MODULE 10

CONTEMPORARY WORLD

POPULAR MUSIC AND GLOBALIZATION

Popular music serves here as the gateway to explore the representations

and meanings associated with music making in the time of globalization. A
brief overview of the literature in the social sciences and humanities on the
relationship between music place, identity and society and how they are
intertwined in the context of globalization will act as a starting point.

The history of globalization of music as a long series of fruitful, yet

violent cross – cultural encounters that took place beyond the north-south axis
and the time -frame of modernity that globalization as a phenomenon tends to
be limited to.

However, while contact may enable a form of mutuality, it also inevitably

creates friction. From the term of Anna Tsing’s illuminating ethnography of
globalization in which she defines friction as the ‘awkward, unequal, unstable,
and creative qualities of interconnection across difference’. Friction is
exemplified here by the music that emerged out of the Black Atlantic slave
trade. It is, Paul Gilroy has argued, the violent economic and cultural
maelstrom out of which the sound track of modernity emerged.

Following on this, contradictory ways enable musical contact but

exacerbates friction through the medium of new technologies raising economic,
political, aesthetic and ethical questions with regards to authenticity,
representation of the other, commodification and ownership of cultural forms
such as music through copyright laws in the age of digital sampling. It is
largely within this context that discuss the emergence of world music as a
globalized form of mass-produced popular music intended for the cosmopolitan
audience of the twenty-first century.
 Qualifying music as a popular is a value judgment indicating the
important place music occupies in everyday life, as a highly subjective
aesthetic experience, as an essential part of shared social activities, as a
mediated and mass-produced cultural product and as a means for engagement
with power and with Otherness. When examined through the prism of contact,
friction and capital, popular music is therefore better understood as an
umbrella term encompassing a wide variety of genres, practices and meanings
that goes beyond its general association with Anglo-American inspired pop
culture.

POPULAR MUSIC AND MUSICIANS IN SOCIETY: FROM THE LOCAL TO

THE GLOBAL

When the terms globalization and music are put together, they tend to
conjure up critical reflections regarding the notions of culture, place and
identity. They also underline anthropological and ethnomusicological
understandings of music making as an important catalyst in the generating of
various representations and ideologies associated with such notions. Indeed
music participates at once in the reinforcing of boundaries of culture and
identity and in subverting them. It is no surprise, then, that music should be
just as implicated in subject formation and identity politics, particularly in
‘playing out’ a sense of common nationhood or belonging in a context marked
by uneven transnational social, cultural, political and economic transactions.
Taking that into account, popular music makes a compelling case for
elucidating the complex dynamics of globalization, not only because it is
popular, but because music is highly mediated, is deeply invested in meaning,
and has proven to be an extremely mobile and resourceful form of capital.

Sociologists have been ahead of the game in this. Engaging critically with
Adorno’s (1191) seminal work on the intimate relationship between musical
structure and social structure, they paved the way for what Tia DeNora has
termed, ‘the production of culture’ approach which ‘signalled a shift in focus
from aesthetic objects and their content to the cultural practices in and
through which aesthetic materials were appropriated and used to produce
social life.

Along the same lines, Hall and Jefferson (1976) and Simon Frith (1981),
among others, emphasize the links between popular music and social change.
The music of youth, in particular, because youth is conceived as liminoidal –
that is, representing a moment of ambiguity, transition, even crisis – have been
central to investigating the class, racial, and generational tensions that
permeate and inevitably lead to change in society. These ground-breaking
studies lead the way for the sociocultural analysis of other genres of music like
reggae, heavy metal, rap and hip-hop, all of which would eventually become
globalized, prompting further studies on their transformation as they are
performed in new contexts and are appropriated by musicians and audiences
carrying increasingly transnational biographies and transcultural references.
Other sociologists opted to focus on the concrete, step-by-step, work of making
art and music happen. Howard Becker demonstrates in Art Worlds how any
form of cultural production, including music, even that which is individual in
appearance, results from the interaction of a large network of actors, hence
providing a sense of community and identity through the collective work of
producing music and other forms of art. Taking this analysis further in
Producing Pop, Keith Negus (1992) unravels the mechanisms and strategies
multinational record companies employ to produce popular music and develop
end promote successful new artists. He sheds light on the internal
organization, logistics and interrelations between the various branches of the
industry (recruiters, managers, promoters, producers, broadcasters, etc.),
offering a critique of the way value-laden notions such as musical talented
authenticity are constructed and then legitimized on a global scale through the
branding and marketing of new artists. All of this underlines the political and
economic undercurrents that run through popular music, an issue that is
taken head on by cultural studies scholars. Drawing on Marxist and Post-
Marxist critical theories of the Frankfurt School, semiotic analysis, scholars
mostly associated with the University of Birmingham put the spotlight on the
political economy of culture and the representation, resistance to and
appropriation of dominant cultural tropes.

