Abstract
This paper offers an overview of nearly 20 years of researching music making in Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand. This is a critical commentary that engages with the musical life of the city as it has waxed and waned over that period of time. In reflecting on this, the discussion will engage with the ways in which the ‘creative capital’ of New Zealand has put into various policies that have, over time, cemented its status as a neoliberal, entrepreneurial city, while also noting the ways in which music makers have found ways to work within and without these policy frameworks.
In the following discussion, I offer a critical reflection on my nearly 20 years observing Wellington's music scenes, drawing directly and indirectly from some of the various studies I’ve done over that time. This includes references to national and local policies that have shaped the sociomusical experience and addresses a selection of micro- and macro-issues that are policy-related but also sit outside policy imperatives. Doing so will help illustrate how a constellation of factors has fallen into place, providing some impetus and stability for creative practice. As will also be made clear, other factors and events have undermined long-term sustainability, adding to a sense of precariousness that has only increased in recent years. I want to frame these as operating at different scales, at times in concert and others at odds. This disjuncture has transformed music-making in the city, producing some of the changes that present in Wellington as distinctly localised iterations of neoliberalism. I suggest that the current moment encourages opportunities to extend the horizons of what is possible for music making in Wellington, refashioning it as something other than in thrall to the lingering entrepreneurial fantasies of neoliberalism. This is more pressing as we move into another period of uncertainty and instability due to the global pandemic and its aftermath.
Peak or Piqued Wellington?
I moved to Wellington to take up a lecturing position at Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University of Wellington in 2005. 1 The tenor of the city's music scenes has been marked by, to flip Sara Cohen's study of Liverpool's music scenes on its head (2017), renewal and decline, an arc shared with many other cities. My arrival seemed to be at a musical apex, marked by the local, national and international success of such bands such as Trinity Roots, the Black Seeds and Fat Freddy's Drop, where Polynesian- and Māori-inflected soul, dub, reggae and dance music was holding sway in several mid-size and larger venues and bars around town. This vibrancy was tied in many respects to what Michael Scott and David Craig (2012) refer to as the country's ‘pop renaissance’, a period that overlaps the tenure of Helen Clark's Labour government (1999–2008) and marked by an alliance between cultural policy, industries and institutions operating under the aegis of the ‘promotional state’. 2 This was also a moment when a vibrant indie music scene was in full swing, with bands like the Phoenix Foundation, mathcore outfit So So Modern, the feminist interventions of Fantasing, and solo synth-pop artist Disasteradio playing at smaller venues tucked away at gigs in places such as Happy, Fred's, Zeal (an all-ages venue), Bodega and Mighty Mighty, sites about which I’ve written in the past (Stahl, 2011, 2018, 2022). As some of my respondents made clear in those early days, part of the success of the scene, an upswing that was rippling through the wider cultural sector around the country, was due in part to a government-sponsored artist subsidy, Pathways to Arts and Cultural Employment (PACE), which began in 2001(see Goodall, 2018). This form of state intervention was sometimes called the ‘artist dole’, a form of financial support instigated by the Labour-led government. This was a pro-arts, state-sponsored stance that aimed to bolster the role culture played in the health and vitality of the nation (PACE ran until 2012, at which point a new National-led government was in power and agendas had shifted so the funding was discontinued, though there have been calls to have it reinstated. See, for example, Wenley, 2023).
Eighteen years later, those bands and places are gone. The healthiness and vibrance that gave this scene its distinctive pulse has tapered off dramatically, a decline due to several overlapping factors: the closure of venues, tightening up of alcohol licensing laws, stricter enforcement of noise control, steep increases in the cost of living, shifting ideological agendas of municipal and national governments, and the impact of three large earthquakes on the viability of the building stock that makes up the material infrastructure of the scene's ecosystem. This series of events, which unfolded over many years, led to the proliferation of reckonings about the sorry state of music-making in the city in news stories, on social media, among music-makers, and in public discourse heard in bars and venues. This fed into a pervasive atmosphere of urban melancholy, which I have discussed regarding the recent disappearance of performance spaces, bars and venues (Stahl, 2018). On this latter sentiment, I noted that it opened up a space of thoughtfulness and reflection born of an absence and loss, where many of those invested in the city's musical ecosystem could continue to hold on to and work through Wellington as a space of possibility, a site valued for fruitful creative encounters. For many, this was, and is, about engaging with the city as an ethical space, facilitating a more extensive conversation as to what matters in the city, about how affective affinities to the place have shifted in light of the decline in available music venues and the consequent winnowing of the sociomusical experiences possible in Wellington.
