How the US Exported A Cultural Hegemony Through Music

Recipe: Cultural Melting Pot

Introduction & Background

American music first borrowed from European classical music tradition and has been a force to reckon with globally since the US decided to become their own superpower – coincidentally a part of the reason they broke off from the UK, but I’ll digress at a later time.

The first American music that was made styled itself off of the music that colonists knew the best: European classical music at the time. All of their new music, whether it was John Sousa or Francis Scott Key, would go on to be a continuation of the soundscapes of Europe until the revolutionary war. Then we see poor folks in the boonies start making music that’s loosely based on European music, but without the training or proximity they relied on the influences of the musics that surrounded them to create something new. The only other influences nearby were Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans, both of whom were actively having their culture repressed either by genocide, removal from familiar environment, or lack of intra-cultural exchange and intergenerational teaching. 

For enslaved Africans in the newly minted USA, practicing a culture was almost all but forbidden. The amount of work needed by slavery left little to no time for leisure so the earliest songs were work songs, songs to pass the day away as they labored underneath hot suns. When freedom came and they didn’t have to work the fields anymore then came the blues, a style of music that exemplified their struggles within place and time in relation to their race. 

As white people do, when they discovered the blues it had no form, just a relation in terms of theme and key and white academics went on to create a “blues form” and a “blues scale” out of the existing material. The blues in Black populations and “hillbilly music” in white populations –which both stemmed from the blues – would be some of the first forms of American music to exist. Later came marching band music, ragtime, jazz, rock, country, hip-hop, gospel, and funk, all of whom – except the first – were rooted in the blues and the developing musical culture of African-Americans. Most of the genres thought of to be American in nature today come from white academics putting a form and a white face on Black music and selling it to the rest of the nation and in turn the world. Thus is the creation story of popular music, known colloquially as pop music.

Today people might call rock and country “white” genres, and jazz and hip-hop “genres for everyone,” but the undeniable truth is that America has made its musical legacy off of something borrowed, something blue, and nothing new.

Yes I’m gonna tell a long story before we get to the recipe, I’m one of those cooks

In this project, I will explore how the US’s hegemony has affected South Korea’s genre of K-pop and Brazil’s genre of Brazilian Jazz, both thought to be unique to their respective countries, but both most certainly are not.

In the case of South Korea, it was only through Japan’s harsh control of Korea during the fervor of Japan’s imperial years that their own musical traditions of court music were suppressed and with the fall of Japan’s influence in Korea came the American Way® that sought a faux liberation in the lending of their own musical tradition – which was already a Frankenstein creation as we discussed – of pop music and rock to influence the genre of K-pop: Korean pop music that uses elements of hip-hop, rap, rock, and American pop music to create a Korean parallel to American pop music… with American pop elements.

For Brazil, they also leaned heavily on their African influences through their first national forms of art: capoeira and samba. In a sense they did the same with African-derived music that the USA did: make it the country’s brand and thus leaving it accessible to be used around the world. Samba — a fast-paced dancing style of music — turned into Bossa Nova —slow ballad-like music — due to American influence during a time where the USA was trying to buddy up to its Latin American neighbors. The other genres, the folk music genre Forró, and the classical music Choro, also came about the same way that they did in the US, using available instruments and European stylings to make a new sound for a new country. 

Recipe

Before starting it’s important that you’ve completely obliterated – or at least tried your best to obliterate – the rich cultural traditions of music that came before your rag-tag music genre you’re about to impose. Here are the ingredients necessary to accomplish this if you are a baby imperialist and this is your first time:

*note if you can’t colonize from scratch, leftovers are okay

Open the rest of the project here: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Z6fn0P8GcIvS5yd1WQPymzyW3tm_7S_y/view?usp=sharing

it literally won't link...