Mapping The Kominas' sociomusical transnation: punk, diaspora, and digital media (original) (raw)
Related papers
Muslim punks online: A diasporic Pakistani music subculture on the Internet
This article seeks to explore how Internet media is shaping transnationally-mediated South Asian music subcultures. Rather than serve as a literature review of new media and South Asian popular culture, this paper is especially interested in how particular music websites, discussion forums, social networking sites, and IP-based technologies in general are facilitating the creation of progressive South Asian virtual spaces. One particular South Asian musical scene, ‘Taqwacore’, a transnational Muslim punk music scene, is used as a case study. Reference is made to other non-Muslim diasporic South Asian musical scenes including Asian electronic music and Bhangra as well to contextualize Taqwacore. Ethnographic research (participant observation and interviewing) was conducted both online and offline using Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blogs, discussion groups, and face-to-face meetings.
‘Muslim Punk’ Music Online: Piety and Protest in the Digital Age
The presence of young diasporic Muslim musicians in new media is already significant, but also continually rising. The explosion of MySpace and Facebook pages for diasporic Muslim bands is a case in point. It is tempting to stop at this moment, basking in this concrete new media presence. However, presence does not always beget position. And in this case, young Muslim males continue to be othered, exoticized, otherwise marginalized online and offline. The online presence of ‘Taqwacores’, a transnational diasporic punk music scene, serves as a space where these marginal essentialisms are contested. In the face of post-9/11 and 7/7 Islamophobia, Taqwacores’ cyberspaces have been viewed as ‘safe’ outlets for progressive activist Muslims to discuss and organize. Though the Internet’s role in growing Muslim musical youth subcultures is important, it is critical not to let this overshadow the role of these virtual spaces as cocoons where young Muslim males (especially marginalized ones) can creatively and freely express themselves. This chapter explores the continuing circulation of pejorative essentialisms of diasporic Muslim males (especially as ‘terrorist’/demonic ‘other’) and underlines the possibility of cyberspaces to function as meaningful and progressive Muslim social worlds which challenge these essentialisms both online and offline (a case in point for the anti-Islamophobic leanings of the Taqwacores).
The punks, the web, local concerns and global appeal: Cultural hybridity in Turkish hardcore punk
Punk & Post Punk, 2016
Turkish hardcore punk rock can easily be dismissed as an example of cultural imperialism due to heavy borrowing from the West. However, mapping the cultural flow of music globally is insufficient. Though the global flow of culture (including music) is characterized by an imbalance which favours the West, we prefer viewing cultural flows as 'complex patterns of cross-fertilisation and cultural hybridity' where semiotic resources from the local and the West produce new packages of semiotic meanings. This article outlines how punks are able to harness the power of western hardcore punk and western technology such as the Internet to express real concern about Turkey for Turkish and international fans. Band members and fans of two hardcore bands are interviewed and lyrics and visuals of a typical video is analysed. This research reveals how bands use western resources to express opinions and views about life in Turkey for a local and international audience. In this sense, Turkish punk is not a case of cultural imperialism, but a cultural hybrid. Through internationalizing punk using technology and a DIY approach common in punk, punk thrives in a place which is inhospitable to most things alternative, different and not easily controlled.
The Streamyard Cyphers: Online Place-Making Within an Indian Hip Hop Community
AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research, 2021
This paper presents an ethnographic account of how a community of Bengali-speaking rappers called the Cypher Projekt, based in the Indian state of West Bengal, attempted to create an online place for conducting cyphers during India’s harsh lockdowns in 2020. As an integral practice in Hip Hop culture, a rap cypher is akin to a poetry slam and typically held in physical locations where proximity between rappers is key to lyrical improvisation and competitive engagement. The Covid-19 lockdowns imposed throughout India in 2020 forced this community of Indian rappers to explore online environments for conducting the cyphers. However, due to infrastructural constraints related to latency in Internet connections, the cyphers were replaced with informal discussion sessions. These sessions were referred to as the Streamyard cyphers, owing to use of the free version of a web-enabled video-conferencing application called Streamyard. The ethnographic study revealed how the online sessions serv...
