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

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

Rarámuri violin music in a cross-border space

One of the more illuminating encounters I had during my fieldwork in Mexico took place on the outskirts of El Paso, Texas.  I had been studying Raramuri Indian violin music in the Sierra Tarahumara, a mountainous region in the southern part of the state of Chihuahua.

Heading home for a break between grants, I happened to pass through El Paso when some of the Rarámuri men I knew were performing a traditional dance at a museum on the edge of town.  They didn’t know that I was coming to see them, and I didn’t know, as I arrived in the morning after an arduous drive north from Chihuahua City, that they had commandeered the museum’s rest room as an impromptu backstage.

Absent-mindedly pushing open the door, I found myself surrounded by men from the hamlet of Coyachique, festooned in the bright bandanas and headdresses of the Matachin costume, jostling for space amidst the stalls and cinder block.  We did a double take and broke into laughter at the strangeness of meeting in such a place, far outside the normal science context of ‘fieldwork’ that we all, in our different ways, had come to take for granted.

—David Noveck

Rarámuris countered with their own construal of indigenous locality, but in a more subtly coded way.  During the dance, the Rarámuri fiddler made prominent use of a tune called Semati Siyoname or “beautiful blue (sky).”  The tune is something of an anthem for Rarámuris.

—Noveck

Rarámuris play the violin throughout their ritual and home life, and at times it provides an opportunity for Rarámuri men to travel and perform in southern Mexico, the US, and at times in Europe.  However, Rarámuris don’t see the violin as a specifically Rarámuri tradition, but rather a subset of a shared, circulating form of music, within which they have crafted a particular style.

The violin thus has an ambivalent status in the Sierra Tarahumara, since it is considered at once an emblem of European high culture and an icon of Rarámuri particularity.  Musically, it embodies intimately local, felt and lived spaces even while it circulates globally in recorded, decontextualized form.

As an object, it exists both as commodity and tool, an object in itself and a means to another end.  The instrument is thus centrally important in the extent to which it links up the production of indigenous locality with transnational circuits of movement and exchange.

—David Noveck

The sonic center of the performance was a Rarámuri violin, but it seemed ill suited to the space, its sound dwarfed by the vastness of the surrounding desert.

Meanwhile, the mixture of European and Indigenous qualities in the Matachines form – a quadrille dance with a Christian background, European costume (bandanas, boots and crowns), and music supplied by a violin and guitar – clashed with American expectations of untouched indigeneity (Iannielo 1988; Delgado 2008).

—David Noveck

It was this resonance of the violin that underlay a plan to bring Rarámuris to Cremona, Italy, the storied birthplace of the modern violin, in order to learn the techniques of modern violin making [...]  The Italians sought to integrate Rarámuri practices of playing and making the violin into a European story about the instrument and its universality.  Verplancken and the Italians concurred with each other, then, in valuing the cultural wealth of the Sierra and its material embodiment in objects of art.  They worked together, each one reinforcing the other’s imagined universes of value. But the expectation of commonality could also serve as a source of tension.

—David Noveck

  The Rarámuris’ use of the violin complicates the question: humiliation from one angle could like success from another.  Hence in Italy, learning to make a violin was less important than the journey itself and the chance to valorize Rarámuri traditions on a world stage, both of which could be converted, on returning to the Sierra, into wider prestige and perhaps greater wealth for one’s own family.

In El Paso, Rarámuris could use the violin to make a subtle riposte to the dominant discourse of Indigeneity on display at the museum.  In this sense it was part of a more pugnacious stance, which came to light as Rarámuris conflicted with Fisher over the terms of their pay.

The violin fits into an ethos of “chingando al Gringo” – in essence, playing the system to invert its terms.  By redefining themselves as culturally valuable they blunt their own domination as ‘blacks’ and ‘animals’.

Rather than do away with the language of racial domination in the Sierra, Rarámuri men perhaps want only to claim it’s efficacy for themselves.

—David Noveck

For more information, visit:  http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/a/MUSGLP

Since the early 1980s I have been tracking “world music.” I place that term immediately in quotes to indicate that I don’t use it transparently, as a benign generic gloss for human musical diversity. Rather, my interest is specifically in “world music” as a label of industrial origin, a label that refers to an amalgamated global marketplace of sounds as ethnic commodities. Once more idiosyncratically and unevenly collected and circulated under labels like “primitive,” “folk,” “ethnic,” “race,” “traditional,” “exotic,” or “international” music, today’s “world music” tells a new story.

