Louisville’s Underground: Music Scenes and Urban Imaginaries

Keywords: Urban, Counterculture, Imaginaries, Placemaking, Louisville
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

The fight against displacement and dispossession is the most pressing struggle of the modern city. It transforms both the material landscape of the city and our image of the city – and it’s staged through cultural production as much as through political debate and economic development. A specific form of urban cultural landscape, music scenes are collective imaginative texts in which these socially contested processes are simultaneously written, read, and revised. However, critical research at the nexus of urban and cultural geographies which explores the resistant potential of countercultural production rather than the hegemonic impact of mainstream cultural production is underdeveloped. Such research is particularly vital in Louisville, where effects of these struggles have recently drawn global attention. This study examines Louisville’s music scenes to explore how these processes unfold as part of everyday urban experience. It relies upon the interviews, lyrics, flyers, and fanzines collected in the Louisville Underground Music Archive to analyze the city’s nationally significant (1980s-1990s) underground scene. Why are some cultural forms valued while others are devalued? Which groups are made visible and which groups are made invisible in the process? And what are the im/material manifestations of struggles over the evaluation of urban cultural production? Cultural production mediates the relationship between placemaking and urban imaginaries – and countercultural production is radically transformative. This study will amplify the voices of historically marginalized populations and it will illustrate how their music grappled with inequality and sought to keep that struggle at the forefront of our urban imagination.