The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography, 2016
Digital ethnography has a double meaning, referring both to the ethnographic study of digital cultures and to the development of digital methodologies to enhance anthropological, ethnographic and related interdisciplinary research. In this paper we combine the two. We offer a critical and reflexive introduction to novel internet-based methodologies that complement offline ethnographic research. Our aim is to show the powers of such methodologies and how they can be used to supplement other sources of ethnographic insight. The chapter’s ethnographic focus is on two digital music cultures, both of which make significant use of the internet: Vaporwave, a contemporary genre, and Microsound, an established and long-standing one. By comparing the two genres, and analysing their online practices, we show how they represent distinctive moments in the evolution of the internet as a digital-cultural medium. We therefore contend that digital methodologies oriented to our actors’ uses of the internet must be attuned to its cultural and historical variation: to the internet itself as a cultural form, and its changing contributions to such digital-music assemblages. Methodologically, we adapt tools developed previously for Actor Network Theory: the issue crawler software (http://www.govcom.org/Issuecrawler\_instructions.htm). Brought to digital music genres, these tools analyse the exchange of hyperlinks amongst actors online, mapping, visualising and making available for further analysis relations among some of the many entities––labels, platforms, venues, festivals, funding bodies, distributors, critics, bloggers, fans, co-artists, allies––that mediate, and are mobilised by, such genres. Coupled with analysis of the two genres’ offline social and cultural formations, and supported by qualitative insights from genre theory and media aesthetics, such network visualisations offer ways of significantly deepening the analysis of genres with online emanations. Yet, importantly, adequate interpretation of the network visualisations demand that they are combined them with other sources of ethnographic knowledge. Use of these tools, combined with the methodological principles we set out, can be transposed, we contend, into many spheres of ethnographic enquiry where cultural scenes and practices combine offline and online manifestations. At the outset, we analyse the distinctive ways in which uses of the internet enter into the aesthetic and communicative practices of Vaporwave and Microsound. We proceed to analyse the temporality of these practices––including the temporality of the web; through the case of Microsound, we trace the beginnings of the migration of electronic music cultures online in the mid-late 1990s, and through Vaporwave, we examine very current, transmedial aesthetic uses of the internet. Together, the two demonstrate how the web is employed, with various levels of emphasis, in several ways: 1) to circulate music in the form of text, recordings, and objects; 2) to cultivate, publicise and distribute knowledge and facilitate discussion, via blogs, mailing lists and fora; 3) to accumulate, and accelerate the accumulation of, cultural capital through the creation and exchange of symbolic, semiotic and material links; and 4) as an expressive and aesthetic medium, part of a genre’s larger transmedial aesthetic assemblage. Indeed, in the case of Vaporwave, the internet acts as a rudimentary content creator, providing––in the guise of recycled web content––the substantive material through which the music is realised. Our comparative analysis of Microsound and Vaporwave affords insights into the historicity of the web, showing how online communities and digitally-native practices have developed from ‘wide’, open, and often anonymous social networks to more ‘local’ and intimate communities that, in their small scale, seek to mimic or replicate ‘offline’, co-present musical socialities. In the case of Vaporwave, this historicity enters into the very aesthetics of the genre, as artists and other actors engage in knowing, postmodern play with the signifiers of the early days of web 2.0.
Transnational Punk: The Growing Push for Global Change Through a Music-Based Subculture
LUX, 2013
Little media attention has been devoted to the burgeoning punk scene that has raised alarm abroad in areas such as Banda Aceh, Indonesia and Moscow, Russia. While the punk subculture has been analyzed in-depth by such notable theorists as Dick Hebdige and Stuart Hall, their work has been limited to examining the rise and apparent decline of the subculture in England, rendering any further investigations into punk as looking back at a nostalgic novelty of post-World War II British milieu. Furthermore, the commodification of punk music and style has relegated punk to the realm of an alternative culture in Britain and locally in the U.S. In these current international incarnations, however, a social space for this alternative culture is threatened by severe punishment including what Indonesian police officials have label "moral rehabilitation" and, in the case of Russian punks, imprisonment. Punk today is once more-or, for the first time, truly becoming-an oppositional culture as described by Raymond Williams, rather than a non-threatening alternative. The international punk scene has become deeply connected to other punks through the internet, creating a growing global community. Through musical and stylistic culture, punk offers its members much more: a voice that questions established values, that screams for change. In these nations where punks have little agency in political and social matters, a guitar and a microphone offer a means of speaking. The communal aspect of punk creates an arena for those involved to foster a culture of dialogue and dissent.
