Popular music from Greenland – Globalization, nationalism and performance of place. This thesis is based on fieldwork done within the popular music scene in Greenland from 2008 to 2014. It engages with the question of how music and conceptions of the nation (Greenland) affect each other in social spaces, and analyses on how popular music can be used to construct senses of place and situate individuals within these places. The thesis is centered on four articles that engage with Greenlandic popular music from different perspectives. The first article looks at the historical development in inducing a sense of place in popular music. The second probes different strategies for co-branding popular music and Greenland. The third is concerned with music consumption patterns among Greenlandic youth. And the fourth article engages with an alternative form of nationalism found within the Nuuk underground scene.
These topics are mainly discussed by use of globalization, nationalism and performance theory, while also looking towards human geography to explain how places can be experienced through music. It is concluded in this thesis, that Greenlandic popular music, to a large extent, gains social significance as a forum for imagining idealized versions of ‘the national’ and thereby affect individual experiences of the nation.