Emotion, Space and Society 30 (2019) 34–40

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Emotion, Space and Society

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/emospa

Hearing histories of Hammer Hill: Pop music as auditory geography T

Phil Dodds
Institute of Geography, University of Edinburgh, Drummond Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9XP, UK

A R T I C LE I N FO A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Focusing on artful, embodied listening as a method of analysing the emotional intensities of place, this article
Emotional listening calls for academic geographers to listen to practitioners of nonacademic geography. It explores an ethical and
Fan listening methodological agenda for understanding how pop musicians have heard the world, and for taking them ser-
Pop music iously as creative geographers who contribute sophisticated interpretations of and interventions in space. It
Nonacademic geography
listens emotionally to Jens Lekman's auditory reminiscences – informed by listening and expressed through song
Jens Lekman
Hammarkullen
– pertaining to the marginalised and stigmatised Gothenburg suburb of Hammarkullen (or ‘Hammer Hill’). By
Gothenburg understanding how Lekman's ideas about his home suburb relate to pop musical history, the article analyses the
musician's interpretive geographical methods and the effect sound can have on space. It juxtaposes these
methods with recent scholarly research on sonic and listening geographies, and embraces the emotional listening
practised by pop music fans to appreciate how scholars can learn from this form of nonacademic geography.

1. Introduction: listening to pop music
What is heard – and what is heard as significant – is important in the
construction of place (Revill, 2016). Listeners' emotional responses to
sounds are key processes by which territories are invested with
meaning (Duffy et al., 2016; Jones and Fairclough, 2016). Scholars
have long appreciated this but have struggled to develop a fully ethical
and practicable method for accessing and expressing the emotional
intensities of people's listening experiences (Harris, 2015). The complex
processes by which places are ascribed value therefore remain im-
perfectly understood. Here I suggest the ‘sonic turn’ in academia –
comprising both ‘sonic geographies’ (Gallagher and Prior, 2014) and
‘listening geographies’ (Gallagher et al., 2017) – should listen out and
embrace the evidential and analytical potential of a popular and vibrant
geographical praxis that has a rich tradition of interpreting and inter-
vening in space. I argue that scholars should listen to the work of pop
musicians – figured here as expert ‘nonacademic geograph[ers]’
(Gallagher, 2015: 560) and ‘visceral sonic map[makers]’ (Duffy et al.,
2016) – to understand how they explore the sonic experience of place
and of social life using non-textual, more-than-linguistic forms (Shuker,
2016). By listening to pop music, I suggest, we can better understand
how the place of listening matters for what is heard, and how listening
and what is heard matter to place.
This article draws on a vernacular tradition that uses sound to ex-
plore the power of sound, and that investigates the social, place-making
function of music through music. The focus is not on musicians' re-
presentations per se but on how songs are heard in the world, in time
and space, and in the context of other sounds. Musicians are therefore
understood here not only as producers of sound, but also as expert
listeners.1 I am primarily exploring what and how pop musicians have
heard – how they have used their listening bodies in making sense of
space. This is a creative attempt to learn from the ‘sensitive ear’ (Prior,
2017) – or more properly the sensitive body – pop musicians develop in
listening to place. It is an investigation of a pop musician's ‘art of lis-
tening’ (Back, 2007) and its potential relationship to academic sonic-
geographical research.
In this article, pop songs are understood as having two key func-
tions. First, they can be records of listening experience, often func-
tioning as ‘accidental archives’ speaking to particular ‘aural histories’
(Katz and VanderHamm, 2015: 33). They can be useful sources for
uncovering people's experiences of past worlds, and for exploring
‘mental maps of the urban terrain’ (Ghosh, 2013: 131). This is not to say
that songs provide narrowly ‘accurate’ accounts of precisely what was
heard and when. These are not the ‘logject’ devices celebrated by Beer
(2010) for keeping a full list of people's listening choices. Rather, pop
songs can function as richer, deeper, emotional archives of not just what
was heard, but how, in what combination and with what effect. They are
not limited to sounds the listener chose to hear; the examples discussed
herein feature a range of overheard musics mingling in space with other
human and more-than-human sounds. But they do feature what was
heard as significant to a site or to a sense of placed identity.
The second virtue of songs as discussed in this article is that they
share and interpret such complex listening experiences in a suitable
form: music. Pop songs can act as ‘sonic descriptive aesthetics’ of the

E-mail address: s1149930@ed-alumni.net.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2018.12.004
Received 11 June 2018; Received in revised form 15 December 2018; Accepted 18 December 2018
Available online 12 January 2019
1755-4586/ © 2018 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
P. Dodds
kind proposed by Prior (2017, 12). The claim here is that music is more
effective than written text or other graphic methods at communicating
how sounds make people feel. Furthermore, a pop song can have a
subtly analytical dimension, often elucidating its own contexts and
exploring its connections to listeners and places. Songs are understood
here as ‘acts of creative geography’ that ‘exist as much in an associa-
tional, affective, and emotional mode as in an explanatory mode’ and
‘through which we may find other ways of approaching research’
(Magrane et al., 2016: 485; see also Attoh, 2011). With their ‘capacity
to index memories and associations’, pop songs prompt ‘new notions of
geography’ (McAlister, 2012: 26; see also Sites, 2012).