It’s a story about intersections of transnational capital, global economic niche expansion, technological ubiquity, and the contradictions of aesthetic pluralism and product homogenization.

It’s a story about the shaping power of a global recording industry that sees the marketplace as the actual arbiter and guarantor of musical authenticity.

This is to argue that the existence of the category of “world music” –-like the existence of the category of  “fine art” examined by Fred Myers (2001) in The Empire of Things­— derives from and is chiefly dependent on the marketplace, and not from formal genre distinctions, autonomous aesthetic qualities, or geographic categories.

— Steven Feld

Listen to Brian Eno’s My Life in Bush of Ghosts here.

Alongside the production of these anxious narratives, “world music” has consistently, indeed, dialectically, produced a much more frequent narrative, of celebration. It’s this celebratory narrative that sees “world music” as indigeneity’s champion and best friend.

This celebratory narrative sees musical hybridity and fusion as cultural signs of unbounded and deterritorialized identities.

It sees the production of both indigenous autonomy and cultural hybridity as unassailable global positives, moves that signify the desire for greater cultural respect, tolerance, and blending.

Here is where celebratory discourse virtually proclaims “world music” synonymous with anti-essentialism, with borderlessness, with cultural free-flow, with a futurist hope or prediction of greater cultural and economic equilibrium.

— Steven Feld

Anxious narratives tend toward sharper focus on economics and power. They emphasize how the music marketplace is structurally founded on historical inequities in the areas of copyright, royalty structures, ownership regimes, and access to the market.

They insist that the industry is currently organized in ways that typically reproduce and amplify these fundamental inequities. Celebratory narratives tend toward sharper focus on how pleasure and participation enhance new connections and close old gaps.

They emphasize new possibilities, new forms of recognition and the potential for respect they bring. In short, both anxious and celebratory narratives of “world music” embed a fraught cultural politics of nostalgia, that is, they each are deeply linked to the management of senses of loss and renewal in the modern world. And they each involve complex suspicions and idealizations about notions like resistance and survival, or tradition and heritage.

My project is devoted to untangling some of the strands of suspicion and idealization that bind anxious and celebratory narratives. It is in this mutualism and interdependence, this play “from schizophonia to schismogenesis” that I locate the social core of the “world music” story (Feld 1994, 2000).

— Steven Feld

 

World music was not quite a newly emergent market category when My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was released on LP in February 1981.

But the LP certainly heralded a great deal of what was to come in the 80’s and 90’s under the banners of “world music” as well as “world beat” and “ethno-techno” —the two sub-genre terms that most overtly celebrate exotic alterity as danceable hybridity.

— Steven Feld

Read an Interview with Brian Eno by Sandy Robertson (1981) “The Life of Brian in the Bush of Ghosts, here

Most importantly, all of this takes place in an aesthetic space that is dominated by dance music, by the allure of physical participation and its promise of bodily pleasure.

Danceability is what sold pop and rock music, and danceability was well understood by Eno and Byrne to be the critical step in resignification, the commodity phase where the exotic tease never strips the familiar.

Again the anxious question about virtual religion comes into focus: Is MLBG, then or now, a simulacrum of increased spiritual contact that masks an unexamined reproduction of increased spiritual distance?

— Steven Feld

Globalization, Music and Cultural Identity in Contemporary Vanuatu

For more information, visit:  http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/a/MUSGLP

Bolton (1999) explores the modern ni-Vanuatu notion of kastom and the manner in which it has developed through – and in interrelation with – oral history projects, radio and the activities of the Vanuatu Kaljural Senta and offers a definition of kastom as “practices understood to derive from the pre-colonial past” (1999: 335). William Miles concurs but qualifies this further, deeming the term to refer to a set of diverse indigenous practices that were recently re-conceptualised as an aggregate in order “to incarnate indigenous cultural authenticity in opposition to colonialism” (ibid: 59).

—Philip Hayward

Around 1960, prior to the introduction of radio broadcasting in The New Hebrides, a shortly weekly programme of topical items was compiled by three French residents in Port Vila for broadcast through Radio Noumea (in the French colony of Nouvelle Caledonie – known in English as New Caledonia) and was able to be picked up by radio receivers in the New Hebrides.

