"Music in Diaspora: The View from Euro-America" -Slobin

The main points that Slobin is making in his writing are about how diaspora is incorporated into the superculture of the larger community around it, diasporic communities as a subculture, and the ideas of a changeable definition for music-culture. Although many make the generic definition of “subculture” as diasporic communities, a community can be diasporic but there can be opposing ideas within it, making it different from a subculture. I think it was important to understand the role that a superculture plays in the creation and recognition of a subculture through their control over the media, money, and control. Slobin also makes the point that the future musical component of a group’s culture is “volatile, changeable, and improvisatory.” To me, Slobin’s point is that the unknown events of the future, such as a war or conspiracy, could change, not the type of music but, the sound of the music to match the native culture at the time.

This reading helped me to understand what a subculture is, which is especially important in a class where we are studying ethnography, a way to collect data about subcultures. Especially in the parts about activists and oppositionality, it helped me to understand that understanding a subculture is more than just the record labels and sales. A good ethnographer would have to take into consideration how that subculture views the music, but know that ethnicity does not apply to subcultures.


Slobin wrote that “music is central to the diasporic experience, linking homeland and here-land with an intricate network of sound. Whether through the burnished memory of childhood songs, the packaged passions of recordings, or the steady traffic of live bands, people identify themselves strongly, even principally, through their music.” Does the United States have a specific “taste” that Americans can connect to?