Critically explore the ways in which the work of Frith (1996) and Tagg (1989) has contributed to our understanding of the significance of identity in popular music culture.

Nowadays more than ever, music and identity appear to be connected as two elements linked in histories of appropriation, adoption and transformation. Technology has disseminated music throughout continents and in this process of narration, music itself has lost not only its origins but has also stepped beyond the definite borders that once announced particular histories, cultures and the ethnicity of those who invented it. Sounds are continuously borrowed, contested and recycled, thus, ‘music [is displayed as] a constant flow of appropriations in which origins, and notions of originality, are often difficult, if not impossible to trace’ (Mitchell 1996: 8). The proliferation of music into different societies has originated a dialogue in which every individual aggregates to specific sounds, determined cultural patterns that contribute to make both music and identity hybrid and ambivalent.

With the public and private invasion of mass media, some music genres, like rap and hip-hop, that used to define the cultures and social status of the people who employed them, now apply to a large audience. It follows, that nowadays the same sound can reflect various cultural experiences generated by different people who make music polysemic. Radios, concerts, commercial cable televisions convert music into a process of globalisation and free migration in space, time and cultures. This contributes profoundly to the creation of imaginary communities that make no longer plausible the notion of identity as an integral original and stable entity. Rather, it is something unfixed, perpetually generated in the subject’s social practices, and developed between different cultural and ethnical contexts. ‘Amongst the countless ways in which we “relocate” ourselves, music undoubtedly has a vital role to play’ (Giddens in Stokes 1994: 3). In its geographic trips, music has acquired a metaphoric meaning, through which it is visible how, for instance, white people use what has been defined as “black music” to express their identity.

‘Music develops within and between people and groups of people with their condition of life’ (Tagg 1989: 293). Everybody is different, consequently everybody experiences the world differently and through the diversities that emerge from the interrelation between subjects in everyday life, identities are constructed. ‘Identity is not a thing but a process – an experimental process which is most vividly grasped as music’ (Frith 1996: 110). Hence, it appears quite vague and imprecise to define music as “black” or “white”. As a matter of fact, to affirm that a piece of music is “black”, would signify on the other hand, that the producers of that music have no cultural exchange with any other subject, except blacks. Moreover, it would exclude all different genres that are part of it, assuming that “black” music is all the same. Thus, if identity is mobile because continuously reshaped by the cultural articulations, to define certain tunes as “black” would mean also to exclude all whites who play and produce that music. Additionally and relevantly, it would entail to categorise blacks as having a fixed identity. While on the contrary, most “black” songs, are uttered in English, a language of European origin. This element seems to highlight the ambivalence of “black music”. As ‘the subject is constituted in language’ (Rutherford 1990: 56), it seems evident that by employing English, blacks not only fragment their culture and identity but also transport them by carrying at the same time, the white world and its cultural meanings. This might be the proof that belies the notion of a possible existence of “black music” in itself. Therefore, what is still called “black music” should be rectified as “black-white” music, because the English language is a sufficient evidence of a link between the two races.

There is ‘recognition that “black” [music] is essentially and culturally constructed category’ (Hall in Donald and Rattansi 1992: 254). Thus, to asseverate identity as a mobile entity, seems to be contradictory. In this respect, the term “black music” stabilises automatically the identity of blacks as race. It is now clear that what has been designated as “black music” portrays a pre-existing identity that finds its roots not in musical terms, but rather in ideological ones. It might be said that those who invented such term, strove to cataloguise music in order to present identities ‘[connected] between the colour of people’s skin and the sort of music people with that colour of skin produce’ (Tagg 1989: 287). Undoubtedly, nobody knows if there has been a time in which music was truly black. The point is that people should not talk about “black” or “white” music, because since the colonisation of the New World, these two races came into contact and in their articulation they shaped a new hybrid identity which was afterwards reflected in music as well. Hence, terms like “black” or “white” music, seems to be employed ‘as one of [the] most iniquitous mechanisms for perpetuating a class society’ (Tagg 1989: 295).

Thus, music has been institutionalised by the dominant Western high class in order to anchor and solidify its status, culture and sense of identity that otherwise would be put into question. As a result, music becomes a medium for recording, consolidating and renewing the sense of identity of certain people. In this respect, by having conventionalised the term “black music”, they attempted to reaffirm their culture so as to fix racial boundaries and hierarchies. As such, music appears to be an ambivalent system of cultural signification that, by expressing the authority of some, generates centres and margins, inclusion and exclusion, sameness and difference.

