33 - Toward a new world? The vicissitudes of American popular music

Summary

Earth becomes world only when it can be subjectively seized as such imagined, claimed, colonized mentally as well as physically. World music, as concept, is inconceivable outside this nexus whereby a subjective world and the world of political and cultural commerce set themselves in a dialogue marked by an elaborate theater of inclusion and exclusion. This chapter explores where the vicissitudes of American popular music are to be located and how the American case enacts, in microcosm, the formations of inclusion and exclusion that have gone to produce the modern sense of a world society as such. It focuses on moments when the work of exception took particularly dramatic form. The moment of revolution represented in Yankee Doodle and the other national songs was real and was recognized in the world at large. The American market for recorded music is still, by some distance, the biggest, and English is still the default language worldwide for popular music.