ETHNO Stories About World Music on the Internet
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BIBLIOTEKA XX VEK 157 (e) Editor Ivan Čolović Ivan Čolović ETHNO Stories about World Music on the Internet Translated from Serbo-Croatian by Vladimir Arandjelović Belgrade 2018 Original title: Etno. Priče o muzici sveta na Internetu Biblioteka XX vek, Belgrade, 2006 © Ivan Čolović Ivan Čolović (1938, Belgrade) has published a large number of essays and studies in the field of litera- ture, urban ethnology, ethnolinguistics and political anthropology. Some of his books have been trans- lated into German, English, French, Italian, Polish and Greek. He is a winner of the Herder Award (2000) and has been decorated with the French Legion of Honour (2001). Among recent works in English: Politics of Symbol in Serbia. Essays on Political Anthropology. Translation Celia Hawkes- worht, Hurst, London, 2002. "A Criminal-National Hero? Bit Who Else?", in: M. Todorova (editor), Balkan Identities. Nation and Memory. Hurst, London, 2004. "Priests of language: the nation, poetry and the cult of language", in: R. Bugarski and C. Hawkesworht (editors), Language in the former Yugoslav lands. Slavica, Bloomington, 2004. "Football, Hooligans and War in Ex-Yugoslavia", in: A. Fenner ansd Eric D. Weitz (editors), Fascism and Neofascism. Critical Writings on the Radical Right in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. and The Balkans: The Terror of Culture. Essays in Plitical Anthropology. Translation V. Aranđelović. Nomos, Baden-Baden 2011. Cover by Ivan Mesner FOREWORD What prompted me to embark upon this internet cruise in search of stories about the world music was the proliferation of those stories in the Serbian media, which had begun in the mid-nineties of the Twentieth century. Paying close attention to all that was being said there about ethno music – term most commonly used in Serbia for world music – I noticed that it was being offered as a new genre of popular music with a folkloric foundation, felicitously free of weaknesses plaguing the dominant (and up to that point the only) kind of such music: the folk, that is, newly written and performed folk music, nicknamed mockingly turbo folk in the early nineties. Ever since it emerged, some fifty years ago, this kind folk music has been looked down upon by the cultural elite of Serbia as a worthless simulacrum of Serbian folklore, the gravest of its weaknesses, particularly manifest during the last twenty years, being its susceptibility to the influence of the Turkish and Arabic melodic patterns, allegedly totally absent from the original Serbian folkloric music. This prompted certain critics of this kind of folk to refer to it as "Anatolian howling", or "turban folk". Low and behold – I thought while reading the ethno music stories – it seems that the Serbian elite have finally gotten a kind of folklore- 6 Ethno based popular music perfectly suited to their taste, custom made for it, as it were. That music – the stories about it go on to say – remains true to the authentic sources of the Serbian folk melodic patterns, but is, on the other hand, open to cross breeding with other Balkan people’s music, as well as to the utilization of modern musical forms – primarily those peculiar to jazz and rock music – and modern production technology. Thus, Serbian ethno music is represented in these stories as national in its spirit, but modern in its form, and politically correct to boot from the standpoint of democratic standards, as a form of intercultural communication and dialogue. It seemed to me as though the same formula was at work here that has also been used, since the mid-nineties of the past century, by the adherents of the so called "good nationalism", just so they could offer a political project named the Third Serbia, a vision of a society capable of avoiding the excesses of radical nationalism (exemplified by Šešelj’s Serbian Radical Party), as well as those of supposedly unacceptable radical anti- nationalism (exemplified primarily by the activists of independent non-governmental organizations for the protection of human rights in Serbia). I thought that, if I gave it a try, I would be able to find out what is being said in our country about ethno music, and learn through it some key elements of the ideology, or what I suppose could be called the political faith of the Serbian elite. Perhaps, the name of its head idol is: Ethno. However, I went beyond the Serb stories. I ventured into other, close by as well as far away regions of Ethnoland - the name I gave to the virtual archipelago of world music narration. Thanks to that, I was able to see to which degree the Serbian stories on this topic represent Foreword 7 versions of a globally spread