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Cultural Studies
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MUSIC RADIO AND GLOBAL MEDIATION

Joshua Tucker Available online: 22 Jul 2010

To cite this article: Joshua Tucker (2010): MUSIC RADIO AND GLOBAL MEDIATION, Cultural Studies, 24:4, 553-579 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2010.488409

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Joshua Tucker
MUSIC RADIO AND GLOBAL MEDIATION Producing social distinction in the Andean public sphere
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This article offers a model for studying the dynamics of globalized popular musics, that fills methodological and theoretical lacunae in existing scholarly approaches. It deals with the emergence and circulation of a hybrid popular music called musica ayacuchana, which over the 1990s became an important site of identification for the emergent Andean migrant middle class of Lima, Peru. Describing the role of radio stations and, particularly, DJs actions in this process, I suggest that attention to the working practices of mediators can reveal how popular music becomes attached to new identities, particularly in the context of broader social changes. Further, I use this example to show why scholarly accounts of globalization, which rarely attend to the everyday mechanics of mediation, must take them into account, to arrive at a satisfactory understanding of the way that these processes engage, challenge, and/or reproduce social hierarchies. Keywords popular music; radio; public sphere; globalization; Peru

Introduction
In early 2005, Lima FM station Studio 92 aired a new, socially perceptive segment on their radio program Mal Elemento (Bad Element).1 It was a satire in two parts, each lampooning a social type familiar to citizens of Perus coastal capital. The first half, entitled Vida en Lima (Life in Lima), was dedicated to the foibles of Limas wealthy white criollos (Creoles).2 Invariably it was set in a tony locale such as an ambassadors residence, foreign electronica pulsing in the background. Here, shallow consumerists engaged in activities stressing their admiration for Euro-American trends, all the while addressing one another by mannered, foreign-sounding nicknames. In this way, the programme ridiculed Perus dominant class as xenophilic pitucos (roughly, snobs), poking merciless fun at a criollo who are perceived to define the value of material culture in relation to its cosmopolitan origins.
Cultural Studies Vol. 24, No. 4 July 2010, pp. 553579 ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online 2010 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2010.488409

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The programmes second part also sent up social climbers, but was instead entitled Veda en Lema. This orthographic change, replacing Vida en Limas is with es, mimicked the speech of indigenous and mestizo (mixed-race) people from the countrys Andean highlands, where Spanish pronunciation is inflected by the indigenous Quechua language. Signalling a change of social scene, the segment began with a jarring shift in musical background. Slick techno was replaced by the song Como has hecho (What have you done?), as performed by the Duo Hermanos Gaitan Castro. The outstanding hit of the contemporary huayno ayacuchano genre, Como has hecho fused traditional Andean stylistics with international balada and rock. The track was a favourite of then-President Alejandro Toledo, Perus first modern leader of indigenous heritage, and the style in general had become publicly identified with Limas ascendant Andean migrant community. Turning back centuries of racist exclusion by a power structure anchored in the coastal criollo sphere, Perus highland majority has in recent decades achieved representation in the political and public realms, and Veda en Lema skewered the perceived nouveau riche sensibilities of a new Andean middle class. Aiming its barbs at the emergent migrant bourgeoisie, hungry to demonstrate its unaccustomed wealth and status, the segment was set at locales typifying their lifeworld, such as a successful merchants stall in Limas central market. It satirized their acquisitive pursuit of cultural and economic capital, focusing in particular upon objects connoting cosmopolitan savvy, marker par excellence of bourgeois sophistication. As such, the hybrid style of Como has hecho, displaying cosmopolitan sophistication via elements of musical form, perfectly underlined Veda en Lemas knowing portrait of consumerism and social distinction. Vida en Lima/Veda en Lema can be read in part, as an astute commentary on the intertwining of popular music, mass mediation, and social change in contemporary Peru. In this article, my interest is to account for the association between musical style and social position that it takes for granted. Specifically, I want to show how one traditional style, huayno music from the highland city of Ayacucho, became consolidated as a figure for Perus Andean middle class, in Ayacucho and Lima alike. I argue that this depended upon its public framing as cosmopolitan, and hence potentially modern, in contradistinction to other traditional Andean musics. More broadly, by focusing on key agents who crafted this imagery, and the media channels through which they worked, I advocate an ethnographic model for studying the relation between popular music, globalization, and the production of cosmopolitan sensibility. By focusing upon a limited group of agents, I hope to demonstrate that a methodological focus on mediators can yield important insights about the mechanics of contemporary public culture.

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Popular music, globalization, and cosmopolitan forms

Since its inception, scholarship on popular music in the global South has been dominated by studies of those processes, tied largely to the spread of Western capital and communications, conventionally labelled globalization. Moving from apprehensive accounts of westernization (Nettl 1985) to studies praising the socially productive nature of hybridity, this work has provided key insights into the way that musicians reflect and shape emergent social formations (see, for example, Waterman 1990; Erlmann 1996; Turino 2000; Perrone & Dunn 2001). In an age of intense commodity circulation, the conviction that identities are shaped by the life of the imagination (Appadurai 1996) in relation to mass media thoroughly informs contemporary musical scholarship. However, scholars of globalization increasingly recognize that globalization is hardly experienced in a homogeneous manner (Turino 2000; Vertovec & Cohen 2002).3 As globalizing processes reorder conceptual worlds, communities knit together different aspects of translocal material culture, finding meaning in travelling forms by adapting them to local constraints and interests. Local regimes of custom and taste, as well as the unequal spread of capital and infrastructure, each ensure that the putatively global reach of images, discourses, and ideologies remains uneven (Mazzarella 2003; Abu-Lughod 2005). Some studies of music have attended specifically to the variegated nature of global processes, acknowledging that local socio-economic structures, and the actions of those who mediate between local and global levels, condition the spread of musical sounds and ideologies (see, in particular, Meintjes 2003). Nevertheless, most do not describe the specific contexts and channels in and by which translocal artefacts, the material basis of Appadurais imaginative cosmopolitan worlds, take effect in consumers lives. Instead, they often rely upon analyses of musical structure, backed up by statements elicited from musicians (or, rarely, listeners), which are taken as analogous to the mindset of consumers. Even in recent work on music production, which has greatly enriched scholarly understandings of mass mediation, analysis tends to reify the producer as auteur, taking the production of expressive culture to be the equivalent of the effective adoption of social identities more broadly.4 Such ideas have been widely critiqued in scholarship on popular music, and scholars have resisted the notion that any given piece of music exteriorizes a preconstituted social identity (Frith 1996b). A more nuanced approach instead emphasizes the way that a sense of groupness is constructed by agents who shape and circulate music, thus drawing listeners into evolving structures of shared meaning (see especially Frith 1996a). As Richard Middleton has recently stated, it no longer seems desirable to:

