7 Magical mystical tourism (debate dub version)
The first part of this chapter is a straightforward (in some ways) essay which discusses the uses of South Asian music and cultural forms by the band Kula Shaker. It was presented at the Perth symposium and so bears some of the marks of writing for oral presentation. As there was some lively discussion and criticism there, I have tried to recapture some of that engagement here through the device of a supplementary discussion. Thus the second part of the present chapter opens up some of the polemical angles of the first part through debate with a magazine editor, a ‘world music’ practitioner and with comrades (there is, of course, some degree of fudge in the construction of these subject positions and the debate does not thereby ‘reflect’ any ‘really existing’ empirical event; nevertheless …).
Part one: magical mystical tourism
In 1997, on MTV Europe, a young white male ‘pop star’ stood outside a Hindu temple in India and looked into the camera to say: ‘Did you ever get the feeling you were in a Star Wars movie?’ His comment on the project of filming in India: ‘What happens here is about what you feel, you can't necessarily show that on camera.’ When filming local musicians he explains: ‘this is the tribal stuff, everyone has a good heart and they put it into the music … they are just happy … them living their culture just seems completely natural’ (Mills, Kula Shaker in India, MTV 1997).
Kula Shaker's lead singer and guitarist Crispian Mills makes souvenirs of ‘real experiences, man’ by meeting sadhus and priests at Indian temples and buying trinket versions of cosmic harmony, singing dirge-like versions of devotional tunes while strumming his six-string guitar. Of course this souveniring of sound and culture is only possible on the basis of a long history of colonial power and theft transmuted into nostalgia for an idealised exotic India. Today we would also want to tie this to the idea of a new ‘cool’ England, and not just an MTV phenomenon: the general population is flocking to curry houses to dine out on twisted appropriations of colonialism brought here in new packets; the red hot ‘fuckin’ vindaloo’1 is the country's national dish; white women are wearing bindi and nose-rings; world music festivals are a common event along with the popularity of the ‘new’ Asian dance music at fashionable nightclubs — all this as exotica deliciously snapped up at bargain prices.
What is wrong with all this? Is it really worth a critical focus on the touristic practice of the pop star Crispian Mills? Best of luck to the temple touts who manage to redistribute a few of the pop star's royalty monies. But with considerable media-enhanced influence, Crispian is representative of pop music's rediscovery of the East, and this has extensive consequences. Although it has become fairly commonplace to acknowledge that authenticity is a sham, it is also true that conscious recognition of the staged character of ‘authentic’ performance does not compromise, but can in effect enhance, authenticity. It would be enough here to consider the carefully crafted and annually remodelled identities of Bowie, Madonna or even the Spice Girls. In recent times all three took an ‘Asian’ turn, with the Spice Girls appearing dressed in saris for a performance in Delhi, and both Bowie and Madonna doing Asian-influenced dance tracks on their latest albums, with the material girl displacing Asian group Cornershop at the top of the charts with the track ‘Frozen’ from her album Ray of Light. Her performance videos now include decontextualised symbols of Hinduism and tawdry imitations of Bharatanatyam dance moves (MTV Madonna Special, March 1998). Such high-profile visitations come with access to public broadcasting opportunities rarely enjoyed by anyone else.
So there is an important cultural politics at stake in the old pop-star-goes-to-see-the-gurus routine, and in this context Crispian's pronouncements on India are fundamentally dangerous when he says things like: ‘India is the Ibiza of concepts’ (Mills, MTV 1997). Crispian is the son of Hayley Mills, a Hare Krishna devotee and the film actress star of Disney's Pollyanna and Whistle Down the Wind. His estranged father Roy Boulting and maternal grandfather Sir John Mills were also film stars in their own right (Grandpa Mills won an Oscar for his role as the village idiot in David Lean's Ryan's Daughter). Even with such a pedigree, obviously many in the audiences who might hear him make these comments will laugh, and know that shit still smells like shit when it is dished out undisguised like this, especially on MTV. But at risk of picking on a soft target, there is an element which prides itself on its ethnic cosmopolitanism and will accept such statements with the lack of irony intended, much more so than ‘enthusiasms’ for temples or for ‘India’ are required to escape prejudicial patronising and garden-variety Orientalism.
Let us consider patrons and pedigrees though. Cool Kula Crispian's search for the alterity of Asia through music, like that trek of George Harrison 30 years ago today, celebrates the overpopulated, history-laden, olfactory, sensuous abundance of an ‘India’ that is almost entirely fantasy. Supreme irony then that Madonna's sanskritised single lyric repeats: ‘You only see what your eyes want to see’ (Frozen 1998). Crispian and the MTV film crew went to India to explore the ‘Eastern influences’ of the band. Embarrassing travelogue this. In one scene the singer faces up to a Brahmin priest who mixes and applies red paste to Crispian's brow. Crispian says he does not know why it is done or why the Brahmin says he needs it, but afterwards — well, after an edit cuts away to Crispian on his own outside the temple — he explains it is a ‘third eye’ and that it is the sun, just set, on his forehead. This process of moving from incomprehension to explanation, from letting something happen to explaining it to camera, from participation to observation (and later dissemination to the MTV audience worldwide) is the typical structure of ethnographic storytelling and the way exotica is always coded and consumed, irrespective of local significance. Collecting cultural experiences and displaying them provides the pattern for intercultural engagement that relentlessly produces meaning and text (and videotape) in the global media circus.
