Popular journalism and cultural change: The discourse of globalization in world music reviews

Abstract

This study interrogates whether popular journalism – in this case music journalism – can contribute to a productive discourse on issues of public concern. We conducted a textual analysis of the discourse on cultural globalization in the coverage on world music in the US popular press over the last 30 years. We found that music journalists developed a new cultural sensibility in several distinctive phases. The first phase was marked by a firm West/non-West dichotomy and ‘othering.’ A brief second phase denoted the confusion of prior assumptions. The third phase indicated the dissolution of traditional dichotomies and the integration of dynamic and hybrid ideas of global cultural exchange. Along with significant modifications in journalistic style and a different representation of global others, the position of music reviewers as popular journalists eventually helped their acceptance of global cultural transformations. At their best, the reviews created relevant and productive texts on the cultural dimensions of globalization.

The Case of/for Communication (What Does It Mean to Study Popular Music?)

“…Moreover, popular music can be found as theme, content, and background material in television programming, in commercials and advertisements, in movies (with diegetic and nondiegetic functions; as scores as well as soundtracks), and also in political campaign rhetoric and various other forms of “rhetoric” (e.g., Calhoun, ; Pineda, ). Popular music can be discussed in the context of the journalistic discourse in newspapers and magazines (e.g., Fürsich and Avant‐Mier, ). Popular music can even be related to different forms of “new media” such as computers in general, the Internet, video games, mobile phones and other devices, various apps, Internet radio (e.g., Pandora and Spotify), and even in social media (e.g., popular social media sites such as Facebook and YouTube's content is often something related to popular music and/or music videos).…”

Voz colonial: representación de la Otredad y exotización racializada en los contactos entre el campo musical chileno y el concepto de world music

“…Si bien la práctica del campo musical occidental de exotizar prácticas musicales no occidentales para su incorporación en el canon occidental puede rastrearse hasta el siglo XVII (Fritsch 1981; Bohlman 2002Bohlman , 2013, no es sino hasta que se desarrolla una conciencia de las culturas a escala global y se desarrollan prácticas creativas, etnomusicológicas y comerciales en el paso del siglo XIX al XX sobre la base de dicha conciencia, que el dispositivo específico de exotización musical pasaría a ser la narrativa de la world music. Así, la historia y consolidación del concepto ha sido celebrada por encarnar la hibridez entre los mundos musicales occidentales y no occidentales (Craig 1971;Guilbault 1997;Haynes 2005Haynes , 2010 y por presentar una plataforma de activismo político para el combate del racismo, la opresión política y la explotación de las sociedades no occidentales (Guilbault 2001;Martin 1996;Fürsich y Avant-Mier 2012). Asimismo, también ha sido criticado como ejemplo de imperialismo cultural y de explotación de la creatividad de las culturas no occidentales en el contexto del capitalismo global (Jowers 1993;Feld 2000;Arom y Martin 2006;Haynes 2013) y de descontextualizar y homogeneizar la diversidad cultural de las sociedades humanas (Rohlehr 1998;Guilbault 2001;Mallet 2002).…”

How have music emotions been described in Google books? Historical trends and corpus differences

“…Since music plays an important role in human life, how music was described by people has been recorded in different corpora, such as books (Michel et al, 2011), music reviews (Vannini, 2004), and texts in social media platforms (Dewan and Ramaprasad, 2014). By mining the music-related texts, researchers have investigated the meanings of a singer (Vannini, 2004), the contributions of music journalism (Fürsich and Avant-Mier, 2013), music-related metaphors (Šeškauskienė and Levandauskaitė, 2013), and so forth. However, the emotional description of music in texts has not been systematically investigated.…”