Thirty Years of World Music

[JWPM 1.2 (2014) 192-200] JWPM (print) ISSN 2052-4900 doi:10.1558/jwpm.v1i2.26062 JWPM (online) ISSN 2052-4919

Timothy D. Taylor Thirty Years of World Music

Timothy D. Taylor is a professor in the Depart- Department of Ethnomusicology ment of Ethnomusicology at the University of University of California California, Los Angeles. He is the author of many 2539 Schoenberg Music Building books and articles, most recently, Music and Cap- Los Angeles, CA 90095 italism: A History of the Present, to be published USA later this year by the University of Chicago Press. [email protected]

Abstract This article tracks major developments in world music since the inception of the term in the late 1980s, situating the rise and continued currency of world music as an effect of the most recent phase of globalization in the West, which itself is part of the neoliberal capitalism of the past few decades.

Keywords: globalization; neoliberalism; world music

Nearly thirty years have passed since the music industry’s adoption of the term “world music” (see Denselow 2004) but nothing much has changed, or so it seems to me. The western-dominated music industry is still racist, sexist and xenophobic, ignoring most of the planet’s music unless it perceives an easy path to profit. University music departments, at least in the US, are still overwhelmingly dedicated to the performance, composition and study of western European classical music, ignoring, even denigrating, virtually everything else. Ethnomusicology, when present (and it has become some- what more present in the US), is still marginal in music departments, conser- vatories and schools of music. The musics of the world, when noticed by the West, are still frequently viewed as raw materials that can be drawn upon to enhance or renew the musics of the West. Plus ça change. Yet there have been a few salutary developments. All sorts of musics are easier to hear than they once were, thanks in part to the rise of the “world music” category (which still has plenty of drawbacks, not least from the perspective of musicians who are relegated to it); and it is increasingly possible for some musicians in this category to make a living. Those public schools (at least in the US) that still offer music programmes are increasingly incorporat- ing world music into them (though what passes for world music can be quite sanitized and unintentionally caricatured almost beyond recognition, to the

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2015, Office 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield S1 2BX. Thirty Years of World Music 193 extent that one wonders if it is worth trying to teach it at all). But, clearly, decades of the promulgation of the ideologies of multiculturalism and, more recently, diversity have had noticeable impacts in US curricula, for good and for ill. There have also been some developments in the music industry that are worth reviewing (for more in-depth treatment, see Taylor 2012b). Perhaps the most salient is that the western music industry, from the inception of the “world music” term in the late 1980s, has attempted to genericize it, making it into a single entity that is thought to be knowable and learnable. This is in keeping with long-understood machinations of capital, as we learned from Max Weber: capitalism requires, and effects, standardization. It happened before, of course, perhaps most famously in the realm of popular music with the segregation of musics into the categories of “race” and “hillbilly” in the 1920s (see Miller 2010), the effects of which are still discernible today, as (for just one example) some African American musicians still struggle to enter the prestigious “rock” category (see Mahon 2004). Such segregation, standardization and genericization were and continue to be necessary in the music industry (understood here as a complex of interrelated industries comprising recording, broadcasting, advertising, musical instrument manufacture and sales, concert booking and promoting, and much more), for all musics need to have their place: in what radio formats do they go? Where are they placed in shops, whether brick-and-mortar or online? Which venues host their per- formances? In which magazines and websites, and in which sections of magazines and websites, are they reviewed? The growth of the visibility of world music has also meant that composers for film, broadcasting and advertising now routinely need to know how to “compose” world music, for a producer or director or filmmaker or other sort of client could ask for it. More than likely, this music will be fab- ricated, though sometimes real instruments are used. “Exotic” percussion is increasingly common in studios, and a (small) group of utility performers has emerged that can play a variety of unusual instruments, or who can sing in different styles and accents (see Taylor forthcoming 2015). And there are an increasing number of high-quality digital samples of world music available, which are cheaper to use than hiring a live musician. There are low-quality samples as well, available for much less money. It is no accident that “world music” appeared when the West was beginning to talk about the most recent regime of globalization, in which peoples, commodities and money were moving about at greater speeds and further than ever before. Music that sounded like western popular music but was not sung in a European language found its way to western record stores and needed a new designation—hence “world music”. Globalization (and new digital tech-

