Rainforest to Raves

Ethnomusicological Forays into Popular Music

Authors

  • Jeremy Wallach Bowling Green State University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/jwpm.40175

Keywords:

ethnomusicology, popular music studies, culture industry, music and politics

Abstract

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.

Author Biography

  • Jeremy Wallach, Bowling Green State University

    Jeremy Wallach is Professor of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania. He has published his research on Southeast Asian popular music, global heavy metal and punk, and recording technology in edited volumes and journals, including Asian Music, Ethnomusicology, Popular Music History and Journal of Popular Music Studies, as well as his book, Modern Noise, Fluid Genres: Popular Music in Indonesia, 1997–2001 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). With Harris M. Berger and Paul D. Greene, he co-edited and contributed to Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music around the World (Duke University Press, 2011).

References

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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