Polysemic Sign Vehicle // Global Commodity : Commodifying Political Engagement Through Music?

In her article “Paul Simon’s Graceland, South Africa, and the Mediation of Musical Meaning,” ethnomusicologist Louise Meintjes invites her readers to consider how Graceland’s meaning and political stakes shift from individual to individual, depending on their positionality in relation to the context of the political implications of the work and how these implications interface with the listeners’ and producers’ identity. Meintjes notes that “the idea of collaboration is embedded in many levels of the music and musicmaking process…the ambiguity of its political orientation allows multiple interpretations of that collaboration..[and] interpretations of that collaboration are tied through icons and indices to listeners’ sense of themselves (linked to their positioning in social space [Bordieu 1984] so that their interpretations are felt to be true and natural.” (Meintjes, 38) She notes later on this page that the album’s success is predicated upon its validation of multivalent listening experiences. I’m curious about how we can consider this practice as a marketing strategy; in other words, if Meintjes accounts for the political, collective and individual meaning-making of Graceland, how does she and how can we contextualize this in neoliberal consumerist ideologies, and globalized capitalism more broadly? Can extend her argument to read the album’s success as a commodification of political engagement and political identity?