Everybody's Talking About World Music

im all over sunny ade and fela kuti of late as well

Good question, Tom. Will try to get back to it. (Shades of Dr C here.)

Something I've been listening to a lot lately is African pop.

Just don't turn into Damon and you're all right. ;-) In terms of how you criticize -- well, do you like it or don't you? Before you complain, obviously there are further questions one can ask -- whether something is a clear ripoff, a hybrid, a cover, whether what you're hearing is 'real' or is in fact incorporating influences from outside the 'traditions,' etc. But ultimately that doesn't impact on what you think of it or not, and even if you can't speak in the voice of The Expert you can still say "I like (or don't like) this and here's why." A starting point, at the very least.

That is the like the mother of all questions! Esp. for critics, it is very difficult to answer. Of course, selfishly, most critics I know will say, I'm only responsible for writing about how I feel about a piece, not I'm not assuming any authority and neither should the reader. Of course that's complete crap, as if that were true, and critics were really off the hook, there'd be no reason that they'd choose someone like Chuck Eddy instead of my sister to write reviews about obscure blues rock. The truth is that most people are lazy and don't want to make the effort to learn--or they get older and settle into one fashion or another--and from then on out, it's very difficult to assimilate new perspectives.

To criticise a music without understanding its unique conditions-- assuming one can understand, in gross terms, what a condition is--is a bit presumptuous. Having said that, as long as you're aware that you aren't really appreciating the work as the artist intends, though, you're perfectly free to describe it, deconstruct it, whatever. But keep in mind that if you do want to fully enjoy a work, it would definitely help to understand the creation's boundaries and its place in its own genre.

So basically you can totally describe Gary Lucas and Jelly Roll Morton and contrast them, but it would be stupid. That's pretty obvious, but what's not so obvious is when people try to describe Morton Feldman in terms of Glenn Branca. But I've read reviews that do that--because certain critics just don't give a shit about actually learning a discipline, and they're arrogant enough to assume that their limited musical training is enough to decode the musical work. After all, to them, it's just emotions and notes. I'm all for critical relativism, but that's seems to push it a little too far.

When we put it in other contexts though, that line of criticism is just ludicrous. No one would ever try and describe Neruda in its original text without being able to speak Spanish. Or describe Mishima by talking about the way the Japanese letters resemble abstract art. But that's what many rock critics do, metaphorically, critique Neruda on the basis of the fact that English and Spanish share roughly the same alphabet. It's a rather sad endeavour.

Tom --

If I were you, I wouldn't worry about forming critical opinions just yet. When jumping that far outside of "your" musical tradition, you're putting yourself in the position of a child, really, to whom the entire form is new and alien and obscure -- the problem is that unlike a child, you have all of these intellectual tools to try and "decode" the music by brute mental force, and you have the desire to develop an informed and reasonable opinion as soon as you can.

But maybe the best you can do here is to proceed the way a 10 year old proceeds through rock music: buy what you like, get really excited about it, buy whatever seems related to the stuff you like, etc., and don't worry too much about your opinion in critical terms. Chances are you'll wind up just like that 10 year old by the time he's 20 -- you'll have a much clearer concept of what's good and what's bad and why, and hopefully you'll realize that a lot of the stuff you liked when you first started listening was actually quite awful. It's unfortunate that it takes so much effort, but then hey, what do you expect? You're not likely to find a guy in Senegal who can listen to a few rock records and start talking about how Wire were better than Gang of Four.

That said, I've been enjoying the new Baba Maal quite a bit. Maybe in ten years, I'll be able to tell you whether I think it's "good" or not.

The euro-US based "world music" critics — who "knew an awful lot abt the context" — are what made me stop writing about this music. It wasn't the homework aspect of it, it was the godawful thinness of the assumptions about what music's for, why people make it and why they listen. Yr assumptions abt pop and how it works "here" are far richer and more interesting (and common-sensy) anyway than most "ethno-musicological" review-journos and Andy K*rshaw types. Look at a Top Ten in Addis Ababa or Kinshasa: 70% is music you KNOW, american chart music. Just don't go making claims about knowing what the talking drums are actually SAYING.

