Funky Nassau: Roots, Routes, and Representation in Bahamian Popular Music (Music of the African Diaspora) (Volume 15)

Rommen, Timothy

ISBN 10: 0520265696 / ISBN 13: 9780520265691

Published by University of California Press, 2011

About this Item

Seller Inventory # BSM.18LK9

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Funky Nassau: Roots, Routes, and Representation in Bahamian Popular Music (Music of the African Diaspora) (Volume 15)
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication Date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520265696
• ISBN 13: 9780520265691
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: very_good

About this title

Synopsis

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.

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.