Resoundingly different: Desire and alterity in the United States world beat culture industry

The increased ease with which music can be transferred, exchanged, and consumed, vis-a-vis file-sharing and the cheap availability of compact discs and cassette tapes makes it an important medium in the transnational exchange of cultural information. Music is successfully exploited by a culture industry that finds its rapid expansion both threatening and potentially lucrative. World music has become an important object within the global expansion of the music industry. World beat, an emerging form of world music that mixes "traditional" and "modern" sounds, harnesses the cultural cachet contained within world music and puts it to work within the context of familiar Western rhythms and production practices. This thesis is an ethnographic and analytical examination of Kinship Records, a San Francisco, California-based record company that participates in the international world beat culture industry. I examine the production, consumption, and brokerage of this music arguing that it contributes to a libidinal economy in which racialized and gendered bodies are materialized through sound and fetishized through listening. I contend that this culture industry is propelled by an economy of desire. The sounds brokered by world beat labels like Kinship Records work to materialize bodies through practices that work to racialize and gender the musicians who perform the music. These bodies figure as important aspects of the commodity and function to provide pleasure for listeners through an engagement with these bodies at a safe distance.