In exploring the world of contemporary Korean music, you will quickly discover that “k-pop” is the genre dominating that scene. Short for Korean popular music, k-pop (a term derived from the same naming trend that gave us the term “J-pop” for Japanese pop music) spans a variety of styles including dance, electropop, hip hop, rock, and R&B. With its upbeat danceable tunes and processed, saccharine vocals, k-pop epitomizes the current mainstream. Another prominent feature you’ll find thrown in with the drum machines, synthesizer, and AutoTune, is the use of English in song lyrics. These k-pop characteristics create a striking contrast with Korea’s indie music, often referred to as k-indie. As in many cultures, pinpointing a definition of indie music presents a challenge, k-indie encompasses a variety of music put out by independent record labels, marked by its lo-fi aesthetics and more introspective, poignant lyrical content. Gone are the flashy production values of mainstream media, and gone too is the omnipresence of English. Upon inspection, it becomes clear that although k-pop dominates the airwaves, k-indie is a more authentically Korean art form, and this difference is symbolically represented in the relative frequencies with which each genre uses English in its lyrics.
South Korea’s top hits are compiled in the Gaon chart (self-identified as a Korean equivalent to the Oricon chart of Japan and Billboard chart of the US). If you browse the top ten singles for the week of May 20th to May 26th, you will find just a single song (“Humility is Hard” by Leessang, coming in at #6) containing no English words or phrases. For an extreme example of Western influence, I recommend watching the video for the number two song, “2Hot” by singer G.NA (aka Gina Choi). Not only are the lyrics peppered with bits of English, but the video is overflowing with gratuitous Western imagery:
The house where the video opens looks like something straight out of a quiet, middle class American neighborhood several decades ago, complete with manicured lawn and white picket fence:
When the girls head downtown later on, all the street signs and building labels in English:
Indeed, the ubiquity of English phrases in k-pop songs is widely acknowledged. As the writer KisforKarenx3 on the Korean music website Soompi puts it, “many (nearly most) pop songs have bits of Engrish sprinkled on top.” (For those unfamiliar, “Engrish” is a somewhat offensive slang term referring to unusual and/or incorrect uses of the English language by people of East Asian descent.) Blogger Ngoc Nguyen goes so far as to say that “English has intertwined its way into KPOP songs so thoroughly that we have come to expect its use in every single song.” The presence of Western influence in Korean pop should come as no real surprise. As globalization pushes forward in the world of music, musical features common to certain cultures are adopted and exchanged freely, and trends in Western music have proven to be especially pervasive. Given the extent to which Western traits dominate global popular media, it seems natural that we would start hearing things like heavy bass beats, AutoTune, or even some English words in k-pop. What might come as more of a surprise, though, is just how much of this is actually a calculated strategy, rather than innocent adoption of a pervasive style.
For several decades, the popularity of South Korean entertainment has been spreading across Asia and beyond in a phenomenon known as the “Korean wave”. If you are a Korean musician looking to capture a larger audience, adding some Western sounds to your music is certainly one way you could try to broaden your appeal and garner more international attention. Enter the Asian financial crisis. Back in 1997, Thailand’s currency collapsed, and South Korea was one of the nations hit hardest by the ensuing economic repercussions. In a wounded economy, it suddenly wasn’t so easy to sell records anymore. The music industry was under a great deal of pressure, and they responded by riding the Korean wave for all it was worth, capitalizing on the international fan base of their cultural exports, according to a January 2010 article in The Economist. Several music labels were making serious efforts to market their music outside of Korea (Hyunjoon 150). In fact, The Economist reveals that the South Korean government itself employed the same tactic, funding organizations that introduce and market Korean culture overseas in hopes of mitigating the stagnation they experienced in the years following 1997. I maintain that this had a nontrivial amount of influence on the direction of k-pop, creating clear incentives for the incorporation of Western musical features as Korean musicians tried to market their work to an international audience with unprecedented fervor and urgency.