"THIS IS NOT RAP" Boundary Works and Symbolic Violence in YouTube-Based Music Subcultures
Rap music is one of the main components of hip-hop culture, together with break-dance and graffiti; this music emerged in the United States during the late 1970s, but has quickly spread throughout all the continents. But what is rap? Music genres have always revealed boundaries which are not only fuzzy in their definition, but they are also often intended as stakes in dialectical processes involving the different actors animating musical scenes, and rap too has been and still is clearly exposed to these dynamics. During the last decade, however, the emergent role of social media and digital platforms opened a new phase for these processes, because it provided them with a new stage and battleground. The chapter aims at reflecting on this topic by focusing on the Italianrap scene. Originated as a grassroots urban movement in the early 1990s, and become mainstream in the 2000s, also Italian rap music has recently entered a novel phase of its relatively short life, that is, a "YouTube era." Key names of the 2010s Italian hip-hop scene have become nationally famous mainly thanks to the enormous circulation of their videos. "Old-school" Italian rap videos are also widely present and commented on the platform. Nowadays, two generations of Italian rap lovers interact publicly across YouTube's techno-social contexts, fighting on the authenticity and street credibility of national and international artists, while continuously negotiating the boundaries of a subcultural taste regime in constant transition. This chapter analyses the discursive boundary works, forms of aesthetic resistance and manifestations of symbolic violence characterising the Italian rap subculture on YouTube, based on a mixed-method analysis of a large sample of comments and metadata extracted from the platform. Williams 2006). Later, the so-called Web 2.0 considerably upscaled this phenomenon, as in the emblematic case of the (now defunct) social networking site MySpace.com, which gave unprecedented online visibility to obscure bands and niche genres (Silver, Lee and Childress 2016). As a result, the interconnected publics of music producers and consumers gradually became larger and larger, often blending into the hybrid form of the "prosumer" (Ritzer 2013). Social media such as Facebook or Twitter have provided these publics with spaces for collectively sharing music and ideas, regardless of geographical or social borders (Rimmer 2012; Verboord 2014; Arvidsson et al. 2016). In the early 2010s, the Internet still appeared as the realm of a digitally-enabled "participatory culture," characterised by low barriers to access and novel opportunities for individual learning, community building and cultural change (Benkler 2006; Jenkins et al. 2009). This was the case, for instance, of video-sharing platform YouTube, described by Chau (2010:65) as a medium "providing young people a participatory culture in which to create and share original content while making new social connections." At the beginning of the 2020s, the aforementioned rhetoric on the emancipatory power and social potential of digital connectivity has made way for a wider scepticismor, worse, disillusioned pessimismtowards online technologies, due to the widespread consequences of data surveillance and algorithmic control for privacy and public participation (van Dijck, Poell and De Waal 2018). Consumers aged 16-24 currently listen to music at all points of the day and in unprecedented amount (IFPI 2018:7). Yet, it is worth asking: what is the place of music subcultures in today's platform-based consumer culture? Rather than boosting subcultural identification among young and connected consumers, the disruptive diffusion of AI-powered streaming services and apps (e.g. Spotify and Apple Music) is believed to have contributed to the erosion of cultural boundaries among genres and dilution of symbolic meanings attached to subcultural lifestyles. A number of scholars have argued that the business-driven "platformisation" of cultural production and reception (Nieborg and Poell 2018) is likely to foster individualisation and passivity in music consumption (see Section 1), in sharp contrast with the collective and participative dimensions of traditional youth subcultures (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Thornton 1995). Still, there is a lack of empirical studies addressing how and to what extent platformisation has transformed music subcultures. Thus, this chapter attempts to shed light on the platformbased negotiation of subcultural identities by young generations of music listeners. As the title suggests, I will focus on a specific music community and platform environment: Italian rap music on YouTube. Rap music is one of the main components of hip-hop culture, together with break-dance and graffiti. This genre emerged in the United States during the late 1970s but has quickly spread throughout all the continents, undergoing gradual processes of popularisation, consecration and stylistic transformation (Gibson 2014)for example, as for the recently emerged sub-genre of trap music (Conti 2020). Video-sharing platform YouTube is the most used music service worldwide (IFPI 2018) and, different from "pure" music streaming platforms such as Spotify or Apple Music, it allows users to publicly comment on the consumed content. In Italy, rap music and YouTube have become increasingly intertwined over the past decade. Two generations of rap lovers interact across the platform's techno-social contexts, fighting on the authenticity and street credibility of national and international artists, while collectively reworking the unstable boundaries of a subcultural "taste regime" in constant transition (Arsel and Bean 2013). Based on the discourse and content analyses of a large amount of YouTube comments, the present contribution examines the boundary works, forms of resistance and manifestations of symbolic violence characterising this platformised subculture. In contrast with technologically deterministic views of the relation between digital media and cultural reception, I will show that genre boundaries, distinctive identity markers and recognised forms of subcultural capital continue to affect music consumption among YouTube commenters of all ages. Qualitative interviews with 15 music listeners active on the platform are used to provide context on how platform affordances and subcultural experiences are articulated in practice. Then, in the discussion, I will mention possible directions for future research on the subject, and conclude with the following theoretical proposition: the platform-driven shift from consumption communities to ephemeral "consumer publics" theorised in consumer research (Arvidsson and Caliandro 2016) can be fruitfully used to make sense of platformised "subcultural publics"which, reflecting the native logics of digital media, tend to be affectively committed, yet socially disconnected.
