关键词: 音乐, 表演, 广州, 文化地理, 音乐地理

Abstract:

The main purpose of this article is to examine the ways in which popular music (live music) in Guangzhou is implicated in the emotive production of performance venues, and how it is located in Guangzhou. The popular music in Guangzhou can be considered to be a noise that has social and political power to challenge the pre-existing place meanings and norms, rather than simply being sounds that lack aesthetics. According to the previous cultural geographical analysis on popular music, how (popular) music is embodied and performs the space and place is the core issues in recent research. Especially, the non-representational side of music is highlighted in current music studies. However, the geographical research on popular music in China is rare and limited to the discussions on the relations between music and place. This shortcoming limits geographers’ understanding of popular music in contemporary urban China, and obstructs Chinese cultural geographies’ focuses on ‘ways of doing/practice’. Drawing on participant observation and life history interviews with 25 informants (3 owners, 4 organizers, 15 musicians and 4 audience members) in 6 live houses in Guangzhou (T: union; C: union; Musician; SD livehouse; 191 Space; and Tek Kwun), this article analyses the function of popular music in performing the identities of different people, creating the mobilizing and transgressive space/place for the participants to form their embodied identities, and modernising traditional social norms. Building up the theories and results from Wood et al.’s (2007) non-representational music study and Revill’s (2000) politics of popular music, the findings of this research indicate that: firstly, music has ‘cultural authority’ in the organization of the socio-cultural, economic, and political spaces. The performance venues, therefore, can be considered as a kind of material culture which is made by their owners, music events’ organizers, musicians and audiences; Secondly, the performance venues are mobilising. They are made by performing music that is on the move, and are empowered by the musicians who create and perform the music, and people who arrange the performance venues; at the same time, these venues are transgressive, they are seen as pollution in Guangzhou, and evade the ‘formal procedure’ of performance, and distinguish the ‘insiders’ from ‘outsiders’. Conversely, the bodies are shaped and restricted by the socio-political contexts in Guangzhou and the physical venues. These findings not only respond to the previous music geographical studies on lyrics and sounds/voices, but also extend the research areas of Chinese popular music. In addition, though the existed music studies have paid attentions on Chinese popular music, most of them are from western or westernized views. Therefore, this musical research with non-western gaze in non-western society provides a new perspective to Chinese cultural geographers to go further the analysis on ‘the ways of seeing’.

Key words: music, performance, Guangzhou, cultural geography, geographies of music