culture that emerged in post-colonial London at the end of the twentieth century; the people who made it, the racial and spatial politics of its development and change, and the part it played in founding London's precious, embattled multiculture. It tells the story of the linked Black musical scenes of the city, from ska, reggae and soul in the 1970s, to rare groove and rave in the 1980s and jungle and its offshoots in the 1990s, to dubstep and grime of the 2000s. Melville argues that these demonstrate enough common features to be thought of as one musical culture, an Afro-diasporic continuum. Core to this idea is that this dance culture has been ignored in history and cultural theory and that it should be thought of as a powerful and internationally significant form of popular art

London Underground : The multicultural routes of London dance cultures

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Process as Outcome: Research Across Borders

This chapter reflects on the role of the university at a time when that role is changing in a number of important ways. If there is a clearly defined boundary between academia and “industry”—something there is reason to doubt—it is one that is routinely crossed, at least in the corner of academia in which I work. Academics like me, who spend their time researching, teaching and writing about popular music and the creative economies through which its circulates, not only spend a lot of time thinking about issues associated with “the industry,” but often spend time working in industry too