Essay 3 - Allison Cuculich - Music and Global Culture

Music and Global Culture

The debate is still out as to whether or not our world is moving in the direction of a global culture.  Even though (depending on who you ask) there is not a definite answer to this, the media industry has not put a halt to any gains that could be made in search of profits.  This is due to the fact that the idea of building a global culture is not necessarily on the agenda of money driven media corporations. 

Although this idea is of no importance to media, the outlook of a potential global culture is cloudy.  There are too many responses and understandings that people have when faced with globalization, that a singular culture is not very probable but rather a handful of cultures is more likely (Featherstone, 1990, p. 10).  This being said, the music industry continues in its pursuit to spread musicians that reach one if not multiple cultures that are present.  The process that is taken by the music industry to incorporate a number of cultures usually results in only reaching one that they set out to impact.  This is the idea known as transcultural music (Wallis & Malm, 2003, p. 376). 

Transcultural music appears to be a unifying idea, but this is only at the surface.  Deeper into this idea, there is the fact that musicians participate in this exchange of music whether they are fully aware or even want to (Wallis & Malm, 2003, p. 377).  Wallis and Malm give an example of this that a record producer, from the West for argument?s sake, travels across the sea to record music native to a specific tribe in Africa unbeknownst to them and then brings it back to the West and adds and tweaks the sound to resemble something that Westerners would recognize while still possessing a distinct quality about it (2003, p. 377).  So, even the plan to make music that transcends cultures ends up at the heart of the music industry, which is cut whoever you can to make top dollar.

Herbert Schiller makes the points that everything people are exposed to, will essentially become their new culture and that because Western culture extends to virtually every corner of the earth that we are living in a U.S. dominated view of world culture (Tomlinson, 2003, p. 116).  Tomlinson counteracts this by adding that transnational media can and will be separated from each other once people come in contact with it (2003, p. 117).  This opens up the idea that even though the U.S. has put itself out there on the music market, that there is still room for other countries that do not have the power that is tied to the U.S. to infiltrate our boundaries.  An example of this would be Jamaica, which is definitely not known for its extreme wealth as a nation, and the way reggae became a major part of music across the world.  Reggae has not generated nearly as much music as a few American pieces of media have, but the point is the impact that the music makes and the fact that ?people will be listening to and talking about Bob Marley and the Wailers long after they ever watch Titanic as an old classic? (Waring, 2001, ¶ 14). 

There is an infinite amount of ways that the globalization of music could be read.  There are some people within a nation that will always refuse the idea of foreign anything, whether it is media or not.  On the other hand, there will be the people within a nation that embrace these differences and look to build a common culture or music, economy, politics, etc.  I predict there will be a united culture that will encompass these ideas that are shared across the globe, but that culture will not be strong enough to reach the entire population.
   

References

Featherstone, M. (1990). Global culture: An introduction. In M. Featherstone (Ed.),
    Global culture: Nationalism, globalization and modernity, 7, 1-14.
Tomlinson, J. (2003). Media imperialism. In L. Parks and S. Kumar (Eds.), Planet TV:
    A global television reader, 113-134.
Wallis, R., & Malm, K. (2003). The international music industry and transnational
    communication. In J. Lull (Ed.), Popular music in communication: Social and
    cultural perspectives, 375-377.
Waring, M. (2001). Will the world economy produce only world culture? Retrieved June
    7, 2007 from the International Society for the Performing Arts Foundation Web
    site: http://www.ispa.org/ideas/waring.html

Posted at 07:52PM Jun 07, 2007 by CUCULICH, ALLISON in General  |  Comments[2]