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[examine] popular music with a view to deciphering there representations of identity that have already been laid down elsewhere: rather, we should be looking for mechanisms of practice and orders of discourse through which sites of musical work contribute to the construction, maintenance and dissemination of identities. (Middleton 2003, p. 3) Analyses of performed or recorded texts are, on their own, particularly insufficient for scholars interested in the relation between musical globalization and its effects on social identity. Such an analysis is unable to account for the mechanisms by which subjects come to understand cosmopolitan forms as persuasive signifiers of personal and collective experience. It is also unable to describe why different collectivities, all of which interact within a nominally shared public sphere, come to identify with different kinds of cosmopolitan forms. While it is clear that sound can be a vehicle for shaping common values, neither musical ideologies, nor the abilities and dispositions that underwrite their adoption, are evenly distributed. Understanding the ways that people come to possess and share a sense of investment in new musical idioms, and hence a potential site of identification, means describing where such ideas are spread, how they are made persuasive, and who can gain access to them.5 Such a framework is especially imperative for scholars invested in interrogating the politics of musical globalization, for only this kind of study can move beyond banal generalities affirming the universality of hybridity, to show how translocal structures of sound and meaning engage, reproduce, or transform local hierarchies. In other words those of anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod hybridizations and cosmopolitanisms are worth specifying . . . the effects of media on what Appadurai calls the work of the imagination, and selffabrication are worth tracing to particular configurations of power, education, age, and wealth in particular places (Abu-Lughod 2005, p. 50). My analysis of huayno ayacuchano builds upon these foundations, showing that it recruited particular kinds of listeners by tracing specified paths through local media networks. Musicians and, more particularly, mediators, including DJs, station managers, and record producers, actively constructed ties between the style and a specific image of bourgeois cosmopolitanism.6 As an object of identification, the style contested dominant discourses of Andean backwardness. Its mediators recognized the reality of a nascent Andean bourgeoisie, one craving legitimacy but still marginalized in a racist society. Stated differently, musicians and mediators publicly created via contemporary huayno ayacuchana an Andean cosmopolitan subject position that could be inhabited by individual listeners, and successfully interpellated consumers into it. In making this argument, I do not wish to exaggerate the power of music or media to shape identities. These actions took place against a background of economic and political change, seismic shifts in Perus demographics which fostered the ascendancy of the Limas migrant community. However, I do

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want to suggest that in times of societal restructuring, mediators and musicians often work in tandem to organize new modes of identification. In the case of Peru, the self-consciously cosmopolitan subject position of the migrant bourgeoisie that came to be associated with huayno ayacuchano, was not grounded in a collective sentiment that predated the styles dissemination: rather, it arose from the public mediation of an emergent class sensibility.7
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Shaping difference in the public sphere

Recent scholarship on public culture offers an effective model for studying the relation between popular music and social change that I link to huayno ayacuchano (see especially Appadurai & Breckenridge 1995; Pinney 2001; Warner 2002).8 For these purposes, a public is a social formation defined not only by shared attributes, or the common social-structural position of its members, but by the identification of their groupness and their common interest in the public sphere. Collective subjectivity arises not primarily through reference to pre-established commonalities (culture), but via the everyday interactions of private citizens who mutually recognize one another as objects of public discourse. In an age of theory after culture (see Ortner 1999), wherein accounts of identity that emphasize coherence and unity over power-laden processes of group definition have become suspect (Brubaker & Cooper 2000; Hall & du Gay 1996), the figure of the public is an increasingly fruitful analytic lens. This model invites specification of the actors involved in addressing and framing publics, the conditions that grant them the right to speak in the public sphere, and the means by which their models of groupness become persuasive. In this way, a public appears as a contingent framing of . . . structures and practices that, while moveable, malleable, and borrowable, is hardly inevitable (Gal & Woolard 2001a, p. 9). Such an approach recognizes that dynamics of inequality restrict certain classes of people from going public, but it also shows that power-laden imageries nevertheless take on great force in peoples lives. Further, in an age where the public sphere has been irremediably colonized by capital, these ideas can illuminate the mass mediation of social identities, offering means of theorizing the formation of collectivities that cross ruptures of space and are outside formal definitions of culture (Ginsburg et al. 2002, p. 5). Following work on the socially creative dimensions of consumption (Miller 1994; Garca Canclini 2001), scholars of public culture have effectively shown how publics come to life when groups are projected as markets for particular media, named as users with a particular interest, and understood as having a historical endurance as such (Warner 2002).9

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Such publics are omnipresent social formations, and scholars require a model for studying the emergence and endurance of mass-mediated intersubjectivity. Methodologically, this means showing how mediators occupy subsectors of the public sphere, interpellating particular citizens as consumers. The task of the analyst is to show how audiences are semiotically constructed, signaled, and typologised within media practice, and . . . [to link] these analyses to the society more broadly, specifically in terms of how they connect . . . people together (Spitulnik 1994, p. 18). In any given situation the relative prominence of particular media, and the strength of the habits tied to them, should make certain channels especially active fields of organization. For these reasons, popular music radio is a critical site for the construction of public distinctions in Peru.

Radio broadcasting and the construction of musical experience

The dynamics of radio broadcasting have received little attention in scholarship on popular music.10 Commercial radio, particularly in North America, is assumed to be inherently alienating: guided by the specific requirement to maximise audiences rather than a concern for listeners or music (Hendy 2000a, p. 743), broadcasters serve only to deliver demographically calculated slices of a population to advertisers (Berland 1993; but see also Barnes 1988). DJs are thus overwhelmingly absent from studies of popular music as well. Limited in originality, pandering to audiences of the broadest possible kind, they are of negligible interest compared to their creative colleagues in public or college radio (Berland 1998).11 However, the structure of local radio industries and the nature of local broadcasts matter quite a lot in assessing such claims, and there is a marked need for attention to the agency of DJs in contexts where their actions are less overdetermined (see also Ahlkvist 2001). Especially where the listening public is much larger than the record buying public, radio is an important site of public ideological work, and should be of prime interest to scholars of popular music (Hennion and Meadel 1986). In contemporary Peru, as explained later, many DJs exert a greater leeway in selecting musical content for broadcasts than their counterparts elsewhere. More importantly, as elsewhere, the drive to develop an individual style of delivery means that DJs can exert other kinds of agency in their workplace, effectively controlling the overall tone and meaning of the broadcast space. And finally, the omnipresence of radio in Peruvian life is difficult to overstate. Sound emanating from transistor radios saturates the urban soundscape. Few businesses leave the radio off during business hours. It accompanies work and leisure, it eases the solace of time alone, it provides a context for socializing, and it is rare for a household to pass an entire day without tuning in.

