Music is a vessel of communication that allows people to express emotion and meaning, even if the artist’s spoken language is not comprehensible to the listener. (HARGREAVES, MIELL and MACDONALD, 1997). Due to technological development and the increasing commercialisation of music over the last two decades, music has become a greater part of our everyday lives. Music can construct and express an individual’s identity through direct experiences that it offers the body, time and sociability. This can enable us to place ourselves in similar and different cultural narratives than our own. Performers use their music as a platform to express their assessments of the world but also as a vehicle for social change. Our musical taste and preferences can form an important statement of our values, attitudes and identity. Attali suggests that music has a responsibility to society and acts as catalyst for social revolution and political transformation. In this essay, I will explore music in relation to political identity, primarily focusing on music’s role in mobilising a culture of resistance during the Arab Springs and how it was used as political communication and identity.

Music in identity concerns how we use music as a means or resource for developing and or expressing aspects of our individual identities. Essentially, music is a social activity that we do with and for others, either as a listener or as a creator. Research evidence suggests that the social functions of music are manifested in three principal ways for the individual, specifically in managing interpersonal relationships, mood and self-identity (Hargreaves and North, 1999a). People use music as a tool to develop and negotiate interpersonal relationships, as individual’s musical preferences can express the social group they do and don’t belong to. Furthermore, a cumulative quantity of evidence displays the relationship between music and mood. Music is used to regulate moods and that is further facilitated by the immediate social environment in which listening takes place. The third and most important social function of music lies in constructing and developing an individual’s sense of identity.

To understand the relationship between music and political identity is to understand that identity is mobile. As ethnomusicologist, Simon Firth noted identity is not fixed but it is a process with the idea of the self as focus and unchanging core of an individual’s personality, which has allowed for a less fixed and a more dynamic view of the self. Identity is fundamentally self-in-process which is constantly being reconstructed through experiences of music; whether making music or listening to it and interactions with others. Social constructionist theories suggest that identity is created through interactions with other people and that people have multiple identities rather than one core one as Firth suggested. Burner (1990), however, suggests that the concept of narrative identities which are continuous stories that we construct throughout over lives. Therefore, Burner and Firth agree that we have one core identity which is “a relatively unchanging sense of self that has a history”, rather than the shifting and multiple identities