World Beat. World Music. Ethno-Pop. Techno-primitive. What’s in a name? Apparently a great deal if the measure of attention devoted to successive waves of imported music is any indication. After all, this is a world where, as music critic Simon Frith puts it, “every global genre gets its moment of chart glory,” every culture its predicted fifteen minutes of fame.
With music, however, what’s not in a name may be just as important. The definition of music has been, like many cultural activities in the West, more a process of exclusion than inclusion. That may seem strange at first for, aside from a passing encounter with a culture’s food and language, it is often through music that we form an impression of a culture, whether it is the women’s choirs of Bulgaria or the gamelan music of Java. Music like language and food is an eminently portable component of culture. That transportability has given rise to entirely new musical genres; jazz, salsa, jùjú, dangdut, conjunto, zouk, and highlife could never have emerged autonomously from any single culture. In short, music might serve as an archetypal metaphor for the social and historical construction of all facets of cultural identity.
Labels, or more specifically “genres,” are indispensable to our
conception of music. Think, for a minute, of a record store freely
intermixing all genres of music—rock, jazz, classical, rap, and the
ubiquitous “international” section—Anthrax next to Albert Ayler,
Charles Ives next to Ice-T. Genres are nothing more than the symbolic
boundaries of a musical language, a language that serves both as the
expressions and invested interpretations of a particular group of
people. Be it opera, heavy-metal, gagaku, or kroncong, musical genres
often speak little to those outside the province of initiated
participants. Frith argues, in World Music, Politics, and Social Change,
that music represents the experience of certain social groups not
because it is created by them but because certain aural qualities are
heard as homologous to their values. People’s daily experiences, their
values and beliefs, are encoded in the sound itself. “This is the link
between musical object and musical subject,” writes Frith “between text
and pleasure.”
However, music—indeed art in general—does not “work” only in a
homologous fashion. If this were so how could we “connect” with music
from a culture of which we have little knowledge or no direct
experience? “Music…serves its audience through…its ability to contain
the investment of a range of interpretation and assignment of
meanings,” writes Ray Pratt in his book Rhythm and Resistance: Explorations in the Political Uses of Popular Music.
For some, music is the paramount expression of human creativity,
universal in its aspirations, for others the symbolic affirmation of a
cultural tradition—or the explicit denial of that tradition, as in the
case of youth rebellion music such as punk or hip-hop.
This ability of music to traverse cultural boundaries in a
non-linguistic manner, to be invested with new, unforeseen, and often
contradictory meanings has mistakenly given rise to the formulation of
music as transcendental, based not in social expression and
interpretation but in absolutes. Nowhere is this view more prevalent,
even fundamental to the definition of the genre, than in the case of
“classical” music.
The degree to which the “popular”—indeed the
pleasurable in music—has been viewed with contempt by classical music
throughout history is astounding. No other genre is so dependent upon
the suppression of the claim to music’s homologous function. The
reasons for this are several. Foremost, any music that elevates the
abstract, the transcendental, the universal in music, will ultimately
appeal to the universality of these concepts to all musics; hence music
that does not adhere to these concepts is not music. In a more
pragmatic sense, the popularity of musics that espouse radically
different underlying principles threatens the real, or perceived, basis
of support for classical music. Popular music, as well as music from
“other” cultures, have remained suspect, depicted often as vulgar
amalgams of the vernacular, or “corrupted” versions of more
“traditional” forms.
Attempts to redefine music in a more inclusive fashion—to accord
jazz, Balinese gamelan, Ewé drumming, or tango the same respect that
classical music enjoys—have been met by musicology with claims that
such issues are irrelevant, that what really matters is quality. To lay
claim to the argument of “quality” without defining the underlying
cultural basis that constitutes the yardstick of measure is a ruse by
now familiar to all proponents of multiculturalism. John Shepherd
argues that musical academia has no intention of changing, rather it
has turned its back “on the majority of the world’s musics: musics
which are used by people in the context of their everyday lives, and
which have the most intimate relationships with the forces that
musicology does not wish to confront.”