Do-It-Yourself vs. Do-It-Together
This more recent period of reckoning puts into relief that earlier halcyon 2005-period. This was another moment of critical and collective reflection, which had as its mantra Do-It-Together, or DIT, an antidote to the kind of insidious way in which the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethos was seen by some as further, if slyly, entrenching neoliberal imperatives for many music-makers (Stahl, 2011, 2022). There is a history at play here. The social experiment of neoliberalism that began in the early 1980s in Aotearoa (see Kelsey, 2015), a radically transformative period – during which independent music also began to establish itself institutionally and industrially and an era into which most of my respondents at the time were born – was now being tackled from a deliberately counter-hegemonic position that embraced sharing and solidarity. Such a DIT vs DIY moment could suggest the lifestyle versus way of life Bennett and Guerra (2018) refer to, citing Chaney, as ‘demonstrative of the increasing reflexivity exhibited by individuals in both the practice and negotiation of everyday lifestu’ (13). Do-It-Yourself is figured here as an increasingly acute awareness that doing it yourself was less tied to its musical heritage and its indebtedness to punk, post-punk, hardcore and indie and bound up more with finding ways to resist or challenge or even work within the invidious, individualistic logic of neoliberalism. In Aotearoa, it was undoubtedly an uneasy mix of both, and the subcultural impulses towards resistance were undoubtedly at play in the Wellington scene. The shift in emphasis among its members, musicians and fans alike, from individual to collective, was inextricably tied to the kind of Third Way-style politics the then-PM Helen Clark (1999–2008) was instituting around cultural policy to bolster creative practice locally as well as provide a better showcase internationally (Volkerling, 2010). This went beyond PACE. Many of the artists received support for recording and touring from Creative New Zealand (established as a Crown Entity in 1994) and New Zealand on Air (founded 1991), institutional bodies that provided contestable funding for up-and-coming as well as established artists (see Shuker, 2008). Clark stepped into that role as PM and as Minister of Arts, Culture and Heritage at a point when New Zealand's neoliberalisation had been implemented more comprehensively and more consistently than any other of the governments of the English-speaking countries (Wade, 2001: 1).
Scott and Craig (2012) suggest this phase of state-subsidised, market-oriented support raised the profile for New Zealand musicians across several platforms here and abroad, leading to a robust local industry that lasted at least as long as Clark's tenure. As Russell Prince argues, in a discussion of the UK-inspired emphasis on creative industries more broadly, ‘(t)he development of creative industries policy in New Zealand was a disjunctive and often contingently realised process involving translation, experimentation and failure. As a result, while policy for the creative industries was initially intended to be cultural policy, it ended up being economic policy’ (2010, 133). Changes in the music industry and supporting institutions occurred with shifts in thinking about urban culture and policy around this time. Mullen and Harvey suggest that this thinking carries through the current situation, holding onto a model of creativity that has long determined cultural policy: (I)nitiatives established since 2017 leave in place the regime of truth shored up by governments since the late twentieth century. That the worth of artistic work is best judged according to its contribution, directly or indirectly to the capitalist market economy and economic growth; and that capitalist markets, or market-like processes, are most likely to deliver excellence in and access to the arts; and that work in the arts should be treated according to the ubiquitous logic of human capital. The regulation of the arts and discursive production of artistic subjectivities continues to leave few, if any, viable possibilities for ‘doing’ the arts or ‘being’ an artist in radically different ways. (2022: 303)
The character and quality of Wellington's creative life in the last couple of decades exemplify how, for example, cultural policies tied to such notions of artistic labour and creativity, alongside revamped regulatory regimes, have been linked with urban renewal, creating crucibles of sorts in many cities throughout the country. As Prince claims, this period of urban entrepreneurialism has relied on knowledge, symbolic and cultural economies becoming entwined in complex ways. Yoked together as such, they have been shaped not only by successive national and municipal governments embracing neoliberalisation but have elevated and highlighted a species of discourse that has long underpinned a story New Zealand is wont to tell itself. This is centred on the social and cultural value of the DIY ethos, colloquially referred to in New Zealand as ‘kiwi ingenuity’. Here, DIY is often understood as a practical response to a lack of otherwise readily accessible resources, a circumstance born out of distance from global markets and by immediate need. There is something locally significant about how technology and innovation have wired themselves into the national imaginary. On the face of it, here it is a relatively straightforward sociotechnical fact, a way of doing things born out of distance and practicality.
