Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
I'm Not Like Everybody Else: Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, and American Popular Music

I'm Not Like Everybody Else: Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, and American Popular Music

Nealon, Jeffrey T.

Paperback

Series: Provocations

General MusicGeneral SociologyPop/Rock

ISBN10: 149620865X
ISBN13: 9781496208651
Publisher: Univ Of Nebraska Pr
Published: Oct 1 2018
Pages: 144
Weight: 0.36
Height: 0.34 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
Despite the presence of the Flaming Lips in a commercial for a copier and Iggy Pop's music in luxury cruise advertisements, Jeffrey T. Nealon argues that popular music has not exactly been co-opted in the American capitalist present. Contemporary neoliberal capitalism has, in fact, found a central organizing use for the values of twentieth-century popular music: being authentic, being your own person, and being free. In short, not being like everybody else.

Through a consideration of the shift in dominant modes of power in the American twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from what Michel Foucault calls a dominant disciplinary mode of power to a biopolitical mode, Nealon argues that the modes of musical resistance need to be completely rethought and that a commitment to musical authenticity or meaning--saying no to the mainstream--is no longer primarily where we might look for music to function against the grain.

Rather, it is in the technological revolutions that allow biopolitical subjects to deploy music within an everyday set of practices (MP3 listening on smartphones and iPods, streaming and downloading on the internet, the background music that plays nearly everywhere) that one might find a kind of ambient or ubiquitous answer to the attention capitalism that has come to organize neoliberalism in the American present. In short, Nealon stages the final confrontation between keepin' it real and sellin' out.


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