Voicing freedom, sounding dissent: Popular music, simulation and citizenship in democratizing Albania, 1991–1997

Abstract

Between 1991 and 1997, Western-style rock and popular music in postsocialist Albania came to be targeted for processes of democratization and de-communization. In this article, I examine how efforts to imaginatively locate and musically voice ‘freedom’ and ‘dissent’ through popular musicians’ performances articulated to a nominally democratic order that necessitated ‘free’ citizens. Starting from Nikolas Rose’s notion of ‘freedom as a formula of power’, I explore how particular musical performances, commentaries and received ideas about the ‘power’ of popular music in democratic and nondemocratic contexts helped to shape and promote an ideal kind of agent, a ‘free’ Citizen–Subject. In approaching ‘democratization’ as an aesthetic and cultural process rather than ‘democracy’ as an ideal political condition, I outline popular music’s significant role in the cultural construction of conceptions of liberal democracy and ‘good’ citizenship in one postauthoritarian context. The historicization of commonsense notions about the relationship between popular music and democracy, I conclude, provides a potential means to more critically examine the emergence – and normalization – of contemporary politics of citizenship pursued under the sign of ‘freedom’ in democratizing states.