Apropos yesterday's post about the way the internet has changed the discovery of new music (for the worse!), I wonder: what has happened to regional band clusters and their sound? Back in the day, you knew certain cities had their sound. The Boston sound, the LA sound, the Gainesville sound, the Omaha sound, the Austin sound, the Denver sound, the Bakersfied sound (seriously).
Linguists say that the advent of national television has caused a dilution in regional accents. Sure, someimtes you can identify a guy with a hard Boston, Chicago or Vermont accent, but even most Texans pretty much sound like Midwesterners these days. Has the the same happened with bands? Is there still a distinct Boston scene/sound, or has the internetization of music diluted the similarities.
It does seem like regional musical dialects still exist pretty strongly in rap: Houston, Dirty South, Cali, etc.
If it hasn't been done, it'd make for a great study for some budding ethnomusicologist. Ideally you'd have some kind of empirical way to measure the similarness of a cluster of bands, and then see whether that measure has changed of time.
Anyone have any ideas?
Seems like you'd want a little bit of a more complex analysis: with regional accents you don't get a few people in Boston starting to talk with a gentle southern drawl just because they heard the sound and liked it.
In the case of music I'd wonder whether the number and size of identifiable "clusters" isn't the same or larger, but just not geographically limited anymore.
The new folk/freak folk/whatever people are calling it scene seems like a useful example: not really big or mainstream, but a pretty significant amount of cross-pollination happening that wouldn't be possible if all of the artists were working in relative isolation.
I really miss the "holy crap, I've never heard anything like this before" cassettes passed from hand to hand, too, but I'm not sure that the changes are all for the worse.
Posted by: whitneymcn | May 11, 2008 at 08:44 PM
I don't know much about hip hop, but the Cajun and zydeco of southern Louisiana hasn't been homogenized away, least not yet. And even though jazz has gone international, their remains a New Orleans style. Bands like the Dirty Dozen Brass Band or Bonerama - they couldn't come from anywhere other than New Orleans.
That seems to me to be evidence for a persisting local musical dialect.
Posted by: Mike Giberson | May 12, 2008 at 11:07 PM
I guess I am not the only one having all the enjoyment here!
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