Already a member?
Sign in
| Version | User | Scope of changes |
|---|---|---|
| Dec 18 2007, 12:48 PM EST (current) | NashwaG | 13 words added, 6 words deleted, 1 photo added, 1 photo deleted |
| Dec 18 2007, 12:41 PM EST | NashwaG | 1 photo added |
Changes
Key: Additions Deletions
by Nashwa Gewaily December 12, 2007In an incisive 1999 Op/Ed piece in The New York Times titled “I Hate World Music,” former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne assailed the use of the term “world music” as “a way of relegating this ‘thing’ into the realm of something exotic and therefore cute, weird but safe, because exotica is beautiful but irrelevant.” Extending this observation to newspaper and magazine reporting on the wide array of music from around the globe highlights the exoticizing tendencies that still persist in American media approaches to foreign coverage. By preserving prototypical, generalized imagining of non-Western cultures and adhering to fixed ideas of national character, mainstream media in the U.S. oftentimes reinforce, with varying degrees of subtlety, the notion inherent to the American/“world” music dichotomy that “they are, by definition, not like us” (Byrne).
A common thread in problematic reporting in much of “world music”mus
ic” journalismjournalism is the reliance on pre-established narratives of the nature of a country and itsits people. A look at the reinforcementreinforcement of widely disseminated cultural stereotypes associatedassociated with Brazil provides a classic example of the ethnic mythographymythography underpinning frequent media depictions. Though the “myth of tropical exuberance” as part of Brazil’s fixed character has been tempered significantly over time since it was famously epitomized by Carmen Miranda’s iconic 1940s Hollywood persona as “Lady in the Tutti-Fruitti Hat,” this image “established a stereotype that lingers today — the vulgar, flashy, hyperkinetic…Latin”—a representation that continues to reverberate in American press (Dunn and Perrone 13).
This does not mean that all music journalism reduces “world music” genres to clichés of cultural objectification. In the case of Brazil, many articles in major publications touch upon or directly make reference to its large African population and its impact on aspects of Brazilian heritage, adding a layer of insight into the complex interweaving of ethnic influences on the development of sounds associated with the country. The Boston Globe, for instance, sheds light on this African presence within the variety of regional forms of samba in a February 2006 article titled “Lights! Music! Samba!; Carnaval Brasileiro Comes to Town,” which describes the group featured in the festival as performing “both the frenetic Rio style of samba and the slower Bahia style, which is imbued with the African heritage of the Brazilian northeast.” The New York Times similarly highlights distinctions within the samba genre itself in an April 2004 concert review, providing a comprehensive introduction to the role of samba in Brazilian life: “It can be a parade song pounded and shouted by thousands of people in a carnival procession, or it can be an intimate ballad. It can be a love song, a proclamation of local pride, an exploration of nostalgia or a subtle protest. It can be a pop ditty, a jazz exploration and an Afro-Brazilian celebration; it's almost always dance music.”
On the other end of the spectrum, however, are several instances of oversimplified characterizations and romanticized depictions of Brazilian music and the environment in which it is bred. Such inadequate and frequently misleading coverage ranges from flagrant typecasting to the questionable implications of descriptors commonly employed in association with Brazilian arts. A movie review featured in The Washington Post in July 2006 provides a clear example of indiscreet cultural essentialism in the frame it offers in understanding the milieu of the film’s setting: “Now, since it's set in Brazil, throw in Afro-Brazilian music, torrid weather, scabby buildings, a lot of beer and sweat and not much modesty. These are the people, after all, who invented the thong.”
Nation in a Nutshell
Seemingly more benign is the way in which Brazil and its musical exports are depicted as an intriguingly different, or “exotic,” foil to familiar Western/American ways. The “sultry, tropical, musical” Salvador, Bahia, presented in the Washington Post movie review conjures up an image of a city that parallels the “exotic journey to Rio de Janeiro” one can expect to take when listening to the bossa nova jazz of Philadelphia-based Mamaluco, according to an April 2006 feature in The Philadelphia Inquirer titled “Get a Taste of the Tropics.” In a similar style of semantic cliché, The Boston Globe promotes a concert by Brazilian singer CeU in its April 2007 events calendar, reducing the image of the Grammy-nominee to that of one of many “sultry Brazilian chanteuses,” and lauding the strength of her album as favoring alternative styles to the “ethereal junglism popular in Brazil.”
By repeating such tried-and-true descriptors as “sultry,” “seductive,” “tropical,” and “exotic,” in reference to Brazilian arts, mainstream American news outlets reinforce associations of the nation and its people with imagery that fits neatly into a simplified, pre-conceived rendering of Brazil as a far-removed but enticing locale, unique in its ubiquitous and uninhibited sensuality.
The pattern observed here extends well beyond popular conceptions of Brazilians alone. An article in The New York Times, for instance, is representative of the endless stream of Orientalist clichés all too frequently employed in describing music and culture exported from the Middle East. Focusing on the presence of Arab culture in France (“In the Heart of Paris, An African Beat”), the feature sets the scene with a crowd that “swirls like charmed snakes to arabesque club beats” and “sultry, electro-Oriental” rhythms. The author invokes imagery of “desert decadence” and “1001 Nights,” drawing from a canon of “various patterns (images, clichés, abstractions) by which the Orient is represented” (Said 291). It goes on to describe the “first few seductive notes” of an Egyptian club hit while “the small dance floor becomes a blur of whirling dervishes,” in reference to ascetic Sufi followers of a mystical sect of Islam and their tradition of whirling to achieve a state of higher spiritual consciousness. The irrelevance and incongruence of re-imagining the dance floor as a site of both Arab decadence and spiritual mystique is disregarded in favor of constructing a scene that, wittingly or not, plays to classic archetypes of the Arab “Oriental other.” As with familiar representations of Brazilian unbridled sexuality, the idea of a fixed, timeless, “mysteriously known essence” informs much of the language chosen in portraying art forms originating in non-Western regions of the world (Said 305).
