The World Music Culture of Incorporation
The World Music Culture of Incorporation
Chapter 5 discusses how the blurring of the lines between commerce, industry, and knowledge production has been the legacy of the world music culture industry. Desire and yearning for the sounds of the other has helped to structure modern, so-called ultramodernist, and popular music forms in dynamic and aesthetic tension, continuing into the contemporary moment. This structure of desire has helped to train first-world listeners and music producers to listen for racialized gender and to structure their own listening subjectivity vis-à-vis, and often in opposition to, this alterity. But thanks to incorporation, the commodity chain has been delinked. The listener, now also in part the producer, aurally lays claim to sonic traditions and constitutes a key site of production. This chapter critically engages a long history of both Marxian and Freudian theorizing on fetishism in an effort to understand a recent shift to what I call the WMCI’s post-fetishization of traditional sounds, which coexists alongside the fetishism to which we’ve grown accustomed.
Keywords: fetishism, culture of incorporation, listener as producer, libidinal economy, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, post-fetishism
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