This ethos fits into standard takes on DIY in most respects, aligning with Bennett and Guerra's (2018) suggestion that ‘(m)ore than anything, DIY serves as a counterforce to neoliberalism’ (12). However, in Aotearoa, this is more complicated, as the DIT vs DIY sensibility outlined above suggests. There are inevitable links that can be made between a DIY ethos and neoliberal ideologies and policies. However, embracing DIY as a national sensibility also works to mystify other imperatives that underpin culture and creativity in contemporary Aotearoa. The media have done much to celebrate and sell this idea of entrepreneurialism as a badge of national pride. There are ample instances that make this case. For example, DIY home makeovers became competitive reality shows (see Cox, 2016). However, these sorts of reality shows can be found around the world. An example that better articulates how DIY finds local expression is a TV ad for Mitre 10, one of the country's home hardware chains, a commercial I’ve long been fascinated with. In it, two very young New Zealanders are in a sandpit, talking about their weekend, with one stating he's putting up a retaining wall and getting a ‘mate’ in. The friend encourages him to do it himself, inviting their Australian playmate to join them. The latter replies, ‘Mate, you’re dreaming!’ to which the New Zealander responds, ‘Aussies. No surprises there’. The ad closes with the slogan ‘DIY. It's In Our DNA’ (Mitre 10, 2012; initially aired in 2009).
Using kids to mouth the thoughts and sentiments of grown men and their weekend renovation plans say much about where DIY fits into the New Zealand imaginary. If not hard-wired into the national genetic code, at the very least, it is often deployed to use a marketing term as a point of difference, which shapes a sense of self and a collective identity. This has been celebrated as a distinctive part of the national character, an ethos articulated to and within an ethnos, informing cultural policy and debates and discussions about technology and innovation (Neilsen, 2007). It exemplifies how DIY becomes both an alibi for and an accomplice to neoliberalism. Framing Wellington as the nation's creative capital is thus articulating and articulated to a more significant myth (I mean by this Roland Barthes’ [1957] sense of myth as both a type of speech, an ideology and an alibi) that shapes the New Zealand imaginary, one that expresses itself in an entrepreneurial zeal and is often used as the signature brand of Wellington.
This sensibility is ingrained in the urban imaginary in Wellington (Jones and Smith, 2005; Bonelli et al., 2019), one of the ways in which music-making in the city is framed and around which cultural policy in the capital is designed and put into practice. This is a discussion about Wellington as an exemplar of a neoliberal city, certainly with its local peculiarities, given its geographical placement, topography and the tyranny of distance. As Brenner and Theodor note about this sort of specificity, what they term ‘actually existing neoliberalism’, by which they mean ‘the contextual embeddedness of neoliberal restructuring projects insofar as they have been produced within national, regional and local contexts defined by the legacies of inherited institutional frameworks, policy regimes, regulatory practices and political struggles’ (2002, 349). With that ‘contextual embeddedness’ in mind, I focus on what shaping Wellington into a neoliberal city over many years has done to music-making. In encouraging brand managers, city councillors and media pundits to adopt and promulgate the mantle of ‘the creative capital of New Zealand’ (Macandrew, 2019; Wellington City Council, 2023), what has been wrought on the health and vitality culture in the city, or more to the point what kind of culture is possible under a title that seems less and less tenable? In this capacity, I want to challenge that moniker, an exhausted trope that has too long contained/constrained the city. Drawing together fragments and asides, the remainder of this discussion offers an impressionistic meditation of music-making in the neoliberal city.
