#audiotopia

By embracing the idea of music as an audiotopia, we are embracing music's role in what Soja calls "the lifeworld of being creatively located not only in the making of history but also in the construction of human geographies, the social production of space and the restless formation and reformation of geographical landscapes." [Foucault's] heterotopia prophesied Ruth Levitas's revision of utopian thinking, wherein instead of looking for "maps of the future," we look for "adequate maps of the present" that can lead to a more just world. To echo a similar revision by Rustom Bharucha, these maps point us to the possible, not the impossible; they lead us not to another world, but back to coping with this one. Because of music's ability to do just this - to point us to the possible, to help us remap the world we live in now - and because of its uncanny ability to absorb and meld heterogeneous national, cultural, and historical styles and traditions across space and within place, the possibility of the audiotopia makes sense: sonic spaces of effective urban longings where several sites normally deemed incompatible are brought together, not only in the space of a particular piece of music itself, but in the production of social space and the mapping of geographical space that music makes possible as well. In a sense, audiotopias can also be understood as identificatory "contact zones," in that they are both sonic and social spaces where disparate identity-hformations, cultures, and geographies historically kept and mapped separately are allowed to interact with each other as well enter into relationships whose consequences for cultural identification are never predetermined. Through affectively empowering emotional changes, music promotes the establishment of sustaining relations of community and subculture that are fundamental to the creation of an alternative public realm.

Having The Weavers as a musical blueprint meant that from the beginning I got the message - however subconsciously - that music was about cultural exchange, internationalist interpretation, and radical politics. The Weavers were white, English-speaking, highly educated Americans, and yet some of their songs were in Spanish and Hebrew, some of their songs were written by Latin American revolutionaries, South African poets, and African American laborers. They identified as "American folksingers" and yet their America was different from McCarthy's, different from Jim Crow's and different from suburbia. Their America was a provisional, ideal America where racial difference did not mean racial persecution, where rights and social welfare were not selective, where, as their partner-in-folk-crime Woody Guthrie would sing, the land belonged to everyone, from the Native Americans it was taken from to the poor black, white and Mexican farmers who now worked its fields. ... This idea of being a stranger among sounds immediately seemed a fitting way to understand how identity and listening work and, especially in the context of "American" music and "American" culture, a fitting way to approach the study of music's relationship to the production of listening subjects, citizens of pop music's myriad republics of sound. Popular music has always been my refuge because it is the refuge of strangers; because in the world of popular music, we are all strangers among sounds made by others.