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PUNCTUM
By George
Chen
Fantasyland
NAVIGATING
THE RACKS at Down Home Records in El Cerrito is like what I
imagine taking in the California exhibit at Legoland would
be like: surveying a shrunken world. The division of CDs into continents,
nations, and genres compacts the world's sound cultures into relative
order while reminding me how little I know about them. I wanted
a tour guide, a sonic sherpa to steer me clear of blindly buying
into the wrong thing.
There are associations
with world music, thankfully absent from Down Home, that plague
me: drum circles, hacky sacks, and that patchouli stench that is
woven into pockets of the East Bay. These stereotypes trail the
category, even though the name of the genre itself is the
vaguest description ever. Isn't world music just music produced
in (or on) the world? It leaves little room for exceptions –
maybe SETI recordings or Sun Ra, but even Saturn's most famous export
did his best work on Earth. What is disturbing is the way this world
gets partitioned, as if the world in world music only
means the third world and safely antiquated folk traditions of the
first world.
The overriding
factor that drove me to El Cerrito: I hate my music collection.
It demands more psychic and physical space than I feel is healthy
at my age. Another reason – my roommate put it best –
"I'm so sick of listening to music made by white people!"
Not that I don't like music made by white people. My roommate whom
I am quoting is white, and she is even known to occasionally make
music. Almost all of the bands I go see are predominantly white.
Some of them are trying to escape that peg somehow, like my roommate
and me. I was accused of listening to "white music" by
kids I grew up with who listen to commercial R&B and hip-hop, as
if that is part of the "authentic" Asian American experience.
For all of the claims that hip-hop belongs to everyone, there are
a bunch of white indie kids whose approaches to beats and rhymes
are considered inauthentic in terms of standards of class and race.
It's weird to see who makes these classifications and how they are
used: whiteness, world-ness, and wrongness are all up for grabs.
The demand for
a packaged experience that will conform to your theoretical understanding
can obliterate actual experience. This is what my foray into Down
Home felt like – my armchair tour through the world as a music
consumer. I found myself wondering, "Is this going to be 'real'
African music? Or is it going to be like the Paul Simon stuff?"
I wanted something that kicked me the way an MP3 by the Congolese
Konono 1 did, a compressed but ferocious cacophony that featured
traditional trance music with handmade microphones and amplification.
But gauging by covers of smiling, costumed natives dancing through
these CD racks, the options seemed more like polite preservations
than the gritty, amplified thumb piano blasts I'd downloaded at
www.crammed.be/konono.
There were accepted pathways through this world – the general
consensus among my peers is that the Ethiopiques compilations are
top-notch, and Dutch punks the Ex have endorsed Konono I. That selective,
conditional acceptance of certain genres was all the more motivation
to find something else, a sound that would be superfreaky and would
also break down the illusion that globalization is hunky-dory. At
the same time I was starkly aware of the privilege to pick and choose
cultures like ice-cream flavors and of what little percentage of
the import markup the artists recoup, not to mention how that market
could validate some musical traditions and let others die off. It's
a scary privilege to have.
These are my
issues and not Down Home's. The cognitive dissonance of liking Burmese
and Brainbombs, after all of my UC Berkeley training, echoes in
the hunt for exotics. When using two different measuring systems,
one for aesthetic quality and one for politics, you end up with
strange bedfellows. My favorite Saturday Night Live sketch
this season was a mock German youth talk show where teenyboppers
articulated informed critiques of American foreign policy followed
by requests for Top 40 American pop songs.
Speaking of
bedfellows, much salad has been tossed over the fakery of Zeigenbock
Kopf, the John Dwyer-Jeff Anderson incarnation of gay techno culture.
Zeigenbock Kopf is, let's face it, as dumb about its fake gayness
as it is about its fake German-ness (the name roughly translates
as "male goat head"). The only common ground between
critics and defenders seems to be that as far as fake techno goes,
it's pretty catchy. On Nocturnal Submissions (Tigerbeat6),
the distorted grime of the crackling drum machines and burping electronics
is monotonous and insistent, the deadpan vocals caricatures of robotic
cock obsession. It is dumb, it is fun, and the weirdest part, the
part that invalidates most of the criticisms I've heard, is that
it would all be OK if the guys perpetrating the joke were actually
gay.
There's a whole
history of minority groups struggling for the rights that others
take for granted, of the silence that is forced on people that can't
or aren't allowed to speak for themselves, but that may not be what
is going on here. Music can be history, but it's also fiction. Trying
to occupy another subjectivity is part of fantasy, and who is to
say that hetero Western fantasies cannot be totally revealing and
valid? It might be more necessary to watch these fantasies for the
hairline fractures that do emerge, for what they say about a power
structure trying to absorb differences and failing. Making politics
out of music may not be as simple as adding up the race, gender,
orientation, and nationality of the performers, but we always latch
onto those things because they are easier to quantify. Assuming
the purity or authenticity of a culture, even if it belongs to an
oppressed minority, speeds up the process where it becomes history,
dead and safe, one more category on a shelf.
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