Zwischen Authentizität und dem Markt: Musik, Subkultur und Werte in den USA seit den 1970er Jahren
Musikwissenschaften
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
Researching five individual topics (Waffle House Music, Native American cross-over, Christian Rock, Classical Music of Charles Ives, and Detroit Techno) and the development of the composers in relation to the market, gave insights into the way how the artists had to respond to a more and more neoliberal market, driven by identity politics. The expression of self was found to have become a more and more marketable item, to which the composers responded. In some cases they tried to counteract "self-exploitation" (blackness, Native-ness, folkey-ness, Christian-ness, Elite-ness), in others they embraced fully the idea of "message" over "music". It was surprising that the Native American music turned out to be a fusion of Native and Mexican, that there was not just one composer, but actually two working together in a collaboration. It also developed during the project that the research was best done by doing interviews with the artists, instead of just researching articles in journals written about them. The whiter the musician got, the more did they not want to share their motivation. I even encountered that I couldn’t get any interview with the Christian musicians at all. Music, as a way to see into the development of the last four decades of American culture, revealed the cultural trends which have led the U.S. become more and more conservative and at the same time obsessively liberal in terms of identity politics. The development of the musicians from the late 70s to the 2010s shows how they themselves, without even noticing, had adjusted to the market of conservatism and extreme liberalism, while leaving their artistic motivation of innovation behind. In adjusting to the market, the market itself became an issue of "authenticity".
Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)
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“Identity and In-Betweenness: Hybridity as Transcultural Mobility in the Music of Native American R. Carlos Nakai and his Band Jackalope.” In Key Tropes in Inter-American Studies: Perspectives from the forum for inter-american research (fiar), ed. by Wilfried Raussert, et al, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2015, 213-230
Gail, Dorothea
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“Appropriation by the Appropriated: The Commodification of Latino Ethnicity in Detroit Techno’s Underground ResistanceIn: ” Politics of Entanglement in the Americas, ed. by Lukas Rehm, Jochen Kemner, Olaf Kaltmeier. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. 2017,
Dorothea Gail
