Between the Bogside and boy bands: Pop music and place-based identities in Derry Girls

Abstract

The British teen sitcom Derry Girls has been noted for its unique spatial and historical setting: the Northern Irish city of Derry in the 1990s. These coordinates furnish a number of intersecting transition narratives in which place-based identities are negotiated against the backdrop of the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland as well as neo-liberal globalization and European integration. The role of pop music is of vital importance in narrating and structuring the teenaged protagonists’ identity formation processes. Through a recognizable mix of commercially successful pop, Eurodance and hip hop songs, the show inscribes the main characters’ experiences into a wider social fabric – one marked by post-ideological, post-nationalist and consumerist undertones. This social fabric is shown to be delineated by middle-class Whiteness, thereby reflecting the role of, in particular, Europop as the soundtrack of a (perceived) 1990s post-cold war liberal hegemony. The inclusionary and exclusionary aspects of western popular music are also shown to work in tandem with pre-Brexit nostalgia and the renegotiation of gendered power structures vis-à-vis local traditionalism. Overall, Derry Girls employs popular music in ways which foster accessibility for universalized adolescent transition narratives built around White cosmopolitanism.