Peter Manuel

Popular musics of the non-Western world : an introductory survey

This volume sets out to examine non-Western urban music styles, from familiar genres like reggae and salsa to the lesser-known regional styles of Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, non-Western Europe, Asia and the near East. The author establishes parameters that distinguish popular music from both folk and classical music, defining popular music as music created with the mass media in mind and reproduced on a mass basis as a saleable commodity for large public consumption.

Music as symbol, music as simulacrum: postmodern, pre-modern, and modern aesthetics in subcultural popular musics

Postmodern aesthetics has come to be recognised as a salient feature of much popular culture, including music. Urban subcultures, and especially migrant subcultures, may have inherent inclinations toward postmodern aesthetics, while at the same time retaining ties to modern and even pre-modern cultural discourses. The syncretic popular musics created by such subcultures may reflect these multiple cultural orientations by combining postmodern and more traditional characteristics. Thus, for example, punk rock and rap music can be seen to combine postmodern techniques of pastiche, bricolage and blank irony with modernist socio-political protest. Similar eclecticisms can also be found in the musics of some urban migrant subcultures, whose syncretic musics, like their senses of social identity, often self-consciously juxtapose or combine ancestral homeland traditions with the most contemporary cosmopolitan styles and attitudes. Interpretations of such musics may call for a particularly nuanced appreciation of the distinct aesthetic modes which may coexist in the same work.

Marxism, nationalism and popular music in revolutionary Cuba

Among the ever-growing body of publications on popular music, all but a small minority have tended to deal exclusively with the capitalist world. The relative neglect of the workings of popular music in socialist countries has led to an unfortunate lacuna in descriptive studies and, perhaps more importantly, a potential bias in theoretical studies. Popular cultures in socialist states may share many features with their counterparts in the capitalist world, but they are also likely to differ in several important aspects, including, for example, the role of the market, of the bureaucracy, of state cultural policy, the limits on commercialism and the entire ideological climate fostered by socialism. Consequently, many of the theoretical generalisations about popular music, based on studies of the capitalist world, must be revised or qualified when socialist countries are considered.

The cassette industry and popular music in North India

Since the early 1970s the advent of cassette technology has had a profound effect on music industries worldwide. This influence has been particularly marked in the developing world, where cassettes have largely replaced vinyl records and have extended their impact into regions, classes and genres previously uninfluenced by the mass media. Cassettes have served to decentralise and democratise both production and consumption, thereby counterbalancing the previous tendency toward oligopolisation of international commercial recording industries. While the cassette boom started later in India than in areas such as the Middle

Popular Music in India: 1901–86

The dramatic development of popular music in India illustrates some of the complex and varied ways that South Asians have used art and entertainment as a means of adapting and relating to the social transitions accompanying modernisation. Indian popular music, nevertheless, has been all but ignored in scholarly literature, whether musicological or sociological; this article endeavours to provide a basis for future inquiries by providing a descriptive outline of the development of modern Indian commercial music in the twentieth century.

Chutney and Indo-Trinidadian cultural identity

Since the early 1980s Indian diasporic communities have attained sufficient size, affluence, self-awareness and generational distance from South Asia to have created a set of popular music styles that are autonomous and distinctive rather than strictly derivative of Indian models. While the bhangra music of British Punjabis has attracted some scholarly and journalistic attention, chutney, a syncretic Indo-Caribbean popular music and dance idiom, is little known outside its own milieu. This article constitutes a preliminary socio-musical study of chutney.

The regional North Indian popular music industry in 2014: from cassette culture to cyberculture

This article explores the current state of the regional vernacular popular music industry in North India, assessing the changes that have occurred since around 2000 with the advent of digital technologies, including DVD format, and especially the Internet, cellphones and ‘pen-drives’. It provides a cursory overview of the regional music scene as a whole, and then focuses, as a case study, on a particular genre, namely the languriya songs of the Braj region, south of Delhi. It discusses how commercial music production is adapting, or failing to adapt, to recent technological developments, and it notes the vigorous and persistent flowering of regional music scenes such as that in the Braj region.

Popular music as popular expression in North India and the Bhojpuri region, from cassette culture to VCD culture

In the 1980s the Indian popular music scene was revolutionized by the advent of audio cassettes that dramatically decentralized production and precipitated the rise of syncretic folk-pop hybrids aimed at diverse regional audiences. In the years around 2000, the new medium of the VCD, or video compact disc, came to exert a similarly prodigious impact, enabling inexpensive popular music recordings marketed to diverse audiences to have visual as well as audio components. Song picturizations came to display a variety of approaches, from low-budget Bollywood imitations to new formats evolving in response to local sensibilities. This article outlines some of these developments, looking in particular at VCD production in North Indias Bhojpuri region as a representative case study.

Modal Harmony in Andalusian, Eastern European, and Turkish Syncretic Musics

Syntheses entre la musique arabe et europeenne en Andalousie, developpement de la musique modale de la tradition byzantine en Grece et en Turquie (analyse de plusieurs exemples), confluence de la musique occidentale et de la musique modale en Roumanie, en Hongrie, dans le repertoire des instrumentistes juifs klezmer

Jaipongan: Indigenous Popular Music of West Java

The advent of mass media particularly cassettes and films in Indonesia has led to the flowering of two mass popular music forms, namely, dangdut and jaipongan. Kroncong, an older urban popular form, presents a mixture of Portuguese folksong style and Indonesian features; dangdut style, while in some respects an extension of the orkes melayu tradition, is heavily influenced by Hindi film songs and Western pop; only jaipongan is purely Indonesian or more properly speaking, Sundanese in origin and style. While kroncong and dangdut have rEceived some scholarly attention (Becker 1975, Heins 1975, Frederick 1982), jaipongan has received only passing reference in a few publications. An examination of jaipongan is well overdue, in view of the phenomenal popularity of the genre not only in its home, West Java (Sunda), but throughout greater Java. This article is a preliminary study aimed at introducing the genre to English-speaking readers.