Soundscapes of Wellbeing in Popular Music

Gavin J. Andrews, Paul Kingsbury, Robin Kearns, Paul Kingsbury, Gavin J. Andrews, Robin Kearns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317052357
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Pop Music

Unearthing the messy and sprawling interrelationships of place, wellbeing, and popular music, this book explores musical soundscapes of health, ranging from activism to international charity, to therapeutic treatments and how wellbeing is sought and attained in contexts of music. Drawing on critical social theories of the production, circulation, and consumption of popular music, the book gathers together diverse insights from geographers and musicologists. Popular music has become increasingly embedded in complex and often contradictory discourses of wellbeing. For instance, some new genres and sub-cultures of popular music are associated with violence, drug-use, and the angst of living, yet simultaneously define the hopes and dreams of millions of young people. At a service level, popular music is increasingly used as a therapeutic modality in holistic medicine, as well as in conventional health care and public health practice. The genre of popular music, then, is fundamental to human wellbeing as an active and central part of people's emotional lives. By conceptually and empirically foregrounding place, this book demonstrates how - music whether from particular places, about particular places, or played in particular places " is a crucial component of health and wellbeing.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Gavin J. Andrews, Paul Kingsbury, and Robin Kearns

‘It’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it’. These lyrics, repeated in the chorus of Faith No More’s metal meets dance song, ‘We Care A Lot’ (1985), propel a sarcastic commentary on rich popular musicians’ concern for the lives of impoverished people in Africa. The song also tells us that Faith No More have a ‘dirty job’ to do because they care a lot ‘about the smack and crack and whack that hits the streets’, care a lot ‘about starvation and the food that Live Aid bought’, and care a lot ‘about disease, baby Rock Hudson rock, yeah’. To further intensify the acerbity, live performances of the song involved lead singer Mike Patton doing on-stage exercises including push-ups and star jumps. Although ‘We Care A Lot’ is almost three decades old, its lyrics are arguably more relevant than ever before. Today, it is customary for celebrity musicians to participate in and even lead major global health, social, and welfare initiatives (Andrews et al. 2011). Music industry-led charity and activism are commonplace, and their messages about health and socio-environmental justice are a staple refrain in the global soundscape of contemporary popular music (Richey and Ponte 2008).

Beyond charity and activism, however, significant developments have taken place since the release of ‘We Care A Lot’. To begin with, popular music has become increasingly embedded in complex discourses of wellbeing. For instance, new genres and sub-cultures of popular music are associated with violence and drug-use yet simultaneously define the hopes and dreams of millions of young people (Anderson 2002). At a service level, popular music is increasingly used as a therapeutic modality in ‘holistic medicine’ and also in conventional health care and public health practice (Evans 2002, Lipe 2002). In everyday life, this musical genre is a fundamental part of human wellbeing as an active and fundamental part of people’s emotional lives. While these phenomena have arguably existed ever since the emergence of popular music, the rise of social media and other new digital technologies in the twenty-first century has meant that consumption patterns are even more varied and extensive. Many people listen to popular music in places other than their homes and dedicated live music venues. They can listen to popular music when they eat, work, shop, travel, exercise, and socialize (Frith 2002). Given its enduring appeal and widespread dissemination, popular music is an extremely diverse genre that appeals to numerous social groups throughout countless contexts around the world.

Faith No More’s dirty job in 1985, then, was ultimately not to save the world from illness and poverty but to expose the hypocrisy of popular music’s exponents who claimed to save the world from such ailments. Our job, with the help of the book’s contributors, is animated by a similar attitude: to critically unearth the messy and sprawling interrelationships of place, wellbeing, and popular music. Before turning to the results of this daunting task, we introduce some of the substantial yet fragmented literatures on place, wellbeing, and popular music by surveying the current academic literatures on these topics. Such a maneuver is necessary given the book’s idiosyncratic positioning wherein some readers will be familiar with the literatures on health and welfare but unfamiliar with those on music. Conversely, other readers may be acquainted with the research on music but unaware of the debates within health and welfare literatures. The guiding questions that compose the following three sections are as follows: How do we define and understand popular music and wellbeing? What are the relationships between popular music and wellbeing, and what relationships need to be explored further? How do we understand place, and why does place matter to music? In the final section, we briefly elaborate on the book’s sections and the major themes that comprise the individual chapters.

Defining Popular Music, Health, and Wellbeing

Popular Music

Any attempt to define popular music is fraught with difficulty (Birrer 1985, Connell and Gibson 2003, Holt 2007, Tagg 1982,). Despite the emergence of general understandings and interpretations, constant changes in musical styles, tastes, and cultural contexts means that there can be no universally accepted definition of it (Connell and Gibson 2003). Broadly speaking, the term ‘popular music’ refers to forms of music that are mass-produced, distributed, and consumed, and thus familiar to a significant number of people. In short, popular music is the dominant music of a given time and place. This very literal definition, based on sheer proportions, is temporally inclusive insofar as it does not exclude forms of music that might have been popular in past times, but may have since declined in prominence. It is also a spatially inclusive definition insofar as it does not exclude forms of music that are only popular in certain nations or world regions.

