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Will Straw is Professor at the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). His interests include popular music, urban culture, cinema and night. He is the author of, among others, the articles the Urban Night (2014), Music and Material Culture (2012), Sizing Up Record Collections (1997) and Systems of articulation, logics of change: Communities and scenes in popular music (1991).Interview by Loïc Riom (January 2017)&#160;Before your first works on music, you were (and still are) writing on films. How did you become involved in studying music? How do you think your background in film studies has influenced the way you approach music?My interest in both films and music both go back to my early adolescence. I watched old films late at night on television, and came to recognize studios, actors, genres, historical styles. At the same time, though, I was an obsessive music fan - I listened to what, in North America, we called Top 40 radio. I was intrigued by the criteria by which radio stations chose what music to play -- I would make lists of songs in the order that they were played, hoping that I could decipher the logic of playlists. All of this was in small towns in English Canada with no live venues and very few local bands.When I went off to university, things changed. I pursued my interest in cinema, but was much more interested in music for many years. I began buying dozens of records a month, and reading music magazines. Through fans I’d met through sf fandom I was directed towards things like Roxy Music, the first Eno albums, the Canterbury School. My first significant change of tastes came when I shifted from being a folkie to being a fan of progressive rock. A large part of your work on music, but also movies, is related to the urban context. Why this interest for cities? In you view, what role do cities play in our culture?My interest in cities go back a long way. Living in small towns rendered cities romantic for me. The one city in which I lived as an adolescent (Hamilton, Ontario) was a decaying industrial city, full of the residual features of North American urbanity we still consider mysterious. My interest in cities has much to do with my sense that they are able to generate narratives endlessly, and that they are palimpsests in which the new develops on top of the old. Like many generations, mine was drawn to the period which immediately preceded it -- in my case, the post-war period of American film noir and smoky music clubs.Cities, of course, play an enormous cultural role, as place of encounter (between classes, races, etc.) and as archives of a sort, in which, as noted, the past persists and is available alongside what is new and innovative. Where do you see the role of music in urban culture nowadays? Should we be more aware of other cultural forms when discussing urban culture (e.g. street art or computing)?Since the late 1970s, music has been bound up with some of the most important tendencies in urban development: the repurposing of old industrial spaces, the stylization of neighbourhoods and so on. Music’s role in all of this has not always been positive; its role in processes of gentrification is probably as least as strong as that of the visual arts (the cultural field long associated with gentrification.) In cities, places of musical consumption have been bound up with the emergence and consolidation of sexual and other sorts of communities, and so music marks the identitarian space of the city in important ways.Street art still remains less significant than music, I would argue. I also think music itself has receded as the most important of cultural forms in urban life. It is omnipresent, in the bars and restaurants which have transformed cities into spaces of renewed sociability over the last decade. At the same time, it risk becoming decorative (as the background to socializing) and one more interesting cultural form amidst various kinds of high tech and other cultural forms. In a recent article, you revisit your now classical concept of scene (“Scènes : ouvertes et restreintes”, Cahiers de recherche sociologique) by describing two ways of understanding scenes : open and restricted. Could you explain this difference a little further for our readers?I wrote this article in part because I thought two ways of talking about scene were drifting away from each other. One is the sense of scene one finds in popular music studies, where scene is that assemblage which gathers around a particular musical “object” (a style, a genre) and names the people, places, technologies and activities which sustain this musical “object”. The other sense of scene is common in more aestheticizing descriptions of urban affect; a scene is the energy, or the effervescence, or the excess of sociability which marks urban life. The first sense begins with a musical style or genre and asks what kinds of things surround it and make it possible. The second begins with the general experience of urban life and asks how different kinds of cultural activities (listening to music, sitting in restuarants) contribute to a general sense of urbanity.The distinction is not absolute, of course, but each definition points to different bodies of writing about scenes and distinct points of departure. Would you say that your view of the open scene is close to certain conceptions of public space as a characteristic of urbanity?Yes, indeed. I draw on the work of sociologist Alan Blum, for whom the production of “scenes” is the way in which cities make a spectacle of intimacy transpiring in public space. So, while the first definition I describe above (of what I call a “closed” scene), which encompasses all the things surrounding a particular genre or style of music, might name things which happen in private, the second or “open” definition of scene requires that there is a “publicness” to urban culture. The popular music studies have gone through various changes since you started your career, for instance with the recent emergence of the sound studies field and scholars coming from Science and Technology Studies such as Trevor Pinch. How and where do you see your field of research today?The field has grown and fragmented. In most ways this is positive. The key divisions are no longer merely between those who can read and analyse musical texts and those who cannot. I find sound studies and STS studies encouraging because they have taught us to see music as a complex object produced through a complex array of social, aesthetic and technological processes. My critique of popular music studies for a long time was that people within it rarely read anything outside it. I think the rise of sound studies, material cultural studies and urban “scene” studies have made it more difficult to avoid the work of others who are not talking specifically about popular music. When I was studying the global dissemination of 1970s disco, for example, I found more ideas in writing on literary globalization than I did on music per se. You have recently started to work on the urban night as a research subject. Can you tell us al little more about it? What is this new scholarly field about? How do you engage with these questions?I like to say that the urban night has emerged as the interdisciplinary object par excellence in the last ten years. The night is, on the one hand, the focus of a very significant level of policy intervention, as cities seek ways to control, liberate, commodify and extend their night time activities. At the same time, the night remains a major focus of identitarian struggle: the right of women, racialized minorities and sexual communities to build institutions of night-time sociability, or to occupy the public space of their cities in safety and tolerance, has been on the agenda around the world, from cities in India to Sao Paolo in Brazil and cities in the south of the United States. I am also interested in cultural texts, like films, that aestheticize and narrativize the night. I have written, for example, about “single night narrative” films -- films that take place in a single night, and which present the night as a space/time for the emergence of community or for an individual to come to self-realization.Unofficially, we divide art forms between day and night: we visit galleries in the day and go to clubs at night. I’m interested, as well, in events like Nuits blanches or day-time techno parties, that mix this up.Finally, what are you working on right now and what future projects on music are you planning?Right now I’m trying to finish a book on sensational tabloid magazines and newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s. This has almost nothing to do with music, though it has much to do with night culture and with the gossip of Broadway and New York night clubs. In relation to music, I have returned to the concept of scene. It’s become clear recently that the French theorists Jacques Rancière, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes all saw the concept of “scene” as central to their methods. I’m interested in seeing whether we can put these ways of thinking about scene in relation to the ways in which scene is thought about in popular music and urban studies.And I keep writing about two things that will always fascinate me: disco music in Montreal, and the material culture of music (the things in which it is embedded and through which it travels.)photo @ Andrew Kaszowski (via Flickr)