out discourse about the Holy Grail of ethnic identity, wherein allegedly resides the authentic sound of traditional music. The first, longest part of this book Is written in the form of a diary of a field research, and since my field is the virtual space of the Internet, my journal contains notes of my visits to websites speaking of world music, its stars, producers, projects, disks, festivals, instruments, critics… In Part Two, I attempted to systematize the observations and insights I had arrived at as a cybernaut ethnologist, a kind of ethnologist I christened: internethtnologist. In short, I discovered that the focal point of the narration I was studying was the quest for authenticity of music, culture, and of man himself, which lay hidden in the ethnic identity, in ethno, as in some sort of "primordial soup". And, when a narrative is about musicians who valiantly cross borders between musical genres and national traditions, in order to effect multiple and diverse fusions, the steadfastness of the primordial ethno sound is never compromised by it. Its vitality is even more emphasized in episodes focusing on genre and ethnic mixing. Thus, the term ethno in the title of this book does not point only to one of several names given to world music, but to a certain quality it is presumed to possess, regardless of what one may call it, and regardless of where else that quality may be present. Sometimes, ethno appears in my text as a personification, an embodiment of that quality, in which case I capitalize it: Ethno. Some of my observations in the Journal are not consistent with what I wrote later in Part Two of the book. I was reluctant to fill those gaps later, for I wanted to give the reader a sense of gradual character, not only of my journey through diverse regions of Ethnoland but of 8 Ethno my discovering and grasping what I have termed the system of ethno sound. Also, I left material, in the Journal, that does not corroborate my thesis, hoping that it would help me show more convincingly that my main thesis is well founded in the totality of the material, than I would have if I had cleaned it of all that did not fit it. Nor did I attempt to account for the development of world music narration from its earliest beginnings in the eighties to the present. I considered examples of it in the order in which I was finding them on the Internet, in some kind of virtual synchronicity. The succession of my encounters with individual musicians and other personalities from the world of ethno music, or, to be exact, with texts about them, does not follow any "objective" chronology, thus, representatives of different generations of musicians may, at times, appear next to each other in my Journal, as is the case with Alan Steevel or Purna das Baul, who had emerged as stars in the late sixties of the last century, and Amazigh Kateb and Richard Boné, whose first albums came out only a few years ago. I met them mixed together on the monitor of my computer, so they appear likewise before my readers. This book is surely not exempt from a number of other weaknesses and mistakes, which found their way into it without my knowledge and will. The two people who saw to it that this number be greatly reduced are my friend Eric Gordy – professor of sociology at Clark University in Boston, author of the study The Culture of Power in Serbia, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for valuable information on American and British research regarding world music, which would otherwise have remained unknown to me. I am also indebted to the translator Ðorđe Tomić, editor of the very first selection of texts on Foreword 9 this type of music ever published in Serbian, in the magazine Reč, who helped me eliminate a great deal of imprecision from my text. I take this opportunity to address my warmest thanks to them. PART ONE A VIRTUAL VOYAGE TO ETHNOLAND A Research Journal I AMONG THE STARS OF SERBIAN ETHNO MUSIC It is difficult to convey the feeling of intense Curiosity and uncertainty with which an ethnographer enters for the first time a domain representing the future area of his field research. Bronislaw Malinowski, The Argonauts of The Western Pacific June 12, 2003 I am hoisting anchor, that is, putting my computer online and Internet Explorer leads me automatically – it is preset to do that – to one of the best-known devices for exploring the vast expanses of the Internet. I am feeling an excitement coming over me that appears every time the individually colored characters spelling G o o g l e pop up in front of me, accompanied by that narrow rectangle into which I only need inscribe the name of my wish, before my search engine, similar to Aladdin’s good genie, picks me up and carries me toward its fulfillment.