We Are the World: The Rise of “World Music”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Woods
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
World Music ◽  
Western Music ◽  
Cultural Imperialism ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
The West ◽  
Lack Of Control ◽  
The World ◽  
Musical Characteristics

Due to globalization we live in a global culture which includes sharing and creating genres of music. “World music” is a phenomenon that began in the 80s. This genre, amongst other things, blends popular Western musical characteristics with non-Western musics which has rejuvenated popular music in the West. However, the term “world music” is difficult to grapple. “World music” cannot be described as a genre completely outside of the Euro-American mainstream. The music of our global culture is largely thought to be dominated by the cultural imperialism of the West. Nevertheless, this model does not encompass the extent of the control ‘foreign’ musical aspects of the “world music” genre are exerting on Western popular culture. Therefore, the co-option of “world music” by the West is being reversed. The popularity of “world music” is rising in Western popular culture. There are increasing amounts of “world music” resources becoming available and the “classicization of world music” is apparent in various trends. While “world music” depends on Western markets, these markets are dependent on non-Western music to diversify and provide products displaying the lack of control the West has on the genre it created. The roles have been reversed and “world music” is in the process of co-opting Western popular music.  

The Globalization of Superheroes: Diffusion, Genre, and Cultural Adaptations

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Hammonds
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Retributive Justice ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Cultural Imperialism ◽  
High Demand ◽  
Cultural Adaptations ◽  
Civic Values ◽  
The World ◽  
Entertainment Value ◽  
Industrial Societies

Superheroes are a global phenomenon. The superhero genre has been proliferated through modern industrial societies by way of movies, television, comics, and other forms of popular media. Although virtually every nation in the world has heroic myths, the modern superhero, as marked by the inception of recent American comics heroes in 1929, is a uniquely Western invention. Superheroes are “Western” insofar as they embody and exhibit Western civic values, such as democracy, humanism, and retributive justice. These characters have been communicatively incorporated into globalization processes by means of diffusion and thereby enact aspects of cultural imperialism. Even so, superhero figures have been in high demand across many populations for their entertainment value. As superheroes have diffused in non-Western cultures, they have not only been absorbed by new cultures but also refigured and adapted. These non-Western adaptations have had a recursive influence, such as the global popularity of Japanese manga. The recursive relationship between Western superheroes and their non-Western adaptations implies superheroes are an important aspect of cultural fusion in global popular culture.

The Beau Monde

2020 ◽  
pp. 41-62
Author(s):  
Rohan McWilliam
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Night Time ◽  
The West ◽  
The World

Chapter 3 explores the world of elite leisure in both its high and low forms to uncover how the aristocracy continued to shape the West End in the first half of the nineteenth century. This chapter is devoted to nightlife and is intended to show that one purpose of pleasure districts was to construct the idea of the night-time economy. The chapter explores the world of gentlemens’ clubs and other locations of masculine pleasure before moving into an examination of opera, ballet, and gambling; both sources of aristocratic networks. The second half of the chapter then looks at the world of low life in the Covent Garden and Maiden Lane areas; territory of the ‘flash’ and the bohemians. Affluent gentlemen explored what they saw as the ‘underworld’. Here was a world of disreputable bars and spaces for popular song. There is a detailed analysis of venues such as the Cider Cellars which shaped the development of popular music and culture with its bawdy ballads.

scholarly journals The Balkans of the Balkans: The Meaning of Autobalkanism in Regional Popular Music

Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marija Dumnić Vilotijević
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
World Music ◽  
First Century ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Western Balkans ◽  
Applied Music ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
The People ◽  
Musical Characteristics

In this article, I discuss the use of the term “Balkan” in the regional popular music. In this context, Balkan popular music is contemporary popular folk music produced in the countries of the Balkans and intended for the Balkan markets (specifically, the people in the Western Balkans and diaspora communities). After the global success of “Balkan music” in the world music scene, this term influenced the cultures in the Balkans itself; however, interestingly, in the Balkans themselves “Balkan music” does not only refer to the musical characteristics of this genre—namely, it can also be applied music that derives from the genre of the “newly-composed folk music”, which is well known in the Western Balkans. The most important legacy of “Balkan” world music is the discourse on Balkan stereotypes, hence this article will reveal new aspects of autobalkanism in music. This research starts from several questions: where is “the Balkans” which is mentioned in these songs actually situated; what is the meaning of the term “Balkan” used for the audience from the Balkans; and, what are musical characteristics of the genre called trepfolk? Special focus will be on the post-Yugoslav market in the twenty-first century, with particular examples in Serbian language (as well as Bosnian and Croatian).

scholarly journals World Studies and Relational Comparison

PMLA ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 130 (2) ◽  
pp. 430-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shu-Mei Shih
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
World Music ◽  
The West ◽  
World Cinema ◽  
The World

A new kind of world studies is emerging. This is a world studies 2.0, since some forms of world studies, such as world literature, world music, and world cinema, have existed for some years in the humanities. These categories have been more narrowly defined and refer to literature, music, and cinema from places other than the West—that is, “the rest,” as seen from the West. In this vein, world literature has sometimes been euphemistically called “literature of the world at large,” conjuring a chase, if only halfhearted, after a world that somehow slipped away: at large.

