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Giving voice to the ‘dignified man’: reflections on global popular music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 May 2011

Helena Simonett
Helena Simonett
Affiliation:
Center for Latin American Studies, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

As music increasingly links the global and the local and vice versa, fusions of diverse musical genres and styles burgeon. Globalisation theory (specifically Appadurai) has spurred explorations of musical hybridity and cross-fertilisation among scholars from different academic fields focusing on music. In this essay, I argue for the necessity of understanding global cultural interactions and musical appropriations or exchanges in the context of the ambivalences of the globalised mass diffusion and the power asymmetries involved. The purpose of this paper is to contextualise contemporary theoretical considerations by describing the Yoremensamble project – a government-sponsored cultural project in which a group of urban mestizo musicians from northwestern Mexico appropriated local indigenous musical expressions to produce an album titled ‘Hombre digno’ (‘Dignified man’). The album is just one of many projects around the globe in which artists self-consciously re-localize global popular music styles. The resulting sonic fusions point to the need for a critical cultural analysis of such translocal and global phenomena which is rooted in ethnography.

Type
Articles
Information
Popular Music , Volume 30 , Special Issue 2: Crossing Borders: Music of Latin America , May 2011 , pp. 227 - 244
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Discography

Los Sierreños, En dialecto ‘mayo’. Monterrey, American Show Latin, Disa Records (CD), 9057301302. 2008Google Scholar
Yoremensamble, Hombre Digno. CONACULTA, DIFOCUR Sinaloa, Municipio de Ahome (CD). 2006Google Scholar