Flamenco

Passion, Politics and Popular Culture

William Washabaugh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000181173
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Flamenco is renowned for its passion and flamboyance. Yet because it generates such visceral responses, it is often overlooked as a site for subtler discourses. This absorbing book articulates powerful and convincing arguments on such key subjects as ethnicity, irony, authenticity, the body and resistance. Franco's 'politics of original sin' had left its mark on every aspect of Spanish life between 1936 and 1975, and flamenco music was no exception. Although widely portrayed as an apolitical, even frivolous form of entertainment, flamenco is shown here to have played a role in both the strategies of Franco's supporters and of those who opposed him. The author explores how the meaning of flamenco shifts according to the social, cultural and historical contexts within which it appears. In so doing, he demonstrates that flamenco is an ideal subject for analyzing the construction and appropriation of popular culture, given the way in which it was developed for middle-class audiences, converted into grand spectacle, and conscripted to serve political ends.

Chapter 1
The Politics of Passion: Flamenco, Power, and the Body

The flamenco musical style, like most other popular musical styles, exercises political power despite its appearance of political detachment.¹ Its politics is effective but invisible. Its clout is veiled. Here I will show that while political positioning is rarely mentioned by flamenco artists, it is almost always present in their bodies. Elucidating flamenco politics, therefore, means demonstrating the politics of bodies, rather than of minds, and showing how ideologies are promoted physically even though they might stand outside of thought and consciousness.

Any effort to lift the veil on flamenco politics should start, one would think, with a definition of this flamenco style. Ironically, however, the essence of flamenco is, like its politics, hidden, and muddled, and contested, partly as a result of 125 years of commercialization, which, having played havoc with the memories and commitments of its adepts, throws all descriptions, definitions, and illustrations into doubt. Indeed, most scholars recognize that the description and definition of flamenco are hyperpoliticized even if, as they contend, the music itself is not.

Despite these controversies, flamenco can be described for heuristic purposes as a musical style that remembers, celebrates, and plays with seminal but elusive moments of sociality, one male-centered, the other female-centered. The first moment is male-centered and central - though not necessarily original as Ortiz Nuevo has shown (1990). It involves emotionally rich experiences of public fraternity and male bonding in small semipublic gatherings where rhythm, poetry and passion bind together simple folks in southern Spain. Such precious occasions of public fraternity come about in this way. Late at night, in a tavern or bar in southern Spain, some working-class men gather together. Their comraderie is celebrated with wine and traditional poetry sung at the top of their lungs. The longer they persist at drinking and singing, the more intense becomes their reunion. The air, thick with smoke and a musky scent of wine, starts to resonate with their passion. Eventually, one or another of the singers produces a texture of sound that sets teeth on edge, induces chills, and raises goosebumps. This is the quintessential moment of flamenco song or cante.

The flamenco lyrics (coplas) that are sung during these events are bare expressions of elemental emotion. They are simple in form, often anonymously authored, and usually based on a rustic poetic style that operates like a psychic key to open up floodgates of passion. Often this poetical style consists of little more than an enunciation of evocative terms such as love, hate, pain, death, mother, prison.

Por ti abandoné a mis niñas,
mi mare de penita murió;
ahora te vas y me abandonas,
no tienes perdón de Dió!

For you I abandoned my little girls,
my mother died of sorrow;
and now you abandon me...
may you be eternally damned! (Pohren 1984: 23).

The guitar, for its part, provides musical spice for the copla. Moreover, between coplas, the guitarist plays melodic interludes (falsetas), which develop and extend the emotional atmosphere created by the poetry (Manuel 1988).

The second critical moment in flamenco music is female-centered, and it stands a pole apart from the dark and musky experiences of male-bonding. Bright and blaring and daring, the carnivalesque fair in Andalucía is a seasonal opportunity for release from the workaday constraints of social life, especially for women. For three or four days at a time, men and women gambol with abandon, singing, dancing, drinking, and parading about. For men, the highpoint of the feria is the bullfight, the moment in which the matador, standing for all that is disciplined, cultural, vital and bright - wearing his suit of lights traje de luces - confronts and subdues the bull that stands for the wildness of nature and the darkness of death. For women, the feria is a time for walking on the wild side, stepping out and away from the suffocating privacy of the household, parading to the fairground located on the very edge of town where the cultural world abuts on the wild countryside. At this liminal time and in this marginal space, women dress in the most daring clothes and dance the most provocative dances, thereby presenting themselves as hot and "natural" in contrast to cool "cultural" men. This challenging role reversal is nicely illustrated in sevillanas, a musical genre perennially popular at fairs in and around Seville and redolent with the very same nature-culture contrasts that are so evident in the bullfight. The woman, with arms curved over her head as if to imitate the horns of a bull, challenges the composure and self-discipline of the cultured man with her wild and dangerous naturalness (Corbin and Corbin 1987: 94- 127).

