5 paragraph response to music article

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Malm, a process that was beginning when they were conducting their study. By the mid- 1990s, the major entertainment industries derived over 50 percent of their income from foreign markets (Burnett 1996, 11). The mergers and ac- quisitions in the advertising industry discussed in chapter 2 affected the other cultural industries just as much. The cultural industries shifted to a model of seeking to find and promote blockbusters that they can market around the world rather than cultivating local or regional artists.

MTV found its way to Europe in the late 1980s, then India in the late 1990s and elsewhere on the planet, and found that it could not simply export American culture around the world; local musics needed to be aired in order for the network to have a chance of survival. But local musics frequently owe much to Western pop and rock. And these musics are frequently employed in marketing campaigns. Local rock music, for example, is used to promote a rising consumer culture in India through the sponsorship of festivals by multinational brands (Coventry 2013).

The Rise of “World Music”

Those few recordings of musics from outside of Western metropoles by major labels, along with imports of recording by small labels, slowly began to awaken interest in what has become known as “world music.” While Western popular musics had been exported to non- Western countries for decades, it wasn’t until the 1980s that non- Western musicians commonly made popular musics that clearly emulated Euro- American popular musics and that were noticed in the West (though there was the occasional precursor, such as songs by Miriam Makeba or Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa,” from 1972, and the occasional fad for Indian or “Latin” sounds).

It was probably African popular musics that first captured the attention of most listeners. These musics didn’t fit in the usual retail sections in record stores or radio formats, and a new term was needed. Thus, in 1987, a group of music professionals gathered in London to confect this new term. After ban- dying about a variety of labels, they settled on “world music,” a term that was already circulating in some ethnomusicological circles. The influential British DJ Charlie Gillett recounted:

We had a very simple, small ambition. It was all geared to record shops, that was the only thing we were thinking about. In America, King Sunny Adé (from Nigeria) was being filed under reggae. That was the only place shops could think of to put him. In Britain they didn’t know where to put this music— I think Adé was just lost in the alphabet, next to Abba. In 1985 [sic] Paul Simon did Graceland and that burst everything wide open, because he created an

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interest in South African music. People were going into shops saying: “I want some of that stuff ” and there wasn’t anywhere for them to look. (Denselow 2004, 10)

Radio formats emerged, mostly on college and public radio, a small critical press appeared, charts were created in Billboard magazine beginning in 1990, a Grammy Award was created starting in 1991, specialty record labels materi- alized, and space was carved out in retail establishments.

World music quickly became the main musical signifier of globalization. But it has never sold much, about the same as classical music. At the same time, however, the educated, middle- class consumers of music have been ca- tered to more and more by the music industry, particularly with the decline of audiences for classical music. World music has increasingly come to occupy the exclusive space, both figuratively and literally (in record shops), once held by classical music. For just one example, BBC Radio 4 now airs world music and jazz, not just the classical music it once broadcast exclusively.

The term “world music” has traveled, for new information technologies have made it increasingly possible to impose the West’s notion of cultural production and consumption on the rest of the globe. Local musics become incorporated into the new “genre” of world music, though a good deal of cultural work is required to do this in the form of festivals, placement in re- tail establishments (whether brick- and- mortar or online), the establishment of charts, awards, specialized magazines, specialized reviewers, and more. This effort to contain a vast number of unrelated musics under a single ge- neric label is part of how today’s globalized capitalism operates, attempting, as Bourdieu writes, to universalize through the imposition on other cultures Western cultural traditions in which commercial logic has been fully devel- oped (2003, 75).

Genrefication, as I have argued elsewhere (Taylor 2014a) with respect to world music, is a complex process that is most likely to occur in moments in capitalist cultures when historical regimes of consumption are dominant or ascendant, exerting pressure on purveyors of various commodities to put them in their place, rendering them easily accessible to potential consumers. The rise of “world music” as a genre occurred in just such a moment, when other types of music such as hip- hop and heavy metal were also emerging and becoming genrefied.

Imagine the surprise, or consternation, of a musician outside of the West who discovers that her music with a local genre name actually has a “genre” name applied to it by the Western music industry: “world music.” The great Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour said:

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I want people just to say it is good music, not that it is good for African music. It’s music that is as relevant on the streets of New York as on the streets of Dakar. If people call it world music they are putting it in a ghetto. I prefer to call it Afropop. I am an African artist and you can hear that in everything I do. But it’s more than that. It’s music for the whole world rather than world music. (Williamson 2000, 43)

Other musicians profess to like the term, for it gives them a slot in which to place their music in order to market it. Still others have merely made their peace with it. The Beninoise singer Angélique Kidjo said in 2007 that the term “used to make my blood boil.” But “now I don’t care— I know it’s human nature to try to categorise people in order to feel in charge” (Jaggi 2007, 37).

S h i f t i n g A u t h e n t i c i t i e s

One of the most prominent discourses that accompanied the rise of world music in the late 1980s and early 1990s concerned authenticity, one of the most complex ideologies in Western culture. Consumers seemed to want to hear “real” African music or Native American music or something else be- lieved to be real. Concerns for authenticity are not new in Western culture, but this form of authenticity is in part an effect of the suffusion of consumer goods and signs in a commodity- laden culture. Jean Baudrillard argued that one of the effects of the “real” no longer seeming what it was once was is that authenticity becomes a symptomatic discourse of this shift (1988a, 170). In today’s Western neoliberal capitalist culture, authenticity has become a kind of floating ideology that is used to animate a variety of other ideologies/ discourses.

In Global Pop (Taylor 1997a), I identified three forms of authenticity with respect to world music in the late 1980s and early 1990s: authenticities of po- sitionality, emotionality, and primality, all of which I conceptualized as being interrelated. (This parsing of the authenticities at play during this period was an attempt to understand the ideologies through which, or with which, lis- teners were apprehending world music.) The first type, positionality, refers to expectations that musicians be downtrodden or from a poor or danger- ous part of the world. Musicians who were more privileged were viewed as inauthentic, or at least less authentic than those with few advantages. As An- gélique Kidjo said:

There is a kind of cultural racism going on where people think that African musicians have to make a certain kind of music. No one asks Paul Simon, “Why did you use black African musicians? Why don’t you use Americans?

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Why don’t you make your music?” What is the music that Paul Simon is sup- posed to do? (Burr 1994, H28)

Elsewhere she said:

I won’t do my music different to please some people who want to see some- thing very traditional. The music I write is me. It’s how I feel. If you want to see traditional music and exoticism, take a plane to Africa. They play that music on the streets. I’m not going to play traditional drums and dress like bush people. I’m not going to show my ass for any fucking white man. If they want to see it, they can go outside. I’m not here for that. I don’t ask Americans to play country music. (Wentz 1993, 43)

Authenticity of positionality is no less important in musics such as hip- hop, where musicians must frequently demonstrate their lowly origins in blighted urban areas, or country, where a musician’s poor and rural upbringing greatly matters. Authenticity of emotionality refers to the kind of raw emotions that people with the backgrounds just described are thought to possess and ex- press in their music. This is in contrast to the highly produced nature of most Western popular musics. But even with these musics, stars are expected to pour out their hearts in song. And finally, authenticity of primality was meant to refer to Western expectations that non- Western musicians were closer to nature, to the earth, than modern Western musicians. Countless recordings and record labels made reference to the earth, to the supposedly “natural” characteristics of the music purveyed.

