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Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies

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INTRODUCTION: SPANISH POPULAR

MUSIC STUDIES
Silvia Bermúdez & Jorge Pérez
Published online: 28 Jul 2009.

To cite this article: Silvia Bermúdez & Jorge Pérez (2009) INTRODUCTION: SPANISH POPULAR MUSIC
STUDIES , Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 10:2, 127-133, DOI: 10.1080/14636200902990661

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 Silvia Bermúdez & Jorge Pérez

INTRODUCTION: SPANISH POPULAR

MUSIC STUDIES1

In 1970 Manuel Vázquez Montalbán published Crónica sentimental de España, offering a

valuable methodology for interpreting an entire array of popular cultural products and
practices*songs, bullfighting, American films, soccer*that allowed Spaniards to
survive not only the harsh 1940s, the so-called ‘‘Years of Hunger’’, but the entire
Franco dictatorship. The ways in which Spaniards identified with specific songs,
singers and performers was the focus of much of Vázquez Montalbán’s evaluation of
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three decades of Spanish life*from the 1940s through the 1960s. More importantly,
Crónica underscored the important social function of music. In the chapter ‘‘Canciones
y sı́mbolos’’, he argues that ‘‘las canciones son esa ración de estética que más se presta
a ser recreada a medias entre el que la emite y el que la recibe’’ (20), and that ‘‘[el]
hecho artı́stico comunicado y reactualizado en cada lectura, contemplación o audición,
tiene en la canción la interesante faceta de que puede convertirse en un test sobre
psicologı́a colectiva y sobre el temple sentimental popular de toda una época’’ (20).
These key insights anticipate ideas that scholars such as Simon Frith, George Lipsitz,
Richard Middleton, John Shepherd, Tia DeNora, and Roy Shuker have been
developing since the explosion of Popular Music Studies in the early 1980s.
The creation of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music
(IASPM) in 1981 facilitated the growth of the discipline as an independent field
of studies, not a mere subsidiary of Cultural Studies, since this association
institutionalized new methodologies that went beyond the subcultural approaches in
vogue in the 1970s (Hall, Hebdige). Nevertheless, the study of popular music did not
thrive within the field of Spanish Cultural Studies until fairly recently, despite having a
compelling predecessor in Vázquez Montalbán. Several concise contributions to the
volume Spanish Cultural Studies, edited by Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi in 1995
(Serge Salaün, Julian White, and Catherine Boyle), along with the work of scholars
such as Joan-Elies Adell, Héctor Fouce, Silvia Martı́nez, Ignacio Mejı́as, Antonio
Méndez Rubio, Eduardo Viñuela and Elena Rodrı́guez, have recently established this
area of study as a vital area of research.
Returning to Vázquez Montalbán’s insight that songs are collaborative enterprises
between those who perform them and those who listen to them, we can see that the
Spanish cultural critic was already defining what Roy Shuker forcefully states in
Understanding Popular Music: meaning in popular music is not only produced at a
textual level, but it is rather the result of ‘‘a complex set of interactions’’ between the
‘‘nature of the production context, including State cultural policy, the text and their
creators, and the consumers of the music and their spatial location’’ (x). Three recent
contributions to Popular Music Studies, Richard Middleton’s Voicing the Popular: On
the Subjects of Popular Music (2006), Tia DeNora’s After Adorno: Rethinking Music
Sociology (2003), and George Lipsitz’s Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of
Popular Music (2007), also underscore Vázquez Montalbán’s second assertion: that
songs provide clues about the collective psychology of a society and the sentimental
Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies Vol. 10, No. 2 June 2009, pp. 127133
ISSN 1463-6204 print/ISSN 1469-9818 online – 2009 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/14636200902990661
 128 J O U R N A L O F S PA N I S H C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

geography of an epoch. Indeed, by highlighting how songs create landscapes of feeling,

