Gospel Music in Africa

This chapter outlines the development of gospel music in Africa, highlighting particularly its interrelationship with the rise of neoliberalism since the 1980s. Carried by the proliferation of Pentecostal/charismatic Christianity, gospel has become the most pervasive popular music genre in Africa. Authors have noted a strong convergence between neo-Pentecostalism and neoliberalism, both worshipping prosperity, wealth accumulation, and capitalist consumerism as (quasi-)religious devotional acts. The first part of this chapter provides the conceptual background and gives a broader overview of the existing literature on gospel music in Africa. The second part, then, presents a case study of Christian popular music in Ghana, examining more in depth how gospel music features and promotes ideologies of prosperity and consumption, and how it contributes to the making of neoliberal subjectivity and the constitution of neoliberal bodies.

Heavy Metal in “Global” Perspectives

This chapter uses critical discourse analysis and textual analysis to offer a general overview of metal as a multi-sited, multi-modal genre. While acknowledging the centrality of metal’s ostensible “birth” in the United Kingdom, and rapid spread to the United States and Western Europe, to the genre’s identity, this chapter also discusses metal’s positionality in discrete studies from Northern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. In examining how metal is experienced in these contexts, this chapter thus seeks to problematize the discourse of metal’s “true” birth in the Anglosphere, and elucidate a critique of the scholarly literature of the “global metal” model, which has permeated metal music studies over the last decade. Such a model, as the author concludes in this chapter, potentially replicates many of the problems—Othering, exclusive, non-agentic—with “world music” as a discourse, and thus it is necessary to assert the ways in which scholars and scene members alike are speaking back to these characterizations.

The Rise and Rise of K-Pop

K-pop, Korean popular music, is a central component in Korea’s cultural exports. It helps brand Korea, and through sponsorships and tie-ups, generates attention for Korea that goes well beyond the music and media industries. This essay traces the history of Korean popular music, from its emergence in the early decades of the twentieth century, through the influence of America on South Korea’s cultural development and the assimilation of genres such as rap, reggae, punk, and hip hop, to the international success of Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’ and the idol group BTS. It explores the rise of entertainment companies, how they overcame the digital challenge, and how their use of restrictive contracts created today’s cultural economy. It introduces issues of gender and sexuality, and outlines how music videos and social media have been used to leverage fandom.

Blackness, Jazz, and Globalization

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.

Fragments of a Queer Feminist Rock and Pop History in Vienna

The historical development of Viennese rock and pop music started with rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s, continued with beat music and the “dialect wave” in the late 1960s, punk in the 1980s, the popular Viennese electronic music scene in the 1990s, and is currently enjoying a renaissance of the “dialect wave.” Artists like the Rosée Sisters, Austria’s first all-female rock band founded in 1962, Topsy Girl, A-Gen 53, or SV Damenkraft were active in local music scenes. In retrospect, they are considered as exceptions in the historiography of Austrian popular music. This chapter discusses several feminist and queer artists and collectives in Austria, their position in popular culture, and in historical and geographical contexts. The author concentrates primarily on all-female bands, LGBTIQ+ artists, and queerpop projects to illustrate diverse approaches to music, feminism, and their position within the pop and rock music scenes in Vienna.

Punk Sans Frontières

Punk’s diaspora was not limited to the United Kingdom or the United States, and, even during its mid-1970s heyday, parallel developments were happening around the globe, and what would become known as “punk” emerged in Australia, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia at the same time as the nascent UK punk movement. Furthermore, as punk in the United Kingdom reached its commercial peak and began to decline (at least in terms of its public profile), it was being discovered, reinvented, or adapted in far-flung places beyond the (Western) critical radar. More than forty years on, punk has traversed international boundaries, and the legacies of the original UK and US scenes are now accompanied by a variety of global counterparts. This chapter narrates punk’s evolution as an international phenomenon, whose interaction with wider cultural contexts, languages, and systems of belief challenged notions of a homogeneous “punk” identity.

Music Recording and the Recording Industry

Records have become an essential source for popular music history. The article discusses the technical development and global expansion of the international recording industry from the 1890s to the 2010s. Production peaked in 1929 and started to grow again after the Second World War. As the technology developed, independent recording studios were established, and the infrastructure for making records became widely available. The article also discusses the special case of record production in the Soviet Union. In the early days of radio, stations produced music themselves, but since the 1960s, radio has mostly relied on records. Many public broadcasters still have large music archives. Television has also been important for documenting and marketing music. Since 2000, the recording industry has made a successful transition to the internet. Access to social networks has given birth to a large number of microproducers, and the role of music videos has increased.

The Music Cities Paradigm

Because music cities are fast becoming economically important urban spaces for neoliberal capitalism, this chapter draws a map of this emerging field of research. Using thematic analysis, it offers an overview of the current debates connected with the development of music cities, focusing on two key issues, definitional problems, and the music city branding process. Building on these issues, the chapter examines a set of algorithms used to describe the development of neoliberal music cities, based on economics, the creative cities index, and heritage. In case studies of the size, scope, and significance of London, New York City, and Los Angeles, it uses algorithms to unpack the branding of these neoliberal cities as music city superstars. Uncovering a global music ecosystem based on a three-tiered cultural hierarchy of authority, where the city on the highest tier has the most power and influence in the global music industry, it notes that London is highest in the hierarchy because it is seen as the music business capital of the world. Representing the digital music and music consumption capitals of the world, New York City is second in the hierarchy, and Los Angeles, viewed as the entertainment capital, is third. The chapter concludes by offering a summary of what the study of global music cities might look like in the future.

Race, Latinidad, and Latin Pop

Popular music is one site where the contributions of Afro-Latinos are widely recognized. However, few Afro-Latino musicians reach the top of the Latin music charts. Several authors have argued that music like mambo or salsa, which began with strong Afro-Latino representation, “whitened” once it entered the mainstream Latin music market. This whitening involved both a shift in aesthetics and in the prevalence and popularity of white Latino artists. This chapter examines the contemporary pop phenomenon reggaetón as the latest iteration of this shift. The author pays particular attention to the rise and popularity of CNCO, the “first reggaetón boyband” that emerged from a television show called La Banda on Univision. Through an analysis of CNCO’s self-presentation, performance, and music videos, the author examines the current trend toward whitening in reggaetón that has helped facilitate the genre’s growth in Latin and global pop music.

Music Festival Capitalism

This chapter adds to a growing subfield of music festival studies by examining the business practices and cultures of the commercial outdoor sector, with a particular focus on rock, pop, and dance music events. The events of this sector require substantial financial and other capital in order to be staged and achieve success, yet the market is highly volatile, with relatively few festivals managing to attain longevity. It is argued that these events must balance their commercial needs with the socio-cultural expectations of their audiences for hedonistic, carnivalesque experiences that draw on countercultural understanding of festival culture (the countercultural carnivalesque). This balancing act has come into increased focus as corporate promoters, brand sponsors, and venture capitalists have sought to dominate the market in the neoliberal era of late capitalism. The chapter examines the riskiness and volatility of the sector before examining contemporary economic strategies for risk management and audience development, and critiques of these corporatizing and mainstreaming processes.