But fashion saves us from this: according to Crispian, it is by paying attention to the supposedly ‘timeless’ spiritual message in the music that the contemporary ills of the planet can be cured. To a journalist who asked him if all this India pose was not just a bit ‘out of fashion’ and kitsch, he insists that it is not some
incense burning, talking philosophy bollocks. It is always relevant, it always means something. India is the source of all, they hold a lot of secrets … We are in a civilisation about to destroy the planet. Everything is destroying itself … and so where is the rescue mission gonna come from … we have something to learn from India … it's just about keeping a door open in the back of your head … for some people it's just a fashion, but for others it is timeless.
(Popview Live interview 1997)
The moral certainty is presented as instruction, the music is the message, the planet must be liberated (this missionary zeal). Indeed, most of Kula Shaker's public relations repertoire is moral and ethical (why, for example, does Crispian need to tell us he is not into drugs anymore? How does he cope?). To understand the marketing of the band in this register it is important to remember that cure-alls for alienation and moral-epistemological crisis have long been sold in mystic bottles. Call this the snake-oil medicine man gambit of the cultural frontier.
Too many Bhang lassis, Crispian? Could it really be that he thinks mumbling conspiracy theories about an imminent apocalypse from Asia is funny? The accusation that Kula Shaker are racists and ‘racist by ignorance’ (Time Out, various issues 1996–7) was always going to be controversial, however substantiated by really offensive comments (Crispian says rap is not music, it is attitude; and so buys into the complaint rock explanation routine of the right-wing reactionaries). No matter how well intentioned and multicultural the lead singer might claim to be with his studies of Eastern scripture, the consequences of commercial appropriation and decontextualised decorative aesthetics were always going to offend. Gross ignorance is confirmed in slide-shows at live gigs which superimpose Lord Horatio Kitchener (the butcher of the Transvaal) over Radha (Krishna's consort), as well as in the imperious arrogance of planning a concert at the Great Pyramid of Cheops on 31 December 1999. This big gig was to go ahead presumably only if the promised Armageddon which Crispian believed would begin with conflict in Pakistan, India and China could be averted by the saviour St George arriving from a place of spiritualism destined to free the world — that is, from England.2
That Crispian is covertly rehearsing a grand epic nostalgia for the days of the Raj must be taken seriously. He is part of a family who, like many, have very real links to the old imperial project — in Crispian's case those thespian relatives worked the ideological division, grandfather John portraying the heroic deeds of men such as that same slide-show Kitchener (in the arguably mediocre film Young Winston). In contemporary times, Kula Shaker plays at a struggling re-run of the psychedelic late 1960s because this rehearses the last moment of excitement before the post-imperial crisis really caught hold at home. Today, the rules of retro 1960s mean operating a tamed psychedelics without the counter-establishment threat — neither Crispian nor Clinton inhale these days (yet even the 1960s UK music scene fascination with an ‘otherworldly’ India of peace and good vibes was in large part in denial of, and even counter to, a sharp and strident worldwide political movement, one that was eclectic and disorganised in some ways, but with serious student politics and worker alliances in Chicago, Paris, Algeria, Japan, and in different ways, China). In retro 1960s nostalgia, opportunities to extend the parallels to political issues are never taken. Whatever the tactical incoherence of the Situationist International at the Sorbonne in 1968 or of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin's exuberant Youth International Party (Yippies) in Chicago, it was at least possible for the vehicle of music to convey concerns about Western imperialist aggression in Vietnam and racist exclusion and white supremacy at home. (What is Crispian's view on direct foreign investment in India? On the bombing of Baghdad? On anti-Muslim sentiment in the media? On racist violence and murder on the streets of Britain? On import/export quotas? Or must we remain in trivial fanzine-land and only ask Crispian his views on Rajasthani mirrorwork vests, the Knights of the Round Table, his horoscope and his star-sign?)