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2015. 194 Journal of World Popular Music nologies) as I have written elsewhere (Taylor forthcoming 2015) need to be viewed as part of the package of neoliberal capitalism of the last few decades, though the ideologies of neoliberalism have an earlier history (see Foucault 2008 for this; see also Hayek 1994 [1944] and Friedman 1982 [1962] for perhaps the baldest articulations of neoliberal ideologies, which are still routinely, and alarmingly, articulated today). World music might be the soundtrack to the most recent regime of globalization, but that regime is both product and producer of neoliberal capitalism. One of the most remarked-upon features of neoliberal capitalism is its financialized nature (about which much has been written and—see at least Duménil and Lévy 2004 and 2011, and Harvey 2005 and 2010—which has affected billions of people on the planet, not least because of the Great Reces- sion of 2007 and its aftermath), that is, the outsize role played by banks in today’s capitalism, assisted by computers, complex algorithms and global communications that make millions of transactions possible in an instant. This is perhaps best seen as a culmination of a long era of finance capital beginning in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries with the rise of Ameri- can hegemony in the world (see Arrighi 2010). I have come to view financialization as one of the symptoms of increasingly abstract ways of viewing the world that emerged in this period. Composers and others began for the first time to construe “other” music (whether non-western other or historical or social other) as raw material available to be employed in their own work (see Taylor 2013). These processes of growing abstraction are perhaps most audi- ble in the rise of sampling practices in the 1980s, followed quickly by all sorts of electronic musicians who routinely sampled various world music sounds as part of their music. One could argue, in technological-determinist fashion, that it was the sampler and later the computer that made this possible, but of course there was musique concrète first in the 1940s. This didn’t really catch on as a musical technique. But sampling did, for it emerged in a cultural and historical moment—the 1980s—not only shaped by the increasing abstraction of financialization, but the emergence of a new wave of consumption in the same era (see Lee 1993 and Taylor 2012a). Other people’s sounds could begin to be heard as attractive, and abstractable, available to be sampled. After having spent over a decade researching a book on the history of music used in advertising in the US and talking to many workers in the industry (Taylor 2012a), it has become difficult not to view that industry, along with the marketing and branding industries, as driving the other cultural industries, even driving the culture more generally (at least in the US). But I have come to think of all of this mainly in terms of being a primary symptom of today’s capitalism. The cultural industries were always capitalist industries, of course, but their strategies for realizing profits have changed over the years.

What is perhaps less obvious than globalization (or some other aspects of neoliberal capitalism such as financialization) is the redefinition of cultural capital in the broadest of fields, society. Bourdieu’s famous and volu- minous analysis of the French society of the 1960s and 1970s (Bourdieu 1984 [1979]) argued for the importance of knowledge of the fine arts in that society. This sort of knowledge, what Bourdieu influentially called “cultural capital”, conferred prestige upon the knower. But Bourdieu also wondered in that book if the bourgeois group that possessed great knowledge of the fine arts—possessed high volumes of cultural capital in his thinking—were being supplanted by a more technocratic social group that was indifferent to high culture. It seems to me that this has in fact happened in the US (I am less able to speak of the French or other European cases, though I think Bourdieu was right there, too). That is, the “field” of American society has changed. What now confers cultural capital in the broadest sense in US society is not knowledge of the fine arts (and one could argue about how much this ever mattered vis-à-vis Bourdieu’s case), but, rather, knowledge of the hip and the cool, the trendy (see Taylor 2009; see also Boltanski and Chiapello 2005 and Frank 1997). From what I have read and observed, the ideologies of the hip, cool and trendy are becoming increasingly common around the world. I would now go so far as to put it this way: What is the cultural logic of neoliberal capitalism? It is the hip and the cool. That is, knowledge of the hip and the cool is the source of cultural capital today; and what drives the cultural industries is the production of the hip and the cool. In terms of cultural production, workers frequently use the term “edgy” to describe the sort of work that they want to produce, which, it is hoped, will be thought of as hip or cool by consumers. What do all these terms mean? They are bandied about quite a bit though seldom defined, at least by those workers in various parts of the cultural industries with which I am most familiar. “Hip” and “cool” are social terms. “Hip” tends to refer to an ironic stance, aloofness, insider knowledge, and while it can be associated with young people, it is not usually a term associated with the youngest of youth; cool is related but more youth-oriented, younger. “Edgy” is a term used to describe cultural production, and one frequently encounters it in the cultural industries when workers attempt to describe the sort of film or television programme or advertisement they prefer, or are trying to make something that breaks with genre conventions, something that departs from the mainstream, something that might cause a little bit of unease in audiences (see Ortner 2013 and Taylor forthcoming 2015). This, it seems to me, marks a massive shift. It is no longer social elites who control the forms of cultural capital that matter (except of course those who occupy positions of power and prestige in the cultural industries), but