The program included local music and stories and was introduced each week by a short song, entitled ‘Kavelicolico’ sung in local language by its Ifira Island composer. Bolton notes that the song was so popular that “the program was known, and is remembered, as Radio Kavelicolico” (ibid, 339).

Received best in the north and central parts of the archipelago, the service was a significant promulgator of a nascent national identity (albeit within a francophone language frame) and was also significant for the diffusion of stringband music.

—Philip Hayward

For ni-Vanuatu, contact with Americans in 1942-45 offered an alternative model of both the benefits of engagement with westerners and of the nature of inter-racial relations in general.

—Philip Hayward

By the early 1960s stringband music was widely performed in informal social contexts around Port Vila, various parts of Shefa province (ie central Vanuatu) and, according to some reports,in the national ‘second city’ of Luganville (on Espiritu Santo). In many ways, with its pan-regional musical style and appeal, stringband music provided a new vernacular music for displaced islanders around Port Vila and, by association, New Hebrideans as a whole.

—Philip Hayward

Given the limited access to electricity outside Port Vila – let alone computers or internet file sharing networks – the local industry’s engagement with national and international markets has primarily been through more traditional products and transactions.

—Philip Hayward

The life of the Senegambian Afro-Cuban singer Laba Sosseh challenges this rigid vantage point and undermines many of the facile suppositions on world music scholarship.

Sosseh was born March 12, 1943 in the “half died city” section of Banjul (then Bathurst), the capital of the Gambia, into a notable griot family.

Sosseh devoted his energy between the 1960s until his death on September 20, 2007, to expanding musical exchanges between West Africa and the Caribbean, two developing regions, by skirting the usual international circuits of cultural exchange.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Sosseh championed a more authentic Cuban style of performing Afro-Cuban music in Africa.   In the 1980s, he reversed direction by pioneering the spreading of an Africanized salsa to the United States and the Caribbean.

In the years before his death, he attempted to introduce his style of Cuban music to Communist Cuba itself.  Sosseh’s career charts an artistic trajectory outside the globalization and cultural imperialist world music paradigms.  Assessing his work spatially reorients dominant world music models and restores agency to non-western performers.

—Richard M. Shain

In particular, Sosseh’s success raises questions about the demographics of global music publics and the role of western cultural influence and economic dominance in molding “world musics”.  As Timothy Taylor persuasively points out in another chapter of this book, from a North American or British perspective, world music audiences overlap with classical music publics, sometimes even poaching from them.This group while not large is highly educated, cosmopolitan and prosperous.

—Richard M. Shain

Listen to some of Laba Sosseh’s songs:

Son Soneate

Diokma Sa Loxo

Con El Paso

Maricosa

Seyni

Sola

Sitiera

Aminata

Sosseh’s career also contradicts the argument that economic structures of dominance always determine the direction and nature of transnational cultural flows and that pervasive western influence is always at the heart of world musics.

—Richard M. Shain

Until the 1950s, Senegalese only knew Cuban music through these recordings and radio broadcasts.   However, in the postwar period, Senegalese musical groups began to perform “covers” of Afro-Cuban music. These bands went through a long apprenticeship to approximate a Cuban sound.  Initially, they played Afro-Cuban music note for note, chord for chord, word for word by listening to records repeatedly.

—Richard M. Shain

According to Sosseh, he and the Cuban-American and Puerto Rican musicians he recorded with faced few obstacles in discovering a common musical language, a tribute to his mastery of Afro-Cuban musical forms and the other musicians’ openness to new ideas

—Richard M. Shain

Laba Sosseh’s career is replete with ironies.  He began as an agent of globalization in his own society but in the latter part of his life, he engaged in a globalization in reverse.  An individual of great renown in West Africa, he mostly labored in obscurity in the United States, outside of the Caribbean Hispanic communities.

It is unlikely that many who heard his music over the radio in New York and Miami knew he was Gambian.  Even fewer realized that his work constituted a daring intervention into the complicated terrain of diasporic cultural politics, creating “world music” before that term had been invented.

