Funky Nassau: Roots, Routes, and Representation in Bahamian Popular Music / Edition 1

by Timothy Rommen

Overview

This book examines the role music has played in the formation of the political and national identity of the Bahamas. Timothy Rommen analyzes Bahamian musical life as it has been influenced and shaped by the islands’ location between the United States and the rest of the Caribbean; tourism; and Bahamian colonial and postcolonial history. Focusing on popular music in the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, in particular rake-n-scrape and Junkanoo, Rommen finds a Bahamian music that has remained culturally rooted in the local even as it has undergone major transformations. Highlighting the ways entertainers have represented themselves to Bahamians and to tourists, Funky Nassau illustrates the shifting terrain that musicians navigated during the rapid growth of tourism and in the aftermath of independence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520265684
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	05/19/2011
Series:	Music of the African Diaspora , #15
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	332
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Timothy Rommen is Associate Professor in the Department of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Mek Some Noise: Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad (UC Press), which in 2008 was awarded the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Map of the Bahamas

1. Nassau’s Gone Funky: Sounding Some Themes in Bahamian Music
2. "Muddy da Water": Provincializing the Center, or Recentering the Periphery through Rake-n-Scrape
3. "Calypso Island": Exporting the Local, Particularizing the Region, and Developing the Sounds of Goombay
4. "Gone ta Bay": Institutionalizing Junkanoo, Festivalizing the Nation
5. "A New Day Dawning": Cosmopolitanism, Roots, and Identity in the Postcolony
6. "Back to the Island": Travels in Paradox—Creating the Future-Past

Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"[A] highly insightful book. . . . Rommen here offers the most extensive publication to date on Bahamian music. . . . [An] excellent study.

—Journal of Anthropological Research

Editorial Reviews

"The book is eye-opening... a must-read for anyone interested in tourism and cultural policy."

Ethnomusicology

"Funky Nassau gives an insider perspective on the complex routes and representations in Bahamian music before and after independence. Through many quotations from interviews and other sources the voice of Bahamian musicians and cultural activists is present . . . Rommen reveals Bahamian roots in local popular music that cannot be discovered by an outsider."

Popular Music - Krister Malm

[A] highly insightful book. . . . Rommen here offers the most extensive publication to date on Bahamian music. . . . [An] excellent study.

Journal Of Anthropological Research - Stephen Stuempfle