Local Music Scenes and Globalization

Transnational Platforms in Beirut

Thomas Burkhalter

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135073695
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Categoría: Etnomusicología

This book offers the first in-depth study of experimental and popular music scenes in Beirut, looking at musicians working towards a new understanding of musical creativity and music culture in a country that is dominated by mass-mediated pop music, and propaganda. Burkhalter studies the generation of musicians born at the beginning of the Civil War in the Lebanese capital, an urban and cosmopolitan center with a long tradition of cultural activities and exchanges with the Arab world, Europe, the US, and the former Soviet Union. These Lebanese rappers, rockers, death-metal, jazz, and electro-acoustic musicians and free improvisers choose local and transnational forms to express their connection to the broader musical, cultural, social, and political environment. Burkhalter explores how these musicians organize their own small concerts for 'insider' audiences, set up music labels, and network with like-minded musicians in Europe, the US, and the Arab world. Several key tracks are analyzed with methods from ethnomusicology, and popular music studies, and contextualized through interviews with the musicians. Discussing key references from belly dance culture (1960s), psychedelic rock in Beirut (1970s), the noises of the Lebanese Civil war (1975-1990), and transnational Pop-Avant-Gardes and World Music 2.0 networks, this book contributes to the study of localization and globalization processes in music in an increasingly digitalized and transnational world. At the core, this music from Beirut challenges "ethnocentric" perceptions of "locality" in music. It attacks both "Orientalist" readings of the Arab world, the Middle East, and Lebanon, and the focus on musical "difference" in Euro-American music and culture markets. On theoretical grounds, this music is a small, but passionate attempt to re-shape the world into a place where "modernity" is not "euro-modernity" or "euro-american modernity, " but where possible new configurations of modernity exist next to each other.

Part I

Theory and Methodology

Music Making in a Digitalized World

1 Globalization and Digitalization in Music

The accelerated processes of globalization and digitalization have revolutionized music making on many levels. Austrian music sociologists Kurt Blaukopf (1996) and Alfred Smudits (2002) use the term media-morphoses to describe in detail major changes from the first recordings on cylinder phonographs to the advent of cassettes and CDs to the complete digitalization of musical production from the 1980s onwards. The digital media-morphosis alone continually brings revolutionary changes. Throughout the world, musicians find new ways to produce music at low cost and to promote it globally. Chris Anderson (2006:57–57) emphasizes the fact that the universe of musical content is growing faster than ever. He lists three main forces that have led to this situation: the democratization of the tools of production (new and cheaper computer hardware and software); the democratization of the tools of distribution (e.g., CD-Baby); and new mediators that connect supply and demand (e.g., Weblogs, Facebook, YouTube, SoundCloud, Spotify). Anderson describes today's music market as a confusing mosaic of a million minimarkets and microstars: Increasingly, the mass market is turning into a mass of niches. The geographical location of a musician, label, or distributor becomes a minor factor, it seems. Thomas Friedman (2005), among many others, highlights the newfound power for individuals to collaborate and compete globally. It is some of these individuals, musicians from Beirut in this case, that this book is about.

SAMPLE: BEIRUT—AFRICA, ASIA, AND LATIN AMERICA

Musicians from Beijing to Tijuana, from Istanbul to Johannesburg, mix and manipulate local and global sounds and ideas within their music. They network with artists and multipliers (e.g., curators, producers, journalist, and scholars) worldwide and experiment with new ways of producing, distributing, and selling music. This recent music from Africa, Asia, and Latin America is progressively reaching Euro-American reception platforms and is being discussed by ethnomusicologists, popular music scholars, journalists, and bloggers with increased interest. Style-wise, the sample is broad: commercially successful styles of pop music like reggaeton (Marshall, Rivera, and Hernandez 2009) and kwaito (Steingo 2005; Swartz 2008), and electronic music styles like kuduro (Alisch and Siegert 2011), nortec (Madrid 2008), baile funk (Stöcker 2009; Lanz et al. 2008), shangaan electro, or cumbia electronica form the popular end of the spectrum. The experimental end offers African, Asian, and Latin American musique concrète, free improvisation, noise music, and sound art (e.g., Wallach 2008).