For many, living “on the hyphen” induces psychological anxiety and cultural confusion with troubling feelings of marginality and liminality.  Sosseh was able to avoid this “nervous condition” by living in the hyphen.  Like Léopold Senghor who lived a very different life, choosing to spend his later years in France instead of Senegal, Sosseh was a true cosmopolitan at home in the world.

For Sosseh, living in the hyphen engendered groundbreaking music and a deeper sense of his Africanité.  Rather than being caught between two cultures, his artistic modus operandi was to be African in a Cuban context and Cuban in an African context.  His incessant migrations trace the reverberations of Afro-Cuban music around the Black Atlantic.

—Richard M. Shain

His (Sosseh) incessant migrations trace the reverberations of Afro-Cuban music around the Black Atlantic.  His lasting accomplishment was to add his distinctive voice to that ever-continuing conversation.

—Richard M. Shain

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QifiyNm6jG4

The first forms of musical expression by slaves, of which all these contemporary forms to a greater or lesser degree bear the stamp, were harbingers of what is now called globalization. Understanding the processes of cross-fertilization and creation that led to the invention of original genres in the slave societies and their successor societies should help us better to analyse the mechanisms of current globalization.

This history of cross-fertilizations and innovation, of creolization in Édouard Glissant’s sense (Glissant 1990, 1997), indicates at the very least that the spread of certain phenomena, including musical phenomena, to the whole planet is linked to systems of domination and the inextricable strategies of resistance, accommodation and power they have brought into being and continue to produce.

The study of the modalities of the emergence of new musics in slave societies – or at least the attempt to reconstruct them from fragmentary data – should enable us better to understand the functions of musical creation in the face of domination, and hence to re-evaluate the meaning of “world music” in today’s world.

—Denis-Constant Martin

Thinking Cross-fertilization

In the beginning comes the encounter: people move of their own free will or are moved by force and come up against others: they are all human beings (even if some argue otherwise); they are therefore similar and yet different. What differentiates them at times frightens them; it also inevitably fascinates them. This ambivalence underlies the contact they establish and frames the exchanges that follow from it. Those exchanges may be – often have been – violent, by dint of the fear that seizes human beings, their will to dominate or their ambitions of conquest.

But brutality never prevents objects from circulating (Turgeon 2003), bodies from rubbing up against each other, words from mingling (Alleyne 1980; Valkhoff 1972), musical forms from becoming entangled with each other (Dubois 1997; Pacquier 1996). Meetings between human groups are, thus, almost always opportunities to establish a relationship: a relationship of domination, admittedly, but a relationship nonetheless.

For example, when the meeting occurs at the end of a voyage, on lands which some people wish to settle and control, and when people are brought from other continents to exploit those lands, the exchanges between natives, conquering settlers and slaves or indentured servants shape a new world. Though asymmetrical, those exchanges are based on a degree of reciprocity (Turgeon 1996, 16). All are transformed by them.

—Denis-Constant Martin

The cross-fertilization that is the launch pad for creolization must be understood then, first, as a creative activity whose goal is to master the environment and understand – and then often change – the respective positions occupied by its various inhabitants. In the Americas, languages and religions have provided many confirmations of this. It is no different for musics.

—Denis-Constant Martin

A great number of the musics that are widely listened to today are the product of the blending and innovation that has occurred in northern America. Two strands have been particularly fertile here: the first – secular – strand leads from blackface minstrels to an infinite range of light musical forms, but also to the Blues, Country and Western, Jazz, Rock and all their offshoots; the second – initially sacred – strand began with Spirituals and led, after many a twist and turn, to Soul, Reggae and Rap.

—Denis-Constant Martin

Despite the inequality and violence that characterized them, slave societies were also universes of contact, exchange and blending. Slavery was, in the cultural field too, a cause of cross-fertilizations in which all took part, masters and slaves alike. However, the habits of classificatory division and the penchant for a supposed purity or “authenticity” that have long characterized Western social sciences make it difficult to think in terms of cross-fertilization (Amselle 1990).

To achieve this, we must abandon the idea that blending and cross-fertilization necessarily produce mongrelization and impoverishment, and recognize that they are sources of “fundamental dynamics” (Gruzinski 1999, 54) that unfold in “strange zones” and bring into play previously unknown procedures (ibid., 241) capable of engendering creative activity.

