Arid fidelity, reluctant capitalists: salvage, curation, and the circulation of Tuareg music on independent record labels

Abstract

ABSTRACT The record labels Sahel Sounds and Sublime Frequencies position themselves as insurgent alternatives to the mainstream music industry’s capitalist profiteering in the global circulation of Tuareg music. While they are rooted in an art scene promoting a new media ethics and mode of world music circulation characterised by David Novak [2011. ‘The Sublime Frequencies of New Old Media’. Public Culture 23(3): 603–34] as ‘World Music 2.0,’ the relations of production among the Tuareg artists and American producers involved, in many respects, differ little from those of other labels. I argue that these producers’ claims to subversive subject positions are primarily motivated by the values of their U.S. social worlds rather than those of northwest Africa, though these worlds are entangled. To this end, I situate these labels within a particular global network of music circulation, examining their remediation of salvaged recordings, production of new studio albums, and competing claims of ethnographic authority to show their ambivalent reckonings with the commodification process.