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Will Straw, “Communities and Scenes in Popular Music,” in Ken Gelder (ed), The Subcultures Reader, Second Edition (London and New York: Routledge, 1997): 469-78.
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Shuhei Hosokawa, “Soy Sauce Music: Haruomi Hosono and Japanese Self-Orientalism,” in Philip Hayward (ed), Widening the Horizon: Exoticism in Postwar Popular Music (Sydney: Perfect Beat Publications, 1999): 114-44.
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Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005)
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Joanna Demers, Listening Through The Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
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Mandy-Suzanne Wong, “Listening to EDM: Sound Object Analysis and Vital Materialism,” Volume! 10 (1) (2013): 193-211.
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This site is a probably futile attempt to gather together my various published and (mostly) unpublished writings on global popular music over the past couple of decades.
My thinking about this subject has been shaped by many sources, but I’ve been particularly indebted to Will Straw’s writings on music scenes; Shuhei Hosokawa’s concept of “soy sauce music”; Josh Kun’s concept of audiotopia; Joanna Demers’ and Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s theorizations of sound objects in electronic music; and my continuing ongoing conversation about global popular music with Yoshitaka Mōri and Hyunjoon Shin.
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“World Music and the Global Cultural Economy,” in Diaspora: a Journal of Transnational Studies 2 (2) (1992): 229-242.
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My exploration of the transnational flows of popular music around the globe began with a paper on world music at the “Producão Cultural: Centro/Periferia” conference in Maceió, Brazil, in 1992, which was subsequently published in the journal Diaspora.
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“World Music: The Relocation of Culture.” World Culture Report 1998: Culture, Creativity and Markets (Paris: UNESCO, 1998).
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I subsequently presented a paper titled “World Music: The Relocation of Culture,” which focused on the globalization of Indonesian gamelan music, at the “Globalization and Creativity” roundtable organized by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1996. A shorter version of the paper was subsequently published in UNESCO's 1998 World Culture Report.
I then presented a paper on the Nortec Collective, a Mexican electronic music collective, titled “‘El Download es Cultura’: Electronic Music in Latin America,” at the conference “Critical Worlds I: From Slave Music to World Music,” at the Université de Montréal in 2004. {% marginnote margin1 %} “Keyword: Cosmopolitanism,” Critical World: Thinking Globalization Through Music (website), Université de Montréal, 2008. {% endmarginnote %} I subsequently contributed an online article on music and cosmopolitanism to the Critical Worlds website.
{% marginnote margin1 %} “‘A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular’: Shibuya-kei as Transnational Soundscape,” Popular Music 32, no. 1 (January 2013) 111-123. {% endmarginnote %} My next project was an article on the globalization of Japanese popular music, focusing on the emergence of the indie music genre known as Shibuya-kei in Japan in the late 1980s, which played a key role in the popularization of Japanese popular music in the 1990s and beyond. This was published in the Cambridge University journal Popular Music.
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Cornelius's ‘Fantasma’ (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 33 1/3 series).
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My Shibuya-kei article laid the groundwork for my book on one of the most influential albums associated with the movement, Fantasma, released in 1997 by the musician Cornelius (Keigo Oyamada). This was published in 2019 in Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 album series.
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“From the East Village to Shibuya: A Tale of Two Record Stores.” 333Sound: Short Books About Albums. Bloomsbury, 11 March 2020.
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I also contributed an article about the genesis of the project to the 33 1/3 blog.
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“Imagine: Performance and Ritual in an Age of Global Insecurity.” Cultural Typhoon conference, Tokyo University of the Arts (GEIDAI), Japan, July 2016.
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“From Cookbook to Comic Book: Graphic Media, Hip Hop, and Asian-American Food Culture.” Journal of Intercultural Studies conference, “Migrating Concepts: Cosmopolitanism, Multiculturalism, and Conviviality Across the Asia Pacific,” Singapore, 23-25 February 2018.
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“Gathering Storm: Post-Rock Scenes in Asia.” Interasiapop conference, Beijing, China, 9-10 June 2018.
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“Tropical Dandies: Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Exoticism, and Bamboo Music.” Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference, Seattle, 13-17 March 2019.
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“Three-Dimensional Music: Cornelius’s Animated Soundworlds.” Japan Society for Popular Music (JASPM) conference, Osaka, Japan, December 2019.
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Over the past five years I’ve continued to present my research on global popular music at conferences in Japan, Singapore, and China, including papers on John Lennon’s song “Imagine” as a global audiotopia, on the convergence between Asian hip hop and food culture, on the popularization of post-rock in Asia, and on the the digital music videos of Kōchirō Tsujikawa for Cornelius.
I’m planning to post online versions of all of these papers over the coming year.
This overview doesn’t include my papers on the globalization of chipmusic and ludomusicology over the past decade--I'll try to make a separate page about them soon.
Martin Roberts teaches in the Department of Film & Media studies at Dartmouth College and the Department of Visual & Media Arts at Emerson College. His research interests include global documentary and world cinema, media subcultures, ludomusicology, and electronic music.