Deviating from the mainstream norm of k-pop, we have the Korean indie music scene. In place of over-the-top energy, bouncing dance beats, and flashy celebrities, k-indie offers a mellower sound, often bittersweet or intellectual in nature, and more artistically crafted lyrics. One of the most well-known independent record labels in South Korea today is Pastel Music, whose musical ideology is described as pushing for “gentle, soothing melodies like the murmuring of the river or children’s laughter resonating form a nearby playground,” to quote a March 2010 article on the site minipopcube. K-indie has seen a considerable upswing in popularity over the course of the last five years or so. Some k-indie bands have even developed a modest fan base overseas, participating in festivals and concerts in areas like Japan and North America (Hyunjoon 147). This music scene can trace its roots back to the early 90s, when it grew out of small clubs in the western end of Seoul. Korean music got a new lease on life in 1987 when the government changed hands and strict censorship standards were relaxed. The early and mid 90s were a time of optimism, social liberalization, and economic prosperity, and it was in that environment that k-indie got its start (Hyunjoon 153). This alternative music scene was based in Hongdae, a district of Seoul. The several universities nearby contributed a sizable student population to the area, making it a perfect hotbed for underground music. The music was a refreshing challenge to the norms of the mainstream media, and the indie scene was mostly made up of small-scale concerts and festivals, and DIY record releases. When the Asian financial crisis struck, it became harder than ever for indie musicians to get work. This came right around the same time as the advent of digital music on the internet, so illegal file sharing and piracy compounded the financial insecurity of the music industry. Many artists gave up on music, pursing other ways to support themselves, and the first wave of k-indie essentially collapsed (Hyunjoon 154).
However, a second wave of indie music emerged in Korea not long afterward. This wave of musicians were influenced by recordings from the 70s and 80s, and they gave more thought to their place within the history of Korea’s musical legacy (Hyunjoon 155). By 2004, Korea had managed to stabilize the chaos surrounding the availability of digital music, becoming the first country where digital music sales beat out physical sales. On top of that, bands had ready access to home recording equipment, and often took advantage of it rather than using professional recording studios, making it easier than ever to market your music without the backing of a wealthy major record label. With this background in mind, it is now time to look at a few particular k-indie acts.
Hot Potato
Formed in 1997, k-indie band Hot Potato is currently made up of bassist Koh Beom Jun and singer Kim C (biography courtesy of the site go kpop). Hot Potato is well known within the k-indie community, and in 2010, their song Confession even made it to the number one spot on Korea’s Cyworld rock chart, according to music site all kpop. Here is their song “Irony”:
Consider the following translation of some of “Irony”’s lyrics:
Season comes again and again, and wind blows again and again
Thought/mind is again in that state, and although (I/we) had thought/decided that it would be when (I/we) become adult/grownup
Between 17 and 22, exactly what seems to have changed?
Hurting and dreaming and exactly what did change?
The sound of the music is stripped down and simple, not glitzy and dolled up like k-pop. Even without understanding the lyrics, you can appreciate the sincerity of the emotion in Kim C’s voice. Armed with an understanding of what the words mean, it’s easy to see that “Irony” is a pensive and honest song, exploring real feelings that people can relate to in a meaningful way. Also, notice that the lyrics are purely Korean (it sounds like Kim C is saying “irony”, but the Hangul word for irony is just pronounced the same way as the English word). This song is artistic expression, not a tool for feverishly seeking attention and money. Lead singer Kim C once explained in an interview that he isn’t concerned with how people perceive him and his music. He said that back in the days when people didn’t ask him questions about his music, he didn’t worry about it, commenting that “whatever the image, it’s all still me.” (The transcription and translation of this interview were provided by the blog Dw4p TommyROT.) Hot Potato is not a group concerned with fame or image. They’ve been at it for a long time, and they clearly just love what they do. Over the last fifteen years, they’ve had undeniable hits as well as clear misses, and through it all they have stayed true to their alternative expressive style, never selling out and adopting mainstream trends.
You may have noticed while listening to “Irony” that it has a somewhat similar feel to familiar Western indie music. During k-indie’s formative years, there were already established alternative music scenes in countries like the US and UK, so you can hear traces of that inspiration in k-indie. However, there’s a lot more than just those Western influences; you can also hear a diverse range of domestic influences. Local trends and traditions are reflected in Korean indie music as well, which is a dimension more or less absent from the nation’s pop.