Making a muddle of middle-earth
As a leaping-off point, let me start in the middle of things. A particular moment stands out as illustrative of the issues faced by music-making in Wellington that was then coming into focus because, in certain respects, it foreshadows the current situation tellingly. It was a very pivotal juncture. In April of 2013, NZ's then-prime minister, John Key, told a group of business leaders: ‘The reality is even Wellington is dying and we don’t know how to turn it around…. All you have there is government, Victoria University and Wētā Workshop’ (Hallahan et al., 2013). The quip generated the sort of response one might reasonably expect, including from the city's mayor, pundits of all kinds, and, most vociferously, from the arts and culture sector, one which has been under sustained pressure from a conservative government whose leader who seemed little interested in arts and culture. In response to the backlash, Key walked back his comments, admitting he was referring primarily to the movement out of Wellington of significant business interests and corporate head offices, some of which had migrated to Auckland. So he was, in fact, not referring to arts and culture in Wellington at all, about which he admitted to know little. And while the gnashing of teeth among artists at the time was undoubtedly appropriate, not least because it confirmed Key to be the philistine many thought he was, that prophetic gaffe has become demonstrably true in the years since. But not for the reasons Key cites. He was focused on how many of his ideological stripe tend to read the health of a city against its financial fortitude, as measured by its attraction to corporate entities who want to headquarter there, often incentivised by corporate welfare in the form of tax subsidies and proximity and access to central government.
Some more context is needed to situate music-making within the city's broader cultural ecosystem. Under Key's tenure, the kowtowing to corporate interests was most tellingly revealed through the Employment Relations (Film Production Work) Amendment Act of 2010, what is known colloquially as ‘The Hobbit Law’, before his claim about the livelihood or lack thereof of Wellington. This was the moment when Key cosied up to Warner Bros. executives who were then thinking about where to shoot the Hobbit films, looking for amenable locations, meaning nations with the sort of de-regulated market that keeps investment costs low, plump with incentives like tax subsidies and made more attractive by offering a ‘flexible’ workforce, i.e., an ‘affordable’ pool of labour not privy to things such as benefits and overtime. The movie executives were flown over, wined and dined by Key, who had Peter Jackson in his corner. Jackson advocated for film workers to be dubbed contractors rather than employees, and he threatened that the films would go elsewhere if the government did not amend the law (Staff, 2010). As part of this, Key assured Warner Bros that New Zealand would bend to their corporate wants, and almost before the last forkful had passed their lips, the legislation was passed under urgency, meaning no proper parliamentary procedure, i.e., consultation, was followed. With that, New Zealand saw the further diminishment of workers’ rights through free market fundamentalism, and the exploitation of creative labourers became local law, changed at the behest of a foreign entertainment conglomerate (Ferrer-Roca, 2020).
Wētā and Peter Jackson have been held up as icons, the latter a de facto cultural ambassador of Wellington as the ‘creative capital’ of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Jackson is often revered as New Zealand's DIY entrepreneur extraordinaire (Leotta, 2015). On this, Williams (2021) offers this salient observation: He is simultaneously a personal brand (the local small-time director who escapes neoliberal precarity to make it big), the manipulator of an external brand (creator and conductor of the post-Tolkien LOTR), and patriotic hero (he kept it all in New Zealand because he loves it so). In a sense, Jackson is New Zealand, or at least the New Zealand that came into being with the advent of LOTR. (353)
This was confirmed in the literature associated with advocating for the creative city when Richard Florida begins his Flight of the Creative Class (2005) in Wellington and lauds Jackson and Wētā for what they’ve been able to establish in the city as a film-making hub (nowadays primarily doing digital imaging and post-production). I use this example because The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films and the creative labour they relied upon were very much the forces driving and populating the cultural ecosystem of Wellington at the start of the 21st century, including its music scenes. The success of LOTR was fuel for Wellington policymakers and others, who would reposition it as a creative city, the nation's ‘creative capital’ (Leotta and O'Regan, 2014). These workers populated the city's cultural spaces, sometimes as audience members and sometimes as performers. In the early to mid-00s, at the end of a 70-to-80-h workweek, they were looking for a release, a good night out. They joined with the city's other knowledge workers–civil servants, government employees, university staff and students, among others – bolstering the city's well-established service economy and lending it a conviviality deemed a welcome respite to this once grey government town. The need for quality nightlife became fundamental to the rise of Wellington. Its night-time economy flourished, with bars, clubs and cultural events coalescing to affirm that the city was indeed what the travel guide The Lonely Planet in 2010 dubbed ‘the coolest little capital’ (Wood, 2010).