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The nature of radio consumption in Peru is distinct from that of other media artefacts, such as soap operas or news programmes. Rather than attending to a specific message or narrative, listeners use music radio primarily to create a context, whether designing a relaxing home environment via a broadcaster of romantic baladas, or by a stimulating workplace via a loud and lively salsa stations, among other possibilities. Interaction with radio sound is therefore often transitory and distracted. Nevertheless, embedded in broadcasts are framings and categorizations by which people internalize key dispositions and distinctions (Bourdieu 1993). In fact, the relatively unremarked nature of radio is what ensures that its ideological effects become pervasive, naturalized, and hard to disavow (see also Turino 1999). Like the Egyptian television programming described by Abu-Lughod, Peruvian radio is socially efficacious because it weaves its magic through pleasures and subliminal framings (Abu-Lughod 2005, p. 9) rather than didactic suasion. Commercial radio thus requires modes of analysis distinct from those usually applied in studies of popular music, or talk radio. As noted by Ahlkvist (2001), the gatekeeper metaphor still dominates accounts of pop radio DJs, and their elision in popular music scholarship is perhaps linked to the fact that they are not perceived to do much of anything. Since music itself is considered to be the real locus of signification and ideological work, DJs are treated merely as conduits. Their significance is primarily assessed in terms of the materials they allow to pass, and an enumeration of the songs that are broadcast substitutes for effective analysis of DJ work. I argue instead that a primary aspect of DJ work is to shape the public values of the music that is admitted to the public sphere. As noted by Hennion and Meadel (1986), DJs organize ideas about music by linking it to other materials over the course of a broadcast. Understanding their activities thus requires analysing the entire inventory of particular programmes. In this way, it is possible to show how DJs situate music within a broader experiential field, placing songs and genres in proximity to other kinds of marked public cultural artefacts. Two intertwined aspects of DJ work are of particular interest. The first relates to categorization, and requires attention to broadcast markers that hierarchize musical styles. By positioning them in different spots over the broadcast day, and within individual programmes, mediators sort musical objects and imply that particular musical and discursive styles belong together. They also imply that some styles are more important or mainstream than others, by programming them at peak listening hours (Berland 1998; Hendy 2000b). More significant, however, is the atmosphere and affect generated by DJs, explicitly designed to hail particular audiences for particular programmes. Spitulniks (1994) work on cosmopolitan nationalism and radio broadcasting in Zambia provides a particularly astute analysis of this matter. Spitulnik focuses primarily upon DJ talk, emphasizing how DJs attract their audience using an

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easy, bantering style of popular DJ locution that she labels the upbeat beat. This discursive style, familiar to listeners of pop radio around the world, conveys primarily a mood of optimism, prosperity, having fun, and being in touch with a wider modern world . . . an imagined cosmopolitan community of affluence and excitement (Spitulnik 1994, p. 315). Critically, Spitulnik argues that this has become a globally-circulating speech genre primarily because it provides a certain quality of experience to listeners, assuring them that they possess the requisite bourgeois modern orientation to legitimately consume cosmopolitan cultural forms. As such, DJs use it in: a very deliberate effort to signal a certain kind of audience and more generally a certain kind of lifestyle. [This] lifestyle, and the mood associated with it, is one of modernity and cosmopolitanism: being up to date, listening to the latest music and lingo, and having fun or even more precisely having the leisure time and the sensibility to enjoy radio listening. (Spitulnik 1994, p. 321, original emphasis) It is critical for scholars to understand media and mediators not merely as channels and gatekeepers. Rather, they are agents who construct contexts, in which listeners are encouraged to inhabit particular identities: they provide a technology for the production of new kinds of selves (see Abu-Lughod 2005, p. 113). These tools of analysis are particularly useful in showing how huayno ayacuchano accrued its public over the 1990s. Seeking to tap emergent markets among Perus Andean middle class, mediators drew listeners into a mutual awareness that they inhabited a new kind of subject position. This would not have been possible without shifts in the Peruvian social landscape, to which I now turn.

Models of groupness and disjunct musical cosmopolitanism in contemporary Peru

Historically, social discourse in Lima has been structured by a pervasive division between two supposedly irreconcilable lifeworlds: that of a progressive, white, Eurocentric minority centred in the coastal capital, and that of the Andean highlands, dismissed as a reservoir of backwards indigenes slated for inevitable extinction. A general distaste for things Andean among Perus dominant classes has until recently extended to Andean cultural practices as well. In musical terms, this has meant that the public airwaves, particularly the more prestigious FM band, have been devoted to such modern, cosmopolitan genres as rock, salsa, bolero, and the local musica criolla of the coastal region.

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However, due to an influx of Andean migrants seeking work and better life chances in Lima, the last several decades have seen a massive shift in the social landscape. Peru remains profoundly stratified by race and regional origin, but room has been made for Andean mobility, virtually unthinkable only decades before. It may be somewhat premature to speak of a stable Andean bourgeoisie (see Fuller 2002), but it is certainly the case that the marginalized have accrued significant power. Viewing such changes, scholars once predicted the Andeanization of Lima (Matos Mar 1984), with the sociocultural authority of the criollo minority waning in favour of an Andean national identity. However, instead of a linear Andeanization, life in Lima today is characterized by intense fragmentation. Far from homogeneous, Limas Andean migrant community is rent by internal divisions of class, race (that is, indigenous versus mestizo), and region.12 And finally, in an age of intense media circulation and increased linkage between the capital and the provinces, Limas nascent social formations also restructure life in the provinces, where people realign their lifeways by following the emergent patterns of the capital. Similarly, as in the case of huayno ayacuchana, which was consolidated in the Andean city of Ayacucho before moving to Lima, developing patterns in the provinces have the potential to reverberate in the national capital. Contemporary Peru is characterized by dynamic change, in which distinctions of class and race are being reworked into new configurations. Public cultural manifestations, and popular music in particular, play a key role in organizing, reproducing, and disseminating these emergent social formations. Scholars have long noted the development of distinct expressive practices within the bubbling cauldron of Lima (see Turino 1988, 1993; Vich 2001; Romero 2001, 2002). Musics that hybridize international and local elements have been interpreted as public manifestations of an emergent Andean migrant identity, positioned between an adherence to traditional lifeways and participation in a global culture of modernity. With its use of the Gaitans hit song Como has hecho to mark the Andean middle-class milieu, Veda en Lema demonstrated that Peruvian audiences are assumed to recognize this as well. However, by acknowledging that different sectors of society seek cosmopolitan cultural capital via different kinds of consumption, the programme also signalled the development of distinct local milieux of globalized consumption. The existence of disjunct cosmopolitanisms in contemporary Peru becomes especially evident in the way that new musical fusions have typically been dismissed by Perus traditional elites. Often contravening hegemonic categories of good taste, the cosmopolitan forms of Perus emergent Andean middle class tend to be dismissed as ham-fisted products of the mere parvenu instead of aesthetic objects with their own validity, rooted in a system of musical appreciation different from that of criollo aesthetes. Veda en Lema both drew upon and satirized these discourses of uncultured arrivisme. Juxtaposing elite and subaltern modes of consumerist

