Morphing Borders: The Remanence of MTV

Abstract

This singing is now commonplace. In the modern capitals as well as small towns it blares at all hours from car radios, boom boxes, and personal headphones. It is known, collectively, as beat, a genre of popular music that combines the melodic and rhythmic signatures of multiple cultures in single compositions. World beat is multicolored insofar as it is multicultural; polyphonic insofar as its sources are contrapuntal; revolutionary insofar as its discourse suggests that actual cultural differences may be fused as easily as dissonant sounds are rendered harmonious by a digital synthesizer. Consistent with the Futurist program for social change outlined in I909 by Marinetti in his First Manifesto, world beat converges aesthetics and politics, exalting the powerful mediating effects of technology as a form of spiritual fulfillment for the laboring masses without altering the global property structure. Implicit in its multilayered grooves is also the Futurist notion of a technologically generated utopia; here a transcultural audio no place in which all world languages and rhythms are simultaneously articulated and universally understood. How do such utopias, created by contemporary media technologies, connect to the cacophony and clash of broken languages in the real world, or to the fissures and eruptions occurring when and where actual cultures collide? How do they intersect with the actuality of the ways people continue to interact: with increasing familiarity but also increasing hostility, racial and ethnic hatred, and suspicion? How do they relate, in this sense, to intercultural performance?

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