A journey through music expressions to contest tourism impacts

“A cheap holiday in other people’s misery! I don’t wanna holiday in the sun”. Even if it might sound as a recent slogan of a South European urban collective, the lyrics were actually written during the late 70s by an English band: Sex Pistols. Far from being an isolated example, this song allows us to explore tourism contestation by taking into account music expressions as a specific channel. Music and protest have been widely scrutinized over the decades. Nonetheless, the multifaceted intersections of critical tourism studies and the diverse realms of music and sound still remain under examined. Music has long been an integral component of the tourist experience – from traditional performances and folk festivals to the curated soundscapes of resorts and the globalized rhythms of destination marketing – but its relation to touristification processes remains nascent.
A diachronic path over the last 50 years will prove how musicians, from a variety of geographical backgrounds, have produced lyrical contents much earlier than the term overtourism spread all over the world. Secondly, a synchronic analysis will offer evidences of how tourism contestation has entered into the creativity of several compositions. For the specific propose of this conference, songs from Italy, Spain and Jamaica will serve as specific cases of study to investigate in depth how music and tourism turn into a profitable occasion to address tourism anthropology issues. Such a contribution aims to critically interrogate how music intersects the politics of representation, and the agency of musicians in challenging dominant tourism narratives. Finally, the present study seeks to foster a vibrant interdisciplinary dialogue that enriches our understanding of power dynamics by taking as a starting point the lyrical creativity and how it communicates the impacts of an increasingly extractive sector, i.e. tourism.