Rainforest to Raves
Ethnomusicological Forays into Popular Music
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jwpm.40175Keywords:
ethnomusicology, popular music studies, culture industry, music and politicsAbstract
Steven Feld’s ethnomusicological framework was originally formulated to investigate the music culture of an indigenous people in Papua New Guinea. Nonetheless, its potent amalgamation of linguistic anthropology, ethnoaesthetics, social phenomenology and Geertzian interpretivism has become an influential approach to popular musics that avoids reductionistic political economic assessments. This article argues for a Feldian ethnomusicological perspective as a corrective to ethnocentric and dismissive tendencies in the study of popular music. Only an ethnographically grounded, culturally sensitive approach can lend insight into popular music’s prominent role in a range of social upheavals in the late twentieth and twenty-first century.
References
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Wallach, Jeremy. 2014. “Indieglobalization and the Triumph of Punk in Indonesia”. In Sounds and the City: Essays on Music, Globalisation and Place, edited by Brett Lashua, Karl Spracklen and Stephen Wagg, 148–61. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283115_9
Warshow, Robert. 2001 [1962]. The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Beech, Hannah. 2019. “A Rap Challenger to the Thai Military Junta”. New York Times, 15 February.
Denning, Michael. 2015. Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution. New York: Verso.
Feld, Steven. 1982. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. 2nd edn. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. https://doi.org/10.5840/ajs19832334
Fox, Aaron. 2004. Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822385998
Frith, Simon. 1996. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hood, Mantle. 1971. The Ethnomusicologist. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Keil, Charles. 1966. Urban Blues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Meintjes, Louise. 2003. Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822384632
Nechepurenko, Ivan. 2019. “Russia’s Youth Found Rap: The Kremlin Is Worried”. New York Times, 21 May.
Porcello, Thomas. 1998. “‘Tails Out’: Social Phenomenology and the Ethnographic Representation of Technology in Music-Making”. Ethnomusicology 42/3: 485–510. https://doi.org/10.2307/852851
Samuels, David. 2004. Putting a Song on Top of It: Expression and Identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Wallach, Jeremy. 2014. “Indieglobalization and the Triumph of Punk in Indonesia”. In Sounds and the City: Essays on Music, Globalisation and Place, edited by Brett Lashua, Karl Spracklen and Stephen Wagg, 148–61. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283115_9
Warshow, Robert. 2001 [1962]. The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Published
2019-12-23
Issue
Section
Special Section
How to Cite
Wallach, J. (2019). Rainforest to Raves: Ethnomusicological Forays into Popular Music. Journal of World Popular Music, 6(2), 223-227. https://doi.org/10.1558/jwpm.40175
