Processes of institutionalisation and ‘symbolic struggles’ in the ‘independent music’ field in Italy

Modern Italy ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Magaudda
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
National Level ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Industrial Sector ◽  
Independent Music ◽  
Field Of Cultural Production ◽  
National Music

Over the last fifteen years, independent rock music has become a wider field of cultural production and consumption in Italy. Indeed, while during the 1970s and 1990s the production of independent music was connected predominantly to political movements, alternative subcultures and the antagonistic attitude of the ‘centri sociali’, in the present decade, independent popular music has moved towards the centre of the national music industry and the mass media of the musical mainstream. This article describes the phases of this process of institutionalisation, showing how the politically based culture of independent music is today at the centre of a symbolic struggle occurring between the values of authenticity, rooted in political youth cultures, and the strategic and pragmatic tendency towards integration into the mainstream of the national music industry. This analysis is carried out applying the Bourdieian concepts of ‘field of cultural production’ and ‘cultural capital’, together with their evolutions into the notion of ‘subcultural capital’. This theoretical framework is applied in order to show both the process of institutionalisation this cultural field is undergoing, and the symbolic struggle taking place between the original values of the political and cultural autonomy of music and the commoditisation of musical objects in the mainstream mass media and national industrial sector. Finally, it is shown how new agents who represent the independent popular music industry at the national level need to deal with claims for authenticity raised by the alternative and extreme wings of the independent music scene.

Nordic Modernity and the Structure of the Musical Landscape

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabian Holt
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Geography ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Global Modernity

This chapter outlines macro structural changes in the Nordic music landscape, drawing from sociological theory of modernity. The chapter identifies popular music in wider tensions in Nordic modernity, particularly in relation to shifting hegemonic cultures to uncover the underlying dynamics of tensions between shifting mainstream formations and their alternatives. Following this logic, musical style and taste involve positionings in relation to issues of capitalism, nationalism, and mass media. The chapter analyzes changes in the region’s music landscape within the region’s evolving modernity, particularly in the transition from a national to a more global modernity. This is illustrated by the declining status of Stockholm’s Anglo pop music industry as the region’s center into a more decentralized and networked transnational cultural geography.

'Was ist aus uns geworden? – Ein Häufchen Sand am Meer: emotions of post-war Germany as extracted from examples of popular music

Popular Music ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Ritzel
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Political Identities ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Expectations ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Masses

Kurt Tucholsky wrote in 1923 in reference to an old ‘Fasching’ tune of that era that this song comprised the ‘most complete expression of the German “Volksseele” (“soul of people”) that one could imagine’ and that it ‘truly reveals the day and age we live in, how this age has evolved and how we ourselves come to terms with this age’ (Tucholsky 1975, p. 187). His argument can be compared to Kracauer's thesis on the effects of film (Kracauer 1979, p. 11). He suggested that the commercial character of mass cultural production was constantly affected by what was provided in a stream of feedback: only commodities which convincingly meet public expectations on either a latent or manifest level are successful with the public. If the masses are moved by a national rhythmic feeling, then the hits articulating that feeling can be seen as a kind of national expression. From this perspective, national and political identities are bound up in the daily emotional turbulence of the music industry.

Conflation and conflict in Brazilian popular music: forty years between ‘filming’ bossa nova in Orfeu Negro and rap in Orfeu

Popular Music ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
JONATHON GRASSE
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
Bossa Nova

Popular music plays important roles in two related films portraying Brazilian slum life. Based on a 1953 play by Vinícius de Morais, Marcel Camus's 1959 film Orfeu Negro, and a 1999 feature by Brazilian director Carlos Diegues titled Orfeu, augment traditional samba styles with bossa nova and rap, respectively. Interpreting musical style as allegorical texts within fictive landscapes, this paper examines conflation and conflict among musical meanings, Brazilian social histories, and discursive identities marking the twentieth century. Broad aspects of Brazilian political and socio-cultural development are implicated, such as authoritarianism, the politics and sociology of race, technological advances, mass media, and modes of modernisation. Here, bossa nova and rap engage society through reflexive and generative interpretations within a narrative designed to illustrate connections between processes of innovative, trans-national cultural production, myths of national identity, social change, and the powerful role of popular music in film.

The music industry, technology and utopia – an exchange between Marcus Breen and Eamonn Forde

Popular Music ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARCUS BREEN
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
The State ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Computer Mediated ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Multiple Characteristics

A new struggle has emerged within popular music. This struggle is about technology and access to music through computer-mediated technology. Somewhat typical of the state of cultural things being more complex in their multiple articulations, this struggle runs in tandem with the historical struggle by youth for ‘their music’ against that of previous generations. The multiple characteristics of the struggle over cultural production, ownership and circulation represents a change from earlier days when pop music was articulated to youth culture and social movements, offering relatively direct relationships from one to another. (For example, ‘The Sixties’ became the shorthand reference for these cultural formations.) That relationship still exists, albeit in a self-conscious historical sense that requires continuous examination as it changes with the new generations of youth and the available technologies.

