Pop Tourism

You're all right. There is no such thing as the "noble savage," just as not every sophisticated capitalist exploiter lacks good taste. Given DAT decks and MIDI keyboards (and of course, the means to run them) and the power of distribution and advertising, aborigines could produce either abstract post-serial fusion or bubbly pop tunes. Some will be masterpieces and the rest will be ethnic dross. Some will kill and cannibalize to have a hit single--just like in the "real" world. I bet you when the first wire recorders made it across savannah and rain forest there were plenty of enterprising tribal chieftains eager to manage their "talent," just as there were always those slave-dealers who were of the same provenance as their slaves. It's up to us decide when the fruits of exploitation are worth the cost in human suffering; don't our nice shoes come from Chinese sweatshops? Has the "world music" CD I use for pleasant background music been approved by Amnesty International?

Permission to add something parenthetically which may be a little off the beaten path? This is an ancedote as related in the liner notes to a CD called something like “Sounds Of The Borneo Rainforest” (don’t have it here, so allow me to paraphrase). It’s night. A member of some jungle clan who is listening to another clan member sing a sad song about the death of a relative suddenly jumps up and severely burns the singer with a torch. Why? Because his song caused the listener to feel genuine pain, in the form of sadness. This, I think is the origin of Art. And if that tribal singer were somehow to get a hit single out of his impromptu dirge? That’s commerce, but it’s still art, damn it. There’s some kind of lesson to be learned here, but I don’t want to spell it out any more ineptly than I already have.

The Buena Vista album is actually quite good, is the problem here. The problem lies with the conversion of music into purely extra-musical social signifier.

I think that I agree with the direction of Sterling's thought but not with the way he's saying it. Social signification is part of what music does; it's never "extra-musical." But Buena Vista is being put to ugly use, not by everybody into the music - probably not by most - but by many of the people who write about it: "This is the real thing, not the Ricky Martin pop bullshit." And "real" means "drab," which is an ugly message in itself. There was an awful piece in Esquire a couple of years back, "Who Put the Honky Tonk in 'Honky Tonk Women'" by Alec Wilkinson, about Ry Cooder with only passing reference to Buena Vista but very much part of its ethos, I'm afraid: "Many rock guitar players consider their guitar to be an accessory to their appearance. They match its color to their outfits. They have guitars made in peculiar shapes. They have flags painted on them, or maybe the insignia of a record company. The have the necks and bodies inlaid with mother-of-pearl dragons or death's heads or devils or snaky patterns of geometric figures. Cooder's guitars are homely. He plays guitars that a lot of other musicians would be embarrassed to be seen with. He cares about how a guitar sounds, not how it looks." Just pages and pages of this reactionary crap. "Cooper is averse to self-promotion. He has never changed the color of his hair. He has no tattoos. He has never appeared in a beer commercial or made an arrangement to wear the clothes of a specific designer or connived with a press agent to be photographed in the company of a famous actress or released photographs of how he looks sitting around his house or ones that reveal his body or that portray him engaged in lewd activities."

So I guess my thought here is that "tomb raiding" isn't the issue with me so much as how the "world" music is being used in various home environments, what it beats down and raises up. What's missing so far from this thread, interestingly, is how you yourselves use the world's music in your lives - I presume in ways that are idiosyncratic and simply don't register in the discourse of music journalism.

Nitsuh - equation music = mathematics EXACTLY what I was getting at. (i.e. People don't LIKE one equation better than other on purely non- rational grounds, and that's for a reason. Imagine scientists designing a nuclear weapons system and saying, "Let's use something else besides plutonium, plutonium is overhyped beyond belief and it's SO last year and plus it sucks"?)

But that would be cool Tarden. Anyway it's more like that than you think: when I was undergrad, the happnin' thing in mathematics was KNOT THEORY, which my tutor was a world expert on. I however cannot even tie my own tie.

