Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place.

Andrew Ross 

For some time now George Lipsitz has been a major voice of conscience in U.S. cultural studies; his steady commitment to doing justice to people's own sense of their lives and aspirations is an antidote to the kind of glib theorizing about "mass culture" that still holds sway in certain intellectual circles. In Dangerous Crossroads, Lipsitz focuses on the new transnational world of cross-cultural exchange. While the new circuits of economic investment and technological communication appear to be erasing our sense of place and local identity, Lipsitz argues, they are also forging connections, dependencies, and vital intercultural communications across the migrant-busy map of the new world order. In the late-capitalist world of nation-states, where ethnic and racial strife has escalated dramatically, cross-national and multiracial popular musics are playing a considerable role in regional and global politics alike. When the Caribbean music scene flourishes so vividly in London, New York, and Toronto, and when its African counterpart prospers in Paris, the complexities of postcolonial culture can no longer be explained by the old metropolis/periphery model. Nor can the cause of cultural politics be served by an older vanguard faith in noncommercial purism: as Lipsitz shows, for example, the same circuit of investment that brings low-wage employment to Haiti distributes far and wide the most politicized forms of local music, already shot through with international influences. We ignore the challenge of these "dangerous crossroads" (the crossroads is a special location in African and Caribbean folklore) at our peril.

In weaving together commentary and anecdotes about music's role in third-and fourth-world liberation struggles--from Native America to Zimbabwe, the Philippines, and aboriginal Australia--Lipsitz's range is as breathtaking as his insights are shrewd. Also included are chapters on hip-hop, on the Paul Simon/David Byrne/Peter Gabriel world-beat phenom, on pop reggae, rai, and bhangramuffin, on local examples of cross-cultural identification like the cholo-punks, Mardi Gras Indians, and Nuyorican home-boys, and on Lipsitz's own music-rich years in St. Louis, of which he writes a poignant memoir. Younger readers of this book will be forgiven their astonishment at learning that in the fledgling years of cultural studies, much time and energy was devoted to asking whether cultural activities could ever have a "real" political impact upon people. Among Lipsitz's achievements here is to leave us with the shoe on the other foot, asking if "we might better wonder whether politics can ever be political, whether political discourse will ever amount to anything other than a cultural performance designed to divert attention from who actually has power and what they have done with it."

Andrew Ross' column "Weather Report" appears bimonthly in Artforum. He is director of the American Studies Program at New York University.