What is more troubling is the abject failure to recognise that the retread character (caricature) of the Kula Shaker sound is blind to the circumstances of its own production even at the point where it tries to claim some sort of heritage. That Kula Shaker sitarism can place itself on the eastern end of British pop in full knowing ignorance of the myriad presence of Asian musics in the UK is not only naive. The wilful failure is of the Sony Music-signed stars to recognise the full heritage of Asian musics in their own country at the very time when Sony were attempting to market those very musics (with the signing of Birmingham turntable stalwart Bally Sagoo, and the release of a double LP sampler of other ‘new’ Asian artists).3
What does Kula Shaker know of how Asian musics have travelled to Britain? The band trace their interest in ‘Eastern’ sounds to white ‘innovators’ in the West. The Byrds, the Incredible String Band, Donovan and later Quintessence (Shiva Jones), Gong (Daevid Allen), Magic Carpet (Clem Alford) and the Teardrop Explodes, right on up to Paul Weller's Parisian sitar experiments on ‘Wild Wood’ offer examples. Yet theirs is only the white Britpop side of British Asia. (Are Kula Shaker Britpop like Oasis? What does Oasis signify if not T. E. Lawrence's mirage desire for a green and pleasant island in an inhospitable desert?)
There is of course much more going on in British music than the market hype of guitar bands. It would be plausible to think of groups like Fun^Da^Mental and Asian Dub Foundation (ADF) as the current avant-garde of a well-pedigreed sound only now becoming saccharinised for commercial purposes in the Sony production sampler and in popular mixed club nights like Anokha in London. This does not mean that outfits like Fun^Da^Mental and ADF have not also sought commercial success, nor were the efforts of Bhangra, Qawwali and playback singers before them without commercial desire. But as much as the publicity machine was cranked up around the Fun^Da^Mental videos produced for MTV (but banned), financial success was secondary and in any case not readily forthcoming4 — the Nation Records posse directed their efforts to using the media space, and all their time and energy, in projects like bringing Pakistani Qawaal Aziz Mian to British audiences, campaigning against the removal of asylum rights from British law and against the draconian Criminal Justice and Public Order Act.5
The point here is to establish the basis for arguing that cultural appropriations such as those by Kula Shaker in regard to ‘India’ are not innocent, but rather do ideological work for a basically exploitative frame — the inexorable logic of value misappropriation, prejudicial division of labour, inequitable distribution of resources and a homogenisation of social relations throughout the world. This homogenisation of the world under capitalist relations proceeds by bringing all differences to the HMV bargain bin and it indeed ‘thrives’ on ‘cultural’ content where differences can be equated through abstract equivalencies. All this was so well foreseen by Marx, not Madonna.6
So when Kula Shaker present themselves as a ‘rediscovery’ of the Asian sound and its crossover into popular music they manage to ignore the significance of political and musical histories that paradoxically they must also acknowledge, only to appropriate and convert. This is nothing more than the operation of a business-as-usual colonial project. It is still about wanting to rule the world.
Another danger of this Orientalism in action can be seen in Kula Shaker's repackaging of souvenired knick-knack mysticism in tracks like ‘Tattva’ and ‘Govinda’. When, in the MTV travelogue, Crispian was faced with a unscheduled performance at a conveniently ‘found’ Hindu ‘party’7 at a Roadside Hotel stop, the most uncomfortable and awkward moment of ‘intercultural relations’ is shown in full glorious colour. The mix of pop star prima donna and nervous pre-stage appearance tension, the embarrassing, halting, jangling, acoustic and discordant — though mercifully short — performance, and the attempt to authorise this difficult moment as the culmination of Crispian's India pilgrimage illuminates the hypocrisy. The disturbing spectacle of consumable India presented to audiences in this version at least has the merit of being too transparent for most viewers and fans to swallow whole — though it may be feared that even this could sometimes be taken as representative of a real and available India. The only image in the MTV special that conveys the possibility that there is also a political domain in India is a split-second still of a red protest banner declaring ‘Coke-Pepsi Quit India’ — but you need a dexterous hand on the pause button to read it. Unfortunately a significant degree of scepticism and cynicism from the music press has been insufficient to undo the ideological stereotyping achieved by the new media Orientalisms that Kula Shaker, Madonna and Bowie are able to deploy.
In the end we are left with an apocalyptic vision of a scary alternative universe: what should we make of Crispian's interest in Arthurian legends, his English St George's flag pasted onto his guitar (ironically?) alongside the Sanskrit om? His eulogy for empire in his display of both Kitchener and that flag evokes a nostalgia for the East (nostalgia as a career?, to paraphrase Disraeli8) that omits the oppression, violence and struggle of history, as if a different outcome to the Raj can be imagined into being through Crispian's mystical trip. Kula Shaker's trinket sound-bites are souvenired baubles in an ongoing Raj powerplay. The sitar strumming, tabla thumping and temple touring philosophy are the knick-knacks of a distorting remix of the past.
Rather than the global jukebox9 which Kula Shaker and so many others seem to imagine as the perfect multicultural soundtrack, an engagement with political issues, exclusions and the co-constitution of racism and imperialism would be a far better project. In the face of deportations, police attacks and repressive force, an injunction to ‘shut up and dance’ to the bhajans of Crispian is just not an adequate response to the expansive appropriations of capitalism.
