A couple posts ago I shared some new videos c/o Maga Bo and Ghislain Poirier — two of the transnational bass proponents profiled in Camilo Rocha’s “globalistas” article. It goes without saying that I’m a supporter of what both Bo and Ghis are up to. In partic, I dig their cross-border collaborations, their distinctive sounds despite shared styles, their preference for low-end frequencies and the hip-hop logic they bring to bear on everything they do.
Indeed, although Ghis & Bo both also draw on reggae, soca, techno, jungle, etc., to my ears all of this is ultimately filtered through a hip-hop aesthetic: their music bumps and crunches, bristles and bangs, pushes and pulls with disparate timbres and resonant samples; it is as once sweet and sour, nice and ill, & indexes a wide range of other genres within — for the most part — a boom-bap framework. I think one could say the same for the other so-called globalists featured in Camilo’s piece, Diplo and /rupture, and I would certainly say the same for myself: that despite my wide-ranging mixes and mashes, an irrepressible hip-hop steelo undergirds it all.
I think — to get to(ward) my point — that that’s the difference between the globalists named above and the other DJ/producer profiled in the piece, Brazil’s DJ Dolores —
I recently got ahold of Dolores’s new album 1 Real, and though I was struck by the similar synthesis of so many genres, I was also struck by a certain, audible difference between Dolores’s music and that by those mentioned above. On 1 Real Dolores manages, to his credit, to project a distinctive producerly voice and vision — and one rather Brazilian in sound and sentiment — while also engaging with house, drum’n’bass, dancehall and roots and dub reggae, and other global (electronic dance) genres. And yet, somehow the seamlessness of his synthesis — produced in part by the frequent use of studio musicians rather than samples — stands in stark contrast to the way, if I may, that the music of the other globalistas perifericos more often shows its seams — & indeed, revels in the cut, the break, the mix.
To my ears, Dolores’s approach is closer to, say, the way Gotan Project brings together dub and downtempo, etc., and yet manages to sound like tango (/Argentina) all the way through. It is an effect achieved via ensemble sound, but it is also an aesthetic preference. There’s a smoothness to it that reminds me more of ol worldmusic fusions than nu whirledmusic mashups. I don’t doubt that Dolores would sell well in Starbucks, while I suspect that the rest of us might fall on deaf ears (ok, maybe Florida could work there too). And I don’t mean that quite as a slight, though I clearly have my own aesthetic preferences.
That said, I should note that I’ve been enjoying 1 Real as I’ve tried to wrap my ears and head around it. It’s served well as (cooking&eating) dinner music for us, which means it occupies a special place in our domestic soundscape. And it’s the kind of thing I can recommend to people for whom I know some break-ier stuff might seem grating. But I wouldn’t call Dolores a global ghettotechie, if we actually want to invest in that term or find it to have explanatory power, for I find his music less concerned with the audibility of technology — especially low-fi, gritty, DIY/p2p stuff — and more concerned with “high” / “organic” production values. (Or maybe I just need to check more of his DJ work?)
Don’t get me wrong, tho, that doesn’t mean dude ain’t down for a lil drum’n’bass one-drop, Japanese vox noisemaking (still, note the drum[kit] timbres and “clean” violin) —
or, for that matter, some street-y ambience b/w reggae drums, melodica melancholia, and (sampled?) gestures to the other-side-of-the-world —
…
While I’m at it, allow me to riff a lil more — this time w/r/t coupé décalé and global-gtech blogging.
I was psyched to find in my Google Reader this morning a shared item from Chief Boima pointing me to a great coupé décalé vid via the Fader —
Boima was just in town, rocking some WestAf dance traxx @ Beat Research, and he schooled me on coupé décalé. According to Boima, the genre emerged from the zouglou tradition, whereby university students in Côte d’Ivoire would rap about topical subjects to the accompaniment of syncopated sticks. Boima says that these zouglou rhythms have been transmuted for coupé décalé by Ivorian youth in the diaspora (especially Paris, which has long been the recording center for Francophone Africa), who substitute — to my delight, aesthetic affinities as they are — synthesized handclaps for the sticks, while augmenting the underlying dance pulses with FruityLoopy drums. Say word. In French. Or just shake it, universal-like.
