ABSTRACT
Popular music, like other popular media, has the ability to mediate social knowledge, reinforce (or challenge) ideological constructions of contemporary (or past) life and be an agent of hegemony. Beyond that, and central to its importance, it is a part of everyday life and a key element of recreation for many. It accompanies and transforms daily life for vast numbers of the world’s population. Even so it has received scant attention in the world of geography primarily because its spatial impact is supposedly trivial. Though Guattari once described music as ‘the most non-signifying and de-territorializing of all’ cultural forms (1984: 41) it is now evident that music can be linked to images of place, and to the places where music has been created and performed, and that it is one element of the transformative power of globalisation.
