Busking, i.e., street performance in public spaces for donations, has been associated with cultural activities and urban life for centuries. While some buskers play for fun, acknowledgment, practice purposes, creative self-fulfillment, and the realization of an alternative and romanticized lifestyle, others are in constant struggle for survival. For the latter, the most lucrative places, the attention of the fleeting public, and the ability to earn their living through busking are of existential importance. The situation for buskers is becoming increasingly complicated as public spaces worldwide have been transformed under rampant neo-liberal conditions where market-driven policies dominate. These conditions also more directly affect buskers’ living conditions through ever-rising rents and the lack of insurance – especially in times of crisis, as the (after)effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have shown. This paper illustrates that older artists are particularly affected by these transformation processes. Based on online ethnography, participant observation, and narrative interviews conducted with buskers in New York City, this paper focuses on the realities and well-being of older buskers. Using a narrative-biographic approach, it provides insights into their life paths and associated self-concepts; it identifies their individual physical and psychological challenges associated with these transformations and examines the (stress) factor aging itself and its effects on musicianship and artist performance practices. Rooted in Ethnomusicology and Public Health, this paper forms the basis for an effective debate on the deficits and challenges musical life in urban spaces faces and highlights buskers’ dependence on governmental and societal support to maintain their well-being.

This paper explores pumba performance as a site of negotiation between class, gender, and digital economies in contemporary South Korea. Once associated with itinerant performers and working-class survival strategies, pumba has been increasingly performed by elderly artists. While state-supported silver culture promotes senior participation in cultural production, pumba remains an overlooked genre within this institutional framework. Beyond its marginal status, pumba is also undergoing a transformation through digital platforms, where livestreamed performances, fan-driven economies, and online donations reshape performer-audience relationships. While pumba’s improvisational humor and vocal exaggeration resonate with elements of K-pop fan culture—such as direct engagement with audiences and the proliferation of fancam-style videos—its aesthetic and sociopolitical position remain distinct.

Drawing on Butler’s (1990) performativity and Berlant’s (2011) affective labor, this study examines how elderly pumba performers construct alternative forms of celebrity that challenge dominant imaginaries of aging and artistic legitimacy. Additionally, informed by Bourdieu’s (1984) notion of cultural capital, I investigate how pumba negotiates hierarchical distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ performance cultures, particularly as its visibility grows in digital spaces. Through ethnographic research and performance analysis, this paper situates pumba within broader discussions of sonic labor, digital economies, and performative labor, arguing that it disrupts binaries of tradition and modernity, street performance and online entertainment, marginality and mainstream recognition. Ultimately, this research contributes to ethnomusicological discourses on the evolving intersections of performance, technology, and aging in late capitalist societies.

In northern Mozambique’s coastal provinces, veterano (veteran) night clubs are a pillar of social life for the 50+ demographic, and in particular, the generation of Mozambicans who came of age in the 1960s and 70s and lived through the civil war. On weekends and holidays, elders dance to popular music from their youth, and host events with other clubs where dancers show off their skills, while also forming and maintaining relationships. For many participants, listening and dancing to old songs with friends “kills nostalgia” for the past, and in so doing, rejuvenates the body and emotional wellbeing. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic research in veterano clubs and interviews with DJs and dancers in the coastal district of Pebane to examine how, in night club spaces, music is a “technology of care” (Sykes 2018) that heals and uplifts, and is central to how aging people mediate relationships with others, the self, and those who have passed on. I analyze how musical care is enacted within two relationships central to dance-floor activity: first, in the relationship between the DJ and audiences during song selection; and second, as dancers care for their aging bodies by ‘playing ’at being young on the dance floor. Bringing together anthropological theories of care with scholarship on elderly social dance cultures, I argue that in the absence of formal care institutions for the elderly, veterano participants engage in musical care to imagine and prepare for their futures by revisiting their pasts in night club settings.