—Denis-Constant Martin

From Blackface Minstrels to Musical Revue

Against a background of incomprehension, cruelty, collusion and solidarity, and through misunderstandings and approximations (Gruzinski 1996, 144), all the parties forge markers for themselves in which the Other necessarily plays a part, and these markers – on both sides – together delimit the mixed universe they now share.

—Denis-Constant Martin

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

http://www.rainforestfoundationuk.org

In 1989, Raoni, the chief of the Txukahamãe Indians in Brazil, and Sting, the British rock superstar, travelled to Europe, where they were formally hosted by government officials and dignitaries of various orientations and stature.

Following this initiative, Raoni started to participate in concerts and related events in Brazil and overseas not only with Sting but also other figures of the international popular music scene.  In 1991, Raoni participated in a show with Elton John, Tom Jobim, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, and Red Crow (a North-American Sioux leader). This encounter was witnessed by a crowd of excited fans who believed in the music as much as in the cause (Carvalho 1991).

The concert’s primary objective, as in the case of Raoni and Sting’s trip to Europe, was to raise funds for the protection of the tropical rainforest and Indigenous rights in the Amazon and the initiative was supported by the Rainforest Foundation, which then had a Brazilian branch called “Fundação Mata Virgem”

—Rafael José de Menezes Bastos

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

The market for Cuban music shrunk dramatically during the early years of the Cuban Revolution. U.S. labels and music editors, which controlled the sector up until then, left Cuba, and, since 1961, a trade embargo against the island closed the United States to the import of Cuban music, recorded or live.

Cuban-made records hardly found international distribution beyond small solidarity organizations and exceptional licensing agreements with sympathetic labels. The Finnish Love Records was probably the most effective. Thanks to Finland’s privileged relations with the Communist bloc, it diversified its large catalogue, made up mostly of Finnish rock and protest song music, with materials from those countries (including Lenin’s speeches).

Throughout the 1970s, Love Records licensed several LPs from Cuba’s state label EGREM as well as issued new recordings by Cuban groups playing in Finland, such as Omara Portuondo (in 1974) and Paquito d’Rivera (in 1976).

—- Ariana Hernandez-Reguant

The revolutionary song, “Siempre es 26″,  is in reference to the 26 of July, the revolutionary holiday.

In the 1990s, Cuban music experienced an international visibility not known since its pre-revolutionary heyday in the 1940s and 1950s. This time, however, what triumphed in the world’s major cities was not the latest dance craze emanating from the island but the traditional music of yesteryear –with a contemporary bent.

Differently from the earlier era, it was not the music industry’s major companies that were responsible for this comeback, but small, new, independent labels that combined their profit imperative with a mission, and a passion, to bring a diverse soundtrack to a booming multicultural landscape.

The most famous Cuban music album of the decade, Ry Cooder’s Buena Vista Social Club, introduced Cuban sounds in many homes already furnished with other musics from around the world.

This time, indeed, Cuban music was not marketed in Latin dance circles, but within world music networks, framed within the intersecting histories of Cold War politics, market trends, and developments in the cultural industries both in Cuba and abroad.

—- Ariana Hernandez-Reguant

The rhythm behind Aragon Orchestra’s song, Cha-Onda, was inspired by after touring Africa:

There was something very specific about how these music producers operated in foreign lands. They were neither anthropologists or members of a diasporic community with long-standing ties to the place, nor tourists or business travelers without emotional attachment to it.

Always in search of new frontiers, these producers were the contemporary equivalent of old colonial traders, who merged their love of music and adventure with the determination to succeed in a crowded and increasingly fragmented marketplace. They fit the definition of “cultural brokers” developed by Steiner (1994) for African art dealers and intermediaries, who would both coach the producers and guide the prospective publics.

—- Ariana Hernandez-Reguant

Vieja Trova Santiaguera, which preceded the Buena Vista Social Club project

From the 1996 album Hotel Asturias:

Through the 1990s, the world music industry, mostly based in Europe and North America, expanded its reach to the most remote regions of the world. It both marketed traditional sounds to urban audiences and fostered musical collaborations between Western and non-Western musicians.

What was peculiar about this apparent globalization story was that it required the fragmentation and autonomy of its actors in order to circumvent the numerous roadblocks imposed on the circulation of cultural commodities, from international sanctions and country-led embargoes allegedly geared to promote democracy in foreign regions to the quick turn-over of cultural and entertainment fads among the world’s urban consumers.

