Music, Popular Culture, Identities

Richard Young assembled sixteen essays that range impressively across the globe — from flamenco in Spain and boerenrock in the Netherlands to the Mexican corrido, Cuban dance music, bossa nova, South African jazz, and Somali immigrant youth in North America. The unifying question is how popular music carries and constructs identity for communities across cultures, and the collection brings ethnomusicology, cultural studies, and popular culture studies into productive conversation. Published in Rodopi's respected Critical Studies series, the editorial oversight is solid. The breadth of coverage is the book's genuine strength; very few single volumes reach this many cultural traditions with this degree of specificity. The honest caveat is that multi-essay anthologies are inherently uneven, the academic language is dense, and the global popular music landscape has shifted considerably since 2002. For graduate students and scholars in cultural studies or ethnomusicology, it remains a useful reference point.