Kristin Solli on Ian Condry

This essay is a response to Ian Condry’s contribution in this book, Global Perspectives on the United States. Solli appreciates Condry’s analysis and ideas about music, location, and power but also extends them by discussing an example that, like Condry’s case, suggests the intricacies and paradoxes that follow in the wake of the global dissemination of U.S. popular culture. More specifically, Solli here examines jazz, a genre that has received considerable attention by scholars interested in the local/global dynamic that Condry addresses. While acknowledging that hip-hop in Japan and jazz in Norway have their important differences, Solli considers some similarities as well, especially the dynamic whereby the music gains meaning from being positioned in relation to a perceived U.S. center. Solli notes that both academic and popular discourses tend to focus on how U.S. cultural products and practices are changed and reworked by people in other places, and she asks if this move might risk recentering the U.S. even if the goal is the opposite. In the end, this essay argues that it is important to show how hip-hop in Japan, jazz in Norway, or country music in Brazil, for example, complicate simplistic models of U.S. cultural imperialism. Has the time now come to examine what is and is not localized?