World Popular Music

This book traces the trajectories of modern globalization since the late nineteenth century, and considers hegemonic cultural beliefs and practices during the various phases of the history of capitalism. It offers a way to study world popular music from the perspective of critical social theory.

Moving chronologically, the book adopts the three phases in the history of capitalist hegemony since the nineteenth century—liberal, organized, and neoliberal capitalism—to consider world popular music in each of these cultural contexts. While capitalism is now everywhere, its history has been one borne out of racism and masculine hegemony. Early Europeanization and globalization have had a major impact on race/gender/sexuality/capitalist hegemony, while nascent technologies of capital have led to a renewed reification and exploitation of racialized, sexualized, and classed populations. This book offers a critique of the relationship between emergent capitalist formations and culture over the past hundred years. It explores the way that world popular music mediates economic, cultural, and ideological conditions, through which capitalism has been created in multiple and heterogeneous ways, understanding world popular music as the production of meaning through language and representation. The various dimensions considered in the book are the work of critical social science—a critique of capitalism’s impact upon popular music in historical and world perspective.

This book provides a powerful contemporary framework for contemporary popular music studies with a distinctive global and interdisciplinary awareness, covering empirical research from across the world in addition to well-established and newer theory from the music disciplines, social sciences, and humanities. It offers fresh conceptualizations about world popular music seen within the context of globalization, capitalism, and identity.

The Oxford Handbook of Global Popular Music offers an authoritative and state-of-the-art survey of current thinking and research in studies of global popular musics from different parts of the world. The essays in this volume are written by leading international figures and music insiders from ethnomusicology, popular music studies, anthropology, and other disciplines studying music to give critical examinations of the progress and direction of debates surrounding global popular music. The essays will not merely constitute summaries of previous research but cover genuinely new ground in this emerging field of enquiry.

In academic and journalistic studies, “popular music” often has its “official” beginnings in the 1950s, and its discourses have been preoccupied with a canonical focus on American and British white and “black” popular music. Discussions of popular music outside the West are predominantly (but not exclusively) the domain of ethnomusicologists and anthropologists, who have since the 1980s began to focus their attention on global popular music due to the dissolution of the holistic concept of culture, the emergence of popular music studies in the 1980s, and the globalizing trends and processes that impacted on the traditional music they were typically studying. Consequently, ethnomusicologists and anthropologists began to incorporate insights from popular music studies and shifted their attention to music cultures created out of diaspora and hybridity, migration, urbanization and mass media, while popular music scholars have in turn widened their attention to popular music outside of Europe and the US (although probably lesser so). Since the 1980s, studies of global popular music have surfaced in academic writings by ethnomusicologists, popular music scholars, and others, notably Peter Manuel’s milestone publication _Popular Musics of the Non-Western World: An Introductory Survey_ (1988), and, later, entire compilations or book series dedicated to world popular music (Routledge Global Popular Music Series, The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Equinox Transcultural Music Studies series). The conception of the academic _Journal of World Popular Music_ represents another recent milestone in this area of study. There has also been a trend toward developing academic programmes of study with a focus on global popular music. For example, SOAS University of London has offered an entire BA in Global Popular Music since 2018, while many popular music and ethnomusicology programmes in the US, Europe, and (increasingly) Latin America, Africa, and Asia offer an element of academic study in global popular music. The upsurge of student textbooks with a focus on global popular music is further testament to a growing academic interest in this area of study, while postgraduate research by young people, who are truly the product of the era of globalization, is increasingly likely to focus on popular music expressions in different parts of the world as these are shaped by global hegemonic capitalism. In the commercial sphere, the global popularity of genres like hip hop, J-Pop, K-Pop, electronic dance, and others, along with the global spread and hegemony of the American-European pop-rock aesthetic, are a clear indicator of the likely growth of academic interest in global popular music.

The Oxford Handbook of Global Popular Music captures the vibrant, dynamic, and diverse approaches that characterize popular music across the world. The volume features a diversity of topics and approaches, structured into five conceptual parts: Capitalism; Genres; Migration; Identities; and Technology. The purpose of the organization is to give a comprehensive review of achievements by leading scholars in the field of global popular music to date, and to contribute to an understanding of what global popular music might become in future, charting new areas that are likely to define studies of global popular music in the coming decades. Since the 1990s, and with the emergence of digital technologies and the internet, global popular music is marked by increased stylistic diversification in accordance with trends globally and locally. Along global trends, for instance, diversification is manifested by global electronic music, hip hop, or global Bollywood. Local stylistic trends, meanwhile, rendered the Anglo-American mainstream less relevant to global popular music cultures, instead maintaining their “own” vernacular popular music. In some instances, artists have occasionally produced their own variants of global stylistic patterns and successfully forayed into the global field, such as the teen pop idols of K-Pop and J-Pop in the 1990s and 2000s. International world pop stars, who also became part of the World Music craze in the West, are further examples of local musicians who have entered the international field of popular music with occasional success. All of this development underpins the structure of the volume: The part GLOBAL CAPITALISM serves as a broad placeholder to describe essays that capture the economic contexts in wich global popular music has developed and been shaped. Under GLOBAL GENRES are essays that capture “big” or “global” popular music genres as they have gained global popularity and recognition. MIGRATION features essays that engage with the way that geopolitical movements of migration resonate in the memories of migants and are manifested through popular music. The part on IDENTITY will feature essays of selected global popular music that critically engage with and further our understandings of class, gender, LGBTQ, race/ethnicity, nationalism, disability, health, and religion (Islam). The final part, TECHNOLOGY, will contain essays that focus on people’s engagement with recording, broadcasing and other technologies, and the impact of digital technologies and the internet on the increased stylistic diversification musically.