And yet, I wonder how the Fader’s & Boima’s & my own enthusiasm for something like coupé décalé would sit with JP de Masala, given his most recent musings —
I read Fader stories about hiplife and kwaito with interest but I couldn’t stop thinking about the distorsion between our conception of african music and the music africans are listening to. I mean, is Fader really setting a trend on 2 genres that seems to be stuck in a dead end ? Is kwaito and hiplife are just still living in our western imaginary and romantism ? What if african rappers just want to sing in english and sounds like Tupac ?
& moreover, JP quotes a provocative comment from someone he calls the antisuck —
The roots obsessed decry HH for losing touch with indiginous sounds. they blame american rap for detroying indigenous sounds yet They love ali farka toure, amadou & mariam, ethiopiques, things that sound like american jazz and rock music. Then you have hipsters into african rap scenes, daraa j, kuduro, trying to find the music with the most dangerous street cred/booty beats and/or backpacker rap in africa. both “scenes” are perhaps dying yet so small and insignificant as to be nearly nonexistant next to the reality of african pop music and the actually huge scenes alive and well of coupe-decale, mbalax, swahili pop, zouk.
For all the trenchant points made here — many of which get to the heart of global ghettotechery and nuwhirled musings — I think we begin to lose sight of something with the oppositions employed here. Sure, kuduro and kwaito might be (increasingly) marginal in their cities and countries of origin, but that’s no reason not to show interest in them over, say, the newest Tupac impersonator on the block. Yes, we should be careful and reflective about our interest in exotic/indigenous sounds and our desires for hearing an audible localization or indigenization of such global genres as hip-hop and house, but we need not necessarily embrace what’s popular elsewhere just as we need not foist our own popular music on the rest of the world. Further, it seems to me that we must also bear in mind that we American seekers of global sounds (and I mean American in the most inclusive sense) — as well as our Euro brethren — are inevitably guided by own our aesthetics, an aesthetics which — at least in my case, as I have tried to lay out here — does privilege what I’m calling a “hip-hop logic” as well as the audibility of certain technologies and a set of sonic priorities weighted toward the low-end & the polyrhythmic. (These priorities are qualities which, need I remind, got SFJ in some hot water for demanding that rock musicians stop embracing their opposites.)
A lot of the most popular genres cited above as more appropriate objects of our attention are, to my ears, sweet but boring. I want more bass, more synth&sampled drums, more sour with my sweet. I wouldn’t want to distort the record in terms of what’s popular and so forth, but I don’t think we need to be guided entirely by such concerns, or by fears that we will have a more heisenbergian effect on the objects of our affection than we actually will. (All of this music — and the local and diasporic scenes in which it’s enmeshed — are stronger than a few friendly firstworld bloggers.) Plus, it’s not as if coupé décalé hasn’t already been fingered for global ghettopop by the usual suspects.
What’s more, the last thing we need to do is join the chorus of the preservationists (a camp with which ethnomusicologists are far too often conflated), as JP seemingly does at the end of his post —
I guess I could resume my thaughts by saying that I’m concerned about how globalization of the american rap industry affects youths from all over the world and tends to create a cultural and economic model uniformisation, killing diversity of rhythms and language.
I’ve been teaching a course on global hip-hop all semester (I’ll share the syllabus soon), and if there’s one thing I hope my students take away from the class, it’s this: claims of American cultural hegemony, as demonstrated by the spread of hip-hop, are overstated. And this: looking for local markers as a sign of resistance is a red herring. So what if some rappers in Africa decide to sound just like Tupac? Rather than using such an instance to bemoan the so-called grey-out produced by American economic, cultural, and military forces, better to consider what it means in a particular place — how it informs local debates about selfhood and nationhood — to adopt an (African-)American accent and other sounds associated with global modernity.
