Dave Matthews Band사례로 알아보는 '대중문화의 전파 경로'의 지리적 고찰

[Dave Matthews Band]

이 이야기는 창의적으로 생산해 낸 것이 아니라, 항상 그렇듯이

Human Geography (10th) by H.J.de Blij (Wiley) 책에서 베껴온 것임을 밝혀드립니다.

The innovation of agriculture took nearly 10,000 years to diffuse around the world. 

In much more recent times, the diffusion of developments such as the printing press or the Industrial Revolution
was measured over the course of 100 years or more.

파급되는데 10,000년이나 걸린 농업혁명, 100년이나 걸린 산업혁명

이런 사례들은 'A Distance Decay'모델의 대표적인 예시가 될 것입니다.

뜨거운 Hearth옆이 달궈지고, 그 뜨거운 열기가 전달 되는 것은 거리와 상관관계가 있을 것입니다.

그것이 바로 Distance Decay모델이죠.

멀어지면 그 뜨거움이 쇠락해간다는 아주 간단한 얘기.

다른식으로 생각해보면, 먼 곳까지 달궈지는데는 오랜 시간이 걸린다는 해석도 가능하겠죠.

하지만, 이런 것들(본문에 언급되는 Facebook은 유행-물리적 거리에 상관없이 빠르게 유행하는 사례)은
지리적으로 어떻게 설명할까요?

During the twentieth century, however, the pace of diffusion shrank to months, weeks, days,
and in some cases even hours. Simultaneously, the spatial extent of diffusion has expanded,
so that more and more parts of the Earth’s surface are affected by ideas and innovations from faraway places. 

For example, the social networking site Facebook

그래서 대안으로 나온 것이

David Harvey의 'time–space compression'입니다

(아래 그림)

[Figure 4.15a, b] Distance Decay and Time–Space Compression. 

With distance decay, the likelihood of diffusion decreases as time and distance from the hearth increases.
With time–space compression, the likelihood of diffusion depends on the connectedness
(in communications and transportation technologies) among places.

Transportation and communication technologies have altered distance decay. 

No longer does a map with a bull’s-eye surrounding the hearth of an innovation 
describe how quickly the innovation will diffuse to areas around it (Fig. 4.15 top). 

Rather, what geographer David Harvey called time–space compression explains
how quickly innovations diffuse and refers to
how interlinked two places are through transportation and communication technologies (Fig. 4.15 bottom).

인터넷와 mass communication 이라는 신무기를 통해 시-공간을 찌부려 뜨릴 수도 있다는 말입니다.

멀다고 innovation diffusion이 오래 걸린다는 얘기는 옛 이야기가 된 것이죠.

이제, Distance Decay 와 Time–Space Compression 두가지 모델을 Dave Matthews Band를 통해 알아보도록 하겠습니다.

이 책에서는 수 많은 대중가수들을 놔 두고 Dave Matthews Band를 골랐을까요?

혹시, 나이가 어느 정도 있으신 분들은 R.E.M을 기억하실런지 모르겠습니다
조금 더 젊으시다면 Hootie and the blowfish는요?

(그러고 보니, 저는 이 세 밴드의 앨범을 갖고 있네요 ㅎㅎ)

이 세 Band의 공통점은
대학가에서 시작해서 입소문으로 유명세가 퍼져나간 케이스라는 점입니다.

좀 더 학술적인 표현으로 말해본다면

초기에는 Contagious diffusion(대학가에서 입에서 입으로)이였다가
인기가 어느 정도 생긴  이후에는 Hierarchical Diffusion을 통해 인기가 확산된 경우라는 뜻입니다.

그러므로,

이들 밴드의 전파과정은 매우 지리적이란 얘기죠.

[Figure 1.22] Contagious and Hierarchical Diffusion. 

Human Geography (10th) by H.J.de Blij (Wiley) - 30page

[Figure 4.17] World Distribution of Dave Matthews Band concerts. 

Data from: http://www.bmbalmanac.com, last accessed July 2011. Compiled by Liz Sydnor and Lennea Mueller.
Human Geography (10th) by H.J.de Blij (Wiley) - 130page

* 참고로, Dave Matthews Band의 본거지는 Charlottesville입니다.

[Establishing a Hearth]

All aspects of popular culture—music, sports, television, and dance—have a hearth, a place of origin. 

Typically, a hearth begins with contagious diffusion

: developers of an idea or innovation may find they have followers who dress as they do or listen to the music they play. 

A multitude of American musical groups (REM, Hootie and the Blowfish, Vertical Horizon)
began as college bands or in college towns. 

They play a few sets in a campus bar or at a campus party and gain followers. 

The group starts to play to bars and campuses in nearby college towns,
and soon they sell self-made compact discs at their concerts.

Bands that begin on college campuses or in college towns
and build from their base typically follow the path of 
building a hearth for their sound’s diffusion first through contagious diffusion
and then through hierarchical diffusion. 

College towns like Athens, Georgia, Burlington, Vermont, Seattle, Washington, and Charlottesville, Virginia,
are the perfect nesting spaces for new bands. 

The Dave Matthews Band created and perfected their sound in Charlottesville, Virginia,
in the early 1990s. Lead singer and guitarist Dave Matthews was born in South Africa
and landed in Charlottesville as a young adult after living in Johannesburg, New York, and London 

Matthews was a bartender at Miller’s in Charlottesville when he met Ross Hoffman,
a local songwriter who mentored Matthews in song writing. 

The Dave Matthews Band was formed when Matthews invited Carter Beuford (drums),
LeRoi Moore (saxophone, who died in 2008), Stefan Lessard (bass),
and Boyd Tinsley (violin) to join him in creating a demo of some of his songs. 

The Dave Matthews Band’s fi rst live show was in Charlottesville on Earth Day in April 1991. 

