Michael Titlestad on Solli and Condry

This essay takes Solli’s and Condry’s essays as examples of possibilities worth emulating. Both essays, Titlestad argues, are refined instances of a refusal to adopt simple dialectical or bilateral understandings or analyses. Both describe the use of aspects of “American” culture (country and rap music respectively, as well as their social-symbolic architecture) in dynamic processes of triangulation that link their origins (in the United States), their destinations (Norway and Japan respectively), and third terms demarcated by the context and political priorities of performers and their publics. Titlestad is interested in a question he sees both essays fundamentally asking, namely, how particular communities put aspects of U.S. culture to work. In both essays, Titlestad argues, the work entails a redefinition, a resetting, indeed a productive consumption of cultural practice, something Titlestad prefers to think of as some form of improvisation but that still captures the need to complicate any sense of bilateralism. Clearly, Titlestad argues, the particular Norwegian and Japanese communities and subcultures described in the essays by Solli and Condry are embroiled in transnational imaginaries in which “America” already circulates as shorthand for a number of contemporary ideological proclivities.