Flamenco performances are riddled with reminiscences of these two kinds of social experiences, the somber song and flashy dance. As such, flamenco performances seem to operate as sacraments through which to remember and reenact the soul of Andalusian social life, playing out, now this way now that way, the twists and turns of Andalusian cultural history The extraordinary variety of flamenco performances in the twentieth century results, in part, from artists' creative handling of these elemental experiences. In one moment, flamenco consists the sober and soulful songs of Andalusian ne'er-do-wells (Somerset Maugham 1920: 26). In another, flamenco consists of the flash and splash of a dancer like Joaquín Cortes who can stop one's heart with a single step, and of a guitarist like Rafael Riqueni whose wondrous talents have helped to revise the very concept of "flamenco guitar." This whole package, including the signal moments of fraternity and the sizzling moments of commercialized performance, constitutes the flamenco style. And this whole package is implicated in this study of flamenco politics. It may seem obvious and uncontroversial to claim that the flamenco style or any other style of popular music exercises politics. After all, popular music everywhere plays with power in manifold ways. The songs that we hear on the radio, that we play on disk, and that we see performed on stage or in film reinforce authority, resist oppression, intervene in conflicts, and in a hundred different ways resolve the quarrels of public life. Interestingly, however, the most common political moments in popular music, and perhaps the most effective, are moments that we fail to understand, usually because we overlook them. These are moments when bodies are caught up in the politics of music.² Beyond the forces exerted by obvious lyrics and by hidden metaphors in any bit of music, politics is also done by bodies.

Getting this picture of music, the body, and politics clear is no mean feat. However, the flamenco style offers itself as a musical laboratory for testing just such issues. The intriguing and problematic feature to be scrutinized is simply this, that the flamenco style is said to be devoid of political significance. Both the content and the unconscious form of flamenco performance suggest detachment from politics. Yet the ideological interest and political persuasiveness of this music cannot be doubted. Thus, flamenco is a perfect test case for exploring a politic that has everything to do with bodies and little to do with thoughts. Where better to look for embodied politics than in a music that is, conceptually at least, apolitical.

Though said to be apolitical, this style has nevertheless grown up in the midst of some of the most highly politicized and bitterly contested social circumstances in the modem world. Specifically, flamenco music arose in a region, Andaluía, which, on the one hand, has been marked by exaggerated social inequities and horrific poverty, and on the other, has served as a playground for nineteenth-century European intellectuals and as a punching bag for Franco's cultural ministries (García Gómez 1993; Miguel 1975; Steingress 1993 ).³ Caught up in this milieu of poverty and oppression, the flamenco style could hardly have avoided the touch of politic s. Accordingly, I will argue that flamenco politics is primarily an embodied politics that is unintentional, inadvertent, but no less effective than conceptual politics.

In order to argue this case, I will first comment on the absence of political content in flamenco song. I will reiterate the oft-stated observation that flamenco lyrics, the haiku-like coplas, rarely speak of political matters, and I will show that the form of flamenco performances suggests, if anything, a flight from politics. At this point, I will tum away from discussing political ideas, whether overt or covert, and towards politicized practice. I will use the term metonymy, unusual in analyses of music and politics, to show how muscles, not minds, accomplish politics in flamenco performance.⁴ It is the bodily activity of flamenco artists and aficionados that makes politics happen. Flamenco bodies, moving within the long-lived political force fields of Andalusian social life, inadvertently comply with or resist specific political agendas. Finally, I will offer four examples of flamenco political practice.

Politics in Popular Music

A great many musical moments spanning the time from Richard Wagner to Bob Dylan remind us that music mediates politics and that popular music, in particular, has regularly been used to spin political wheels. However, debate persists about how, when, and toward what end any musical style is tied in with a political agenda.⁵ The answers to these questions may come easily where lyrics are obviously intended to incite political movements, e.g. songs for labor rallies or national anthems. But after one sets aside these easy cases, the arguments about the politics of popular music rapidly become dense and protracted. My support, in these arguments, inclines toward those who contend that the visible politics of popular music is minimally effective, and that the real potency of the music lies below the waterline, where power is managed through covert strategies and hidden tactics.

