There are multiple ties between popular music and politics. This symposium is guided by the purpose of extending the thematic scope encompassing these relationships as far as possible, with a view to accommodating the conceptual broadening of what is understood by politics.
In the tradition established in the social sciences since the nineteenth century, the domain of politics has been thought of as inexorably tied to the State, or to whatever took the State as its point of reference. New winds have blown in this area, especially since the 1960s. Its fundamental—though not exclusive—symbolic center was May 1968 in France. Increasingly, it became clear that there was no close synonymy between State and politics, with the argument that politics is not concentrated at a single fixed point but manifests itself, through disparate power relations, through every pore of social life. This is why the notion of the “circularity of power” (Foucault) gained strength, in its capillary dissemination, over the understanding that power is not susceptible to exclusive appropriation by an individual or by particular groups or social classes—however much, in a world marked by socioeconomic inequality, an asymmetrical distribution of power reserves may predominate.
Within this theoretical shift, the perspectives on the interweaving between popular music and politics are broadened. Without necessarily confining ourselves to the boundaries of macropolitics, room opens up for incorporating a research agenda linked to the multiplicity of expressions of power relations, including those associated with micropolitics (Guattari).
In this way, under the umbrella of politics we find topics referring to the behavioral plane, to contrasting performances, to the most diverse fields of dispute and competition demonstrated through the adoption of varied musical languages, ranging from production processes and the packaging of compositional arrangements to increasingly striking visual aspects in artistic presentations. Thus, the scale of observation and analysis of musical artifacts is considerably extended, as if it were not enough that studies on popular music, by their very nature, compete to affirm an inter/multidisciplinary outlook. In this context, they offer clues for analyzing the political and social reality in which they are situated, serving as documentary sources and witnesses of their historical time, increasingly linked to issues associated with race, class and gender, at a time when, in Latin America, intersectional and decolonial approaches are gaining ground.
Be that as it may, it should not be lost from view that, as it circulates socially, a song often acquires meanings that reveal the condition of its consumers as subjects—not mere passive recipients (Certeau). In the end, consumers always act as political beings, to the point of even being able to subvert what was supposed to be the original meaning of a musical work.