While culture production and cultural studies analysis has tended to put
the emphasis on the consumption of culture and the cultural brokers that
mediate it, anthropologists and ethnomusicologists have directed their
attention to the role of musician themselves and their status in society.
Merriam’s The Anthropology of Music (1964), for example discusses the
ambiguous social position of musicians, describing it as a wandering between
marginality and power. This is also the case of Indian Musicians, whose
vocation, as ethnomusicologist Regula Qureshi has noted, allows them to
temporarily neutralize inequities that cut across Indian society. In other
contexts, like the Arab World for example, it is a deep belief in the power of
music, that is, its ability to stir the soul and provoke strong emotions that has
tended to shape perceptions of musicians and their place in society, hence the
emphasis on ethics, morality and the art of good manners as a criterion for the
social legitimation of musicians and for the recognition of their talents.

Western musicians are no exception. During the 17 th and 18th centuries,

they were subject to religious or royal patronage. With that came the privilege
of circulating among nobility and the possibility of being listened to, figuratively
and literally by those holding power. Three centuries later, the avantgarde
composers of the early 20th century would in some ways capitalize on
marginality and turn it into a political manifesto by posing as representatives
of a future society.

Today, the dynamics of centrality and marginality, power and

submission that continuously shape the lives and livelihood of musicians,
perceptions of their work, and the social place it occupies play out on a much
larger scale, compounded by the asymmetrical encounter made by
globalization, postcolonial identity politics and the commoditization of music.
Some of these issues have been raised through ethnographies of the marketing
and performance of African music and musicians on the world stage. Other
studies have looked at the emergence of hybrid music practices in
multicultural urban centers. In all of these case studies, theories of
globalization, global capitalism, cosmopolitanism and belonging, and critical
theories calling into question isomorphic configurations of culture, nation,
place, and identity provide fruitful concepts that elucidate how transcultural
encounters act upon and are themselves enacted through musical practices.
One may safely assume following this brief overview of the literature, that
music makers – be they located in the northern hemisphere or in the southern
hemisphere – are inevitably entangled in the cultural, economic, and political
dynamics of globalization. They engage with it as musicians through the points
of contact and friction that the circulation of capital provides.
RELIGION IN GLOBAL CONFLICT

In the last decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st,
religion has often been in the news, and when it has, it has been bad news.
The rise of xenophobic right-wing Christians in Europe and the United States,
the emergence of Hindu nationalism in India, extreme Jewish political
movements in Israel, Buddhist confrontations in Sri Lanka and Thailand, and
radical Muslim movements throughout the middle East have branded all
religious traditions as potential conveyors of strident political activism. This all
the more surprising in the modern era, when some of the best minds of the
early 20th century predicted that religion would eventually wither away. But
even those who expected it to persist did not anticipate such a vigorous public
appearance at this moment in late modernity.

The contemporary conflicts with which religion has been associated are
not solely about religion, however, if one means by ‘religion’ a set of doctrines
and beliefs. The conflicts have been about identity and economics, about
privilege and power – the things that most social conflicts are about. When
these conflicts are religionized – when they are justified in religious terms and
presented with the aura of sacred combat – they often become more
intractable, less susceptible to negotiate settlement. Thus, although religion is
seldom the problem, in the sense of causing the tensions that produced the
conflicts in the first place, it is often problematic in increasing the intensity and
character of the struggle.

REVOLT AGAINST GLOBAL SECULARISM

The first stage of the encounter was characterized by isolated outbursts.

It began in the 1970s by a variety of groups – Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, and
Muslim – that were revolting against what they regarded as the moral failing of
the secular state. One of the first of these religious rebellions was nonviolent –
the Gandhian movement in India led by Jayaprakash Narayan, who called for a
“Total Revolution’ in 1974 against the corruption of the Indian government. It
threatened to bring the workings of the Indian government to a standstill, and
in 1975 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi responded by proclaiming a general
emergency in the country. Several years later, in 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini
led a revolt against the secular regime of the Shah of Iran, though not entirely
bloodless, the numbers killed in coup were probably not much more than a few
hundred. Soon after, the Khalistani movement of Sikh separatism gained
momentum and unleashed a reign of violence in the north Indian Sate of
Punjab throughout the 1980s, killing tens of thousands. At the same time,
Buddhists activists violently resisted attempts by the Sri Lankan government to
appease the growing movement of Tamil separatism that had arisen in that
island nation in 1970s. the gathering power of Muslim extremist in Egypt led to
the brutal assassination of President Mohammad Anwar al Sadat in 1981.

The common element that ran through all of these otherwise isolated
nonviolent and violent incidents of Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, and Sunni Muslim
rebellion in the 1970s and early 1980s was an implicit moral critique of secular
politics. Though radical religious movements had been at the margins of
politics for much of the 20th century – the Muslim Brotherhood, for example,
was formed in 1928 – the movements did not gain strength until the last
decades of the century. By that time a revived anti – colonial mood had
developed against the cultural and political legacies of European modernity in
the Middle East and South Asia that gave the movements a new force. The
modern secular governments in those regions were fashioned in the mid-
twentieth century in the in the image of retreating European colonial powers
were deemed to be insufficient conveyers of social identity and moral purpose.
Hence the opponents of these secular regimes utilized the power of religion –
not only as mobilizing force but also as an ideological basis of cultural identity
and ethical condemnation.

Secular authorities treated these rebellious religious movements simply

as attempts to asurp power. The secular leaders left unchallenged the moral
critique that the movements conveyed. In the early months of the Iranian
revolution, some American scholars refused to accept it as genuine. They
though it was only an unfortunate interruption of the historical process that
they believed had been leading Iran inexorably toward a Western – style liberal
political system. In India, Indira Gandhi scoffed at the pretensions of the young
Sikh leaders who challenged her authority, and she refused to take them
seriously. Yet at the same time, within the general public in South Asia, Iran,
and the Middle East many people began to accept as valid certain aspects of
these movements’ moral critique. In some cases, they regarded the new
religious activists as version of the legendary Robin Hood – extra-legal though
virtuous to the political status quo.

Early in the 1980s international developments also affected the Jewish

religious politics of Israel which in turn would help to spur the growth of
Muslim movements in Israeli controlled Palestine and the adjacent region. The
enormous victory of Israel of 1967 over its Arab neighbors had been a point of
pride for the young nation of Israel, and it also helped to stimulate new
thinking about broader role for the nation both geographically and
theologically. Some religious leaders had begun to imagine that the military
successes of Israel would preface a great moment in Jewish history – the
reestablishment of the ancient temple and the coming of the messiah. In the
catastrophic messiahnism espoused by a Brooklyn-born Rabbi, Meir Kahane,
his moment would come when Arabs would retreat from the biblical territory of
ancient Israel and the humiliation of the Jews would be avenged. Kahane’s
vision of Israel was the recreation of the ancient biblical kingdom.

Kahane and the specific of his greater Israel vision had an impact on the
radical Muslim activism in Israeli-controlled regions and nearby. After Israel’s
entrance into Lebanon in the 1982 war, the Hezbollah Shi’ite movement was
formed to oppose Israel and to resist the Westernization of Lebanon. At the end
of the decade the Palestinian resistance movement – which up to the time had
been largely secular – took on an arrestingly religious character along the
model of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, leading to the formation of Hamas.
Leaders of the Hamas movement pointed to the right – wing Jewish politics of
Kahane in justifying the need for their own religious-motivated political action.