Broccoli You Too
Broccoli You Too got together in 2005 and consists of members consists of Yoon Duk-won aka Duk-won (bass and vocals), Ryu Ji-hyun aka Ryuji (drums and vocals), Kim Jan-di aka Jandi (keyboard), and Ban Hyang-ki aka Hyang-ki(guitar and vocals). They are known for their borderline-melancholy sound and relatable lyrics. While many people describe Broccoli You Too’s sound as “songs of comfort”, Duk-won disagrees with that notion. He said in an interview with 10asia reporter Lee Ga-on that their songs are more about sharing “the pain that is hard to be comforted”, maintaining that those emotions are important to confront. The song “Dance” provides a good example of this lyrical quality:
The narrative in “Dance” talks pensively about dancing and stepping on a partner’s feet, and how being together is not easy, but neither is separating. A verse toward the end asks the following questions (rough translation courtesy of the site lyricalmovement):
We are dreaming a long dream
Will we wake up suddenly one day?
Will everything disappear when we open our eyes
As if nothing ever happened?
K-pop caters to people constantly seeking energetic happiness and constant stimulation, and indie songs like “Dance” step in and provide a space for introspection. Music like this gives listeners a creative space to explore their lives, thoughts, and feelings in a deeper and more sincere manner.
In 2010, Broccoli You Too released an album entitled “The Graduation”. They wrote the album as they were growing up and getting through their 20s, hence the name. As Duk-won said the aforementioned 10asia interview, “graduation is a part of growing up, and don’t most people go through that stage?” In particular, the years surrounding graduation can be a tense stage in life, as youth unemployment and underemployment continue to be an issue in South Korea (Hyunjoon 154). This is a kind of music that hasn’t lost touch with people’s experiences. It speaks to the lives of its listeners. In that interview, Duk-won also shed light on his writing process, explaining that he “wanted to write as simple as possible the irreversible part of life such as encounter and separation”, and that the process of revising his work “led me to write things that are more intimate”. Band mate Hyang-ki added on that “[the] lesser the words, [the] larger the space for empathy.” Their uncluttered sound and somewhat minimalist lyrics leave room for thought, and their messages are relatable and thought-provoking, making this a culturally significant art form.
Chang Kiha and the Faces
Chang Kiha played a major role in the success of independent record label Boongaboonga Records (aka BGBG). BGBG referred to themselves as a “no budget indie label” (a cute play on the more commonly heard term “low-budget indie label”). For a while, they cut costs by burning singles onto blank CDs one at a time and distributing them to a few individual shops. Although they continued operating as an independent label and stayed true to their “sustainable entertainment” mission, things became easier for BGBG following their artist Chang Kiha’s breakthrough. The effort that kick started Chang Kiha’s fame was a grassroots effort by his fans, who went online and uploaded video clips they’d taken at his concerts and other performances. He now performs as part of the band Chang Kiha and the Faces. In honor of his musical beginnings, here is an unofficial fan recording of Chang Kiha and the Faces performing their song “정말 없었는지”:
As with the other two songs, you can appreciate the simple, relaxing tone of the music while sensing the pensive emotional undercurrents. Also, the lyrics are once again all in Korean. This stylistic choice is particularly significant now that the band is gaining more recognition outside of Korea, even performing in Japan. In 2010 Chang commented in an interview with The Japan Times reporter Shawn Despres that “the Korean lyrics are very important in our music… one of my main goals is to make our lyrics as Korean as possible. Our priority is to do well in Korea.” Chang Kiha and the Faces are focused on their domestic audience. That’s who they write for, regardless of the success they achieve elsewhere. Now that they’re doing shows in Japan and released a record over there, they are thinking about ways to make themselves accessible to those fans; in that same interview with The Japan Times, Chang mentions that he’s learning Japanese to speak in between songs, and toys with the idea of making “picket signs” featuring translations of key lyrics. Although the band is branching out, they are keeping close to their indie roots, and the discourse on finding ways to involve international fans has not turned to changing the essential Korean content of their music.
From its inception, k-indie has blazed its own trail, largely unswayed by the commercial incentives for squeezing itself into the mould of Western pop norms or widespread use of English lyrics. I mentioned earlier that there is no dearth of sources acknowledging the ubiquity of English in k-pop, but that isn’t the whole story. Most of those acknowledgements actually come up in the course of mocking the genre’s often-poor English use. The English in k-pop rarely serves to communicate anything. It is often garbled and nonsensical, adding no value to the song. K-indie avoids that blatant pandering to international audiences, and as a result, the finished product reflects a much higher degree of artistry. As k-pop chases global trends, it loses its connection to the everyday lives of common people, while k-indie retains narratives about life in a specific time and place. While k-pop continues to be the international face of Korean music, it isn’t a characteristically Korean sound, but instead, it lives in the transnational space of global popular music. As a genre, k-indie does much more to express a sense of Korean identity.
