Emerging from the Darkness: Irish Rock, Modernity, and Anxiety 1979-1990.

This article examines the linkage between the rise of Irish rock music and the conquest of the economy by an aggressively neo-liberal regime. Did the former merely «reflect’ the latter, or did the cultural ambassadorship of bands such as U2 and the Cranberries manifest a «soft power’ that enabled the economic transformation that followed and inaugurate a new representation of Ireland and Irishness? Using contemporary accounts of the country as it looked then, and looking back from the aftermath of the crash of 2008 that devastated the still novel prosperity, I ask how we may understand rock music, not as a countercultural force, but rather as a modernizing agent, very much in step with a neoliberal economic project.