pop music and society
...ital, but Connell and Gibson believe the local continues to factor in these networks and movements. "Local music remains vital," the authors remark, even as it is "simultaneously both local and transnational" (271). The local not only continues to be the place in which most people encounter music and its potential meanings, according to Connell and Gibson, but conceptualizations of the local have become even more crucial in the global context. Often, the local lingers in new transnational situations as a reinvented ideal of authenticity, allowing senses of place to be voraciously commodified. But so too, Connell and Gibson note, locality and place help people cope with, transform, or even resist, the disruptive, harmful aspects of the growing global market. Most usefully, Connell and Gibson pinpoint a dialectic between "fixity" and "fluidity," two terms that the authors repeatedly utilize as lodestones that help to navigate the resource-rich landscape of their topic. "Fixity" signifies the ways music emerges from or embodies stable, situated places of traditions, continuities, and grounded, sustained links among people. But "fixity," it turns out, is no fixed matter. From hip hop to reggae to bhangra to salsa to many other genres, music can signify the "fixity" of local place, but it also tends toward mobility and "fluidity," especially in a world of global capital. The point is not that the local vanishes, or that it stands merely as an antipode of diversity to the homogenizing force of the global, but rather that popular music manifests how "fixity" and "fluidity" continually interact. "Rather than eliminating specificity and creating homogeneity, capitalism absorbs and works through difference, resulting in multiple capitalisms and multiple modernisms," Connell and Gibson explain. "Popular music reflects this combination of hybridity and differentiation" (191). The subtlety of how Connell and Gibson explore the interaction of "fixity" and "fluidity" in popular music bespeaks the breadth of their reading in the secondary literatures on music, place, and identity as well as the depth of their perceptions, which carefully explore all sides of their topic. One refreshing aspect of the book is that it dethrones rock, and western music in general, as the sum total of popular music. It does so, however, without ignoring the dominance of western modes of musical communication: the need to sing in English in order to reach a global market; the ways that western corporations wield overwhelming control of musical production and distribution; and other imbalances. There may be "multiple capitalisms and multiple modernities" as well as multiple musics, but power "remains centered in the West" (191). Still, popular music provides a particularly vital site of resistance against the dominant, and Connell and Gibson are sensitive to the range of expression popular music can encompass. Examples from across the world demonstrate how people use popular music to reconfigure their lives. Connell and Gibson guide us through many specific instances of how music, place, and identity take shape in bottom-up as well as top-down processes. The authors also possess a knack for selecting the perfect quotation in order to convey this point. "Death metal is neither an example of false consciousness nor a coping mechanism for the stresses of an unequalled world. It is a promise unfulfilled," we hear from Harris Berger (79). Popular music is "a sphere in which people struggle over reality and their place in it, a sphere in which people are continuously working with and within already existing relations of power, to make sense of and improve their lives," Lawrence Grossberg explains (4-5). In fact, Sound Tracks is so chock full of references to other scholarship, it sent me continually turning to the bibliography. There's an article about music and cultural politics in Singapore? Must read that! There's a book...