Concentrating on the local beat in South Africa and beyond.
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Music is your own experience,
your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.
Charlie
Parker, U.S. jazzman (1920-1955)
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By adapting global music
trends, are young people dancing on the graves of their cultures or building new
hybrid identities?
 In
the black townships around Johannesburg, South Africa, a new music culture is taking
hold among youth. In the small clubs and storefront shebeens of these impoverished
dormitory towns, young people are eschewing the government-sanctioned “authentic”
music of Afro-jazz bands in favour of recorded sound. Just as Jamaican sound system
operators back in the 1950s or South Bronx hip-hop DJs in the mid-1970s discovered,
two turntables, a mixer and a microphone (made in Japan), a supply of vinyl records
(pressed in Europe or the U.S.) and a competent DJ are all that is required to get
the party rockin’ until dawn.
Local eruptions of globalised “club culture” frustrate simplistic notions of authenticity
(shouldn’t Africans listen to African music?) or attempts to wrest a definitive meaning
from youth culture (linked so often to music). The township kids have punctured and
deflated the over-simplified analysis often surrounding Afro-diasporic music. In
many cases, paths are traced from African origin—the music’s “authentic roots”— through
to its re-articulation (“whitening”) or commodification (“sell out”) by greedy corporations
based in the modern Western metropolis. That argument falls apart in places like
the townships, where youth adopt music with Afro-diasporic roots (house music was
born in the black-latino urban gay clubs of the U.S.) but routed through the cities
of northern Europe. For these young people, it represents a highly valued link to
the West—much as their heavily logoed jeans and baseball caps function as status
symbols. But is their rejection of Afro-jazz for Euro-house a subtle form of reverse
appropriation (whereby kids have adopted the music as their own) or merely bad faith
(a rejection of their culture)? Music scenes like these are far too sophisticated
to fit into the cramped confines of binary (either/or) analysis.
Instead of delivering easy answers, these music scenes raise critical questions:
is globalisation a sign of the world’s unification or cultural imperialism? Is this
embryonic youth culture just another example of one-way globalisation—vinyl singles
being exported from the First World to the Third along with Coca-Cola, designer jeans
and other markers of conspicuous consumption, in the endless cycle of seduction and
exploitation? Or is this the story of creative adaptation—youth as cultural bricoleur,
mixing and matching symbols of prestige to create their own, autonomous subculture?
Township DJs play house records at around 90 beats per minute (bpm), far slower than
the 130 bpm pace preferred by the European audience. The reduced speed turns the
propulsive, hectic “banging” into a glutinous and out-of-focus funk-dub, more in
keeping with the drinking culture of South Africa than the drug-induced speed of
European scenes. With a flick of a pitch control, black youth re-signify and re-claim
a Europeanised form of “black” (Afro-American) music.
Replacing
rock
Are these young
South Africans building new hybrid identities or dancing at the funeral of their
own cultural traditions? As Jeff Chang notes in his assessment of hip-hop (see
p.23), it is
never clear whether youth music cultures “reflect a hybrid youth rebellion or capitulation
to global capitalism.”
Therein lies the great promise, as well as the central dilemma, for academic analyses
of youth-music cultures, particularly “dance” or electronic music (house music and
its derivatives), which has arguably replaced rock as the most globally significant
popular form. Whether it is Detroit techno in Birmingham, trance in Goa (see
p.51) or funk
in Rio de Janeiro, there is no single theory to explain the meaning of dance music
scenes. We simply cannot resolve the youth rebellion/commercial co-optation couplet
once and for all.
Caribbean social theorist Stuart Hall reminds us (taking as a given the unequal distribution
of wealth in a world “structured in dominance”) that the basic principle of popular
culture is contradiction, and that there can be no guarantee that the “meanings”
encoded into cultural products (TV ads or records) will be those “decoded” by the
audience. Nothing can be taken for granted in the terrain of popular culture, especially
that associated with socially marginal groups.
The “meaning” of scenes organised around exactly the same music can be markedly different
in different circumstances. The politics of buying your way into the “dancefloor
community” at one of the globally branded and meticulously policed “superclubs” is
significantly different than that of illegal raves in Northern Ireland or Sarajevo
where “dancefloor communitarianism” takes on a more convincing tone in the light
of fierce religious or ethnic antagonisms that may be overcome, however briefly,
on the dancefloor.
The rebellious genre of today can become tomorrow’s mainstream music and the day
after tomorrow’s darling of nostalgia (see the strange revival of old rock ’n’roll).
Counter-culture can become over-the-counter culture.
Did I say “can become…”? I meant “will become”. For this is one of the only reliable
features of popular music: it will change. According to some technologically minded
theorists, digitally produced dance music is like an alien virus with a life of its
own, continually splitting and reforming, spreading and folding back on itself. Short-lived
sub-genres are constantly spreading: neuro-funk, acid jazz, tech-step, happy hardcore,
trip-hop, “nosebleed” and the list goes on
As electronic music spreads—through traditional circulation loops like import record
networks, via radio airwaves, and through the Internet—it fuses with other musical
forms and local styles like flamenco, dancehall reggae and Middle Eastern pop. It
revitalizes itself through this profane contact, and new genres emerge which feedback
to the centres of production. The twin forces of youthful disrespect for orthodoxy
and the ever-present threat of co-optation by the content-hungry global entertainment
complex virtually guarantees change.
The
politics of the dancefloor
But is this
global mixing and matching evidence of the increased hybridisation of aesthetic forms,
or of the cannibalistic appetites of First World capital? Are genres like Asian dance
music—pioneered in Britain by Asian Dub Foundation (see p.47)—signs that the West is finally coming
to terms with its post-colonial responsibilites, or another déjà vu
phase of Said’s Orientalism (fetishism for the exotic)?
The challenge for the analyst is to disentangle these processes. To ensure that this
incredible amount of creative (and frequently under-rewarded) cultural labour is
given its due, while simultaneously ensuring that “celebrations” of youthful creativity
and hedonism are not merely laying the groundwork and supplying the justification
for the dealers and profiteers—whether they are peddling Ectsasy drug tablets, clothing
brands or fizzy drinks. Corporate capital needs no more cheerleaders.
Dance music continues to grow and mutate, to focus anxieties associated with youth—namely
drug use and hedonism—to acquire associations with local politics, to offer opportunities
for fun, work, creativity and corporate exploitation. Like any cultural form, dance
music is always related to a socio-political context. It may embody global aspirations
but it always has a local manifestation: dancing takes place somewhere, with particular
kinds of people present, in a particular socio-historical moment. The music has no
meaning outside of these concrete, but difficult to discern, relations; and even
then its meanings are never complete or resolved. As Yale professor Paul Gilroy reminds
us, “communicative gestures”, like dance, “are not expressive of an essence that
exists outside the acts that perform them.”
Academics, journalists and others interested in what youth are up to have the task
of tracking these dancing bodies and mapping these “social movements”. As in all
cultural production, the dialectic between resistance and exploitation plays out
across its surfaces, refusing to resolve itself into a transcendent either/or, always
in the process of becoming.
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