More broadly, ‘pop music’ is understood here as a varied cultural
form that has certain recognisable characteristics: ‘catchy’ rhythms,
melodies and song structures that facilitate listeners' joining in. It is a
recorded and reproducible medium susceptible to repeat and intensive
listening, entailing a relationship between artist and ‘fan’. Indeed, ac-
knowledging that pop music is a sometimes-cynical form mediated by a
commercialised industry should not detract from studying its sig-
nificance to listeners. Pop music can be overheard as background noise,
yet it is personal, often experienced emotionally. Because of the diverse
ways people hear pop music, and because of its ‘hyper-connotative,
hyper-affective propensities’ (Born, 2011: 384), listening to it can re-
configure space as plural and heterogeneous, eschewing fixed per-
spectives (see Moisala et al., 2017). As Warren G once sang to his dis-
persed, global listeners: ‘You don't hear what I hear’. At the same time,
shared listening can produce and strengthen relationships in and across
space, bringing people empathically closer to create ‘web[s] of in-
timacy’ (Wood et al., 2007: 883), spaces of conviviality (Doughty and
Lagerqvist, 2016; Simpson, 2017), or ‘aggregations of the affected’
(Born, 2011: 384). Rihanna and her fans, for example, share a complex
sonic vocabulary that articulates global cultural relationships and
produces spaces of creative emotion and expression (Beckles and
Russell, 2015). The geographies of pop music are not always inclusive
or emancipatory; practices of listening to pop music can reproduce and
reinforce existing inequalities (Saldanha, 2002). But from US West
Coast G-funk to Swedish West Coast hip-hop – both of which are dis-
cussed in what follows – pop music has been heard as significant in
place, and used to assert the value of places.
In this paper, the prime example of an artful listener is Jens Lekman,
a Swedish indie pop musician who, through more than 15 years as a
recording artist and performer, has demonstrated a deep engagement
with the world's auditory geographies. His work, I argue, uses ‘creative
geographic methods’ in order to know, represent and intervene in the
world (Hawkins, 2015). Lekman's background and creative practices
are explored more fully in what follows, but suffice to say here that his
music tends to be guitar-based with heavy use of sampling to create a
richly textured sound. He sings occasionally in Swedish but most
commonly in English and is known for a witty, storytelling lyrical style.
Since signing for the American independent record label Secretly Ca-
nadian in 2002, he has produced four studio albums and dozens of EPs,
singles and compilations. He has toured most extensively throughout
Europe, Australia and North America, and has also performed in Ar-
gentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Phi-
lippines, Singapore and South Korea.2 Besides brief periods living in
Melbourne, Australia, and Tromsø, Norway, he has generally been
based in his home town of Gothenburg. He was born in 1981 in An-
gered, a suburb north of Gothenburg with a high immigrant population.
Gothenburg and its suburbs have always featured heavily in Lekman's
music.
This article listens to Lekman's sonic reminiscences about the suburb
of Hammarkullen (or ‘Hammer Hill’) in the district of Angered, espe-
cially the songs ‘A Sweet Summer's Night on Hammer Hill’ and ‘Another
Sweet Summer's Night on Hammer Hill’. Released on the ‘Julie’ EP in
2004, both songs revisit and re-sound his (auditory) experiences of
Hammarkullen during his adolescence in the mid-1990s. These two
songs, contextualised and interpreted in relation to Lekman's wider
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Emotion, Space and Society 30 (2019) 34–40
discography and to other musical traditions heard in Hammarkullen,
comprise a rich sonic historical geography of a contested, marginalised
place and how music has been used to define it. Indeed, this apparently
unambitious study of pop songs about (and heard in) a suburb addresses
a ‘bigger’ question about how stigmatised places are understood and
contested through sound, and about the musical means that have been
mobilised to invest ‘problem’ places with value.
In what follows, I develop and explore an ethical methodology for
engaging with pop musicians. This approach could be applied to any
artist or group with whom researchers have an emotional connection.
However, Lekman is my exemplar because in his songs he is explicit
about the importance of listening and of engaging with the emotional
intensities of place, and about his own ‘art of listening’. Moreover, I
choose Lekman not because he self-identifies as a ‘geographer’ but be-
cause I, as a fan, know and have felt the emotional intensity of his work
better than that of any other pop musician. I make a virtue here not just
of the ‘expert’ listening of an artist but also of vernacular ‘fan’ listening.
Fans are vital to the pop musical form, integral to what and how pop
music communicates and so crucially involved in what pop music as
sonic geography involves. So, in considering how best to make sense of
Lekman's music, I follow Lekman's own listening practices and use my
body as a listening technology, registering my embodied responses to
analyse the emotional intensities expressed through his songs.
