William Roy's recent book, Reds, Whites, and Blues: Social Movements, Folk Music, and Race in the United States (Princeton Univ Press 2010), is quite successful in revisiting the role of music in mobilization. I particularly enjoyed his analytical approach to culture. According to Roy, scholars tend to analyze social movements as knowledge-bearing entities that focuses on cultural change. This is especially evident in oft cited work of Eyerman and Jamison- Music and Social Movements (1998), where the authors stressed the cognitive praxis of social movement activists. This approach, Roy continues, regards culture as system of symbols and meanings; and therefore, pays attention to content of that system than the concrete social relations that embed in. In this sense, Roy asks an intriguing question: what explains the fundamental differences between the musical achievements of the Communist Party and those of the civil rights movement.
Throughout the book, Roy documents how the civil rights movement was more successful than the Communist Party at facilitating music as an integral part of collective action that actually informed movement practice. Although the Communist Party activists achieved to diffuse their movement culture into the broader culture, they could not make their music remains at the core of social network. Roy concludes that the effect of music on social movement activities and outcomes depends less on the meaning of the lyrics or the sonic qualities of the performance than on the social relationships within which it is embedded.
Although I agree with Roy in his theoretical criticism, it would be very nice to see a recognition of recent works in similar lines. Roy is not the first author who criticizes the study of culture in social movement scholarship. And, there are some important contributions that regard culture as the constitutive of the structure (Polletta 1999; Steinberg 1999; Williams 2004; Armstrong and Bernstein 2008). The author did not engage this emerging literature in the field.
I appreciate Roy's emphasis on the fact that music is primarily a social relationship. I also believe that studying relations between music and social movements in the age of Youtube & Facebook requires further analysis. My ongoing study on Islamic protest music repertoires, which explores the link between transformation of social relations after Youtube revolution and the Islamic activism, is an endeavor in this vein.