But this regime of authenticities shifted fairly quickly after the rise of world music as a label. By the late 1990s, authenticities of positionality and primality had waned to a certain extent, and Western listeners, at least as measured by critical response and marketing language, were more tolerant of non- Western musicians who employed some popular music sounds. I was struck, for one example, at how quickly critical reception to Kidjo’s recordings changed. Whereas her earlier albums had been critiqued for sounding too influenced by Western popular music (see Taylor 1997a), by the late 1990s, what was per- ceived as a hybrid sound between Africa and the West was praised, though the plaudits employed language that continued older ideologies of the authenticity of primality. For example, one reviewer commended Kidjo’s 1998 album Oremi for balancing the “electronic and organic,” the former presumably referring to the Western influences and the latter to African (Robicheau 1998, D15).

A more striking example from the same era is the Cameroonian musician Wes Madiko, who goes by his first name only. Sony Music introduced his 1997 collaboration with producer Michel Sanchez of Deep Forest fame, Welenga, thus:

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Having written his first traditional album (which only appeared in the USA), Wes was wary of facile and over- artificial associations, a form of white- gloved slavery that is at the heart of too many fashionable cross- cultural projects. He was, however, reassured by the sincere passion of Michel Sanchez, who for three years gave Wes his time and his know- how. The combination of the two spirits, the irrational Wes and the virtuoso Michel, was a fusion of fire and water, the meeting of a wild but fertile root and the gifted loving caretaker of a musical garden where Wes could flourish. (Liner notes to Welenga 1997)

What is noteworthy here— beyond the rather astonishing pseudo- political correctness and the continuing representations of a non- Western person as “irrational,” “wild,” and more— is the continued use of familiar ideologies of authenticity of primality, but this time subordinated to the ideology of the hybrid- as- authentic.

Reviews of Kidjo’s and other African musicians’ later albums have slowly jettisoned some of the earlier reliance on ideologies and discourses of vari- ous forms of authenticity, though they do persist. A review of Kidjo’s Oyaya! from 2004 praised the album for “strip[ping] away the Europop affections and return[ing] . . . to a rootsier sound” (“Angélique Kidjo ‘Oyaya!’” 2004, T07). Kidjo still feels buffeted by different critical reactions, telling an interviewer, “I’ve been bashed left and right by people who want to have control. I never fit those clichés. I grew up listening to all genres” (Jaggi 2007, 37).

All these conceptions of authenticity persist today, sometimes more strongly or weakly than at the advent of world music, though whatever ide- ology of authenticity that serves capitalism is subject to change, sometimes quite quickly.

As a result of the entry of world music and musicians into the Western market, just as some musicians have become brands, as discussed in the pre- vious chapter, the logic of branding has been extended to certain types of music, particularly small “genres” such as world music. Branding is another way of putting something in its place, making it knowable and accessible to potential consumers and creating an emotional connection to it. Fairly early in its existence, “world music” was branded as happy, celebratory, unthreat- ening, symbolized in the packaging of recordings in multicolored artwork and employing wacky, colorful fonts, sometimes mimicking the fonts of the music culture’s, e.g., “Gaelic” or a South Asian language. This is the “celebra- tory” aspect of world music, as opposed to the anxiousness about it, as Steven Feld (2002) has written, anxiousness that reflects a concern for the dynamics of economics and power around world music (figure 3.1).

I would now argue that the rise of “world music” in the late 1980s wasn’t the beginning of something but a culmination, or at least an important mile-

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stone in the ways that Western peoples put their Others in (small) boxes. For almost immediately with the rise of “world music” and the various pro- cess of genrefication of it, we saw the conglomeration of some musics into brand categories under what I have elsewhere called the “brand warehouse” of “world music” (Taylor 2014a). It is perhaps “subgenres” or “styles” within world music where this process is clearest. Probably the best example remains “Celtic” music, which frequently has little or nothing to do with traditional musics from the ancient Celtic nations of Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, the Isle of Man, and Brittany, and which usually employs the color green, images of Celtic crosses or standing stones, and/or “Gaelic” fonts; another example is Gypsy music (see Silverman 2012). What branding accomplishes for small bodies of music such as this is that it organizes them into knowable, recog- nizable categories so that consumers can instantly determine whether or not a particular music is “Celtic” (or whatever) and if it has made an emotional connection. Certain sounds became emblematic, metonymic, of such musical brands, such as the sound of the tin whistle in the “Celtic” brand. Branded

F i g u r e 3 . 1 . Putumayo Presents: World Hits (2007), Cover

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musics are expected to conform to the authenticity of the brand more than anything else (figures 3.2 and 3.3).

World music is also increasingly produced in studios. Musicians in the commercial music world have had to learn how to make “world music,” or at least approximate it. Commercial music composers need to know how to compose in a variety of styles, as they always did, but their brief increas- ingly includes world music. One commercial music guidebook advises to hire “native” musicians to perform compositions written in a “typical folkloric style,” warning that unless the performer really knows the musical culture she or he is playing, “it will not sound authentic” (Zager 2003, 24).

There are also “utility” performers who have sprung up, musicians who can imitate a variety of sounds and styles for use in commercial music. It is simply more economical to hire such a person than to seek out an authentic practitioner of a particular tradition, despite the advice proffered above. Mi-

F i g u r e 3 . 2 . Liam Lawton: The Clouds’ Veil (1997), Cover

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chael Stern, a recording engineer and music- scoring mixer, told me that Los Angeles boasts many world- class musicians:

One thing we have in Los Angeles is ethnic specialists. You’ve got people like Pedro Eustache, who is one of the most phenomenal duduk players in the world, and he will show up to a recording session with 200 flutes, and both legit instruments and things he’s made out of plastic tubes, one- of- a kind, unique instruments that he will get incredible sounds out of. You have George Doering who is probably one of the busiest studio musicians in the world who is a phenomenal guitar player, but he’ll play bass and all the dulcimers, the Aeolian wind harp, things that you don’t even know what they are, and he’ll tell you, he’ll play lute or oud or whatever is required for the film score, and he’ll do it fast, he will be efficient, he will play what is right almost every single time. (Stern 2012)

It is no different for singers today in the commercial music world. Marissa Steingold (2009), a singer who works for commercials and films, told me, “A lot of times they’ll ask, ‘Can you do this?,’ ‘Can you sound like a Bulgar- ian . . . ?’ ‘Okay,’ and I’ll just listen to one YouTube example and just sort of

F i g u r e 3 . 3 . The Best of Celtic Music (2006), Cover

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make it up. I’ve had to do a lot of Celtic stuff, just hoping I’m pronouncing things correctly.” And she provided an illustrative anecdote.