Listening as a form of ‘radical openness’ (Lacey, 2013: 8) is therefore
both the subject and the method of this research. The conclusion ex-
plores the radical potential of researchers being open to diverse, ver-
nacular, non-academic praxes such as pop music. First, however, I re-
view important work in sonic and listening geographies, emphasising
its connections to the practices of pop musicians. I then identify the
ethical and methodological inadequacies of much ‘sonic turn’ research
to date and show how they can be addressed by listening to Lekman and
learning how he listens. Subsequently, I explain the methods used in the
present study before analysing Lekman's listening methods in general
and his auditory engagement with Hammer Hill in particular, situating
his work in relation to academic and vernacular musical traditions in
order to stimulate a fruitful conversation between the two.
2. Words, bodies, emotions: hearing nonacademic geography
2.1. Sonic geography: listening to and through pop music
Lefebvre points out that space ‘is listened for … as much as seen,
and heard before it comes into view’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 200), so it is
unsurprising that many geographers have attended to the role of sound
in producing space and spatial knowledge (see, for example, Cohen,
1995; Smith, 1997, 2000; Revill, 2000, 2016; Duffy et al., 2016;
Holloway, 2017; Gallagher et al., 2017). Much of this literature aligns
with influential work in sociology, anthropology and ethnomusicology,
especially Feld's ‘acoustemology’ research agenda, which focuses on
sonic practices ‘as a way of knowing worlds’ (Feld, 2012a: 7) or ‘as a
habit of knowing’ (Feld, 2012b: xxvii). His analyses of the performance
and sensory experience of sound and song in the rainforests of Papua
New Guinea (Feld, 2012b) and of jazz cosmopolitanism in Accra, Ghana
(Feld, 2012a), have shed light on the diverse ways in which people
listen and sound to make sense of space. Western pop music, too, has
been shown to be used for movement and for understanding spatial
relationships (see Connell and Gibson, 2003; Anderson, 2004;
Hemsworth, 2016; Nowak, 2016). I seek to demonstrate that there is
significant crossover between this research and Lekman's work as a pop
musician. Furthermore, I suggest that scholars can learn from listening
carefully to Lekman, his methods of experiencing sounds in space and
his process of sharing these experiences with listeners.
Rich traditions of participatory action research, decolonial methods
and feminist theory show there is nothing new in the suggestion that
the academy can learn from subaltern and/or popular (counter-)cul-
tural geographical work, but the specific area of sonic geographical
P. Dodds
analysis is particularly ripe for engagement with vernacular praxes. Pop
musicians are specialists in terms of understanding how sounds come
together in space, how they come to move listeners and be heard as
important. Most straightforwardly, pop musicians have already over-
come the problem that numerous sonic geographers have grappled
with: that words alone often fail to communicate the affective qualities
of sound. This is the oft-discussed challenge of ‘talking about sound’ or
of textually rendering sonic experiences (Duffy et al., 2016: 53; Wood,
2002; De Silvey, 2010; Gallagher and Prior, 2014). Smith (1997: 504)
notes that ‘[w]riting about music is like dancing about architecture.’
Duffy et al. (2016: 52–3) have experimented with graphic media such
as ‘oval shapes, and different fonts and styles’ for sharing sonic affects. I
advocate, instead, listening to people who render their responses to the
sonic world sonically. Pop musicians use ‘sonic descriptive aesthetics’
(Prior, 2017: 12) – including timbre, tone, pitch, rhythm, (dis)harmony
and volume – to share their listening experiences. They do what scho-
lars such as Duffy and Waitt (2013: 472) have advocated: they ‘use the
affordances of sound in helping make sense of self and reassembling
connections to place’. In Lekman's case, his songs express not just what
he has heard but also how he has heard it and how it made him feel.
Pop songs are therefore rich resources for advancing Feld's (2012a: 7)
project of ‘listening to histories of listening’.
2.2. Ethical listening: emotions and the body as technology
Scholars must find an ethical means of engaging with the nonaca-
demic geographical work of pop musicians. Here I argue that the
characteristics of pop music – including the artist-fan relationship it
entails – can help scholars overcome conventional drawbacks of re-
searcher-participant interviews and other traditional methods of ‘get-
ting at’ people's sonic experiences. I advocate that researchers should
not request musicians explain their practices and productions for us.
Interview methods, besides generally relying on words, are often in-
effective or frustrating for the researcher with a set of academic cate-
gories in mind (Back, 2003). Musicians can be understandably resistant
to operationalising their practices in such terms (Mulholland et al.,
2009). Instead, we should engage with their songs on their own terms
and in the manner expected of fans – that is, as active, emotional lis-
teners who ‘join in’ and become conversant with the music.