Indeed, we need to constantly ask ourselves what it means in the particular places we live (Boston, Montreal, New York, London, Paris, etc.) to embrace the sounds of the DIY Global (“dirty”) South. I remain optimistic that it expresses something about our own grappling with the post-colonial, perhaps even cosmopolitan, circumstances in which we find ourselves — that, as Paul Gilroy might put it, we’re striving to cultivate, in the transnational metropoles where we live, a certain conviviality. Then again, such “engagement” / “grappling” can slide easily enough into selfish, self-centered appropriation and downloading-at-a-distance. On the contrary — if perhaps naively — I’d like to think of all this musicking as, inherently, a lot more neighborly than that.
hi wayne
my enthusiasm for coupé-décalé could sit very well with you,Fader and Boima. I’ve played coupé-décalé on masala radio show for the first time in 2005. Recently, i update my coupé-décalé since every haitian kids at the school i work are asking for it to play in party. I will post some new stuff soon.
Concerning the post on Citizen Touré, it was very frustrating for me to not be able to express in english what I really wanted to say. I translate it from french to english so everybody could understand and join the discussion but finally this is leading to a lot of misunderstanding and confusion. But like you wrote, it was just musings. Not affirmations. But maybe being a french in an english North America makes me more worried about diversity and language as this debate is going day-to-day here in Quebec since a long long time. But I’m far to be a preservationnist, it’s just that i’m old school…
I’m very glad that a man of “savoir” like you took time to share his taughts and guidance. Thx
JP
uf, as usual, lots of tasty thought morsels, more than I can address via bloggy comment.
I get a little uncomfortable sometimes with the deep moral streak in music assessment. “Good” mixing v. “bad” mixing, “good” appropriation v. “bad.” I do think it’s real important to pay attention to strategy, to intent — against the folks who defend the “if it sounds good, it’s alright” position that flattens/silences context — but I get interested in questions of reception, of how people hear things.
Meaning, pop forms may sound boring — and trust me, I’ve been trying to unbraid transLatin baladas out of my musical DNA for years — but they have a social function, fill an audience need, one which is not always overdetermined by the market or by the industry.
I think some of it depends of one’s ears. I hear Jose Jose, eg, differently when I have the ears of someone who grew up in Latin America in the 70s, as opposed to how I hear it in music critic or academic mode. If I had a musician/DJ mode, I’d hear it differently too. It’s inherent to the music critic to look for the “new,” the “different” (meaning, different from ME). That’s not always conducive to hearing what fans hear.
I don’t think this means you have to like everything that’s popular, but it’s important to have some sense of what local tastes are (what is it about the local Tupac wannabe that hits a chord) and how people in different places manage the intersections of local production resources, transnational circuits (which bring in “local” and “international” product and practices), local methods of distribution, venues for music, what vibrations resonate with local taste, etc.
My personal taste does not veer to, for example, heavy metal or prog rock, but I’d be interested in thinking how those forms work in Brazil or El Salvador or Iran.
Interesting you mention DJ Dolores – I heard him on the BBC world service last night –
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/the_beat.shtml
I shall let others fill in the blanks about what that could signify, re: globalisation and ‘world’ music.
I’m with caro on the importance of local context – while power relations vis-a-vis the west are a very significant influence on the material and cultural development of music, they are not the only one. or rather the economics/development mode of globalisation need not be the only facet of cultural exchange – chutney soca being a prime example of a cultural meeting born of, but transcending economic migration. How will chinese influence (both interms of economics and the cultural presence of guest workers) interact with african music in the present/future. The influence of the west is an important filter both historically and contemporarily, but we should not delude ourselves into thinking its the only one – world music (the music of the world) is polycentric and infintely subtle and complex.
apologies if I’m stating the obvious. the coupe decale video is awesome (as is the discussion). looking forward to seeing a global hiphop syllabus.
Thanks for the thoughts, y’all. In case it’s not abundantly clear, I’m all about the importance of local context too — that’s what the last two paragraphs are about — recognizing, of course, that the local and global quite utterly interpenetrate at this point. Still, you won’t catch me using the term glocal to describe that — I find it too silly. I do like polycentric however!
