Chapter One

Introduction: The Postnational Turn in Mu-

sic Scholarship and Music Marketing
Ignacio Corona and Alejandro L. Madrid

The Idea of the Postnational

Current scholarship in the humanities and social sciences recognizes the limita-
tions of attempting to understand the history and practice of cultural manifesta-
tions within the boundaries of the nation-States. These relatively new approach-
es understand the nation-State as an “imagined community” whose existence is
based upon the discursive homogenization of the diverse groups it seeks to rep-
resent. Such a view emphasizes the fact that culture and the people who produce
it, consume it, and identify with it continuously move through the borders of the
nation-State via a wide range of technologies. These people group together in a
variety of “imagined communities” that might be greater or smaller than the
nation-State, but transcend it as a unit of identification. Thus, transnational his-
torians, recognizing the historical validity of this argument, push for the treat-
ment of “the nation as one among a range of social phenomena to be studied,
rather than the frame of study itself.”1 Likewise, cultural theorists who articulate
these ideas as part of their interest in the increasingly rapid flow of information,
capital, people, and culture under globalization propose an approach that recog-
nizes citizenship as performed “across as well as within national boundaries.”2
Both historians concerned with fluid patterns of cultural formation predating
current globalization, and cultural theorists interested in the impact of globaliza-
tion on contemporary culture recognize the need to approach their objects of
study from a postnational perspective, a point of view beyond the nation-State as
the frame of reference. Such an angle would allow us to recognize cultural for-
mations as glocal phenomena where global and local motivations coexist and
avoid “reinstituting fictitious cultural units [and]

3
4 Corona / Madrid

ignoring racial, ethnic, and sexual difference because it disrupts the national
fantasy.”3
Just as the idea of the postnational refers to the aforementioned postnational-
ism as an epistemological turn, it also implies a postnational condition inform-
ing, reflected in, and reflected upon by such postnationalist perspective. More
than talking about a disputed disappearance of the nation-State as a viable entel-
echy, a postnational condition refers to its crisis and shortcomings as reflected in
a wide variety of social and cultural events. Signs of the crisis of the nation-
State in the United States are the growing influence of corporate power and spe-
cial interests on governmental decisions and democratic practices, the State’s
neglect of its social obligations in favor of privatization, and the decentralization
of capital that pressed Hardt and Negri to optimistically hypothesize the devel-
opment of a new type of “postnational,” decentered Empire that “rules over the
entire ‘civilized’ world.”4 In developing countries, the incredibly unequal and
unjust distribution of wealth, out-of-control unemployment and the importation
of “second class” jobs (such as maquiladoras at the U.S.-Mexico border), the
near collapse of the legal system and the state’s networks of social protection,
economic dependency, and political subordination are all signs of the crisis of
the nation-State. Common to both experiences of this crisis is the increasing
inability (or unwillingness) of the nation-State to fulfill its raison d’ètre: to pro-
tect, serve, and offer security to its citizens, particularly the most underprivi-
leged. Moreover, the dual phenomenon of migration represents a further chal-
lenge to the idea of the nation-State both in “developing” countries and in the
“developed” world. For the former, emigration is a direct result of the nation-
State’s inability to close the gap between the rich and the poor and its lack of capacity
to provide tools for social mobility. For the latter, the presence of in- creasingly
large ethnic communities due to immigration represents a challenge to the ideal
of a homogenized national identity. The presence of these communi- ties in the
United States and other “developed” nations, and the reality of their everyday
life of exploitation and human-rights abuse, not only raise important questions
about citizenship but also challenge some of the most basic premises of national
ideologies. In both cases, migration contributes to the further frag- mentation,
overlapping, and amalgamation of collective experiences within and beyond the
nation-State.
However, such crisis should not be homologized with a necessity to discard
the nation-State as a viable form of strategic political and social organization.
Events unforeseen by Hardt and Negri after the publication of their 2000 book
have reminded us that although capital might not have a nationality, the interests
of a majority of multinational corporations are strongly associated to a specific
nation-State, the United States of America. The confirmation of the United
States as the center of Empire shows the pressing need for forms of political and
social organization that would counterbalance such power and maintain the na-
tion-State’s raison d’ètre. Under these circumstances, a postnational condition
does not refer to the impossibility of the nation-State but rather to the urgency of
its rearticulation in relation to the current needs of those citizens it once attempt-
ed to discursively homogenize. Such rearticulation implies the recognition of the
injustices, the omissions, the dismissals, and the repudiations that univocal na-
tionalist discourses have inflicted upon their citizens. Acknowledging the ethnic,
racial, sexual, and class diversity of the liminal citizens “forgotten” by hege-
monic nationalist discourses is not only an act of justice but also a necessity to
understand the future of the nation-State as a feasible form of political organiza-
tion.