Pop music is an emotional form through which artists and listeners
explore and express the ‘emotional cartographies of place’ (Berrens,
2016: 79). As Duffy (2017: 190) points out: ‘the emotional and affective
responses we have to music and sound are often the primary ways in
which we register their impact.’ Music is not a finished representation
but an ongoing creative effort that requires and prompts ‘the listening
subject's own histories, subjectivities, experiences, bodily conditions'
(Duffy, 2017: 197). I suggest, therefore, that pop music fans – with a
history of emotional engagement with particular songs and/or artists –
are best placed to appreciate pop music's emotional registers. We
should embrace the way we are moved to dance, sing, clap and cry, and
practise ‘embodied listening’ (Bennett et al., 2015) as ‘sensing partici-
pants’ (Wood et al., 2007: 882). This method of fan listening also
sidesteps many of the ethical and practical problems with common non-
interview-based methods of eliciting sound memories. Harris (2015)
has highlighted, in particular, the ethical problems of eliciting emo-
tional responses from participants, and the difficulties of finding sonic
‘triggers’ that jog participants' memories. Listening carefully to pop
music, however, means engaging with ‘participant-generated’ artistic
outputs that have already been shared with the world and that make a
feature of sonic memory triggers. Following the listening methodology
outlined here, we need not prod interviewees to provide their emo-
tional responses for us nor hope that participants will ‘allow[…] re-
searchers to listen’ (Bennett et al., 2015: 12). Instead, we, as fans, be-
come the emotional participants as we engage with pop musicians'
work. Furthermore, using the listening body as a listening technology
avoids the trap of ‘writing about sound’. We write, instead, about how
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Emotion, Space and Society 30 (2019) 34–40
sound moves us. Rather than attempting to judge or deconstruct what
we hear, we register its connection to us and analyse how it moves
through us (Cf. Cohen, 1995; Leppänen, 2017). This attention to how
the body is moved by music – to ‘listen to oneself listening’ (Berrens,
2016: 80) – is, I argue, an approach that has long been used by Lekman.
In some sense, however, it is my own ‘history of listening’ that I am
listening to in what follows.
2.3. The fan method: a history of listening and singing along
I associate Lekman's Hammer Hill songs with different places and
episodes of my life. I have listened to them in different sonic contexts on
innumerable occasions over more than a decade – live at concerts or
played through different technologies; at home or on the move; alone or
in company. I can draw on a wealth of listening experience to consider
how the music has moved me. This longer-term emotional engagement
with songs as a fan is key, as is my deep knowledge of Lekman's wider
body of work, which allows me to make connections to his other songs.
Following feminist theory's disavowal of the detached, objective re-
searcher, I am exploring how sound, in all its material and expressive
senses, ‘is known through the body’ (Duffy et al., 2016: 50). This
‘whole-body listening’ attends to ‘gestures, textures, atmospheres’ and
‘involves ears, eyes, beating hearts, feelings, skin, pores’ (Bennett et al.,
2015: 9). I consider how I have been moved to tears or laughter, and
how I am inspired to dance, clap and sing along. However, I do not
abrogate the task of making sense of Lekman's work in the context of
ongoing scholarly debates; I am interested in the radical potential of
applying his insights in academia.
With my method I necessarily forgo a degree of certainty – although
the messiness and imprecision of memories expressed in pop songs is
not ripe for a method that would seek ‘accuracy’. I must rely on my
interpretations and accept that Lekman's intentions cannot be clarified
in an interview. But this is the benefit of emphasising not what a song
means but how it has worked through and been registered by a listening
body: this is Lekman's focus too, as we will see. It is also important to
acknowledge that both Lekman and I hear a partial history of
Hammarkullen and in focusing on this one necessarily do not hear a
range of others. Lekman should not be understood as accounting for
such a culturally and ethnically diverse place, nor can I claim to hear
Hammarkullen in all its complexity. The intention is not to suggest that
Lekman's songs represent the objective truth of a place, but to ap-
preciate how pop music can work in and on space, and how pop mu-
sicians' work can assist academic researchers when we listen as fans.
To return to words: there is a question about how lyrics should be
treated in our listening methodologies. Popular music works through
both more-than-representational and representational registers. Lyrics
are more than purely semantic; their properties differ crucially from
those of written text and their often-ambiguous meaning varies ac-
cording to the tone and context of their performance (Frith, 1989;
Connell and Gibson, 2003). However, singing with words is part of the
creative method by which pop musicians articulate places, construct
(symbolic) topographies (Daynes, 2009; Moss, 2011) and move lis-
teners. When pop songs are recognised as representing particular
places, this allows them to ‘tell compelling stories’ and to share
‘knowledge that hits home’ (Gallagher, 2015: 571; see also Hogan,
2007). Lyrics that I myself have sung and come to know by heart
therefore form an important part of the following analysis of Lekman's
creative methods and his songs about Hammer Hill.
3. Hearing Hammarkullen
3.1. Lekman's listening
I just wanna listen to people's stories
Hear what they have to say
My friends say, ‘just be a shrink then’
P. Dodds
But I don't know, I don't think I'll have the grades
But in a world of mouths
I want to be an ear
If there's a purpose to all this
Then that's why God put me here
In ‘To Know Your Mission’, Lekman identifies listening as an in-
tegral part of his creative practice. He sings of how, as a teenager, he
identified pop music as his vocation. The song features numerous au-
ditory references, often simply to identify the story it tells as taking
place in ‘1997, the last morning of August’. A corner shop radio
broadcasts ‘the top 10 tunes: Will Smith, Puff Daddy, Gala,
Chumbawumba’. The song's hyperactive, tinny rhythm and bright tone
recall the pop musical aesthetics of the period. In this and other songs,
Lekman attends explicitly to the theme of listening and to the im-
portance of pop music in his life. ‘Silvia’ begins with an apparently
seven-year-old Lekman ‘dancing to Michael Jackson’. Another song, ‘If
You Ever Need A Stranger (To Sing At Your Wedding)’, speaks to
Lekman's familiarity with ‘every stupid love song that's ever touched
your heart’. He also uses complex sampling and references to songs and
pop musical history to construct his own music. His ‘Maple Leaves’
samples a melody from The Mamas & The Papas' ‘Do You Wanna
Dance?’, while on ‘Black Cab’ he plays along with a loop from ‘I've Got
Something on My Mind’ by The Left Banke.
