Conference Agenda

Around the turn of the twentieth century, a craze swept across the U.S. entertainment landscape. It began at one of many popular weekly amateur nights in New York City, where aspiring amateurs were offered an opportunity to display their talent for a voting audience and vie for fame. When a particularly bad tenor refused to surrender the stage, the panicked manager snatched a cane left backstage by a blackface performer and dragged the singer offstage by his throat. With a single gratifying yank, this cane underwent a transfiguration: it became an emblem of retribution against the untalented and undeserving, a prosthesis of democracy enacting the public’s condemnation, a protector of viewers’ valuable and finite attention. No longer a cane, it became the Hook. In vaudeville theatres nationwide, “Get the hook!” soon became a resounding refrain, chanted by overflowing audiences as eager to eradicate the unworthy as they were to discover new “talent.”

Drawing upon archival materials and work on vaudeville’s representative and influential role in early twentieth-century American culture (Monod 2020, Gebhardt 2017), this paper historicizes and theorizes the Hook’s crucial role as an object and an idea in vaudeville-era amateur nights. These early talent shows became exceptionally popular and pervasive during the Progressive era, which championed ideals like direct democracy, bureaucratic transparency, and upward mobility. This hopeful ethos, however, was inextricable from the coeval rise of exclusionary practices and policies across the country, from growing anti-immigrant sentiments to the nadir of American race relations (Logan 1954). I argue that the Hook offers a rich materialized theory (Bachelard 1984) of the exclusionary processes lurking behind every story of meritocratic uplift. The Hook’s cutting-down of audition times and culling of sonically offensive contestants was not an ornamental addition, but a fundamental one. In ceremonially marking talent’s “constitutive outside,” the Hook participated not only in a process of musical limitation, but of reification, transforming each musician’s multi-dimensional range of abilities—their “talent”—into an immediately recognizable and measurable possession.

In the early twentieth century, sound recording corporations from the United States and Europe captured musics from all over the world. They sent recording scouts abroad, recruited performers from the global South, and sometimes, instead of capturing sound or mobilizing people, they collected music scores to be arranged for and recorded by their house bands at their metropolitan headquarters. Rather than telling a simple story about the globalization of recorded sound, this narrative of musical collection constitutes one chapter in a long imperial history. In this paper, I examine the sound recording ventures of Victor, Columbia, Odeon, and other businesses in Latin America and the Caribbean in the broader context of (neo)colonial extractivism. By examining recording ledgers, recording scouts’ travelogues, and other corporate documentation, I frame these operations as an economy of talent. For these corporations, I argue, talent was a designation for musical labor. Although “talent” was ubiquitous in these recording and marketing endeavors, the word was used less to evaluate musicians’ abilities than to classify them as talent, that is, as recordable and profitable. The gesture towards “economy” is not metaphorical. Along multiple transactions around new sounding commodities, talent emerges as a currency in transnational flows of global capitalism. Building on the work of Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Dylan Robinson, and Kyle Devine, I ultimately discuss how the activities of recording scouts on behalf of transnational businesses were instrumental for the development of a unique kind of extractive economy—one not substantially different from the incursions of other corporations in pursuit of natural resources. As much as people in Latin America and the Caribbean represented a host of potential consumers, their cultural practices offered a rich resource pool of raw materials for the ongoing development of novel products for mass consumption. Along with oil, copper, manganese, nickel, iron, cinchona, rubber, banana, and other natural resources, vernacular musics by local musicians were part of the extractive economies that nurtured the industrial and imperial growth of the United States, England, Germany, and France in the early twentieth century.

In contemporary India, “talent” is a densely multivalent term that at once indexes an individual’s musical potential while pointing to the possibility of a previously unimaginable social mobility. This paper examines the proliferation and reformulation of understandings of “talent” through Indian reality music television shows following India’s market liberalization in the 1990s. Drawing on my reading of two early music competition TV shows – SaReGaMa and Indian Idol – I elucidate a shift that took place from the 1990s to 2000s in terms of the qualities that “talent” was understood to encapsulate, the social and economic value it held, and the kinds of ideological work it could perform. In comparison to SaReGaMa’s emphasis on musical labor and skill, Indian Idol offered a compelling understanding of “talent” as natural, innate, and therefore socially unmarked, such that the show could brand itself as a meritocracy wherein "pure talent" transcends the social structures of class and caste. Drawing on my ethnographic research with media producers and musical entrepreneurs, I trace how this newly fetishized conception of talent has subsequently emerged as the primary commodity of the reality music TV industry. Now understood to reside in the bodies of performing individuals, yet not controlled by them, “talent” becomes a form of biocapital to be extracted and speculated upon. I place this conception of “talent” in the context of India’s globalizing economy and ideals of labor under global neoliberal economic regimes. In this broader context, ascriptions of “talent” function as claims to embodied value and as a cipher for discussing which lives merit further investment. This paper thus contributes to the scant literature that critically interrogates musical “talent” (Kingsbury 1988, Nettl 1995, Wright 2023) and associated discourses of meritocracy on reality music television shows (Stahl 2013, Meizel 2011, Wright 2024) to argue that “talent” becomes an argument for granting social mobility to a select few while obscuring the structures of inequality that continue to keep so many in poverty and precarity, in India and beyond.