—- Ariana Hernandez-Reguant

In this context, the intervention of the world music industry in a small state-controlled Cuban music infrastructure resulted in two important developments. The first concerned the definition and conceptualization of Cuban music in the world. Specifically, a by now standard Black Atlantic narrative of musical circulation which situated Africa at the genesis underwent a significant reformulation, for Cuban music came to be presented not so much as a heir to ancestral African sounds, but as an inspiration to contemporary African dance music.

The second and related development was the central role assigned to the musical producer. As shown throughout this paper, for music buyers, the musical producer, more so than the armchair music critic, became a leader of taste and guarantor of quality in a very crowded marketplace where most consumers would otherwise feel unable to discriminate. But that was not the whole story.

For musicians and music professionals from around the world, these independent producers, despite their, often, financial struggles and risky propositions, were ambassadors of an expanding capitalism that, contrary to expectations, did not have to be corporate. It was these men, and not anonymous corporate addresses, who, in these contexts, came to be seen as the faces of the global economy.

—- Ariana Hernandez-Reguant

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

I want to bring together three figures—those of the slave ship, the blood-borne virus, and digital information—and think about the ways in which they contaminate one another in the work and legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and Gilberto Gil.

—Barbara Browning

 

Send “Fela Kuti” to your Cell

Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was born in Nigeria in 1938, and died there in 1997. Without exaggeration, he was an artist who radically transformed the global understanding of African and African diasporic musics and political interventionism.

—Barbara Browning

Contamination and its variants, contagion and infection, are risky and yet often productive terms in analyzing the relationship between political exploitation, disease, and cultural transmission (Patton 1990, Farmer 1995, Browning 1998, Wald 2008, e-misférica 2009). There are insidious and often racist ways in which metaphorical and literal forms of “infectiousness” are often blithely yoked together.

And yet I am, in effect, encouraging here an analysis which allows for the interpenetration of three spheres – the political, the biological, and the cultural – in the hope is that these figures (of the slave ship, the virus and the digital information circuit) might also help us in thinking through a political critique both in and of two influential artists often categorized under the rubric of “World Music.”

—Barbara Browning

Malaria fever nko? (He dey!)
Jaundice fever nko? (He dey!)
Hay fever nko? (He dey!)
Influenza fever nko? (He dey!)
Inflation fever nko? (He dey!)
Freedom fever nko? (He dey!)
Yellow fever nko? (He dey!)

Original catch you
Your eye go yellow
Your yansh go yellow
Your face go yellow
Your body go weak
I say but later if you no die inside
The yellow go fade away

Artificial catch you
You be man or woman
Na you go catch am yourself
Na your money go do am for you
You go yellow pass yellow
You go catch moustache for face
You go get your double colour
Your yansh go black like coal
You self go think say you dey fine
Who say you fine?

Yellow fever, of course, is a “sickness, a true sickness.” But the figurative yellowing of a desire to emulate whiteness is, to Fela, also truly pathological. As is not only malaria and influenza, but economic violence as well. And what of freedom? The lyric implies that political consciousness can be as “catching,” as “infectious,” as either the blood-borne virus or cultural imperialism.

—Barbara Browning

Yellow Fever by Fela Kuti:

It would be accurate to say that Yellow Fever simply manifests the deeper pathology of the commodification of human beings, and the slave ship as a vector of that pathology is much greater than the circulation of the mosquito. But freedom, too, is contagious—which is precisely why Haitian slaves were cast as dangerous, potentially infectious beings.

—Barbara Browning

The notion of contagion or infectiousness is a powerful metaphor that has at times been invoked in seemingly benign ways, sometimes malignant ways, and sometimes in politically productive ways to talk about African and African diasporic culture—and particularly music and dance.

—Barbara Browning

Afro Beat, the cosmopolitan and insistently African musical style that Fela popularized, is almost invariably described in terms of its “infectiousness.” And his political philosophy, dubbed “felism” on his posthumous official website, is defined in relation to its “virulence” (http://www.fela.net/). The lyric of his 1976 song “Perambulator” is said to “summarize” this politics of virulence. The lyric warns that perambulation—a possible alternative term for the exploitative effects of globalization—is not necessarily progress. “Mobility”—in the forms of literal travel, Western education, or the African importation of external cultural and intellectual influences can lead, Fela says, to immobility.