He often explores his memories through songs, most obviously in ‘I
Remember’, the rhythm and structure of which prompt recollections of
childhood, but also in ‘What's That Perfume That You Wear’ and ‘REC
(at Saltholmen)’. Futhermore, Lekman's music is intensely engaged with
place-based memories pertaining especially to Gothenburg and its
suburbs. Ola Johansson (2012) identifies Lekman as an exception
among English-language Swedish pop musicians in that he regularly
refers to Swedish places, sometimes using a Swedish accent or phrase,
unlike other internationally successful Swedish acts such as José Gon-
zalez, Robyn, Lykke Li and First Aid Kit. Many of Lekman's early songs
describe romantic or frustrated encounters with Gothenburg's public
transport system and the title of his 2007 album ‘Night Falls Over
Kortedala’ refers to a residential area on the city's northern outskirts.
Meanwhile, in ‘Dandelion Seed’, he uses the sounds of Gothenburg
during a storm to reconnect with a sense of home:
I turn around
Make a beeline past Domkyrkan
Dripping down Västra Hamngatan
Down to the harbour
To what's left of this old town
I sit there and listen
To the wind and how it's playing
Through the cranes over at Hisingen
The wind is like a
The wind is like a string section
Sitting and listening follows a journey through a marked and
identified urban landscape. His aural experiences are expressed through
the pop song which features, somewhat predictably, a prominent string
section. The urban environment is rendered as music; the score ex-
presses the sounds of wind through cranes; and his connection to the
city is fundamentally auditory. Lekman practises what Macpherson
et al. call ‘attuned being with’, a form of ‘careful listening through art
making’ which involves ‘being patient, suspending a sense of “time as
pressing” in order to be open to the temporality of the other’
(Macpherson et al., 2016: 384–385; see also Jones and Fairclough,
2016). Through his artful listening, Lekman hears music in the urban
environment of Gothenburg, the largest industrial port in Scandinavia.
Cranes, a notable feature of the island of Hisingen, become a source of
musical inspiration and, through his song, we understand how he has
heard them.
37
Emotion, Space and Society 30 (2019) 34–40
3.2. Hearing the suburb: ‘Another Sweet Summer's Night on Hammer Hill’
Two of his songs focus explicitly on the suburb of Lekman's child-
hood: Hammarkullen or ‘Hammer Hill’. Through these, Lekman ex-
plores his auditory recollections of home and shares a sonic history of
the place. This ‘urban composition’ (Beer, 2007: 849; see also Gallagher
and Prior, 2014; Prior, 2017) entails sampling and re-sounding noises
he recalls or has recorded in the landscape to construct a rich musical
collage (Butler, 2006). In ‘Another Sweet Summer's Night on Hammer
Hill’, Lekman's listening experiences are evoked through a sparse mu-
sical score and the sampled sounds of night-time insects. The music that
comes both from the natural landscape and from the homes of Ham-
markullen stimulates Lekman's recollections. In a fractured, half-re-
membered, half-overheard narrative of senselessness, violence, and the
damage it can inflict on people, Lekman gives voice to the darker, more
troubling aspects of life in the suburb. The song beguiles me. Lekman's
low ‘oh’ slows me down. I listen for the mournful silences to be filled.
Singing stories of his friends being cruelly bullied at school (‘they
burned her with a cigarette lighter’; ‘they beat him black and blue’),
Lekman twice interrupts himself, or is interrupted by sounds in the
environment:
Oh the memories, they come a-streamin'
When I'm walkin' 'round here dreamin'
On a summer's night on Hammer Hill
[…]
Oh, but it's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty
An open window, someone's playing ‘Tutti Frutti’
It's a sweet summer's night on Hammer Hill
There is dissonance in the reference to ‘Tutti Frutti’. Gallagher,
Kanngieser and Prior (2017: 620) note than sound has ‘a tendency to
escape from everyday spatial containers’. As Butler (2006: 892) puts it,
‘Noise tends to bleed over boundaries; it is fluid and in its plurality
uncontrollable.’ This is true of music, both in the sense that sound
waves cannot easily be contained within a desired space and, more
figuratively, in terms of its polysemy. The original Little Richard song is
loud, upbeat, energetic: in opposition, in other words, to the mood of
‘Another Sweet Summer's Night … ’. Yet this overheard performance of
‘Tutti Frutti’ is subsumed into the melancholy atmosphere, aligning
with Lekman's sombre contemplation, and demonstrating Berrens'
(2016, 75) observation that ‘emotion influences our perception of lis-
tening to the ambiance of the city’. It demonstrates, too, how mixed-up
nostalgia can be: placed memories entail tensions or interconnections
between positive and negative emotions.
