ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between live music and urban change. Focusing on rock music in the city of Liverpool (situated on the northwest coast of England), it considers how music performance, and the social dynamics involved, relates to various trends in urban regeneration. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to long-standing debates about the impact of urban change on social groups and cultural identities. While there is no space here to do justice to their subtleties and complexities, one set of debates concerns the emergence and growth of cities in the industrial era. Some scholars, for example, have argued that this urbanization, along with developments in media and communication technologies, prompted a decline or loss of community and the rise of individualism (Tönnies 1887 [1957]; Wirth 1938). Yet, this rather evolutionary perspective has been countered by scholars interested in the symbolic creation of community within urban contexts and how developments in media and communication technologies have enabled that process (Anderson 1983; Cohen 1985). For other scholars, the same developments have given rise to alienation, as illustrated by Benjamin’s distinction between the urban crowd and the street spectator or flâneur. These debates have been applied to music by scholars who argue that in a context of urbanization, popular music and the music industries have enabled the emergence of new alliances, communities, and collective identities that bring together even geographically dispersed urban audiences (Lipsitz, 1990; Cavicchi, 1998; Waxer 2002); or that they have instead given rise to alienated audiences, whether crowds of passive and ‘rhythmically obedient’ young jazz fans or the emotional, frustrated and manipulated Tin Pan Alley listener (Adorno, 1990).
