Vicarious Journeys: Travels in Music

Abstract

This paper discusses links between cultural constructions of places in tourism and in music, with a textual analysis of visual materials associated with selected musical releases. Album covers, liner notes and websites are symbolic devices to market music, establish credibility and ‘authenticity’; they also serve as representations of other places. Economic and technological changes beyond music itself also contributed to the widespread adoption and adaptation of visual symbols. Places themselves provided evocative and seemingly endless sets of images for discursive constructions of music (and music commodities), particularly when mass tourism became possible. Three genres of music from different time periods – lounge music, ambient (new age) music and world music – demonstrate how idealized places and essentialized identities have been produced and reinforced through visual musical texts. Such images have created vicarious tours, through music, to distant, exotic places and, at the same time, have mobilized particular (and often problematic) depictions of place, ethnicity and gender. They have stimulated notions of timeless, idyllic places that enabled vicarious tourism, accompanied and endorsed nostalgia and encouraged the emergence of new destinations.

Keywords:

• Music
• tourism
• visual and aural texts
• exoticism
• gender
• authenticity