The coming of Americans: Moroccan popular music, modernity, and mimetic encounters

Abstract

This article explores the mediation by Moroccans of cross-cultural difference through the production and reception of popular music in the modern eras of colonialism and post-colonialism, impelled by the increased circulation and contact of people, ideas, and cultural products and processes during those eras. The explication in this article of music and lyrical texts from three songs recorded over a 60-year period tracks the adoption, distortion, and re-purposing through irony and mimesis of novel cultural forms, techniques, and ideas arriving in Morocco from others’ distant practices. Different ideas of consumption are recurring themes in the texts of the songs, and the article considers these together as a key mode of self-conscious examination of social and cultural change in Morocco by songwriters, singers, and their audiences. The article also looks at spiritually oriented or supernatural motifs in popular song as one other mode for the Moroccan negotiation of newer cultural elements and notions arriving from outside previous Moroccan custom, following earlier scholarly proposals that this spiritual aspect has been an important means for many Moroccans towards addressing aspects of disjunction and unease more generally.