IN-PERSON New Schools of Thought

Abstract

Music videos are unmistakably geographic. Academics have been preoccupied with them since long before MTV, culminating in what cultural critic Simon Frith said, by 1988, had “generated more scholarly nonsense than anything since punk.” Despite videos’ potential for communicating and understanding sense of place, however representative, geography research on the cultural constant has been limited. Even more limited has been any approach to using music videos to teach geography. In my time teaching undergraduate courses on World Regional Geography, the Geography of Popular Culture, and related cultural topics, music videos have consistently provided valuable perspective into how artists represent and reproduce place. Additionally, the reoriented access to music videos in the streaming video era, especially those previously propelled by heavy rotation on MTV, MuchMusic, and an array of upstart cable networks in the late-20th century, has given life to countless forums of (often highly personal) open-access ethnographic content. This discussion seeks to build off of Smiley and Posts’ (2014) foundation on the valuable role that popular music plays in geography pedagogy. Using multiple examples of videos and video-related assignments, I argue that music videos provide an excellent foundation for communicating and understanding the relationship(s) between music, memory, and place.