Volume 14, Number 1 | Spring/Summer 2018
ISSN 2578-4242 1
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STUDENTNEWS
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MUSIC AND POLITICS
Letter from the SEM President 1
Student Voices: Who Cares About Ethnomusicology? 5
Thoughts from the Field 10
Audiovisual Frames: What Films Can Do: An Interview with Jef Roy 14
Dear SEM 19
“We’re Not Gonna Take It”: Trump and Striking West Virginia Teachers 22
Deconstruction as Political Discourse in Janelle Monáe’s “Q.U.E.E.N.” 25
Stadium Shows and Spotify: Popular Music and the Complicity of Consumption 29
“Baile de Favela” and Its Sounding Transgressions 32
Glocal Politics in Bavarian Slang Rap: “Wolli” by Liquid & Maniac 37
Music and Confict Resolution in Israeli-Palestinian Relations 42
Peacebuilding, Not Politics: Music and MESPO’s Model for Change 46
Ethnomusicology and Empathy 49
After the Mudslides: The Ethics of Singing, Witnessing, and Fieldwork 51
Beyond the IRB: Afirmative Consent in the Field 54
Analogies of Political Structure in Ethnomusicological Writing 56
Politics & Music: An Annotated Bibliography 60
Our Staf 63
Letter from the SEM President
The Coextensive Moment of Music and Politics
in Africa: A Pedagogical Perspective
As I write this brief refection, I
wind down the spring semester
at Vanderbilt University where I
co-teach a course with political
scientist Keith Weghorst, titled
“Rhythm of Change: African
Music and African Politics,”
as part of our university’s initiative to support
trans-institutional team teaching. As a theoretical
concept, the confuence of music and politics may
be commonplace to most ethnomusicologists. Yet,
collaborating with a political scientist who “gets it”
in the classroom was an opportunity I could not
pass up. While each of us clearly brings a diferent
set of discipline-specifc tools and methodologies
to the classroom every week, we nevertheless
continue to be surprised at how many case studies,
musical repertoires, and pedagogical experiences
we have in common (note that both of us conducted
doctoral-level feld research in Tanzania). I should
say that when we frst started teaching together, it
was crystal clear to the students who the “political
scientist” was versus the “ethnomusicologist.” We
seemed to be speaking diferent languages—he
had wonderfully complex graphs; I had slides with
musical instruments. Afer several weeks, however,
we established a pedagogical groove, and I began
to notice fewer charts, diagrams, and organological
images in our joint sessions.
Since Vanderbilt does not have an African studies
program, the students came to the course with a
variety of backgrounds and a meager assortment
of courses from which they could draw preexisting
SEM
Cover image courtesy of Liquid & Maniac/Demografics © (see page 37)
continued on next page . . .
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Ethnomusicology ©
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