I’ll leave you with a mixtape of enjoyable k-indie songs I came across in my exploration.
1. Belle Epoque//December
2. Broccoli You Too//Kkookkookkoo
3. Peterpan Complex//Swallow Feelings
4. Hot Potato//Rain Tears
5. Belle Epoque//Not Yet
6. Casker//꼭 이만큼만
References
KisforKarenx3, “Top 5 Ridiculous Uses of English in K-Pop,” Soompi, October 20, 2010.
http://www.soompi.com/2010/10/20/top-5-ridiculous-uses-of-english-in-kpop/
Ngoc Nguyen, “10 ridiculous uses of English in KPOP songs,” ningin, June 17, 2011.
http://blog.ningin.com/2011/06/17/10-ridiculous-uses-of-english-in-kpop-songs/
“Hallyu, yeah!” The Economist, January 25 2010.
http://www.economist.com/node/15385735
Hyunjoon Shin, “The success of hopelessness: the evolution of Korean indie music”, Perfect Beat Vol 12.2(2011): 147-165.
“Pastel Music 5th Anniversary: We Will Be Together,” minipopcube, March 19, 2010.
http://minipopcube.blogspot.com/2010/03/pastel-music-5th-anniversary-we-will-be.html
“Hot Potato,” go kpop. http://www.gokpop.com/hotpotato/
jeshicaa, “Confession by Kim C’s band, Hot Potato achieves #1 on music charts,” all kpop, April 27, 2010.
http://www.allkpop.com/2010/04/confession-by-kim-cs-band-hot-potato-achieves-1-on-music-charts
“Kim C says goodbye to 1n2d,” Dw4p TommyROT, May 12, 2010.
http://dw4ptommyrot.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/kim-c-says-goodbye-to-1n2d/
Lee Gao-on, “(Interview) Indie band “Broccoli You Too”,” 10asia, November 22, 2010.
Part 1:
http://10.asiae.co.kr/Articles/new_view.htm?sec=ent0&a_id=2010111716044590663
Part 2:
http://10.asiae.co.kr/Articles/new_view.htm?sec=ent4&a_id=2010111716154938960
“Broccoli You Too- Dance lyrics,” lyricalmovement, September 12, 2009.
http://lyricalmovement.livejournal.com/4718.html
Shawn Despres, “Indie breakout, ‘kimchibilly’ rockers bring Seoul to Japan,” The Japan Times, November 12, 2011.
[Note: While the Goodman and Cusick readings were both very thought provoking, I’m a bit uncomfortable putting my opinions about such sensitive topics in writing on the internet, so I’m going to sidestep them and just address the Sullivan article.]
Sullivan’s main focus is how the international music blogging community suffers when the authorities step in to defend major artists/recording labels/film studios. According to Sullivan, some of the people suffering most are “the collectors, sharers, listeners, and scholars” of that community. I found his angle interesting, because so far we’ve read and talked a lot about how these issues affect non-Western and/or obscure musicians. I’ve been prompted to think a lot about what is and is not fair to musicians, but asking what is fair to the fans and scholars of that music is a decidedly different, albeit interrelated, question.
This is a bit of a side note, but I’m curious about the exact circumstances of this music sharing. Is the international music blogging community by and large sharing songs that are old and/or obscure enough to not be copyright protected? If we’re talking about bloggers illegally sharing copyrighted music, then shutting down their blogs doesn’t seem like much of a moral gray area to me.
Sullivan quotes Doug Schulkind about the shutdown of the Holy Warbles blog, who said “For the artists and their creations, it’s just another in a long line of corporate interests screwing them out of something.” I wonder why he thinks this is an example of the artists getting screwed over. First of all, most of the musicians whose music was promoted on such international music blogs probably never see any financial benefit after having their music shared, since most of the music being discussed is out of print or otherwise difficult to find. So it isn’t money that the artists are getting screwed out of. Is the assumption here that musicians have a fundamental desire for their music to be heard, and taking down blogs like Holy Warbles deprives them of that opportunity? In our recent readings and discussions, it has come up that perhaps musicians don’t want their music to gain a wider audience if that comes at the price of losing their control over it. So while these musicians are losing opportunities to have their music heard, I’m not convinced we can take it as a given that everyone WANTS that visibility.
