Critical Review Set 1, Post #2 (Cohen, due 9/20)

Cohen, Sara.  "Ethnography and Popular Music Studies."  1993.  In Popular Music (12.2).  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Cohen’s article tackles the delicacy of ethnographic research, namely the fine line between respecting a community’s values and uprooting that value by immersing it in Western research methodology, classical theories, and other ethnocentric vehicles for framing it.  But beyond the scope of ethnographic research, Cohen describes the imposition of “global processes of homogenisation or diversification,” mediated by a vast commercial enterprise (namely, the music industry), as a threat to the preservation of culturally rooted art forms, noting the “theft” of these forms as they are beaten and folded into a contmporary, “schizoid” musical agenda (126-7).  Cohen’s musing on identity and locality go a long way in articulating these concerns; she notes, for example, that since identity is “not a fixed essence...[but] always in the process of being achieved, negotiated, invented” (132), music and its relation to networks of individuals within a place or community (or, a locality) are constantly in flux as well.  These fluid boundaries harken back to the notion, as Thornton outlines, of “subculture” and “mainstream” as unfixed and relationally shifting entities (if the identities that construct subcultures are perpetually changing, so then does the relationship between these subcultures and the “mainstream”’s that they do(n’t) stand in opposition to; and furthermore, the flexible (or nonexistent) boundaries of identity allow music to ooze between the pores in groups and communities, making way for the socially contested but meanwhile celebrated fusion of musical styles in genres such as punk.  

My questions address Cohen’s bit on technology, namely her assertion that, within academic discourse, the idea that “new technologies...have supposedly resulted in the plundering of different cultures or eras” (126) predominates.  I question the notion that technology, and the melding and “homogenization” of “disparate” styles, enforces notions of placelessness in music, and I ask how can these processes actually give power and credence to communities and places that create them?  In what ways can “playing” with traditional ideals of music, and simmering a diverse gumbo of styles mediated by modern technology to produce a new sound,   re-define but preserve the strength and unity of this sound’s creators and visionaries?  (I look to my hometown of Detroit, the birthplace of electronic music and techno, as a locality that exemplifies the association between place and a new sound that may not initially seem like a “native” one...could we say this about punk in London as well?)