If “ordinary people [in Africa] tend to be invisible and inaudible” (Barber 1987), African youth initially appear to be the silent majority. Yet youth are becoming increasingly audible. In Tanzania (and elsewhere in Africa) urban youth and young adults have absorbed global popular musics like rap and reggae and have created local, loud varieties, and are thus making sure their experience is no longer invisible. Access to, and incorporation of, global popular musics — and other elements of globalized popular culture like fashion, food, dance, and sports — have intensified with the rapid mediatization of Tanzanian society in the 1990s. In this article I will focus on the relationship between global popular musics and the experiences of Tanzanian urban youth in the 1990s.

During the latter part of the 19th century, many different dances such as schottis, rheinldnder and pas de quatre were commonly performed both in the cities and in the countryside in Sweden. The ways of dancing varied slightly, but the music was very similar for each dance. Some decades later, in the 1920s, people danced all over Sweden to a type of music that sounded bewilderingly similar to late 19th-century dance music. This style was in everyday speech called bonnjazz, i.e. “rustic jazz,” or to use a less pejorative term, “farmer jazz.” In this article I will give a survey of how this change came about, discuss the Swedishness of bonnjazz, and consider how this style was related to jazz and other types of foxtrot.

Scholars who study world musics as fields of meaning formation have been devoting a great deal of attention to a historical phenomenon that, although not exactly new, is exerting a relatively greater impact on world cultures at the end of the century. The term globalization has been used to express this unprecedented movement of capital concentration on a worldwide scale, diminishing or at least redefining the role of nation-states as traditional centers of power and decision-making. This phenomenon has conditioned the restructuring of economic, political, and cultural relations among human groups (nation-states, social classes, ethnic groups, urban sub-cultures, etc.) worldwide (Ianni 1992). Making it possible to think of space and time in new terms, globalization has immersed those groups in various types of virtual interaction, something that many of their own musical practices had experienced since the growth of mass reproduction technologies. In such context, several of the social sciences’ more influential concepts (culture, class, national state, etc.) have been challenged to reaffirm their relevance (Ianni 1992).

Global flows of people, capital and ideas in the late 20th century have challenged scholars of culture to acknowledge that cultural practices do not remain anchored to either places or peoples of origin. Movements of groups of peoples away from homelands continue to provide one means by which cultural practices spread. The circulation of mass-mediated means of communication, especially television broadcasting, videotapes, and sound recordings, has not only facilitated the circulation of ideas, images and practices, but has made possible their separation from the bodily presence of cultural carriers.

Over a century after its gestation in the slums of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the tango has become a global music in several interdependent ways. It is global in the most literal sense of geographic reach, flourishing in Buenos Aires and Tokyo, in Saigon and Durban, in small towns in Scandinavia and in the U.S. It has attained and maintained such a reach through its distinctive and enduring musical profile and, more importantly, through several kinds of semantic flexibility. The tango bears strong yet mutable links to place and culture; it is variously but vividly perceived as belonging to the Rio de la Plata culture of the Argentine and Uruguayan capitals, as the national music of Argentina, as more generically Latin, or just as pleasantly (or bizarrely) exotic, older dance music. It rewards the intense attention offered by aficionados in Buenos Aires, by a core of tango kichigai (tango fanatics) in Japan, and by serious devotees elsewhere, in addition to the passing notice of people exposed only to isolated dances in movies or at an ice-skating rink. For different populations, the tango is either a historical footnote, a healthful hobby, or a stunningly complex and all-consuming focus for emotional life.

As everyday musical experience becomes increasingly mediated by radio, recordings, television, film, and computers, scholarly and popular discourses about music are periodically punctuated by concerns over consumer passivity and alienation. When we shift the focus to the musical practices of children and youth, these concerns are accompanied by age-old arguments over the intellectual, moral, and physical effects of music on developing young people. Charles Keil (1998:304) has recently suggested that humanity is in dire need of “restoration of grooving-capacity,” or else “boredom, anxiety, consumerism, and business as usual will kill us.” This is apparently a continuation of his earlier concern (1993:2) that mass mediation may be “enriching our private lives at the expense of a broader sociability.” Undoubtedly, thoughtful critiques of mass media constitute important work for musicologists; grass-roots projects for enlarging the musical materials to which children have access are equally valuable. Nevertheless, I think it's too early to condemn mass mediation as the pathway to human devolution.

Musicologists are beginning to be disturbed by cases of Western artists using music from other parts of the world for profit. For example, in the Yearbook for Traditional Music, Hugo Zemp (1996) critically elaborates the recent case of sampling by two French musicians of a Solomon Islands lullaby that resulted in millions of dollars in profit through CD sales; Timothy Taylor, in his “When We Think about Music and Politics: The Case of Kevin Volans,” accuses South African composer Kevin Volans of “appropriating” various “indigenous” African elements in his music without authority (1995:514). Much of the debate about how such cases should be arbitrated has focused on the culturally specific lineaments of the current copyright law — its origins in European book publishing, the signing of the Berne Convention of 1886, and so on — and is thus taken to be inherently ethnocentric. In his article, “The Problem of Oral Copyright: The Case of Ghana” (Frith 1993:146-158), John Collins raises the problem of global copyright protection in the context of “Eurocentric assumptions that a specific art-work or intellectual idea is created by a single or restricted number of individuals who are therefore easily identifiable” (1993:146). Similarly, Simon Frith, in his introduction to Music and Copyright, voices a suspicion about the role that copyright law plays in ostensibly protecting artists and publishers from exploitation and shows instead how the law is implicated in economic exploitation on a global scale: “[F]rom an international perspective, copyright can be seen as a key plank in Western cultural and commercial imperialism” (1993:xiii). Thus, according to Frith, the copyright law “is increasingly seen as a weapon used by the multinationals against small nations” (ibid.).