Its interesting to compare Ricky Martin to BWSC seeing as like him or loath him ricky martin is much more the real deal. He is Mr Latin Pop whereas BWSC sem to be some exploited old geezers.

'What's missing so far from this thread, interestingly, is how you yourselves use the world's music in your lives - I presume in ways that are idiosyncratic and simply don't register in the discourse of music journalism'.

I find world music useful in that it provides 'rock' something to kick against and thus makes it worthwhile again. 'Rockism' ever since its mid-50s inception, by divorcing music from the folk traditions from which it sprang (that's counting Tin Pan Alley pop as an American middle-class folk tradition even if it germinated in the Lower East Side ghetto)became an agent of Western scientific materialism that exists to overturn or devour static utopian cultures, even artificial or conceptual ones. Scratch a world-music enthusiast, find someone who just wants something nice on the turntable while getting respite from the treadmill that W.s.m. Meanwhile, the rockists are helping to crank the treadmill. Roll with the wheel of history or be crushed by it, as (ironically for avowed utopians) the Khmer Rouge once put it.

Sorry, 'treadmill OF w.s.m'

By 'world music enthusiast', I mean somebody whose taste is defined by breadth rather than depth. To be purely subjective for a moment, I quite like duduk music but have no great fondness for soca, and I'm a bit suspicious of somebody who claims to love both equally. Liking both, fine, but 'equally'?

And what's REALLY interesting is that as Ricky's gotten more and more of an Anglo audience he's been ADDING more and more salsa to his music; also some worldbeat: there are Arabian elements on his recent LP.

Another interesting phenomenon - interesting at least in that no one seems to be commenting on it, and that it's not being played for its signifiers - is the frequent insertion of Hispanic musical elements into pop and r&b. I'm thinking of Debelah Morgan, 'N Sync, Bryan Adams, Toni Braxton (a diverse bunch, no?). Seems to me that Justin Timberlake's singing on "Tearing Up My Heart" and "Bye Bye Bye," and the basic melodic patterns of those songs, is a lot closer to Latin freestyle (TKA, Cover Girls, etc.) than to New Kids or Bell Biv Devoe.

'Another interesting phenomenon - interesting at least in that no one seems to be commenting on it, and that it's not being played for its signifiers - is the frequent insertion of Hispanic musical elements into pop and r&b. I'm thinking of Debelah Morgan, 'N Sync, Bryan Adams, Toni Braxton (a diverse bunch, no?). Seems to me that Justin Timberlake's singing on "Tearing Up My Heart" and "Bye Bye Bye," and the basic melodic patterns of those songs, is a lot closer to Latin freestyle (TKA, Cover Girls, etc.) than to New Kids or Bell Biv Devoe.'

Maybe nobody's commenting on it because it's not exactly a new thing. 'La Bamba'?'Tequila'?'Ring of Fire'? Elvis' entire Mediterranean period (post-army/early films)? Bossa nova soundtracks?

In fact, one could almost call supposed influence-gods Suicide etiolated art-school ? and the Mysterians.

No comment because people are AFRAID of it.

Re: the Khmer Rouge, tarden--I'm acquainted with several Cambodians who escaped the juggernaut of history by burying themselves in sand while the adults around them were slaughtered. Now they have a rock and roll band in New Hampshire, but their music still seems to use the pentatonic scales of their homeland's music--it least, it doesn't sound much like most pop music I've ever heard.

I regret to inform the public that much of the "worldbeat" I play becomes relugated to pleasant but unobtrusive music I listen to while reading or cleaning house. I wonder if this is how American pop music is utilized by kids in Bhutan or middle-aged couples in Tuvalu. But the dudek--now, that can make me cry!

I tend not to own "worldbeat" music. What I do own are a variety of international artists who have fused distinctive characteristics of their musical tradition into more modern frameworks. Found myself, as recent threads will document, investigating bhangra, for example. A Brazilian friend of mine has plenty of artists from there that he likes, but far from Tom Ze, they tend to be along the lines of his fav. band ever... Menudo!