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cosmopolitanism in its equal-opportunity skewering, the programme recognized that patterns of globalist consumption are not uniform. In point of fact, such distinctions also exist within the sphere of Andean music itself. Though it is often left unstated in studies of Peruvian popular music, the blanket term Andean music includes a very heterogeneous set of commercial styles. Many of these are seen as aesthetically incompatible, associated with distinct listening communities. Within the system of distinctions that structures the field of Andean popular musical production (Bourdieu 1993), individual genres often derive their meaning from opposition to one another. At the same time, however, artists often borrow features from other musicians in a continual attempt to capture new markets. Social and stylistic differences are thus constantly reconstructed and repositioned, generating new affective alliances, new audiences, and hence new consuming publics. By focusing on one musical strand alone, existing literature has tended to elide this dynamic of the Andean music scene (see also Straw 1991), even though it has been crucial to the emergence of styles such as contemporary huayno ayacuchano. For instance, Perus dominant Andean popular music, commonly denoted huayno (after the genres most prevalent song type) and based on earlier oral forms, is relatively well attested, and scholars frequently note its intense regional variety (see for example Llorens Amico 1983 Turino 1993; Romero 2001).13 Nevertheless, few scholars have noted that certain regional huayno styles are marked as especially elegant, cultural property of the privileged mestizo (mixed-race) sector of Andean society, rather than indigenous peoples (see however Llorens Amico 1983). This is particularly true of Ayacuchos older, traditional huayno style, which became publicly identified as the most elegant variant when introduced on record in the 1960s. Similarly, there is a scholarly literature treating the pan-Andean style of artists like Inti-Illimani, Quilapayun, Los Kjarkas, and Vctor Jara (see for example Wara Cespedes 1984, 1993; Bigenho 2002, 2007). The worlds best known Andean style, it is this music that generally represents the region in world music record bins, and in the repertoires of Andean street performers worldwide. However, it is at best tenuously traditional or Andean, having been developed by the regions elite leftists as a vehicle for anti-imperialist ideology. Further, it has historically been quite unpopular in Perus Andean region, and that there has been a powerful animosity between its practitioners and the huayno musicians who represent older traditions, indigenous to the Peruvian Andes properly speaking.14 Instead of a truly popular style, panAndean music within Peru has mostly been consumed on and around university campuses, and it is often seen as a misguided appropriation of Andean musical signifiers by outside performers, an alienated music of refined intellectuals. At the same time, however, an appreciation for pan-Andean music has long been a sign of serious intellectual engagement, a marker of musical and sociocultural erudition.

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Another strand of literature deals with the fusion of Peruvian huayno, Colombian cumbia, and international rock music called chicha (Turino 1988, 1990; Hurtado Suarez 1995; Romero 2002; Tucker in preparation). Chicha gained massive popularity among Andean migrants in the 1980s, seducing the traditional audience base of huayno with its modernized keyboards, wah-wah guitars, and tropical beat. Camouflaging its Andean roots, much of chichas marketing apparatus revolved around its presentation as a hip, danceable, less Andean and more fun music than the parochial huayno listened to by generations past. As such, it was widely decried as a hopelessly lowbrow, and it became associated in the popular press with a highly-stereotyped proletarian underclass imagery. By the time that contemporary huayno ayacuchano appeared in the mid1980s, all of these musical distinctions were widely recognized. The styles musicians and mediators drew upon them to redefine Ayacuchos huayno style, bringing a new audience to their new sound. They combined elements of Ayacuchos elegant huayno tradition with rock and pop, showing that the musical semiotics of Andean tradition could co-exist in the same expressive vehicle as the musical affect of cosmopolitanism. They consciously presented the style as an alternative to the mode of musical fusion presented by chicha, using the respectable, educated legitimacy of pan-Andean musical stylistics as a counter to the declasse proletarian imagery of the former. Most importantly, in contrast to chicha, the practitioners of contemporary huayno ayacuchano argued that their music showed an appreciation for Andean heritage, rather than seeking to bury it beneath chichas electronic instrumentation and tropical dance moves. Overall, the style bespoke itself as a cosmopolitan form that was simultaneously educated, refined, and respectful of tradition, eminently suitable for an emergent Andean middle class. Instead of countering the discourses of Andean backwardness that long dominate Peruvian public discourse, contemporary huayno ayacuchano seems to surrender to those very stereotypes, its legitimacy tied to its claim on foreign, less parochial, cultural spheres. I will return to this issue in the conclusion to this article. Here, however, my goal is instead to show how, faced with the task of rendering an outdated traditional style into a vehicle of cosmopolitan identification, huayno ayacuchano achieved its image of cosmopolitanism in the popular sphere, and how the actions of mediators were central to this achievement.

Music radio and huayno ayacuchano in the 1990s

Between the early 1980s and the late 1990s, Ayacuchos huayno style grew from a largely localized music of marginal interest, to become a mass phenomenon in Peru. It attracted a following due to musicians exploration of

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politically sensitive themes, and to experiments in formal innovation and musical fusion. However, its transformation into a social fact of mass importance owes more to the way that media workers repositioned the style within the Peruvian musical field. And though their techniques of sociomusical engineering later became generalized throughout the countrys larger and more lucrative markets, DJs working at Ayacuchos FM radio stations were pioneers in demonstrating that audiences could be convinced to think about huayno in new ways. Developments in Ayacucho were underwritten by the sudden appearance of several new stations. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, after decades of dominance by three AM stations, Ayacucho saw a sudden boom in FM broadcasting. At this time, a decrease in the cost of transmitters made FM radios stereo-capable and high-fidelity signal affordable after many years of financial impossibility. By one experienced directors estimate, setting up an FM operation required less than one-fifth the capital needed for an AM transmitter: further, whereas an AM antenna required a hectare of open high ground, FM antennas could be set up on rooftops in the city centre.15 Virtually overnight several aficionados became small radio impresarios, working from their homes or back gardens. Even so, the creation of a new market for huayno ayacuchano rested upon the way these channels were put to work. In particular, the FM station Frecuencia A Record is acknowledged to have had a decisive role in this process. Licensed in 1997, it was the first station in the city exclusively devoted to traditional music, an innovation reflected in the stations motto: The first folkloric station of the department. Its employees built upon earlier methods tested elsewhere, but even rivals attribute the rise of huayno ayacuchano to Frecuencia A above all else. In a typical testimonial, one DJ at another station responded to my query about the reasons for the styles success by saying, simple: it was Frecuencia A. How else would it have happened? By 2001 contemporary huayno ayacuchano was central to the programming of well over half of Ayacuchos radio stations.16 This was a marked contrast to the situation that prevailed throughout the 1980s and much of the 1990s, when local music was largely absent from the airwaves. This change in the local music scene derived from the willingness of innovative programmers to take risks with unproved music. As noted earlier, Peruvian broadcasters of traditional music function differently than their counterparts in the commercial operations of North America or Europe.17 This relates to the manner in which such broadcasting emerged, in 1950s-era Lima, where procedures emerged that became generalized as radio stations appeared in other Peruvian cities. At this time, though radio broadcasting had existed in Lima for over two decades, there was no regular programming of Andean music, since it was widely considered by station managers to be both socially worthless and unremunerative. Despite this, in the late 1950s a handful of hobbyists