Notation and identity in contemporary popular music

Popular Music ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 215-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Stith Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World ◽  
Long Term Changes ◽  
Western European ◽  
Rock N Roll

Popular music, like all manifestations of popular culture, lives on in spite of recurring criticisms that cast it as somehow inauthentic. In fact, defences against this discounting are built into popular music (for example, the Rolling Stones' classic: ‘It's only rock 'n' roll but I like it’) and built in, as well, to the identities of those who make the music a part of their lives, be they players, producers, consumers or critics. On the other hand, so-called classical music, not unlike other manifestations of Western European art culture, lives on in spite of popular music and provides the touchstone of authenticity that creates the defensive popular response. The ideas I am advancing here are intended to allow the players in this authenticity contest to be recognised as evidence of unique historical circumstances: recognised, that is, not only as stock dramatists of ethnocentrism, but as indicators of long-term changes in music cultures in all parts of the world.

Negotiating Gender, Popular Culture, and Social Justice in Music Education

2015 ◽  
pp. 581-597
Author(s):  
Joseph Abramo
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Female Empowerment ◽  
Music Video ◽  
The World ◽  
Relations Of Power

This chapter describes how educators may use Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model to create instruction and curricula that challenge students to critically examine popular music. Through this process, students generate dominant, oppositional, and negotiated readings of songs, music videos, and other popular culture texts, and situate these readings within relations of power and privilege. This pedagogical process is illustrated in an analysis of contested notions of “female empowerment” in Beyoncé Knowles’s music video Run the World (Girls). Finally, limitations of the encoding/decoding model are accounted in order to create new aims for social justice in music education, including the exploration of diversity and the exploration of societal power and privilege in the production and reception of popular music.

Blackness, Jazz, and Globalization

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Johnson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Music ◽  
Race Politics ◽  
Pan African ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Historical Trajectory ◽  
Over Time

The globalization of jazz was also the globalization of black US popular culture. This essay discloses, and provides a model for, the ambiguous dynamics of popular music migrations and the race politics that frame them. In diasporic destinations, those politics are generated by cultural histories very different from that of the United States, and which also exhibit their own synchronic and diachronic heterogeneities, thus introducing distinctive local complexities. In the context of the black-centered jazz canon, these circumstances have produced regional jazz narratives that are derived from the US model, but with often radically different inflections from place to place, and over time. Apart from documenting the perennial ubiquity of the blackness/jazz nexus, the study identifies a broad historical trajectory, in which the focus shifted from African American blackness to a pan-African model that anticipated the World Music phenomenon.

Promoting a Global Culture of Science

2009 ◽  
Vol 17 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 477-486 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bhikhu Parekh
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Scientific Research ◽  
Scientific Culture ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
The West ◽  
Close Interaction ◽  
The World ◽  
Culture Of Science ◽  
Do So

Basic scientific research is largely limited to the West. Original scientific contributions by the rest of the world are extremely limited, though China, South Korea and India are beginning to make their presence felt. This absence of scientific research is largely due to the undeveloped state of scientific culture. To counter this, systematic and rigorous theoretical training of talented minds is crucial. That requires close interaction with the West. The author suggests various ways to do so.

2. The West and the world

2020 ◽  
pp. 18-36
Author(s):  
Philip V. Bohlman
Keyword(s):  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Folk Songs ◽  
World Music ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
The West ◽  
Music Making ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Different Cultures

‘The West and the world’ investigates the unequal balance of power in the transcription, recording, and history of world music. World music may have been forged in the ‘Middle Passage’ from Africa to slavery elsewhere, but its musicians were nameless. Their music-making was documented by those with power. Collectors of world music have an anthological impulse, bringing together songs from different cultures. Johann Gottfried Herder’s collection of Volkslieder or ‘Folk Songs’ and two of the first anthologies on record—the Demonstration Collection and Music of the Orient—show that the products of the overarching anthological impulse can be very different.

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