Mark, why would someone be afraid to note that the Backstreet Boys' "The Call" opens with a Spanish guitar? (Unless maybe the fear is in admitting that pop has ANY musical characteristics (since for the lunkheads among music critics, pop tends to be seen as threatening or diluting other forms of music, rather than as creating and combining forms itself).)

Another trend: East Asian motifs in hip-hop. All over the place in the last couple of years, and not just where you'd expect them (e.g. RZA's Ghost Dog soundtrack), but in Ja Rule's "Between Me and You." I like the motifs, but have nothing to say about why they're there. Maybe they're just an example of hip-hop's never-ending quest to incorporate something new. Like, "I've got Ivan Julian's 'Blank Generation' guitar line." "Yeah, well I've got Chinese flutes, and time is on my side, nyaaah nyaaah."

But Tarden's point about the ongoing Latin tinge makes me think of something else (the converse of this thread's starting idea): people absorbing foreign sounds without knowing that the source is foreign. Well, I suppose that the Troggs, for instance, knew that "Wild Thing" was from a U.S. sound, but they didn't know that the sound got to the U.S. from Mexico and the Caribbean. That is, Dylan self-consciously used the "La Bamba" chords in the chorus of "Like A Rolling Stone"; Richard Berry was self-consciously writing a Caribbean-like number when he did "Louie Louie," which made sense since its quick I-IV-V-IV- I (V-minor for "Louie Louie") was already a basic piano vamp in Cuban and New York Latino music. And so after the Kingsmen hit, boogalooers tried to cross over by building tracks solely around the vamp: Ray Baretto's "El Watusi" and Joe Cuba's "Bang Bang." The Blues Magoos covered Cuba's "I'll Never Go Back To Georgia," but by-and-large I think most garage bands were ignorant of the fact that their music had Latino and Caribbean sources.

Oh yes, I forgot the terrific NOW 2! from China that I have. Distinctively non-western, but at some level extremely similar to Celine et al. -- while some of the harmonics are different, the schmaltz string backing is thicker and more syrupy than ever.

Mark, beautiful stuff on Paul Simon, as usual. You and Paul seem to have a good thing goin' on. But, "This was a marketing device, to follow up a success no one had predicted: a gimmick with which he had zero relationship." Maybe, but note that since 1969 Simon's music had become continually more loaded with south-of-the-border rhythms, and I can't think of marketing playing a role here. I mean, when he writes "Mother and Child Reunion," does he think that "I'm using a reggae rhythm because I want this thing to hit big"? While I was ignoring him in the early '80s he was putting out calypso-type stuff, I'm told. Or at least I remember an r&b musician, originally from St. Thomas, telling me that the new Paul Simon was the best calypso record in years and put the rest of the genre to shame. (Or course, the fact that he was from St. Thomas doesn't give his claim automatic validity, but the claim was interesting nonetheless, even if it didn't inspire me to buy the record.)

By the way, I think you and Tarden are too quick to stomp on the word "depth." Not that the word hasn't been put to awful uses, but still I'll usually take depth over shallowness, thank you. I'll say that people who take the time to understand my ideas have done far better commenting on them, pro or con, than those who don't. Not too many inspired mistakes. (I can think of only one, in fact: Michael Freedberg; he'd somehow misremembered one of my Voice pieces as picturing working girls at their sewing machines moving their feet to Company B. If only it had.) When Greil Marcus misread Quine (con) and Kuhn (pro), he didn't do anything interesting with the result, he just reinforced his conventional ideas. Whereas when Dylan got Nietzsche correctly he was able to come up with a heartwrenching retort (the rejection of the eternal recurrence at the end of "Memphis Blues Again").

Another term I'd like to add to this thread. "Content." As in maybe the Stones covered Muddy Waters "I Can't Be Satisfied" so that they could say, "I feel like smashing this pistol in your face." By content I don't just mean lyrics, of course. When I was in San Francisco, a lot of lesbians danced to world music. The content here would be how they danced. (And I don't know the content, since I rarely witnessed it.)

