Music, Power, and Politics

Book excerpt: Music, Power, and Politics presents sixteen different cultural perspectives on the concept of music as a site of socio-political struggle. Essays by scholars from around the world explore the means by which music's long-acknowledged potential to persuade, seduce, indoctrinate, rouse, incite, or even silence listeners, has been used to advance agendas of power and protest. The essays included examine: music used to convey political ideology in Nazi Germany, apartheid-era South Africa, and modern-day North Korea postcolonial musical efforts to reclaim ethnic heritage in Serbia and the Caribbean music as a means of establishing new cultural identities for recently empowered social groups in the UK and Brazil the subversion of racial stereotypes through popular music in the USA music as a tool of popular resistance to oppressive government policies in modern day Iran and the Bolivian Andes