Perhaps the first step in understanding the process of exclusion
practiced by Western music is to examine the labels “traditional,”
“popular,” and “folk”—labels that may be little more than euphemisms
for the musical subaltern. In his book Studying Popular Music,
British musicologist Richard Middleton traces the genesis of these
concepts, demonstrating their basis in social and historical—not
absolute—constructs, and the subsequent expunging of the “pleasurable”
from “serious” musical discourse.
Conventionally held assumptions of musical “development” promulgate
either the out-dated notion that music “evolves” from the simple to the
complex, the primitive to the civilized, or that contemporary popular
music represents a corruption of somehow more “authentic,” more “pure,”
traditional music. Yet, to assert the former requires that the inherent
value of cultural expression be reducible to formal complexity; to
assert the latter presupposes the existence of an ideal state, a pure,
“uncorrupted” culture.
For Frith, and critics like him, “there is no such thing as a
culturally ‘pure’ sound.” The need to construct the concepts
“primitive” and “traditional” is seen as little more than an
unwillingness to address the less desirable aspects of industrial
capitalism. The desire to identify and preserve specific aspects of a
culture as timeless and “traditional” without addressing contemporary
economic imbalances between developing and developed nations leaves a
culture, as critic Lucy Lippard has written, “frozen in an
anthropological present or an archaeological past.” In contrast to
those who assert that developmental pressures and modernization have
led to the fragmentation of once culturally homogeneous societies,
Frith denies such homogeneity ever existed. Cultures are in a constant
state of flux and cross-fertilization, all musical expression an
offspring of miscegenation.
An even more troubling aspect of archaic theories of cultural
corruption is the lack of any individual autonomy. The individual is
nameless, powerless, cast against the the forces of Western-style
modernization; popular cultural hybrids, such as world beat, are seen
more as the product of an intersection between “traditional” static
societies and a “dynamizing” West, rather than as a continual process
of people adapting and re-articulating pre-existing cultural forms to
embody the aspirations and desires of conscious individuals. In a
society based upon individualism, such as ours, this denial of even
limited individual authority in other societies is tantamount to the
denial of humanity itself. Indeed, one of the cornerstones of the
concept of “folk” culture is the subjugation of the individual to the
collective; authorship is rarely attributable, even when evidence to
the contrary is widely available. Therefore, perhaps the greatest
contribution of world beat is the tendency to identify musical
contributions from abroad with distinct individuals—to think of Thomas
Mapfumo not just music from Zimbabwe—for in that perception lies the
ability to see others as we see ourselves and the germ of seeing all
people, albeit culturally distinct, as one.
For Frith then, popular music and modernization are not seen as an
extension of colonialism catalyzing a somnolent pre-colonial social
formation, or the corruption of some static notion of “authenticity,”
but as a “progressive, empowering, democratic force.” What’s more,
Frith asserts that we must ask ourselves a different question: under
what circumstances do people feel empowered—rather than limited—by
musical conventions?
None of this explains, however, the sudden explosion of interest in
“world beat” in the last few years in Europe and the United States.
What meanings do we find in the music of another’s culture? What do we
find lacking in our own? And, why now? Is it, as the criticism of the
last decade has argued, the manifestation of post-modernism? Or, is it
as cultural critic Gayatri Spivak has remarked, that “otherness has
replaced post-modernism as the object of desire?” What’s more, if the
impetus of multiculturalism is, at its most fundamental, the
recognition of people and cultures—both here and abroad—long denied,
are we prepared to deal with those aspects of other cultures we find
repugnant in our own?
Musical migration and miscegenation has not occurred without costs.
Paradoxically, music’s near universal appeal, and transportability, may
have inadvertently helped to obscure our culture’s ethnocentric
definition of music; the widespread dissemination of so many different
types of music may have led to a false complacency. As Lippard has
noted in her book Mixed Blessings: new art in a multicultural America,
the celebration of difference may be itself “a type of ethnocentricism,
for while the value system of the other is acknowledged as different,
it is never allowed to…challenge the dominant culture’s values.”
Access to a vast marketplace of the world’s musics with scant
understanding of the role those musics play in people’s lives bestows
on us new responsibilities. As Lippard writes, sensitivity to the issue
requires us to constantly ask ourselves, “the difference between homage
and robbery, between mutual exchange and rape.”
This article originally appeared in the journal High Performance.