Part two: dialogic discussions
The second part of this chapter is a response/discussion by several people, and my responses in return, over a version of the above sent to the magazine Mute10 and circulated electronically over a few days in March of 1998. By no means does it represent the range of possible responses, taking up only the possibility-credibility of white uses of ‘exotic’ cultural forms. Nor is it, as mentioned at the beginning, either representative of the discussion at the Perth symposium, or exactly representative of any ‘really existing’ discussion beyond that constructed here from written and spoken texts. This dialogic presentation is an edited transcript of email and conversation (of course all so-called dialogic texts are reconstructions with no guaranteed relation to the ‘real’11). Yet there is considerable correspondence with the actual words of the named participants — all samples have been cleared and rash rapid asides have been left in (as markers of ‘authenticity’). At the end there is a summation which I hope opens up these questions in yet another direction.
From Josie: Hi John, I've just finished reading your Kula Shaker piece for the next issue of Mute, and while I'm still fresh and flustered from the experience, I'm taking the opportunity to write to you.
Two remarks before I begin: 1) I'm *not* in any way a fan of said band. 2) I really like your piece overall. BUT … I'm afraid I do have some questions and reservations,
The main question boils down to this: Is the logical conclusion of your argument the fact that no white Western musicians can incorporate non-Western instruments, rhythms, harmonics, scales, etc. etc. into their music without being guilty of orientalism, hypocrisy or ignorance? Although I fully agree that Kula Shaker's method of adopting Indian exotica is, in the words of Time Out, racism by ignorance, the question being begged here is what kind of musical exchange is legitimate? Are you perhaps saying that legitimate adoption of non-Western styles must occur outside the mainstream or else it is hypocritical of ‘the circumstances of its own production’? I'm tempted to say that this line of thinking would lead to white, patriarchal rock being the only option left to the ‘mainstream’, if I weren't aware that Brit Pop and the like are also in denial as to their non-white, non-Western musical genealogy.
I suppose what I'm saying is you need to make the premise of your critique more clear — what are the implications more generally for music coming out of the West? Especially when one considers that all music is in part ‘mongrel’, and in a world of global communication networks, liable to become more so.
My last question/criticism is this: one of the most powerful points of your essay is when you root your critique in the concrete example of the scene with Crispian, the MTV crew and the Brahmin at the temple. I suppose I feel that, in contrast, your focus on Crispian's own personal family genealogy is ill advised — a) because it becomes too specific in a context where colonialism is in every white's history, regardless of their own particular family stories — the guilt is communal, and b) because it inadvertently gets Crispian off the hook — this, because he becomes subject to his own family history and circumstances which in turn seem beyond his control or individual responsibility — he didn't ask to be born into this family etc. etc. Either all whites inherit responsibility for colonialism or none do.
Phew! Got that off my chest. Please don't infer from this that I think you should rewrite this piece — it's just a question of maybe bringing out the broader implications of your argument, and sorting out the family issue. I realise that there is an irresistible coincidence of both grandfather and grandson employing the figure of Kitchener to notionally different ends — which really form part of the same spectrum — but maybe the excavation of the family history should be limited to this point.
Please just tell me to piss off if I've misunderstood you on any of these points or, if you think the criticisms are founded, I would suggest the following alterations:
– draw out the broader implications of you critique (no more than a sentence)
– limit the family history to the Kitchener issue.
I look forward to your reply!
love Josie
From John: Hi Josie, Thanks heaps for the comments. I think your bit about the Kitchener connection is good because that brings out the point even more clearly, but it is also important that Crispian's mum was a Krishna devotee — its the dancing end of appropriation shared by many today — so I want to stick to the family romance. I deal with the links of all white families to the Empire project in a different version of the piece. I don't think it lets Crispian off the hook to show that his is a family project. I think this project is a family one for everyone. I used to ask my Manchester Political Anthropology classes if they had any personal involvement in imperialism — to which most said no — and then we'd go around the room and ask everyone if any of there parents were ever in the services, overseas, missions, education etc. etc. Invariably ninety percent were linked up in some way, even if it was just a grandparent who fought in the second world imperialist war.12 Rushdie's comment that England's history happened overseas and the English are unaware of it (1981) is only partly true, they are mostly in a kind of knowing denial.
White Rock as the only option left to the mainstream?! Well, I'm confused as to what you mean by ‘left’ here. I guess not left wing eh, as in left of the mainstream (wilful misunderstanding here!), cos rock hasn't been close to that for a long time. Mainstream? What's that? Is rock anywhere near it? I guess Brit Pop is the mainstream in England — but I've been saying that Oasis is just the colonial dream of a cool green and pleasant nostalgia amidst the inhospitable desert of a world that is too threatening — a rerun Lawrence of Arabia boy's own adventure in the game of global domination. Options? This mainstream doesn't take options, except in the financial speculation sense.
As for all music being ‘mongrel’. I have real problems with such lines of argument, since they offer no hope for any transformative politics, they misconstrue the past as a time of non-mongrelness, and they celebrate without consideration every mix in a relativist mish-mash. I've a chapter in the book Debating Cultural Hybridity where I go through the arguments about why academic celebration of ‘Hybridity’ is fatally flawed as a political strategy. The chapter is called ‘Adorno at Womad: Crossover Musics and the Limits of Hybridity-talk’. It is mostly about Adorno and Asian Dub Foundation, published by Zed in 1997 (hmmm, one day I have to rewrite that in terms of critique of Haraway's Cyborg stuff that you are into).