City shakeup
As I’ve been intimating, since Key uttered his famous dismissal of the country's capital city, music-making in Wellington has become a harder scrabble. It was most certainly the case during lockdown and then afterwards. Still, the decline long precedes the pandemic, with the city's fragile musical ecosystem and its infrastructure, more generally, undercut by a series of significant earthquakes, which happened on either side of Key's claim: two in Christchurch in 2010 and 2011 and the 2016 Kaikōura quake further up the east coast of the South Island. All of these were felt dramatically in Wellington, situated on seven fault lines with varying degrees of activity, prompting a quick assessment of the city's residential and commercial building stock. After that first wave of quakes in Christchurch, hundreds of buildings were labelled earthquake-prone. Many had to be evacuated and others demolished. With the later Kaikōura quake, more were nominated unfit for lease 3 . At this point, many remain dormant and unoccupied as refurbishing costs are too prohibitive. In another city, these empty spaces might be primed for cultural squatting; instead, here they sit empty, haunting the city centre. This spectral quality is also abetted by negative gearing, which allows commercial landlords to simply hold onto unleased properties and write losses off against their other real estate income. Buildings have been dormant for over a decade under this regime, which could be put to other more culturally focused uses. In 2017, Labour changed the law, which would be phased in over five years (Small, 2017). With the pandemic and the consequences of more people working from home, it is difficult to assess this change's impact. However, dozens of buildings remain empty (Bishop, 2022).
Suppose we want to consider the political economy of the city's musical ecosystem further. In that case, there is diminishing revenue coming to bars or venues as the cost of living in the city centre has become prohibitive for the many young people, both musicians and audiences, that make up the music scene, with numerous news reports noting their flight to Australia or elsewhere (McClure, 2022). Rising rents and an overheated housing market have been detrimental to the cultural life of the city (there is no rent control in New Zealand, neither is there a capital gains tax, both of which could temper the housing market), not least because it discourages young people renting in the central city (McKee, 2021). This was underpinned by stricter social regulation due to changes in licensing laws and more zealous enforcement of noise bylaws from noise control patrols. With the scene's hard infrastructure atrophying, its building stock is but one dimension of this. The consequences have been alarming and combined with the depletion of the city's soft infrastructure, meaning fewer people out and about, a complex array of factors and forces, from seismic to economic to social, has over the last decade cumulatively and negatively impinged on music-making in the city.
What is this city?
Over the past 20 years, Wellington's waxing, now waning musical ecosystem prompts more questions, which can point to a more fruitful imagining of the city's future. I want to point to some ideas that broach issues, concerns, debates and discourses about culture in the city and its ecosystems. Moving the focus of my discussion laterally, I want to draw upon a comment made by the sociologist Robert Merton, a prompt that guides my research teaching. Some decades ago, in an overview of sociological methods, Merton suggestively put forward the notion that, when thinking about social and cultural objects of research, ‘problem-finding’ in sociology, it is often harder to come up with the right questions to ask than it is to answer them (Merton, 1959). Considering this caveat, I want to pose more questions that can open things up for conversation beyond this discussion. In doing so, I aim to posit the city and its cultures as offering us problems and possible solutions that put us in a better position as people who strive to find ways to cultivate and sustain musical and cultural ecosystems in the city.
Let the first question be a rhetorical one, a question I come back to quite often: ‘What is a city’? Lewis Mumford asked in 1937, to which he answered: ‘One may describe the city, in its social aspect, as a special framework directed towards the creation of differentiated opportunities for a common life and a significant collective drama’ (1937). This formulation of the city contains many ideas that have remained salient for much of the modern city's existence. Mumford's use of the term ‘special framework’, for example, is notable because the city's social and cultural diversity, roiling heterogeneity and confounding pluralisms presents us with a dilemma: we can never expect to know a city fully. We can only realise it partially, the elusiveness of its manifold dimensions teasing us through furtive glimpses and momentary apprehensions. The template we are given, that framework, means we live the urban mosaic in fragments and shards, glimpses and glances that never give us the whole picture. We can never grasp the city in its entirety. Blum (2003) suggests this gives way to the fundamental ambiguity of the city, which is at the root of how we engage with it, with the people, places, spaces and cultures of the city, leading to the sorts of ‘ethical collisions’ that define daily life. It is what animates many of us who live, work, study and create in the city, where the city in its multiplicity vexes us in its many guises, problems and promises, grappling with its elusive as much as its allusive elements and experiences.
