Of Light Music. Pop Song and Neoliberalism in Three Fictions by Alberto Fuguet

Abstract

Chilean writer and film director Alberto Fuguet obtained a certain critica! prominence in the 90s as the creator of a Latin American version of Generation X. Fuguet's films and novels follow the lives of young people subjected to intense consumption of commodities, discourses, images, and icons from the media. A close analysis of the "soundtracks" of these narratives shows that, the relation between music and subjectivity is based on the commodity-like character of pop music and on the instrumentalization of the refrain's nostalgic power on a diegetic level, guiding the characters in their reintegration into the social order. While the plots of Mala Onda (1991), Por favor, rebobinar (1994) and Se arrienda (2005) seem to offer a criticism of the logic of the market economy, I will show that Fuguet's use of pop music serves to reinforce the rhetoric of exchange, the fetishism of commodities, and the commercial conception of youth culture, as well as his use of musical repetition serves to naturalize the "neoliberal consensus".