Music Scholarship in Times of Postnationality

Why is music important in the discussion of postnational identities? How does

the social and cultural study of music illuminate our understanding of the issues
at stake in the debate about postnationality and postnationalism? It is interesting
that in her denunciation of the shortcomings of traditional world history narra-
tives in the U.S., Micol Seigel chooses jazz as an example of the thematic ap-
proach that would shed light on the true transcultural and transnational character
of history.5 For a transnational historian like Seigel, interested in the constant
flow of cultural units beyond the boundaries of the nation-State and the dialogic
(or “multilogic”) construction of meaning that results from those crossings, mu-
sic in general and jazz in particular are the perfect embodiment of these issues.6
Music is always in constant flux, music is the perennial undocumented immi-
grant; it has always moved beyond borders without the required paperwork. As
cultural theorist Josh Kun suggests, “music is always from somewhere else and
is always en route to somewhere else.”7 It may be produced under very specific
circumstances that grant it particular local significance, but consumed under
completely different conditions that in turn help redefine its meaning.
Frances Aparicio and Cándida Jáquez state that the prominence of music as a
transnational cultural production makes it a perfect element in challenging
“scholars to engage in interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity to better capture
its multifaceted complexities.”8 Indeed, a postnational study of music can only
be possible from an inter or multidisciplinary angle, given that the incorporation
of aesthetic values, performatic and performative aspects, and social reception
and meaning are integral parts of the musical experience—and they change in
every context the music is experienced. Furthermore, in a postnationalist world,
where composer, artist, and listener are no longer part of the same cultural con-
text, social meaning, performative aspects, and aesthetic values are no longer to
be implicitly understood or presumed. An inter or multidisciplinary approach
would only allow scholars to better understand the transnational fluxes and the
postnational dissemination and reception of music. For that reason, throughout
this book we speak of “music scholarship” as opposed to simply “musicology”
or “ethnomusicology.” We believe that the aforementioned multidisciplinarity
cannot be articulated solely from one discipline; musicologists borrowing from
sociology, anthropology or cultural studies in order to have a multidisciplinary
understanding of music texts is not what a postnational approach would encour-
age. Rather, a postnational music scholarship should stem from any potential
6 Corona / Madrid

discipline and aspire to understand and illuminate cultural and social practices
beyond the consideration of music texts or music practices. A postnational ap-
proach to the study of music should encourage music scholars to enter into a real
dialogue with the rest of the humanities and social sciences instead of remaining
ghettoized by a language incomprehensible for the rest of the intellectual com-
munity.9 In fact, in an ideal postnational or transnational music scholarship those
very languages, their inception, and the aesthetic criteria that inform them
should also be subjected to critical inquiry.
One may argue that such a claim is not new. Joseph Kerman’s 30-year old
diatribe against positivist musicology was informed by a similar dissatisfaction
with this discipline’s lack of interdisciplinary conversations.10 However, much
of the scholarship produced under the aegis of the New Musicology (of which
Kerman was a key instigator), although decidedly aware of social, critical, and
cultural thinking beyond the discipline, failed to fully address the questions and
ideas pondered by scholars in the humanities and social sciences, since it re-
mained interested in what had interested old-school musicologists—the under-
standing of individual, “attention-deserving” music texts.11
The role of musicology in supporting positivist, colonialist, and nationalist
projects is explored at length in Arved Ashby’s essay in this volume. If nation-
building was the historical contingency that shaped and gave meaning to the
nascent discipline of musicology at the end of the 19th century, how would the
crisis of that nationalist project affect the contemporary goals, methods, analyti-
cal and theoretical perspectives, and overall definition of that discipline at the
beginning of the 21st century? If as we have suggested above, a postnationalist
approach in dialogue with a postcolonial approach would acknowledge the in-
justices, the omissions, the dismissals, and the repudiations that univocal nation-
alist discourses have inflicted upon their citizens, which would be the role of
music scholarship in recognizing these hidden stories? What power relations are
articulated in the revision of the nation-State’s essentialist rhetoric?
A few years ago, at an informal meeting of musicologists in Mexico City, a
discussion of the relationship between art and popular music in Latin America
took place. At one point someone mentioned Juan Gabriel, one of Mexico’s
most successful singers and song writers in the last thirty years. Surprisingly
most of the scholars in the room dismissed him and his music on the grounds
that the “music itself” was of bad quality and lacked the harmonic, rhythmic,
and improvisatory complexity of other types of Mexican traditional musical
genres. Several problems that permeate Mexican musicology, an activity still
largely under the influence of the Mexican post-revolutionary nationalist project,
are evident in this anecdote. First, a common mistake is to try to isolate music
structures and texts from their social and cultural context in an attempt to under-
stand an ideal, “incorruptible” aesthetic meaning. As if the very analytical tools
chosen to describe the musical phenomenon would not determine the aesthetic
value to be found in the musical structures, as if the aesthetic values themselves
were not politically and culturally informed, or as if the sounds had a fixed
meaning independent from their social, historical, and cultural context, not to
mention its reception and consumption. Second, judging one type of music with
the aesthetic criteria of another is also problematic. In this case, judging the
quality of a popular song in terms of a harmonic, rhythmic, and improvisational
complexity that is absent in that song’s genre or meaningless to its audience is to
impose the scholar’s criteria upon it—an obvious exercise of intellectual coloni-
alism. Third, emphasizing the process of production as the locus of musical
meaning reduces music to composition and neglects its value as personal and
collective experience.
We believe that musical meaning is found at the intersection of production,
distribution, performance, and consumption. Opening up music scholarship to
the study of distribution, performance, and consumption, without neglecting a
critical approach to production (or composition), allows us to understand music
as a medium for the representation and negotiation of identities within specific
social contexts. Furthermore, opening music scholarship to these areas of in-
quiry allows us to identify power relations that are transnationally negotiated
and that rearticulate the relationship between citizenship, people, and nation
under contemporary globalization.
Adopting such an epistemological framework also gives us the opportunity to
question music history as a univocal and teleological process. Such a process
implies the revision of music history on several grounds, including an analysis
of performative aspects, as well as gender and ethnic issues, and the question of
the “evolution” of music as an abstract language articulated by “great men.”12 A
system that takes into consideration the distribution, performance, and consump-
tion of music as fundamental aspects in the production of musical meaning
opens the door to a multiplicity of interpretations of the musical experience, and
how the history of that experience is written. This multiplicity of interpretations
rejects history as a teleological process since it recognizes the large number of
power relations that coincide in the writing of history. It is in the recognition of
these contingencies that the “great men” stop being history’s “chosen ones” to
become individuals that, like history itself, are constructed in relation to the
power relations they articulate. However, this type of historical music scholar-
ship should not simply question the position of these “great men” or some musi-
cal practices within the inherited musical canons. Instead, it is necessary to rec-
ognize that the very arguments about nationalist meaning are unstable and
contingent, and should be placed under scrutiny. For this reason, we do not sug-
gest a simple restitution of marginal composers, musical practices, or musical
trends to their “proper” place in a nationalist canon; this type of scholarship
would only reproduce an essentialist notion of what a given national music and
its canon should be. On the other hand, we suggest that one of the goals of a
postnational music scholarship would be to question the very values that support
these nationalist canons. If identities are unstable, continuously-changing pro-
cesses, we must understand the fixed character of nationalist music historiog-
raphy as well as their music canons as essentialist discourses that support larger
nationalist and often colonialist projects. Recognizing the contingency of the
essentialist discourses about nationalist meaning would allow us to better under-
stand the continuous processes of identity negotiation that permit citizens of a
given nation-State to establish effective transregional and transnational relations.
8 Corona / Madrid

