Rock – Rebellion or Maybe No?

Rebellion is the stuff rock ‘n’ roll is made of. If there is a line between rock and pop – and I think there is – then it is this attitude, this stance of doing the wrong thing that is at its center. Elvis’ voice is too wild, his hips out of control; the Stones’ reference to brown sugar a little too obvious; and, well, Heroin, is about doing heroin. Society at large rightly objected to these public expressions of alterity because they flew in the face of our accepted habitus and dared even to revel in it. The youth are being corrupted, the world is going to hell. (Fade in Led Zeppelin…)

 

Or have we been living in hell all along? Prof. Dr Peter Wicke (Humboldt Universitaet zu Berlin), one of Europe’s leading experts on popular music culture, has suggested that the seeming rebellion of rock music culture is a space in which nascent traits of the dominant society are variously celebrated and decried. In short, rock is the place of social contest, but contest of traits already endemic to the whole of society. Such a proposition might irk our ready-rocker who wants to be called an outlaw, feared and yet respected for his – yes, his – brash disavowal of society’s mores, but it is quite promising for the observer wishing to find more than visceral value in the music culture of rock. Rock is thus transformed into prominent stage for the analysis of new social and cultural formations, thus extending Attali’s argument beyond the economic realm.

 

In Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1999/1984 [1977]) the French economist, politician, and Marxist intellectual argues that the stages of the mode of musical production through European history always foreshadow the analogous change in the economy. The movement from noise to music is the gradual acceptance of societal norms already present. “Music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things; it is not only the image of things, but the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future. For this reason musicians, even when officially recognized, are dangerous, disturbing, and subversive (p 11).” Attali thus places musical rebellion in this liminal space between revolution and normativity: music is the rebellion of becoming normal.

 

Is the undulating, thrusting fascination of Elvis’ hips truly that radical to America culture of the 1950s? What about the dances of minstrelsy or the Charleston and the risque Josephine Baker? Sexualized dance was nothing new, but Elvis’ faux pas was to lay this bare and present it to a willing audience of teenage girls. Similarly, “interracial” sex and narcotic drug use are practically founding gestures of our great country given the liberties slave owners regularly took with their female property and the tobacco plantations of the colonies which supplied the Old Country. But these aspects of habitus remained proscribed from the dominant discourse, while rock dared talk about it and sell it to the little ones.

 

I will leave it to others to comment or reflect on this suggestion in relation to other examples. Further, I recognize the slight inconsistency of the theoretical position outlined above – is rock a true harbinger of new cultural artifacts or does it merely reveal what was already there? – but both demand a repositioning of rebellion in rock ‘n’ roll. Rock does not have the status of an Act in the Lacanian sense of initiating that which was previously inconceivable; it isn’t true revolution, but rather a ground on which very real, existing traits of the dominant society are contested.

All Songs (Really) Considered?

Is music still only sound? Is that all we can talk about? For me as a scholar it is striking (and worrying) that the non-academic media continues to discuss music almost exclusively as an autonomous art object. Be they commercial radio stations, television channels, web sites, or magazines the discourse centers on the sound, on genre, and, largely, on the influences of b(r)ands on each other. Isn’t there anything else?

 

This all struck me recently while listening to the NPR radio program All Songs Considered, hosted by the long-time director of the highly popular All Things Considered: Bob Boilen. I saw the podcast offered among iTunes recommended programs, read the blurb describing itself as an “eclectic mix of fresh music by emerging artists and breakout bands,” and thought I’d found myself a great new resource for discovering various musics of the world or at least of the US. Instead I found my iPod saturated with a rather lame, self-congratulating version of a college radio station. Indie-pop for hipsters is the fare of the day. I was amused for about twenty minutes.

 

So I returned to read the reviews given the program. Aren’t other people bothered by the incongruity between the title and the content? Indeed they are. A few laud Boilen for his choices, but the naysayers have the majority, all lambasting him for not including . . . heavy metal or pop or hip hop: i.e. other mainstays of the commercial music industry. The radio program he directs is widely praised because it does indeed take on a surprisingly large range of topics from near and far, the serious to the utterly mundane, all with very even respect and treatment. All Things Considered deserves, in my opinion, both its name and its reputation. All Songs Considered does not.

 

Take one recent episode in which an NPR intern was asked to come on the show to play some of his top picks and discuss them with Boilen. To start with the range of musical styles presented remained largely within the description given above. If one wants to argue about genre, then it is at the least safe to say that no non-Western or non-commercial music got any play. But what is really at issue here for me is the content of the discourse. (I’m using discourse here in the original Foucauldian sense of a hegemonic field of symbolic interaction which maintains control, in part, by defining what can be discussed and what cannot. See Foucault’s essay “The Discourse on Language,” 1971) The conversation between the two presenters was almost exclusively limited to three topics: 1. impressionistic descriptions of the sound of the band in question, 2. talk of instrumentation/orchestration, and 3. discussion of influence between bands and/or band members. A common rhetorical device was, “It sounds like a cross between band X and band Y.” Another, “Do you know musician Z? Ok, well s/he’s the leader of this new band.”

