Putting the night to music

The search field dedicated to nightlife (night studies) is flourishing. One of its particularities is that it is largely led by geographers and urban planners, but also by researchers from the study of popular music (popular music studies), as indicated by the recent publication of Nocturnes: Popular music and the nightThis book was edited by Geoff Stahl, known for his research on the music scenes in Montreal, Berlin and Wellington, and Giacomo Bottà, a specialist in punk and post-punk across Europe, particularly in deindustrialized cities (Manchester, Düsseldorf, Turin, Bologna and Tampere).

Historical studies of urban life often use music as a common thread or starting point to shed light on this hidden part of social life, as Will Straw points out in his afterword. In fact, café-concerts, cabarets, clubs and even dedicated concert halls are essentially nocturnal. They participate in this presential and collective culture that Stahl and Bottà contrast, in the introduction to this work, with the individualized and/or functional uses of music during the day (listening with headphones on public transport, background music in shopping centres, etc.). Music venues have this ability to bring together, during the night, groups of people on an affective and bodily principle that goes beyond or dilutes other classic identity categories. However, within research on popular music, this nocturnal dimension is, at best, taken for granted or, at worst, completely ignored. The history of these musics was indeed for a long time reduced to works, before gradually opening up to places of production (rehearsal and recording studios) and diffusion (festivals, concerts, public spaces, etc.). Through a series of cases scattered around the world, this book therefore responds to a certain lack concerning the intimate and complex link that unites the night and popular music.

Musical night, new avatar of the creative city

The nocturnal musical activity of large European and North American cities has today become one of the avatars of the modern city, as evidenced by the interest of public authorities who seek to both promote it and instrumentalize it. This is brilliantly demonstrated in the chapter by Myrtille Picaud, through the example of Paris and Berlin. The attractiveness of clubs and the reappropriation of vacant spaces linked to deindustrialization have placed musical nights at the heart of the strategies for transforming these capitals into “creative cities”. Berlin’s transformation being older, it now serves as a model for the French capital, where ephemeral clubs (warehouses) are proliferating, often with the help of the authorities and large companies. The position of the players in the nightlife musical scene is ambivalent, because they benefit from this change as much as they suffer from it. While having the advantage of being ejectable, these spaces thus serve to restore the image of formerly marginalized areas, or even to develop, in finemajor real estate projects. However, Straw points out, public policies related to nightlife have also sought to move away from music, by diversifying the nighttime offering (museums, gyms, libraries, etc.), or even by directly attacking music venues. Whether or not they are linked to music, these nighttime developments are more broadly part of the gentrification of post-industrial cities: rising rents, privatization of public spaces, emergence of standardized places of consumption and residents who perceive nighttime activity as a nuisance. The identification of this problem has recently led, in France, to changes in legislation relating to the seniority of music venues in the event of a dispute.

These trends explicitly raise the question of the modes of governance and regulation of nightlife, as well as the measurement of the impact of music venues on the quality of life of a neighbourhood or a city. The case of Wellington described by Stahl is striking in this respect, because it is the same company that carries out noise checks on behalf of the town hall and that provides most of the security guards (bouncers) to the city’s clubs. Beyond this type of conflict of interest that is quite classic at the local level, the regulation of urban areas often does not fit well with any nocturnal musical activity in public spaces, as shown in Jhessica Reia’s chapter on street musicians in Rio de Janeiro and Montreal. These musicians are in fact the first to be affected by the power mechanisms aimed at standardizing, or even neutralizing, nightlife, particularly because of the stigma of their activity that is associated with begging. Maintaining a nocturnal musical life open to all is therefore the subject of a constant struggle, even in places that have a real street music culture, such as samba in Rio.

