Producing "Local" Repertoire: Czech Identity, Pop Music, and the Global Music Industry

351 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2005.This study considers the politics and complexity of cultural production, consumption, and exchange by examining how cultural identity and the specific social and economic relations of symbolic creativity relate to the corporate production of music transnationally. Utilizing a multi-sited ethnography to examine the relationships between the Bertelsmann Music Group (Prague, London and New York) and Czech pop/rock music culture, it illuminates the factors that inform their structure, practices, and belief systems. I demonstrate how the socio-historical experience of communism continues to shape Czech music culture, and how the transition to capitalism has principally served to marginalize Czech pop/rock music and artists within the streams of global music circulation; an outcome produced by changes in both international politics and the developing corporate-cultural logics that largely govern commercial music production globally. By considering both the structural organization of a transnational music corporation as well as the cultural experience of that organization by the individuals and artists that constitute and reproduce its logics and meanings, this study presents a complex portrait of the intricate industry mediations and interpersonal negotiations involved in the creation, production and dissemination of symbolic culture, while underscoring the larger geopolitical forces involved in the processes of articulating culture through music internationally.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD