Irish Journal of Applied Social Studies Est 1998. Published by Social Care Ireland Volume 16 Issue 1 The construction of otherness in Ireland, Guest Editor Encarnacion Hidalgo Tenorio 2017 Listening to Identity: Music in 21st century Ireland Andrew Blake
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://arrow.tudublin.ie/ijass Recommended Citation Blake, Andrew (2017) "Listening to Identity: Music in 21st century Ireland," Irish Journal of Applied Social Studies: Vol. 16: Iss. 1, Article 7. doi:10.21427/D7514M Available at: https://arrow.tudublin.ie/ijass/vol16/iss1/7 115 Irish Journal of Applied Social Studies Listening to identity: Music in 21 st century Ireland Andrew Blake
[email protected] © Copyright Irish Journal of Applied Social Studies ISSN 1393-7022 Vol. 16(1), 2016, 115-127. Abstract This paper firstly reviews recent scholarship on music and identity in Ireland. The review detects and discusses a set of issues around the identification of genre and nationality in a country which continues to experience a rapidly changing population structure, against which the mapping of a communal Irishness onto existing categories such as ‘traditional music’ becomes increasingly difficult. Against the grain of this recent scholarship, the paper argues that, in a postmodern and globalised consumer culture, one of the principal locations of music’s affect is through music synchronised to advertising. Having examined the musical content of a number of television advertisements, the paper concludes that the global culture they represent indicates the comparative dis-location of music, identity and Irishness. Keywords: (Traditional) music, Irishness, identity, television, advertising Introduction At the end of the past century music in Ireland seemed to revolve around a couple of relatively stable, though overlapping signifiers.