The politics that operates in and through flamenco music is most certainly covert. For one thing, flamenco lyrics and performances are rarely, if ever, overtly political. Bernal Rodríguez (1982: 311) has summarized the politics of flamenco in this way: "It is widely understood that political problems and social conflicts traditionally find no explicit treatment in cante flamenco, to the point that when such treatments do appear in a song, one doubts its authenticity." Even more peremptory generalizations are offered by Germán Herrero, who contends that the flamenco style has been completely insulated from political life:⁶ "A flamenco singer...makes no effort to influence the public" (1991: 74); "Scarcely anywhere can we see signs of those who spoke with a tone of rebellion, which may be so because cante served to absorb suffering and almost never to invite others to combat it" (1 991: 79). This lack of a resistant spirit and of a rebellious attitude in the flamenco style are allegedly due to systematic mystifications. Musicians, it is said, have been benighted by a pervasive Andalusian ideology (see Mitchell 1994: 21). Their consciousness has not been raised to a point at which they might focus on the sources of their suffering. In the words of Gelardo and Belade, the class from which flamenco song springs "feels itself powerless to initiate any kind of struggle and is dominated by fatalism, by tragic fate: hence, their passive attitude" (Gelardo and Belade 1985: 146; see also Garcia Chicón 1987: 186).

Evidently flamenco song overflows with personal sentiment, but runs dry when it comes to political commitment. However, might it not be the case that these flamencologists are placing too much emphasis on words and are relying too heavily on analyses of flamenco lyrics for their discernment of politics in flamenco music? To echo a judgment offered by Ray Pratt, "efforts to establish meaning through apparent substantive lyrical content" constitute "a fallacious but common practice among critics" (Pratt 1990: 8). Better to search for meaning outside the words of a song, as Simon Frith (1987) suggests.

In line with Frith's recommendation, one might search for political significance in the form, rather than in the content. Musical form can, it seems, serve as a metaphor for musical content, including political content. Just so, Lévi-Strauss (1969: 27) found that the forms of modern symphonic performances convey, metaphorically, a struggle with ideological conundrums. Similarly, Charles Keil and Steven Feld found that "metaphorical processes" mediate "special ways of experiencing, knowing, and feeling value, identity, and coherence" (1994: 91). In the light of these precedents, one might expect that the forms of flamenco performance should communicate something of the emotional struggle associated with life in Andalucía. Curiously, however, when one explores the forms of flamenco performance, one finds metaphors that suggest more the absence than the activation of political interest. A revealing example is to be found in the highprofile films of Carlos Saura that feature the dancer Antonio Gades: Carmen, Blood Wedding and Amor Brujo. These films by Carlos Saura all involve specular frame-within-a-frame imagery (see Molina 1994 for Saura's own considerations of these mirrored images). In Carmen, for example, flamenco dance is mediated by mirrors and fractured into moments of rehearsal, and is, by these devices, detached from everyday life. Moreover, performers becomes spectators as they watch themselves in the mirrors, not merely taking in the movement, but interrogating it with the sort of critical eye that ought to, but rarely does, operate in everyday life.⁷

In the light of these foregoing observations, one might well conclude that politics in flamenco music ranges from absent to avoided. The form of flamenco performances makes the absence of politics seem intentional. Unfortunately, such a conclusion does not allow for the sort of politics that is accomplished by bodies, where political significance is not necessarily something that is contained in someone's mind. Political ideology, as Terry Eagleton has argued, "is not primarily a matter of 'ideas': it is a structure which imposes itself upon us without necessarily having to pass through consciousness at all" (Eagleton 1991: 148; see also Duranti 1993: 41). If we take this warning seriously, then we should look outside of lyrics and metaphors for flamenco politics. More to the point, we should attend to musical metonyms.

Generally speaking, metonymy is the use of a part to signify the whole. For our purposes, a musical metonym is musical behavior that is part of politics. Musical metonyms are behaviors that rehearse politics, operating wherever music walks people through a course of action that has the potential of channelling interests and resolving quarrels. Via metonymical action, bodies inadvertently do politics while enjoying music. Unlike metaphors, which operate always from a distance, metonyms practice politics by proximity and contact, and, crucially, the contact is muscular not men...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 The Politics of Passion: Flamenco, Power, and the Body
• 2 The Histories of Flamenco
• 3 The Pleasures of Music
• 4 Gypsies
• 5 The Body
• 6 Women
• 7 Anglo Perspectives on Flamenco Music
• 8 Music, Resistance, and Popular Culture
• 9 "Rito y Geografía del Cante"
• Bibliography
• Index