Apropiation and Reception of Popular Music: Enunciation Devices, Social Places and Identity

Abstract

Among the different problems related to the reception of popular music, there is one that analyzes the capacity of certain genres to interpellate specific groups of consumers. In this paper I propose to analyze the production and reception of popular music as a discursive practice, meaning by this a process of production of strategic options by a social agent who is conditioned by its place in a specific system of relations and its competence or knowledge linked to that place and its trajectory. When it comes to reception, the processes that listeners go through are those of selection and connection between different elements present in the song they hear. These processes are also conditioned by the structure of the music (more specifically, by its enunciation device which is materialized, in the case of popular music, in verbal, visual and sound elements). This means that the process of reception implies the complex relationship between two systems of relation: the enunciation device of the musical product and the place occupied by the social agent that consumes the product. Considering this, we assume that the processes the listeners go through when they receive or consume music, make up a set of valued strategies of construction of their own social identity. I will try to support these hypotheses with examples on reception of rock, tango and folklore in the city of Córdoba, Argentina.