Studying the construction of identities within discourses of representation—

individual, collective, self-reflexive, and hegemonic—helps us understand that
identities are intimately related to the invention of narratives of tradition, herit-
age, and myth. As Stuart Hall elegantly puts it, identity obliges us to read tradi-
tion “not [as] the so-called return to the roots but [as] a coming-to-terms-with
our ‘routes.’”13 It is as part of continuous processes of negotiation and re-
negotiation of power relations that identities are constructed. To question the
“roots” of any music in an attempt to understand the routes we had to walk and
that have led us to accept them as national fixed essences should be one of the
projects of a postnational music scholarship. The crisis of the nation-State and
the need to rearticulate it according to the transnational power relations that de-
fine its citizens and institutions appear as important challenges to contemporary
music scholarship. This challenge forces us to question many of the principles
we took for granted in relation to music and nationality. Recognizing that our
routes determine how we define our roots will clarify the role of a postnational
music scholarship.

The Postnational Marketing of Music

A crucial component of that challenge necessarily deals with the arborescent

concept of globalization at the root of an emergent critical paradigm. In theoriz-
ing the emergence of postnational configurations, it is equally important to focus
on the new tensions that have sprouted in the political, socio-economic, and cul-
tural arenas as a result of the accelerated expansion of global corporate capital-
ism as well as focusing on the pre-modern conflicts—mainly based on religious,
ethnic and gender issues—unresolved or ignored by national modernization pro-
jects and reactivated in a context of further weakening of the State. In this sec-
tion of the introduction, we focus on the first part of this task by discussing the
relationship between globalization, the world music market, and the idea of the
postnational. Numerous globalization scholars have called attention to how
transnational economic interests make inquiries regarding the viability or obso-
lescence of national entities relevant.14 In effect, national boundaries are increas-
ingly insufficient to locate national or local cultures, “as commodities of all sorts—
including music—are being produced and consumed in multiple interna- tional
contexts rather than one culturally-specific location.”15 Mexican ranchera, for
instance, used to be thought of as a musical genre performed by people with strong
roots in the Mexican countryside, recorded by local producers in local studios,
accompanied by local musicians, and using traditional instrumentation in order
to remain close to the ideal of “authentic” ranchera music. Not any- more. Not
only are many ranchera recordings being produced in the U.S., in many cases
by urban-based musicians, but also the genre has been hybridized and given way
to very different musical expressions. The same occurs with oth-
er forms of Mexican regional music (see Helena Simonett’s essay in this vol-
ume).
 As with culture in general, current cultural predicaments in the study of music
include the stretching, blurring, fragmentation, doubling, and multiplication of
previously “fixed” and “stable” national (or regional and local) identities. Thus,
it is not surprising that some scholars have even proposed the end of national
musics in a sort of “late modern collage”: “where global and local do not form
an antithesis […where] a global, transnational culture leads to an increasing
sensitivity to the local particularities of social life.”16 Just like Western musi-
cians have employed and been influenced by global musics, so musicians and
producers everywhere have been adapting, mixing, and using modern popular
Western music in a complex scenario of hybridization to the point that some
music sociologists, such as Simon Frith, call it “a universal pop aesthetic.”17
Frith explains that “even the most nationalistic sounds—carefully cultivated
‘folk’ songs, angry local dialect punk, preserved (for the tourist) traditional dance—
are determined by a critique of international entertainment” and adds “no
country in the world is unaffected by […] the twentieth-century mass media (the
electronic means of musical production, reproduction and transmission).”18
What the parameters and elements that comprise such a “universal pop aesthet-
ic” may be is open to contention and debate, but surely Frith refers to the influ-
ence of pop-rock music as one of the enabling elements of such musical homog-
enization.
Mentions of a transnational and universal culture always raise a number of
important issues regarding the politics of culture. In effect, a truly global culture
would imply a certain leveling of all cultures and yet, in all identified transna-
tional configurations—of which the music market could be considered a prime
example—the ubiquitous issue of power asymmetries remains. In analyzing the
status of language—as one of the defining elements of any culture—in the “new
world-system,” cultural critic Fredric Jameson has posed the question, “Are they
all equal, and can every language group freely produce its own culture according
to its own needs?”19 Such an inquiry could be extrapolated to music production,
its marketing and consumption as well as to a whole host of related issues.
Jameson’s own response identifies some of the underlying cultural conflicts:
“The speakers of the smaller languages have always protested against that view
[of supposed global equality]; and their anxieties can only be heightened by the
emergence of a kind of global or jet-set transnational culture in which a few
international hits (literary or cultural) are canonized by the media and given a
heightened circulation inconceivable for the local products they tend in any case
to squeeze out.”20 In effect, such transnational culture evidences the overpower-
ing logic of the global market, which in turn reminds us about the resurgent
phenomenon of empire.21 From the point of view of music production, this phe-
nomenon may be well illustrated by a series of centripetal fluxes amid the global
music market:

Multi-track techniques and sampling […] allow Western musicians

today to use Third World musicians, bringing pre-recorded material to
technically more sophisticated Western studios for further elabora-
tion, that is overdubbing, re-mixing, etc. […] it is almost too easy to
compare these procedures with earlier imperialistic economic sys-
10 Corona / Madrid

tems, where raw materials were acquired from the colonies, manufac-
tured in the West and commercialized in both the West and the colo-
nies, profits staying mainly in the West.”22

As Pedro van der Lee suggests above, there is an unavoidable relationship be-
tween economics and ethics in the process of music contact and hybridization
that needs to be taken into account. At the other end of music production, analo-
gous centripetal flows occur in the circuits of marketing and consumption. The
U.S.A. accounts for almost forty percent of the world’s record sales and contin-
ues to be the main market for the commercialization of music.23 Further, while
corporate representatives might downplay the issue of language,24 the fact is that
world music has more chances to succeed if sung in English. Concerning the
commercialization aspect of the circuit, even though only one of the major rec-
ord labels (SONY-CBS, EMI, Universal, BMG-RCA, and Time-Warner-WEA),
is completely American, most of the music commercialized in the world contin-
ues to be Anglo-American. From that perspective, the marketing side of music
production offers further ground to the thesis of “cultural imperialism,” as artic-
ulated by Jameson, Hardt and Negri, and other authors. This monopolization of
the music market is not contradicted by the coexistence of a multiplicity of small
independent labels as long as they are not very successful, artistically or com-
mercially speaking—because, once an independent label establishes a niche or
significantly impacts a regional market it tends to be absorbed by one of those
corporations, as occurred with Windham Hill during the heyday of New Age
music.25 However, such absorption does not represent the obliteration ipso facto
of the specific “cultural identity” that a local label might represent. Windham
Hill continues to play out an identitarian element in the construction of a sophis-
ticated yuppie “subculture” (to borrow D. Hebdidge’s term).26 In her study of
world music Ana María Ochoa also refers to another conspicuous aspect of mu-
sic distribution and consumption in many regions, such as piracy and its role in
the informal sector of the economy, which constitutes a radical bypassing of the
established circuits of the music market.27
Postnational marketing surpasses national boundaries in order to better re-
spond to the needs of an increasingly multicultural domestic market in the U.S.
and Western Europe (much less so in Japan) as well as a global “transnational-
ized” market.28 In the U.S., the conflation of musical styles, genres and regional
manifestations under the rubric of “ethnic” music, mostly replaced by that of
“world” music since the late eighties, represents a strategy that responds to both
needs. Nowadays, the term “ethnic” in the U.S. is mostly used to represent eth-
nic communities within the country. For instance, Cajun music is an accepted
term for record stores, while Nuyorican or Chicano music is not, and the issue of
the specificity of a style or sub-genre only partially explains what is behind such
marketing decision (see Vanessa Knights’ and Steven Loza’s respective essays
in this volume). In a way, such a term is the music marketing equivalent to
“multiculturalism,” but one that seems to reinforce rather than dispel the implicit
“Eurocentrism.” Outside the U.S., the commercial strategy that links musical
production and categorization of styles and genres at the root of such a confla-
tion and amalgamation of cultures is to a certain extent complementary to the
rules that control and define the American music market. In Spanish-speaking
countries, for instance, the traditional category of “música internacional” is akin
to the “world music” category with two important differences: it takes into ac-
count national borders and does not imply the postmodern celebration of differ-
ence and differentiation that Jameson talks about.29 As in other regions, Anglo-
American pop-rock music (mainly aimed at the teen and the under-30 de-
mographics) continues to dominate the Latino/Hispanic market. Therefore,
“contemporary,” “modern,” “pop,” or simply genre-based classifications (i.e.,
“rock,” “jazz”) mostly designate Anglo-American musical production, which
serves as the main referent. When the category of “rock,” “jazz,” or “pop” is
applied to the domestic or regional production, specification for the local con-
sumer seems to be required, such as “rock en español” (see Greg Schelonka’s
essay in this volume). But even if Latino musicians produce their records in the
U.S., with U.S.-based studio musicians, and opt for singing in English or to a
mix of English and Spanish (sometimes in a deliberate attempt at crossing over),
with very few exceptions such as Carlos Santana, they are left wondering why if
what they are doing is, say, simply rock or jazz, their music is still classified as world
music or Mexican or Argentine or Brazilian music instead of simply rock or jazz.