‘Come join the rock gharaana’: The cultural politics of MTV’s Kurkure Desi Beats Rock On
In the first two decades of liberalization MTV has been a symbol of the complicated trajectory of transnational media in Indian public culture. A juggernaut cultural force and arguably one of the most potent dynamics in the globalization of youth culture, MTV, whose content in India is largely film-music oriented, has recently (2009) introduced a rock-centric “making-the band” show called Kurkure Desi Beats Rock On (KDBRO) that taps into and draws from a six-decades old culture of rock music performance in urban middle class India. Drawing from personal interviews and examining musical and discursive texts from KDBRO’s first season, this article interprets how the show’s producers and judges have attempted to ascertain an appropriately “Indian” yet “rock” sound, with musical outcomes that display tension between a desire for audible cultural nationalism and the practicalities of performing a transnational musical form. Through close reading of the show’s musical and discursive negotiations I argue that the figure of the rock musician is a conduit for complicated cultural politics in which a mandate for cultural “authenticity” is troubled by the realities of participation in a globalized media field – and that this dynamic speaks to larger social transformations in an economically globalized India.
Los Kjarkas and the diasporic community on the internet
2016
This article examines questions of how elements of musical traditions are reproduced in new social contexts, and what kind of music-making processes are involved when Los Kjarkas, an urban folk music group from Bolivia, encounters a diasporic community in Europe.42 Transnational experiences and opportunities for new forms of communication are significant for this urban folk music culture, which travels between places and spaces, as will be discussed in this article. This essay also focuses on the relationship between representations of Bolivian urban folk music and spaces where old and new meanings of identity and relationships are based on a sense of community. Aspects concerning relationships between Andean popular music, Latin American music and Bolivian folk music and their relationships to the audience are explored. Issues such as how relationships between a musical culture and a globally marginalised musical culture are articulated on the Internet, and new as well as old ident...
Nomadic ethnoscapes in the changing globallocal pop music industry
Popular culture in Taiwan: charismatic modernity, 2010
Much has been written about pop music culture in Asia, both in the global diffusion of Western culture generally and in the emergence of popular music as a kind of public sphere 1 . The history of ICRT Radio (International Community Radio Taipei), which represents on the one hand the development of a typical Western language radio station, reflects on the other hand the peculiar transformation of a government subsidized non-profit radio station to a fully commercial station caught within the changing landscape of transnational mass media and the politicizing imperatives of indigenization 2 . The events affecting that transformation reflect the peculiar status of ICRT as an institution. But at a deeper level this transformation ultimately reflects the complex processes that underlie the changing semantics of popular culture in Taiwan, where ICRT has always played a seminal role in disseminating (through music) "Western" culture. It is easy to read at face value the changing nature of (musical) culture by viewing it purely in semantic terms as "program content" and by regarding the promotion of what is undoubtedly Western pop music simply as a process of "diffusion". Both the semantics of culture and diffusion as cultural change overlook the embeddedness of culture in its institutional context of production, consumption and accommodation as well as the varied perceptions of meaning and complex strategies of power that drive and oppose different agencies within institutions. The negotiated quality of culture within the contest of meaning is best seen as the target of different vested interests. In this case, transnationalism is a conflict between cosmopolitanizing and indigenizing worldviews, and this conflict, albeit locally situated, can have in my opinion important ramifications for how one should view the emergence of transnational culture in other sociopolitical venues, as well as generally.