Reviewed Elsewhere: Morgan James Luker, The Tango Machine: Musical Culture in the Age of Expediency.

Lars Fischer Discussion

Morgan James Luker. The Tango Machine: Musical Culture in the Age of Expediency. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 218 pp. $90,00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-38554-9.

In recent years, music scholarship in Argentina has largely focused on tango, especially concerning the history of the genre and the various identity politics associated with the music and dance. Rather than focusing on defining tango as a genre, Morgan James Luker's The Tango Machine: Musical Culture in the Age of Expediency explores what tango does for Argentina, and how. Framing his narrative around George Yúdice's The Expediency of Culture (2003), Luker explains how tango has become a mode of cultural production that advances numerous political, social, and economic agendas from a multitude of actors after Argentina's neoliberal turn in the 1990s. These "managerial regimes," as he calls them, include tango artists, nonprofit organizations, transnational societies, and record labels, among others. Luker argues that "cultural-policy making has become the key mediator of cultural practice and artistic life at all levels and in nearly all places" (180), and as such, it must be considered a critical component of contemporary music scholarship.
 
Drawing primarily on fieldwork from 2004 to 2007, nearly every chapter begins with an ethnographic vignette, which then transitions into the goals and practices of a specific type of managerial regime. ...
 
Interdisciplinary in nature, The Tango Machine will likely serve as a useful resource for performers, historians, cultural policy makers, and scholars in heritage studies and Latin American studies, in addition to ethnomusicology. The strongest point of this book is its impeccable balance of music, history, economics, and cultural policy making that negotiates the complex relationships between sound, heritage, tourism, and politics. The framework is broad enough to prove relevant to other musical genres in Latin America and beyond. Luker includes just enough historical background on Argentina and tango to make the book a valuable resource for a much wider audience, without diminishing its value to specialists in the region or genre. ...
 
Despite the choice to focus on a narrower scope of examples throughout the book, the case studies that Luker analyzes still prove effective, and readers can easily apply the observations he makes on Buenos Aires to tango elsewhere. Overall, The Tango Machine makes an important contribution to music scholarship on Latin America, as it clearly and concisely analyzes the complex relationships of cultural, social, political, and economic actors involved in the age of expediency.