ABSTRACT
As both cultural history and metaphor, the theme of migrancy is deployed to reconsider the complexity of cultural powers exposed in the current decentering of the cultures and languages of the West. In repudiating the discontinous tempos and cultures of the city, commerce and capital, this critical tradition has also sought radical alternatives in the assumed continuities of folk cultures, 'authentic' habits and 'genuine' communities. If rock music is a global linguistic institution, a communicative practice, it stands in analogous relationship to other worldly languages, offering both a shared grammar and network, and a shifting historical-cultural syntax, contingent meanings and a contextual sense of identity. It was always a portmanteau concept into which many radically different types of society and culture were crammed and, as the relations between the core and the periphery change and a new world system begins to emerge, it will open up yet new fields of difference.