—Barbara Browning

Photo in the News: Bird Flu Dance Craze Sweeps Ivory Coast

Economic circulatory systems are linked to routes of literal contagion—and of healing. And the most extremely exploitative system of circulation—the trafficking of slaves—was also linked to pathological vectors.

John Edgar Wideman’s short story, “Fever,” returns to an 18^th-century epidemiological theory that suggested that Yellow Fever spread to the U.S. through the vector of Haitian slaves being transported north by slave-owners fearing political foment on the island.

Wideman opens his meditation on the virulent nature of the pathology of slavery in the hold of a slave ship, where an aedes aegypti mosquito infects a man with a blood-borne virus. It would be accurate to say that Yellow Fever simply manifests the deeper pathology of the commodification of human beings, and the slave ship as a vector of that pathology is much greater than the circulation of the mosquito. But freedom, too, is contagious—which is precisely why Haitian slaves were cast as dangerous, potentially infectious beings.

—Barbara Browning

In 2004, Gil performed a benefit concert in New York with David Byrne to promote the Creative Commons project. It was co-sponsored by Wired magazine.

It struck me as entirely logical at the time that he performed two songs, one about the tragedy of the transatlantic slave trade, and another about the utopian possibilities of the digital crossing of information across the “infosea” of the internet.

He prefaced the former song (“La lune de Gorée”) by referencing the history of slavery in the Americas, “the reason,” he said, “we are here today.”

That meant many things—among them, that a celebration of technology’s capacity to endow individuals with self-sovereignty is directly related to the historical enslavement of Africans.

—Barbara Browning

Gilberto Gil, Pela Internet:

In the live show promoting the new album, Gil performed a number of his older songs – including “Pela Internet,” which I cited above, and also “Sarará Miolo,” a song which has remarkable resonances with Fela’s “Yellow Fever.” Sarará designates, in Brazil, a person of mixed racial heritage, with kinky but blonde hair:

 

Sara, sara, sara, sarará                         Heal, heal, heal, sarará
Sara, sara, sara, sarará                         Heal, heal, heal, sarará
Sarará miolo                                           Sarará flesh
Sara, sara, sara cura                              Heal, heal, heal, cure
Dessa doença de branco                       This sickness of the white man
Sara, sara, sara cura                               Heal, heal, heal, cure
Dessa doença de branco                        This sickness of the white man
De querer cabelo liso                              Of wanting straight hair
Já tendo cabelo louro                              When you already have blonde hair
Cabelo duro é preciso                               Kinky hair is necessary
Que é para ser você, crioulo                    For you to be who you are, black man

Intellectual property rights bear a relation to the historical trafficking not only of black artistic production, but of black people. That makes this a complex issue with no easy answers.

There are certainly contexts within which a freer circulation of, for example, life-saving medications can only be understood as righteous and just. It remains to be charted, what the freer circulation of artistic productions might mean.

We’re just starting out on this ocean, even though in many ways it’s the same ocean we’ve been traversing for hundreds of years. It’s a dangerous place with a pathological history of exploitation and viruses both literal and figurative. The utopian question, and I think we really do need some of those right now, is whether we might stand a chance of catching a little freedom.

—Barbara Browning

A good deal has happened in the realm of “world music” since my book Global Pop: World Music, World Markets appeared (Taylor 1997). While I have written quite a bit about world music since Global Pop, I have had few opportunities to step back and attempt to take the long view about world music in the marketplace.

My aim in this chapter is to lay out the nature of some of the changes that have taken place in the last decade or so, as well as fill in some lacunae in Global Pop that have come into focus since it was published.

This chapter is less about “world music” itself than how its representations and constructions have changed in the years since Global Pop was published. The music itself has not changed all that much, in fact.

To be sure, it often shows an increasing familiarity with Anglo-American popular music, and makes use of more sophisticated technologies and production techniques. But in a more abstract and broader sense, it is still a category of music that includes many clever and complex amalgamations of local musics from around the world with Anglo-American popular musics.

––Timothy D. Taylor

Disco Apocalypto?