They operate under capitalism = they are pop

Mark, you deserve high praise for that. Absolutely spot on.

heard in a record Store today
Why buy the $ Karhimi Karie , Brits on Sale for 10

Sort of true, Mark, but sort of not. In the broadest sense, yes: I can vouch for the kids in Addis Ababa being quite keen on 2Pac and Ziggy Marley, but I can also vouch for their never really having heard much of these people's music. And you know all those French hip-hop outfits where you wonder where the hell their fan base is located? Answer: Senegal, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire...

But that doesn't mean that turning on a radio in Addis Ababa means hearing Elton John or the Spice Girls. You get something entirely else, and something pretty damn fascinating: a weird sonic amalgam of local traditional music, hip-hop, reggae, soul, and of course the international sound of pop cheese. All within the same song, half the time: one guy playing a kraar, one guy playing dubby basslines, one guy rapping, etc. Followed by recordings of children singing folk songs, followed by locally-produced ballads that don't sound particularly different from either Whitney Houston or the latest film theme from Bombay.

My unrelated point, however, being: I think this material is "used" and "reacted to" in mostly the same way that Westerners use and react to music -- it's something to like, it's something to dance to, and it's something to make aesthetic decisions that seem to have a meaningful place in the world around them, to differentiate certain parts of a culture from other parts of a culture. Most of us just happen to be rather removed from that culture, and therefore can't be expected to parse it without a bit of immersion first.

Also good is the Ethiopiques series, but of course I'd say that.

P.S.: something like the Backstreet Boys is obviously going to be pretty amazing to a kid in the third world, who's going to have very little concept of the staginess and artificiality of the thing; from that perspective, the 'Boys are going to look like absolute gods, and the U.S., by extension, will seem very much like the most amazing place on Earth, and not so wrongly so. (Although here's where I recall a conversation with a little girl in Ethiopia who claimed to like N'Sync. Me: "Which one's your favorite?" [winking and nudging] "Which do you think is cute?" Her: "Eeew, they're white!")

Well, the amalgam on the radio is precisely what I like about it, Nitsuh. I took Mark's post to be a well-written and well-placed attack on those misguided enough to search for some kind of "purity" rather than be fascinated with that mix of sounds.

For some reason, I took Tom's Afro-pop question to concern "world music" not so much in the vein of Rachid Taha or Angelique Kidjo, but more, say, maybe Joseph Spence or L. Subramaniam or something-- something that comes more indigenous than imported. It's probably not as difficult to critique world pop as it usually has something to do with Western ideas of harmony, melody, rhythm, etc.

On the other hand, there is a growing problem of new, shiny music forcing out the old, familiar music in lots of places around the world.

It's weird--so basically the Western imperialists, if you like, go and plum some great, some not-so-great artists from the far corners of the dark and not-so-dark continent and package it for Western consumption. Then this newly packaged, oft-simplistic music gets sent back to the old world, where it infects all these youngsters who like that it's more "Western" and hence hipper.

Meanwhile, the depth and nuance of old music is traded on a surfeit of techno-beats and rock guitars. Thus creating an awful feedback loop where the music gets shallower and shallower--kind of like xeroxing a xerox. The new music is not bad, not inherently anything-- but the problem is that the old music is rapidly growing extinct. This is happening everywhere, from Africa to Australia to Thailand to India. The new music is simply more enticing, and the old too complicated and requiring too much discipline and patience.

And no matter what anyone says, this is not a trend in history, for a problem of this scope and magnitude, it's a singularly modern phenomenon.

sunny ade and youssou and salif keita and whoever and whoever CAME OUT of africa to bring their music elsewhere: they weren't really "plummed"; they themselves wanted to partake of the power and glamour and extended value they felt that western pop had/has, being a universal lingua franca of freedom and other vague stuff...

in john miller chernoff's "african rhythm and african sensibility" (jmc studied under a ghanaian drum master), he asked what the msic had been like a few generations back. te drum masters look at him and chuckle: we haven't the slightest idea; completely different, it changes with every generation. point being, the "old music" was already enormously fluid and adaptive (product of being "oral" not written in transmission), so that "adhering to the tradition" may end up meaning "retaining fluidity" (as opposed to trapped forever imitating some folkways recording to stay in with Folk R**ts magazine...)