More commonly, however, understandings of popular music are not so literal and encompass a vast range of contemporary musical styles that are variously defined by the music industry, media, and general public typically located in the ‘global north’. From these perspectives, technical and stylistic qualities are frequently cited, most notably forms of music that are highly sectional with short verse-chorus repeat patterns that are produced by instruments and technologies developed in the twentieth century such as electric guitars, mixed drum kits, and synthesizers. Connell and Gibson (2003) observe that such qualities have been the target of elitist derision because of their alleged lack of creativity and technical intricacy. Moreover, the elitist diagnosis of popular music as ‘low culture’ alleges that it is not worthy of serious academic consideration (Kong 1995). Given the growth of peer-reviewed publications such as Popular Music & Society and The Journal of Popular Music Studies such criticisms are becoming increasingly outmoded and irrelevant.

The latter style-based definition of popular music is problematic because it excludes other genres of music such as classical music that might be popular or commercially successful. Nonetheless, this definition is useful. To begin with, it is responsive to an ongoing diversification process whereby sub-categories of popular music have emerged since the mid-1950s such as rock, soul, funk, hip hop, pop, dance, disco, R&B, and various hybrid categories (Holt 2007). Yet to assert the inclusiveness of a style-based definition risks excluding those types of music that, while highly sectional with short verse-chorus repeat patterns, are not necessarily produced for or consumed by large numbers of people. Specialist styles or niche genres of popular music, particularly during their initial formation, may have thrived precisely because of their relatively small-sized arenas and audiences such as grime, dub-step, hardcore techno, and death metal. In addition, popular music has been made by musicians who have played this musical style but without being commercially successful. In this respect, it is quite possible to create popular music in a garage that is never heard by anyone except the musicians themselves.

For the purposes of this book, we have aimed for definitional inclusivity by considering other musical forms such as ‘world music’, folk pop, jazz-fusion, and others. We have also tried to be inclusive by considering the various stylistic elements within popular music. The book’s title uses the term ‘soundscape’, which has inspired a significant amount of work inside and outside of geography (Schafer 1977, Smith 1994, Waterman 2000), and furthers this inclusivity for two interrelated reasons. First, soundscape evokes ‘landscape’: a fundamental and extremely valuable concept in human geography (Wylie 2007). What is fruitful about both terms is that they are simultaneously nouns and verbs. A soundscape, then, is as much a thing as a doing. We could immerse ourselves in a particular soundscape or we could soundscape a particular place. In addition, the adjective ‘sound’ refers to the condition or wellbeing of something or someone. Our friend may not be of sound mind or our friend may give us unsound advice. Rather than mere musings on the nuances of this word, such issues are at the heart of one of the book’s main goals: to take heed of the spaciousness of wellbeing and popular music.

Second, soundscape expresses the lively plurality of theories, empirical contexts, and methodologies that infuse the contributors’ writings on the sonic environments that comprise health and wellbeing in popular music. It is important to note, however, that this plurality is inflected by the contributors’ locations in the so-called Anglosphere: six chapters are from Canada, four each from the United States and the United Kingdom, two from New Zealand, one from Ireland, and one from Singapore. Mirroring the breadth of inquiry of the contributors’ disciplines, which includes music, geography, history, ethno-musicology, and cultural studies, this book is ultimately a diverse yet focused exploration of the many forces and structures that comprise the sounds, people, organizations, technologies, materials, and practices of popular music.

From Health to Wellbeing

Understandings of health have changed over time. The World Health Organization’s (WHO) broad definition of health as a state of physical, mental, and social wellbeing – and not merely the absence of disease – (WHO 1948) has underpinned numerous movements beyond institutional bio-medicine in recent decades, including the rise the social model of health and health promotion practice and research (Jadad and O’Grady 2008). Echoing this trend, our book explores how music relates to good or improving health, especially in terms of the nature of wellbeing as a key component of health.