From Bali to Bollywood
Similar indifference is evident in journalism that takes interpretations of “world music” as an amorphous, all-encompassing category to an extreme, indiscriminately lumping together disparate genres as a singular, vaguely “Eastern” sound. A prime example of this is found in music reviews of hip hop artist Jay-Z’s 1999 hit “Big Pimpin’,” which heavily sampled 1957’s “Khosara” by Abdel Halim Hafez, an Egyptian singer who “achieved Elvis Presley-like stature” in his home country. The album’s liner notes credit nearly every sampled hook except for “Big Pimpin’,” “which is silent about the song's musical origins.” Shirking the obligation of extra research due to the omission, music journalists have peppered their reviews with erroneous descriptions of the composition as far-flung as“a South-Seas flavoured groove that's a happy musical marriage of Brooklyn and Bali” and “Bollywood-wigged NOLA bounce stutter-stepping," according to an article in Egypt's Al-Ahram Weekly called "Pimpin' a Classic."
Distinct cultures are conflated in a comparable manner in the Seattle Post Intelligencer, which explains that ska developed when Jamaicans combined “American R&B and jazz, and calypso/mento from Trinidad to create their own music.” While calypso and mento both emerged out of the Caribbean, the two genres are not similar enough to be collapsed as one, particularly since mento originated in Jamaica – not in Trinidad, as the article indicates. In fact, according to Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, mento was so integral to Jamaican culture as its “first indigenous popular music form” that it became the national music of the country for a time before it was eclipsed by ska in the 1960s. The style is “similar to up-tempo calypso,” which likely explains the misperception, “although its heritage is far too complex to be considered derivative” (Appiah and Gates 1289).
Such instances amusingly echo the cultural confusion found in an episode of The Simpsons that aired in 2002, titled “Blame it on Lisa” (“a take on the 1984 film Blame it on Rio”). In addition to playing off less lighthearted stereotypes of Brazil, the satire presents Rio in a way that mirrors common American misperceptions of South American cultures on the whole. Notably, the Simpsons family is shown taking a conga line as a form of transport to the hotel, later visiting a samba school to learn the “Macarena” and the “penetrada, a fictitious and lascivious dance shown them by the teacher.” The extent of the episode’s negative connotations prompted Rio’s tourist board to consider a lawsuit against Fox producers, with at least some of the offense stemming from the reckless fusion of the Cuban conga and the Spanish “Macarena” with notions of quintessentially Brazilian culture as one broad, south-of-the-border conception.
Rest-of-the-World Music Journalism
The maintenance of what Byrne calls a “world music ghetto” leaves little room for discerning between “‘oppositional’ cultures (cultures that seem to be ‘different’ and ‘marginal’, that is, from a Western perspective)” that are “introduced to the audience via ‘world music’ for the sake of their marketability” (Mert 114). By using the catch-all tag – which has been widely adopted by American press in its form as a “marketing as well as a pseudomusical term” – to refer to an amalgamated heap of non-Western produced music ranging from “the most blatantly commercial music produced by a country, like Hindi film music…to the ultra-sophisticated, super-cosmopolitan art-pop of Brazil,” it contributes to reductive imagining of “otherized” cultures as monolithic and unchanging, as upheld by some media in the U.S (Byrne).
Though ethnomusicologist Steven Feld argues in “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music,” “that any and every hybrid or traditional style could so successfully be lumped together by the single market label world music signified the commercial triumph of global musical industrialization” and has had the effect of “banalizing difference” among cultures with ease, widespread approaches to marketing and reporting alike also rest on “fetishizing” and exoticizing the “West’s ethnic others” as they are partitioned off in the “binary reproduced by the world music concept.” As articulated by Keith Negus in Music Genres and Corporate Cultures, “there is no doubt that the presentation of world music often involves an exoticism and romanticization of music from ‘other’ places” (167).
The continued reliance on this framework in some music journalism can partially be attributed to the status of global music in the hierarchy of news coverage within large publications, where “the arts section is not taken as seriously as hard news,” according to Cindy Byram, publicist and member of the Board of Directors for the World Music Institute. Regarding the staff writers and reviewers hired by newspapers to cover international music, Byram ascribes frequently inadequate portrayals to a lack of specialization, leading journalists to operate “out of their element” as “general practitioners -- they know a little about everything and not a lot about one thing, so they’re going to fall back on a lot of clichés.”
While Byram makes clear that the current state of world music journalism “is not a golden age by any means,” a broader societal reading of embedded values that allow “the myths and clichés of national and cultural traits” to flourish can be gleaned from David Byrne’s explanation that “white folks needed to see Leadbelly in prison garb to feel they were getting the real thing. They need to be assured that rappers are ‘keeping it real,’ they need their Cuban musicians old and sweet, their Eastern and Asian artists ‘spiritual’.”
Sources:
Appiah, Kwame Anthony and Henry Louis Gates. Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999.
Byram, Cindy. Telephone Interview. 11 December 2007.
Dunn, Christopher and Charles A. Perrone. “Chiclete Com Banana.” Brazilian Music and
Globalization. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Feld, Steven. “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music.” Public Culture. 12.1 (2000) 145-171.
Mert, Ceren. “The Vigorous Local: Culture Industry, Hip Hop and the Politics of
Resistance in the Age of Globalization.” MA thesis. Middle East Technical
Institute, 2003.
Negus, Keith. Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. London: Routledge, 1999.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1978.
