Sonic Eponyms

When music is written for places or about places (Galveston, Phoenix, Wichita, La Grange) we get the movie version of it.

Media has a long history of creating alternate realities as a byproduct.  Back in the early days of photography, images were new prototypes for identity, and could be quickly manufactured as opposed to being painted. It's like Lewis Carroll’s photos of his daughter Alice Liddell. She became a character that could be reproduced, and in fact was copied by her siblings.

Glen Campbell's dreamy "place" songs are for all intents and purposes "soundtracks", but soundtracks change with music trends, so we can't use saccharine string parts because it's now a different story being told with different sonic identities. When you get to Phoenix these days it isn't Glen Campbell's version. La Grange Texas (where ZZ Top has only recently played after 40 years), has always been a conservative town. But the fact that we've been watching those "films" in our heads for that long means the places are in fact reinvented.

It will be interesting to see how immersive media used with VR (in places like The Sphere) will further fictionalize actual places.

From the book review of Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll: 

"There is a confluence between the literary Alice and the Alice who stood before Carroll’s camera. The photographic Alice is also a production of imagination. In the enduring wonderland of Carroll’s photographs—where fiction abounds and the natural is made surreal—Alice is changed into an image. And like her literary counterpart, the photographic Alice raises a series of questions about identity, not only how it’s constructed, but also how one’s identity is understood by others. What kind of knowledge does photography provide about a person, if any at all? The most poignant question is perhaps the hardest to answer: What does it mean to become a photograph?"

What does it mean when a place becomes a song and the place is changed by it.