Stuart Hall Response - Zac Gottlieb

In his speech Ethnicity: Identity and Difference, Stuart Hall examines why and what people are exactly looking for when forming an identity. He said, “the logic of the discourse of identity assumes a stable subject, i.e., we’ve assumed that there is something which we can call our identity which, in a rapidly shifting world, has the great advantage of staying still. Identities are a kind of guarantee that the world isn’t falling apart quite as rapidly as it seems to be.” He says that these groups, classes, or categories provide people with the ability to feel steadiness in their lives through shared opinions or ideas. Even though identities are supposed to provide comfort in this way, ironically identities themselves are bound to evolve and reform constantly. This is due to societal contributions, history, and current events that influence and shape people’s opinion.

Music is one way or tool that enables people to “identify” with a group, movement, idea, opinion, or any entity of life. Artists compose works that provide a medium for their listeners to hear their personal emotions and thoughts and in turn provide an overall sense of the artist’s identity. Music provides the stability that Hall discusses because listeners are each able to personally form their own interpretations of said music, and are able to relate to these feelings and ideas at a current point in their lives. The fact that music and identities both share a dynamic state further allows music to act as a complex medium for “promoting” an identity. It continually evolves and artists form new genres with combinations of different types of music. The extremely large realm or music provides every sound imaginable and various lyrical varieties, but each ultimately engages in the same activity of forming identities.