I had this gig not too long ago for Coca- Cola. They had this Indian singer who they really liked and so they gave me a recording in advance of her doing some wonderful chanting, and they said, “We want you to sound like her, but it’s a Coca- Cola commercial and there are lyrics in English.” So I called up my friend from Bangladesh and had her do an impression of an Indian person speaking English who just doesn’t speak English that well, and tried to absorb that without being really offensive. It’s quite difficult; sometimes I have to be “Asian,” and I’m just praying that no one in Asia is listening. There’s no time to really work it out.

They need people like me who are not genuine, not genuinely black, or not genuinely Indian, or whatever, because it would be offensive to ask an Indian person to sound less Indian.

Steingold reflected on the range of “ethnic” sounds she operates in, from the Irish New Age singer Enya to Lisa Gerrard, who is famous in the commer- cial music world for her emotional singing of nonsense syllables that imitate a foreign language (heard in the 2000 film Gladiator among other places).

I think of two singers as a spectrum and one’s on each end. Usually on one side you’ve got Enya, and then on the other side you’ve got Lisa Gerrard, and she’s much more intense. And so often I’m having to play this dance, so if I start to get too intense, earthy, too ethnic then it’s got to go to the Enya side. I think part of the reason why she’s been so successful is, she’s still pretty white. It’s an “Other”— it’s Celtic, but it’s still something that we can handle (Steingold 2009).

Another commercial singer, Randy Crenshaw (2009), told me:

When you get the call they’ll say, “We’re looking for someone who can sing authentically in Farsi, are you good at that? Or do you know somebody who’s good at it?” So you come preapproved, but once you get called for that you’re expected to come in there and really sound quite authentic. I’ve had to do things where I had to come in and do, you know, Sufi devotional music. I’ve had to come in and sing things that were in Hindi, or things that were in Sanskrit, or things in Indonesian, where they said, “Okay, we have kind of a gamelan orchestra and we need you to sound authentically like— ” and they’ll play me samples of stuff.

In a lot of cases producers are still looking for a pastiche thing that has the flavor of it without the genuine article. But in enough cases they’re true aficionados of a musical style and when they say they want Bulgarian women, they really do want it to sound just like the record they have of the Bulgarian women. So it’s made us be a lot more broadly based eclectic music makers,

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instead of what we used to be, which is really highly technically great tone generators.

Crenshaw also told me:

I have a library of probably three thousand CDs and two thousand LPs, you know, of the vinyl variety that nobody knows about anymore? I still have a wall full of them, and I purposely took samples of virtually every vocal style that’s known to exist. I try and actually have a listening library so that when somebody says that they me want to sound like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, or whoever it is, I’ll say, “Okay, sure,” and then I go and listen.

Connoisseurs, Collaborators, Curators

Promoting musicians who don’t sing in English to US and UK audiences has always been difficult, no matter how famous those musicians might be in their own countries or regions. Chris Stapleton and Chris May write of the regular flow of African musicians from various countries to Britain, other European countries, and North America; musicians left their homes for lack of opportunity to realize their musical and professional ambitions in their own countries, finding also that they couldn’t become influential until they had spent some time in a Western metropole. The prominence of a particular musician could result in new waves of immigration, as in the success of the UK- based Ghanaian/Caribbean group Osibisa in the 1970s, which increased Ghanaian and other West African immigration. Manu Dibango’s globally suc- cessful “Soul Makossa” from the early 1970s and Miriam Makeba’s success inspired more immigration, as did the rise of Sunny Adé (Stapleton and May 1989, 279– 80). Yet it remains difficult for musicians not singing in English to break through; the international music industry’s conservatism and xenopho- bia make success even more difficult.

What has helped non- Western musicians achieve some degree of inter- national success is the efforts of a Western star/broker. Beyond the increas- ing noticeability and availability of what has become known as world music, one of the effects of globalization under neoliberal capitalism has been the increased desire of Western musicians to work with non- Western ones, under ideologies of “collaboration” (Meintjes 1990; Taylor 2007a). When the Western musicians who take an interest in non- Western ones are stars, col- laborations commonly take the form of curatorship. Fans are invited to use the Western stars’ tastes to follow them to new music.

Paul Simon, David Byrne, Peter Gabriel, Ry Cooder, and others serve as examples of how “globalization” has created awareness of and interest in mu-

Taylor, Timothy D.. Music and Capitalism : A History of the Present. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Accessed October 13, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central. Created from ucr on 2019-10-13 13:24:37.

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sics from afar, but their desire to collaborate— a desire that could only have resulted from being in a capitalist culture in which no object, tangible or not, is seen as unobtainable, especially by the wealthy— resulted in complex rela- tionships and negotiations between famous musicians and those less famous but with aspirations toward fame, international recognition, and wealth.

At the vanguard of these new intermediaries, at least in the realm of popular music, were musicians themselves, stars who performed and re- corded with little- known musicians from around the world. Early examples include Paul Simon and his Grammy- winning Graceland (1986), which fea- tured musicians from South Africa, and his later recording The Rhythm of the Saints (1990) with Brazilian musicians. Other such connoisseurs/curators from the early days of “world music” include, most prominently, David Byrne, who founded the Luaka Bop label, which released many recordings by Brazil- ian and other musicians, and Peter Gabriel, whose record label Real World features musicians from around the world.

A common strategy employed by Western musicians who work with non- Western or other subaltern musicians is to claim affection and longtime fa- miliarity with the music whose makers they are drawn to collaborate with. It is a fundamental expression of connoisseurship: they found this music before it became popular. This is clear enough in Paul Simon’s (1986) liner notes to Graceland.

In the summer of 1984, a friend gave me a cassette of an album called Gum- boots: Accordion Jive Hits, Volume II. It sounded vaguely like ’50s rock ’n’ roll out of the Atlantic Records school of simple three- chord pop hits: “Mr. Lee” by the Bobettes, “Jim Dandy” by Laverne [sic] Baker. It was very up, very happy music— familiar and foreign- sounding at the same time. The instru- mentation (accordion, bass, drums and electric guitars) and the name of the record label (Gallo Records) made me think that Gumboots probably hadn’t been recorded by an American or British band [boldface in original].

Or David Byrne’s comments on working with salsa musicians for Rei Momo in 1989: “For years I’d listened to this music and at some point it just seeped into me enough where I felt comfortable enough to say, ‘Okay, now I can ac- tually approach the musicians and work with them, and it’s not gonna seem like I’m just adding a sound or a texture onto something else’” (Thompson 1988, 44).

These and other Western star musicians employ other common dis- courses about the musicians with whom they worked and the musics they appropriated or collaborated with. The dominant ideology and discourse are

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that non- Western musics are a kind of natural resource that is available for the taking, though these acts of appropriation are frequently tempered by the Western star’s appearance alongside the non- Western musicians in public- ity photographs, on recordings, and in liner notes. Examples from the early days of “world music” are still the clearest, though the ideologies that inform them remain. Stewart Copeland, the drummer for the 1980s band the Police, released a recording in 1985 entitled The Rhythmatist, which is a collection of songs utilizing sounds from all over the African continent. The liner notes and iconography point to nineteenth- century notions of the Western explorer entering the untamed jungle. An interior photograph, for example, shows a dressed- in- black, hatted Copeland brandishing a huge, phallic microphone. Here is Copeland’s description of the music on the album:

“Rhythmatism” is the study of patterns that weave the fabric of life; with this speculation in mind a black clad figure is on his way across the so- called dark continent. He meets lions, warriors, pygmies and jungles before stumbling across the rock.