In search of the nocturnal spaces of emancipation

The night regime generally presents itself in two complementary facets for musicians: that of risk and that of opportunity. On the one hand, it acts as a space of confinement and repression in which music is perceived as a vector of disorder and risky behavior (drug use, unbridled sexuality, etc.). Michael Drewett’s chapter on black musicians during apartheid teaches us how there were not only legal obstacles (for example curfews) to performing in concerts at night, but also symbolic obstacles, because the apparent calm of South African nights hid extreme violence, most often committed by the police. This risk is also found in the songs of the musicians of the time. On the other hand, the hidden dimension of the night is of capital importance for the expression of cultural minorities who are openly marginalized during the day. For example, using archives, Jarek Paul Ervin shows how the night is a founding element of New York queer culture, a space of experimentation and emancipation. By studying it through the prism of the song ” Walk on the wild side » by Lou Reed and his characteristic vocal detachment, Ervin also highlights the fatalism of a part of the queer community faced with the idea of ​​its true recognition by daytime society.

There is a lot of research into alternative nightlife practices, and they often aim to overcome the divide between safety and commercial entertainment that the concept of night-time economy. While the latter refers to an arrangement of nighttime rhythms that benefits Richard Florida’s famous “creative class” and is based on the exploitation of cheap, sleep-deprived labor, the civic night instead considers non-commercial, community-based, and emancipatory activities. Beyond the street musicians and the queer community already mentioned, we can cite the example of Australian breakdancing enthusiasts studied by Rachael Gunn, the feminist figure of the Japanese flâneuse described by Karen Anne Mata, and the collective wanderings of young Indonesian musicians documented by Oki Rahadianto Sutopo. One of the riches of the book is therefore to point out these geographically distant dynamics, but brought together by the anthropological ambivalence of the urban night: between violence and solidarity, dispersion and homogeneity, interest and creativity.

However, it is not a question of idealizing all nocturnal behaviors. Jordi Nofre and Daniel Malet Calvo show, for example, how the laissez-faire attitude of the Lisbon authorities has led to the development of misogynistic and harmful night tourism, centered on alcohol consumption and where local musical culture occupies a rather marginal place. The Portuguese capital thus seems to be only the decor, partly sound (soundscape), of a low-cost relocation of an alcoholic culture where rape culture reigns. This problem exists elsewhere and in other musical contexts, such as concerts or festivals, and is only just beginning to be the subject of academic work. We cannot therefore reduce music and nocturnal artistic activities to simple ramparts against the alienating and colonizing tendencies of urban society and contemporary capitalism. In fact, in its relationship to new technologies, the nocturnal experience is largely marked by these tendencies. The current configuration of urban societies has allowed the emergence of an “eternal night”, through an offer of continuous, automated services, and a blurring of the distinctions between leisure and work, real and virtual. This aspect is expressed through the example of DeepDream. As Christopher M. Cox explains in his contribution, this software developed by Google is supposed to provide a virtual substitute for our dreams. It thus functions as the digital and musical spectrum of the playful cannibalization of our sleep time by the internet.

Conclusion

We can therefore only note the vitality of research on the contemporary night, which is approached here from a musical perspective. However, the youth and fragmentation of this field of research are particularly visible in this work. In several contributions, the theoretical articulation of the night with music (or even with other aspects of social life) appears weak or convoluted. Indeed, since the night is an aspect of our environment that is at once natural, abstract and fleeting, its understanding is not always easy. It is similar to what is called a “hyperobject”, that is to say, something “massively distributed in time and space in relation to humans”, which can be experienced concretely without being easily delimited, and which implies a particular style of thought and writing. This style remains to be invented, in our opinion. In the various works proposed, the concept of night is presented in a way that is too often volatile and under-theorized, whereas it precisely calls for a solid framework of thought in order to be judiciously circumscribed.

On the methodological level, we know how difficult it is to investigate in a nocturnal environment, to gather information, to occupy the field in a productive and ethical manner. However, the various chapters are rather vague on this subject: we do not know how much time the researcher spent in the field, the type of interaction with the night owls, etc. More generally, the massive and overflowing aspect of the nocturnal theme results in a fragmentation of themes and approaches that is not always fruitful, especially in the case of analyses of works that refer, sometimes somewhat distantly, to the night. We are not opposed, in principle, to the coexistence of field approaches and corpus analysis, but they are never juxtaposed and give a feeling of fruitless disciplinary compartmentalization. Without expecting this work to resolve all the intellectual challenges linked to the study of a vast object such as the night, we believe that these disciplinary and methodological questions are priorities for the development of night studies.