M.I.A.’s collaboration with Angola’s Buraka Som Sistema:

The digital world has digitized, atomized, world music, so that it is broken up and disseminated everywhere, though not always in ways that can be easily recognized by listeners.

This process could only have happened after world music—which is, after all, a vast collection of wildly different musics from all over the planet—had been reduced to a “style” or “genre” so it could be disciplined, managed, and discursively constructed.

Then the music and marketing industries could dissect and disseminate it for their profit-driven ends, marking their triumph over this vast collection of musics. At least for now.

––Timothy D. Taylor

The importance of global informational capital needs to be understood in part by examining the recent emphasis in the business world on globalization, and, more generally, on discourses of globalization in the public domain. It is now commonly believed that everyone now lives in an information economy or an information age or a global economy, or whatever one wants to call it.

––Timothy D. Taylor

World Music Awards 2011

Since Global Pop appeared, world music has become somewhat better known, increasingly part of the average American’s musical landscape. It is used in the soundtracks to television programs, films, and advertising, in the background of music played in shops.

But the sales of world music are still quite small, so small that the Recording Industry Association of America, which keeps track of sales in various categories, doesn’t bother with the world music category, instead including a category called “Other” which has a footnote to say that that it includes “Ethnic” and “Folk” music, among others.

The “Other” category accounted for 97.1% of sales in 2008, the last year for which data are available as of this writing (Recording Industry Association of America 2008).

––Timothy D. Taylor

More than simply filling in the gap left by a waning classical music, world music has begun to mix with classical music sounds.

––Timothy D. Taylor

World music now occupies the noise-proofed portion of this particular store. Another major retailer in New York City also noise-proofed this portion of its store, and it has a separate entrance so patrons do not have to walk through the rest of the store to get to it.

This segregation of world music from the rest of the store is the same kind of protection of the ears of world music listeners from the rabble of other customers and sounds that classical music listeners expect.

––Timothy D. Taylor

String bands are popular across the Pacific but nowhere more so than in Vanuatu (check out the link below)

Vanuatu string band music

Use: Adventure, Light Industrial, Travel

Category: Light Hearted, Motivational, Warm

Use: Ceremonial, Educational, Light Industrial

Category: Floating, Meditative, Pensive

I think that there is in fact a new kind of capital, in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense of cultural capital, that is increasingly deemed to be necessary in this moment of hype over globalization (Bourdieu 1984).

In an article on the use of world music in television advertisements (Taylor 2007), I called this new capital “global informational capital”.

This term refers to the increasing importance in the developed countries of possessing a kind of capital that stands in for real knowledge of the world in this cultural moment of globalization, transnationalism, information age, or however one wants to characterize it.

––Timothy D. Taylor

1990s conceptions of World Music

More than simply filling in the gap left by a waning classical music, world music has begun to mix with classical music sounds. It is now possible to hear classicalized world music performances such as Jonathan Elias’s The Prayer Cycle, released in 1999, featuring singers ranging from Alanis Morissette to Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn (Elias 1999).

The result is a mixture of world music, classical, and new age “styles”, a sound that is increasingly common (Parney 1999). It is not a coincidence that Jonathan Elias is the head of one of the biggest advertising music companies, Elias Arts.  To give some idea of the sound of this work, and its somewhat forced eclecticism, the sixth movement of nine, “Innocence,” features a chorus that sings in Swahili, Alanis Morrisette in Hungarian, and Salif Keita in Bambara.

I should also note that this recording was released on the Sony Classical label, another sign of the classicalization of world music—or in this case the “worldification” of classical music—as the label seeks to broaden what may be included in the “classical” category.

––Timothy D. Taylor

KasaiAllStars

It is clear from sales data that, while world music is not important to the music industry since it does not provide much revenue, it nonetheless has seeped into the broader musical soundscape of the contemporary west, largely through samples and usages in broadcasting.

In a sense, the digital world has digitized, atomized, world music, so that it is broken up and disseminated everywhere, though not always in ways that can be easily recognized by listeners.

This process could only have happened after world music—which is, after all, a vast collection of wildly different musics from all over the planet—had been reduced to a “style” or “genre” so it could be disciplined, managed, and discursively constructed. Then the music and marketing industries could dissect and disseminate it for their profit-driven ends, marking their triumph over this vast collection of musics. At least for now.

––Timothy D. Taylor