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proposed to rent unused airtime from existing stations, devoting the space to migrant audiences from the Andean highlands. These first programmes thus appeared in the wee hours between 4 and 7 a.m., and they tended to target listeners from a single Andean locale, transmitting the music of one area. As such, the funds to rent the airtime often derived from sponsors within the migrant community associated with that region itself. Following these efforts, the radio stations that emerged throughout the Andean highlands in the 1960s functioned as concessionaires. Rather than maintaining managerial control over the days broadcasts, they rented hourly blocks of airtime to other individuals or organizations, who directed the content of their programmes largely at their own discretion. These programmes transmitted different musics, targeted to distinct listening constituencies, and were usually hosted by non-professionals, who raised money for their efforts from local businesses, from friends and acquaintances, or from their own activities as artists or concert promoters. To this day most DJs begin as hobbyists, aficionados with a desire to communicate their ideas and disseminate their musical dispositions. They often retain strong opinions, fitting comfortably into the musicologist paradigm described by Ahlkvist, in his study of programming philosophies: [their] real challenge . . . is balancing their personally high standards with what the market will bear (2001, p. 347). And while some stations are now run as format stations, with a unified broadcasting structure, most tend toward the concessionary model. Though many DJs work for record companies or concert promoters, and are required to highlight the recordings associated with them, many do not. Principles of DJ independence continue to structure huayno broadcasting, according individual mediators a significant hand in structuring the public experience of Andean music. Instead of striving to maximize profits, hobbyist radio directors are often content merely to attract enough income to keep their stations afloat. Airtime is inexpensive, and since a sufficient number of advertisers are usually available to replace any that are lost, DJs need not slavishly follow the path of greatest cost-effectiveness. Mandated playlists are rare: even at format stations DJs are hired for their musical expertise, and they are largely trusted to programme according to their personal dispositions. Consequently, many use the time slots guaranteed by advertising money to innovate, allowing the safe repertoire that retains audiences to underwrite the parallel programming of new materials. Like other stations, Ayacuchos Frecuencia A functioned strictly as a concessionaire in its early years, and DJs dedicated to creating an audience for contemporary huayno ayacuchano found considerable leeway to do so over the 1990s. The agents involved relied upon two key strategies, both designed to neutralize the associations of moldy traditionalism and racially-marked backwardness that had accrued to huayno in the local imagination. They revamped the nature of on-air DJ performances, on the one hand, and

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challenged received wisdom concerning the position of huayno within radio space, on the other hand. By the time that musicians began to record huayno ayacuchano in the late 1980s, radio broadcasting and listening habits in Ayacucho were solidly structured around parallel models of musical categorization and radio temporality. The profitable hours between 7 a.m. and midnight were reserved for two distinct kinds of programming. One targeted urban elites, tuning listeners into rhetorically modern styles such as the elitist musica criolla, bolero, rock, and synthesized musica tropical that Limas elites consumed in lieu of folklore. The second instead sought a listenership among Ayacuchos proletarian underclass of indigenous peoples. These spaces were largely devoted to chicha, and to related styles. As such, these stations were marked as tacky, backward, and understood to lie outside the respectable sphere. Ayacuchos huayno style, understood as a respectable idiom unlike chicha, but also marked as an antiquated and parochial music of generations past, was confined to the unglamorous hours between 4 and 7 a.m., marking it as a musical has-been. This trend began to shift in 1991, after the initial phase of experimentation with huayno ayacuchano among local performers. The leading producer of the new style, a young student of obstetrics named Julian Fernandez, purchased off-peak morning hours to promote his record companys wares. Produced by Fernandez himself, Ayacucho en el corazon de todos (roughly, Ayacucho in all our hearts) was consistently devoted to local huayno music. It remained marginal within the daily schedule, airing in a rented slot from 4 to 7 a.m. on the station Radio Cinetica, but between 1991 and 1993 it inspired a cult following. Such success showed that contrary to widespread perceptions, a market for local huayno existed among the citys population. Despite this beachhead into the realm of mainstream radio, however, the show did not find a mass listenership, instead remaining limited to a faithful core audience. It was hosted by Miguel Angel Huaman, a young DJ who had been working in radio since 1985. His background was in pop radio, and while he was also a private aficionado of huayno, he described the uniqueness of this orientation in a 2002 interview: There was a kind of complex among my generation, there was no acceptance, no, none at all, it was degrading to listen to [huayno]. I dont know who made it that way, but it was strong, that tendency. They all wanted something that was more modern. Huaman became pivotal in recasting the nature of huayno ayacuchano after 1993, when Fernandez moved to Lima and left his show to his employee. If Ayacucho en el corazon de todos had established Ayacuchano huayno as a fixture on local radio, it also gave Huaman inside connections. This was fortuitous, since as a result of his earlier work he had also mastered the charismatic and bantering style of a pop music DJ. Taken together, these factors equipped him to decisively alter the status of huayno within the public

