Dangerous crossroads

In cities around the globe, immigrant populations are finding their identity by making music which combines their own experiences with the forms of the mainstream culture they have come to inhabit.

Dangerous Crossroads surveys an extraordinary range of these musical fusions: Puerto Rican Bugalu in New York; Algerian rai in Paris; Chicano punk in Los Angeles; Indigenous rock in Australia; chanson Quebecois in Montreal; swamp pop in Houston and New Orleans; reggae, bhangra, and juju in London; and zouk, rap, and jazz in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Throughout, Lipsitz highlights the issues that unite inter-ethnic music fusions across geographic boundaries. He demonstrates that what might be interpreted as a postmodern process of meaningless juxtapositions of musical forms ripped from their original contexts may actually be a redeployment of traditional music to serve untraditional purposes. Lipsitz explores the ways in which ethnic difference in popular music enables musicians from aggrieved populations to enjoy the rewards of mainstream culture while boldly stating their divergence from it, and how it offers a utopian model of inter-cultural cooperation, at the same time making a spectacle out of ethnicity and reinforcing ethnic divisions. Some inter-ethnic music has become part of significant movements for social change; in other instances it has played a reactionary role. But in all the case studies in this book, inter-cultural fusion music displays the contours of ethnic anxiety in an age characterized by the rapid movement of people, capital, and images across national borders.