Listening to certain products gives people a particular cultural and musical capital that carries different meanings according to different contexts that are culturally and socially shaped. Thus, in the postmodern age ‘music made in one place for one reason can be immediately appropriated in another place for quite another reason’ (Frith 1996: 109) that consequently describes it as a multidiscursive word. Jovanotti, the main exponent of Italian rap, in his imitation and translation of the original American rap context, can be said to have been the creator of an international rap community. This might be argued to be the diaspora of “Afro-American” music itself, insofar as it has been exploited and re-appropriated in Italy. It broke the ethnical borders and led to the hybridisation of its characters that express their Italian culture and identity through rhythms that were originally introduced by another ethnic group. Consequently, they express an identity by referring to musical rhythms in which are embodied other social, historical and cultural contexts. They renewed rap style by introducing the Italian language in such a way as to confer to those rhythms a metaphorical function. In other words, the Italians adopted certain rhythms to convey a meaning that was different from the original one imported from the new continent. Therefore, what was borrowed from abroad was afterwards denied, expanded and re-embraced by the Italians who ‘consume[d] and reconstruct[ed] selected fragments from imported musical practices’ (Mitchell 1996: 217). Therefore, the Italian’s rapper's identity arises from influences, themes and styles that, although they remain governed by a characteristic international sound and rhythm, have been reassembled. As a matter of fact, by listening and maybe, in some cases, dressing and moving like their overseas idols, the Italians recycled history and rhythms which were essentially “Afro-American”. In so doing, they proclaim their slippage of identity, which is neither Italian nor “Afro-American” but something between the two.

‘The cultural impact of rap music,[…] despite its origins and continuing cultural importance within Afro-American ghetto culture, has found widespread appeal among youth of all races in different parts of the world’ (Mitchell in Bennet 1999: 30).
This statement belies the notion of rap as originally conceived by the Afro-American and consequently accessible only to them. As such, Italian rappers narrate their hybrid identity brought to light by the clash of cultures, that consequently may display it as closer to black culture than Italian. It is evident that music itself is a multicultural form of expression ‘understood as producing not new texts but new ways of performing texts, new ways of performing the making of meaning’ (Frith 1996: 115) in which the listener shapes music and vice versa.

‘The issue is not how a particular piece of music or a performance reflects the people, but how it produces them, how it creates and constructs an experience’ (Frith 1996: 109). To elucidate this sentence, it might be helpful to consider how music generates a collective national sense of identity through national anthems. The anomalous instance of Switzerland reinforces this theory. In the celebration of sportive events for instance, it is highly visible how music can unify an imaginary community. The members of each canton in effect, will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even understand the different languages (French, German, Italian) they speak. In the act of singing the national anthem, however, music itself ‘provide[s] a common anchoring point for a range of different activities, customs and traditions relating to a nation and its people’ (Bennett 1999: 21). From here it is deducible how music describes the quality of an experience. Consequently, the Swiss recognise their subjective and collective identity through what that piece of music generates, and not in the musical anthem itself. In other words, the national anthem has not an intrinsic meaning but represents a symbolic arbitrary element through which different ethnic groups, origins, customs, traditions and habits are appropriated and maintained unified under the same concept of identity. Thus, the meaning of ‘music as an experience is not to be found in the text, but in the performance of the text, in the process in which it is realised’ (Frith 1996: 111). As a result, sounds are culturally determined signs through which the Swiss read uniformly and share simultaneously the same cultural meanings.

‘The sound must somehow “reflect” or “represent” the people’ (Frith 1996: 108). According to this, particular tunes express particular identities, hence, in the act of singing, the Swiss socially construct a cultural context that narrates their origins and assert their national identity, as individual and as a member of the collectivity. ‘Identification is constituted on the back of a recognition of some common origin or shared characteristics with another person or group, or with an ideal’ (Hall and du Gay 1996: 2). Hence, anthems are symbolic representations through which material experiences keep the historical continuity and the sense of identity alive. This seems to emphasise the power of music, which in this context, by homogenising people's differences, satisfies the Swiss need to recognise their collective identity.