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sphere. In 1996, he rented space on Frecuencia A, boldly assuming a spot at the peak hour of 10 a.m. The financial risk of this move should not be underestimated. Through long familiarity and listening practice, associations between genre and schedule had come to be experienced as normative expressions of distinction in Ayacucho. DJs opened themselves to monetary ruin and social censure by thrusting huayno onto a stage normally occupied by salsa, rock, and other supposedly modern musics. By all accounts it was a startling experience for local listeners. Huaman himself confessed his apprehension about placing mu ayacuchana in the most sica important slot of the broadcast day: Ill tell you, I had that experience, that it wasnt right. Listening to huayno, it wasnt the right space; I mean I also thought, this isnt the right space. So many years Id done this, I said huayno, at 10 a.m.? It doesnt fit, I said it myself, you know? So, I thought Id be disappointed, but I said well, Ive got to try. Nor was he the only person to find the placement inappropriate: A lot of people criticized me, said Miguel Angel, you used to do pop, contemporary music, now you do [huayno]? They made fun of me, said Id lowered my standards. To my face, they said that. So, I was pretty embarrassed, but I kept doing it, kept on that road, you know? Huaman, however, was and remains a talented DJ, and his programme soon became the radios central show. As the programmes listenership increased, Isaac Argumedo, the stations manager, decided to change the stations format. They converted it entirely to huayno programming, filling the midday slots with contemporary huayno ayacuchano, and hired regular employees with a demonstrable talent for radio presentation rather than unproved amateurs. Such an idea had never been attempted in Ayacucho, and success was not immediate. The proposition that contemporary huayno was an Andean music unlike other styles, functionally interchangeable with the pop genres that properly occupied the days central hours, was far from self-evident. Huaman described Frecuencia As Christmas celebration, after their initial three months of work, as a spare affair, featuring small rolls and no traditional paneto n (Christmas fruitcake). Nevertheless, the station soon attracted a regular audience, rising to become one of the most successful in the city by the late 1990s. The listenership of a radio station is difficult to assess in Peru: most radio workers rely on word of mouth and personal observation to determine their level of success, especially in a small market like Ayacucho.18 An indication of their success, however, was the rapidity with which other stations moved to imitate them. Rock station Radio Melody became a huayno station literally overnight, and others developed shows in the middle of the day. In

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Huamans words, Thats where this idea that huayno should only be on in the morning ended for good.

Constructing context in broadcasting space

Naturally, Frecuencia As success rested in part upon the perceived quality of the music that they transmitted. However, the convincing way in which that music was presented was equally important in attracting an audience. This involved a major shift in discursive style, derived from DJs knowledge of local listening habits, and popular modes of radio interaction. Knowing that listeners sought not only music but also a particular atmosphere in radio consumption, they sought to exploit the cosmopolitan DJ speech genre as a way of legitimating the new huayno ayacuchano style. They adopted mannerisms and patterns of interaction similar to those used on pop stations, especially ones that targeted a relatively young, affluent, urban audience. Poaching experienced pop DJs from other stations, they adopted the same easy, charming discursive mode as salsa and rock shows: Institutions, everyone was listening to Frecuencia A. We were pretty smart with our programming, you know, because we thought about it: how can we get an office to listen to us? It was tough, because Ayacucho was always invaded by stations from Lima, and people liked their style, no? So, we had a really nice programming style, we made adjustments, that is, we made it so that you could listen to this music in a kitchen, or in an office. I tell you, we made ourselves sweet, we did nice things. Significantly, in this quote Huaman describes the switch as a calculated attempt to reach a particular audience, implicitly evaluated in class terms. Offices and institutions are sites where middle-class professionals are employed, rather than the indigenous migrants who formed the audience for other kinds of Andean music. After long years of degrading associations, it was the middle classes who most required convincing, who most needed reassurance that an Andean style like huayno ayacuchano could be their music. By publicly performing their own cosmopolitanism via a stylish form of address, DJs underscored for listeners huayno ayacuchanos potential as a site of a different Andean identification, one that could be recognized and appropriated without shame. What Huaman refers to as the style of Lima-based radio is not primarily a matter of musical selection, but rather something like Spitulniks upbeat beat. Frecuencia As DJs interspersed broadcasts with humorous asides, flirting and joking on-air with callers. They spoke rapidly in the characteristically slick, slangy, and melodious manner of Latin American FM DJs.

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Within this milieu, DJs are regarded as skilled for the degree to which they can entertain listeners and maintain interest in the programme, rather than their detailed knowledge of music itself, though a mastery of both is ideal. Creating the requisite atmosphere is a matter of both language register and of using key contextual devices during a broadcast. The importance of the latter was emphasized for me during a meeting that took place at Frecuencia A in January of 2003. At this time, some of the citys trend-setting DJs still worked at the station, and it was still a central institution. Many DJs around the city and in Lima had seen stints of varying lengths in its broadcast booth. However, due in part to the widespread adoption of their model by other stations, their listenership had decreased substantially. The meeting was therefore convoked by the stations director to remedy the situation via programming changes. However, this meeting featured neither the hierarchical instruction session nor the definition of playlists that I had anticipated. It was conducted informally, in a small room just outside the stations broadcast booth, against the background noise of a weekend broadcast hosted by DJ Coco C, whose selections of upbeat huayno were bridged, incongruously, by brief snatches of seashore sound effects.19 Instead of repertoire choices, most of the conversation was devoted to the metapragmatics of broadcasting. Talk revolved around revamping the stations overall tone, in order to achieve a style in line with that being used at more successful stations around the city. The use of catchy station identifications; sound effects called cunas, such as those in use by Coco C; clips signalling the opening of the broadcast day and of individual programmes; and pre-recorded pilot CDs containing current hits to use in DJ absences were all proposed as improvements. Huaman was especially vocal. In addition to his role at Frecuencia A, he was also involved with rival Radio La Caribena, the most popular in the city. In a fashion similar to a North American Contemporary Hit Radio station, La Caribena had attracted a wide audience using a calculated blend of musical genres, monitoring the airplay of other stations and constantly renewing their mixed sets based on the hits emerging elsewhere. Like Limas FM stations, La Caribena trafficked in musical genres such as rock, pop, salsa, and tecnocumbia (a Peruvian variant of chicha). Significantly, however, the neotraditional huayno ayacuchano by this time received roughly equal airplay, a testament to the extent to which these musical categories had become commensurable. All of this musical content was framed by attention-grabbing cunas and electronically-processed station identifications. The signature phrase La Caribena: siiiii, suena! (roughly, La Caribena, yeeeah, it rocks!), accom panied by an energetic swooshing sound, was one of many cunas used continually to foreground a mood of animated entertainment. Others included female giggles, laser sound effects, and similar noises connoting fun

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and excitement. Aware that these devices had become important means of signalling a cosmopolitan aura of bourgeois leisure, the DJs at Frecuencia A were eager to capitalize on their semiotic value. Therefore, the meeting featured no specific instructions as to musical content. Instead, it would be the intentional borrowing of these stylistics, necessary signifiers of modernity for an audience in search of a particular mediated experience, that would allow the station to continue operating at its previous level. In effect, Frecuencia As radio workers were, in Angs memorable phrase, desperately seeking the audience (1991) by making the broadcast style resonate with the way that listeners had come to imagine themselves and their place in the world.