Vázquez Montalbán exposes the ways in which music gains value through the
emotions it arouses. DeNora makes this point compellingly: ‘‘[m]usic is strongly
associated with mood, feeling, emotion, and subjectivity’’ (83).
Musical emotions are both personal and social. Middleton, for example, shows
how music embodies and reinforces forms of identity (Voicing 2325), while Lipsitz
argues that music serves as a ‘‘repository for collective memory’’ (Footsteps viii). The
connections between emotion and geography, the formation of identity, and the role
of music as a repository of collective memory are central to the articles included in
this issue authored by Pepa Novell, Kirsty Hooper, Jorge Pérez, Santiago Fouz-
Hernández, Christopher Paetzold, José Colmeiro, and Benjamin Fraser. All of the
articles examine specific musical texts and/or performers, taking into consideration
the various contexts*economic, cultural, affective, political*in which the music has
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been produced, performed, and received by audiences. One common objective of the
essays is to reveal the ‘‘hidden histories’’ of Spanish popular music in the last forty
years, by offering critical evaluations that expose why and how music means what it
means to Spanish society from the dawn of democratic Spain to the first decade of the
twenty-first century. Our issue is limited to this historical period because the late
1970s and early 1980s witness the Golden Age of Spanish popular music (Fouce 19) as
well as the process of internationalization through which Spain becomes a significant
landscape within the larger field of Popular Music, in both musical and economic
terms. It is in this period that new musical cultures and styles, mainly inspired by
Anglo-American models, develop in Spain, moving rapidly from the underground
scene to mainstream circles thanks to the modernization of Spanish media and, in
particular, of the music industry.
The articles included here demonstrate that a narrowly analytic musicological
approach cannot account for the importance of music to societies. In order to gauge
the meaning of popular music with greater precision, we need to be active on several
fronts at once. For instance, we must address the relationship between producers,
musical texts, and their contexts, and the links between music and emotion. And we
must study how music structures and reproduces ideologies and power structures
and how music can sometimes contest these very structures. An examination of
popular music, indeed, of any music at all, cannot be limited to internal musical
characteristics. Musical meanings, as David Brackett notes, are socially constructed
(xii), and we have to consider not only the way power relations determine those
meanings but also how music is an ‘‘emotional medium’’ (De Nora 83) experienced
directly in time and space.
It is clear, then, that the analytical tools that musicology has employed for the
study of classical or art music cannot account for a number of significant features
related to the ways popular music is produced and distributed. Formalist
musicological approaches fail to address, for example, the manner in which popular
music is ‘‘conceived for mass distribution’’ in a commercial industry and ‘‘stored and
distributed in non-written forms’’ that are capable of transmitting values and shaping
identities in unique ways (Tagg 75). Nor can they account for how music is ‘‘so
important to people’s understanding of themselves and their identities, to the
formation and sustenance of social groups, to spiritual and emotional communication,
to political movements, and to other fundamental aspects of social life’’ (Turino 12).
 I N T R O D U C T I O N : S PA N I S H P O P U L A R M U S I C S T U D I E S 129

Finally, our understanding of popular music must be framed within the existing
debates among popular music scholars regarding the ‘‘proper’’ definition of popular
music and the methodology for its study. As Simon Frith explains, there has been a
clear divide between musicological approaches, which maintain that the meaning of
popular music depends largely on the way it sounds, and the tradition of content
analysis, best exemplified by the journal Popular Music and Society, which locates the
meaning of popular music almost exclusively in its lyrics (159). From our discussion it
follows that we consider that neither approach is sufficient on its own to address the
multiple ways in which popular music produces meaning. Our contention, then, is
that the study of popular music should always be interdisciplinary.
In this respect, and in the context of contemporary Spain, our working definition
of popular music encompasses a number of musical styles disseminated through one or
more mass media that are produced within capitalist and late-late capitalist modes and
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that are easily accessible to the public. Popular music is largely commercial music that
has the capacity to reach and influence a broad audience and, therefore is not aimed at
elite groups with specialized listening skills. However, we also acknowledge that there
are other forms of popular music in present-day Spain that are produced neither to
achieve commercial success nor to reach a broad audience. Finally, and with regard to
the transmission and dissemination of popular music, our contributors take into
account the rapid changes and advances brought on by the recording technology and
the internet, such as iPods and YouTube videos, which allow for immediate and
apparently unlimited access to music.
In ‘‘Cantautoras catalanas: de la nova cançó a la nova cançó d’ara. El paso y el peso
del pasado’’, Pepa Novell delineates the musical and political trajectory of the nova
cançó vis-à-vis the articulation of a Catalan identity from the latter years of the
dictatorship to its present-day manifestations, focusing on the artistic paths of popular
cantautoras such as Maria del Mar Bonet, Marina Rossell, and Guillermina Motta, and
also on the emergent voices of Sı́lvia Comes and Lı́dia Pujol. The article explores how
popular music enacts and promotes institutionalized versions of Catalan identity.
Novell highlights the historically specific relationship between the cultural and the
political in the nova cançó and shows how, as early as 1991, the Generalitat de
Catalunya understood that music was a key field of cultural production that it could
influence directly in order to present a less folkloric image of the Catalan nation. As
the author suggests, this has led to the institutionalized promotion of a Catalan rock
music ‘‘scene’’ by the Generalitat, and the consequent abandonment of the nova cançó;
a musical genre that, in light of the preparations to host the 1992 Olympic Games,
seemed démodé and related to connected political causes. In her succinct but
comprehensive description of the politics that shaped how and why Catalan
governmental institutions stopped supporting the nova cançó, Novell pays particular
attention to the role played by the cantautoras in committing to this musical style while
also expanding their musical horizons into other genres.
Kirsty Hooper’s ‘‘The Many Faces of Julio Iglesias: ‘Un Canto a Galicia’,
Emigration and the Network Society’’ is likewise focused on the connections between
music and the construction of national identity. This article pays close attention to the
ways in which music counters the dominance of institutionalized national culture, by
evaluating the fluctuating notions of Galicianness that stem from the multiple
transformations*including its latest manifestations on YouTube*of Julio Iglesias’s
 130 J O U R N A L O F S PA N I S H C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