Further thoughts —
The thing about attending to the local is that is still does not require us to privilege the popular over the marginal. As Caro suggests with her comments re: metal/progrock, we can find all kinds of musical practices interesting in a particular place, regardless of whether we find the music itself interesting.
But this is where we get into questions of critical intimacy/distance. I find myself far more motivated to examine and think about and write about and network around music that I find aesthetically up my alley. (And, tho it goes without saying, I should note that for me aesthetics is not a question simply of surfaces/stylistic dimensions, but is deeply bound up with how I perceive form and content to be informed by and to shape social and historical forces and narratives about ourselves and our others. In other words, aesthetics is inseparable from ideology.) For some traditional objectivist academics, it’s dangerous to study something that so floats one’s boat, but I don’t see any other way to get up in the morning and tap tap tap on these keys.
And, of course, it depends on what hat we’re wearing. The question of critical distance / intimacy is different for an academic, a critic, a booster, a participant, an artist, and so on (bearing in mind that we often wear such hats at the same time, awkward as that can appear).
Wayne y demas, of course you’re going to dig deeper with the boat-floaters. It’s the reason I give my students parameters for their research projects, but refuse to assign topics. I don’t mean that I’ll pay attention to every movement everywhere and give it all equal weight in my time, interest, and critical energy. Eventually one has to sacrifice absolute breadth in the interest of depth, sleep and life. Even “eclectic” taste has organizing principles.
I guess I was reacting to people (academics/critics) who hole up in their area of specialization, never to venture to a different sonic neighborhood ever again. I assure you I won’t spend a lot of time writing about prog rock any time soon (I think it’s a gender thing; even the music-geekiest girls tend not to like it), but I check in occasionally (e.g. I am digging the new Mars Volta record).
And, um, someone needs to call the fashion police on either/both of those hats.
Woooooowwww, there’s enough material in that sprawling mega-post for four or five comments on totally different topics. (Just taking the last half I’d like to talk about how JP is both right (we should broaden our listening) and wrong (we shouldn’t stop focusing on interesting and forward looking genres); how there are lots of actually vital and popular hip-hop genres in africa; how we “hear” differences in our favoured genres but have difficulty distinguishing between others; the process by which genres die and how there’s always been a tendency for westerners to hang onto dying ones; a defense of nu-world vs world music; and so on.)
But what I got struck by immediately was the very first bit of the post, about the similarities between the globaltech artists. It’s true that not only is the “scene” gelling towards a single sound, but that there’s something a bit “off” in the way that sound feels when compared to the music they’re supposed to draw inspiration from. Your metaphor is hip-hop, but I think it’s more similar to the “blog house” phenomenon from sites like Discobelle.net – firmly rooted in remix culture (these are all “ecelctic” DJs originally, after all) and a touch throwaway in their combination approach. It’s not bad (and is certainly an obvious part of an experimental phase) but I certainly do hope to see it come together as a separate, self-referencing, community-driven genre real soon.
I was concerned with you’re comment about “letting history write itself”. I think that this is problematic becuase if this means that history-making has to operate as a strategy, then everyone of us has to be self-conscious of the position occupied by history as a strategy and the effects it has on each of us. Actually, this is not opperating yet and I really think it’s problematic to do so if there is no profound thinking about capitalist effects, contribution in music/history making and the further implications of your scholar thaughts/choices/taste for example.
Hi Soda (if that’s your real name). I’m afraid I don’t follow you at all. When did I say we should let history write itself? And when did I encourage anything other than that each of us has to be self-conscious of our relationships to historical processes and narratives? And, though I wouldn’t be so bold as to label my own thinking “profound,” do you really think that I gloss over such things as “capitalist effects” and the implications of my own choices/aesthetics as a blogger, scholar, DJ? I mean, that’s basically what this blog is all about. I suggest you read more.
And, Birdseed, let a man sprawl from time to time, eh? We can’t all produce concise posts attempting to map the world in all its genres (nor should we). As for your main point, I have to disagree on a few counts. For one, the scene is certainly self-referencing and community-driven already, and I’m not sure any of us seek to be ‘separate’ from the music that inspires us. Indeed, for many of the so-called globalistas, it is the act of interpersonal collaboration that is central to what we’re doing.
