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This chapter focuses on the new petite bourgeoisie in advertising, a social group that adheres to the ideologies of creativity and the hip and the cool. It considers who these people are, including their relationship to techno and alternative music. The chapter also discusses their involvement in promoting a new capitalism that is more culturalized than earlier ones.

This chapter examines China's musical history, starting with the birth of Chinese popular music in the East Asian jazz mecca of 1920s Shanghai and tracing musical and cultural developments to the present day. It includes a brief overview of alternative musical genres in the PRC such as Beijing rock and revolutionary opera, among others. It considers the ways in which Taiwan's musical ethos influenced the PRC music industry and how Taiwan's Mandopop has served as a middle zone by introducing Western music and cultural values to the PRC. The chapter concludes by exploring Taiwan pop's role in exporting a very different version of womanhood to the PRC—directly confronting and subverting PRC state attempts at gender erasure from 1949 through the 1970s as well as contemporary masculinist discourse.

In 1969 the director of Cuba’s film institute, Alfredo Guevara, founded a musical collective whose official purpose was to provide film music for Cuba’s vibrant and experimental new socialist cinema. The resulting Grupo de Experimentación Sonora represented something of a “rescue mission” for artists who for reasons political, aesthetic, or of personality found themselves on the margins of increasingly conservative and restrictive state-run cultural institutions. Under the direction of composer Leo Brouwer, the Grupo incorporated musicians who became some of the Revolution’s most renowned artists. Brouwer declared that the primary mission of the Grupo was not to create film music but “to transform the repertoire of Cuban popular music to the best of our abilities.” The Grupo merged discourses of the artistic avant-garde with those of revolutionary praxis and in doing so, positioned their sonic experiments both aesthetically and politically. The Grupo has had a marked impact on later groups who also struggled on the margins of state institutions. Drawing overt references to the Grupo and appropriating similar avant-garde rhetoric, collectives such as Habana Abierta and Interactivo promoted a new musical and social “revolution from within,” one that advocated from the margins of official discourse for a radically new transnational model of Cuban citizenship and civic participation.

Chapter 4 claims that music collaborates in the construction of subjectivity in at least two ways: on the one hand, it represents subjects, characters, roles, and social agents. On the other, it helps to build viewpoints, opinions, and positionings, guiding the way the listeners think of themselves and the world around them. At the beginning of the Cuban Revolution’s process, music helped the regime to build the centered main subject: the “compañero” [companion/comrade] or Che Guevara’s “hombre nuevo” [new man]. But through the last twenty-five years, music has worked intensively to give rise to alternative or subaltern subjectivities that challenge that centrality. The diasporic subject, the subjectivity of the new marginality, the subject of ethnic difference, the dissident, the anti-”new man” subjectivity, and so on, are all of them young “post-communist subjectivities” that are represented and shaped by means of recent music practices.