1972 co-authored song ‘‘Un Canto a Galicia.’’ Hooper’s analysis of the impact of this
song by a transnational musical icon such as Julio Iglesias brings to the fore the
important role played by new spaces of communication in the redistribution and
reinterpretation of popular music. By focusing on the afterlife of the song in
cyberspace, the author exposes the contradictory meanings and oppositional readings
that are now made possible by its accessibility on YouTube. Ultimately, Hooper’s
article demonstrates that the analysis of a single song by a performer is relevant to the
study of popular music, through its discussion of the processes by which different
layers of meaning*cultural, social, and political*are conveyed through music.
The following two articles address the period commonly known as the ‘‘Edad de
Oro del Pop Español’’*roughly speaking from the late 1970s to the late 1980s*
which developed in close association with the celebrated, though paradoxically
disputed, movida madrileña. The highly publicized events of ‘‘La Movida’’*funded by
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the Comunidad de Madrid from the end of 2006 to the beginning of 2007 and curated
by Blanca Sánchez Berciano*included concerts, art exhibits, roundtable discussions,
and film screenings. This project was offered as a nostalgic homage to one of the most
vibrant cultural periods of recent Spanish history. The catalog of the project, edited by
Blanca Sánchez, engaged one of the most controversial aspects of the movida: the
accusations of its lack of aesthetic value. The pervasive presence of defensive
comments by the participants in this nostalgic project compels cultural critics to
revisit the achievements of the movida and, concretely, its musical soundtrack.
With this context in mind, in ‘‘Driving with La Movida: The Rock ‘n’ Road
Aesthetics of Loquillo’s Rock Ibérico,’’ Jorge Pérez calls for more analytical studies of
particular musical productions that would complement the already vast movida-related
literature that focuses on the general atmosphere and the contentious issue of its
precarious existence. Pérez examines the career of Loquillo, one of the main icons of
the movida, to demonstrate the usefulness of case studies that weigh the contributions
and innovations of the musicians associated with the movida. He argues that Loquillo’s
rock ‘n’ road songs constitute his most original musical contribution. These songs
insert a rock ‘n’ road aesthetic, with the appeal of the road as a space of rebellion
against mainstream society, into the context of Spanish music and culture. The author
credits Loquillo for an alluring cultural politics in his music, which has impacted
several generations of fans, distancing himself from Loquillo’s emphasis on the
modernist innovation of his rock ibérico.
In ‘‘Me cuesta tanto olvidarte: Mecano and the Movida Remixed, Revisited and
Repackaged’’, Santiago Fouz-Hernández evaluates the profitable results of the recent
nostalgic return to the spirit of the movida. The author provides a thorough account of
the events surrounding what he cleverly calls the ‘‘re-movida’’, epitomized by the
previously mentioned project ‘‘La Movida’’. He then proceeds to analyze the musical
Hoy no me puedo levantar (2005), which uses the songs of the band Mecano as its
narrative backbone, as a cogent example of the successful use of marketing strategies
and technological resources to re-sell a bygone musical product. Fouz-Hernández’s
article affirms one of the main contentions throughout this issue: when studying
popular music, one has to take into account that it is a cultural product circulating in a
complex market structure. Therefore, we cannot, as Philip Tagg warns us, evaluate
popular music ‘‘using some platonic ideal scale of aesthetic value’’ (74), but rather as a
 I N T R O D U C T I O N : S PA N I S H P O P U L A R M U S I C S T U D I E S 131

