Echoes of the Colonial Past in Discourse on North Atlantic Popular Music

• Main Author: Cannady, Kimberly
• Other Authors: Holt, Fabian, Kärjä, Antti-Ville
• Format: Book
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University Press 2017
• Subjects: Iceland; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190603908.013.11

This chapter brings a postcolonial perspective into the study of popular music in Iceland and the North Atlantic. The argument is that the fascination with Icelandic culture and nature, in which popular music plays a key role, evolves from a sense of “discovery” in the 1980s in Anglophone media that echoes a longer colonial history. The fascination with the present is grounded in the familiar myth of an isolated culture and nature untouched by modernity. Iceland’s authenticity is thus inseparable from the country’s mythical status as a deep freeze for Old Norse heritage and its location at the margins of Scandinavian modernity. The argument is demonstrated through analysis of the “discovery” motif in international media and in Icelandic record shops, festivals, and tourism marketing. The analysis opens up for a more nuanced understanding of the North Atlantic, looking beyond late twentieth-century dichotomies.