Adverbiage
At the risk of another divergent tangent, I can illustrate this by dusting off a local slogan, how in the drive to sell a city and one of its principal ‘assets’, its culture, we are back to where we started, with more questions than answers. ‘Absolutely Positively Wellington’ is an advertising catchphrase that was first floated over three decades ago in 1991, courtesy of Wellington newspapers and then picked up and developed by the ad agency Saatchi and Saatchi (Staff, 2011). It remains pertinent to the discussion about DIY as the campaign was meant to convey a certain kind of kiwi ingenuity, inspired in part by everyday Wellingtonians who had demonstrated good citizenship and could serve as inspiring examples for the resulting ads: One of them was Stefan Lepionka who had converted an old washing machine and started squeezing juice and delivering to hotels…. Another was Gordon May who bought an old sewing machine and he made ties and called it Rixon Groove. There were a whole lot of people who, in the face of adversity, had gotten off their chuffs and done something about their lot. (Staff, 2011)
More than 40 years later and still in use, its adverbial certitude arrogates for itself a knowingness of what this city is, shrewdly eschewing any specificity about what it is. So what kind of knowledge of the city is it? What city truly knows itself? This brings us back to what I read in the slogan: a sort of promotional mise en abyme, an overdetermined statement of fact that only reflects more reflections, recursively and endlessly, to no end. By this, I mean the slogan undoes itself. Its immodesty reveals and then undermines its presumptive declarations by prompting only more questions, which elides the process of posing them. It makes a claim which has as its only certainty its sheer vagueness masked by its cheerleading enthusiasms. Its economy of expression is so sure that Wellington's essence is distilled into what this city is. Still, with an overdetermined resoluteness, it only serves as a reminder of how irresolvable and enigmatic a city can only ever be. Its pretensions towards the affirmative elide what happens in cities, as sites of debate and discussion, places where an urban ethos is worked on and worked out and where questions are the lifeblood of what makes the city mean and matter. In its exclamatory zeal, the slogan has leap-frogged to an answer without even trying to pose a question, let alone allowing the space or time to formulate the right one.
The virtuous city
In my work on Wellington, I have explored the question ‘What is a city?’ by drawing on the work of Richard Sennett, particularly his twinned notion of urban virtues, which gets at the culture of the city differently and reiterates Mumford's characterisation of the city as providing a kind stage for collective drama and providing frameworks for being and doing. In examining the contemporary neoliberal city, Sennett formulates two urban virtues: sociability and subjectivity. As to the first virtue, sociability, the city is a place where people ‘can learn to live with strangers’ (2005, 109). Expanding this to consider what the consequences of these encounters can make possible, Sennett suggests that the practice of modern democracy demands that citizens learn how to enter into the experience and interests of unfamiliar lives. Society progresses when people's experience is not just limited to those who resemble them in class, race, or ways of life. Sameness stultifies the mind, diversity stimulates and expands it. Cities are places where learning to live with strangers can happen directly, bodily, physically, on the ground. (ibid) The experience of complexity is not just an external event, it reflects back on individuals’ sense of themselves. People can develop multiple images of their own identities, knowing that who they are shifts, depending upon who they are with. Moreover, complex social systems tend to be open-ended rather than tightly closed; they are incomplete ways of living that can reflect back into the subjective realm, as lessons about human limits and the irresolvable and necessarily partial, unfinished character of experience. (2005, 109–110)
Drawing from Levinas, Sennett notes the former suggests ‘that when a person's experience is so complex as to become multiply defined or open-ended, they have need of others – others whom they do not know ‘the neighbourliness of strangers’ (proximité des inconnus)’ (110). This formulation is quite helpful as it can inform how planners go about their business, finding the best ways to build into the city spaces of encounter of the sort that allow individuals and collectives to find one another, the kind of elective affinities cities afford of like minds that together can flourish.