OK. Now to the question of who can sample sitars and get away with it. Answer. Who cares? I don't feel any responsibility to provide neat lists dos and don'ts. My quick answer would be — it's OK if it raises money for the revolutionary party or defence campaign …
I was asked a similar question by an musician in Australia. I'll attach her question and my answer below. Take care, Be well, John:
From Liz Van Dort, singer, ‘Far’:
OK — I think that the issues you raise are certainly very topical — I face these questions all the time, bands like Deep Forest and Enigma get lots of flack for sampling ‘ethnic’ voices (in this I think the flack is deserved — I find this, as well as immoral, totally pointless — isn't the point of releasing music to show off one's own talents?).
What your paper doesn't answer for me is — where do you draw the line? When is it theft and when not? Can anything be used at all — if not, then what do we do, accuse Indians wearing Levis of cultural theft? Or have I totally missed the point …
From John:
Hi Liz
Your comments raise one of the most important issues, and I need to clarify. However much people into making music might want a line to be drawn, I personally don't see that as my project. I'm not interested in drawing a line as to when it's OK to borrow and when not … I remember George Bush drawing a line in the sand re Kuwait — and of course it didn't matter where the line was drawn, because the agenda was American world power (as globo-cops) and no matter what happened George wanted to be a bully muscleman and get himself reelected.
BUT, what I do want to point out is that the versions of India that Kula Shaker think are ‘Indian Culture’ are ones that belong to this racist imperialist trinketizing exoticising fantasy dream of white supremacy and world domination.
I want to argue that this temple-trip jaya version of India that comes along with the ‘sitarism ethnic restaurant music and Womad woolly llama macramé bicycles’ scene is one that provides an alibi for a rather more sinister Western intervention into India. It's exactly the one that gets people buying Levis jeans — the routine of structural adjustment programmes, direct foreign investment and the international division of labour … While cool Kula Crispian is babbling on about tribal music forms, those tribal people have been fighting revolutionary war against capitalism/imperialism (and not generally winning) and etc. Other groupings of India are engaged in other kinds of political struggle against that same intervention. By looking to the temple and not to the oppressive apparatus we participate in the global menace.
A similar argument could be made about enthusiasm for the didgeridoo. Sure, great instrument, and it sounds ‘nice’ when played by Irish folk bands etc!, but this allows people to ‘be into’ Aboriginal culture at the very same time as doing nothing about the racist Howardite clique and the disaster that is contemporary Australian so-called ‘race relations’ (well this doing ‘nothing’ of course doesn't include everyone — there are lots of good leftists doing solidarity work and hopefully Howard will be gone after the next vote …).
Anyway, if you have to pay your rent and you can do that by music, that's as good if not better than working for an international jeans manufacturer, isn't it? Though, no matter what ‘your’ identity/cultural reference, if you sample the sounds I would consider setting aside a proportion of any royalty money etc. to the anti-racist groups in your area, to the Pay the Rent Campaign in Australia, to the Free Satpal Ram Campaign in the UK, or to some Naxalite group in Bengal if you can get a CPI (ML) address (there is of course a very respectable history of music people showing the way through such benefit-solidarity).
There you go. John.
[Insert added later: There is of course some contextual information needed to put the above in focus. The racist Howard government in Australia is debating legislation to secure farming and mining rights to Aboriginal land. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that the opposition Labor Party will provide any substantial opposition since it is equally bound up in relations of clientage and compromise with the mining and farming lobby. There are some that hope this is not true. Far more progressive are those groups campaigning and organising together to defeat the Howard push and for the first time begin an adequate and just process of redistribution and reconciliation with Australia's Aboriginal peoples. The ‘Pay the Rent’ campaign was a proposal from left groups that a percentage of every organisation's operating budget be allocated to such campaigning — admittedly in most cases a symbolic gesture, given it is the mining industry that has the big income and they do not often pay rents.13 The music of No Fixed Address, Warumpi Band and perhaps Yothu Yindi would be the soundtrack. Information on Satpal Ram's case I take directly from material prepared for flyer for a ‘New Asian Dance Music’ club night in Frankfurt, Germany April 1998 — the text, translated, reads:
Satpal Ram is in his eleventh year of imprisonment in the racist UK prison system. At an Indian restaurant Satpal was attacked by six men, one of whom was injured after Satpal defended himself. The injured white man later went to hospital, but refused treatment when he found that the staff assigned to help him were Asian. He subsequently died. In British law, self-defence is no offence, but Satpal is in jail for murder. Satpal's appeal was heard, but rejected, in November 1995: his campaign organised several lively demos at the High Court. Satpal was refused the right to speak in the court and was dragged out shouting ‘No Justice No Peace!’ The campaign continues for Justice for Satpal Ram. Most recently, the group ‘Asian Dub Foundation’ released the single ‘Free Satpal Ram’ to highlight the injustice of this case. Across Europe the state authorities continually turn a blind eye to their own outrages. This must be stopped by the mass of people demanding: Free Satpal Ram! Support the Free Satpal Campaign, c/o Hands-worth Law Centre, 101 Villa Rd, Birmingham, B19 1NH.