By the way, nothing I've ever read makes me think that either Jamaicans or the Rolling Stones misheard American r&b. It doesn't take mishearing to understand the untapped possibilities in a music.

Oh, and Mark, one more thing: I agree with you about the connection that Simon made (and used) between South African singing and the doo- wop of his New York youth. But now I'm going to say something ignorant and possibly totally wrong, but the little I've heard of SA vocal music seems to have - relative to the music of Central Africa, anyway - more unison harmonies and fewer call-and-response multivocal lines. And S&G vocals tended toward unison harmonies rather than doo- wop interplay. And S&G's first single, under the name Tom and Jerry, was an Everly Brothers imitation, and the Everlys tended to sing in the unison harmonies of their c&w youth. So maybe that's why Paul went to SA rather than Zaire.

Paul Simon also found a fairly deep fusion of border-south elements and his doo-wop youth on Capeman, which is one of the greatest albums ever. In an album about racial tension, Simon reimagines a should-have-been past where calypso piano vamps mingled freely with slide guitar. Cf. classic scene in Matewan.

'No comment because people are AFRAID of it.'

Intriguing - are you speaking of changing demographics in the US? Is 'Livin' la Vida Loca' written off as a novelty because it annoys certain people in the same way 'Chocolate City' might've if they ever heard it?
Not only the English-language-only legislators getting upset either - I'm also thinking of tension between African-Americans & Latinos re roots of hip hop, seeing as how many of the latter are claiming it as part of their heritage too. (Incidentally I believe that few people outside of New York realize how strong the Latino presence actually IS in the South Bronx.)

Apologies for using the word 'Latinos' in such a monolithic context, I'm fully aware that, for instance, the implications of 'BVSC' are far different in Miami. (Ask any random 10 people there what THEIR take is on Cooder and friends, you might get some, ahem, interesting answers).

I'm still thinking about what I meant. But it applies in UK too, so not purely a sense of sociological unease.

I am going to try something glib and perilous, like, er, the idea of the bisexual in a world only just now clumsily getting used to homo and het as creatively different yet interdependent. If black music/white music = homo/het (or vice versa, same diff, whatever, calm down), then latino = bi. Just when you get yr head round it, it messes with the powerful simple opposition, and you no longer know where you are. (In ref purely the trans-atlantic community, obviously... I have not the slightest will to — or idea HOW to — expand this idea to include the vast and multivalent Asian aspect...)

"I've got Ivan Julian's 'Blank Generation' guitar line." "Yeah, well I've got Chinese flutes, and time is on my side, nyaaah nyaaah."

...I just wanted to give this line it's own post, for us to better appreciate its brilliance.

Tension between black/latino in hip-hop? It always seemed more of an organic assimilation thing to me.

In John Storm Roberts' update of The Latin Tinge he talks of Latinos being very involved in early hip-hop and then being virtually run out of the business and only recently making much of a comeback.

The Latinos in hip-hop seem to be expressing "Latin" mainly through language and accent while sticking to the same hip-hop beats and melodies as the non-Latins. (Compare to disco and club music in general, which is shot through with the Latino influence - but club vs. hip-hop, of course, is yet another severe tension).

On the other hand, Latin club music seems to be eagerly incorporating hip-hop and a grab-bag of other things - I say this, ignorantly, on the basis of a recent K-Tel compilation More Latin Club Mix 2000, which seems all over the map and extraordinary, Joey Beltram dark- techno murder beats played under salsa piano, this programmed next to Europop and rumbas, raps added to virtually anything. Can anyone tell me more?

(And like Tarden I realize that I'm overlooking different situations in different places, Miami in particular - Miami Bass was the one hip- hop scene that really took in the club influence, took in Baker-Robie and maybe, for all I know, took in Ledesma and Martinee and aspects of the Miami Sound. But I don't know, since Miami was never high- profile anywhere I was picking up hip-hop radio. I think that Miami (more than d'n'b) may have been a big influence on Timbaland, hence the resemblance between his beats and the Baker-Robie speed beats of old. But I don't know.)

a quick question, in addition to miami bass, what is the score with new orleans bounce?