The Collapse of the “Grand Narratives” in Popular Music

The current postnational marketing of music arguably operates within a different

paradigm than the one predicated upon the “grand narratives” of musical histo-
riography and its central corpus—that of Western art music. In effect, the musi-
cal developments gathered under the heterogeneous concept known as modern-
ism—or the avant-garde—had seemingly surpassed those identitary issues so
prominently articulated and performed throughout the 19th century in the rise of
musical European nationalisms—and early 20th century elsewhere, via an in-
creased “abstraction” and “self-referentiality” of the musical language. Never-
theless, the current popularity of identitarian labels in the marketing of popular
music does not necessarily destabilize such a paradigm when applied to the field
of contemporary classical music, even if it has progressively incorporated some
non-Western European composers into the musical canon (see Barry Shank’s
essay in this volume). Such a historiographic paradigm also presupposed the
idea of the distinctiveness of “true” art, which in the musical field, as in art in
general, relied on basic dichotomies, such as that of the classical (serious) and
the popular (or non-serious). The cross-fertilization between both fields was a
fact recognized in the proliferation of new musical expressions and styles on
both sides of the divide, further enriched by the inclusion of non-Western in-
strumentation and musics along the 20th century. In the field of popular music,
such a paradigm was still operating in the late sixties and early seventies, which
helps to explains how musicians at work on the popular side of the divide tried
to link the “serious” and the “non-serious,” the individual composer and the
group, attempting to find common ground for the possibility of meaningful col-
12 Corona / Madrid

laborations between, say, Spooky Tooth and Pierre Henry, Frank Zappa and
Pierre Boulez, Can and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The modernist vision that under-
lies such an endeavor finds few historical precedents in the field of popular cul-
ture. Since “world music” would be implicitly considered “popular” or “non-
serious” music in relation to the aforementioned divide, reference to this devel-
opment in Western popular music will be helpful to understand other aspects of
the current marketing practices in which “world music” is commercialized.
The powerful vision of a common musical development embedded in shaping
the “music of the future,” and hence unifying the classical and the popular, was
a stated goal of many participants of the “progressive music” movement of the
late 60s and 70s. Originally based in England, it offered a more ambitious musi-
cal response to the psychedelic, hippie, and counterculture movements in the
U.S. attracting numerous followers in Western Europe as elsewhere. Having
emerged in a period of great cultural and social fermentation, the progressive
movement sought out to stretch the limits of popular music—mainly through
rock, jazz, and electronic idioms—in its exploration of cultural scenarios, aes-
thetics, and ideologies. Such an agenda could not be less avant-garde, to the
point that in its brief existence it mimicked some of the directions taken by clas-
sical music throughout the 20th century—something which ultimately tested the
limits of audience receptivity as much as the commitment of the labels to the
pursuit of musical experimentation. If male-dominated and Europe-centered
“progressive music” actually operated within a modernist paradigm as we pro-
pose, we should briefly focus on its cultural context to inquire about the condi-
tions in which a supposedly de-centered “world music” might operate within a
postmodern paradigm. Such an examination will allow us to trace the underlying
ideological implications as well as the similarities and contrasts between both
marketing strategies and musical categories.30 Interestingly enough, “progressive
music” (along similar hybrid musical interests by rock, jazz, and some classical
musicians) became a significant trend in the mid-1960s when popular (Anglo-
American) music began to explore “world” sources of inspiration, from the mere
use of non-Western sounds and instruments to composition techniques and mu-
sical structures. Some critics go as far as to identify the Beatles’ use of Indian
instrumentation, in the interest of adding spiritual depth and exoticism to pop
ballads such as “Norwegian Wood,” as a breakthrough moment in that process.31
As van der Lee has pointed out, however, world music influences (Latin music
for instance), had long been incorporated into Western popular music.32 The
Beatles themselves made occasional use of boleros, Latin instrumentation (e.g.,
claves and maracas) and rhythms from their earliest recordings, following the
precedent of many U.S. musicians who had assimilated Latin rhythms, sounds,
musical structures since before World War II.33 Such undercurrent reveals that
the link between both categories might not be entirely an accidental event of
musical contact between metropolis and periphery at different moments within
the same stage of late capitalism.
As popular music scholar Tony Mitchell has observed, progressive rock “ex-
tended rock music further away from its roots.”34 This genre became an im-
portant explorer of musical cultures and a mediator of social sensibilities, creat-
ing a field that intersected diverse intellectual and artistic pursues, precisely at
the same time that rock “was emerging as a kind of universal and global musical
language.”35 It mostly signified an open-ended, all embracing musical practice.
As Bill Martin claims, “by the 1970s, rock music had become open to the whole
world of music, and it had become an international musical language, with
something of a ‘tradition’ of its own. Arguably, a great deal of rock music since
the 1970s, whether experimental or not, continues to come out of the dynamics
or conflicts of that period.”36 An important step in that direction occurred when
it cross-fertilized with jazz music, employing improvisation techniques and jazz-
fusion experiments developed by Soft Machine, Miles Davis, The Mahavishnu
Orchestra, Passport, among many others. It might be argued as well that espe-
cially in the U.S., “progressive” jazz or jazz-fusion groups (i.e., Weather Report,
Return to Forever, or Oregon), following the involvement of Stan Getz and other
musicians in the dissemination of Bossa Nova, were even more instrumental in
introducing American audiences to African, Brazilian, Asian, and Caribbean
instruments and musical elements than their European-based progressive rock
counterparts.37 “Progressive music” was also bolstered by new recording tech-
nologies and concept albums that allowed the development of unified themes
through extended play, which made the use of classical structures, such as the
suite-form, a natural choice; high-tech electronic instruments that often ended up
displacing the guitar as the main expressive vehicle of rock music; an active
international counterculture receptive to both the proliferation of musical styles
and explorations of non-traditional philosophical and metaphysical concepts;
and a new popular aesthetic that was visually captured by album covers and in-
concert visuals.38 The single characteristic that we highlight in connection to our
subject is that the progressive movement became, to this day, the major catalyst
of musical and cultural exploration in popular music. For Western audiences, it
channeled the attempts to safely explore the “real world” (the peripheries)
through the incorporation of non-Western instrumentation and musical elements
as much as the past and the future in musical dialogues with folk music, the to-
nal harmonic traditions of classical music, and the contemporary manifestations
of atonal and electronic music.
In part, such an exploration was connected to the counterculture movement
and its critique of late capitalism and industrial societies. Hence, when not open-
ly providing social commentary and literal or allegorical interpretations of con-
temporary reality, progressive musicians were looking for alternative “worlds.”
Some found them in the ancient, medieval, or romantic pasts (i.e., Ange, Gentle
Giant, Jethro Tull, David Bedford, Anthony Phillips); in utopian places (i.e.,
Yes, Bo Hansson, Sally Oldfield, Pink Floyd); in heterotopic European scenari-
os (i.e., Genesis, Le Orme, Focus, Premiata Fornieri Marconi, Renaissance); in
sci-fi spaces (i.e., ELP, Kraftwerk, Magma, Tangerine Dream, Gong); outside
Europe through musical experimentation (i.e., Popol Vuh, Can, Mike Olfield,
David Parsons). In the aforementioned cultural and economic context, such an
exploration might not be unrelated to the creation of ethnomusicology recording
series in England, France, and the U.S. precisely around the same period. Aspir-
ing to capture “authentic” traditional music from around the globe, the link with
14 Corona / Madrid

