La unificación de los modos de vida en la modernidad tardía. La música popular y la desaparición de lo rural en el caso español

Abstract

In this late modernity, one of the characteristics of western societies is the unification of lifestyles. The old rural/urban dichotomy today lacks meaning, since human experience in both housing contexts each day moves closer to a unified model we might unambiguously refer to as urban (this term now being more the definition of homogeneous ways of behavior than a population type). Within this framework, it is highly pertinent to examine one of the timeless phenomena which currently acquires a special significance: the music we term traditional and which is of oral transmission (beyond its better known features, generically called folklore). This music contains some of the keys to the interpretation of the dichotomy referred to above and this generalization of lifestyles which I refer to as urban, and which, increasingly, lacks contraposition to other models that an old intellectual inertia called rural.