The group went their separate ways immediately afterwards, and two seasons after release, this album is just another sluggish item on the shelves. To the contrary, what is vastly more evident is the overwhelming embrace of globalism by American musical aesthetics. This is globalism as consumption regime, whereas what needs specification is globalism as a site of aesthetic production. It is the most commonplace observation that the American music industry is a central beneficiary of economic globalism and its intellectual property regime. An aesthetic or style, as even the dullest art history student realizes, almost inevitably bears an intense relationship with the economic environment from where it emerges.
Examples are too numerous to mention.
For an artist to record for a major label in the United States today, or even a good number of smaller labels, is to accept participation in a paradigm of global capitalism. So it is hardly a surprise that the recording industry horizon is devoid of artists who carry messages that emphasize local economies, anti-capitalism, and opposition to the exploitation of international labor. Even local and regional musics become global products under transnational capitalism. When I stand amid the World Music racks poking about, there is a prevailing sense of commonality that transcends geography and musics, a sense that a First World consumer like myself has become the definition of international success. The market is where the money is, not where the people are.