Occasionally, Lekman loses his lyrical thread as his singing and the
spare musical score desist to leave only insect sounds. There are no
human, urban, technological noises here, which contributes to the sense
that Hammarkullen was a place apart, socially and spatially separated
from the city. Indeed, other Lekman songs elucidate what kind of place
Hammarkullen was. In ‘Waiting For Kirsten’, Lekman sings of ‘a sub-
urban boy like me’ who ‘grew up outside the city, where the local
Estrella chips factory had paved the way to your grave and to your
destiny’. This snack manufacturing plant had been a major employer of
Hammarkullen residents, and the suburb was economically depressed.
In ‘I Remember’, Lekman sings of how he became aware as a child of
spatialised ‘class differences’. He remembers:
A friend from the city
Saying he wasn't allowed to visit me
He returned respectfully
The invitations to my birthday party
He felt bad for me
‘Why do you live out there?’ he asked me
‘You're better than those monkeys
‘Freeloaders and junkies’
P. Dodds
When he did hang out with me
His dad would take us to the city
Lekman's sense of the distinction between his suburb ‘out there’ and
‘the city’ proper is palpable (see Johansson and Hammarén, 2011), as
are the racial overtones of his friend's use of the word ‘monkeys’. He
hears how others see the suburb, how it has been constructed as low-
status – ‘peripheral’ and ‘different’ (Stenberg and Fryk, 2012) – in
outsiders' imaginations.
The term ‘suburb’ has different connotations in Sweden than in
many other countries: in Sweden suburbs are often ‘areas on the edge of
large towns and cities, with high poverty levels that segregate and se-
parate immigrant-dense housing areas from the rest of the city’
(Sernhede, 2011: 161). Part of the larger ‘Million Programme’ suburb of
Angered, Hammarkullen was constructed as part of the Swedish gov-
ernment's efforts to build a million new homes between 1965 and 1974.
It and other estates of this period, such as Rosengård in Malmö and
Rinkeby in Stockholm, have become home to substantial immigrant
communities; they have also become marginalised and stigmatised
territories. Their segregation has been, apparently, intentional over a
period of decades, a form of what Loïc Wacquant (1999) calls ‘advanced
marginality’ that exacerbates perceived racial and cultural differences
and presents places as problems or as valueless. Ove Sernhede describes
Angered as one of many ‘ghetto-like neighbourhoods’ that are in
Sweden but not necessarily of it (2011: 166), quoting residents who
refer to Hammarkullen as ‘the third world in the middle of the first
world’ (2007: 463) and who identify not with Sweden or even Go-
thenburg but with their suburb. Lekman hears both this cultural se-
paration and the strength of shared suburban identity.
3.3. Listening together: ‘A sweet Summer's Night on Hammer Hill’
In Lekman's ‘A Sweet Summer's Night on Hammer Hill’, an episode
of community conviviality is reconstructed from different sonic influ-
ences:
Oh, I still remember ‘Regulate’ with Warren G
Could that have been back in the sweet summer of 1993?
It was a sweet summer's night on Hammer Hill
Oh, the sound of distant carnival drums
The Spanish guitar someone strums
It's a sweet summer's night on Hammer Hill
My heart goes like:
Bom-ba-bom-ba-bom-ba-bom-ba-bom-ba-bom-ba-bom
Can you hear the beat of my heart?
Bom-ba-bom-ba-bom-ba-bom-ba-bom-ba-bom-ba-bom
Oh, the memories they come a-streamin’
When I'm walkin’ round here dreamin’
It's a sweet summer's night in Hammer Hill
Till (2008: 101) has noted that artists can ‘animate the multiple
spacetimes of memory through their work’. In this case, Lekman con-
jures, out of his situated suburban sonic memories, a ‘pluritemporal
landscape’ (Crang and Travlou, 2001: 173), a multiple space in which
‘the fluidity, the messiness, the “noisiness”’ of memories can be ex-
plored and expressed, ‘offering insights far beyond exactly what did or
didn't happen at a certain time and place’ (Butler, 2006: 985). More-
over, sound is not just something remembered, but a ‘way of re-
membering’ (Whale and Ginn, 2017: 109; italics in original); not just a
memory, but a mnemonic (Nowak, 2016). It is a way of re-exploring
placed memories. Lekman embraces the fact that music is ‘almost un-
iquely polysemic’ (Revill, 2000: 605) and ‘trigger[s] associative forms
of discourse and knowledge’ (Labelle, 2010: xix). Unlike the earlier
example in which pop songs are heard as radio noise, used to time-
stamp a memory, here the Warren G hit stimulates memories of and
reflections on his neighbourhood.