For Naxalite, again Asian Dub Foundation figure in the story, but here it's a little strange that an East London Drum n Bass outfit have recorded a CD eulogising the armed struggle of the Bengali peasantry in 1967 — it is not at all clear what audiences of ADF, besides those diasporised Bengalis of London, would make of ADF's plan to ‘encircle the cities’ and other ultra-Maoist tactics. That a ‘peal of Spring Thunder has broken over Brick Lane’ may signal a new urban politics, but the issue of metropole celebration of peasant struggle is not without contradictions (see note 9). The abbreviation CPI (ML) stands for Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), of which there are several fragments extant in Calcutta alone — the CPM(ML)TND — Towards New Democracy — group are at 102 S. N. Banerjee Rd, Calcutta, Bengal.]
From Josie: Thanks for getting back with such extensive comments.
I suppose what this comes down to — if it's at all possible to be brief here (!) — is the fact that you see music (rightly of course) as a product of its cultural/political/economic/etc. etc. context and therefore any appropriation of that by external cultures as a direct engagement (conscious or not) with those circumstances. The implications of which are clear and the hypocrisy, wilful ignorance and the false consciousness of certain appropriations is clear. But where your argument falls down is your refusal to answer the question: Are there instances of mixing the music of different ethnicities which do not fall into this trap? And more specifically to your particular area of interest — i.e. Western uses of non-Western musical traditions — are all such adoptions automatically Orientalist. I think saying that it's not your problem to lay down the dos and don'ts is missing the point. Of course no-one would want you to and there would be little point in that. These questions relate far more to an examination of your own position than the formulation of prescriptions.
I haven't read your piece on hybridity *yet* and I will do so today — but while I've still got fire in my fingertips I'll just state two objections that immediately come to mind:
1 Cultural mixing or hybridity can be bricolage — a way of indicating that no cultural artefact is whole or natural or central etc.
2 Music, it could be argued, in many cases seeks to transcend the circumstances of its production. Although reaching ‘outside’ to the music of a foreign culture immediately implicates the (always already implicated) musician, it could conceivably be motivated by the will to find an ‘outside’ to the inside of the musician's circumstances. I think your argument sweeps away the possibility that Westerners are looking for ways to confound the circumstances that position and entrap them through the music of ethnic culture and that this can entail a fully conscious knowledge of global power relations.
All in all I think your criticism of KS are right on, and mostly those criticisms can be levelled against musicians doing the ethnic thang — but there must be possibilities for non-racist cultural hybridity or the scenario looks bleak for a variety of reasons.
Love Josie
From John: Hi Josie,
I have to be brief, there are deadlines hanging around my neck today… but some quick points just speculating and trying to tie your interesting questions to directions I think my research is heading:
You wrote:
… I think saying that it's not your problem to lay down the dos and don'ts is missing the point. Of course no-one would want you to and there would be little point in that. These questions relate far more to an examination of your own position than the formulation of prescriptions.
On dos and don'ts. I say do join the party. Don't just ‘shut up and dance’. We will sing multicultural songs as we march into battle, but they will be approved by the central committee. My position is that anything less is compromise. I really don't care what good multiculturalisms are possible. Without massive political organising it amounts to the same liberal alibi. That is what ‘comes first’ ‘in the last instance’. At home I listen to stuff with lots of samples. Is it OK? Fun^Da^mental, ADF, Hustlers HC and others — and I think they are OK because they do their sampling/appropriations in the course (or cause) of a militant politics. When Western musicians sample they do not do so — well, very rarely — within such a politics. I'd valorise the struggle over the tunes (and with all the many contradictions of struggle too, which I write about in Dis-Orienting Rhythms).
On hybridity, you wrote:
1 Cultural mixing or hybridity can be bricolage — a way of indicating that no cultural artefact is whole or natural or central etc.
One of my points in ‘Adorno at Womad’ is that if no cultural artefact is whole, then hybridity is saying nothing and all that is useful for politics and all the old problems and analyses/struggles around class, race and gender are still to be argued (and saying things are hybrid or constructed doesn't do much there). Postmodernist storytelling about the videographic construction of the Gulf War does not in any way win justice against the slaughter inflicted upon Iraq.
You wrote:
2Music, it could be argued, in many cases seeks to transcend the circumstances of its production. Although reaching ‘outside’ to the music of a foreign culture immediately implicates the (always already implicated) musician, it could conceivably be motivated by the will to find an ‘outside’ to the inside of the musician's circumstances.