If you cast yr record out into the world, then you're gonna have to live with the response to it in its furthest resting point, as well as the local original audience. And most ethno- correct insistence is not only pedantic to the point of interest-death, it's actually a very extreme mistranslation: it's the label on a museum drawer, rather than a RESPONSE TO THE MUSIC. If you were in village [x] when you heard the music, then you'd know from context what it "means", because it's happening, but if you're in your own flat in Hoxton, then you know from context what it means because it's happening. A bettah bame for this shift than "imperialism" may be "poor sleevenotes"...

I hardly think that this is an academic debate... the fact of the matter is that teenagers across the globe are trading their cultural identities in for far more "fluid" but more historically amnesiac ones. Africa is only one continent of music, diverse as it is--there are plenty of other cultures which have VERY long traditions of classical music--whether it be Indian or Gamelan or Aboriginal. And I seriously doubt that when your Ghanian master said that he had no idea what the music sounded like a few generations back, he meant that it sounded nothing like what it does now. Or that he would agree that the modern music is a continuation in tradition. When I said plummed, I meant the work of such moguls as Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, and Bill Laswell. And I do mean plummed, or plucked, or what have you, because without their infectious media manipulation, without the sort of hipness that world music had developed, we wouldn't really be talking about Salif Keita or palmwine guitar styling.

It always boggled my mind when so many critics tried to draw a line from the African percussionists to modern hiphop. I don't see that much similarity at all. Maybe in the cultural "griot" sense, but certainly not rhythmically or melodically. Keep in mind that I'm not advocating some kind of Ethno-police, a la Kip Hanrahan or Bill Laswell, but that I'm merely pointing out a sad occurence.

Funnily enough, when I was an assistant in the University of Washington music dept, studying under another Ghanian drum master, I asked him what he thought of the new breed of African singers--Kidju, et al. And I kept hearing how frustrated he felt that the very rich and complicated history of his music, the atmosphere and inherent content of the rituals, and the stylistic nuances were being lost by the younger generation. The very same man championed fusion in so many ways, but he always came back to the point that one must truly respect and understand the native tongue before venturing forth--and that what is being recorded and distributed nowadays is the impression of depth, the impression of cultural diversity, not the object itself. Much like sampled music, only in a more derogatory manner, much of world music is iconic--representing the idea of something, but not sincere. And I heard the same thing when from the Thai string ensemble teacher, the steel drum arranger, and the oud master that were there as well.

I don't think that this sense of cultural dislocation is unusual--and I'm tired of hearing about how commenting on such is heretical. If we can be open-minded enough to want to hear cultural fusion, then we must be open-minded enough to see the damage that it does.

Actually funnily enough I think we're sort of saying the same thing a bit, Mickey: I mean, I gave up writing abt African Music precisely as the Laswells and Gabriels swooped, because I hated what everything had become. Because they slathered a kind of gluey "fake respect" over the top of of everything. Liberal-pluralist no-boundaries everyone-equal blah blah: but actually really very frightened of (eg) the cranky opinions of a highly Western-attuned anti- Western playa like Fela, let alone genuine drum-master language, philosophy, practice. And my feeling then — which totally failed to carry, before the kind of smothering PC-ness of the World-Mus com (a feeling which in fact I can articulate better now than I could then, though still not well) — was that if we'd dealt with each of these figures as New Princelings in rock and indie and rap, then we were respecting them MORE than the nervous coddled grown-up distancing we WERE giving them. (So that their particularity would read and evolve in direct contact with ours, and NOT be filtered through some vaguely PC set of moralistic western generalisations...)

I had a very strange but strong idea (back then) of how good rock-writing could effect a better democratised and necessary education about this stuff as it arrived that eg music- academic discourse never could. "Respectful" is such a tricky word: because (to me) it means express in the language I use for those I respect (Johnny Rotten, say). In other words, a complex testing non- hostile friendly antagonism which actually ALLOWS that the incomer has a valued contribution to MY cultural world, engaging with it, not just an abstract ethnological mapping of everything as it supposedly existed in its place. Which is so quickly prey to mere geographical relativism and protected game reserves for the No Longer Dynamic. (Laswell's word for his projects was COLLISION rather than FUSION: I always liked the concept behind that — except in his case I now think it was more shtick than anything else.)

