> and leads
\n> us to an unfair and facile dismissal rather than a closer engagement
\n> with what is going on in B.A. and the blogosphere. For the most part,
\n> the Zizek artists are not sampling distant sounds for their cosmo
\n> cocktail parties. Rather, they’re synthesizing their own versions of
\n> the music that pervades their local soundscapes (backyard sounds can
\n> carry). In a sense, one could argue that they’re grappling with class
\n> and cultural divisions in B.A. as much as they may be benefiting from
\n> them. It is a fair question to ask whether these scenes (will)
\n> intersect at all. Far as I know, there’s not much crossover between
\n> the neo-cumbia scene and the cumbia villera scene. It would be great,
\n> as has happened with the international and middle-class interest in
\n> funk carioca, to see this (re)surgence of interest in cumbia translate
\n> to new opportunities for the “everyday” “people” with whom you seem,
\n> understandably, concerned.<\/font><\/p>\nAll true. On this point, I would, I guess, contextualize my instinctive
\nreaction against this kind of thing in terms of my own work, and actually life
\nexperience as well (in respect to which latter point, I will not bore you).
\n(Let me also warn you: the following section, unlike your mercifully orderly
\nparagraphs, is bound to be virtually incoherent and poorly phrased, as are most
\nof my thought processes and hence, emails.) Obviously, as your last set of
\nquotes here indicate, it’s not only the poor\/working class\/whatever who are
\n“everyday people”; and obviously other actors have the right to create
\nunderstandings of their social situation using the tools at hand. For me,
\nwhether or not that can be usefully understood and critiqued as “appropriation”
\nboils down to the terms on which these cultural fashionings are presented by
\ntheir creators and taken up by their targets. <\/p>\n
That being the case, the phrasing in your original message (viz “cumbia resurgence,”
\nwhich I took to be the manner in which these artists present themselves, which seems
\n*not* to be the case given what you’ve written here) seemed to me to recall a
\nnumber of similar situations from throughout the Americas (and beyond) in which I
\nhave no trouble pointing the finger and saying “now, that’s *definitely* an
\noppressive form of appropriation.” These are the cases in which a national
\nbourgeoisie finds, suddenly, to its surprise, that it is culturally rudderless and no
\nlonger in command of general esthetics (never mind that it never is anyway:
\ndiscursively, that’s not the point). Usually, the result is that whatever is
\ncurrently popular among the working classes (or insert subaltern population
\nhere) is newly indicated as the “real” location of collective
\nself-understanding, but simultaneously derided as a debased version of some
\nalternatively “purer” or more interesting form of itself, and in need of
\n“correction” by an intelligentsia that holds the intellectual and\/or
\ntechnological keys to rescuing what is “actually valuable” about the popular.
\nThe procedure is then to adopt elements of the popular, in either a “cleaned
\nup” (ie “restored”) and\/or a “developed” form (watch for this word in Peru, and
\nyou will find it used to death), suitable for consumption by the class alters of
\nthose who have, thus far, created and consumed what I’m (lazily and this time,
\nacknowledgedly) calling “the popular.” These versions of the popular seem
\ninevitably to smooth out precisely the elements that are pleasurable for the
\npopular classes from which the idioms are abstracted in the first place – those
\nthat mark the *difference* between a bourgeois cultural project and a popular one. <\/p>\n
Now, that’s perhaps no big deal as long as great claims are not made by
\nthose involved to be “bettering” the popular in the first place, and as long as
\nthe goal is not to *replace* the popular in some fashion. However I rarely see
\nthat happening in these situations, in Peru: in every case, historically, there
\nhas been a distinct effort to convince the public at large that the new version
\nof “the popular” is the legitimate and authentic one, and to replace the
\npopular with this bourgeois neopopular version of itself. And it’s worked, in
\nfact, time after time. Convenient, because time after time it’s allowed the
\nnational bourgeoisie to fashion itself as relativistically in-touch with
\npopular esthetics and appreciative of the contributions of the popular classes
\nto “national” culture, *even as they strain out everything that indicates a
\npopular esthetic opposed to the national bourgeoisie*. This has definitely
\nbeen the case with cumbia as well, though not only cumbia. And I think, when
\nyou have a case where an intelligentsia claims to find value in the popular,
\nbut only to the extent that it can be made into a new esthetic object, before
\nwhich the thing’s original is made to look foolish, then you’ve got a case of
\nsomething we might well call appropriation.<\/p>\n
(btw, I think Dan Party’s work on balada is interesting in this context: similar
\ncase, except that there is an open acknowledgment on the part of contemporary
\nbalada fans that the “dangerous” aspect of liking for balada revolves around,
\nprecisely, the danger of cross-class contamination. This doesn’t seem to me to
\nlead to some sort of productive engagement, though, it leads those who like
\nbalada either to affect a kind of irony about it, or to refashion it using
\nalt-rock sounds and procedures.)<\/p>\n
This is all pretty stock, of course: nothing new here, this reading has been
\ndone to death. (I would add: it’s been done to death because in any given
\nsituation there’s potentially a hell of a lot of truth to it.) And there’s a
\nbig analytical difference between the national frame of reference I’ve just
\nbeen relying upon and the international dimensions of this cumbia trend. But I
\nsay all this to indicate that a response to anything is shaped by one’s
\nbackground. I’ll freely acknowledge that my general visceral reaction against
\nintellectual\/cosmopolitan\/bourgeois usages of working-class elements grows out
\nof the confirmed suspicion that these things are *not* usually carried out in
\nthe sense of exploration and alliance that seems to be indicated by Carolina
\nGonzalez, but rather, as you say above, cross-class slumming and an exoticist
\ncraving for a *mediated* sensuality\/authenticity\/spirituality [insert desired
\nquality of subaltern population here]. (Aside: in this context, actually, I
\nwould say that the lazy and already disowned Deep Forest reference comes out of
\nthe same background: it’s inappropriate for Buenos Aires perhaps, but it isn’t
\nfor Peru, where internal exoticism is certainly an engine of the historic
\ndynamic I’m talking about.) And I would be willing to be argued out of that
\nsuspicion in any given instance, perhaps this one: but I don’t think that I
\nwant to change the fact that this is the default position from which I begin,
\nbecause it seems to be to be so close to the historic truth of artistic
\ninteraction and development.<\/p>\n
To phrase\/restate this all another way: I’m certainly a judgmental cynic, and
\nperhaps what I interpret as your optimism is more open-minded and fair. But I
\nthink I need my way for the work that I do. Maybe we should write brilliant
\nKeil-Feldish dialogues where we argue about who’s right, since the discussion
\nis so much more interesting than coming to any convincing conclusions about it.<\/p>\n
(No, I don’t actually think that I’m Steve Feld or Charles Keil. You can speak
\nfor yourself.)<\/p>\n
About the blog: I guess, if you haven’t already gone ahead with it, I would
\nrather it were posted anonymously, though that’s fine by me. (I’m also
\nincreasingly cynical and suspicious about the internet: I had a Facebook
\naccount for three weeks and shut it down because it terrified me.)<\/p>\n
Hope all’s well in Boston,
\n[redacted]\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
No further comment from me for now, though I’m tempted to add lots of little things. Let me leave you instead with this bit of apropos videyoga ::<\/p>\n
![](\"http:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/wp\/images\/buenos-aires.JPG\")
<\/p>\n