"What is the score with New Orleans bounce?" A quick answer: I don't know. But since when has my ignorance ever shut me up? So, at least in regards to Cash Money Records, with most of the music by Mannie Fresh: It's part of the trend away from breakbeats and back towards explicit use of drum machines. Or so I've read; breakbeat vs. drum machine never was a distinction I gave much of a shit about. More interestingly: It has long melodic motifs in background ("long" as in sometimes longer than one or two measures). Juvenile's "Back That Azz Up" is quite beautiful. Often these motifs will be in European- derived diatonic sweetness, which is why I call them "motifs" rather than "riffs." Rhythm is bouncy (I suppose). Words are, um, dirty south. The motif thing has had a big influence on Swizz Beatz in the Ruff Ryder New York.

In general, the genre (hip-hop) as a whole is so secure in the hip- hopness of its beats and raps and its cut-and-paste identity that it's willing to paste in any old (and new) melodic and tonal anything without stressing over whether that thing has r&b pedigree. Compare to c&w, which is perpetually obsessed with whether it's losing its eternal twang.

Frank sez "Latinos in hip-hop seem to be expressing "Latin" mainly through language and accent while sticking to the same hip-hop beats and melodies as the non-Latins." It's also worth pointing out that plenty of those beats are shot through, heavily, with Latin influence. Not just in the sense of any record with congas/timbales/etc. automatically have "Latin percussion," though that's true, but think of War, who were from East L.A. and had a HUGE Hispanic audience. And the Incredible Bongo Band's "Apache," widely regarded as hip-hop's national anthem and for my money the greatest record ever made, whose two-or-so-minute-long conga/bongo/percussion breakdown could have been cut-and-pasted out of a song made in Puerto Rico or Cuba and none of us would be any the wiser. (Compare Candido's "Jingo," on Salsoul, which has a very similar breakdown and rhythmically splits the diff between disco and whatever Latin dance style the original--it's a remake--was based on.)

In terms of "club," many of the most influential DJs/producers, from the beginning to now, have been Hispanic. Masters at Work are the most obvious example; those guys have recorded everything under the sun, from M/A/R/R/S-style hip-hop cut-ups to pounding vocal house anthems, but DJ Sneak's "You Can't Hide from Your Bud" is one of the most influential house records of the 90s for its filtered disco cut- up. Quite a ways from the K-Tel comp, but it shows how important Latin music continues to be even in the haughtiest underground-dance circles.

Re: New Orleans Bounce. It should be mentioned that there is quite a strong connection between Miami Bass and bounce, both historically and musically - the same obsession with sex, and pretty much the same springy programmed beats, though bounce's tend to be lighter and slower so as to not obscure the MC - Nelly's tracks for example could be a much slower take on miami bass, right down to the synthetic handclaps. An obvious exception to this is "Bombs Over Baghdad", which sounds like an imaginary "Welcome To The Terrordome (Quad City DJs Mix)". Mannie Fresh tends to augment the slowed down rhythms with frantic ticking-over snares to give the sensation of heart-racing panic, high-speed chase scenes etc.

I think the possible next step in miami bass's incorporation into hip hop will be MCs rapping at half-speed under regular miami bass beats. There's a remix of Mya's "It's All About Me" (R&B, I know) which demonstrates the idea quite nicely: the BPM is much faster, but the vocals are actually slightly slower than the original.

Agreed on "Back That Azz Up" - morose string-swept action, the music could almost be from Aphex Twin's Richard D. James album. My favourite Cash Money track however is The Hot Boys' "Help" - glitzy horn blasts, baroque harpsichord runs and beats tripping over themselves - love it.