Yes, I wonder if old Beardo on the subsumption of the ‘outside’ might be useful here? Endless paragraphs of discussion in the deep end of Capital. But maybe quoting Marx as oracle is too hard-line, my point can be illustrated with Kula Shaker — to whom there is a fantasy ‘outside’ (called mystical India), which is outside of the commercialism and all that of the West, which Crispian and the lads obviously want to escape. However, it is exactly at this point that their participation in the commercial game — of pop music, but also of travel, and that which enables travel, the aeroplanes, trains, passport controls, border guards, service economies, chai-shop workers, guidebooks, fan-books, temple touts, international hotel chains, radio, satellite, etc. — that suggests there can be no outside here. Or at least, it is an outside that Kula Shaker are in the front-line process of bringing ‘inside’. This is called appropriation. The psychology of expansion. The most favoured practice of Capital. Orientalism today.
[And maybe — in another lifetime — a whole other discussion about the role of technology and music enabling this outside-ification would be possible, starting with Benjamin's age of reproduction essay, but you can imagine the routines here.]
You wrote:
… I think your argument sweeps away the possibility that Westerners are looking for ways to confound the circumstances that position and entrap them through the music of ethnic culture and that this can entail a fully conscious knowledge of global power relations.
Umm. But Kula Shaker just aren't doing very well at confounding those circumstances … Yeah, I know I know, it's too much to lay on the shoulders of a ‘soft target’. My guess is that we need to ask how many Westerners (and how many musicians into ethnic samples) are doing this sort of searching, and whether the organisational apparatus they do it within (say the People's Sampling Party of Cadre for the Revolutionary Potential of Jungle — PPSPCRPJ — Marxist-Leninist March 23rd tendency) is actually adequate to win — yup win — against Capital at this time.
I don't find the scenario bleak. Just hard work. Derrida once said, if things were easy, word would have got round.
Do you mind if I pass your comments on this piece to others? Be well, John
From Virinder Kalra: re: Debate on Kula Shaker:
There are plenty of ‘Western’ bands (or perhaps I should say I'm sure there are) who have engaged in political struggle using musics which are ‘appropriated’. Off hand, if we look at all the music produced in the anti-apartheid movement I'm sure there's plenty of examples. The point which should be made is that the ‘appropriation’ isn't the issue, as all music is (I know this is obvious) predicated on some form of borrowing. The issue which the Kula stuff brings out is about both the repetition of Orientalist discourse and repetition of white imperialist fantasy. In these two senses the fact that music is the medium is irrelevant. The significant fact is in the way that Kula's stuff works and augments those ideologies rather than possible struggles against them. Any explicitly political music, irrespective of its hybrid/appropriating origins, can therefore be validated in the way that Josie seems to be looking for. — Virinder
Coda: final reflex action
I guess that in the end I have been drawing lines in the sand. Such clarification and amplification through debate is only one example of the usually more scattered commentaries that operate in the relative immediacy of internet and conversation vis-à-vis scholarly writing. If the issues raised are complex, this is why we continue to debate them, as do many others. Whether or not this suggests a move to conclusion with regard to debates about appropriation and authenticity, what this discussion also does for me is raise some wider questions about politics and writing. Thus this piece ends with a brief reflection on such problems.
While a more ‘scholarly’ writing may have passed without much comment, the reactions of Josie and Liz to what, after all, is ‘only’ a polemical piece are interesting insofar as they force a consideration of the tactics of writing and reading. Writing and reading are co-constituted, separated only in time; they exit in the same moment of creation (re-creation?). While different readers read differently, and authors have many agendas (sometimes many in the same piece), the scene is inextricably one of joint production and these factors complicate any easy assessment of the game. But should the difficult reception of this ‘attack on a soft target’ mean the writing should be more circumspect? Considerate somehow? Less blunt and willing to offend? Obviously not all writing should seek the happy agreement of all readers, and thus never provoke an exchange. This is not merely a polite question of literary style but, at another level, what are the obligations of a polemic that tries to use the sledgehammer differently? Unlike bludgeoning the reader to death with Brechtian devices and postmodern anxiety about the ontological status of punctuation, the reflex is here situated between the writer and the reader. Perhaps it more readily evokes responses in this way. I am certainly interested in Crispian Mills' response, but alas, as yet, no word …14
Reflexivity already has a long pedigree as the proposed cure for postcolonial dilemmas. We are so often hammered now with a scrupulous micro-self-consciousness that reflexivity comes closer to kneecapping than a small tap that tests reaction.
