Community Reformation in the Diaspora

Author(s):  
Lonán Ó Briain

Chapter 6 investigates the circulation of foreign-produced recordings in Vietnam to understand how popular music is generating a heightened awareness of Hmong transnationalism. Vietnamese minorities are compensating for shortcomings in the national media by accessing transnational networks through alternative technological means. VCDs, cell phones, and the Internet are permitting an unprecedented intensification of cross-border exchanges, some of which promote the concept of an independent Hmong nation. Vietnam-based Hmong now regularly listen to, watch, and comment on recordings and music videos produced in other countries. This chapter examines the means of access to these global networks and argues that the limitations on access outweigh the potential for unification as an independent Hmong nation. The research traces the emergence of a Hmong music industry to provide a means of understanding Vietnamese Hmong power, or lack thereof, in this reimagined ethnonationalist community.

2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyndon C.S. Way

AbstractCountercultural, alternative and subversive values share a history with some popular music, it being subjected to political scrutiny in both western democracies and less tolerant states. In Turkey, despite a thriving indigenous music industry, there has been a long history of censorship, arrests and even exiles due to popular music and its politics. Since 2002, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has governed Turkey, embracing free market policies, privatisation of state services and monopolies alongside conservative Islamic social and religious values. Many of AKP’s dominant discourses are articulated in Turkey’s media, due to intertwined relations. This paper asks how popular music videos can express subversion to AKP’s dominant discourses. A sample of Turkish videos is examined using a multimodal analysis of images, lyrics and music to reveal how these three modes and relations between them shape discourses of subversion. This is contextualised by examining AKP policies and a history of Turkish popular music. This study demonstrates how popular music videos can articulate discourses of subversion to dominant conservative ideologies that benefit those with power to the detriment of those without.


Text Matters ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 209-222
Author(s):  
Eduardo Viñuela

This article analyzes how mainstream artists respond to the dynamics of online fan communities, developing complex metanarratives that interrelate their songs and music videos with their “personal” activity on social media. Audiences analyze in depth and discuss each release, contributing to its viralization on the internet. However, these strategies need strong narratives that allow convincing developments and transmedia storytelling, and this is where literature becomes a significant source of inspiration. I argue that the assumption (or subversion) of popular literary characters and narratives contributes to a positioning of artists in the music scene and facilitates their “reading” by the audience. To illustrate this process, I analyze the references to Romeo and Juliet by mainstream pop artists in the last decade, paying special attention to Troye Sivan’s debut album Blue Neighborhood (2015), considered a homosexual version of Shakespeare’s drama, and to Halsey’s concept album Hopeless Fountain Kingdom (2017), understood as a queer version of the play. Both artists explained their personal reading of Shakespeare’s drama as a way of expressing their own feelings and experiences. These examples of metanarrative storytelling achieved their aim, and millions of fans engaged with both artists, discussing lyrics, photos and music videos related to Romeo and Juliet on social media.


2020 ◽  
Vol 93 (4) ◽  
pp. 16-23
Author(s):  
Song Linlin ◽  

Since the establishment of the China (Heilongjiang) pilot free trade zone, the development of cross-border e-commerce with Russia has continued to increase speed and quality. With its geographical advantages and its comparative advantages in the Internet field, Heilongjiang Province promoted the rapid development of the Internet economy in Russia, fostered a new digital trade format represented by cross-border e-commerce, and promoted online and offline collaborative promotion of customs clearance logistics and financial services. The paper expounds foundation and development status of Heilongjiang Province’s cross-border e-commerce, analyzes in integrated development of digital economy with the Heilongjiang Province’s cross-border e-commerce with Russia, and further puts forward prospects and recommendations.


Author(s):  
Laurence Maslon

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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 174165902110243
Author(s):  
Orlando Woods

This paper explores how digital media can cause the representational value of rap artists to be transformed. Ubiquitous access to digital recording, production and distribution technologies grants rappers an unprecedented degree of representational autonomy, meaning they are able to integrate the street aesthetic into their lyrics and music videos, and thus create content that offers a more authentic representation of their (past) lives. Sidestepping the mainstream music industry, the digital enables these integrations and bolsters the hypercapitalist impulses of content creators. I illustrate these ideas through a case study of grime artist, Bugzy Malone, who uses his music to narrate his evolution from a life of criminality (selling drugs on the street; a ‘roadman’), to one in which his representational value is recognised by commercial brands who want to partner with him because of his street credibility (collecting ‘royalties’). Bugzy Malone’s commercial success is not predicated on a departure from his criminal past, but the deliberate foregrounding of it as a marker of authenticity. The representational autonomy provided by digital media can therefore enable artists to maximise the affective cachet of the once-criminal self.


2012 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dillon Mahoney

Abstract:This article explores recent changes in Kenya's curio or handicrafts industry. In addition to a crisis in access to raw materials and a diversifying tourist market, the rise in the use of cell phones and the Internet during the early 2000s present unique challenges. Nonetheless, innovative Kenyan entrepreneurs are using these challenges to market and brand products in new ways—by representing modern global interconnectedness as “fair trade” or creatively promoting the authenticity of their products in other ways. Kenya's artisans and traders have also adapted to diverse and complex tastes beyond the desire for an invented tradition of ethnic and “tribal” art.


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