Sister Souljah is arguably one of the most important female “raptivists” in the United States. Published in 1994, her autobiography No Disrespect narrates the artist’s rise from poverty to become one of the most prolific writers, educators and activists in the 1990s. Yet critics tend to overlook the autobiography’s strong emphasis on activism, especially how it is embedded in larger Afro-diasporic female literary traditions. No Disrespect re-writes earlier traditions of black women’s writing, visual culture and social activism in order to educate a younger generation on the ongoing need to promote racial justice. The autobiography is located in the larger context of what Paul Gilroy has called the Black Atlantic by situating it not only in American, but also in African cultural traditions. I join Reiland Rabaka and others in moving forward the field of hip hop studies by establishing more cultural, literary and visual continuities between late twentieth-century hip hop culture and earlier literary forms of Afro-diasporic expression, such as poetry and autobiography. In tracing Sister Souljah’s oeuvre to the beginnings of African American women’s literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is the aim of the article to contribute a new perspective to the origins of hip hop culture and activism beyond the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Popular music and musicians are frequently at the centre of what is thought to be cool. In the age of neoliberal capitalism, the ideology of cool determines cultural production and consumption, central to which is branding, the principal concept of advertising. Music and musicians have not been left unaffected by branding and the conquest of cool. This is the concern of my paper, which illustrates the appeal of cool in World Music, the soundtrack of globalization, through the lens of genre branding, authenticity and identity, which will be applied to a concrete case study about the Malian World Music group Tinariwen. I will firstly provide the context to the paper by illustrating the financialized nature of neoliberal capitalism, the most recent regime of globalisation, and establishing that the logic of neoliberal capitalism is the ideology of the hip and the cool. Then I will move on to discussions about World Music, the soundtrack to neoliberal capitalism, which can sometimes signify the hip and the cool, specifically through branding processes that conjure imaginations surrounding authenticity and identity in the consumers of World Music. In the third part, I will illustrate a current example of World Music that evokes the ideology of the cool, namely the Malian Tuareg musicians known as Tinariwen, who have managed to gain popularity and success in the international mainstream pop music market. Overall, the paper will demonstrate that in the most recent regime of globalization, musicians who have the " right " sound, who are accompanied by a strong story, and who come with some photogenic characters can become successful by tapping into the appeal of the cool.

I explore how two Latinx young men made use of rapping within a creative and healing afterschool hip hop space at a California Bay Area High School. I argue that they performed a calculated, strategic ambivalence. That is, just as they composed raps that made use of wordplay with double or more meanings, they constructed personhoods that quite literally embodied double or more meanings. They became the embodiment of double entendre, strategically performing, rapping and narrativizing personas that allowed them to synchronously survive the classroom and the 'hood, subverting the "White gaze" and the gaze of the streets.

In this article, I focus on ethnomusicological and popular music studies’ examinations of Western popular music cultures, and provide a critique of some of their methods. Further, my main aim is not to propose a new method, but to suggest a re-emphasis of some of the fundamental ethnographic approaches in studying Western popular music cultures. These include participatory observation, grounded ethnography, materialism, thick description, and cultural relativism. To substantiate these arguments, I examine my own ethnographic research of American DIY (“do-it-yourself”) venues and scenes as an example of a participatory research of living and touring with DIY participants and studying their everyday lives. I recount my fieldwork methods and experiences and demonstrate how the focus on non-musical and private aspects of American DIY music cultures can produce a better understanding of their musical and public sides. Finally, I also argue how the proposed methodological re-evaluation can help to decolonize music studies.

Popular music and musicians are frequently at the centre of what is thought to be cool. In the age of neoliberal capitalism, the ideology of cool determines cultural production and consumption, central to which is branding, the principal concept of advertising. Music and musicians have not been left unaffected by branding and the conquest of cool. This is the concern of my paper, which illustrates the appeal of cool in World Music, the soundtrack to the most recent regime of globalization, through the lens of genre branding, authenticity and identity, which will be applied to a concrete case study about the Malian World Music group Tinariwen. I will firstly provide the context to the paper by illustrating the financialized nature of neoliberal capitalism, and establishing the idea that the logic of neoliberal capitalism is the ideology of the hip and the cool. Then I will move on to discussions about World Music, the soundtrack to neoliberal capitalism, which can sometimes signify the hip and the cool, specifically through branding processes that conjure in the consumers of World Music imaginations surrounding authenticity and identity. In the third part, I will illustrate a current example of World Music that evokes the ideology of the cool, namely the Malian Tuareg musicians known as Tinariwen, who have managed to gain popularity and success in the international mainstream pop music market. Overall, the paper will demonstrate that in the age of neoliberal capitalism, musicians who have the " right " sound, who are accompanied by a strong story, and who come with some photogenic characters can become successful by tapping into the appeal of the cool.

This article recounts a critical conversation between two Black British sound women, conducted by a Black British female scholar. Together DJ Ade and Junie Rankin (real names Lynda Rosenior-Patten and June Reid) form Nzinga Soundz, one of the UK’s longest running, all-women sound systems. Thali Lotus owns and runs CAYA Sound System, established and built in 2016 with the aim of promoting reggae music as an educational, charitable, entertaining and entrepreneurial tool. Resulting from an extensive double interview conducted by Dr Monique Charles, leading scholar on grime and Black Atlantic performances, the piece offers an insight into issues of race, gender, knowledge transmission and use of technology as reflected in the work of two female reggae outputs. Combining the critical insight of a scholar with the self-reflection and self-articulation of music practitioners, the article explores the way in which the practice of reggae sound systems is constantly rearticulated as a work of...