Global Popular Music, Cultural Imperialism and the English Language

Abstract

Recent academic writing on music has had a great deal to say about the status of local cultures (see Frith 1989; Robinson et al. 1991; Garofalo 1992; Bennett et al. 1993). Much of this work has reacted against the way local musics were dealt with in some cultural imperialism writing. For many on the left in the 1960s and 1970s, the domination of global music production by a group of multinational corporations based in Britain and the United States, issuing records largely made by acts from those countries, provided yet another instance of American cultural hegemony, reinforced by the vestiges of an older empire.