38
Emotion, Space and Society 30 (2019) 34–40
Happiness is derived from the listener's connection to various
sources of sound: the place is alive and interweaved with music, sti-
mulating intense and shared feelings of joy, with Lekman's own beating
heart at the centre. He highlights what Revill (2016: 247–8) calls the
‘heterophony’ or the ‘inherently cosmopolitan quality’ of sound. Music
is loose, free in the air, mingling in space. The samples, the backing
singers and the atmosphere of amateur live performance produce a
sense of open-air musicality, densely textured yet open-ended, em-
bedded in place but welcoming of listeners who are included and ad-
dressed directly. Whenever I listen, I cannot help but ‘join in’, sing
along and share in the celebration. The song is communal and the
community is defined by song. Lekman revels in the vernacular per-
formance of music: someone strums the Spanish guitar casually; the
untrained backing singers are silly, jolly, unselfconscious. Bodies pro-
vide percussion through hand claps and vocalisations of heartbeats. The
listening body is listening to the environment and to itself (Berrens,
2016), and, indeed, explicitly inviting others to listen too. Listeners –
fans – are even incorporated into the song, falling in with the festive
rhythm (Duffy et al., 2011), singing along with the chorus and shouting
requests at the end. A sample from Martha and the Vandellas' ‘Heat-
wave’ creates the effect of live performance. Moreover, Lekman duets
with a Shangri-Las sample: the ‘oh no’ to which he responds is lifted
from their ‘Remember (Walking in the Sand)’. He draws on such scat-
tered contributions to a global popular music canon to express himself
and his ideas about home.
3.4. Community sounds
Although Lekman's music can be interpreted in relation to scholarly
literature, he references various rich traditions of pop musical history.
Warren G and Nate Dogg's ‘Regulate’ features prominently in this as-
semblage of diverse musical and non-musical sounds. The significance
of this is worth exploring. ‘Regulate’ represents an important example
of how music has been used to define and mark space. The song is
considered the ‘apex’ of the Gangsta-funk or G-funk genre of ‘West
Coast’ US hip-hop (Forman, 2002: 182). G-funk featured ‘regionally
definable sounds and discourses about space and place’ and was
strongly associated with particular neighbourhoods in California
(Forman, 2002: 182). Warren G and Nate Dogg identified as part of the
‘213’ hip-hop click named after the Long Beach telephone area code,
and their music described and explored their own streets and neigh-
bourhoods. They were part of a wider hip-hop movement that dealt
with ‘the complex geographies of the postmodern or global city’ via
‘intensely articulated emphases on space, place, and identity’ (Forman,
2002: xvii). Hip-hop was, from the beginning, ‘a neighbourhood thing’
that ‘addresse[d] itself towards urban Black folk in Black neighbour-
hoods’ (Allinson, 1994: 456–7). Rap collectives were using complex
polyrhythmic layering, sampling, repetition and distinct cultures of
orality to challenge urban inequalities, resist police discrimination and
satisfy ‘poor young black people's need to have their territories ac-
knowledged, recognised and celebrated’ (Rose, 1994: 11; see also Katz,
2012). It was a (popular) form of oppositional culture (Martinez, 1997:
266), the politics of which involved the creation of a ‘self-produced
communal history’ (Rose, 1989: 43).
Such music, while addressed to a ‘local’ audience, had ‘open sig-
nificance’ to global listeners, especially those in marginalised commu-
nities and neighbourhoods around the world (Allinson, 1994: 449; see
also Bennett, 1999). Lekman's reference to ‘Regulate’ might be taken to
indicate that he sees his musical practices as exploring similar themes,
or even following a similar tradition of sampling and representing his
neighbourhood; but we should be cautious about writing white, middle-
class listeners into a fundamentally black, working-class sonic history
(Allinson, 1994). Instead, Lekman's (over)hearing of G-funk speaks
simply to the importance of such genres and sounds at this point in
Hammarkullen's history. He memorialises and documents a neigh-
bourhood-based hip-hop culture of which he may not have been part
P. Dodds
but which he nonetheless heard as significant in the construction of
community identity.
By the mid-1990s, Hammarkullen had a substantial immigrant po-
pulation, many of whom identified with Californian rap music such that
the area was known as ‘Los Angered’ (Sernhede, 1998, 2007). Besides
the Iranian-born singer-songwriter Laleh and the Lebanon-born rapper
Nabila, both of whom grew up in Angered, the hip-hop collective the
Hammer Hill Click have been based in Hammarkullen since 1994, and
it was they who coined or at least popularised the suburb's anglicised
moniker. English-language hip-hop became a means of ‘local’ expres-
sion and even intervened in suburban toponymy. Moreover, for the hip-
hop artists and listeners of ‘Los Angered’, this global cultural form was
an expression of a post-colonial political agenda and a means of as-
serting the identity and importance of Hammarkullen relative to and
distinct from the rest of Gothenburg and white Sweden more generally
(Sernhede, 2007). On the Click's 1998 EP ‘199.88’, ‘Pig Hunting Season’
expressed antipathy to the police, while ‘88 Soldiers’ was an attempt to
reclaim the ‘88’ symbol used by neo-Nazis in the city. It was also an
attempt to boost and, crucially, to take control of the image of the
stigmatised, marginalised suburb.