As for the question of “hip-hop” vs “remix culture,” I guess that’s where I show my stripes again: I think remix culture is largely derived from the approaches of hip-hop (and reggae) — two genres that are downright omnivorous in terms of what they incorporate into their flexible if familiar templates — and so I don’t see anything incommensurate with a “combination” or “throwaway” approach exemplified by some of the DJs/producers described here.
Finally, Caro, gotta thank/berate Google Images for those hats. I love the serendipity, however, that turned up a Recife hat on my first “two hats” query, given the place that DJ Dolores represents.
I guess the inherent paradox in the globalista camp (and one I guess you guys will have to struggle with) is that you’re making something cosmopolitan and international while drawing your main inspiration from music where a lot of the strength comes from its existence within tight, very local communities. The music is attractive precisely because it does not sound global or washed-out or “world beat” but very local – how do you reconsile this with the drive towards universal influences?
What I’m saying, though, is that I think you’re on your way towards naturally resolving this apparent conflict of interest, because you’re following the natural path of genre evolution. You may not “separate” yourself conciously from the inspirational music, but since you’re referencing and borrowing off each other and building up a common body of thought and practices, you’re de facto growing towards a separate genre anyway. In my mind that’s purely a good thing.
Hey,
So I wasn’t accusing you of anything and I would like to tell me more about what you want me to read more about. I was triyng to understand your point. I kind of short-circuited your post to the idea of history process. I am not saying that you are profound or that I am. I meant by “profound” a serious consideration of capitalism in our current history understanding and hisory-making. I don’t have any answer to what I am asking you either. I am trying to see with you how in your article some parts appeared to me as problematic.
You said:
“Rather than using such an instance to bemoan the so-called grey-out produced by American economic, cultural, and military forces, better to consider what it means in a particular place — how it informs local debates about selfhood and nationhood — to adopt an (African-)American accent and other sounds associated with global modernity.”
I understand that it is to simplistic to claim one cause (American hegemony and imperialism) but how would you analyse “selfhood and nationhood” without looking to colonial history and to neo-colonial (to read as capitalist strategies) history and how it framed “selfhood and nationhood” until now?
You said:
“it, we’re striving to cultivate, in the transnational metropoles where we live, a certain conviviality. Then again, such “engagement” / “grappling” can slide easily enough into selfish, self-centered appropriation and downloading-at-a-distance. On the contrary — if perhaps naively — I’d like to think of all this musicking as, inherently, a lot more neighborly than that.”
I wish it is “neighborly” but how could it be without aknowledging “en plus” of the location and the self-positioning the importance of how history constructed us, constructed the location we’re in and is continuously constructing the history itself at this moment and putting away the idea that this is evolution (because it states a certain opposition to the past).
Birdseed, I most have expressed myself very badly to make you think I said we should stop focusing on interesting and forward looking genres. The motivation behind Masala is giving exposure to forward sounds and mutation of genres. I think the Masala radio show or audio posts speak better than my not so concise essays…
no doubt, jp. we’re big masala fans here @ w&w, as you well know. didn’t mean to foster any misunderstandings. if anything, i saw your post as a healthy bit of self-reflection, asking pertinent questions about taste and representation and the implications thereof. hope others see that too.
likewise — turning back to señor(a?) soda — i would say that, when i say ‘read more,’ what i mean is that this entire blog is meant to be, among other things sure, an accumulated set of positions, a way of situating myself as a historical subject through which various ideologies speak, if you will, a complex/contradictory but intentional voice, an overarching context for any particular utterance.
so, all i was saying was, don’t judge me based on any particular post/statement; rather, attempt to understand the statement in terms of my overall aesthetic, scholarly, socially-networked project. i guess i am surprised to see the critique that you’re leveling, considering what i perceive to be my rather explicitly outlined (if, sin duda, dynamic) positions on cultural politics, public discourse, and critical bloggery. but maybe that’s a bit much to ask.
so, responding to your specific queries:
> how would you analyse “selfhood and nationhood” without looking to colonial history
> and to neo-colonial (to read as capitalist strategies) history and how it framed
> “selfhood and nationhood” until now?
i wouldn’t.
