The screams all sound the same: The music of Of Monsters and Men and the Icelandic imaginary as geographical discourse

Abstract

Over the last two decades, a substantial body of geographical research has emerged examining the mutually generative relations between music, space, place, landscape, identity and locality. This work has revealed the complex ways in which specific geographical identities and imaginaries can be reinforced and created through differences in sound, through lyrics, and through the acts and meanings of making music. Yet, these identities and imaginaries can also perform important economic functions, representing geographical discourses that musicians can employ to develop distinctiveness to make themselves marketable, particularly in the context of a heavily-saturated contemporary global music market. In this paper, we examine this with specific relation to the Icelandic band, Of Monsters and Men. We provide an account of how references to landscape and folklore in the band's music, lyrics and imagery represent not only expressions of intimate connections with local landscape, cultural identity and lived experience, but also embody awareness of a pre-existing Icelandic imaginary. The use of folk music instruments, cultural references and motifs, we argue, acts to legitimise the band's use of this imaginary. Further, we highlight explicit attempts to brand Icelandic music under a single "label" as representative of the way in which this Icelandic imaginary comes to represent a powerful, if potentially homogenising, geographical discourse to mark out Icelandic music in a crowded global music market. K E Y W O R D Sgeographical imaginary, Iceland, landscape, music

Musical Geopolitics: Masculinity, Nationhood, and the Scoring of Superman (1978–2006)

“…First, regional accounts, prominent in North American cultural geography, have traced the geographical diffusion of musical styles and of the music industry (Carney 1994;Florida and Jackson 2010;Nash and Carney 1996;Sadler 1997). Second, 'representational' accounts have sought to deconstruct the geographical meaning of music (Bennett 2000;Connell and Gibson 2003;Revill 2000;Smith 1994Smith , 1997Tweed and Watson 2019), primarily focusing on lyrical music with exceptions (Jazeel 2005;Knight 2006;Leyshon, Matless, and Revill 1995;Lowenthal 2006;Smith 2000). Third, 'nonrepresentational' accounts have jettisoned the representationalist notion that music itself possesses extra-musical meaning (Anderson, Morton, and Revill 2005), focusing instead on the practice and performance of music (Kruse 2019;Wood 2012;Woods 2019).…”