This record is a curious blend of musical snatches from Tanzania, Kenya, Burundi, Zaire, the Congo and Buckinghamshire (Copeland 1985; boldface in original).

Paul Simon evinced much the same position when working with Ladysmith Black Mambazo and other African musicians on his acclaimed Graceland. Si- mon’s summary of the process of collaboration indicates his overall approach to both Graceland and The Rhythm of the Saints, invoking the explorer/ discover trope: “The act of discovery becomes what the work is about” (Paul Simon: Born at the Right Time 1992).

Both Simon and Copeland, when faced with criticisms that they had ap- propriated black music just as early rock and roll musicians had done, de- fended themselves by claiming that traditional musics were a resource that belong to everyone. Simon exclaimed, “You think it’s easy to make a hit out of [that]?,” as though the African musics that appeared on Graceland were noth- ing but raw material awaiting his refining touch (Born at the Right Time 1992). For him, other people’s culture is natural— he has said, “Culture flows like water. It isn’t something that can just be cut off ” (Herbstein 1987, 35)— though his own cultural productions are, of course, protected by copyright and law- yers (see Taylor 1998 for my experience with the latter). For his part, Cope- land defended his album against the idea that he was plundering or appro- priating other people’s music, similarly viewing somebody else’s culture as a natural resource:

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I’ve recently heard an expression: cultural mining. It’s a term of derision, al- though I proudly assume this term for my own work. Because I think the term itself is only used by intellectual journalists who are very ignorant of the mind- set of the indigenous people in exotic places. That mind- set is very open and giving of its culture and proud to have people from across the world listening to it. And appreciating it. The idea that someone goes to an African village, records their music, and takes the tape away— it’s not like, suddenly, “Where’s all the music gone? Must’ve been that white guy with his microphone! He stole it and took it away with him!” Nothing could give them greater happiness than the idea that some people in a faraway land are dancing to their beat. (Blank- Edelman 1994, 38)

A somewhat different case of connoisseurship is that of Ry Cooder, whose famous “discovery” of prerevolutionary Cuban musicians resulted in the 1997 hit Buena Vista Social Club. This was after several other projects with musi- cians that could be interpreted as more collaborative than some other famous world music projects (such as Talking Timbuktu with the Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré in 1994). Nonetheless, Cooder was hailed as a discoverer, and participated in this perception himself, telling one interviewer, “Music is a treasure hunt. You dig and dig and you find traces. But there I found it all” (Williamson 1997, 33). And his septuagenarian and octogenarian collabora- tors were treated as isolated from modernity: “The players and singers of ‘son de Cuba’ have nurtured this very refined and deeply funky music in an atmo- sphere sealed off from the fall- out of a hyper- organised and noisy world,” said Cooder (Mengel 1997, 13).

But it should be remembered that the relationships of Western stars to their fellow musicians are complex and can seldom be characterized merely by a colonizer/colonized or dominant/subordinate framework. In the case of Simon and Graceland, all the musicians wanted something from each other. Simon was clear about wanting to rejuvenate his career, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo was clear about desiring a broader international audience.

Despite the variety of relationships that Western stars have had with the musicians with whom they work, the result is usually taken as an uncompli- cated example of collaboration (Meintjes 1990). This interpretation is valo- rized by the Grammy Awards for World Music, which have tended to go to collaborations, as I noted in Global Pop (Taylor 1997a), though this pattern was upset somewhat by the introduction of a new World Music Grammy Award in 1992 for the Best World Music Album, to which another award, for Best Traditional World Music Album, was added in 2004 (this category was jettisoned when the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences [NARAS], which oversees the Grammy Awards, eliminated a number of

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awards in small categories in 2011, merging the two back into the Best World Music Album category beginning in 2012). But the likelihood of a recording that featured a known American or European star fronting non- Western or other subaltern musicians was for a time so great that I entitled my review of Buena Vista Social Club “Ry Cooder’s Next Grammy” (Taylor 1997b), which would have been prophetic if it hadn’t been practically foreordained by the demonstrated preferences of the NARAS.

C o l l a b o r a t i o n w i t h o u t C o l l a b o r a t o r s

Other forms of connoisseurship, curatorship, and collaboration have been ac- complished electronically, facilitated first by tape recording technologies and then digital ones. A harbinger of what was going to become a trend within world music appeared in 1981 with the release of Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a recording that utilized snippets of music and speech from various places (made before the advent of digital sampling, this was accomplished through the cutting and splicing of tape). Eno said that he wanted to make a “fourth world music,” which he defined as

music that is done in sympathy with and with consciousness of music of the rest of the world, rather than just with Western music or just with rock music. It’s almost collage music, like grafting a piece of one culture onto a piece of another onto a piece of another and trying to make them work as a coherent musical idea, and also trying to make something you can dance to. (Tamm 1989, 161)

With the rise of digital technologies and sampling, which is now as easy as cutting and pasting in a word processing application, sampling of world music (and other musics) has become so common as to be the norm rather than the exception. The recording that propelled samples of world music into the mainstream appeared in 1992 and was a result of the efforts of two Euro- pean producers, Michel Sanchez and Eric Mouquet. Their recording, Deep Forest, sampled heavily from recorded music by the Baka people of central Africa, representing them as happy, premodern children. The album was so successful that the duo continued with the album title as their “band” name on subsequent albums that repeated the same formula.

Mouquet says that the recording was just for their pleasure at the begin- ning. “We just put all the feeling that we wanted into this music, and after we saw the success, we were very proud.” According to Mouquet, his partner, Sanchez, found some tapes of Pygmy chant recorded decades ago and played them after dinner one night. “It was very quiet, very beautiful,” said Mouquet,

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who then came up with the idea of combining the sounds with their own music. He and Sanchez cut the tapes, mixed them with synthesized music, drum beats and sound effects while keeping as much of the original melody and tempo as possible. Then they took their demos to producer Dan Lacks- man, and the songs were entirely reworked. “It was the vocals and the emo- tion of the songs which attracted me,” said Lacksman (Geitner n.d.). These quotations give a good idea of how Others’ music is romanticized, treated as natural, raw material to be manipulated in the studio.

The liner notes to Deep Forest contain the following statement:

Imprinted with the ancestral wisdom of the African chants, the music of Deep Forest immediately touches everyone’s soul and instinct[.] The forest of all civilizations is a mysterious place where the yarn of tales and legends is woven with images of men, women, children, animals and fairies. Not only living creatures, but also trees steeped in magical powers. Universal rites and cus- toms have been profoundly marked by the influence of the forest, a place of power and knowledge passed down from generation to generation by the oral traditions of primitive societies. The chants of Deep Forest, Baka chants of Cameroun, of Burundi, of Senegal and of Pygmies, transmit a part of this im- portant oral tradition gathering all peoples and joining all continents through the universal language of music. Deep Forest is the respect of this tradition which humanity should cherish which marries world harmony, a harmony often compromised today. That’s why the musical creation of Deep Forest has received the support of UNESCO and of two musicologists, Hugo Zempe [sic] and Shima [sic] Aron [sic], who collected the original documents. (Liner notes to Deep Forest 1992; names spelled as in the original)

There follows information on how to contribute money to “the African Pyg- mies”: for contributions of five dollars or more you receive a receipt, a “To Save the People” kit, and an original 5½″ × 8″ photograph of a pygmy child.

