This collection contains ‘new research in the field of music geography’ (p. 1). The focus is on contemporary popular music, with case studies from the USA, the Caribbean, Canada, Australia and Great Britain. The book is divided into six thematic sections, each with its own introduction by the Editors. The contents list and the Introduction can be found on-line at http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754675778.

A sample illustrates the range of approaches. In the first essay in Part 1, ‘Music, Space and Political Activism’, Robert J. Kruse II explores the Lennon/Ono peace campaign of 1969, including the way the couple used the non-sexual significance of the bedroom to relocate and defamiliarise political protest, and to bridge private feminised space and public masculinised space (pp. 21–23). The ‘bed-ins’ perplexed the media, partly because Lennon and Ono ‘were proposing strategies for peace that were based on symbolic and imaginative geographies, tactics difficult to evaluate in terms of instrumental social change’ (p. 26).

In Part 2, ‘Tourism and Landscapes of Music’, John Connell and Chris Gibson investigate ‘how music informs the creation of tourist spaces in Australia’ (p. 67). One of their case studies, Alice Springs, is particularly rich in insights into the dissonances between ‘authentic’ local musics and forms of tourist ‘world music’. The latter is represented here in the form of ‘aboriginalised’ ambient music. At the same time, ‘the bulk of the contemporary music that is actually produced by Aboriginal Australians [like country and rap] is ignored and excluded’ (p. 81). In the main tourist street, Todd Street Mall, the two are uncomfortably laminated over each other like that stage prop of physics lessons called a compound bar, consisting of two metals stapled together which, when heated, disclose their different expansion coefficients by buckling out of correspondence with each other. In the mall, the police are patrolling, ‘breaking up groups of Aboriginal people and removing those considered to have committed crimes or engaged in “anti-social” behaviour (such as begging, fighting and drinking). All the while, the ambient sounds of didjeridu and clapstick, and also of synthesized, pan pipes and flute are broadcast from the mall's background sound system and from shops selling Aboriginal art, music, and souvenirs’ (p. 83).

In Part 3, ‘Mapping Musical Texts’, Kevin Romig's essay analyzes the representation of California in songs from 1956 to 1996, tracing a thematic shift from ‘escapism and far-away romance’ to ‘masculinity and the gangsta's paradise’. He relates this to changes in ‘political, social, and economic realities of life in some parts of the state’. In Part 5, ‘Local Music in a Connected World’ Sarah Beth Keogh's ethnographic survey of ‘the impact of Internet broadcasting in the radio market in St. John's, Newfoundland’ (p. 186) provides lessons regarding ‘glocalisation’. Internet broadcasting from Newfoundland, with its global reach, identified an international archipelago of diasporic Newfoundlanders who, although dispersed, were able to feel part of their island community (e.g. pp. 188). Holly C. Kruse's study of the role of the internet in the indie scene in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, similarly rebuts some of the gloomier jeremiads about the erasure of local identities: ‘New communications technologies … do not necessarily cause the death of the local’ (p. 216).

In Part 6, ‘The Geography of Genres’, Steven Graves insists on clear distinctions, based largely on spatiality, between hip hop, which he argues is a folk music, and rap, which in his typology is a pop music. Recalling the dynamic articulated by Connell and Gibson, rap is considered more authentic than the original Bronx hip hop ‘by those who have never lived or experienced the inner city’ (p. 246; original italics). In the same section Deborah Che argues the link between the emergence of techno and the spatio-historical specificities of Detroit. The Fordist model that explicitly underpinned Motown Records provided a foundation for the post-Fordist exploitation of ‘technology and machines’ (p. 267) that produced techno. The collection concludes with a study by John Lindenbaum, which argues that Contemporary Christian Music in the US is not driven by missionary zeal, and is now best understood by reference to profit-dominated corporate.

Inevitably in such a collection the standard is uneven. In a couple of the essays the extrapolations do little more than tentatively paraphrase the data. Even so, there is also the value of simply learning about something that has been sidelined in the field, and the book is an abundant source of these satisfactions. For the most part, the ‘textual’ studies duplicate a pervasive problem in popular music studies (PMS): a disproportionate reliance on lyrics. Several of the contributors, including Sarah Dawes, John Finn and Chris Lukinbeal, acknowledge the importance of a point also made by Michael W. Pesses, that ‘popular songs are more than just lyrics’ (p. 148). In Olaf Kuhlke's otherwise fascinating study of a Canadian band, the Rheostatics, the absence of reference to musicality is particularly tantalising, given his comment regarding a song in French that while not all Canadians will understand it, ‘it is nevertheless the melody, the intonation, the musical quality of the French language that all Canadians understand and accept as part of their identity’ (p. 165). More exploration of this would have been of great interest. Several of the studies disclose no consciousness at all that to study a lyric is not in itself to study music.

All but two of the contributors are in Departments of Geography and the structuring of the articles reflects the models of scientific journals. Throwing open the window to other disciplines is a vital development in PMS, and this collection refreshes the stale air generated by the same endlessly recycled theoretical models. I was also presented with a new body of reading in the bibliographies that clearly I should be consulting. It is not simply that the Geographers manifest a distinctive emphasis, but also some conceptual modelling based on a different analytical discourse. Johansson and Bell, for example, in their study of new music scenes, deploy a diagrammatic model used by geographers that is able to represent three axes in a two-dimensional way. Through this they are able to map the relationship between 16 factors in the development of local scenes (pp. 221–3) and prognosticate new scenes in both Seattle and San Francisco. It exemplifies the general point that this collection is an invaluable general introduction to a well developed literature on Cultural Geography, sound and music.