Caspar Melville - It's A London Thingby MTF Labs | MTF Podcasthttps://musictechfest.s3.eu-west-3.amazonaws.com/podcast/117-caspar-melville.mp3Dr Caspar Melville is a Senior Lecturer in Global Creative & Cultural Industries at SOAS. He's an educator, journalist, editor and author of the book It's A London Thing: How rare groove, acid house and jungle remapped the city. Caspar believes that dance culture has been ignored in academic treatment of history and cultural theory and that it should be thought of as a powerful and internationally significant form of popular art. His work bridges decades and genres of dance music but ties them together into a single narrative of Black musical scenes of the city, from ska, reggae and soul in the 1970s, to rare groove and rave in the 1980s and jungle and its offshoots in the 1990s, and on to dubstep and grime. @casparmelville on TwitterIt's A London ThingDownload episode← Previous episodeNext episode →TranscriptDubber Hi, I’m Andrew Dubber. I’m Director of MTF Labs, and this is the MTF Podcast. Now, some years ago, I was a professor in a media and cultural studies department at a UK university, teaching, among other things, on a music industries degree course. And when that’s your focus, you tend to cross paths with other professors in media and cultural studies departments at UK universities who teach, among other things, on music industries degree courses. It’s not an enormous subset of the academic world. And so as a result of this selective professional socialising and collaboration, I know and work with Caspar Melville. Caspar’s a senior lecturer in Global Creative and Cultural Studies at SOAS, which we’ll talk about and unpack, but what I really want to discuss with him is his recent book, ‘It's a London Thing: How Rare Groove, Acid House and Jungle Remapped the City’.Dubber So, Caspar Melville, thank you so much for joining us for the MTF Podcast today. So you are, as I mentioned, a senior lecturer at SOAS. Let’s start with that. What’s SOAS?Caspar Well, SOAS is a part of the University of London. The acronym SOAS stands for School of Oriental and African Studies. Now, we call ourselves SOAS now because we’re all very uncomfortable with the term oriental. And, of course, there’s an inbuilt discomfort with the whole thing about SOAS because SOAS, which originates in the early twentieth century, was a school for training civil servants of the empire, or sometimes known as a school for spies. It was the place where the British government sent their civil servants to learn local languages of the places that they were going to go out and administer in Africa and in the Far East and the Near East and Malaya and Singapore. Places like that. So that’s the history of the institution.It has been affiliated with the University of London for I’m not quite sure how long, and now it’s a university. It’s in Bloomsbury, right near the UCL and the Institute of Education, which has actually been absorbed into UCL now. So it’s in the university intellectual part of London, around Russell Square, Bloomsbury area.Dubber Right. But you’re not teaching spies how to speak Mandarin.Caspar I don’t think I am, no. I’m in the School of Arts. I’m a slightly square peg in a round hole in the sense that the School of Arts at SOAS… It wasn’t originally an arts and humanities based institution. So the core of it, after it had been training imperial civil servants, was politics, development. Those kinds of questions. Specialists in water. Languages, very important. Out of this developed an art stream. So people who were particularly… They were ‘Africanists’ – African specialists, but they had a particular interest in music. There were people in Korean studies, in what they call area studies. This is not a discipline, but you study a particular area. They banded together and they set up a music department, and then there was a history of art department. Similarly, local area expertise. China, Korea, Africa. Usually older forms. Traditions, you might call it. And this banded together in the School of Arts, which was formed maybe ten years ago.I’ve been at SOAS for about eight years, and I came in to teach something called Creative and Cultural Industries. So this was SOAS recognising that while the ethnomusicology and the history of art were really important, there was a missing link, partly to do with media and cultural studies and partly to do with recognising that all of this is caught up within a set of industrial systems and processes. Obviously, the internet and the digitisation of culture which came in the 2010s was happening all around, and there was a sense that they wanted to recognise that. So they brought me in – it was partly under pressure, I think – to think more about careers.As you know, having been an academic, this idea of “Well, what am I going to do ...
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