The band played bars throughout the Charlottesville area from 1991 through 1993. 

Manager Coran Capshaw followed the path of diffusion carved by the Grateful Dead and Phish,
through a grassroots campaign of word of mouth (contagious diffusion).

Hierarchical diffusion of the band soon followed, through the hierarchy of college towns in the United States (Fig. 4.17).
The Dave Matthews Band played 200 nights a year in fraternities, sororities, bars,
and clubs throughout the American Southeast, following the same circuit as college band Hootie and the Blowfish. 

The band encouraged fans to record their music and send it to friends,
helping to establish audiences for the band in college towns far removed from Charlottesville.

Their first album, released in 1993, was on the band’s own independent label. 

It hit the college charts, and a union with RCA soon followed with their second album,
Under the Table and Dreaming, released in 1994. 

As Entertainment magazine explained in 1995,
“By playing nearly 200 gigs a year and releasing their own CDs,
they built up such a zealous following that when Under the Table entered the album chart at No. 34,
neither MTV nor most of America had even heard of them.” 

The band’s first video was not released until three months after the song
“What Would You Say” hit the Billboard charts.

The band became broadly popular after 1995 and began playing large arenas
throughout the United States and in Australia. 

The band continues to rely on its fan base for support. 

Manager Capshaw and the Dave Matthews Band were early adopters of using the Internet to stay connected with fans. 

Today, the official Dave Matthews Band fan club has over 80,000 online members,
each of whom pays $35 a year to belong.

The music of groups such as the Dave Matthews Band,
Phish, Grateful Dead, and Jimmy Buffet also diffuses relocationally,
as fans follow the musicians along their concert routes, living in their cars and selling tiedied shirts
and beaded necklaces out of the backs of their cars in the parking lots of concert venues. 

The action of following the bands for years (an estimated 500 to 1000 fans traveled to every Grateful Dead concert)
leads fans to create their own customs and culture. 

아무래도 Greatful Dead시절 얘기라면 woodstock이 있었던 1969시절의 히피들의 이야로 들립니다.
이때는 정말 '사랑'이라는 모토아래 저런 생활이 가능했던 시기였으니까요
물론 LSD와 같은 마약과 대마초도 flower movement의 빼놓을 수 없는 요소들이였던 시기였습니다.

Like other acts of pilgrimage (see Chapter 7 on religion), environmental effects can be grave. 

Prior to their final concert, Phish (breaking up for the second time)
used their website to plead to fans to leave their beloved rural Vermont as they found it. 

Today, Reverb, a nonprofit organization, helps bands,
including the Dave Matthews Band, create environmentally conscious concerts
by having bands purchase carbon offset credits for each of their concerts,
supporting recycling, selling eco-friendly merchandise,
and setting up Reverb Eco-Villages at concert venues to encourage eco-friendly behaviors among fans.

[Manufacturing a Hearth]

The question of whether a college band “makes it” depends greatly on the choices
and actions of record producers and music media corporate giants. 

Certain corporations, such as Viacom, the parent company of MTV, 
generate and produce popular culture, pushing innovations in popular culture
through the communications infrastructure that links them with the rest of the world.

Geographer Clayton Rosati studied the infrastructure of MTV
and its role in the production of popular culture 
and geographies of popular culture. 

In his study,
he found that MTV produces popular culture by opening globalized spaces to local culture,
thereby globalizing the local. 

Rosati explained that “MTV’s incorporation of rap music
and Hip Hop expressive forms into its production since 1997”
helped produce music celebrities and opened the MTV space to
“artists and forms that were often formerly relegated to street corners, block parties and mixtapes
—broadening the unification of popular aspirations with the machinery of the industrial production of culture.”

A 2001 documentary produced by PBS entitled The Merchants of Cool looks at the roles corporations
and marketing agencies play in creating popular culture. 

By conducting focus groups with teenagers (the main demographic for innovations in popular culture),
by amassing enormous databases of what teenagers do and like,
by sending “cool hunters” (“cool” kids themselves) out to talk with other “cool” kids about what is “cool,” 
and by rummaging through teenagers’ bedrooms (as Rosati noted MTV does for casting its reality shows),
MTV and marketing companies are creating what is cool,
what is new in popular culture. 

In the process of producing The Merchants of Cool, producers interviewed Sharon Lee,
one of the founding partners of Look-Look, a research company specializing in youth culture.

Lee explained how trends in popular culture are spread from the hearth:

Actually it’s a triangle. At the top of the triangle there’s

the innovator, which is like two to three percent of the

population. Underneath them is the trend-setter, which

we would say is about 17 percent. And what they do is

they pick up on ideas that the innovators are doing and

they kind of claim them as their own. Underneath them

is an early adopter, which is questionable exactly what

their percentage is, but they kind of are the layer above

mainstream, which is about 80 percent. And what they

do is they take what the trend-setter is doing and they

make it palatable for mass consumption. They take it,

they tweak it, they make it more acceptable, and that’s

when the mass consumer picks up on it and runs with it

and then it actually kills it.

This description is a perfect story of the hierarchical diffusion of traits and trends in popular culture.

With these kinds of infrastructure behind the production of popular culture,
we may expect popular culture to act as a blanket, evenly covering the globe. 

Even as popular culture has diffused throughout the world,
it has not blanketed the world, hiding all existing local cultures underneath it. 

Rather, one aspect of popular culture (such as music or food) will take on new forms 
when it encounters a new locality and the people and local culture in that place. 

Geographers and anthropologists call this the reterritorialization of popular culture
: a term referring to a process in which people start to produce an aspect of popular culture themselves, 
doing so in the context of their local culture and place, and making it their own.

굵은 글씨의 표현(비유)가 마음에 쏙 드네요^^