The Tricky Business of Cultural Memory - Mapping the Paradigms that Shaped Trip-Hop Music

Sammanfattning

This thesis explores cultural memory and collective identity in trip-hop music. First, I question what it was about Bristol’s history and demography that created such a highly interesting and unusual music scene. To examine how music carries cultural memory, an investigation of significant Bristol artists like Massive Attack and Tricky is undertaken. Expanding the scope, I compare these genres to Britpop, proposing a critique of how that genre expressed national identity and soft power. Based on inter-disciplinary analysis, blending methods and theories from visual culture, linguistics, and sociology, this thesis examines how social, cultural, and historical context generate the meaning of music, transforming it into an audiovisual and imagistic medium. To support the argument that trip-hop was a significant medium of cultural creativity, I draw upon Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia and Mark Fisher’s theory of hauntology in late-stage capitalism. The core methodological structure comprises an active application of Giorgio Agamben’s notions of the paradigm and the apparatus to a popular music and visual culture context. This makes it a wild archaeological undertaking, in which the artefacts of popular culture express meaning through their form. Thus, it constitutes an inquiry into the present as much as it does the past.