
I'm Not Like Everybody Else
Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, and American Popular Music
- 144 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Despite the presence of the Flaming Lips in a commercial for a copier and Iggy Pop's music in luxury cruise advertisements, Jeffrey T. Nealon argues that popular music has not exactly been co-opted in the American capitalist present. Contemporary neoliberal capitalism has, in fact, found a central organizing use for the values of twentieth-century popular music: being authentic, being your own person, and being free. In short, not being like everybody else. Through a consideration of the shift in dominant modes of power in the American twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from what Michel Foucault calls a dominant "disciplinary" mode of power to a "biopolitical" mode, Nealon argues that the modes of musical "resistance" need to be completely rethoughtand that a commitment to musical authenticity or meaningāsaying "no" to the mainstreamāis no longer primarily where we might look for music to function against the grain. Rather, it is in the technological revolutions that allow biopolitical subjects to deploy music within an everyday set of practices (MP3 listening on smartphones and iPods, streaming and downloading on the internet, the background music that plays nearly everywhere) that one might find a kind of ambient or ubiquitous answer to the "attention capitalism" that has come to organize neoliberalism in the American present. In short, Nealon stages the final confrontation between "keepin' it real" and "sellin' out."
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Series Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Provocations
- Introduction
- 1. Biopower Blues
- 2. Steal Your Face
- 3. Not for Sale
- 4. A Genealogy of Popular Music and Authenticity
- 5. Good Rockinā Tonite
- 6. Musical Community, from In- to Excorporation
- 7. Capitalism, from Meaning to Usage
- 8. In the Mood
- 9. Will There Be Music?
- 10. Bourdieu, Bourdonāt
- 11. Everywhere, All the Time
- Notes
- About Jeffrey T. Nealon
- Series List