The McBeat Goes On . . . or Does It?

“Consider popular music. It has long been a stastis truism that the cultural imperialism of Western pop would wipe out the diversity of world music, as surely as McDonald’s is supposed to crush local cuisines. Once imported via mass communication, critics predicted, Anglo-American music would roll over local cultural forms, displacing them with what the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax called a global “grey-out.’ This vision, which has faded among specialists but still crops up in the writings of social critics such as Barber, neatly fits a technocratic model of culture, in which art is dictated rather than evolving. But it misses how cultural processes actually operate” (Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies, p. 194).