ethnomusicologists or anthropologists was key in the new directions taken by

some labels, such as Nonesuch: “In 1966, a musicologist named David Lewiston
showed up in the company’s offices with tapes he’d made of Indonesian game-
lan music while in Bali. The jangly, dreamy percussion was a totally new sound
on the American musical landscape and from those tapes [Teresa] Sterne made
an album, ‘Music from the Morning of the World,’ which became one of the
touchstones of the world-music movement. Soon the label’s Explorers series—
records covering traditional music from around the globe—was under way.”39
The combined dosage of pristine “cultural otherness” and authenticity provided
by series such as Nonesuch’s Explorers represented at the time not only an ex-
pansion of the musical and cultural horizons for the metropolitan listener, but
also a significant maneuvering toward the creation of small and specialized
niches, anticipating the “postmodern” fragmentation of the music market.40
The fact that many rock musicians were willing to take new musical direc-
tions announced also the commercial risks they were able to undertake, but were
ill-prepared to deal with. Undoubtedly, their ambitious scope required from the
audience a certain cultural and educational level and a musical background not
too distant from the practitioners’ own class extraction. It was clearly not the
typical blue collar music; a fact often alluded to by those critics who confronted
the supposed elitism of progressive music with punk and new wave in the rise of
the neoconservative movement in England and the U.S. In a way, such hostility
from the critical establishment mirrored hostility toward pop culture from the
part of the progressive movement, self-identified as the avant-garde of popular
music and culture in general. By the early 1980s, the progressive movement had
declined, returning to the underground where it has remained supported by a
small number of independent labels, mail-order services, specialized publica-
tions, and Web sites. Lack of airplay in a new FM radio—more interested in
briefer and perhaps less complicated compositions—and market pressures—the
music establishment was demanding a return to the origins, which for the record
companies and many critics could only be attained at that time by the punk and
new wave movements—impeded the further development of such a “modernist
phase” of popular music.41 For no few enthusiasts of “progressive music,” this
turn of events ended up mirroring the decisive schism between serious music
and audiences throughout the 20th century, confirming perhaps Theodor Ador-
no’s pessimism regarding a liberating high-art for the masses. It was impossible
to sustain the avant-garde ethos this musical movement had held under the label
“progressive,” “as the whole idea of avant-garde—the historical sensibility of
“progress,” the exploration of new sounds and musical possibilities—[had] lost
all relevance.”42
Nevertheless, the musical contributions of the movement were absorbed and
assimilated by newer trends in the 1980s and 1990s. Progressive music’s more
mellow forms were channeled towards new age music; its experimentation with
rhythms, timbre, and electronics was important to the development of the house
and rave scene; likewise, some recognizable “progressive” elements have been
absorbed by new forms of alternative rock, post-rock, ambient and space music.
The subsequent proliferation of styles and sub-genres, each with its own label,
has implied a strategy of commercial viability and increased market penetration
for a recording industry now fully aware of the difficulty of holding the “grand
narrative” of a unified development in popular music.43 As for progressive
rock’s role of explorer of the musics of the world—as part of its critique of the
present, it became obsolete when confronted with the intensified arrival of “the
peripheries” to the European metropolitan centers. Increased transnational mi-
gration since the late 1970s had an enormous effect on popular music in the U.S
and Western Europe. It reflected profound political, social and cultural changes
in the sending countries, from economic crises and political turmoil to liberation
wars. “World music” performers entered into contact with recent and established
migrants as well as with the dominant local cultures, causing a rearticulation of
identity discourses, attacking incessantly the byproducts of racism and colonial-
ism both in the Western world and in their home countries. The role of self-
appointed cultural mediator or musical translator for European progressive rock
had effectively ended. Perhaps what best symbolized such a turn of events was
Peter Gabriel’s founding of WOMAD in 1982.44 The attention paid by Gabri-
el—one of the most emblematic figures of progressive rock—and other musi-
cians to world music was key in the marketing of the world music movement.
The waning of one label (“progressive music”) implicitly operating within a
modern paradigm and the emergence of the other (“world music”) more related
to the concept of the postmodern also relate to the end of an era in pop music
and a shift toward a more intensified recycling of musical trends and blending of
spatial boundaries.