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2015. 196 Journal of World Popular Music workers in the cultural industries, who may well belong to what Pierre Bour- dieu famously called the new petite bourgeoisie (Bourdieu 1984). This doesn’t mean, of course, that social elites can’t avail themselves of what is hip and cool in terms of clothing, automobiles and so forth. But it is less of a rigidly hierarchical system than that analysed by Bourdieu, though those at the top are no less contemptuous of those at the bottom than in Bourdieu’s France. It is the ideology of the hip/cool/edgy that, more than anything else, drives cultural production and consumption today, and more than that, the production and consumption of other sorts of goods as well. Commodities such as smartphones are increasingly sold less for their utility and more for their perceived coolness. This has been true of some objects such as clothing and automobiles in the past, but it is more and more common for other household items or technological goods to be made to be cool, and desirable because of it. The cultural industries produce cultural commodities, but the commodities of other industries are increasingly culturalized—with Apple’s many products serving as the best example, where the late Steve Jobs was a genius at creating what was thought to be hip and cool. World music can also sometimes signify the hip and the cool; perhaps an early (and still a good) example is the phenomenal success of the recording Le Mystère des voix bulgares (first released in 1975, re-released in the UK in 1986), which I recall seeing on a number of yuppie CD shelves in the 1980s and 1990s. And before “world music” there was The Beatles and Ravi Shankar. How cool was that? In the cultural industries, some world music can be recruited into various hip/cool/edgy projects; world music can provide that edginess, that slightly discomfiting lack of familiarity that turns a mundane soundtrack into something more interesting, or add “exotic” local colour to a television programme or an advertisement. And this is frequently how world music is understood by workers in the cultural industries—it is different and therefore potentially fresh. Or, the anxiety of the other, registered in anxious narratives about world music (see Feld 2002) can add edginess. The production of the hip and cool is aided or enhanced through a series of complex processes that are usually collected under the term “branding”. Branding, at least according to those in the industry, is a way of creating an emotional connection to a product, giving it a real personality, almost so that it becomes a valued and trusted friend, something known and understood (for more on branding, see Aronczyk and Powers 2012; Arvidsson 2006; Lash and Lury 2007; Lury 2004; Moor 2007). Musicians are routinely discussed now as brands, in terms of their “brand image” or “brand management”, and what is good for his or her or their “brand”. This is less the case for musicians in the world music category, for most are still too marginal to have caught the notice of the mainstream music industry. But some kinds of music that are usually