Taken together, all this constitutes a remarkable text. The names of promi- nent ethnomusicologists (Hugo Zemp and Simha Arom) are misspelled, and the notes seem to strive to touch all the most revered themes of Western modernity: the mysterious Other, universal cultural practices, the Other’s unique, idealized kinship to nature, the totalization of the Other— different tribes from different parts of the African continent become “Pygmies,” not to mention the use of the word “primitive” without quotation marks. Sanchez and Mouquet’s discussion of the music continues these mythologies. “When we began the project, the idea was just to play the music we want and to pre- serve the emotion of the music. It was important for us to preserve the tribal voices and not let the music overpower it,” says Mouquet (Borzillo 1994, 44).

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The source music is construed as raw material, thought to be unpalatable to Western listeners with sophisticated tastes. So it’s backgrounded, encom- passed, surrounded by up- to- date synthesized magic and drum machines. Most of the source music on Deep Forest is unrecognizable; it has been so ma- nipulated, so smoothed over, so covered up by the Western synthesizers, that whatever might be “universal” about the original music is subsumed under a Western totalizing ideology of universalism. The music of the “Pygmies” becomes zoo music: placed into Western meter, undergirded by Western har- mony, made accessible to today’s Western listener. Evidently the original music has been sufficiently altered so that the two main forces behind the album, Eric Mouquet and Michel Sanchez, are listed as the “songwriters” for each track.

With the success of Deep Forest and other such recordings, the sampling of world music sounds has become commonplace. There are a number of sample libraries for composers to choose from, libraries that are variable in quality, often imitating instruments and voices from other cultures rather than actually offering recordings of them. But, as is usual, one gets what one pays for. Higher- priced sample libraries tend to be higher quality, featuring recognizably real instruments rather than synthesized ones. No matter the quality, however, they all tend to be marketed as exotic or wild, allowing their users to fabricate “world music” from a safe distance.

Musicians in the Field of World Music in Neoliberal Capitalism

Neoliberal capitalism and globalization are extremely complex historical processes that are both fragmenting and uniting, exploitative to many and beneficial to some. It is impossible to characterize either without running the risk of oversimplification, or of theorizing at such an abstract level that theory might not even be possible. Thus, as ever, it is important to attend to specificities.

C a s e S t u d y : A n g é l i q u e K i d j o

Readers of my earlier work on world music will know my respect for and fascination with Kidjo (b. 1960), a singer from Benin now living in Brooklyn. Kidjo, perhaps more than any other world music figure, has been canny in her negotiations of the ever- shifting (but always sexist, racist, and xenophobic) Western music industry. For that reason, an in- depth examination of her ca- reer will help shed light on how difficult the terrain of world music is, and the positions musicians are forced to take in the world music field.

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Kidjo and “World Music”

This is the point where I might attempt to situate Kidjo in a field of cultural production (Bourdieu 1993), but this raises the question of what the “field” is. This proves to be a complex issue with respect to world music, which is still undergoing processes of genrefication. In many ways I would nonethe- less consider it to be a field since there are forms of capital that circulate con- cerning musicians’ lineages or background, and positions to be taken, about language choice, how much Western pop influences to permit, and more.

Kidjo maneuvers through a complex field that is continually under con- struction by the music industry, musicians, critics, and others. All fields are never static, but world music is different in that it is constantly being con- stituted as a genre by the music industry, and this constitution is resisted by some musicians. It is thus less stable than many other genres since it is rela- tively new and is forced to contain a massive variety of musics, making it sometimes difficult for musicians to know what positions might be available for them to take in the field of world music.

One of the positions Kidjo takes is to resist the field itself. She takes posi- tions to help her escape the confines of the world music field and attract a more mainstream audience, a move that she has in common with some other popular musicians from the African continent and elsewhere. Early in her career, however, Kidjo said she liked the term “world music”:

I like world music. It expresses an open outlook, a lack of musical sectarian- ism. World music is not a genre, like funk or reggae. It is played by musi- cians who think that artists— especially in Third World countries that are not overrun by the media— can express themselves in a very contemporary and original way, thanks to the richness of their cultures. The only danger of the world- music label is that of being left out of the mainstream, because this music is given the same weight in the market that the Third World is given on the global economic chessboard. (Aubert 1992, 25)

Only two years later, she had changed her mind:

World music doesn’t mean anything for me. We African musicians are not the world; we are just part of the world. The term is created to categorise music that is not pop or rock, and for me no one has the right to decide what is rock or pop, how the music deserves to be listened to.

The day I will take into account “world music” will be the day I will enter a record shop and where there will be a big sign on which is written “world music” and everything will be under it, from classical music to the music I am doing. Then it will mean something.

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The same people who created the term “Third World” also created the term “world music.” (Masterson 1994, 3)

This last statement isn’t actually true, but she is right in that “Third World” and “world music” stem from the same kind of classifying and distancing ideology.

Later, Kidjo was even more blunt: “I do not want my music to be put in a ghetto,” Kidjo said about the term (Ntone 1999), and blunter still a decade later:

What is not from a developed country, what is not Western, has to be in a different category— they call it “world music.” We share the same planet but we don’t have the same rights, apparently. We are not considered mainstream artists because we don’t sing in English or in French or in Spanish or in Portu- guese.” (McDonald 2009, 7)

The trajectory of Kidjo’s comments maps the shift of “world music” from an inclusive category that incorporated African music to its clear relegation to the margins of the music industry.

Positions and Forms of Capital in the World Music Field

Even though the world music field is still forming, its relation to the popular music field more generally has bequeathed it positions that are active. There are essentially two main positions: the question of the proximity to sounds that could be considered pop, and the question of the language in which to sing. Kidjo has continually negotiated these in her long career.

The question of the forms of capital at play in this field is more complex. They tend to be ideologies of authenticity that congeal, or are harnessed, as forms of capital, or positions in the field. All forms of capital relate to the authenticity of positionality as I described it in Global Pop, such as the musi- cian’s origins in a remote or oppressed place or conditions of poverty. Lineage matters, too: if, for example, a West African musician can claim to be a griot (a kind of bardic historian), or descended from a line of griots (the role is hereditary), this can be considered as a form of capital in the field (and griots have been musicians particularly fetishized by Western listeners and critics in the world music field); or if a musician simply comes from a line of famous musicians, or even just a generation or two. In some kinds of music, such as Irish traditional music, winning or faring well in a competition can matter a good deal (there is an extensive system of competitions in Irish traditional music). Studying with a famous teacher can also matter; I derive a fair amount of capital in the field of Irish traditional music from having studied with the

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well- known Irish flute player Mike Rafferty, for example. If a musician comes from a region famous for music, or famous for producing musicians, or fa- mous for a particularly revered regional style (as in Rafferty’s case)— all these can be constructed as forms of capital as well. They can be complicated by musicians’ position- takings, or how they attempt to use these forms of capital; abandoning a beloved regional style for more pop sounds is an example.

