Hate it or love it: Global crossover of reggaeton music in the digital age

Rivera, Michelle

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/49834 Copy

Description

Title

Hate it or love it: Global crossover of reggaeton music in the digital age

Author(s)

Rivera, Michelle

Issue Date

2014-05-30T17:20:10Z

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Valdivia, Angharad N.

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Valdivia, Angharad N.

Committee Member(s)

• Molina-Guzman, Isabel
• Rodriguez, Richard T.
• Nakamura, Lisa M.

Department of Study

Inst of Communications Rsch

Discipline

Communications

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• media
• Latina/o
• communication, digital
• music
• reggaeton
• Caribbean
• African
• diaspora
• fans
• anti-fans
• fandom
• Internet
• audience
• visual
• Global

Abstract

This dissertation critically examines reggaetón music as it is discursively constructed through mainstream media and Internet debates about the genre (e.g., online music forums, social networking profile pages) during and after the 2004 global musical crossover of reggaetón. Using various case studies to critically examine processes of both textual production and reception to reggaetón, I interrogate if and how the music industry constructs and simultaneously targets a Latin global and US Latino market for reggaetón through various marketing strategies and via mainstream media coverage in the US and abroad. Considering textual production and reception as equally significant processes that are constantly in contention with one another, I examine how active and participatory audiences online, particularly fans and anti-fans, negotiate reggaetón as a cultural text and in relation to the ways they are interpellated as the target market for it. Here, I apply Louis Althusser’s definition of interpellation, as “ideology’s ability to assign individuals to specific positions within its own communicative (semiotic) representations of reality” to the ways that the audience for reggaetón is constructed based on specific demographic features, such as ethnicity, race, age, income and/or language (Grossberg et al. 2006: 207-208). In this dissertation, I interrogate how targeted demographics play a distinct role in the interpellation of the audiences for “Latin urban” musical forms like reggaetón. Reggaetón is a cultural signifier for the contested ways in which Latinidad is negotiated in everyday life and, particularly, in relation to discourses of authenticity that circulate through Latin(o/a) popular culture and mainstream media representations of Latinidad.

Graduation Semester

2014-05

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/49834

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2014 Michelle Marie Rivera

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