October 2020 – AMERICAN CULTURAL INSULARITY

The cover of a recent issue of the Journal of Communication Inquiry. [Credit: Sage Journals]

In a forthcoming paper, which will be published in the Journal of Communication Inquiry, I seek to define and illustrate the explanatory power of a proposed theory of cultural insularity in the center. I do so via an instructive case study that critically interrogates the self-reflection of American college undergraduates vis-à-vis their largely Anglo-American and English-language centric pop music orientations – with Anglo-American here defined as including the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Cultural insularity in the center — which I will refer to from here on as CIC — describes a tendency among American cultural consumers, especially those who hail from dominant and also mostly English-monolingual groups, to consume Anglo-American cultural products over “other” cultural products, sometimes to the apparent near exclusion of non-Anglo-American cultural products. This tendency, I suggest, is particularly apparent in terms of “language-heavy” objects such as popular music. In this paper, I examine and critically engage CIC via a textual analysis of the written discourse of 86 American undergraduates. These undergraduates were required to — via a formal written and verbal group assignment – directly reflect upon their own English-language heavy online pop music consumption habits when using the global music distribution platform Spotify. Continue reading “Theorizing and documenting cultural insularity in the center: A critical analysis of U.S. college students’ English-language Spotify consumption orientations”

In 2018, I researched the presence of English-language songs in 14 different national Top Weekly Streamed songs lists on Spotify, which was then, and still is, the world’s leading online streaming service. I also analyzed Spotify’s Global Weekly Top Streamed songs list for the presence of English-language songs.

What I found — and I looked across an 18-month period — confirmed, for the most part, that, among other things, on Spotify, there was almost zero presence of non-English language songs on the U.S. and U.K. top weekly streamed songs lists, there was significant presence of English-language songs on the top weekly streamed lists in European countries such as Sweden, Germany and Poland, that there was somewhat less of a presence of English-language songs on several Asian countries’ Spotify lists and, finally, very little presence of English-language pop songs in the Spotify lists from countries in which Spanish is a dominant language such as Spain and Argentina.

The significant presence of English-language pop songs on Spotify charts in diverse countries ranging from Sweden to Poland to Germany to Japan and the near total lack of non-English language songs on the U.S. and UK Spotify charts show cultural and linguistic imperialism are not outmoded nor invalid. Indeed, a cultural and linguistic imperialism perspective reveals much about the cultural and linguistic hierarchies and inequities that characterize contemporary global cultural and linguistic configurations of power

Continue reading “New Global Music Distribution System, Same Old Linguistic Hegemony? Analyzing English on Spotify”