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2015. Thirty Years of World Music 197 lumped under the rubric of world music, such as “Celtic” and “gypsy” music, have become brands of a sort (see Taylor 2014a), the former nearly always represented by “Gaelic” fonts, lots of green and Celtic crosses, the latter by the red and pseudo-ethnographic photographs of people as obedient speci- mens. World music artists from certain parts of the world are expected to appear in native garb, whether or not they actually wear those clothes out- side the concert hall. And world music itself has become something of a brand itself which can be deployed however its wielder wishes. Perhaps the Putu- mayo label best represents the branding of “world music”, with their album covers featuring funky fonts and bright colours. To repeat, lest I appear to have strayed far from the issue of neoliberal capitalism: I regard the hip/cool/edgy as the cultural logic of neoliberal capitalism (or one cultural logic of neoliberal capitalism, certainly the hegemonic one). But the overall logic of any form of capitalism in the broadest sense is the creation of economic values, in surplus. The rise of capitalism brought with it the advent of what Marx famously called exchange value, a new form of value. This didn’t eclipse what Marx labelled use value, but became part of the dual character of commodities. What Marx called (unmarked) value was determined by the amount of socially necessary labour time required to manufacture a commodity. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, observers such as Theodor Adorno began to believe that exchange value had eclipsed use value, that the real use value of a cultural commodity such as music—its uselessness, its autonomy from society—had disappeared, and that status display as an expression of exchange value had replaced it (see Adorno 2009; Horkheimer and Adorno 1990). Bourdieu had something to say about this, of course. With neoliberal capitalism, even brands can add or create value, additional to exchange value; it has even recently become legal to include brand-value on a list of company assets, alongside tangible assets such as cash and real estate (see Foster 2013). Value, then, and the processes of creating it, are always in flux, and the values of and around world music are no exception to this. The creation of the category of “world music” was a way of packaging it so that it fit into existing economic regimes of value. As a commodity, world music acquires a particular form of economic value; the original makers of that music might possess other values for it that are not economic, and faraway listeners in various social groups might possess still other values for it. We can thus speak of “regimes of value” (Appadurai 1986; see also Myers 2001). The hip or cool could be considered to be non-economic forms of value, though they can have strong economic implications or can be brought into economic regimes of value, especially when supplemented or amplified by branding practices. Another non-economic regime of value that is fairly new

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2015. 198 Journal of World Popular Music is encapsulated in the idea of intangible cultural heritage, though this regime can also have economic implications. Fears of the disappearance of world music, or attempts to protect existing genres, led UNESCO early in the twenty- first century to create a designation of “masterpiece of the intangible heritage of humanity”, intangible since cultural practices such as music and dance were not previously recognized. This is a rather non-capitalist way of confer- ring value, though it can be made to be commensurate with capitalist economic value if such a designation creates or increases tourism, increases the economic value of musical instruments or produces other sorts of effects. The UNESCO designation can thus result in what I have called elsewhere a halo effect, hovering over a particular practice or genre or instrument (Taylor 2014b). Nonetheless, the attempt to create a non-economic form of value that can be conferred on a local or regional form or practice of music seems to me to be an important way to attempt to compete with the encroachment of economic regimes of value introduced by neoliberal capitalism around the world. This is not to assume, as is often the case, that neoliberal or any form of capitalism is an all-engulfing wave that wipes out everything in its path. Just because capitalism is hegemonic does not mean that it is total. Other modes of production survive and continue; capitalism actually depends on other modes of production, other mechanisms for the creation of value, as Anna Tsing reminds us (Tsing 2013). The parasite has taken over the body but has not killed its host. Not yet, anyway. Most cultural production, in fact, is ignored by capitalists, even though there are many musicians (and other cultural producers) attempting to catch the attention of capitalists so that they can make a living from their music and their work, perhaps hoping to become rich stars. What I hope we can hope for in the future, at least with respect to world music, is that its makers can earn a living from their labour in a mode of production that they knowingly and consciously embrace, that they are increasingly in possession of those forms of educational, cultural and financial capital to know how to be, or become, subjects in today’s capitalism rather than objects of it. There is not a lot of cause for optimism. Yet many musicians appear to be hopeful, for, luckily for us, there seems to be no shortage of com- pelling new music to hear.

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