Constructing context: DJ style

Even more important than cunas, though, is the work of DJ performance. It is primarily through their on-air actions that identification with a cosmopolitan social space is not only achieved, but more importantly, tied to the listeners immediate milieu. Contemporary huayno DJs like Huaman do not merely play music. They create a certain mood and atmosphere through the force of their on-air personalities, encouraging listeners to tune in as they go about their daily business. In Huamans case, the engaging sound world generated over the course of his show stood in stark contrast to the limited conditions under which it was realized. The first time that I sought him out at Frecuencia A, after having heard his voice on the airwaves for weeks, I was sure that I had come to the wrong location. The adobe-walled house with a door opening onto a large, bare courtyard, and the tiny hand-lettered sign bearing the station name, did not portend the slick musical empire that the sound of his show had led me to expect. Once I located the broadcast booth, opening off the back of a dark, empty room hung with posters of huayno stars, I was further amazed by the stations sparse setup: the two old CD players, cassette deck, and stereo, miniscule mixer and ancient-looking microphone atop a tiny wooden desk were a far cry from the Macintosh G4s and glassed-in booths I had seen at local pop music stations. Huaman often seemed like he was in constant motion from the moment he arrived at Frecuencia A. At roughly 10:00 a.m., he eased himself into the closet-sized broadcast booth, where a pilot CD had been playing since Argumedos 9:30 a.m. departure. Lowering the volume and bending to the microphone, he announced the time and gave the stations identifying slogan. His melodious tenor instantly conveyed a sense of humour and diversion, ranging over the breadth of his vocal capacity as he energetically set the programmes tone for his listeners. He tended to grin as he speaks, thoroughly comfortable in the role of entertainer:

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10:03 a.m. at Frecuencia A, the first folkloric station of the region . . . Im a little sick, as you can see, really too bad, Ive been taken by a cold, two days ago, and it doesnt want to let go. Well have to wait four days, six days still, because a cold lasts eight days, no? Theyve recommended that I take . . . vitapirena, whatever that is. Anyway, Ill get better the natural way: drug-free [laughs]. Such banter is central to his job. Unique to the nominally commercial DJ, it is a mode of discourse reviled by older intellectuals and huayno presenters. For many of them, formed at a time when radio work held the status of an amateur intellectual pursuit, the job of a radio worker is to inform and educate. However, his radio style is shaped by the need to communicate a cosmopolitan aesthetic, indissolubly knitting huayno ayacuchano and a modern sensibility to one another. Huamans goal was for listeners to feel a sense of rapport; that they were spending time with a particularly cool friend. His personalized humour brought listeners into a sphere of public intimacy, a space of familiarity that was conspicuously shared with others in broadcast range. Establishing a mediated space that people will want to inhabit for two hours requires not only discerning musical taste, but also an ability to interweave the humour, intimacy, trendiness, and information that listeners expect from a broadcast. Spitulniks description of good deejaying on Zambian radio closely parallels the assessments of Perus contemporary huayno DJs, who also evaluate how skilfully the disc jockey blends a personalised commentary with time checks and channel identification . . . and with the musical selections themselves (Spitulnik 1994, p. 340). Huaman dexterously wove elements such as station identifications, time checks, song titles, artist names, and advertising, into a relentless patter that drove the overall mood of his programme. He continually drew on his repertoire of linguistic skills and verbal signifiers to communicate such elements with a mix of hip, worldly slang and local references, such that listeners were both reassured of his programmes cosmopolitanism and its personal relevance: that it was locally directed, and that they were fashionably hip for hearing it. Using local idioms and toponyms, saluting specific listeners around the city, his projection of familiarity made listeners aware that they were both personally addressed and part of a larger public that could recognize and appropriate the products of mediated cosmopolitanism as fast as Huaman deployed them. These various elements and functions typically interanimated one another across the broadcast. A sense of humour pervaded the entire show, often deployed via inside references of the kind that flesh out playful interactions between friends in daily life. It was often used improvizationally, to liven up
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aspects of the programme that would otherwise remain functional and dry, such as song introductions and advertisements: Lets go, with the Americas Orchestra, orchestra of the quack quack brothers, the ducks, the ducklings, Ronald and Hugo Dolorier . . .. Here at Frecuencia A, arriving to your homes courtesy of the Tres Mascaras clinic, of Dr Jorge Luis Fernandez, member of the Peruvian ophthalmo logic college, with a degree from the US. Dont trust self-trained doctors, trust a clinic where you get service from a professional, like Dr Fernandez. Hes always there, not like these dudes who, you know, they come, they go, theyll be back next week . . . what a lost cause! Your eyes need good attention. In these cases, a lighthearted reference to the nickname of local musician Hugo Dolorier, and a droll extrapolation upon a daily advertisement, each allow Huaman to turn even the most functional aspects of his programme into a source of amusement for listeners. A second, complementary mode of discourse that was pervasive over Huamans show was the evocation of romance, frequently building upon the songs themselves. This normally appeared during the instrumental lead-in, as Huaman dropped his voice to its lower range and softened his tone, often ending with a recitation of the opening lyrics: Also, a shout out to Sandra, Sandrita, where are you Sandra? Ah, there you are, a kiss for Sandra. And to you as well, a shout out to you, so you dont get sulky. And this song for you, for you with love: Tu eres angel de mi vida, angel de mis ilusiones [roughly, Youre the love of my life, love of my dreams]. Here, by insinuating an anonymous romantic intrigue, Huaman allows listeners to be drawn imaginatively into his personal space, suggesting an intimate rapport with his public. This passage also demonstrates a third key discursive activity of DJs, that of addressing specific listeners. Many of these comments are directed to Huamans personal acquaintances and sponsors, but they are also solicited by callers who respond to his invitation for requests. Fulfilling such requests and saluting callers by name establishes a sense that the programme is directly connected to the community itself. It audibly ties Huamans hip on-air persona to persons within the immediate milieu, assuring listeners that simply by picking up the phone, they can participate in his world of savvy cosmopolitanism. By engaging with potentially-recognizable locals day after day, he makes the public both audible and visible to itself, encourages the perception that the programme is identified with the community, and ties both to the global sphere.

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Huamans frequent mixture of local idiomatic expressions with a translocal colloquial vocabulary achieved a similar effect. His speech was liberally peppered with expressions that form a part of Perus street lexicon. He also drew on phrases particular to the Ayacucho region, especially cries of encouragement from traditional huayno performance, frequently using the Quechua language. These are especially used in performance to maintain forward motion, and to generate the atmosphere of fun attending musical consumption:
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A shout out to the hottie (cuerazo)! Yeah! Hey! Lets go . . . to the Muyurina Valley, where we met, and where you put horns on me (cuckolded me: me pusiste cachos). Sapachallan warmi! Ama waqaspalla! (Quechua: Lonely woman! Dont cry now!). In articulating contemporary huayno ayacuchano to an Andean middle-class public, DJs such as Huaman created both spaces in which to experience it, and drew upon their knowledge of radio stylistics to convince listeners that they could do so without fear of ridicule. They encouraged people to tune in by placing music within a discursive frame identified bourgeois leisure and cosmopolitan discourse. By 2001, these tactics had largely succeeded in redefining the public image of huayno ayacuchano, a fact well evidenced by its appearance on the cosmopolitan, youth-oriented station La Caribena, and by its massive presence in local and media channels, as well as the position that it later attained in Lima.