In the Arab world, beyond Beirut, we find a large number of upcoming musicians. On CDs (e.g., from the label 100copies) and platforms like SoundCloud, we find them experimenting with the noises of Cairo and electronic music (e.g., Mahmoud Refat, Ramsi Lehner, Adham Hafez, Hassan Khan, Kareem Lotfy, and Omar Raafat). Using Casio PT mini-keyboards, Kareem Lotfy and Omar Raafat mix noise with distorted, psychedelic-sounding Egyptian melodies. Mohammed Ragab—alias Machine Eat Man—works with analogue synthesizers. He defines his mixture of Arabic voice, flute samples, drums, psychedelic synthesizer movements, and electronics as “Egyptronica.” Further, musicians range from pioneers like Halim El-Dabh to composers in Syria, rappers in Palestine, and metal musicians in Egypt. The list includes Nassim Maalouf with his “quartertone trumpet” and many other contemporary musicians (see Burkhalter, Dickinson, and Harbert 2013).

In addition, there are musicians of Arab origin in Europe and the US who frequently network with musicians in the Arab world. Mahmoud Turkmani, a Lebanese musician and composer living in Switzerland, experiments with Egyptian takht ensembles, video art, and film. In his piece Ya Sharr Mout (Son of a Bitch), he harshly criticizes both the Europeanization of Arabic music and the extreme commercialism of Lebanese postwar mainstream culture. The hope of many musicians, NGOs, and other actors in the Middle East is that his and other musicians' struggles for more representation (and against censorship and physical aggression) will celebrate more successes after the Arab Spring of 2011 and 2012. Despite the many differences between these musical styles, some commonalities can be clearly identified. In this book, I argue that these musicians offer alternative musical positions and try to fight old “ethnocentric” Euro-American perceptions of their home countries in, for example, challenging and mixing up ideas about “culture,” “place,” “locality,” “tradition,” and/or “authenticity” in music.

In Europe and the US not many years ago, small niche audiences listened exclusively to music from the Arab world, Africa, Asia, or Latin America. Specialists were primarily interested in Arabic maqam music and small Arab takht ensembles or sufi singers, whereas others were drawn to the famous Arabic singers Umm Kulthum, Asmahan, or Fairuz and Algerian or Franco-Algerian raï by Khaled or Cheb Mami (Schade-Poulsen 1999), or they listened to what is often referred to as oriental jazz, crossover, or world fusion. The latter include musicians like Rabih Abou Khalil, Anouar Brahem, and Dhafer Youssef, among others. This variety of music was (and is) often categorized as “world music” by record industries and media. British record producers invented it as a marketing label in the 1980s (e.g., Erlmann 1995, Taylor 1997, Mitchell 1996, Broughton 2006, Binas-Preisendörfer 2010), and the goal was to diversify the Euro-American market in order to sell more music. Consequently, to this day, “world music” is based on musical difference and otherness at its core. Due to this focus, the world music catalogue for the Arab world contains the music mentioned earlier, but few of the current rock, punk, metal, and electronic music, or electro-acoustic experiments and musique concrète, despite the fact that this very music has been produced not only in Beirut, but also in other Middle Eastern, African, Asian, and Latin American cities for many years. After a long period of nonrepresentation, musicians of these genres have now started to perform on various Euro-American reception platforms—with the help, support, and initiative of mostly small European and US-based producers and labels (some of them from within the world music networks).

Many new supporters of this emerging music ignored music from Africa, Asia, and Latin America for a long time—mainly because it fell into the category “world music.” World music to them sounded “too cleanly produced,” “too much of a middle-class taste,” “too boring,” or “too cliché” (interviews and discussions by author 1994–2012). Today, many authors of blogs, disc jockeys, and curators—the multipliers of the present—are considering a multitude of new and “trendy” terms to categorize these upcoming styles, for example, “global ghettotech” (Marshall 2007),¹ “shanty house theory,”² “worldtronica,” or “ghettopop.” In some of my articles I use the term “World Music 2.0” (Burkhalter 2010)—and I do so for various reasons. Many people—including me—hope that these latest tracks, songs, sound montages, and noises from the Arab world, Asia, Africa, and Latin America contain revolutionary meanings: That the old model of center and periphery is less valid than it ever was; that we are living in a world of multiple, interwoven modernities (Eisenstadt 2000). In other words, modernity emerges polycentrically through exchanges between the “global North” and the “global South” (Kolland 2010). We hope that these musics will support claims by social and cultural scientists that declare the one-sided theories of modernization to be unsound (Randeria and Eckert 2009). Whereas terms like “modernity,” “global North,” and “global South” are debated upon and deconstructed in academics, they are still in use in cultural networks and markets. The discussion around discrepancies between academic theory and daily practice is one of the tensions that run like a thread through this book.