Thinking about what Frank said re: hip-hop's lack of a rigid musical self-identification. Perhaps because hip hop's social-cultural signifiers (the black rapper, the ghetto, guns/drugs/sex etc.) are so strong that there's virtually no need to adhere to any musical rules - the music ceases to be the signifier of hip hop's hip hopness, but instead merely the ornate border for other signifiers.

The situation is different with a lot of indie hip hop, where the MCs cover a much broader range of material but the DJs are trapped in a stultifying worship of some pure hip hop ideal (from Eric B to Prince Paul to The Bomb Squad to RZA), placing much of the music's self-identification within the music. There are of course exceptions to this, but it seems to be the most common approach.

Tim's point is excellent. That is all.

"There's a remix of Mya's 'It's All About Me' (R&B, I know)..." Question: how much does the distinction between r&b and hip-hop hold anymore? E.g. Mya's "Best of Me," featuring rap by Jadakiss, prod. by Swizz Beatz, on the radio right next to, say, Eve's "What Ya Want," featuring singing by Nokio and Eve herself, produced by Swizz Beatz. This is a genuine question, since my ear isn't to the ground here, but I'm assuming that the same person is buying both Jay-Z and Aaliyah; at this point the two seem closer to each other in genre and audience than either is to, say, Macy Gray.

Overlap of multiple demographix here, I think. The rap only crowd can go for the R&B crossovers, the R&B crowd can go for the tracks which are sometimes rap crossovers (rap artists ALWAYS have rap on albums, but oft. only a few crossover-capable songs, and similarly R. Kelly for ex. will have his single and then the repackaged remix with the rappers for a slightly different market). There's also the whole set of soul singers with far less rap influence, and who don't tend to collaborate or share producers in the same way. I'd argue the two are fairly melded in the general pop landscape, but there still exist strong currents of the "pure" stuff which increase as the lens moves from the pop center.

Ha! I'm reviving this thread just because I want a lot of people to read it.

A year on, now that "pop tourism" has become thoroughly de rigeur across the board (Truth Hurts ==> Holly Valance ==> No Doubt) have the resonances/implications/meanings/effects of the practice changed? (meanwhile I'm still waiting for that miami bass explosion I was talking about)

Something I was thinking about the other day: assuming hypothetically you're against the practice of stealing from other genres, which is worse: "Addictive", or Oasis's "Hindu Times"? Is stealing direct from the subcontinent more or less justified than worshipping at the alter of those who stole from the sub- continent?

Tim, are you talking about "Addicted To Bass" because i showed it to an argentinian friend and she said the intro sounded exactly like cumbia, till the first minute. I have no idead what cumbia is so i cant say if thats true

Truth Hurts' "Addictive" actually. The intro to "Addicted To Bass" hs a vaguely latin feel to it I guess, but I'm not in a position to be more specific than that.

Cumbia is a very frustrating music to dance to. Pleasant, fast, but somewhat rigid and sexless without being ecstatically so.

have the resonances/implications/meanings/effects of the practice changed?

By "practice" do you mean "pop tourism" as practiced on the ILM board of as practiced elsewhere (by musicians, for instance)?

I'm not sure that Truth Hurts and Quik sampling Mangeshkar in 2002 is different in kind from the Real Roxanne and Howie Tee sampling Elmer Fudd in 1986: it's not so much tourism as grab bag/party favors. But we'll see if there are any consequences, followups, imitations. What I struck me about "Addictive" was how much the sample ruled the song.

What struck me, that is. I didn't strike me, though perhaps I should have.

I took a two hour cumbia workshop back in the spring, but I'm still not really sure how to do it, or sometimes even how to recognize it. It didn't help that this was folklorically oriented, when I am mostly interested in how it would be danced to in clubs (not that much gets played in clubs around me, but occasionally it happens). It's Colombian, by the way (did someone say that already?), but it's fairly popular in other Latin American countries.

Many of the cumbia movements reminded me of things I had done in African dance classes long ago.