While reading this, I gave a lot of thought to what rights listeners ought to have. Sullivan quotes Deejay Moos as saying “What as shame if all of the music I’ve found just stays on my shelf- music belongs to everyone.” Surely, music in general belongs to everyone. There might be people who disagree about this, but I think it seems reasonable to say that everyone has a right to experience the phenomenon of music. But what about a certain song? Does a song belong to everyone? Does everyone in the whole world have the theoretical right to experience a certain musician’s song? That seems like a considerably entitled opinion, and I’m not sure I believe the answer is yes. Whether or not the cultural connoisseurs frequenting these music blogs have an inherent right to experience that music is largely an ideological/philosophical question. Regardless of what side of that debate I come down on, I wouldn’t say I side with the authorities shutting down sites like Megaupload. I feel that way because those authorities aren’t taking a moral stance on the issue I’m discussing (or even considering the intricacies of it, probably)- they’re in the business of protecting big companies/artists, and the blows to the international music blogging community are just minor side effects to them.
Here’s a video of Loreen singing. I’m so proud of my randomly assigned country.
Chief Boima DJing for Jakanese
In 50/50, non-exclusive, Chief Boima talked about Liberian musicians struggling to compete with artists from other parts of the world. This description reminded me of our early conversations about globalization of trade. As music becomes commodified, the music industry becomes just another industry in which domestic producers compete with the global market. In the case of Liberia, it seems that domestic musicians are having a hard time keeping up with musicians from abrouad who may have more production and/or marketing capabilities/resources. In my mind, this is strikingly similar to the portrayal of the Jamaican economy that we saw in Life and Debt. In Jamaica, the local farmers were the ones struggling to compete with international companies, whereas in Liberea it is the musicians who face that challenge. While talking about music solely as an item produced, sold, and consumed seems utilitarian and narrow (because of course there are many dimensions to music beyond its consideration as a commodity), I do think that in today’s world, there is merit to considering the financial aspects of music.
Because we so rarely get to read authors’ responses to critiques, I thought it was neat to see the back and forth between Diplo and Chief Boima in both the Okayafrica Exclusive and the comment section of Global Genre Accumulation. The two DJs are both very concerned with the inequalities in the global music industry, but they have extremely different views on how to remedy those inequalities. While they both made some good points, I tend to side a bit more with Chief Boima. In the abstract, using your wealth and influence to help bring obscure genres into the limelight sounds admirable, but in reality, that isn’t the whole picture. It’s hard to believe that Diplo’s motivations are primarily altruistic when he admits that his exposition of new and foreign genres helps him stand out, rather than being just another of the “dime a dozen” DJs on the scene today (quoted in Okayafrica Exclusive).
Chief Boima made two great comments that essentially frame this issue for me. The first is in Global Genre Accumulation: “How does mainstream exposure benefit a community unless they have total control, and the means to collectively capitalize on that exposure?” This taps into the topics we’ve been discussing for the past few days. Indeed, how much benefit does a community derive from the popularization of their music, if they have no creative control over the direction it goes in? I imagine the tradeoff between becoming famous on someone else’s terms and maintaining artistic integrity is a conundrum for a lot of musicians in this position.
The other comment by Chief Boima that I found particularly compelling was in the Okayafrica Exclusive, where he asks what difference it makes for cultures to have their music pushed into the mainstream for the short time pop culture focuses on it before moving on. If your goal is to bridge inequalities in the music world, does getting an obscure genre its fifteen minutes of fame really make any lasting difference? Perhaps increasing awareness, however briefly, is a step towards leveling the playing field, but I’m not convinced it is an effective solution to the problem.
Apparently, Diplo was recently into something called New Orleans bounce. Here’s an example I found:
http://soundcloud.com/tonyskratchere/bouncin-down-country-roads
I like how quirky it is.