commodity whose meaning also depends on the way it is packaged and re-packaged
within a very complex musical industry.
Identity politics, history, and State and regional cultural policy are the main issues
that Christopher Paetzold explores in regards to flamenco in ‘‘Singing Beneath the
Alhambra: the North African and Arabic Past and Present in Contemporary
Andalusian Music’’. This article traces a historical view of the mix of Arabic and
Andalusian folk music in both the origins of flamenco and its present-day incarnations.
By addressing contemporary artists and bands such as Chambao, Hakim, and Enrique
Morente that continue to build musical projects from the fusion of Arabic and
Andalusian sounds, Paetzold presents flamenco as an arte vivo that undergoes constant
redefinition to offer an image of Andalusia as a region willing to embrace the Arabic
component of its cultural heritage and its contemporary reaffirmation thanks to the
presence of Arabic immigration. As in the case of Pepa Novell’s and Kirsty Hooper’s
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articles, Paetzold teases out the key role government intervention has played in the
development of flamenco. He explains the manner in which flamenco artists have
struggled to transcend cultural stereotypes established by the Francoist regime during
the 1960s and 1970s, and how the Junta de Andalucı́a has supported flamenco since
1978 in order to promote regional identity and to boost the tourism industry, a
crucial prop to the region’s economy.
In ‘‘Smells Like Wild Spirit: Galician Rock Bravú, between the ‘Rurban’ and the
‘Glocal’,’’ José Colmeiro presents the bravú movement, a Galician roots music
movement (with origins in the 1990s) that consists of a fusion of folk music with
several forms of modern rock including punk, indie rock, and ska. Colmeiro argues
that this movement, though deeply rooted in traditional Galician culture and in the
assertion of Galician national identity, constitutes a cogent attempt to offer a more
plural and inclusive version of that identity beyond stereotypical and conservative
notions of folk culture. Among the accomplishments of this now-extinct movement,
the author points out that rock bravú made Galician a viable language for rock music. In
this respect, it had a great impact on Galician youth during the 1990s, as they could
connect with a form of cultural production that spoke their own musical language
while simultaneously affirming local roots and identity, often with an insurgent,
rebellious tone.
The issue closes with ‘‘The Bergsonian Link Between Emotion, Music, and Place:
From the ‘Motion of Emotion’ to the Sonic Immediacy of the Basque Band Lisabö’’. In
this article, Benjamin Fraser argues for a non-representational understanding of music
by focusing on a post-punkemo band, Lisabö, which, unlike the groups and musical
styles considered in the other articles of this issue, does not belong to a mainstream
musical scene, and sings in Euskara against the English-dominated field of post-
punkemo. Fraser frames the discussion of the experience of listening to Lisabö*in
particular their thick guitar sound and the physicality with which it explodes in the
listener’s body, the ‘‘link between musculature and music’’*within a range of
theoretical approaches. Taking Henri Bergson’s insights on the relationship between
sound, emotion and place as a point of departure, Fraser anchors his argument in
Deborah Thien’s felicitous phrase ‘‘the notion of emotion’’. In so doing, he moves the
discussion of music to another level, attempting to understand not only what music
means, but also what it does. In the process, he ultimately argues for another way of
knowing and listening to music that incorporates the spontaneity of emotion.
 132 J O U R N A L O F S PA N I S H C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

Needless to say, our selection is neither definitive nor all-inclusive. By calling

attention to the social function of a few specific musical styles and genres that are and
have been ‘‘popular’’, our aim is to generate much-needed debate and research on the
diverse and rich geographies of Spanish popular music. The crucial role of the
cantaoras for the vigorous state of flamenco in the last two decades, the renewed
success in the selling charts and considerable visibility of the copla sung by folclóricas
such as Lola Flores, Isabel Pantoja, Rocı́o Jurado, and Marı́a Jiménez, the appearance
of new transnational superstars of Spanish origin such as David Bisbal and Enrique
Iglesias, and the surprising success of an overtly feminist composer and singer such as
Bebe in reaching both young and not-so-young audiences, are only a few of the many
topics related to the vibrant state of contemporary Spanish popular music that call for
more scholarly inquiry. In laying the ground for further studies on Spanish popular
music, this special issue serves both as an introduction and an invitation.
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Note
1 We thank Jonathan Mayhew for his help on an earlier version of this Introduction.

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