Another position to be taken concerns the proximity to popular music. World music artists must decided just how much to sound like Western pop stars, and how much of their local, regional sounds to preserve. This is a com- plex question, since people around the world have been able to hear Western popular musics for decades. Kidjo has always said, and reiterated in many interviews, that she grew up listening to many kinds of popular musics. Fairly early in her career, when she was first becoming known to Western audiences, she singled out James Brown, who “opened our ears to the fact American rhythms did sit alongside those of our own people and could be mixed to- gether in exciting new ways” (Sly 1992). She also cites the Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin, the Jackson 5, and the Beatles, all recordings brought home by her older brother and covered by his band. “I’d hear my brothers play- ing modern music inside, and then I’d hear the drums outside, and I was in between both” (Azerrad 1992, 32). Elsewhere, she said, “All the music I heard sounded good to me. Whatever I heard, I found a place for it in the music I was developing” (Sly 1992).

Predictably, however, questions of authenticity crop up frequently in in- terviews with Kidjo if her music is found to sound too much like Western pop. About Logozo (1991)— her first album for Island/Mango, an important label— she articulated her position: “You have to maintain the tradition but expose it to today’s realities. My records sound like dance music because that’s the only way for Europeans to approach something they don’t know” (Rom- ney 1991). As dance music, this album was produced by Joe Galdo, producer for the Miami Sound Machine, who had been chosen by Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records (Kidjo and Wenrick 2014, 85). Logozo included contributions by Branford Marsalis, as well as Cameroonian Manu Dibango, a world music superstar, and keyboardist Ray Lema from Zaire. Galdo’s pres- ence elicited disapprobation from some critics for sounding too much like American popular music.

Kidjo has always maintained that she will not accede to what her Western fans might want (at least as their opinions are represented by critics) by per- forming music that seems to be “authentic,” from the bush. She has been taken to task by many a critic for this. In 1993, Kidjo said, “I don’t want to deny myself. I don’t want to deny my culture or my education and I don’t envy

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the culture of the rest of the world. I just take what I want to take out of it. I take what I think can help me to grow” (Feist 1992, C5).

One journalist contemplated the crossover question and put it to Kidjo, though neither knew just what she had crossed over into: “I’m an African person bringing my culture to the Western world. I am using technology. And rhythm and blues. And jazz. I make it available for you by combining your tools with mine. But then they say it’s not pure” (Zwerin 1998, 10).

A later strategy in the face of criticisms that she did not sound “African” enough was to universalize and dehistoricize African musics. In response to a 2006 interviewer’s question about her musical influences, she said:

You are talking about R & B and funk. Where do they come from? They came from Africa with the slaves. The music that I am doing, the roots always go back to Africa. Why should we African artistes be stuck in one genre of music while we have been influencing the music of the world one or two centuries back? (“Music Lets Me See beyond Color” 2006)

Later still, she summed up her position succinctly: “La pureté, ça n’existe pas” (Dunlevy 2007, D5).

The position concerning language choice shows a similar set of negotia- tions at work. Kidjo has changed her position over time. Early in her inter- national career, she said:

I talked about the idea of having English lyrics with a few people but we didn’t think my music could take it. Take the words out and put in English lyrics and it won’t sound the same. It will be completely new. My voice is very rhythmic, like an instrument. Take it away and you’re losing an important part.

The people I chose to work with may not have known the actual words but I was confident they would treat the songs carefully. I knew these men could give me the kick I needed on a record, the same sort of big thing that I get in the live show (Sutton 1994).

Later, it became an issue of individual choice. About Fifa (1996), which was Kidjo’s first album to include English lyrics, when an interviewer won- dered if some would think she was selling out, she said, “I do what pleases me. I do the music I like. I don’t know if it’s going to be English or French or some African dialect. Music is music, it’s all about communication” (Brand 1996, G10). Later still, she adopted a position one could perhaps call philosophical: “Music is about expression. It doesn’t ask for color or language. I perform music that speaks to me and that is in my heart” (Oppelt 1998, D1).

Asked about singing in different languages in 2006, Kidjo said she has always sung in different languages. She said she chooses which language to sing in based on the music:

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Most of the time, it is the music itself. If I wake up in the morning and the music that I have is still in my head, I have to sing it. When I started singing in Benin, I sang music in the indigenous language, of course. But I also sang in Cameroonian and Zairian languages, and many other languages from Africa but I copy them phonetically. And then you have English too, and Spanish and Portuguese, and many different languages. The thing that matters to me is the beauty of the song, how it makes me feel happy and how I can give it back to people. (“Music Lets Me See beyond Color” 2006; see also Pareles 2014)

She writes much the same thing in her autobiography (Kidjo and Wenrick 2014, 23).

Complaints about Kidjo’s and other musicians’ use of Western sounds in non- Western recordings frequently stem from a fear of what is usually called cultural “grayout,” or a process of “de- differentiation” (Lash 1990). Such argu- ments seem to me to be too broad and not enough based on what real people are doing in the world, and they are based on the sound of the music rather than its conditions of production. In other words, they are written from the perspective of a consumer of music. There are clear instances of homogeniza- tion occurring, just as there are clear occurrences of new musics springing up all over as people come into contact with unfamiliar sounds and bend them to their own uses. Nonetheless, there is a growing global hegemony of fi- nancialized neoliberal capitalism, which has resulted, in part, in a globalized music industry, and with it, the standardization of production (see Regev 2013). Up to a point. Grayout is occurring— but so is diversification.

Gender

Kidjo, as a woman in a (Western, white) male- dominated industry, probably faces expectations of forms of authenticity that male musicians do not, or do not face as frequently. These are old problems, however, and nothing much seems to have changed with neoliberal capitalism. As usual, it is an issue of xenophobia and ignorance, combined with sexism. As for the former, Kidjo has said, “I’m not here to fulfill anybody’s fantasies. If they [Western critics] want to see exotic African women, they have to fly to Africa. And if they’re not careful, when they arrive there, they’ll get their faces punched in” (Burr 1994, H28).

Yet some of the problems faced by Kidjo as a woman in the music industry are more general and familiar:

The music business is macho. When you are a woman, you have to be at a point in life when your mind is at the same place as a man. You have to fight

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two times harder because men want the power for themselves and they don’t want to share it. The advantage of being a woman is having the pride to do what you do every day. Being there and showing men that because you are a woman you can do it too. That is the only way to gain respect. (Wentz 1993, 43)

In a 1996 interview, she addressed the problem of sexism in the music in- dustry, averring, “Well, I’m tough enough to kick anyone, I have been kicking some arse on my way.” When asked who by the interviewer, she replied, “The people who bother me, the people who think I have to have sex with them before I have anything done.” Continuing, she said, “I think: ‘Okay, it’s going to take me more time to get there, but I’m not having sex with you.’ That’s it, that type of compromise— I never did it and I’m never going to do it.” Kidjo believes that sexism is still rampant in the industry:

It still exists, and sometimes it depends on the girls. Some girls are ready to do anything for fame, but I’m not ready to do anything for fame.