I found the premise of the Jenkins paper rather interesting, as I’d never considered whether the communities on YouTube existed before the website. I was also totally unaware of the “vidders” making fan videos. The discussion of vidders reminded me of a recent conversation in class about how musicians are losing control over the usage and distribution of their own work as the trend of globalization in music continues. Hearing about the way Afunakwa’s lullaby was reused and reinterpreted without any consent painted a picture of the West’s music industry as a system that takes complete advantage of non-Western musicians, particularly ones in isolated communities. I wondered if Afunakwa was aware of the rerecordings of Rorogwela, how she feels or would feel about the commercialization. Part of the reason that example was so compelling is that, at least for me, it evoked a sense of sympathy for the singer who had no say in how her song was used, and presumably was never compensated for it in any way. Hearing vidders voice the same concerns (on p. 118, Laura Shapiro is quoted talking about how vidders “can’t stop people from sharing our vids without our consent or even our knowledge”) provided an interesting contrast, since we’re no longer talking about distant outsiders of the Western world being used by the music industry, but rather, people who are very much a part of this culture. While thinking about this issue on the global scale, I hadn’t given much thought to how it played out in domestic communities.
So far in this class, most of the papers we’ve read consist primarily of new information. I went into those readings without many preexisting opinions on the subject matter, mainly interested in learning about new cultures and musics. The Jenkins paper deviated from that trend, because while there was certainly a lot of new information, the focus of the paper is something much more familiar to me than, say, the salsa scene in Dakar. When Jenkins quoted Benkler (p. 116) saying that YouTube makes its users” more self-reflective and more critical of the culture they occupy”, I had a hard time taking that seriously. That seems like an overly optimistic view of how the Internet works. In my experience, the Internet is, by and large, a place where people disagree with each other and respond by blindly clinging to their own views. It seems to me that people could stand to be more critical and self-reflective on the Internet (particularly YouTube). We live in a time when people can become famous online for being bad at something (consider the recent hit song “Friday”), and I think that is in large part due to the fact that people will circulate something without reflecting on the consequences at all.
Meintjes claims that all White South African fans of Graceland embrace the record because it allows them “to legitimate their own identity as local” (p. 51). The issue of White South Africans listening to the traditional influences on Graceland and casting them as belonging to an overarching national identity interests me. Colonization began long ago, and by now generations upon generations of white people have grown up in South Africa. While their heritage is European, if all they’ve ever known is South Africa, I can understand the desire to identify as South African rather than perpetually remaining cultural outsiders in their homeland. However, I wonder where these people stood on apartheid. Were they mainly for or against it? Or was opinion split? It seems to me that if you’re trying to buy in to a system with one unifying notion of South African culture (a South African culture that includes you), it would be extremely hypocritical to support a social structure based on racial segregation and inequality.
On page 69, Meintjes mentions that some people sought to analyze Graceland on a purely aesthetic level, ignoring the social implications and focusing only on the artistic value. Evaluating art in a vacuum seems somewhat problematic to me. You can strip away the context of art and analyze it on its own, but I don’t think that that necessarily gives you the pure, essential core of the piece. While the strictly musical merits of a song are worth considering, ignoring context entirely can put blinders on you and cause you to miss something important. An understanding of context goes a long way in elucidating an artist’s motivation/message, which often makes a piece much more powerful and compelling. When thinking about my position on this, I was reminded of the movie High Noon. High Noon is a Western from the 1950s that I saw on the shelf at a video store this summer and decided to watch. It was a decent viewing experience, but I wasn’t bowled over. Then I looked the movie up online and read that it was culturally significant because of its allegorical criticisms of the Red Scare and the HUAC, which was a highly controversial thing to come out against back in the 50s. Knowing this context absolutely makes High Noon a better movie, and it seems to me that if you analyze High Noon without considering that context, you are, at least to some degree, missing the point.
I thought Larkin made a compelling point in noting how we tend to approach the topic of globalization in music from an angle that assumes a dominant culture and a dominated culture, often with western influences playing the dominating role. This seemed particularly relevant after reading Slobin’s paper and thinking about the effects of superculture on subculture. I never would have thought about the similarities between Nigerian and Indian culture, but after reading about their struggles in negotiating between traditional moral values and shifting modern global values, it doesn’t seem so surprising that Indian film caught on in Nigeria. This left me wondering if the cultural exchange between the two countries is a two way street- do Nigerian art forms lend influences to Indian ones as well? And if not, why not? Is it just an issue of chronology? Did India start navigating the process of balancing tradition and modernity before Nigeria reached that stage in its postcolonial life?