But before all that Real World stuff happened, there really WAS a brief sense of folks like Ade and Youssou travelling OUT and presenting themselves TO the world (this is 83-86 maybe: 1987 was the year the term WORLD MUSIC became a marketing device — i wrote the news story in nme yay me *sigh*). I loved that moment, and I find it hard to let go of it as a good thing, even tho Ade went home a chastened man and Youssou and esp.Salif got caught up in a a machinery they have never been able to operate well

I think you're quite right about the hiphop/ griot nonsense: this kind of predigested dilution sucks, and obscures. And I misdirected myself onto a v.glib point about fluidity, which you demolished pretty well: but there is a deeper, harder point hidden in there too, that when a culture isn't based on a tradition of its own documentation (on paper, on disc), its powers of resistance to outside influence are likely to be expressed at the level of ATTITUDE rather than specific technical practice.

But who is hurting and why? I realize that may sound flippant and I get what you're saying, but still.

Commenting on Mickey rather than Mark there...

actually i'm fairly sure i haven't made what i was trying to say above very clear: i've been intending for abt two years now to write a WHY I STOPPED WRITING ABOUT WORLD MUSIC piece (it's promised to wire, but haha they can wait), but the stuff floating around in my head is still a stupid contradictory mix of what I thought before I stopped, and what I thought WHEN I stopped, and what I think now, all jabbing out with the same vigour (I know how to fight) but not actually coherent. And not necessarily fighting the right ppl! Bah I am such a chucklehead.

Hi Mark,

I'm not entirely sure I follow you either... :) but I think we're coming from the same place, of loving music, and as hokey as that sounds, that's a good enough common ground. However, I think what I meant may be tangential to what you're saying. At least to a certain degree, what I mean is that we are losing precious, detailed music because the West doesn't distinguish between the good and the bad. Because the West can't--it's not our fault, really, it's the same as having Indian musician decree what is good Western Art Music (what some of us call Classical music...) What do you think they're going to pick? Schoenberg or Phillip Glass? My guess is, Phillip Glass, or at least Takemitsu and not Milton Babbitt. And the same problem is happening, where the stuff that gets replicated, that gets distributed, that gets marketed and recorded onto digital media and made immortal, isn't always, and usually isn't, the best stuff... the most difficult, nuanced, sensitive stuff.

I used to write for MTV.com--only pop music--and I worked for a coupla other little musicreview sites, so I'm going to go out on a limb, and risk insulting lots of people, by saying that I don't know if I'd really want a Western critic to review other cultural music. The only exception being a rather anecdotal kind--like, "I have no idea what this music is about, but this is what I feel about it. Or, I think this is really cool, but here's my background, and so this is a Western approach to what is someone else's world. "

It's just that when I traveled around a bit, and played with gypsies in Prague and jammed with Gamalan string players, I always felt like such a cultural imperialist. So awkward and two-left-footed that I wanted to step away from the bounds of what is so precious and gorgeous and immutable.

And it really pains me to see it being watered down for our aesthetic pleasure. And have some arrogant, pompous Western critics and music lovers go, fuck 'em, who cares? Who cares about lineage, history, truth, the past, if we don't understand it? It's all about "feeling." Lighten up! That pisses me off so much, because they're basically hypocrites--they condemn anybody who likes bad music that they understand, but anything they don't is based on hype and their idea of cool... like buying IKEA and thinking that's Scandinavian. Or reading Rem Koolhaas.

They scoff at someone who goes, "I like Oasis" because they know about the Beatles, but they'll go around and broadcast their love for the Tuval Throat Singers and compare them to the Hillard Ensemble, or worse yet, Messiaen and fucking Robert Rich in the same sentence!!!! Comparing them for ambience is like reading V.S. Naipaul for fucking plot. ARGH!

Sorry.. :) You can tell, it's a rather sensitive area for me--just because so few musicians see it happening in our world, whereas the elders in the other cultures can't do anything about it.

For the record though, I like Laswell's works... not all of them. Nicky Skopelitis is soporific, but Imaginary Cuba is gorgeous, and Praxis is just cool. But I know what you mean. And Laswell complains about Byrne and Gabriel! What up with dat?!

But I know what you mean, I think. Or maybe we're kind of in a different tangent, but I'm glad you understand what I'm saying.

Maybe it's time to reopen this thread. Here in NYC all the hipsters seem to be part of "globe" parties of one form or another. We are constantly being reminded that the world is shrinking. Hip-Hop, electronica, rock, brazilian, mambo, bhnagra, dancehall, reggae, klezmer... on and on.. all seem to be crossing with each other. All the critcs seem to be talking and it feels like everyone's trying to break the scene. Even MTV is stressing an "international focus."