The state of rock: a history of Finland’s cultural policy and music export

Popular Music ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janne Mäkelä
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Basis ◽  
High Level

AbstractThe Finnish government has historically been active in regulating the practices of popular music. At the same time, the music industry, rock media and musicians have traditionally insisted on markets free from state intervention. This article focuses on the history of the interrelationship between cultural policy and popular music, especially rock exports, in Finland. It argues that the high level of organised forms of culture and the lure of internationalism form the historical basis for the nation-state–popular music relationship in Finland. Following the demands for ‘competitive society’ in the 1990s and the international breakthroughs of Finnish pop and rock music performers after 2000, this relationship has intensified. Contemporary policy is in many ways healthier than in the past, yet it also raises crucial questions about hierarchies and identity relationships in popular music and society.

“I Go Against the Grain of Your Memory”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel B. Sharp
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Cultural Roots ◽  
Field Of Cultural Production

This chapter charts the artistic trajectory of northeastern Brazilian poet, singer, writer, playwright and actor José Paes de Lira, known as Lirinha, situating his experiments as a long-standing attempt to reject and revise the regional folklorism within which audiences and critics often received his performances. The chapter examines Lirinha’s work, both as the visionary behind the nationally acclaimed group Cordel do Fogo Encantado (1998–2010) and in his subsequent musical and theatrical efforts. It also traces Lirinha’s turn away from folklorism as a reaction against narratives of “cultural rescue” that pressured him to uphold static notions of cultural roots. Reinforcing an overarching argument within this volume, Sharp argues that Lirinha’s work is culturally transformative within its particular field of cultural production, even if it is not always audible as experimental.

The Jewish Population of Tennessee

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Maslon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Jewish Population ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Major Power ◽  
Sheet Music ◽  
Early Music ◽  
Music Publishers ◽  
Popular Music Industry

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the first way that the imprimatur of Broadway reached consumers was through the immense distribution of colorful and tuneful sheet music. Early music publishers learned quickly that associating a song with a Broadway show such as the Ziegfeld Follies, Broadway personalities such as Al Jolson and Fanny Brice, or Broadway composers such as Victor Herbert gave that tune a special identity that increased its popularity. In addition, music publishers, such as Max Dreyfus, were major power brokers in the popular music industry, yielding the ability to make a song into a hit, and continued to be influential through the first half of the twentieth century.

Invented Dances, Or, How Nigerian Musicians Sculpt the Body Politic

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-22
Author(s):  
Dotun Ayobade
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
African Music

AbstractPopular dances encapsulate the aliveness of Africa's young. Radiating an Africanist aesthetic of the cool, these moves enflesh popular music, saturating mass media platforms and everyday spaces with imageries of joyful transcendence. This essay understands scriptive dance fads as textual and choreographic calls for public embodiment. I explore how three Nigerian musicians, and their dances, have wielded scriptive prompts to elicit specific moved responses from dispersed, heterogenous, and transnational publics. Dance fads of this kind productively complicate musicological approaches that insist on divorcing contemporary African music cultures from the dancing bodies that they often conjure. Taken together, these movements enlist popular culture as a domain marked by telling contestations over musical ownership and embodied citizenship.

The Emergence of a Hybrid Public Sphere in Myanmar: Implications for Democratisation

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Carl Middleton ◽  
Tay Zar Myo Win
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
National Level ◽  
Military Coup ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Access To Information ◽  
Military Government ◽  
Coup D'etat ◽  
Hybrid Governance

Abstract Myanmar was under a military government for almost six decades, during which time the state maintained an ‘authoritarian public sphere’ that limited independent civil society, mass media and the population's access to information. In 2010, Myanmar held flawed elections that installed a semi-civilian government and established a hybrid governance regime, within which civil, political and media freedoms expanded while the military's influence remained significant. In this paper, we examine ‘hybrid governance at work’ in the ‘hybrid public sphere’, that holds in tension elements of an authoritarian and democratic public sphere. The boundaries of these spheres are demarcated through legal means, including the 2008 military-created Constitution, associated judicial and administrative state structures and the actions of civil society and community movements toward political, military and bureaucratic elite actors. We develop our analysis first through an assessment of Myanmar's political transition at the national level and, then, in an empirical case of subnational politics in Dawei City regarding the planning of the electricity supply. We suggest that the hybrid public sphere enables discourses—associated with authoritarian popularist politics in Myanmar—that build legitimacy amongst the majority while limiting the circulation of critical discourses of marginalized groups and others challenging government policies. We conclude that for substantive democracy to deepen in Myanmar, civil society and media must actively reinforce the opportunity to produce and circulate critical discourse while also facilitating inclusive debates and consolidating legislated civil, political and media freedoms. On 1 February 2021, shortly after this article was finalized, a military coup d’état detained elected leaders and contracted the post-2010 hybrid public sphere, including constraining access to information via control of the internet and mass media and severely limiting civil and political rights.

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