In this presentation, I would like to examine some of the different notions of “space” in which music mediates and transforms across the cultural boundaries. The theoretical reference will be made to British geographer David Harvey’s notion of interference among three different conceptions of space – ‘absolute’ space, ‘relative space’ and ‘relational’ space. I shall draw some examples from my own fieldwork on hip hop culture in Tokyo, focusing particularly on its emergence in the late 80s and on its successors today, in the context of the crisis of the recording industry and the advent of digital circulation of music.
How, space-wise, did a particular understanding of the space in which we live bring about the appropriation of Tokyo urban landscape into the ‘scene’ whose authenticity was projected to American black neighbourhoods? Through which routes in the same space did the formation of the scene enable the physical packaging and commercial circulation of their sounds and images nation-wide and beyond? How does the collapse of urban record shops and upsurge of music SNS transform the scene and spatial distribution of its agents?
Music is an important component of today’s global popular culture landscape while very often we simplistically assume that music cuts across different cultures and moves freely within, particularly in the advent of digitalised information society. However, a closer look reveals that music undergoes a variety of transformation as it mediates from one place to another, one culture to another. In sketching in local hip hop culture’s trajectories through different configurations of space, I would like to point in this speech to some possibilities for collaborative research with spatial perspectives in future so as to deepen our understanding of media, urban space and globalising popular music.
