ABSTRACT
Popular music is an integral component of processes through which cultural identities are formed, both at personal and collective levels; moreover, ‘the way people think about identity and music is tied to the way they think about places’ (Wade 2000: 2). This chapter examines the role of music in shaping national and ethnic identities. Artists or even whole communities can represent themselves and their experiences of places through music, in much the same way as in literature or art. It was once assumed that communities and individuals were recognisable through relatively stable identities – traditions, cultural traits, opinions and practices that could be collected, mapped and objectified; in some instances, such perspectives were created from within communities as strategic moves towards particular outcomes. More commonly, these‘fixed’ identities were imposed as clichéd images of place and culture in tourist promotions, political rhetoric and sensationalist media, essentialisms that had little resemblance to everyday, lived experience (Said 1978, 1995). Consequently attempts have been made to depict identities as process rather than state, as flow rather than fixed characteristic, as constantly ‘becoming’ rather than‘being’ (see also Chapter 8). The ways individuals, communities, regions or nations see themselves involve engagements with a potential myriad options: ethnicity, religion, gender, occupational status, political beliefs and so on. Music remains an important cultural sphere in which identities are affirmed, challenged, taken apart and reconstructed. So a genre of music such as hip hop, which emerged from black and Hispanic neighbourhoods of American cities during the 1980s, simultaneously involved questions of ethnicity, political motivations, gender identity and discrimination, class status and awareness, cultural nationalism and place.
