Strategies for Non-Essentialist Listening
This article was created to accompany a text that appeared in the edited volume entitled “Music and Globalization: Critical Encounters” (Indiana University Press, 2012). For more information, visit: http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/a/MUSGLP
Sound is the same for all the world
Everybody has a heart
Everybody gets a feeling
Let’s play! Sound box!
Rock, reggae, jazz, mbalax
All around the world…the same
Pachanga, soul music, rhythm and blues…the same
La samba, la rumba, cha-cha-cha…the same
Sound is the same for all the world
Everybody has a heart
Everybody gets a feeling
Mbaqanga, ziglibiti, high life music…the same
Merengue, funk, Chinese music…the same
Bossa nova, soul makossa, rap music…the same
Come on people, dance
Everybody in the world has a culture
Believe what you believe
Respect your customs
Everybody must do what the heart says
Don’t cause trouble; Treat people well
Be sociable; Exchange ideas
Music is the same the world over
Musicians, too, are cut from the same cloth
We’re aiming to entertain you
(Youssou N’dour, “The Same”, Sony/Columbia, 1992)
Music is often presented as a form of cultural expression that is capable of bringing cultures closer together and teaching about tolerance, a kind of promise to respect and honor cultural diversity. Steven Feld (2000) argues that discourses about “world music” tend to take one of two forms.
The first, which he refers to as a discourse of anxiety, is critical not only of globalization, but also of its composite elements: capital, modernity and technology.
The second discourse is one of celebration and is interested either in the genius of human spirit (using concepts such as resistance, appropriation and agency) or in the universal potential of humanity, perhaps most fully embodied in the millennial expression “global village”.
Taking Feld’s observations as a starting point, I would like to further explore the discursive patterns that enable promoters of world music to bring this form of music to potential consumers. The promotion of world music rests on a number of motifs or figures that are not always explicit, but that work together to reinforce a community of taste around this category of music.
—Bob W. White
In the context of world music, hybridity is either presented as a space of liminality between two worlds (neither here nor there, but in between), one that can just as easily be emancipatory or tragic (compare with Homi Bhabha’s notion of “third space”) or as a source of potential strength since cultural hybrids are able to free themselves from the chains of tradition by adding on successive layers of strategic identity.
In a fascinating debate on recent critiques of hybridity, Jan Nederveen Pieterse argues that “[h]ybridity is a journey into the riddles of recognition. Take any exercise in social mapping and it is the hybrids that are missing” (2001, 220). This point is well taken, but the case of world music suggests that discourses of hybridity (at least with regards to the products of culture) are not as marginal as they may have once been.
Pieterse refers to the “world music model of hybridity” as an example of how the longue durée of hybridity has been ignored in recent critiques, but this dismissal signals a certain discomfort with the observation that hybridity increasingly makes good marketing sense.
For fans of “world music”, cultural hybridity is valued not only because it combines desirable aspects of several identities (thus representing the possibility of having the “best of all worlds”), but also because it is the protagonist of an epic myth of the future: a world without racism, without hate, and with a multitude of colors living together in harmony and style.
—Bob W. White
For many consumers of world music, buying a CD constitutes a gesture of solidarity between the consumer and the artist, who represents (or at least stands for) people that are struggling for economic and political survival.
In this way, participating in the world music phenomenon can be seen as a political and social gesture that enables consumers to project their desire for global social change and express their support, albeit symbolically, for people who struggle every day with the injustice of poverty and underdevelopment.
The promotion of world music has always relied on the presence of a certain number of artists who use music as platform to speak out against poverty and injustice. The best example of this is probably the reggae superstar Bob Marley.
—Bob W. White
Thomas Mapfumo and Manu Chao are good examples of how political activism is used in the promotion of world music, and they are far from being the exception. The image of the “rebel” is often accompanied by a story of exile, in part because this creates a link of sympathy because of what he or she experienced as an economic or political refugee
—Bob W. White
The desire to encounter the Other through world music is fraught with risks, especially if the self’s primary objective is the possibility of having an encounter. There are multiple reasons for wanting to meet an Other (education, information, services, wealth, etc.).
But regardless of the self’s objectives, inter-cultural encounters can always lead to the desire to learn more about the individual, social and cultural complexity of people who are different from us. How many people have discovered a musical genre in all of its historical and stylistic complexity after having discovered a hit song or an international star of the same genre?
World music is not a problem per se; it becomes a problem when the listener-consumer makes claims about the world via music without making the effort to go beyond the simple projection of a personal listening utopia. If there is one promise we should make to the Other it is not to love his or her music; with the seemingly endless amount of different musics available to us today, that would be much too simple. The promise that we should make to the Other is to do the work to let ourselves be destabilized by what lies behind the music.
—Bob W. White