> how could it be [neighborly] without aknowledging “en plus” of the location and the
> self-positioning the importance of how history constructed us, constructed the location
> we’re in and is continuously constructing the history itself at this moment and putting
> away the idea that this is evolution (because it states a certain opposition to the past).
given my record of previous arguments proceeding from — what i can only hope is recognized as — a self-reflexive, post-colonial subject position, i didn’t think that i was guilty of not acknowledging the “en plus” as you put it. moreover, i really did not think i was implying any sort of evolutionary process. i mean, sure, there’s colonial and then there’s post-colonial, modern and post-modern, but, unless i’m not following you again, i don’t see how i’ve precluded any notion of neighborliness by virtue of the absence or ignorance of historical consciousness.
this is starting to feel rather tortuous, tho, no? could you speak in more concretes?
I don’t know if Chris-(Word the Cat) is still checking this post, but here is an answer to his Chinese Influence reference…
http://www.museke.com/node/1397
And I’m surprised nobody is mentioning the reality that immigrant communities have in the “first world cities” mentioned. Personally that is a big part of my identity, and I know Wayne it’s an influence in yours. JP mentioned it about Haitian kids in Montreal, but doesn’t the fact that there is an direct exchange going on in our own backyards matter? NEIGHBORLY is the key. Birdseed, in my life NOTHING is self contained.
“show me yr syllabus & i’ll show u mine” . local is a weird wor(l)d.
Dolores is a sweetheart, a great DJ and i like his live band too- esp. the guitarist. we were talking about how that sound/style was from africa but found a home in Recife, an audible home.
DJ Dolores & I played a bunch of shows together in Brazil in 2005. he was spinning bhangra + all sorts of stuff, focused rather than eclectic, but drawing on lots of beat traditions.
incidentally, out of all the ‘g- g-‘ artists you mention , he most reminded me of fellow brasil-resident Maga Bo in terms of dancefloor density & dynamics
Thanks for the comment, Boima. Yes, that’s exactly what I’m getting at when I use the word “neighborly.” If one lives in a (former?) metropole, or simply a modern major city (which will soon = most people in the world), one also lives in a post-colonial or at least polyglot place, so engaging with so-called “world music” actually often enough means engaging with one’s own local music. Local is a weird wor(l)d indeed. It is, in case it bears repeating, always already global (and we should be able to understand that without resorting to clunky neologisms like glocal). Local/global is a false dichotomy!
Glad to hear that Dolores is a sweetheart. I really don’t mean to disparage his work here, and I’m psyched to hear about his focused bhangra digressions. Wish there was a bit stronger whiff of that on 1 Real. “Dancefloor density and dynamics” offer another set of interesting, important rubrics thru which to hear all of this.
Finally, re: Chinese/African syntheses, I find that an interesting bit of prognosticating, WTC. (&thx for the link, Boima — interesting stuff!) Of course, the Chinese diaspora is longstanding and offers perhaps one of the most ubiquitous examples of local/global cultural fusion (perhaps more obviously in cuisine). Whether 21st century Chinese empire will have a similar effect on “world music” as 20C (African-)American is an unremittingly complex and unanswerable question, IMO, tho.
“I don’t know if Chris-(Word the Cat) is still checking this post, but here is an answer to his Chinese Influence reference…”
i just popped out for a second – thanks boima – that stuff is gold.
on the subject of neighbourly world music in the metropole… they may be something in the pipeline here in LDN (depending on venue issues). here/at the moment a lot of residents/musicians seem to play culturally specific council funded events eg. kid afrika or stylo prohibido (who both rep hackney) at the carnival del pueblo in southwark. others are doing scenes for themselves: hold tight dj roughneck and all London soca peoples… and the rowdy Polish parties in Balham… Desi festivals in Barking etc…
Wayne, I’m with you on the interconectedness of aesthetics/form (hopefully I’m not misquoting you) – there’s not just a world of music out there, but a world of flows, events, counter-events, stories and ways of relating to them.