Nor-tec Rifa!

In September of 2010, the Daily Mail Reporter announced "Anti-immigration party formed from skinhead movement seizes balance of power in Sweden." A politics of skinhead protest, expressed through White Power Music and an explicitly nationalistic subgenre known as Viking Rock, has relied on its music to voice opposition to immigration and multiculturism. Often labeled "neo-Nazis" or "right-wing extremists," these actors shook political establishmentsthroughout Sweden, Denmark, and Norway during the 1980s and 1990s by rallying around white power music and skinhead subculture. More recently, however, these groups methodically revised their presentation in an effort to refashion themselves as upstanding, intelligent champions of love and human diversity, and onceagain using music to do so. In Lions of the North: Sounds of the New Nordic Radical Nationalism, author Benjamin Teitelbaum explores this transformation of anti-immigrant, anti-liberal activism in the Nordic countries as it manifests in thought and sound. As his fieldwork in Sweden overlapped with Anders Behring Breivik's attacks in 2011, Teitelbaum observed the radical nationalist movement at a particularly sensitive moment. Offering a rare ethnographic glimpse into controversial and secretive politicalmovements, Lions of the North investigates changes in the music nationalists make and patronize, reading their surprising new music styles as attempts to escape stereotypes and fashion a new image for themselves. Teitelbaum's work reveals organized opposition to immigration and multiculturalism in Scandinavia to be ascene in flux, populated by individuals with diverse understandings of themselves, their cause, and the significance of music. Ultimately, he uncovers the ways in which nationalists use music to frame themselves as agents of justice, an image that is helping to propel these actors to unprecedented success in societies often considered the most tolerant in the world. A timely and powerful work of interdisciplinary ethnomusicology, Lions of the North will appeal to a wide audience, from scholarsin the humanities to those in political science.At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Nor-tec phenomenon emerged from the border city of Tijuana, and through modern Internet technology quickly conquered a global audience. Marketed as a kind of "ethnic" electronic dance music, Nor-tec samples sounds of traditional music from the north of Mexico, transforming these sounds through computer technology used in European and American techno music and electronica. Mostly middle-class artists in their thirties, andwith few exceptions all from Tijuana, Nor-tec musicians tend to avoid the mainstream music industry's channels, distributing works instead through the underground, global means of the Internet, enabling a loyal international following to grow rapidly. Perched on the border between Mexico and the United States, Tijuana has media links to both countries, with peoples, currencies, and cultural goods -perhaps especially music- from both sides circulating intensely within the city. Tijuana's older residents and their more mobile, cosmopolitan-minded children thus engage in a constant struggle with identity and nationality, appropriation and authenticity. Nor-tec music in its very composition encapsulates this city's struggle. It resonates withissues felt on the global level, while holding vastly different meanings to the variety of communities that embrace it. In Nor-tec Rifa!, Alejandro L. Madrid crafts a fascinating account of this music and the city that fostered its birth. With an impressive hybrid of musicology, ethnomusicology, cultural and performance studies, urbanism, and border studies, Nor-tec Rifa! offers compelling insights into the cultural production of Nor-tec as it stems from ortena, banda, and grupera traditions. The book is also amongst the first to offer detailed accounts of Nor-tec music's compositionprocess.