 

The points I’m making here are very simple. First, NPR should be disappointed in the narrow range of its All Songs Considered program. With such an obvious reference to its much more catholic relative, the program can be seen as an absolute failure in continuing the liberal, open discourse common to the network. Second, this limited range of discourse about music – found in a particularly striking example here in the radio program All Songs Considered – is common to the mass of media about music in the cosmopolitan world. The talk of music in our culture remains frighteningly separated from the world in which it takes place and it should worry us that this is the case.

 

Furthermore, this myopia represents a failure of ethnomusicology to publicly critique this pervasive formalist aesthetic and, more sinisterly, the success of the Kulturindustrie to divorce music from its centrally spiritual, political, historical, and identity-forming functions. We are left with little more than a series of Barbie-dolls about which we can discuss the merits of straight-cut bangs or decry the return of bell-bottoms (now called ‘boot cut’), and thereby forget the gender-role implications of playing with mammorous Scandinavian toothpicks and other trivia. Doesn’t music mean more than that to us?

Review: “World Music: A Very Short Introduction” by Philip V. Bohlman

‘World music,’ ‘worldbeat,’ and today I heard ‘international music’ – what do all these names mean, if anything? Does Indian classical music count even though it’s a classical tradition? What about Indiana polka? Paul Simon? And are we really only talking about music? Where are the people, the markets, the histories, the cultures? These are but some of the questions which the eminent scholar Philip V. Bohlman (University of Chicago) has addressed in this 2002 contribution to the Oxford “Very Short Introduction” series, and the answers he provides are many.

 

This multiplicity is already present in the structure of the chapters, each of which includes six brief sections covering different kinds of knowledge and discourse. They begin with a so-called ‘encounter’ with world music. One of Bohlman’s main points in the book is that the othering adjective ‘world’ always already indicates that the named music is the result of an encounter – almost always between the West and the rest. ‘World’ in this context simply means strange, non-Western, different, fascinating. The first of these encounters, chronologically, Bohlman says was the arrival in Brazil of the Huguenot missionary Jean de Lery in 1557 and his writings on the music of the Tupinamba, his initial fright and confusion and his later delight and wondrement. This and other historical encounters which form the birth place of world musics also form the beginnings of the chapters.

The second section of each chapter introduces either a historical or theoretical topic. The ontologies of music is the first – what do various cultures consider music? The Muslim reading of the Koran, for instance, is not music. For the Brazilian worshippers of candomble there is no meaningful separation between music, dance, prayer. At another extreme, the Hausa of northern Nigeria have words for musicians, instruments, and other things and concepts related to music, but not for music itself. It is ontlogically absent from their world. Another chapter deals with the division between folk music and world music; yet another the influence of north African musics and music theory of the middle ages on Europe. Here Bohlman seeks few answers, but provides a great deal for thought in a brief space.

 

Next, we get a profile of a ‘world musician,’ but not primarily of the kind found in most journalism of world music. For example, Bohlman takes up the musicians of the Middle Passage, a term used to refer to the African slaves brought to the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries. Although the names of these musicians might be lost, their music is more present than ever before in the African American musics of North America, the Carribean, and South America and further to pop and commercial world music made in countries much farther afield. Thus the scanty details of what these tragic, yet inspiring men and women played, danced, and sang on the decks of the very ships that symbolized their terror are all the more pregnant with meaning.

The fourth section of each chapter discusses an issue of meaning or identity in music as expressed in aesthetics. This discussion in chapter two deals with the pressing issue of the space created between the West and the rest by the very category of ‘world music.’ If world music is that non-Western music encountered, recorded, and then brought back to the home country for sale and/or analysis, then it is nothing other than cultural colonialism made possible by the same imbalance of power – economic, educational, political – which rightly incenses all world citizens bearing any conscience at all. That being the case, what are we to do with the musics we so enjoy, the musicians who so fascinate us? Is it ok to buy their music from multinational record companies and thus support this system of indirect exploitation? Doesn’t simply writing about a musical tradition, as if from a point of authority, further this imbalance? Yes probably, is the answer Bohlman gives us, and thus enjoins us to remain ever critical of this process creating the space/division between these two worlds. Only be being first conscious of what is the case can we attempt to alter it.

 

The last two sections of each chapter I’ll leave to the readers to discover for themselves, as I believe the scope of this introduction has been sufficiently displayed. World music is anything but a simple topic and Bohlman has not given simple answers, but has done an admirable job of putting both breadth and depth of thought into a lively and jargon-free form. If you are seeking a brief introduction to the main products…I mean…musicians in world music today, then look elsewhere. But if you are interested in a critical and thorough introduction to the worlds of music, then this may well be a very good start.

 

Reviewed Work:

Bohlman, Philip V. 2002. World Music: A Very Short Intrduction. Oxford University Press: Oxford. 177 pages.