Youth identities in Argentina: beyond tango

SEMÁN, PABLO ; VILA, PABLO

Palgrave-Mac Millan

Año: 2012 p. 198

978-0230104631

In Argentina, until quite recently, the way in which the relationship between young people and music was conceptualized was very narrow, either because that was the point of view employed by academicians, or because social reality itself asked for such a framework. In a nutshell, most academic accounts of young people?s music were based on the lyrics and their reception that more often than not rendered an image of young people that, throught the use of culture, constructed dissidencies, questionings and rebellions that did not have other outlets. This kind of approach, almost exclusively focused on youth rebellion, was linked to a particular academic tradition (innovative in the 1970s and 1980s) that today requires a rewriting in order to take into account other musical aspects of the everyday experience of Argentine youth, and, at the same time, being able to inscribe such a practice using different registers than the ones used in the past. Since the early 2000s we have been doing research that has shown us the plurality of issues that are constructed around music and that, at the same time, reveals a symbolic map that is much more variegated and heterogeneous than what previous studies on popular music in Argentina (ours included) had presumed. The music that young people from Metropolitan Buenos Aires (the Capital and its suburbs, which concentrate the bulk of Argentinas population) listen to shows that the field of musical consumption is a field through which categories of class, ethnicity, religion and gender are constructed and processed. And they are constructed and processed within force relationships and social arrangements that challenge any simplistic cultural analysis because they show that young people compatibilize sexualities, religions, egalitarian political principles and hierarchical social classifications.