Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-42gr6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T14:26:06.225Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Music as symbol, music as simulacrum: postmodern, pre-modern, and modern aesthetics in subcultural popular musics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Extract

Postmodern aesthetics has come to be recognised as a salient feature of much popular culture, including music. Urban subcultures, and especially migrant subcultures, may have inherent inclinations toward postmodern aesthetics, while at the same time retaining ties to modern and even pre-modern cultural discourses. The syncretic popular musics created by such subcultures may reflect these multiple cultural orientations by combining postmodern and more traditional characteristics. Thus, for example, punk rock and rap music can be seen to combine postmodern techniques of pastiche, bricolage and blank irony with modernist socio-political protest. Similar eclecticisms can also be found in the musics of some urban migrant subcultures, whose syncretic musics, like their senses of social identity, often self-consciously juxtapose or combine ancestral homeland traditions with the most contemporary cosmopolitan styles and attitudes. Interpretations of such musics may call for a particularly nuanced appreciation of the distinct aesthetic modes which may coexist in the same work.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Banerji, S. and Baumann, G. 1990. ‘Bhangra 1984–8: fusion and professionalization in a genre of South Asian dance music’, in Black Music in Britain: Essays on the Afro-Asian Contribution to Popular Music, ed. Oliver, P. (Milton Keynes), pp. 137–52Google Scholar
Bauman, G. 1990. ‘The Re-invention of Bhangra’, World of Music, 32:2, pp. 8195Google Scholar
Chambers, I. 1987. Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience (New York)Google Scholar
Chambers, I. 1990. Border Dialogues: Journeys in Postmodernity (New York)Google Scholar
Clifford, J. 1992. ‘Traveling cultures’, in Cultural Studies, ed. Grossberg, L., Nelson, C., and Treichler, P. (New York), pp. 96112Google Scholar
Eagleton, T. 1990. The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford)Google Scholar
Gates, H. L. Jr 1988. The Signifyin' Monkey (New York)Google Scholar
Gilroy, P. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA)Google Scholar
Hebdige, D. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London)Google Scholar
Jain, K. 1993. ‘Profile on Apache Indian’, Waaris Punjab De – Vaisakhi Issue, 1993 (brochure accompanying concert in Livingston, New Jersey)Google Scholar
Manuel, P. 1993. Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India (Chicago)Google Scholar
Meyer, L. 1956. Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago)Google Scholar
Rose, T. 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middletown, CT)Google Scholar
Slobin, M. 1992. ‘Micromusics of the West: a comparative approach’, Ethnomusicology, 36:1, pp. 188Google Scholar
Wheeler, E. 1991. ‘‘Most of my heroes don't appear on no stamps': the dialogics of rap music’, Black Music Research Journal, 11:2, pp. 193216CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Willis, A. C. 1991. ‘Rap music and the black musical tradition: a critical assessment’, Radical America, 23:4, pp. 2938Google Scholar