Krimplezing

KR!MPLEZINGvan femina tot en unitas sheltur:

popular music in parkstad

theo ploeg01092011

vrijdag 2 september 11

five years ago there was no cultural spring


‘tales from the dowside’ (2007), Patrick Bisschops


• highest youth unemployment in The Netherlands

• no sense of purpose or place

• third generation stil yerns for the past

• or moves elsewhere to study or work

• pop culture isn’t visible (underground)

back in 2007...


where did that come from?


1960s


the mining industry


the church


marching bands


Holland


Detroit, 1960-70s


MC5: white technology meets black masculinity


“Rock and roll, the music holds the community together. The reason is simple: there isn’t

anything else here.... Life in Detroit is profoundly anti-intellectual. Our institutions are industrial and businesslike, not cultural or

intellectual.”

Robert Duncan in Creem (1970)


“The history of Detroit...is also a history of humiliations; it is a history of humiliation. What I mean by this is summed up in

the famous dictum attributed to Henry Ford: ‘history is bunk’. Fordism was all about that: the creation of a material

plentitude so vast that people would quit worrying about the past, and history would cease to matter. Detroit’s humiliation

of history seemed an exhilarating idea, so long as the good times lasted, but when they ran out, it left both the city and

the people in it painfully undefended and up for grabs.”

Jerry Herron, Detroit Wayne University (1993)


in Detroit people had rock, in Oostelijke Mijnstreek they had nothing


no past, no future, no rock and roll


‘Hello Josephine’, The Scorpions (1964)


Salvatore Adamo (Schlager, the European soul music)


(real) rock came with the AFCENT


and AWACS


• thousands of Canadians and Americans brought their pop culture to the region

• like big cars, weird bikes and ghettoblasters

• radio: CFNB (and BFBS)

• music, albums, tapes, disco and hip hop

• and....

AFCENT and pop culture


“I was born in the Willemstraat. As a seventeen year old I saw someone smoke heroine in disco Shangri-La. I didn’t want it but it was easy to get. It was introduced by the American soldiers. Thirty years ago Heerlen was, in a way, metropolitain. More than Utrecht, where I moved to study.”

writer Hans Dupont in newspaper Limburgs Dagblad


Luxor, Hoensbroek (1979)


Sheltur, Brunssum


Femina, Heerlen


Peppermill, Heerlen


important places, but...


• fragile music scenes

• mostly music consumption, not making

• proud of bringing bands to the region, not of the own music scene

• too small for national impact

lack of healthy music culture


1990s, 2000s: after pop culture


• pop culture becomes mainstream, but in Oostelijke Mijnstreek it goes underground

• there is no pop culture, only music

1990s


Heerlen, the Dutch Seattle


hardcore: Born From Pain


hip hop: Het Verzet (True Villan)


dubstep/drum’n’bass: Raadsel


• ‘proud’ of ‘their’ roots and past

• poorly educated

• loud, raw, energetic, ‘old school’

• lack of connection with mainstream culture

• in a way resisting the alternative mainstream

the have a lot in common...


what vibrant alternative pop culture needs...


• visibility

• unity

• (some) intellect

• institutions

• a future

a lot...


example?


Incubate festival, Tilburg


so?


• mainstream and underground

• high and low

• left and right

we have to connect


• explore the past

• to be able to (re)write the future

• thus to become proud of the pop culture we have

and...


exploring the past?


thanks for your attention


Krimplezing

Entertainment & Humor

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