Music and Urban Geography (review)

In Music and Urban Geography, Adam Krims explores the many ways that music and cities act upon one another now that the economic and cultural realities of globalization are literally reshaping the international urban landscape. Throughout the book, he challenges the common musicological posturing that music of a localized "place" is independent of, and therefore resistant to, the market forces of mainstream capitalist culture. Furthermore, Krims indicates the musicological necessity to more closely examine the cross marketing of classical music, and demands a reconsideration of the role of Adorno's thought in cultural musicology. Finally, he suggests that spatial explanations of popular musics in particular may provide valuable tools with which to interpret urban histories and, using Krims's terminology, the "social possibilities" therein.

The stated purpose of the book, a collection of five essays with an introduction, takes "as a premise the dramatic changes in the world metropolises over the past few decades, using them as instances for explaining changes in musical culture, and looking toward how the two processes may find a connection in a larger unity, including contributions from music back to urban form" (p. xix). One promise of this approach is realized through the variety of musicological discussion thereby enabled, the diverse subject matter of each individual chapter serving here as cases in point: "Defining the Urban Ethos," "Space, Place, and Popular Music in Curaçao and Elsewhere," "Mourning the Impossible Libidinal City in Boogie Nights," "Marxist Music Analysis after Adorno," and "Music for the Design-Intensive City."

These otherwise disparate topics are bound together quite tightly by the author's well developed knowledge of urban geography, and he lucidly offers the reader new tools with which to examine the many modes of contemporary musical consumption. Chief among the theories Krims adopts is an economic world-view known as "post-Fordism," which recognizes a global economy built upon flexible labor and production, vertical disintegration (outsourcing), liberalized trade, the centrality of information in production, and the increased role of regional and urban specialization (p. xxiii). As distinguished from "Fordism," the mode of economic production born of Henry Ford's methods of mass production, post-Fordism depends on the process of "flexible accumulation," in which producers rely on specialized labor and production methods designed to react more quickly and specifically to market changes than would be otherwise possible using Ford's models.

The distinction between Fordism and post-Fordism plays heavily into Krims's over-arching critique of what he believes to be cultural musicology's myopic celebration of subaltern cultural practices and their power to challenge the "totalizing" effects of capitalism. In Krims's view, such cultural practices, "which profit from challenging or complicating national boundaries, dominant identities, and cultural homogeneities, acquire value precisely for having challenged hegemony—and not coincidentally, for having disrupted the deadening sameness embodied in Adorno's nightmare [the loss of human agency to total capitalism]" (p. 104).

Krims provides a healthy counter-balance to at least two decades of popular music scholarship, devoting the entirety of chapter 4 to challenging Adorno's own hegemonic status as cultural musicology's Marxist stand-in. If, as he posits, music now exists in a post-Fordist world, the spectral centrality of Adorno's theories to cultural musicology need to be revised, for—at the risk of oversimplification—Adorno lived in a Fordist world. According to Krims, now that the global economy is defined in part by nimbly adjustable design and niche marketing, any discussion of the culture industry of the mid-twentieth century is an anachronism; the potential loss of human agency to the totalizing forces of today's global capitalism becomes at once both more complicated and evasive.

Post-Fordism also informs his discussion of popular music in Curaçao, particularly the form of song known there as "tumba," in which he argues that tumba's popularity is integrally tied to the cultural regeneration of Willemstad, Curaçao's chief city, as a world tourist...