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The night and popular music have long served to energise one another, such that they appear inextricably bound together as trope and topos. This history of reciprocity has produced a range of resonant and compelling imaginaries, conjured up through countless songs and spaces dedicated to musical life after dark. Nocturnes: Popular Music and the Night is one of the first volumes to examine the relationship between night and popular music. Its scope is interdisciplinary and geographically diverse.
The contributors gathered here explore how the problems, promises, and paradoxes of the night and music play off of one another to produce spaces of solace and sanctuary as well as underpinning strategies designed to police, surveil and control movements and bodies. This edited collection is a welcome addition to debates and discussions about the cultures of the night and how popular music plays a continuing role in shaping them.
List of contents
Introduction: Because the Night...(Giacomo Bottà & Geoff Stahl).- Part I.Nightclubbing.- 1.'In the Pitch Dark': Searching for a 'Proper Allnighter' in the Current Northern Soul Scene (Sarah Raine).- 2. Putting Paris and Berlin on Show: Nightlife in the Struggles to Define Cities' International Position (Myrtille Picaud).- 3. Pubcrawling Lisbon: Nocturnal Geoethnographies of Bairro Alto (Jordi Nofre & Daniel Malet Calvo).- 4. When Night Fails? Wellington's Night-Time Culture in Flux (Geoff Stahl).- 5. Learning by Doing: Young Indonesian Musicians, Capital and Night-Life (Oki Rahadianto Sutopo).- Part II. Dark Histories.- 6. "Sounds and Scents in the Evening Air": Sense and Synaesthesia in Popular Song Settings of Baudelaire's Evening Harmony (Caroline Ardrey).- 7. Got Any Gay Music? London's 'Anti-Gay' Queer Clubs 1995-2000 (Leon Clowes).- 8. Music and Fear in Night-Time Apartheid (Michael Drewett).- Part III. The Night Has a Thousand Eyes.- 9. Nocturnal Paradox: How Breakdancing Reveals the Potentials of the Night (Rachael Gunn).- 10. Can We Play Here? The Regulation of Street Music, Noise, and Public Spaces after Dark (Jhessica Reia).- 11. Transformative Darkness: Fear, Vigilantism, and the Death of Trayvon Martin (Abimbola Cole Kai-Lewis).- Part IV. Midnight Rambler.- 12. Songs of the Apple: The Flaneuse in Nocturnal Tokyo (Karen Anne Mata).- 13. A Hustle Here and a Hustle There: Lou Reed in The City Of Night (Jarek Paul Ervin).- 14. 'Tonight you're still on my mind': Nostalgia and Parody in Donald Fagen's The Nightfly (Nathan Seinen).- 15. Algorithm of the Night: Google's DeepDream and (Dis)Harmonies of an Eternal Nocturnal (Christopher M. Cox).- Afterword: Will Straw.
About the author
Geoff Stahl is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His research areas include cities, scenes, subcultures, semiotics, popular music and advertising. He has published on music making in Montreal, Berlin and Wellington.
Giacomo Bottà is a grant researcher and part-time lecturer in cultural urban studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has researched and written about post-punk in Manchester and Düsseldorf, social beat and poetry slam in Berlin, punk in Turin and Tampere, a Clash gig in Bologna and about music scenes in declining industrial cities in general. He edited Invisible Landscapes: Popular Music and Spatiality (2016).
Summary
The night and popular music have long served to energise one another, such that they appear inextricably bound together as trope and topos. This history of reciprocity has produced a range of resonant and compelling imaginaries, conjured up through countless songs and spaces dedicated to musical life after dark. Nocturnes: Popular Music and the Night is one of the first volumes to examine the relationship between night and popular music. Its scope is interdisciplinary and geographically diverse.
The contributors gathered here explore how the problems, promises, and paradoxes of the night and music play off of one another to produce spaces of solace and sanctuary as well as underpinning strategies designed to police, surveil and control movements and bodies. This edited collection is a welcome addition to debates and discussions about the cultures of the night and how popular music plays a continuing role in shaping them.
