Relocating Popular Music takes a cue from the spatial turn in humanities and aims at observing ‘what music does to places and people’ (p. 5). In this sense, the book contains numerous elements shedding light on the relationship between tourism and music on the one hand and how places acquire specific meanings, depending on economical and political factors, on the other. The concept of place, always ‘re-worked and changed by music’ (p. 11), thus gives space to original topics of discussion around popular music phenomena, such as visual manifestations of authenticity in Turkish protest music, reconfiguration of the space of South Africa through Die Antwoord's music and bodies, ideological negotiation in Tallinn old town representation in popular music, etc. According to Eva Mazierska (p. 12), relocations can consist of displacing music from a context to another or/and changing the representation and the reality of certain places. The book attempts to go beyond the idea that cultural phenomena expressing a sense of space are ‘pure and fixed’ (p. 4).

In a world where national frontiers still determine our conception of space, music can play an important role in redefining our relation to nationalism. This is the subject of Srdan Atanasovski's chapter ‘Recycled Music for Banal Nation: The Case of Serbia 1999–2010’. By clearing eastern sounds out, Yugoslavian rock music expressed a form of cosmopolitan integration to the West, while turbo-folk embodied the hot nationalism that did not correspond to the institutionalisation of Serbia as a Western nation. Sandra D'Angelo's stimulating chapter, ‘Sampling the Sense of Place in Baile Funk Music’, takes another angle and shows how the genre baile funk that emerged in the late 1980s in Brazil created a utopic place that resonated with the harsh conditions of living in a slum. By frequently resorting to the sample of revolver gunshots, baile funk disrupts the idealised narrative of Brazil that samba incarnates. Moreover, the gunshot sample ‘evokes a traumatic spatial impression, that DJs juxtapose on a positive sense of puissance and humour in order to dominate, address, and decrease chronic social tension in the audience, which is unfortunately part of everyday favela reality’ (p. 51). Despite the gunshot sound and contrary to hip hop artists committed to social issues, there is a paradoxical disconnection with the local reality in baile funk, which can be understood as a claustrophobic reaction. Then the utopic dimension is more to be found in the particular use of reverbs carrying a promise of escape. Ironically, this promise only becomes real when baile funk music circulates among Western electronic dance music networks (more specifically ‘Global Bass’, see pp. 54–5), leaving the audience in its shantytowns. The relocation framework is here particularly inspiring for the study of popular music, as the chapter relies on a thorough historical and political analysis of the genre, but also on a clear methodology involving a series of interviews with producers and followers of baile funk.

Another example of original discussion that a reflection around relocation can impulse is Georgina Gregory's chapter ‘Emotional Places: The Role of Affect in the Relocation of Mancunian Melancholia’. Morrissey's music is well known for carrying many local references in its lyrics and for using a local accent. According to the author, despite this particularism, Morrissey became famous among young Mexicans living in Los Angeles owing to the resemblance of his work to Mexican traditional songs (in the vocal style, Pedro Infante for instance, and in the use of tragic lyrics). Such an explanation, although interesting, lacks empirical evidence. Indeed, it is unfortunate that a study of young Mexicans' taste for Morrissey did not give more voice to the fans.

More generally, in the whole book, there are few explicit references to methodology (interviews, corpus analyses, etc.), except in Sarah D'Angelo's paper on baile funk. Given the diversity of the authors' background (musicology, film and media studies, arts), the book does offer a wide range of approaches to popular music ‘relocations’; however, it does not manage to draw a homogenous and solid frame for the study of space and popular music together. Some chapters remain a little too descriptive, with no clear method, enclosing the meaning into the author's frame of interpretation. Yet from time to time references to fans' discourses are mentioned, but only to confirm the author's conclusions. This is the case for Lyndon C.S. Way, in his chapter ‘Spaces of Protest in Turkish Popular Music’, when he has recourse to fans' expertise to explain the flying seagulls symbol in Grup Kizilirmak's music video. There should be a more systematic use of fans' discourses to reach more substantial conclusions on the protest dimension of the band's music and imagery. The same problem occurs when Katarzyna Chruszczewska explains Die Antwoord's international success on the basis of ‘the distorted image of Western culture that is reflected in the ironic and grotesque manner of Afrikaans style’ (p. 77). Despite the richness of the description, where zef style is seen as producing alternative identities in a post-apartheid order, it appears rather slippery to confine the meaning of Die Antwoord's music, especially when the audience is global.

Ultimately, Relocating Popular Music offers an interesting perspective on the type of discussions that can emerge from a spatial approach of popular music. Even though it lacks methodological stand, it remains a very positive contribution to the field, in the sense that it encourages us to resolutely engage notions such as place and space when studying popular music phenomena.