Between Two Monsters: Popular Music, Visual Media, and the Rise of Global Indie in 21st Century Uruguay

This dissertation chronicles the rise of "indie" music and sensibilities among the first generation of young artists to come of age alongside digital media in Montevideo since 2002. Combining an ethnographically and historically detailed case study with interdisciplinary approaches to culture and political economy, I analyze the practices and discourses through which these artists position themselves between the state and the market, and explore how popular music and the visual culture that surrounds it harness social meaning in the context of accelerating global mediation.;The investigation opens with a historical account of the relationship between carnival and rock music in Uruguay, exploring changing concepts of the national, the popular and the oppositional. Several ethnographically grounded chapters then explore the social and aesthetic dimensions of creative practice within the scene that defines itself as "independent" from national and international mainstreams in Uruguay. Examining graphic design, performance and music videos, I trace how the multimedia productions of these artists provoke social tension among artists, critics and audiences. I argue that the anxieties about class and sexuality that surround these aesthetic representations of cosmopolitan aspirations refigure dynamics of knowledge-power associated with connoisseurship, and earlier debates about the relationship between musical taste and political commitments. These discussions also reveal how young Uruguayan artists negotiate shifting concepts of popular authenticity, and imagine their subjective relationships to the local and global past, present and future.;The final two chapters explore the relationship between this sphere of contemporary cultural production and recent political and economic transformations that have occurred in Uruguay as the country has recovered from a major financial crisis in 2002 amid a broad "left turn" in national and regional politics. Exploring the audiovisual and music industries, government cultural policy initiatives and artists' practices of entrepreneurship, I argue that both significant contradictions and major parallels exist between official discourses and the activities of cultural producers. Ultimately, these discussions suggest a comprehensive framework for thinking about the multiple and shifting meanings of cultural citizenship in the 21st century.