Mass Culture, Commodification, and the Consolidation of the Afro-Peruvian Festejo

Abstract

There are two souls that exist in the contemporary world, those of revolution and decadence.... [T]he consciousness of the artist is the agonizing circus of struggle between the two spirits. An understanding of this struggle sometimes, most of the time, escapes the very artist. But ultimately one of the two spirits prevails. The other ends strangled in the sand. --Jose Carlos Mariategui (1981) There is a familiar pattern characteristic of some discussions about popular music in Latin America. Initially, musical practices associated with one particular group or local community undergo a process of discovery and subsequent canonization as part of the symbolic imagery of one or more emerging group identity projects. The relative success of this endeavor is often predicated on the ability to promote this music among wider audiences, thus leading to its entanglement with the mass media and mass-market interests, as well as with institutions of groups of individuals who seek to impose particular stylistic, aesthetic, and performative standards in order to maintain a monopoly over its means of production. Such a process has led to two contrasting yet consistently iterated assessments. More often than not, practitioners, audiences, critics, and musicologists conclude that such commodification and institutionalization leads to creative stagnation and that, as social, political, and economic circumstances change, this genre loses its ability to engage with audiences in meaningful ways, thus bringing about its untimely demise or a nostalgic longing for a former golden age. See, for example, discussions regarding the commodification of salsa (Katz 2005), the nationalization of local musical genres such as the merengue (Austerlitz 1997) Afro-Cuban traditions (Moore 1997), and Colombian musica tropical (Wade 2000) or the mainstreaming of popular genres such as bachata (Pacini Hernandez 1995) or the Brazilian choro (Livingston-Isenhour and Caracas Garcia 2005), among many others. Other scholars, practitioners, and listeners suggest that mass distribution is not necessarily bad. Some even suggest that an embrace of consumer culture, particularly of the transnational kind, can provide individuals with new sources for identity formation that resist the local dominant hegemony. Such is the case with discussions concerning salsa as a source of pan-Latino or transnational identity (Aparicio 1995; Arias Satizabal 2002; Berrios-Miranda 2003; Hosokawa 2002), or the resistive and transgressive power of rock (Pacini Hernandez, Fernandez L'Hoeste, and Zolov 2004; Zolov 1999), rap (Giovannetti 2003), tropicalia (Dunn 2001), and various types of Caribbean and Caribbean-influenced popular genres (Lipsitz 1994). This is not to suggest that these authors, or others who have undertaken similar topics in Latin America and elsewhere, have simply endorsed particular ways of envisioning the relationship between music and mass culture. In most cases, these studies seek to problematize various aspects of this relationship and bring to light those counter-hegemonic tendencies that at times can, at least temporarily, upset the status quo. Frances Aparicio (1995, 244), for example, wrestles with the polarizing ideas of the hegemonic and the resistive, providing pointed critiques regarding various distortions and appropriations of salsa by different social, ethnic, and gendered groups, in the end suggesting that women, as consumers of popular music, are active subjects in their role as listeners, rather than the passive consumers that industries perhaps expect them to be. Consumption then, cannot be seen exclusively as a unidirectional process of subordination but rather as a cultural practice in which individuals, groups and institutions negotiate cultural identity and social, class, and racial meanings, as well as naturalizing or contesting gendered relations. This dialectic between homogenizing or attenuating tendencies of mass culture and the possibility of countering those tendencies by actively embracing consumerism has been a hallmark of popular music studies for a number of decades. …

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