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

Abstract

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.

Hip-Hop and Cultural Citizenship on Kenya's ‘Swahili Coast’

“…Developed in Britain in the 1980s, bhangra is a South Asian diasporic music based on a ‘syncretic fusion of Punjabi folk elements and disco/rock rhythms and instrumentation’ (Manuel 1995: 235). In Adio's hands, however, it was something a bit less defined.…”

‘I Want Muscles’: house music, homosexuality and masculine signification

“…This is not to posit a utopian vision of complete social equality (and equal access to capital) engendered by the ineffable beauty of music; obviously, the asymmetrical nature of power structures in the society in which the music is produced, insofar as they impinge upon basic freedoms (the creation of homophobia via the rhetoric of the heterosexual majority, for example), is a lived reality. Still, cultural capital, capital not measured in the final analysis solely by financial profit (or by numbers of listeners/purchasers) also has a strength which must not only be considered but, in fact, often foregrounded; as Manuel (1988) notes, musics of many 'marginalised' classes 'are often destined later to become national expressions' (p. 18). Additionally, social actors, however they are vertically categorised by the 'dominant' culture, do not always view themselves as subjugated.…”

“…Concurrent with this focus (and sometimes enmeshed with it) has been a burgeoning interest in gender/sexuality and music (Ortega 1994;Whiteley 1997Whiteley , 2000Barkin and Hamessly 1999). While recent reassessments of 'subcultural' formations situated within the postmodern era have suggested inherent complexities, contradictions and a fluidity of self-definition (Lipsitz 1994;Manuel 1995;Young and Craig 1997;Bennett 1999), thus problematising a strict conflation of 'subcultural' with 'subversive' (or 'refusal'; cf. Hebdige 1979 1 ), this second term often appears as a de facto correlate when discussing 'subcultures' defined by homosexuality.…”

Mixed messages: unsettled cosmopolitanisms in Nepali pop

“…In contrast, the new 'mix' music of India (Greene 2000, pp. 545-6), Nepal (Greene 1999A;Henderson 1999), Japan (Condry 1999), Indonesia (Wallach 1999) and South Asian diasporic communities (Manuel 1995) employs the latest sound studio technologies in order to reproduce more precisely than ever before the precise timbres, rhythms and tunings of sound bites of both foreign pop and indigenous music. Yet as these foreign and indigenous sounds are coming more sharply into focus in Asian soundscapes, their meanings and histories seem to be going out of focus.…”

“…Both Western pop and indigenous sounds become perspectival constructs, taking on a range of meanings and affective forces in different listener experiences. Mix music embodies new, understudied and essen-tially postmodern musical aesthetics (in the sense of Manuel 1995) that have taken root in Asian and other world communities.…”