Music and Globalization: Critical Encounters

Introduction: Rethinking Globalization through Music

1 Introduction: Rethinking Globalization through Music Bob W. White World music—the umbrella category under which various types of traditional and non-Western music are produced for Western consumption—has been waiting to happen for a long time. At least since the invention of new technologies of reproduction at the turn of the twentieth century and the realization soon after that records, far from being simply a means of selling phonographs, were in fact themselves a lucrative and renewable resource. Relatively little is known about the marketing strategies of the first international record companies, but clearly these companies distinguished early on between “exotic” music for affluent European and North American audiences and music—perhaps no less exotic—intended for people elsewhere who wanted to hear the sounds of their own culture (White 2002). Yet today, listening to the various forms of music being marketed under the label “world music,” something appears to be different about this historical moment. From our current perspective, world music gives the impression of opening our ears to a vast realm of cultural and political possibilities but at the same time seems to usher in vaguely familiar forms of cultural expansionism and exploitation. If world music has indeed become the soundtrack for globalization, then music is not merely a manifestation of global processes and dynamics but is the very terrain on which globalization is articulated. To begin, we must consider whether there is something distinctive about music— and not just world music—that enhances our understanding of globalization. The chapters in this volume suggest that music is particularly mobile and therefore easily commodified; indeed, nothing seems more characteristic of global capitalism than its capacity to transform culture into a commodity. But music is also 2 | Bob W. White important to our understanding of globalization, because the nature of music is primarily social. Music is generally intended to be heard and often takes the form of a group activity, especially when one considers the way that communities of taste emerge and organize around particular styles and artists. Nonetheless, and despite all the feel-good promotional language about music being a “universal language,” musical practice is everywhere deeply embedded in culture and history , an observation that ethnomusicologists have been making for decades. This means that a complex understanding of the performance and promotion of music can provide a wealth of information about how people from different cultures and class backgrounds engage with one another and attempt to work through what it means to be simultaneously “of the world” and “in the world.” The phenomenon of world music, at least in terms of marketing, has only existed for about twenty years. But this is only a recent manifestation of a much older historical process, and the social science literature on globalization tends to focus more on the culture of globalization than on cultures in a time of globalization. World Music and Globalization The recent phenomenon of world music provides a window on human experience and social life during an era of globalization, but as a broadly diverse form of human expression music has always been global. The invention of new recording and reproduction technologies at the end of the nineteenth century created certain possibilities for music, regarding composition as well as distribution (Gronow 1998). In various places around the globe, the first half of the twentieth century was a period of great mobility for popular music (Jones 2001; Vianna 1999; White 2002). Afro-Cuban music in the interwar period, already a mixture of styles and sounds that emerged from the transatlantic slave trade, was able to take advantage of a lively commercial and cultural corridor between Havana and New York (Moore 1997). Several decades later the Western popular music soundscape saw the emergence of a series of exotic musical appropriations that were influenced not only by the war but also by the spectacular evolution of the tourism industry (Hayward 1999; Keightley 2004). In the 1970s Bob Marley’s music made him an internationally recognized star and made reggae music an international standard of global popular music (Konaté 1987). The music that we call world music is the product of several waves of exchange, movement, and appropriation. Understanding its emergence as a commercial and musical phenomenon improves our ability to understand the links between consumer capitalism (Taylor 2007), new regimes of technology (Sterne 2003), and the evolution of the modern nationstate (Wade 2000). The term “world music,” as a label used for marketing and promotion, is a relatively recent creation...