ABSTRACT
Popular music and cities have always been closely connected. The emergence of commercial forms of popular music during the nineteenth century was bound up with industrialization and increasing urbanization. Rhythm and blues and rock'n'roll developed in North American cities, such as Memphis and Chicago, in the 1940s and 1950s following mass migration to those cities from rural areas and the subsequent mixing of rural blues and country with urban jazz. The global economic recession of the 1970s, resulting from a crisis in the global capitalist economy based upon so-called 'Fordist' methods of mass production, provoked dramatic changes in Liverpool and in many other port and industrial cities. It encouraged and intensified a process of de-industrialization and depopulation that gave rise to intense debates about the future of such cities and their role and significance within the global economy. The chapter examines the impact of urban de-industrialization and economic restructuring on popular music culture.
