ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the changing relationship of young people to place and space through the study of the intersections of ‘the local’ and ‘the global’ in youth music cultures. Using the story of the take-up and transformation of hip hop in Bristol as a case study, I build on the existing literature on youth, place, space and music (Bennett 2000; S. Cohen 1991; Elfl ein 1996; Kahn-Harris 2000; Shank 1994). While my primary focus is upon illustrating the details of the case study, I also briefl y illustrate how Dürrschmidt’s (2000) concept of the ‘milieu’ and Bourdieu’s thoughts on the ‘fi eld of cultural production’ (1993; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992) offer tools which may help researchers to frame the complex interrelationships between global music cultures and local contexts. The notion of the milieu here is useful in capturing the particularities of local music cultures through which global genres can be adapted and transformed, while Bourdieu’s arguments about the logic of the fi eld of cultural production offer us a way of understanding the relationship between such localised music practices and the wider music industry.