2 Theoretical Frame

Ethnomusicology, popular music studies, and musicology find it hard to research the rapid developments in these and similar musics and music circles. Tagg and Clarida (2003) argue that the various academic disciplines that research music cannot keep pace with rapid technological shifts. Digital revolutions and the new possibilities of producing and distributing music demand new methodological and theoretical approaches. One goal of this book is to put forward a methodological approach that analyzes music and music making from miscellaneous perspectives. The approach is inductive, built on my many years of participant observation in music and cultural markets. Overall, I work with a mix of theories from ethnomusicology, pop and media studies, culture studies, and social anthropology.

FROM MUSIC MAKING TO TRANSNATIONAL MEDIA PERFORMANCES

Media channels are crucial in all aspects of music making. They regulate contact and access to other musicians, organizers, funders, and fans. Musicians in Beirut receive information on the latest trends in their specific niche music genres faster than ever before. Whereas in the 1990s metal albums were imported through the port of Kaslik, or brought in by friends or family members by plane, today's musicians can listen to their favorite music from abroad via the Internet. Their knowledge about music and their production and distribution strategies show clearly how closely music making is connected through media worldwide. That Lebanon still has one of the slowest Internet speed rates worldwide does not derogate this fact. Many of the Beiruti musicians download all possible tracks from their favorite sites the moment they step into a zone with fast wireless Internet access abroad—I observed this many times.

Their musics become media products, fixed on CD, LP, or cassette, or as media files (e.g., WAV, MP3). These media products include cover images (with pictures, fonts, and graphic design), titles, logos, and descriptions. Further, video clips, remixes, posters, websites, promotion pictures, and interviews appear on a diversity of old and new media ranging from newspapers and magazines to blogs, SoundCloud, and YouTube. They are not side products of the music; rather, they intensify its aesthetical approach and vision (in the best cases), and they help promote both music and musician. Similar to concert performances and DJ sets in front of audiences, these media products can be defined as transnational media performances. These performances include all elements of Christofer Jost's definition of media as: carriers and transmitters of data (and information); as technical means of communication; as means to create standing; as technical dispositions; and as independent “outdifferentiated” systems of function (2011:7). Furthermore, they fit Rolf Grossmann's definition of musicians, which focuses not on traditional instruments, but on the laptop as an increasingly important device for many (if not all) tasks. Grossmann highlights the changes laptop culture brought to music: “It is a new mode of musicianship: fusing self-research, composition, innovation, performance and distribution in a single technological device connected to digital networks” (2008:9). Many of the musicians in this book combine multiple activities; they are producers, interpreters, activists, historians, salesmen, and networkers—and many of them own an up-to-date laptop, either PC or Mac.

I use the term platform whenever I speak of where these media products appear: on a local stage in Beirut, on an international stage in London, on a media platform like SoundCloud or YouTube, or in a computer game. Possibilities are huge—certainly new platforms open up at the moment of writing. With their media products, musicians perform on several of these platforms simultaneously. They trim their media products to fit—or they challenge consumption on these platforms. Similar to concert performances, where musicians reflect on effective set lists or announcements, they perform strategically (and more and less knowledgeably) on various local and transnational platforms. It is the musicians' strategic use of these platforms that I intend to research. Plus I try to show the interrelation between the production of media products and the reception on these possible platforms.

German media and pop scholar Christoph Jacke (2009:144) splits pop music into four main domains: production, distribution, reception, and further processing. This book is divided along these lines: Parts II and III deal primarily with production and distribution, whereas Part V focuses on reception and further processing. The domain production includes motives of musicians and producers. It looks at the production processes and at the aesthetics of production. It does further highlight economical aspects. The domain distribution observes the role of public relations (PR), advertising, and the impact of media channels (e.g., TV channels, radio stations, blogs). It looks at distribution processes and at aesthetics of distribution. The domain reception looks at the various groups of recipients and their motives and reception aesthetics. The domain “further processing” observes all the further, often nonmusical, appearances of a specific media product.