The Click wanted to be widely heard, to reach an audience, to make
them dance and sing along. Their most popular song, ‘West Coast
Slang’, clearly aligned itself with the more commercial G-funk of US
West Coast hip-hop – it was ‘funky gangsta-shit’ (quoted in Sernhede,
2007: 475) – although in this case celebrating Sweden's West Coast.
They saw this style of music as a means to ‘elevate the local physical
environment’ and ‘charge [it] with meaning’ (Sernhede, 2007: 468). As
one member of the collective said: ‘We don't want Hammarkullen to be
known because there are a lot of problems here, we want everybody to
know about Hammarkullen because the best rappers and break-dancers
are here’ (quoted in Sernhede, 2007: 470). Sernhede discovered the
Click's mission to consist of highlighting the ‘frustration and pain, but
likewise the power and potential, the joy and community that also exist
in the environments where they live their lives’ (Sernhede, 2007: 468).
This is what Lekman heard on the ‘Sweet Summer's Night[s]’, and it is
in this sense that Lekman's songs seem to resonate with those of the
Click. His ‘Another Sweet Summer's Night … ’ hears the damage and
distress that can be caused by people who are themselves damaged and
distressed. ‘A Sweet Summer's Night … ’, meanwhile, memorialises a
blissful episode in the community's history. To me, the latter commu-
nicates pure joy and it makes me want to dance. In aligning Hammar-
kullen with such joyful sounds, it inscribes the territory with meaning
and shares the place's rich sonic history. It gives voice to this ‘web of
intimacy’ (Wood et al., 2007: 883), space of conviviality (Doughty and
Lagerqvist, 2016; Simpson, 2017), and ‘aggregation of the affected’
(Born, 2011: 384) more resoundingly than any academic writer could.
4. Conclusion: listening geographies
This article has argued that academic geography can be enriched
through listening to histories of listening and using pop musicians' lis-
tening practices and experiences to better understand the emotional
historical geographies of place. It can be difficult to find rich archives of
historical listening in which listeners' emotional experiences (not just
recordings of sounds) are primary, but Jens Lekman's pop musical
productions comprise one such. Lekman's work is instructive for geo-
graphers because of his artistic processing of his listening experiences.
We can hear how Lekman has been moved by music. He has explored
and shared his listening history, creating new sounds from a variety of
resonances and performing a sonic history of place in the process.
Hearing histories of Hammer Hill through listening to Lekman's artful
listening reveals his home suburb to have a complex, troubled past but
to also be a site of resistance, community, conviviality and joy.
Hammarkullen exemplifies how listening to genres of pop music in
place – and in the context of other sounds and shared communal per-
formances of listening – can define places in resistance to narratives
39
Emotion, Space and Society 30 (2019) 34–40
from outside. Music can ascribe emotional value to places that have
been designated as problem neighbourhoods or as otherwise valueless.
This article has demonstrated, therefore, that we ought to take pop
music seriously albeit emotionally, since the pop musician's artful, em-
bodied listening makes intelligible the emotional sonic landscape, and
the pop song provides a record of and a means of exploring emotional
memories of place.
But what role can academic geographers play in this kind of re-
search? The agenda outlined here involves listening to, appreciating
and highlighting the rich geographical traditions and praxes that are
not necessarily our own. We should not be trying to ‘colonise’ these for
our own instrumental reasons (Söderman and Sernhede, 2016: 153;
Leyshon et al., 1995: 423); nor should we collapse the distinctions
between academia and the creative arts (Hawkins, 2015: 249; de Leeuw
and Hawkins, 2017); nor, however, should we archly separate ourselves
from them, positioning ourselves as informed, reflective intellectuals
capable of rigorously scrutinising and deconstructing disposable, pri-
mitive forms (Allinson, 1994). Embracing pop music and recognising
our own ‘nonacademic’ responses as fans can fundamentally democra-
tise the production of geographical knowledge. Far from merely de-
ferring to ‘experts’, this involves embracing vernacular ‘fan’ listening.
Moreover, there is radical creative potential in being open to diverse
inputs, and in the choices we make about what to listen to (and how) in
an academic context. In the case of the ‘sonic turn’, this article has made
the case for expanding our notion of the archive and even our notion of
geography, and for listening more carefully to those who have long
been practising sonic geography with profound results.
Funding
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding
agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Notes
1. Following the important work of Harold (2013) and Bell (2016), I
do not wish to exclude D/deaf people from my conception of ‘listening’
or marginalise their musical curation of space. See Leppänen (2017) on
a Deaf Finnish rapper's performances of musical memories, and the
‘non-audist methodologies of music’ that involve close attention to the
visual gestures of performers and listeners, as well as different per-
ceptions of rhythm and tone. See also Gallagher et al. (2017) on an
expanded concept of listening in geographical research.
2. A list of Lekman's live performances is available at “https://www.
jenslekman.com/shows.htm”.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Pauline McGuirk, Kye Askins, Ben Garlick, and two
anonymous reviewers for their invaluable advice. Thanks are also due
to Lettice Hicks for listening (repeatedly) to Jens Lekman with me and
for helping identify the article's key arguments.
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