Uncanny Identities

Abstract

Pop music has gradually lost its exclusive ties with (rebellious) youth culture and has developed into a more general cultural domain with a global effect. In fact, pop music nowadays can be seen as the strongest globalizing force in culture, thanks to its specific translating abilities. The musical career of Elvis Costello is taken as exemplary of this gradual shift of pop music from a youth cultural to a more general and dominant cultural domain in which local cultural identities are constantly translated into musical forms destined to reach a more generalized global audience and in which the dividing lines between high and low and between ‘commercial’ and ‘artistic’ culture are being crossed time and time again. This does not produce a clear and distinct new cultural identity, but invokes an endless play with all kinds of uncanny identities.