Diaspora 5:3 1996 Sound Systems, World Beat and Diasporan Identity in Cartagena, Colombia Deborah Pacini Hernandez Brown University In the early 1990s, anthropologists such as James Clifford and Arjun Appadurai began examining transnational cultural exchanges , in which people, capital, ideas, and culture flowed freely across boundaries and changed the relationship not only between center and periphery but also between different locations along the fringe. While both Clifford and Appadurai mentioned music and music bearers as examples of such "traveling cultures" and "global culture flows" respectively, neither ofthem paid any attention to an important transnational cultural phenomenon that was taking shape and becoming increasingly visible as they were writing: the emergence of the world music and world-beat industries. For music scholars, the term "world music" had long referred to everything that was not Western art music, that is, tribal music, folk music, non-Western classical music, and more recently, some popular music as well; it includes, then, such varied material as songs of the pygmies, Celtic fiddling, classical Indian ragas, Colombian vallenato, and Louisianan zydeco. (By "Western" I refer to those wealthy, powerful, and privileged North American and European countries James Clifford has collectively and appropriately referred to as a "powerful force field.") Before 1980, recordings of these musics, usually released in austere recordjackets with rather dense liner notes, were clearly considered to be serious educational documents intended for specialists, rather than entertainment for mass audiences. By the early 1980s, however, popular musics from diverse regions of the globe had begun appearing in postcolonial métropoles such as London, Paris, and New York, where immigrant populations had introduced the various musics from their home countries. Some of these recordings contained the sort of traditional and folk-oriented music that had been studied by ethnomusicologists as world music, but many of them contained modern, often highly hybridized, and clearly commercially oriented musics that fell beyond the traditional purview of ethnomusicologists. An interlocking commercial infrastructure , composed of record companies, retail and mail order concerns, radio shows, magazines, music festivals, and the like 429 430 Diaspora 5:3 1996 emerged to market these musics, which they did by cultivating the appetites of First World listeners for exotic sounds from the Third World. The term "world music" was appropriated from ethnomusicology to facilitate the marketing of these diverse musics, most of which did not fit into existing marketing categories. The consumers of this new category of world music were not specialists, however, but lay persons—although on the whole they were urban, affluent, well educated—and in Europe and the U.S., mostly white. The term "world beat" emerged about the same time, referring to a subset of world music that included the more dance-oriented products of cross-fertilization between First and Third World musical traditions: examples might be the modernized versions of traditional music by the likes of Nigeria's Sunny Ade, Haiti's Boukman Experience, or the work of U.S. rock musicians such as David Byrne and Paul Simon, who draw upon African and Latin American sources. The following definition by Andrew Goodwin and Joe Gore captures the complexity of world beat: "World Beat might be identified as Western pop stars appropriating non-Western sounds, as Third World musicians using Western rock and pop, or as the Western consumption of non-Western folk music" (72). Since the single most important element of dance music is rhythm, it is no accident that most world-beat musics have originated in areas where percussion has been most consistently and successfully cultivated over time—in Africa and its diaspora. Thus, while the term "world beat" does not refer explicitly to diasporan musics, operationally this clearly is the case because, in creative terms, the most powerful forces behind the world-beat phenomenon have clearly been black musicians. Indeed, even a partial listing of musics marketed as world beat confirms the importance of Africa and its diaspora: juju from Nigeria, soukous from Congo/Zaire/ Senegal, chimurenga from Zimbabwe, zouk from Martinique and Guadeloupe, soca (abbv. soul calypso) from Trinidad, punta from Belize/Honduras, vodou-jazz and misik rasin from Haiti, and Jamaican reggae. Significantly, many world-beat musicians, wherever they are from, explicitly invoke a...
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Jan 1, 1999
Beverley Diamond + 1
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