‘In London’s Irish pubs… “traditional” Irish folk songs are still the most powerful way in which to make people feel Irish and consider what their “Irihness” means’ (Frith in Bennett 1999: 21). These words refer to immigrants who, by referring to particular sounds reconstruct their identity. Irish traditional music plays a pivotal role in the English multicultural society. As such, it is in the temporal spatial context of the Irish pub where music produces a nostalgic turn to Irish past. Indeed, the Irish transform and reinterpret the space that legally belongs to England in the consumption and application of particular Irish signs (Irish songs, Guinness, and typical Irish words). In so doing, they live actively the space and confer a definite meaning to it. The English space on which the pub has been situated reveals a socially constructed place where music (re)produces the Irish popular culture and consequently the concept of Ireland. ‘A range of images, sentiments and feelings are arranged in such a way that their reference to [Irish] society is unmistakable’ (Davies in Bennett 1999: 23). Irish people in the pub create a particular environment in which music allows them to access to a determined cultural context. Hence, music that has been conventionally established by the Irish provides the conditions through which those tunes are associated to their sense of “Irishness”. In other words, it is not the music itself that is Irish, but rather the experience of listening to that makes it such. ‘Music also helps to construct particular places, and the ways in which people conceptualise them’ (Cohen in Stokes 1994: 117). Hence, through their participative presence and interaction with music they become the authors who write the Irish text. As a result, they abandon their status of characters and by deconstructing the official territory and literal English text, they create a new spatial structure. In so doing, they bring into being significant lived place and time through which they reappropriate the cultural historical Irish context and consequently, they express their identity more fully. This process rehabilitates and recontextualise the Irish text, insinuating Irish popular culture into the dominant discourse of England, which is rewritten and reshaped. Hence, music and space appear to be two crucial elements in the creation of a sense of nationhood and selfhood. ‘The experience of music[…] gives us a way of being in the world, a way of making sense of it’ (Frith 1996: 114). In effect, through the jukebox tunes, they communicate their socio-cultural background and express an individual or collective sense of “Irishness”. They also undoubtedly shape their world, their immediate environment and as consequence, help to make England a hybrid and polysemic nation. ‘One of the ways in which individuals culturally relocate themselves is through music’ (Stokes in Bennett 1999: 30). Irish music can, therefore, be seen as a means by which the Irish affirm their existence and narrate their roots, displaying thus, their origins that apparently confirm their authentic identity. As such, the circulation of Irish music in pubs produces continuity across space and time which turns the ordinary English environment into an extraordinary Irish experience. It is when they hear that music that they feel and become what they really want to be, reformulating their Irish identity in a complex mix of a multi-ethnic society.

Music becomes then, a means of cultural identification that through ‘a narrative performance interpellates a growing circle of subjects’ (Bhabha 1990: 297). In effect, it might be considered to be a symbolic element that, when consumed, generates a visual aural imaginary reality. Thus, people use music to narrate and inscribe their identity in such a way as to be brought into being. Hence, identity can be seen as an anonymous cultural concept, which is always regenerated both in space and time. Identity ‘is never fixed, finished or final. It is fluid, it is actively and continually made and re-made’ (Gilroy in Donald and Rattansi 1992: 57). From here it follows that identity is always constructed by the articulation that people have with other individuals. As Lacan would say man is always doomed to ‘wear the armour of an alienating identity which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development (Lacan 1977: 4).

Therefore, if identities are assembled upon bases of difference, in their eternal formation they decontextualise any culture in which they display themselves as ambivalent entities. Music ‘represents [people] real condition of existence to themselves in an imaginary form’ (Althusser 1984: 20). As such, either Italian rappers, or Irish in pubs, they can be conceived as people who present the self and the other at the same time, because both of them reproduce their cultures only partially. Thus, the Irish in England cannot recreate the meaning of Ireland as people who spent all their life in Ireland would, because their narration carries the attributes of an Irish person in England. Also, the Italian can evidently personify neither a white identity nor an Italian one because of the “Afro-American” influxes. This suggests that identity is an imagined creation of differences constituted in what Bhabha defines as ‘diversity of cultures’ (Rutherford 1990: 20). As such, either Italian rappers or Irish in their attempt to employ music in order to develop an identity that leads them back to their origins, inevitably fail. Their original images are decomposed in the articulation of a new process of culture and identity that produces a hybrid history. They can only be a resemblance, which differs from the original because through music they bring certain cultures out of their real context and consequently they alter their properties. Thus, they belong to an anomalous category, the hybrid, that fits neither in the Irish category nor in the English one, or neither in the “Afro-American” nor in the Italian one because they hold the characteristic of both. Furthermore, in the act of narration they deconstruct the ideal Italian or Irish identity, which consequently loses its origins dissolving their initial status that mixes with the attributes of the other. That is why ‘the identity is mobile, a process not a thing, a becoming not a being’ (Frith 1996: 109), an entity always in process and continuously destabilised. Hence, in their narration, both the Irish and the Italian displace history denying the original meaning of their cultures.

It can be convincingly argued that identities are hybrid imaginary constructions generated and kept alive by means of the interaction and narration of different cultures that internalise the self and the other. Hence symbolic musical boundaries unify and separate the ‘immense diversity and differentiation of [listeners] historical and cultural experience’ (Hall in Donald and Rattansi 1992: 254). These words testify the ambivalence of music that can make sameness out of heterogeneous people. Therefore, unified thought of always already imaginary identities celebrates differences and thus the discourse of the other through whom people become aware of what they are. Therefore, both music and identity construct themselves across interactions and cultural differences that produce a discourse of endless renewal where diverse histories, cultures, spaces and times dissolve in the rupture of the barriers of race and in the definition of a multiracial and multicultural identity. Music appears to be an indispensable element for life and identity (which is an articulation and not an assumption), where people play, sing, listen to music in order to say what they want to say as well as what they think they are. Music and identity which are ‘ripped out of their contexts, stripped of their initial referents, circulate in such a manner that they represent nothing other than their own transitory presence’ (Chambers in Stokes 1997: 92). Hence, some ontological question like who are we? will find an answer in the eternal following moment.

CHRISTIAN