No- one ever told me that when you believe in something you want to do you have to sacrifice your body.

And she says she prefers hard work.

You have to give a lot of yourself into it, you have to work hard for it, you have to believe in what you’re doing, you have to be able to listen to advice on your way and you have to keep thinking about how you can make it happen. But not by giving your sex. (Chisholm 1996, 49)

Oremi (1998)

A particularly illustrative case of the complexity of position- takings by art- ists and labels in the world music is Kidjo’s album Oremi, released in 1998. This was her fifth album, and her fourth for Island Records. The label, which had recently dissolved its Mango world music imprint, nonetheless retained Kidjo, and marketed her more as a rhythm and blues (R&B) musician. Alexis Aubrey, product manager for Island Records US, said, “She has demonstrated an enormous potential to touch many different people from children to older people. She crosses all cultural boundaries” (Oumano and Pride 1998, 88). Liz Townsend, international marketing manager for Island UK, said, “We’d like to get her out of the world music ghetto,” though she recognized that this wouldn’t be easy: “You can’t just say Angelique Kidjo is now an R&B artist and expect the dealers to move her records out of that section” (88). As part of this shift, the label shifted away from earthy colors (figures 3.4 and 3.5) to a sepia- toned photograph with Kidjo’s name in sky- blue letters (figure 3.6). Kidjo writes in her autobiography that she came to understand the impor-

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tance of visual representations of artists from Island Records label founder Chris Blackwell: “Music is not just the songs. It’s also the way you present it to the public. A great album cover . . . is like a pair of colored spectacles that illuminates your music” (Kidjo and Wenrick 2014, 88).

Aubrey also said that the label would concentrate mainly on listening posts in “appropriate retail locations,” and they were trying to push the album in alternative press in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other key world music markets in an attempt to cultivate an audience beyond the usual con- sumer of world music (Oumano and Pride 1998, 88).

The genre- resituating effort worked up to a point. Borders’ buyer for international music bought into Island’s marketing plan (using language celebrating the album’s hybridity), saying, “‘Oremi’ is a cutting- edge fusion of African, pop, and R&B influences. It’s urban music for any city. Borders will feature ‘Oremi’ in a front- line listening post, like any major pop release” (Oumano and Pride 1998, 89). Kidjo appeared at Lilith Fair, the concert tour

F i g u r e 3 . 4 . Angélique Kidjo: Ayé (1994), Cover

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and traveling musical festival that featured women artists, and her album’s title track was placed on a Lilith Fair CD entitled The Lilith Developing Artist Sampler, created by the tour organizers. According to Aubrey, 2,500 CDs were given away at each Lilith Fair concert (Oumano and Pride 1998, 89). Radio also was part of this campaign. Aubrey said that they wanted to introduce Kidjo to radio listeners on the “hot AC” (Adult Contemporary) and “AC” for- mats (89). A 12- inch single of the track “Voodoo Child” remixes was released for clubs.

Later Recordings

After her contract with Island expired, Kidjo signed with the jazz department at Columbia Records in 2001, where Columbia Jazz and Legacy Recordings senior vice president Jeff Jones had recently taken over. Jones said that his mandate was to have a diverse group of musicians from traditional and con-

F i g u r e 3 . 5 . Angélique Kidjo: Fifa (1996), Cover

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temporary jazz, world music, blues, and more, and that Kidjo certainly fit (Pesselnick 2002, 86).

Like many popular musicians seeking to find a broader audience, Kidjo collaborated with a producer known for his innovative employment of digi- tal technologies and nonmainstream sounds, Bill Laswell, who is credited as having provided “Reproduction and Mix Translation” for her 2002 record- ing, Black Ivory Soul. Borders’ and Tower Records’ buyers both remarked on Kidjo’s appeal beyond the usual “world music” niche (Pesselnick 2002, 86). At WDET in Detroit, Kidjo had long been popular because she couldn’t be confined to the world music category, and the station’s music director pre- dicted success for the album. But Black Ivory Soul still contained songs not in English. Kidjo said:

The public has proved to me all these years that it isn’t a matter of language— it’s what they feel. I think that I achieved that goal and can bring them to

F i g u r e 3 . 6 . Angélique Kidjo: Oremi (1998), Cover

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realize that, “Hey, we have one life.” After what happened Sept. 11, if a human being does not believe that, then he is in danger. We have to learn to live with each other. We have to learn to heal. (Pesselnick 2002, 86)

Subsequently, Kidjo issued an album, Djin Djin (2007), that contains du- ets, some with well- known Western singers, among them Alicia Keys, Peter Gabriel, and Carlos Santana. This was perhaps her most ambitious recording to date, following the duet albums of famous popular musicians such as Tony Bennett, Johnny Mathis, and many others. This recording, unlike several of the earlier ones, was released not on Columbia but on Razor & Tie, an in- dependent label based in New York City that is distributed by Sony (I have found no explanation anywhere for this shift in labels). Songs were sung in English and French as well as her native languages. Djin Djin was coreleased by Starbucks and was sold in Starbucks stores, and it won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary World Music Album in 2008.

Kidjo’s Õÿö (2010) musically makes the case for what she had argued from the beginning of her career— that she grew up listening to music from all over, not just Africa, but also the United States and Europe. There are songs originally sung by Miriam Makeba, a hero on whom Kidjo modeled herself, and classic soul songs made famous by James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, and Aretha Franklin, as well as versions of Bollywood songs that were popular when she was growing up. Famous Western stars such as Dianne Reeves and Bono joined her for some tracks. Reviews were mostly excellent, though there were still the predictable gripes about her work with Western musicians and praise for what are viewed as the more “authentic” songs, e.g., “Many of the sets’ highlights are entirely African and uncluttered by Western pop stars” (Jenkins 2010, WE06).

Kidjo’s most recent recording as of this writing, Eve (2013), is perhaps even more eclectic, gesturing this time in more “classical” directions, featur- ing collaborations with Rostam Batmanglij of the indie rock band Vampire Weekend, a female vocal trio from Benin called Trio Tériba, the legendary singer- songwriter, pianist, and guitarist Dr. John, the Kronos Quartet, and the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg.

This sketch of Kidjo’s career shows that it is, as I have said, only somewhat different from a Western popular musician’s over time. Apart from language choice, the position- takings that Kidjo has chosen in her career are not un- usual: many a Western popular musician has had to do the same thing. Most Western popular stars find themselves having to reinvent themselves in order to continue to find an audience; in this way they are both reactive and crea- tive. In this respect, world music musicians are much the same. The only real

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difference is that they face greater xenophobia, if not racism, as well as the barriers of a largely monolingual audience, at least in the United States. But all musicians in whatever field today face an ever more uncertain landscape in which the chances of a contract with a record label are diminishing, opportu- nities for radio airplay are shrinking (at least in the States), and their income in general is declining.