The music industry has been through this many times. It seems that world influence has made frequent appearances within the music cycle. However, there's no denying the stakes are a bit different this time out. Post 9-11, Internet and let's not forget.. M.I.A.

Just don't turn into Real World redux and you're probably all right. Point being -- the great, overwhelming mistake of the 'world music' fetishization of the eighties (and beyond) was the varnished/preserved in aspic nature of things carried by so many, where what they were after was as much (if not more so) a chase after something 'real' that wasn't nasty and involved, you know, electricity or the very idea that a musician would have listened to something from the Western world and enjoyed it as much as the culture they were burdened with representing, etc. This is probably discussed upthread.

Also, I admit I find it a bit funny if there's some sort of conscious "oh man let us chase down the new sound!" hipster/party circuit still thinking that, for instance, bhangra or dancehall are somehow new, unheard musics or inspirations in a popular context. "Get Ur Freak On" is four years old now, for instance. ;-)

(I should say I'm not saying any artist from anywhere can't play traditional musics of their own country/area/background, etc., that's idiotic of course. But it's a bit rich to say of oneself, "Wow, how great we are to listen to all these musics from all over the place! We are truly broadminded listeners!" and then to turn around and implicitly say to others, "This better be *real* folk/Afropop/baile funk/whatever the fuck or else, I don't want it diluted or watered down or reminding me of something else because it has to be pure or I won't get my experience." I'm not saying YOU'RE doing that, Zion Train! But that's the kind of thing to avoid like the plague.)

it seems the new paradigm is the recognizing and education of the sounds of the past and creatively forming them into a context with new stuff. this, of course, is nothing new.... hanging out with one culture just ain't hip no more.

Yeah, well, fuck hip. ;-) (More kindly put -- we cherry pick, listen, observe etc. as we please, find the inclination, and connect with that which connects us as receptors. I don't need 'hip' telling me that there's a big wide world out there, and I don't have to fulfill any specific listening requirements from it either!)

Essentially I'm saying what you are -- there's nothing new here.

xposts ned.. it seems that so many cultural traditions continue to crumble. you got yoga purists, now you have yoga chains. you had your traditional african beats in their correct time signatures, now, much to the disapproval of their aging generations, the rules are changed and ran through pro-tools alongside a hip-hop beat.. and pow! CHA-CHING!!!

Good thing too! Let it all come down and apart, things will flow from there.

A fake and forced history lesson but one that came to mind, stereotypes and oversimplications ahoy:

Back in 1996 I recall a slew of articles and discussions saying essentially similar points about how all the music hipsters in various corners were exploring various things old and new, hither and yon, how there was a sense of trying to escape from an imprisoning straitjacket of 'alternative' sound. It cropped up in various guises and scenes, neo-lounge explorations, Os Mutantes reissues, Luaka Bop also going, "Wait a minute, there's this film music in India over here! Gosh!" Etc, etc. Option magazine, there's a good example of all this made manifest (and one you'll note no longer exists).

What seems to have happened since -- on the one hand the 'return to rock' (YAWN!) and its cul de sac, on the other hand Timbaland/Neptunes/any goddamn number of producers and DJs and so forth going "THE WORLD IS OURS" and happily riding to the top of the charts here and a lot elsewhere with whatever they want to fuck around with.

So now if a slew of folks in W'burg are thinking, "Huh, well maybe the Strokes weren't all that and gosh there certainly seems to be a lot of attention on these other sounds here" then I raise my eyebrows a bit.

I went to a disco symposium recently with some of the top music writers and tycoons of the era and the world music scene in NY seems to parallel that time in many ways. you got this group of kids- spreading the love, doing drugs, dancing, following dj's around town- then you got the music writers spinning the scene, the club owners trying to cash in and corporate america slowly getting involved for the final payoff before the whole thing becomes a dirty word.

you might say "techno" tried to break through similarly along with countless other "scenes", many with little or no resonation.

for suburban america, saturday night fever, donna summer and bee gees brought disco to them. there's quite a few people hoping brands like m.i.a. will seal the same fate and become the biggest hit for the industry since N'Sync, Britney and Nirvana!