We can take scenes as cultural spaces where both of these virtues can become manifest, sometimes in spectacular ways (in the classical subcultural sense) or more discreetly. Scenes, whether music, film, theatre, gay, café, craft beer, art or any other kind of scene, mediate peoples’ sense of self, others and place. Scenes offer sites of insulation and incubation, generating and intensifying social and cultural energies and networks, producing a distinctive sort of social power and communal ambience. We could consider the experimental avant-noise scene at the Pyramid Club, Eyegum Wednesdays at San Fran (a rare night set aside for up-and-coming independent artists), a DJ gig at Meow or jazz at Rogue and Vagabond as exemplars of this aspect of scenic life in Wellington that have a powerfully phenomenological function, bringing the two virtues together in compelling ways to provide spaces of encounter that are central to the scene's social power.
Scenes are also indices of a city's cultural vitality; their wax and wane afford opportunities to evaluate what matters in the city. The loss of several live music venues in Wellington over the last decade alone, and the lack of replacement, has been a concern for many constituencies and stakeholders, from fans and musicians to venue owners and members of the City Council. This decline has several consequences for music-makers and scenes, musical and otherwise, mainly because scenes can bring together otherwise dispersed actors and activities, where social bonds are renewed, and new projects are floated. There exist some spaces where this continues to play out. For the last few years, in Wellington, we have the example of Tuatara Open Nights at City Gallery, where the far-reaching capillaries of the ecosystem contract through an event dedicated to showcasing DJs, musicians, artists’ talks and shows, sponsored by a once-NZ owned craft brewery (now part of a multi-national conglomerate), with the evening being hosted at one of the city's principal galleries. In this capacity, scenes can lend the city an energising eventfulness that demonstrates the power of conviviality to serve as a pole towards which these people can gravitate and a barometer of health and vitality. These momentary rituals provide the time and space that allow specific individuals and groups to flourish creatively where they otherwise might not. They help provide the material, symbolic and affective amenities that make the city a catalyst for renewal and reinvention. Scenes in this capacity exist as distinctive species of urban spaces, what Hartmut Häußermann has called, on the one hand, ‘civic-social spaces’, by which he means self-organised spaces from the bottom up and, on the other hand, ‘culinary spaces’, by which he means active sites where ‘the city can be perceived as an experience, places of self-projection and observation’ (2006, 158). The cultural dynamics of the scene fit into both of these spaces as sites where the public life of the city is choreographed by social regulation, both formal and informal, and by social ritual where the collective life of the city makes itself seen and heard, bringing together sociability and subjectivity in moments of solidarity.
In this sense, scenes are ‘specialised occasions’ (Blum, 2003) where the collective life of the city makes itself known in different ways, discreetly by being tucked away in some rough and ready space or ostentatiously by being brazenly private in very public ways (ibid), where the theatricality of city life resonates in compelling ways. On this point, how the city's cultural life is concealed and revealed is worth noting. As Straw (2015) has made explicit, related to this aspect of visibility, scenes also come with social protocols around conducting oneself, so they function almost as pedagogical prisms, where people get to know one another and the city, reinforcing Sennett's virtues. In a related fashion, they also provide ethical spaces where debates and discussions can be had about what matters in the city, to whom, where and why. Scenes are enchanted times and places, alluring and auratic spaces, often carved out as specialised and spatialised moments where one can bask in the social glow of communal ambience, where people can feel modern and up-to-date, each in their way part of the pleasure of city, coming from seeing people together in sociable situations. As Blum (2003) makes clear, scenes in the city are markers of the quality of life in the city as measured by how they provide a stage for those who appear to be living a life of quality.