Ownership

The history of world music, and the history of music more generally with the establishment of copyright in the late eighteenth century, has been a history of someone attempting to profit legally from someone else’s music. Increasing access to, and knowledge of, musics of the world and easy ways of capturing them digitally have resulted in frequent appropriations of musics of all kinds, including world music. Probably the most notorious early case is that of the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” also known as “Wimba Way” or “Wimoweh,” but originally entitled “Mbube” (“Lion”) by its author, the South African Sol- omon Linda, in 1939 (example 3.1). Many groups recorded versions in the 1950s, including some well- known musicians such as the Weavers (example 3.2) and the Kingston Trio (example 3.3); the version by the doo- wop group the Tokens was a number 1 hit in 1961 (example 3.4), and Disney used the song in The Lion King (example 3.5). But there were copyright issues almost from the beginning. Solomon Linda was paid 10 shillings (under $1 today) by Gallo Records when he signed over the copyright to that company in 1952.

After living in poverty, Linda died in 1962, and his heirs have struggled as well. An article by the South African writer Rian Malan published in 2000 in Rolling Stone documented the success of the song and the paltry sums paid to the Linda estate over the years (Malan 2000). The Linda family sued in 2004, asking $1.5 million in damages. But, since Linda had signed away the rights in 1952, and his widow had done the same in 1982, it was a difficult case. The family claimed that a lawyer had deceived them. Disney, always averse to negative publicity, argued that it had paid the copyright holder without knowing anything more about the history of the song, but nonetheless agreed to pay the family royalties from 1987 to the present (LaFraniere 2006, A6).

This is a tragic but all too common story of exploitation in the music in- dustry by the rich of the poor, white of black, and it has been no less common in the realm of “world music,” especially since the rise of digital technologies that have made sampling existing recordings simple and commonplace. Per- haps the most famous example of a sample of “world music” that was exploit- ative of the original makers was the German band Enigma’s use of a folk song

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by Taiwanese singers of the Amis ethnic group (example 3.6). Enigma’s driving force, the Romanian- German Michael Cretu, searched hundreds of recordings of folk and traditional music to sample, and found “Jubilant Drinking Song” on an album called Polyphonies vocales des aborigènes de Taï- wan. Cretu legally licensed the song from the French Maison des Cultures du Monde, which owned the copyright to the recording. The resulting song, “Return to Innocence,” rose to number 2 on the charts in Europe, number 3 in the United Kingdom, and number 4 in the United States in 1993 (example 3.7). The album that the song was on, The Cross of Changes, rose to number 2 in Europe, number 1 in the United Kingdom, and number 9 in the United States.

Two years later, the original singer of the song, Kuo Ying- nan, a seventy- six- year- old betel nut farmer, heard the song on the radio for the first time. Then the song was used as an official song of the 1996 Olympics. The inter- national popularity of the song as measured by sales and its exposure through the Olympics prompted a record label in Taipei, Magic Stone Music, to sue EMI (the parent company of Enigma’s label, Virgin). Press reports on com- pensation to the original musicians are neither clear nor consistent, but it seems that Enigma sent a check to the academic who had made the original recordings in 1978, or perhaps to Kuo himself, or that money was paid by the French Maison des Cultures du Monde, which then paid the Chinese Folk Arts Foundation, which had originally brought the Amis singers from Taiwan to Europe. The lawsuit seemed to stall for a time as Kuo’s legal representation changed. Finally, there was an out- of- court settlement in 1999, stipulating that Kuo and his wife, Kuo Shin- chu, another singer on the recording, would re- ceive credit on all future releases of “Return to Innocence” and would receive a platinum copy of the Cross of Changes album. And the Kuos would be able to establish a foundation to preserve Amis culture.

While such stories of exploitation have a long history, it is only in the neo- liberal era that cultural industries, including the music industry, have assidu- ously sought to capitalize on the ownership of copyrights (Frith 1988). The industry is increasingly organized less around the production of “content” than around the creation and protection of copyrighted entities. Just as agri- business seeks to own and copyright/patent local knowledges, as mentioned in chapter 2 (see Harvey 2005), the cultural industries seek to own and maxi- mize the profit of their copyrighted holdings. And as music industry worker Alan Elliott (2013) told me, the biggest growth area in the music industry today is the legal department. Individual musicians’ discourses about music as a natural resource, examined earlier, continue in the practices of the music industry.

Questions of ownership and exploitation have been, in part, the impetus

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behind the growth of protective measures. The Bolivian government in 1968 passed a Supreme Decree that gave its national folklore a “sole copyright ap- proach,” in which “ownership and control of certain works became vested in the state” (quoted by Albro 2010, 151). After the 1972 UNESCO Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, and Simon and Garfunkel (and others’) appropriation of the song “El Condor Pasa” in the early 1970s, the Bolivian government in 1973 asked for an addi- tional protocol to the Universal Copyright Convention to protect popular and national culture of all countries. This request, and actions in other countries such as Japan and South Korea, spurred UNESCO to begin the process of finding a way to protect national cultural heritage (Albro 2010, 151), and it passed several declarations early in the twenty- first century on intangible cul- tural heritage, including the invention of a new designation of “masterpieces of the intangible heritage of humanity,” meant to protect local and traditional forms of knowledge and practice. UNESCO believes that “traditional knowl- edge and practices lie at the heart of a community’s culture and identity but are under serious threat from globalization” (UNESCO n.d.a).

Since the first of these designations, many music, dance, and quasi- musical practices (various forms of chanting) have been named masterpieces of the intangible heritage of humanity, such as the tango of Argentina and Uruguay, the Chinese guqin musical instrument, music of the Aka people of Central Africa, and much more. The naming of a particular genre or prac- tice or instrument as a masterpiece of the intangible heritage of humanity can have the effect of creating or augmenting tourism, or raising the value of mu- sical instruments. For example, the ethnomusicologist Helen Rees (2010) told me that since the guqin was named a masterpiece of the intangible heritage of humanity in 2003, its role in China has changed dramatically. She found it difficult to find a way to learn the instrument when she first went to China in 1987, but now it is easy to find a studio where one can do so. The instrument that Rees paid about $60 for in the 1980s is now worth $30,000– 50,000.

UNESCO, and the concept and use of the idea of the masterpiece of the in- tangible heritage of humanity, might protect local and ancient cultural forms and practices from being appropriated, but, at the same time, it can have the effect of consecrating those very cultural forms and practices, creating a mar- ket for them or a touristic culture around them that significantly alters those forms and practices that were intended to be protected. Globalized neoliberal capitalism makes it difficult to isolate local forms and practices from its reach: they become commodified, commercial objects, or, in the case of music, sounds available to be sampled; or, if they are protected, they can become a kind of sanctified commodity with the imprimatur of UNESCO.

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The globalization of music under neoliberal capitalism has increasingly meant the acquisition of copyrightable materials and their protection, mate- rials that are sold or licensed to larger and larger audiences around the world. For today’s music industry, it has become less important to find good new music to record, market, and distribute than to exploit to the fullest the copy- rights that it owns.