…and the World Goes to Town

The creation of “world music” as a commercial category also responds to the

creative problems of the music industry: “[world music] is providing new
sounds for a bored culture […] White middle-class culture has run out of inspi-
ration. The normal sources to plunder are exhausted and white middle-class cul-
ture is incapable of inventing anything.”45 A similar view was expressed by Da-
vid Byrne, who rationalized his involvement with world music as “a way out of
the dead end, the one-sided philosophical binder that Western culture has gotten
itself into.”46 Undoubtedly, Paul Simon’s Graceland album released in 1986 was
the most prominent example of a former pop star’s involvement with world mu-
sic, reinvigorating his career and generating all sorts of contradictory comments
and reviews for his top-selling album.47 The “world” had then “entered” the cen-
ter of music production and consumption and the issue of fixed identities and
national allegiances suddenly became more complicated as new forms for blend-
ing musical idioms were sought and promoted. The resulting product was a di-
versity of hybrid musical forms with elements of Western genres, which made
them palatable both to Western audiences and—sung in local languages—in the
scenarios back home, where the musicians’ success abroad validated their work
locally:
16 Corona / Madrid

By the late 1980’s, most ”world” musicians were using the sophisti-
cated electronic and digital means of sound production developed in
Western rock and pop music, many of them using rock instruments
and/or Western guest musicians and producers. These homogenizing
factors ensured a sense of familiarity to the Western listener, and
made notions of musical purity in relation to local or ethnic musics
impossible to entertain but, despite the blurring of boundaries in-
volved, produced a wide range of stimulating and excitingly hybrid
sounds.48

For this reason, while the term “world music” should technically encompass all
non-Western music (both traditional and modern manifestations), the fact is that
it has actually come to mean the hybrid forms in which modern forms and gen-
res of popular music have impacted musically, technologically, and even ideo-
logically the production of local music throughout the world, as it has been stud-
ied by ethnomusicologist Ana María Ochoa concerning Latin America or Kazadi
wa Mukuna regarding African music. Mukuna goes as far as predicting that
“’World music’ will be a genre of musical expression for which the characteris-
tics are being defined through collaborative efforts of musicians from around the
world.”49 What seemingly unites a diversity of musics under the rubric of “world
music” is, for others, a “sense of commodified otherness, blurred boundaries
between exotic and familiar, the local and global in transnational popular cul-
ture,” in the words of ethnomusicologist Steven Feld.50
And yet, against the common charges that the label “world music” is just an-
other commercial strategy to develop new markets and find new material,
sounds and ideas in an area once referred to as “ethnic music,” ethnomusicolo-
gists and popular music scholars like Jocelyne Guilbault and Pedro van der Lee
also recognize the positive potential for the musicians themselves, who may act
as cultural brokers,51 and reap the rewards of an international exposure.52 In
many cases, the original references to third-world scenarios by first-world musi-
cians are playfully inverted or alluded to as an implicit ideological contestation
of certain identitarian constructions, as it is the case of recent covers of The
Clash’s “Rock El Casbah” by Algerian musician Rachid Taha or the Talking
Heads’ “Nothing But Flowers” by Brazilian Caetano Veloso.53 In Latin Ameri-
ca, the adoption and deconstruction of musical genres and styles imported from
the modern metropolises often amounts to “cannibalization” of cultural hierar-
chies, as these serve as the medium for the expression of political resistance and
cultural difference, from the tropicalist movement to contemporary South Amer-
ican hip hop (see Chris Dennis’s essay in this volume).
However, in spite of all the critical attention it has gathered, “world music”
represents a very small niche in the global music market (although in the U.S.
market, the Latin segment of world music continues to show a robust sales
growth), which is something it has in common with progressive music. There is
also another point in common. For both progressive music and world music, the
U.S. and Western Europe remain at the center of the production, consumption
and marketing of music in today’s globalized scenario. On the one hand, the
exploration of epochs, places, sounds and cultures that is characteristic of pro-
gressive music ended up being self-referential, as all representations appear sub-
ordinated to the cultural needs of European musicians and audiences. On the
other hand, world music may represent locality, but is mostly predicated upon
the marketing and appeal required to making itself palatable to first-World audi-
ences. The diffusion of traditional African rhythms (although more often, mod-
ern musical hybrids commonly grouped under the label of Afro-Pop) constitutes
an example of such a phenomenon, as Simon Frith explains: “African mu-
sic…reaches us almost exclusively via France, via French studios, French engi-
neers, and French producers, via, most importantly, French audiences whom the
musicians have learnt to please. The appeal of African music in Britain is as
much a triumph of French as African pop values.”54 Likewise, while progressive
music was often accused of intellectualism and characterized as “music mostly
to listen to and command the attention of the audience,”55 the consumption of
world music is boosted if it is infused with rhythm or is danceable (see Ignacio
Corona and Alejandro L. Madrid’s essay in this volume). Such a difference of
purpose is not arbitrary or based on purely musical reasons. In fact, it tends to
perpetuate old ideological dichotomies that characterize the relationship between
metropolis and periphery, such as those of mind and body or thought and emo-
tion, which find a direct translation in the terms and conditions in which the
global economy is organized.