I work with a broad definition of music that—besides melody, rhythm, and pitch—includes noise(s), the sonic, and sound. The approach is linked to sound studies, which assume that the sound characteristics of a track lead into the middle of music making as a process of action, communication, and meaning (see Binas 2008:11). In sound, we hear the contradictory aesthetical, social, and economical interests and possibilities of the actors involved with the production. By working on sound, we come to the crossroads between the cultural, the social, and the aesthetical.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS: MULTISITED AVANT-GARDES OR WORLD MUSIC 2.0?

From my experience, interview data collected with musicians and the analysis of their media products often reveal different results. It is this gap between empirical data and the actual analysis of the media products that needs to be filled. My main research questions keep the media products of these musicians from Beirut at the center of interest:

• Which musical and nonmusical spheres of influence affect the music making of these musicians from Beirut?
• How do these spheres of influence affect them: Are they binding and inspiring, or do they offer positioning options or playing opportunities?
• How do these interactions between these various spheres of influence become inscribed in their media products?

Approaching music in this way shows that many actors with different policies, strategies, and knowledge are involved in the process of music making (Jacke 2009:144).

The paramount question is: Are these musicians and media products able and allowed to create vanguard musical positions? Do they help cocre-ate, push, and promote concepts of “multisited modernities”? These emerge polycentrically and challenge old readings of modernity as “Euro-modernity” and “Euro-American modernity” (Grossberg 2010). Thus, do these media products in fact hold revolutionary meanings?

I discuss these paramount questions from a Euro-American perspective. Yet, they are important for the musicians in Beirut, too—as I experienced during fieldwork. These musicians work with similar musical material, aesthetical approaches, and techniques as musicians in Europe and the US. Many musicians highlight musical similarities, and focusing on musical differences is far less evident. Their aim is to compete internationally. They search for recognition within their transnational niche networks and desire to be “trendy,” “contemporary,” “hip,” or create “Zeitgeist.” Accordingly, they want to be analyzed and even criticized through Euro-American perspectives as well. Trumpet player Mazen Kerbaj confirmed this several times, in various interviews. He aspires to reach international recognition; to be the best free trumpet player in Beirut is not enough:

To be able to compete internationally is what is most important to me. Not because it is better outside, but because abroad I can play in front of an audience that has experienced free improvised music for many years. To play abroad is the real test! I hate it when Lebanese are so overconfident. Often they are very happy and proud too early. Once, a Lebanese friend and me went to see a Lebanese saxophone player. After the concert, I was very angry; it was the worst saxophone player I had ever heard. My friend answered, “Yes, but for a Lebanese, he was good.” This is what I hate; this makes me almost vomit. It's like admitting that we Lebanese are just a bunch of shits. I really hope this will change—and this is one of the reasons we want to compete internationally and prove ourselves.

Consequently, I measure these musicians between two overall concepts and traditions: One is “avant-garde” that I here call multisited avant-garde to imply that it is not Euro-American exclusively. The other is “World Music 2.0.” Whenever using the term “multisited avant-garde” in the analysis, I argue that these musicians create new vanguard positions. When using “World Music 2.0,” I imply that they are still being pushed to fulfill expectations and adapt to the worldview of Euro-American producers and audiences—and thus offer “World Music 2.0,” simply an updated version of the limiting “world music” (1.0).

A BROAD CONCEPTION OF AVANT-GARDE

In current European music discussions, the term “avant-garde” is often equated with “new music”—with composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, or John Cage. I use “avant-garde” in a broader conception, based on definitions by Hegarty (2009), Jauk (2009), and Van der Berg and Fähnders (2009). Accordingly, artists of the avant-garde are those who seek a break with dominant musical canons. Avant-garde in this broad conception includes Pop-Avant-Garde: art-pop musicians like John Lennon or Pete Townsend, who graduated from art schools rather than conservatories (Jauk 2009:73); “nonacademic,” self-taught pop musicians—for example,...