ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the ways official cartographies of popular cultural memory in Liverpool exercise a performative function predicated on marketing and branding the city as a space of consumption, tourism, and heritage. It also focuses on the question of scope and critical efficacy of cultural mapping from two distinct but overlapping trajectories. The distinctions lie in the specificities of film and popular music as cultural and spatial practices that underwrite multiplicity of forms of urban cultural engagement and each of which mobilizes critical perspectives in disciplinary fields. The maps produced by the rock musicians, for example, tended to trace the biographical journeys of the musicians and bands involved and to focus on live performance venues in Liverpool city center. The instrumental value attached to film and popular music geographies lies in their performative functionality in respect to wider social, spatial, and economic structures and processes.