Conclusion
As contemporary huayno ayacuchano became a mass-mediated object, both a distinctive listening market and a distinct subject position took shape along with it. This identification between music and sociality was not merely a logical culmination of tendencies latent within the countrys changing social climate. The success of the style did not depend in any simple way upon the way that the music represented a pre-existing social group. Rather, artists and mediators organized audiences, linking them into a new kind of cosmopolitan Andean public. Publicly interpellating listeners, making them aware of counterparts hearing elsewhere within broadcast range, and tying the experience of radio listening to known locales in the vicinity, DJs helped individual consumers of huayno ayacuchano to understand themselves as members of a social entity with a historicity superseding the immediate moment of listening. It is in this way that radio publics take on social body: when radio listeners have an awareness of one another and a sense of simultaneous participation, they are more than just a social aggregate of

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listener who happen to use radio. They have a sense of intersubjectivity (Spitulnik 1994, p. 19). Understanding the mechanics of globalization requires attention to media networks and to the actions of such agents. Only by demonstrating how the vehicles of cosmopolitan identification are inserted into everyday life can a satisfying portrait of globalization, one that accounts for its unevenness and disjunct nature, be achieved. This allows for a description of how global processes both subvert and reproduce hegemonic aspects of local and translocal power relations. It is quite clear that contemporary huayno ayacuchanos success is at best an ambivalent victory for Andean public representation. In adapting it to the dominant discourses of respectability, which take affiliation with the Global North as the only legitimate mode of cosmopolitan identification, the styles mediators would in effect seem to have succumbed to the notion of Western superiority that has attended Peruvian colonialism for five centuries. As such, the account of music, media, and social change presented here brings with it none of the satisfying, counterhegemonic claims of liberating hybridity that often accompany studies of globalization. However, the case of huayno ayacuchana does show how mediators engage and redraw the categories imposed by local hegemonies. While submitting to dominant codes, mediators working with the tools they are granted do manage to reformulate such codes, just enough to create some space for powerful new ideas. The emergence and coherence of huayno ayacuchanos public may not portend a revolution in Andean representation. However, its existence as a distinct class of object is in and of itself a challenge to the historic Peruvian paradigm, premised on the swallowing up of Andean distinctiveness. It is precisely for this reason that the contexts and processes of globalization and cosmopolitan identification require more attention than they have so far received in studies of popular music. In order to understand how those involved with global processes get inside hegemonic structures, reworking them as best they can; in order to show how, as both agents of social change and as mediators of the hegemony, people manage to redirect the effects of broader social changes; studies of popular music must move beyond reading style and assuming that their subjects do the same. Instead, attending to the way that mediators create contexts in which to experience music, and showing the underlying conditions that legitimate such contexts, will aid in the creation of a theoretical toolkit for working effectively with globalization and cosmopolitanism.

Acknowledgements
This article is based on research conducted between 2001 and 2003 in Peru. Support is gratefully acknowledged from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological

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Research, and the University of Michigans Rackham School of Graduate Studies and Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. I would also like to thank Jonathan Ritter, Javier Leon, Jessaca Leinaweaver, and Paja Faudree, all of whom commented on some version of this piece in a most helpful way.

Notes
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This article is based primarily on eldwork carried out in Lima and Ayacucho, Peru, between 2001 and 2003. All citations are taken from interviews conducted by me during that period. In wide use since the colonial period as a term for persons of European or African heritage born in the New World, today criollo properly refers to that population, largely conned to Perus coastal region, that is considered to be non-Andean (neither indigenous nor mestizo) in terms of both cultural practice and descent. This is not to deny that the rhetorical shift to cosmopolitanism obeys other considerations as well: however, those studies focusing on vernacular cosmopolitanisms and the uneven distribution of global process is my main concern here. For other key studies of recording studio work see Greene and Porcello (2005) and Zak (2001). A similar approach, focusing on other media and methods of organization, is advocated in Thornton (1996). By the term mediator, I mean specically to designate those individuals who are involved in processes of musical distribution and sales, as opposed to those whose musical talents generate the sound contained in the wares that they circulate. A full account of this process would specify which global factors were selected to appeal to whom, by whom, the methods by which audiences were persuaded of their logic of compatibility. It would also assess the everyday situations in which ideas are appropriated by consumers, and in which they are deployed as positional markers. In this article, however, I limit myself to the actions of key agents working in the eld of folkloric radio: for a fuller discussion see Tucker (2005). It should be noted that Habermas has to a large extent disavowed studies adapting his ideas about the public sphere and public culture (Habermas 1989), which has substantially revised, expanded, and reconsidered his original work. See especially Fraser (1990), Calhoun (1992b), Spitulnik (1994), Gal and Woolard (2001b) and Warner (2002). Note that such an analysis does not assuage Habermass own fears about the etiolation of the democratic public sphere, wherein the rise of mass media and consumer society reduces the publics role to that of spectator. However, it does invite further scholarly specication of the consequences of this shift.

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12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19

Instead scholars have tended to provide broad histories of particular broadcasters without addressing the internal dynamics of radio work: see for example Laird (2005). Conversely, studies of talk radio, such as those collected in Scannell (1991), do not address popular music DJs. In accounting for the dearth of radio studies by popular music scholars it might also be suggested that the products of DJ work radio programmes do not lend themselves to the kind of rich, satisfying semiotic analysis to which many have been accustomed: pop radio does not generate narrative texts that can be deconstructed. Simultaneously, criollo society has retrenched, maintaining its authority and its distinct cultural practices at a social remove from the Andean invasion. Everyday citizens often use the term huayno to denote all music of the Peruvian Andes, treating this dominant song form as a synechdoche for traditional music in general. It is, however, popular in tourist-laden regions such as Cuzco and Puno. Fernando Cruz, director of La Voz de Huamanga, told me that an FM station could be set up, equipped, and begin running with $3000.00 or $4000.00 while founding an AM station meant an investment of more or less $20,000 to $30,000. There were, on average, 25 to 30 FM stations on the air at any given time in Ayacucho, a city of approximately 125,000, during this period. For a fuller account of these developments see Llorens Amico (1983, 1991). Many radio directors are also distrustful of the informal methods they say are actually employed by those who measure ratings. Similarly, many claim that ratings organizations are susceptible to bribery. I expect that these were meant to signal summer to listeners, despite the fact that Ayacucho is several hundred miles from the ocean.

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