Popular Culture and Material Life

Popular music and dance traditions are frequently rooted in specific regions before circulating globally, carrying that regional identity with them. Reggae music developed in Jamaica in the late 1960s, closely tied to the Rastafari movement and to artists such as Bob Marley, who carried the genre, and the social and spiritual outlook behind it, to a worldwide audience. K-pop, South Korea's highly produced pop music genre, has more recently driven the broader "Hallyu," or Korean Wave, of cultural exports across Asia and beyond. Flamenco, born among the Romani and Andalusian communities of southern Spain, combines song, guitar, and dance into a tradition recognized by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage. Highlife, which developed in Ghana and elsewhere in West Africa in the early twentieth century, blended traditional Akan melodic and rhythmic forms with Western instruments introduced through colonial contact, producing a genre that in turn shaped later West African popular music.