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This chapter establishes the topic, justification, theoretical framework, and methodology for the book. Dangdut Stories situates the production and circulation of meanings about a popular music genre within particular social (political and economic) and cultural (ideological) conditions.In a series of brief examples drawn from ethnographic fieldwork in Java, Sumatra, and Kalimantan, the author shows how dangdut participates in social discourses, or “stories,” about social class relations, national belonging, and gendered power and difference in contemporary Indonesia.

This chapter studies popular music in the Iranian community of Los Angeles. It describes the community as an “exile community,” where the members cannot regularly move back and forth between their home country and the United States. The chapter notes that entire genres of Iranian popular music essentially moved offshore after the Islamic Revolution, and that the market for this type of music is the Iranian-American immigrant community, as well as Iran itself. The most successful music genres in Los Angeles are the traditional vernacular genres, “classical” music, and modernized variants of Iranian music. The chapter also determines that the decisive factor in this autonomous Iranian production in the United States is the considerable sense of isolation the Iranian community feels due to the political reality of the Islamic Revolution.

This chapter examines the idea of genre as it applies to jazz by focusing on the output of Atlantic Records' jazz division. Under the stewardship of two men, Nesuhi Ertegun and Joel Dorn, Atlantic Jazz came to signify not a particular approach, but rather a wide variety of artists, styles, and sounds. After tracing a general a history of Atlantic's jazz output from the 1940s to the 1970s, the essay focuses on Rufus Harley. Signed to the label by Joel Dorn, Harley recorded four albums for Atlantic in the 1960s, playing saxophone, flute, and bagpipes, although it was on the last of these that he was best known. While few critics saw Harley as little more than a gimmick, his career can be seen as emblematic as the ways that Atlantic's jazz defies easy categorization; further examination of Atlantic wind players Rahsaan Ronald Kirk and Yusef Lateef amplify this discussion. The chapter ends by questioning the current work on jazz and genre and positing some possible new paths for research.

Between the 16th and 18th centuries, the role of the organ changed from performing the liturgy in alternation with the choir to accompanying a singing congregation or choir. Organ accompaniment of hymns gave support to the people and encouraged them to sing, putting the final nail into the coffin of the choral liturgy among Lutherans. Genres of organ music included interludes (Zwischenspiele), preludes, and postludes; features of it included melodic ornamentation and text expression. In some localities, the length of the prelude was a cause for concern.

By the mid-1980s, industrial music was selectively crossing over into other genres, including more widely popular ones. This chapter considers why the genre gained so much popular ground. It uses a few particular instances of this growth to show the many ways that industrial music and its audiences mutually empowered one another. Starting with a short history of the U.S.-based label WaxTrax! Records and one of its figurehead musicians, Al Jourgensen, this history of the 1985–1988 period looks at how participatory culture in Europe gave new purposes to industrial music and then concludes by revisiting WaxTrax! and Jourgensen at the decade’s close.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief description of the song, “Mindphaser,” by the band Front Line Assembly. It discusses how “ Mindphaser” pits two potentially opposing hearings against one another, which in fact extends to whole eras of the genre of industrial music. It also explains how industrial music has historically embodied or deviated from pan-revolutionary notions. The chapter then sets out the book’s purpose, namely to offer a history of industrial music. It shows how industrial music, and the surrounding world of hegemonies play off of one another, is at once a conflict and a mutual absorption. Throughout the book are musical interpretations that demonstrate the forms of this assimilation.

Chapter Four interrogates what is defined as “sounding Navajo” and what happens when someone refuses to adhere to these expectations. Looking at how gender, nation, and the idea of a prescriptive “Navajo” sound intertwine, I show ethnographically how Navajo blues and rock bands such as Chucki Begay and the Mother Earth Blues Band are often told they don't “sound Navajo'” by local radio station deejays who refuse to play them on air. Instead, these deejays insist that sounding Navajo is defined as a male vocalist singing either Anglo-affiliated genres such as country music, or genres historically associated with Navajo tradition, such as social dance- and ceremonial songs. Tracing why Navajo identity came to be aligned with country music, the “rez” accent and the male singing voice through the work of the late singer and comedian Vincent Craig, it becomes clear how Navajo musical taste is inflected by class, generation, and gender ideologies.

Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz explores various theoretical framings that serve as the primary avenue through which to approach a number of case studies. These frames, broadly speaking, include the central tropes and social forces at play at the core of Latin jazz music making. They include the dynamics of intercultural exchange, the discursive practices associated with genre contestations, and the social forces involved in canonization. The beginning of the book maps out the various social terrains associated with Latin jazz and transparently demonstrates the author’s particular biases, assumptions, and hypotheses. It connects how broader issues of economics, nation, race, and ethnicity are uniquely tied to various sonic manifestations and performance practices of Latin jazz throughout the twentieth century. The book then narrows its focus for each of the following chapters, highlighting historical moments, individual musicians, places, and events that have played key roles in the trajectory of this music.

This chapter examines the saxophone's status as a symbol and an icon within culture. From its inception, the instrument has been identified with modernity, innovation, and a sense of exploration and enquiry. Its unusual shape and timbre were harnessed to great effect and have thus garnered it an audience whose minds were to view it as something new and exotic. The saxophone slowly and eventually penetrated art music genres later on, its supporters pushing the serious qualities of the instrument and its great contribution to music. Clay Smith was one who promoted this in the early 1900s, noting the saxophone as quintessentially American especially since it was perfected and improved in America. Its symbolic role began with astronaut Ron McNair, making it the first musical instrument to be taken into orbit on the space shuttle Challenger in February 1984. The chapter thus illustrates other examples of the saxophone's status and symbol in culture.

This chapter explores how Latin jazz is positioned and named and the primary discursive contestations associated with the genre. What is focused on in particular is how musicians exert agency by manipulating generic boundaries as a negotiative tool. With a focus on two prominent bandleaders as case studies, Arturo O’Farrill and Ray Barretto, discursive strategies embodying a complex of subjectivities are explored and serve as a lens into the fundamental political undergirding of intercultural production. What becomes apparent is that self-conceived notions held by musicians concerning how to label and perform this music prove to be neither static nor terminal in nature but rather must be imagined as mobile, fluid, and changeable, always strategic, and at times even seeming fickle. What is revealed is the pendular, self-positioning discourse that makers of this music engage in, in order to navigate through and strategically position themselves within this at times adversarial milieu. The politics of place, nation, class, economics, and race as well as the complex historical relationships inform their fluid dance of genre imaginings.