Reclaiming the ordinary city
On that quality of life and life of quality dynamic, the former of which we are hearing very much about these days in light of the cost-of-living crisis, let me close with some thoughts informed by some very cogent and relevant appraisals about the past, present and future of the creative city, drawing from a recent article, ‘“Creative City” RIP?’ by Sam Whiting, Tully Barnett and Justin O’Connor (2022). In it, they argue that the instrumentalisation of urban culture under the aegis of the ‘creative city’, referred to as a ‘globally successful policy meme’, has only furthered the neoliberal agenda in ways harmful to cultivating and sustaining a robust urban culture, the creativity it thrives on and the kind of fruitful encounters and experiences for which it makes a space. The imperative for creativity to only be understood within the framework of a consumer leisure economy has led to the absorption and neutralisation of its ‘romantic-utopian promise’. And in the spirit of trying to pose the right question, à la Merton, post-pandemic, they are led to ask: ‘What next?’. While it has been the case for the four decades that neoliberalism has become entrenched in nearly all aspects of life and artmaking in New Zealand, directly or indirectly, there have also always been latter-day bottom-up attempts to counter the centring of urban culture as part of the creative city's toolkit. In Wellington, one instance of this counter-hegemonic positioning was evidenced in the mid-00s by the city's DIT cri de coeur. It is tough to decolonise an urban imaginary so steeped in an instrumentalised DIY ethos, yoked as it has been to the entrepreneurial neo-liberal city where funding edifices have been built to support their regimes, reinforced by the vast apparatuses that work to perpetuate it across a range of industries and institutions that define music-making in Aotearoa. I suggested earlier that this DIY ethos is an alibi for and accomplice to neoliberalism in Aotearoa. Specific stakeholders have built their careers on it. However, in my work, I have tried to focus on those who resisted as exemplars, models of good cultural citizens, and civically minded music-makers who aim to keep Wellington's urban virtues at the forefront of their musical practice as an ethical compass, which helps them guide the communities and cultures they want to create and by extension the kind of city they want to live in. Individually and collectively, they exemplify what Jonathan Raban in 1974 called the ‘soft city’, by which he means a city that awaits the imprint of an identity. For better or worse, it invites you to remake, consolidate it into a shape you can live in. You, too. Decide who you are, and the city will again assume a fixed form around you. Decide what it is, and your own identity will be revealed, like a position on a map fixed by triangulation. Cities, unlike villages and small towns, are plastic by nature. We mould them in our images; they, in their turn, shape us by the resistance they offer when we try to impose our personal form on them. In this sense, it seems to me that living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the relationship between human and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. (2)
Part of Raban's estimation of the city and its virtuous possibilities may seem quaintly naive now, given what successive regimes of urban managerialism followed then by urban entrepreneurialism have since wrought on cityscapes some 50 years later. Still, there is a romantic, utopian, even revolutionary kernel in there that needs holding on to of the sort Whiting et al. (2022) wish to reclaim. In the wake of the pandemic, of which I have said very little here, Wellington's cultural ecosystem needs to rebuild and regenerate its roots and tendrils, not to get us back to ‘business as usual’ or ‘normal’. This readjustment needs to be less obsessed with the ‘extraordinary’ city within which urban entrepreneurialism and its vocabulary of superlatives are entrapped, with its branding and promotional strategies, its absolutelys and its positivelys. We need more of the ordinary city, as Whiting et al. (2022) argue, and you would be right to hear an echo of Williams's (2000 [1958]) claim that ‘culture is ordinary’. This is about resituating, more so reconstituting, creativity, then, as a broader set of practices and values embedded in the everyday life of the city, that in the case of music-making stretches from King Homeboy human beatboxing on Cuba Street to Orchestra of Spheres at Pyramid Club to NZSO performances at the Michael Fowler Centre. From grassroots urban sites on the street and tucked away places to elite institutions and points in-between, each adds value to the sociomusical experience and contributes to the city's creative life, none more so than the other. We would do well to remind ourselves what they have in common and how they shape the commons: those social-civic and culinary spaces that Häußermann singles out demonstrate the health, vitality and sanctity of a city's public life. We need to dispense with the moribund moniker ‘creative city’, its reliance on skewed hierarchies of value and those who use it to privilege one cultural form over another, to find ways to foreground all types of music-making, and art in general, to reimagine and reinvigorate creativity in Wellington as a cultural force for public, not private, good. In Sennett's sense, we must find a way to forge a more virtuous city. We need to see it less as a promotional vehicle or brand or as part of an urban toolkit or index of cool. Instead, a more ordinary notion of creativity needs to be foregrounded as something that can be used to recalibrate thinking around the city and its cultural spaces and practices and, in the process, find ways to ask better questions to understand more fully what it is to be creative in Wellington in ways that matter and mean differently, powerfully, resolutely.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.