'Colonialism' in music
Probably opening a HUGE can of worms here, but there's a couple of very interesting articles in Wire this month.
Firstly, the guy from Awesome Tapes From Africa argues that we need to expose African musicians to globalisation and integrate them with the global music economy, rather than acting like a paternalistic guardian. Personally, think this is a VERY good and well thought out piece, aside from the slightly suspect 'but it's too hard to pay african musicians segment' (although I'll allow him that as I have no experience of the field..)
http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/9052/
Secondly, a letter from an African avant-garde musician who critiques William Bennett for calling an album Afro-Noise and disenfranchising a whole group of musicians of their own genre. You can read it here: http://www.exacteditions.com/read/the-wire/june-2012-31131/6/3/afro%20blues%20la%20bruha%20desi%20la%20wire
You can also read The Masthead (editorial) which mentions both, here: http://www.exacteditions.com/exact/browse/435/493/31131/3/4
I'm sharing those links as I think a) more people should read Wire for stuff like this which no-one else remotely covers and b) I think it's a very interesting debate.
Where do you come down in this debate?
- Relevant artist taggings:
- Dem Brooklyn Bums »[x]
- DJ Super Bamos »[x]
- Totally Boring »[x]
- Sleepflower »[x]
- The Dreadful Yawns »[x]
- Ian Dury and the Music Students »[x]
- The Virgins »[x]
- Mad Professor »[x]
- Sweet Jane Andrews Lane Theatre Saturday October 17th @ 10.30pm »[x]
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yeah I saw ATFA's piece
it was really good. I have no informed opinion, but it's interesting, so just going to watch this one play out, I think.
glad to see someone criticising William Bennett. His forged compliation of 'afro-noise' from years ago was absurdly stupid. i appreciate he enjoys the source material for his music and has done things charitably for the region, but man... his politics are terrible. He seems to me to be one of those guys (like ricky gervais or someone) who is obviously a smart and ostensibly concerned guy who nonetheless have got it in their heads they've reached a certain level of pc-enoughness where they can completely forget about their own privilege: _"if I desire anything, it's for people to have as much self-expression as possible. And it's entirely personal." _
... well, it's not clearly not because any writing from Fanon to Spivak or the history of Africa itself shows that racism and colonialism are structural things that can't entirely be fought off at the level of the individual, so to attempt to turn it into a discussion about individual self-expression seems to me incredibly disingenuous.
That quote is from Rory Gibb's interview w/ him, which was a good interview and on one hand expresses some interesting ideas: e.g. i think there's an argument to taking things that have been intended for extreme racial caricaturing and saying 'look, even if (say) Africans were like this...that would be fine too.' Inserting a human quality back into things that were intended to dehumanise a la the reappropriation of the word 'nigger'.
Yet does Bennett really do that... ?
I mean the fact he brings up Heart of Darkness as a good example at the end is just wtf!? like how can he possibly be so involved in thinking about Africa and yet not know that text is a problematic thing?
_'The heart of darkness is actually everything, and we're in the prison.'_yeah ok so there's ostensibly a positive reversal, but you're still using the idea of this authentic natural African space to project your own desires onto:
_'I want to be frothing at the mouth, I want to be these guys participating. That's what I want to be doing.'_
http://thequietus.com/articles/07199-william-bennett-cut-hands-whitehouse-interview
Ok, wasn't aware of that but I doubt it will destroy my enjoyment of the record
Those particularities aside...
I honestly think that the guy on the letters page is being a little bit ridiculous. What is the possible issue with him calling a record that? How is he disenfranchising artists? It is clearly a label relating to source material and nothing else.
I feel we're increasingly in a world without borders - I don't identify music as afro-punk or afro-noise, I don't care if the maker is black white or otherwise. There are white guys in brooklyn making music which sounds like it came from the Congo, and there are guys in Morocco making music that sounds like Hendrix record on cellphones. All Bennett did was identify what his influence was very specifically. Maybe I'm missing the point but it feels like a storm in a teacup.
I mean, please do correct me here if I've misunderstood this.
I guess your retort will be that the dice are loaded in favour of the western artists who have the infrastructure and the capital to make things successful
and as such will be able to absorb whole and assimilate 'world' sounds robbing them of their context.
To an extent I agree I suppose. But I think that the process is more complex than that and that serious music fans (who seem to be increasing in number) will always look for the roots of things. And that the idea of blurred borders is not a terrible idea and that it will start to work both ways. All we have to do is ensure that the proper conduits are there. Which do seem to be developing: barely a week goes by when I don't see 3 or 4 adverts for african or other acts playing in big venues. I think people are waking up to the idea of music existing beyond continents, in both senses. And some of the developments and the mixes are so fascinating to hear.
yeah, I don't disagree. Didn't really need to type that long post below then. Ah well.
I'm meant to be going out so sorry I can't reply at length...
Yeah, I wasn't implying it should damper your enjoyment of the music, just got some doubts myself, (primarily about the presentation of the music.) Whether or not people should still enjoy problematic art (I'm not sure this even, intrinsically, is that) is a whole big other question.
One of the things about the presentation, as I say, is to do w/ images of Africans...which, whether justifiable in this case or not, can (and this is less likely when we're talking about esoteric electronic music) feed back into African's images of themselves...see Fanon, 'The Pyschopathology of the Negro' for example. I mean maybe it's fine in this case, but I think it is an important issue.
'There are white guys in brooklyn making music which sounds like it came from the Congo'
... I'm sure there are, but following that, it's much easier for those white guys in Brooklyn to get their music released, praised and so on than it is for the (often much poorer) black guys in the Congo...who often orginated the sound and (to my mind) deserve credit and the right to determine the direction of that sound. If this is seen as unimportant, then you get situations where e.g. w/ disco what was a predominately LGBT scene led by black and latino youth with becomes the homogenised heterosexual rite of Saturday Night Fever or w/e, where open LGBT-friendly dance-floors turn an emphasis on male-female couples, which in turn alienates those (often poor) black & latino LGBT youth who started the movement due to a particular need (loneliness, alienation etc.) Maybe it didn't work quite like that but it's an example,and I know Terre Thaemlitz talks a lot about the hyper-specific nature of dance music where music scenes evolve in a particular context, (which is often formed around arbitrary groupings like sexuality, race, geography) and then when taken out of that context and placed into another without those markers becomes something unrecognisable to the originators of the scene.
see above: pre-empted your critique :)
Have never seen Cut Hands live, so can't comment on the images. I think I'd have to experience them to determine my reaction to it.
I think the alienation point is trickier to address. I'll come back on it this evening after I've finished teaching.
Ok, Alienation.
I think again this is a question of whether we feel some white man's guilt urge to shield former colonies in the musical sense. Alienation is a natural process to a degree: music becomes popular underground, gets absorbed partially by the mainstream, but I think the originator still remains and often gains benefits.
I've read Thaemlitz's critiques but I just can't agree: today it is increasingly impossible to say where anything has come from or who has made it, especially for predominantly vocal-less dance music.
I completely agree with the sentiments in the Awesome Tapes From Africa piece - why provide shielding for African or other artists, which as a result of this may actually lose their audience to western groups?
Where are cementimental and countzero?