Western attitides and practices relating to marriage are clearly very different from the corresponding attitudes and practices in Nigeria and India. This made reading Larkin’s paper an engaging exercise in keeping track of my own biases and evaluating the ways they colored my perception of what I was reading. For instance, I’ve grown up in a culture that equates marriage with love, so the notion of arranged marriages seems highly unnatural to me, but I understand that that reaction comes from identifying love as necessary for marriage. I can appreciate that another person might not think of love as the key component of marriage, and that consequently, they could have very different views on arranged marriages. It doesn’t feel like a stretch to acknowledge that perhaps if raising children with someone is your main priority in a marriage partnership, depending on your culture, there might be no special value to be gained by raising children with someone who shares your social space and emotional life. On the other hand, some of the quoted critics of soyayya and general cultural trends in Nigera appear rather displeased that women are gaining freedom of choice (p. 432) and getting married later in life (p. 416) . I wasn’t able to convince myself that a fair and reasonable person in any culture would express a sentiment like that. If it isn’t immediately obvious to me why someone would opt into an arranged marriage, perhaps that’s because I lack an understanding of their culture. But when someone says they think that women making decisions for themselves is harmful to society, I can’t find a way to interpret that as anything other than antiquated and sexist.
One of Erlmann’s major complaints about Slobin’s Micromusics of the West seems to be that Slobin avoids commiting to one “particular conceptual grid” (Erlmann, p. 263). I know very little about ethnomusicological methodology, but for an issue so complex, it seems fair and reasonable to employ “multi-angled vision and plural perspectives” (Slobin, p. 268). In exploring micromusics and their relationship to a larger culture, I think it is valuable to take a variety of analytic approaches. Furthermore, if you were interested in defining a unitary model of the interplay between local and global music systems, casting a wide net as Slobin has could be a very useful place to start in that process. In reading Micromusics, I did get the impression that a sort of feedback loop exists between micromusics and global “superculture”, each constantly molding itself in response to the other. However, I did not find this to be an incomprehensible labyrinth, nor did it paint a picture of global culture as an “overwhelming muddle”, as Erlmann put it.
In Erlmann’s response, he makes a brief pass at giving a unified model for global/local musical exchange. Since this is a complex issue, I feel strongly that I would need to see a longer, more detailed justification of his model to be convinced that it is actually possible to define a single model that encapsulates this set of phenomena. After laying out some postulations, Erlmann admits to a lack of reference to human agency in the systems theory he employs. I would have liked to see him flesh this out more, because it seems remarkably problematic to me, as I see the acts of making music and setting musical trends as fundamentally agentive. If it is possible to define a single model for how micromusics and superculture interact, I would expect it to weigh a bit more heavily the fact that changes in music are motivated, on conscious and subconscious levels, by human tastes and preferences.
When reading about all the tension and disagreement over harmonium in Indian music, one of the first things that came to my mind was that there was a harmonium player in the India Jazz suites performance we saw earlier this term. Matt Rahaim’s paper about the politics of the harmonium is very recent (2011), so I wonder if some audiences find the inclusion of a harmonium in that performance a bold (or even offensive) choice. The complaints about harmonium music seemed to break down into an aesthetic category and a political one. I found myself reading the statements of various musicians, poets, and public figures and trying to determine whether they rejected the aesthetics of harmonium music because of a politically motivated bias, or whether their aesthetic dislike gave them cause to ascribe a greater political controversy to the issue. For some reason, my instinct was not to accept that the two objections could coexist without one of those conditions. Although it was very tempting to think of someone having a single basic motivation linked to the other via cause and effect, I gradually became convinced that the issues of aesthetics and nationality are completely intertwined in this case, as Rahaim posits (p. 657, 661, 669).
I do find the argument about the political implications of harmonium music compelling. However, when Reck talked about India’s tendency to adopt foreign musical influences (p. 271, 272), I began to wonder how much of the harmonium issue arose because people began labeling the harmonium as a stereotypically Indian instrument. Is it fine and not contentious to incorporate outside influences as long as they are clearly recognized as such? It seems to me that there is a big difference between an inclusive musical tradition where a variety of global influences are celebrated, and a system where the addition of new elements makes us lose sight of what features of the music originate with the culture in question. This reminded me a bit of Sublette’s argument regarding Cuban influences in US music. He was concerned about the unacknowledged Cuban influences in musical styles like rock that are considered very American, although he was not upset about a loss of American identity in music so much as the lack of credit given to Cuban music. I wonder if, when the harmonium started being deemed an essentially Indian instrument, there were people expressing the same sentiments as Sublette.
caseybradshaw13 