Music, Sound, Politics

This article reviews literature that followed from a political turn, startingin the 1980s, when new epistemological and disciplinary norms were estab-lished for articulating music and sound with politics. In an age of impotence,when neoliberal expansion led to pervasive political exhaustion, music andsound took on added potency as political forces in and of themselves. Thiswager rests on the presumption of music's capacity for politicization (its en-try into and effect on the sphere of normative politics) under conditions ofincreasing depoliticization (the constraints placed on political participation).I have organized research on the politicization of music and sound into fourprimary categories: resistance and dissent, identity and recognition, affectand belonging, and power and dominance. The article concludes with re-cent wagers on music and sound to mitigate life's perils in the present andmodel "otherwise" possibilities for the future.