emerald PUBLISHING Popular Music in Contemporary Bulgaria: At the Crossroads (Emerald Studies in Alternativity and Marginalization)

Bulgarian popular music, the meanings it articulates, and the infrastructures of its creation, operates within a web of inter-dependencies with changing social and political contexts. Positioned on the edge of Europe, between the cultural constructs of the 'East' and 'West', Bulgarian popular music negotiates the complexities of perceived 'global' values and specificities of the 'local'. This book takes an ethnographic approach to qualitative methodologies to create a mosaic of perspectives through the participation of music artists, critics, business figures, copyright specialists, and young audiences. It employs the metaphor of the 'crossroads' to describe the realities of the contemporary Bulgarian popular music field, developed amidst the prolonged transitions that followed the communist era. In the context of struggles for social change, popular music has participated in the creation of rituals and symbols of protest and resistance. At the same time, the new market environment created opportunities for popular music to formulate a business approach to producing standardised content.  </div> <div> </div> <div>The Balkans, are a melting pot of music traditions, but are also framed as pathologically different from the rest of Europe. This book suggests that an internalised negative stereotype adds tacit complexities to Bulgarian popular music, while at the same time, expressive markers of identity, such as folklore and language, are celebrated. Review Drawing on research with musicians, producers, critics, business figures, copyright specialists, and young audiences, the author analyzes popular music in contemporary Bulgaria and argues that the local music scene is characterized by the ideas of amorphousness, fluidity, and marginalization, rather than clearly defined structures. She shows how contemporary Bulgarian popular music has local specificities but operates through the tools of a global dialogical platform, in which folklore references and language are markers of identity, as well as involving a negative stereotype of the Other. She emphasizes the idea of the crossroads in how the music interacts with social, political, and economic change; the complexities of incorporating global and local markers of meaning; and the relationships between cultural concepts of centrality and peripherality. She uses the idea to explore levels of change and struggle in popular music and focuses on the contemporary cultural and structural characteristics of the environments in which popular music operates and how they have evolved under the influence of democratic transitions following the communist regime. She discusses key areas of debate and concepts in popular music research; her research design and processes of fieldwork data collection, analysis, and interpretation; the characteristics of the local pop music sector in Bulgaria, the cultural influences of post-communist transitions, and the cultural context of the crossroads, where global and local identities interact; and the fluid character of the local music sector, the power relations that define its dynamics, the impact of post-communist transitions on music meanings, and the complexities derived from Bulgaria's position between the cultural constructs of the East and West. -- Annotation ©2019 ― (protoview.com) About the Author Asya Draganova is Lecturer in Media and Communications at Birmingham City University, UK. She co-leads the Popular Music Research Cluster at the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research. Her research interests include contemporary Bulgarian music, the Canterbury Sound, and heavy metal music heritage. Asya, who is from Sofia, is also a guitarist and singer: this continuously inspires her to explore the cultural and social significance of popular music.