Wellbeing is not a new concept and has unfolded over time in different guises, often in philosophical and theological writing. As MacKian (2009) explains, because of the advent of scientific bio-medicine since the eighteenth century, the qualitative category of wellbeing became displaced by scientific positivism’s objectifications and quantifications of the body that divorced it from the mind. Nevertheless, by the mid-twentieth century new understandings of wellbeing came to prominence as a result of governmental institutions (MacKian 2009). Notably, the concept of ‘social wellbeing’ came to the fore through the creation of welfare states in Europe and North America. At the same time, the concept of ‘economic wellbeing’ emerged from neoliberal politics and a belief in market solutions for the allocation of resources and generation of prosperity. Underpinning both social and economic wellbeing was the materialist assumption that improving an individual’s or a population’s wealth, as well as the quality of the services available to them, necessarily improved their wellbeing (MacKian 2009). Importantly, these ideologies are comparable to popular consumer and material cultures that involve a prevailing perception that personal wealth and consumption beget personal happiness. Popular music is connected to all three of these forms of wellbeing in multiple ways. For instance, social wellbeing is the stated goal of many musicians’ charity and activist causes; economic wellbeing is touted as a reason for promoting the music industry, as well as the consumption of and access to music; and materialist wellbeing is manifest in the imagery and iconography of many artists’ products and promotional materials.

Although social and economic ideas about wellbeing remain dominant to this day, more personal, emotional, and virtuous understandings of wellbeing have emerged since the late twentieth century. These might contrast to, or even oppose, social, economic, and materialist understandings such as Western ‘new age’ or ‘spiritual’ movements and their belief in holism, that is, the assertion that wellbeing is achieved though attention to the interconnectedness of mind, body, and spirit (MacKian 2009). In contrast to the collectivistic yearnings of these movements are the rise of ‘individualized’ or ‘self-help’ ‘fitness’ programs wherein wellbeing is not only framed as a health state but also a ‘sense’ and ‘feeling’ that can be achieved through individuals being responsible for and acting to improve their mental and physical condition (MacKian 2009). Popular music styles accompany the former movement in terms of post-1960s psychedelic rock and folk music and the latter in terms of high-energy dance music in fitness gyms.

Bridging all the aforementioned forms and understandings of wellbeing (social, economic, materialist, and spiritual), scholars have paid particular attention to the specific facets that constitute wellbeing as a highly subjective state that varies from one person to another. As Fleuret and Atkinson (2007) observe, some scholars consider wellbeing to be interchangeable with a ‘quality of life’. This notion has been subject to many interpretations and statistical measurements over recent years, particularly in the health sciences. Fleuret and Atkinson also note that most scholars in the social sciences have rejected outright measurement and focus instead on human needs that value vital needs such as clean air, water, and shelter more than spiritual and emotional needs, which are in turn positioned over luxuries (Maslow 1954). Popular music might fall into the two latter groups. Recently, Fleuret and Atkinson (2007) have warned that needs-based theories do not recognize human adaptation and variability by highlighting the development of ‘relative standards theories’ that account for these shortfalls and recent ‘capabilities approaches’ that emphasize the opportunities and choices available to individuals. In terms of popular music, these might explain how the form of musical consumption associated with wellbeing, might reflect consumers’ purchasing power and cultural backgrounds.

Other scholars have attempted to incorporate more geographical perspectives into the wellbeing debates. Kearns and Andrews (2009), for example, note that in a literal sense, wellbeing implies being well, but that being as a state of existence can only be achieved through material connections to place: ‘being-in-the-world’ in particular places. Developing a potential research agenda, Fleuret and Atkinson (2007) summarize four potential ‘spaces of wellbeing’ that offer a framework for future geographical research: ‘spaces of capacity’ that assist and amplify wellbeing, ‘integrative spaces’ of networks of social associations, ‘spaces of security’ of refuge and support, and ‘therapeutic spaces’ that facilitate physical spiritual and emotional healing. With regard to popular music, spaces of capacity might coincide, for example, with a concert venue, integrative spaces as a fan or activist network, spaces of security as a youth’s bedroom, and therapeutic spaces as a clinic for music therapy.

Despite the problems of defining and measuring wellbeing, engaging with the concept affords valuable insights. On the one hand, there are potential insights into the nature of physical and mental health. One can argue that it is important to consider how wellbeing – in terms of the way someone feels in the now or his or her social situation – impacts upon mental health. Conversely, one must reflect on how mental health as a particular condition influences one’s sense of wellbeing. On the other hand, the concept of wellbeing affords insight into the importance of the links between the socio-cultural contexts and people’s emotional and affective states. In mainstream health research, however, current approaches tend to simplify the relationships between people and health. For example, studies that consider the social determinants of health tend to associate social composition and context (measured in terms of where one lives, socio-economic status, local rates of crime, available services, and so on) to health status (measured in units of morbidity, mortality, and physiology). Other complex emotional and affective states and socio-cultural influences exist that cannot be measured in these ways, yet are representative of individual and population health, as well as wellbeing as a lived experience. For example, an adult sitting in their childhood bedroom listening to the songs of their youth might articulate – if asked – an immediate sense of wellbeing and even elucidate on how these songs provided a constant backdrop for their shifting past relationships with friends, lovers, family members, and other significant people in their lives. Such anecdotes, however, could never be adequately interpreted or conveyed by standardized health-based measures because of their intimate, perso...