The Urban and the Global Lounge

Current incorporation of “world music” into a myriad of musical idioms has to

do with another manifestation of postmodernity and the centripetal flows of the
globalized scenario. The growth of cities stresses the importance of the urban
with respect to a national and territorialized culture. In such a scenario, the ur-
ban actually disrupts the meaning of the national, destabilizing its direct link to
the notions of ancestry and the motherland (see Cristina Magaldi’s essay in this
volume). The national boundaries are flexible enough to be stretched, enlarged,
reinforced and effaced in the consumption of world music. The importance of
the city is key in the development of the postnational, in particular the large met-
ropolitan centers of the Western world, which now function as the new hubs of world
music production. London serves in that capacity for that segment of world
music connected to the former British colonies; Paris becomes the essen- tial
place of transculturation and transnationalism for African and Caribbean musicians;
and, finally, Miami increasingly develops into the center of encoun- ter for the
Spanish-speaking world (see Daniel Party’s essay in this volume). These
postnational cities will remain active as the world music level serves as an
interpretive, marketing, and musical strategy.
In the new cosmopolis, the encounters of world music with lounge, jazz and
rock often constitute the new soundtrack for envisaging what the world has to
offer to the senses of avid first-World consumers. A mental trip at the lounge
does not cancel the possibilities of relaxing while making a foray into foreign
landscapes and exotic worlds (see Denilson Lopes’ essay in this volume). Musi-
cally speaking, the postnational is becoming a sort of “urban world music”—
precisely the title used by (multiethnic) jazz group Hiroshima for its 1996 album
Urban World Music.56 Some labels, like Putumayo, have already crafted a niche
for this type of musical idiom in its compilations “Putumayo presents.” In its
Brazilian Lounge’s linear notes, the label echoes Guilbault’s conviction on the
two-way interaction between the musicians from the center and the periphery. It
explains that the process of exploration by the metropolitan musicians is echoed
by the own Brazilian counterparts: “Not so long ago, if you were looking for
classic Brazilian music with an electronic twist you would have had to turn to
the Japanese and European DJs and artists who pioneered the trend. While the
nightclubs and trendy lounges of London, Paris and Tokyo were throbbing to
fusions of modern programmed beats with retro bossa nova and samba, Brazili-
ans had left behind the music of the 60s and 70s and moved on in different di-
rections. Brazilians have now reclaimed their cultural patrimony, and the elec-
tronica-meets-samba-and-bossa nova wave is in full swing in Rio, São Paulo and
other urban centers.”57 This emphasis on the urban is not casual, as the metropo-
lises are the main centers of distribution, consumption and, often, production of
world music. The blending of the “traditional” and the “modern” is the mantra:

On the Putumayo collection Brazilian Groove, we explored the upbeat

side of this trend [modern meets traditional]. Brazilian Lounge continues
the journey, this time uniting tracks with a more down-tempo, chill-out
vibe. We hope every track on Brazilian Lounge encourages you to turn
up the heat and imagine yourself with a tropical drink in your hand as
you relax at a beachside bar in Rio de Janeiro.58

The reference to the trip and the escape from the metropolis is ironic. In some
regions, including many in the Third World, the metropolises grew to devour the
countryside—and the nations so to speak—and now, they return the world sce-
narios packaged as prepared fantasy escapes. Such a rhetoric that strongly re-
sembles that of the tourism industry does not cancel the dominant view that the
Western (and often Japanese) listener is in the privileged position of enjoying,
like a tourist, the ride to global places. These latest developments not only high-
light the relevance of the postnational, but also provide evidence about the fet-
ishization of geography59 that seems to be effectively present in the production,
marketing, and consumption of contemporary popular music.