What legitimate position in solidarity politics might be taken that does not succumb to the privileged roles of broker, gatekeeper, expert, translator, liberal, opportunist, parachutist15 or parasite? Probably none, but it is pretty certain that reflexivity is not a defence against patronising and imperious appropriation, nor does it (as Ko Banerjee points out (1998)), redeem the anthropologist in the eyes of the ‘other’. I would add that reflexivity is no security against comprador co-option and the desire-temptation which succumbs to the delights of polite intellectual discussion — a cosmopolitan salon mentality. Self-reflexivity works as seduction to export fragmentation and divisive tendencies (from Trotskyite sectarianism to postmodern anti-essentialism, diversity sells) and in so doing undermines solidarity and unity. Progressive programmes too can be co-opted by state agencies when offered without organisation. What sort of reflection, reconsideration and reaction are required here? Against the dual problems of fragmentation without coherence, and resistance without plan, perhaps we need to regroup with a more sophisticated rationale and programmes capable of winning, to reconstruct the social power of popular and mass activity (not some pale celebration of microscopic, and diverse, resistances, which, although perhaps capable of surviving the attacks of the state for a time, or of slipping under the wire and avoiding the brutality of the border guards, are never in themselves the basis of a defeat of oppressive states or removal of border laws). On the other hand, there is a place for this kind of reflex questioning that escapes the salons of elegant contemplation — to engage in the double movement of both activism in organisation and semi-autobiographical critical (self-)education-re-education work and thus to do so in a way that is not unrelated to the reflexivity themes, but which turns them into political practices. Dialectical once again, we come close to agreement and wander away soon after. Is this only a reflection of my musical preferences? Is it OK just to tap your toes to the stuff? Cultural commentators and practitioners know that music is not an innocent pleasure. Subtle, then, the writing which ignores any reflexive anxiety over these issues and blunders on regardless because of them.16
Notes
This paper was presented for me at the symposium by Ramona Mitussis, to whom I express many many thanks for stepping in at a time of difficult family drama. Further thanks for comments on this writing go to: Raminder Kaur, Saurabh Dube, Peter Phipps, Sanjay Sharma, Virinder Kalra, Gerard Goggin, Liz van Dort, Josephine Berry, Hari Kunzru@Mute, and Ashwani Sharma. Red Salute.
1 See Banerjea and Banerjea (1996: 111) in Dis-Orienting Rhythms: the Politics of the New Asian Dance Music. We began the introduction to that book (Sharma, Hutnyk and Sharma 1996) by noting how the voracious appetite of the market had turned all manner of ‘Asian markings into exotic objects of value — saris, vindaloo and Ravi Shankar being the least offensive items — but we also noted that this was concurrent with increased racist violence and murder on the streets, police persecution and deportation by the government, and a prurient voyeuristic interest in ‘culture’ on the part of much of academia.
2 Further evidence for the unacknowledged but ever up-front persistence of colonial nostalgia is the reproductions on the first Kula Shaker album cover, imitating the Fab Four and Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts with a collage that included Rudyard Kipling, Kitchener again (this time towering imperiously over the image of Jomo Kenyatta) and Ben Kingsley (Attenborough's imported Gandhi), together with JFK (perhaps this particular arch-imperialist balanced by Martin Luther King), as well as Clark Kent and Captain Kirk to remind us of contemporary US fantasy imperialisms in the sky (all K's, but tactfully no Ku Klux Klan, yet no KC and the Sunshine Band either. Old Beardo Uncle Karl is included as a fashion statement, alongside Khrushchev). Finally, among others such as Boris Karloff and Katherine Hepburn, there is an image of Kali and the centrepiece of Krishna and Radha (the only three non-Western representations of things Indian), which confirms that Orientalism also thrives in the days of desktop publishing.
3 It could be objected that Sony Corporation is after all an ‘Asian’ company, but I think in this case the reification of Japanese business practices tends towards another mode of exoticisation. I would argue that the capitalist ‘identity’ of Sony overrides any corporate ‘ethnicity’ which might be deployed. Elsewhere I will discuss the question of Sony TV's South Asian satellite channel offerings. See Housee and Dar (1996).
4 Recently Nation Records released a double CD compilation of the label's most well-known and memorable tracks, entitled ‘And Still No Hits’.
5 See Hutnyk (1996).
6 I elaborate this connection in a longer version of this writing in Kaur and Hutnyk (1998).
7 It is not clear what this ‘party’ is, but it appears to be an example of the recent rise of Hindutva ideologies in the subcontinent. Hindutva celebrates those same mystical imageries that Crispian portrays in Kula Shaker slide-shows. It has, especially in its Mumbai-based Shiv Sena form under Bal Thackaray, been explained as a consequence of Hindu nationalism mixed with ‘casino capitalist’ black market speculation and Green Revolution payoffs enjoyed by the landed Maharashtran elites. There may be resources within Hinduisms that would not lead to support for the far right, but ignorant participation in the ‘natural’ celebration of Brahmanical and fascist Hindutva populism by white pop stars cannot pass unacknowledged.
8 The often quoted phrase ‘The East is a career’ appears in Disraeli (1871: 141). I take the citation from Chow (1993: 185), for whom it was located by Prabhakara Jha. There is, however, something disturbing in Chow's use of this phrase to make a point about students ‘of the East’ when she writes: ‘The difficulty facing us, it seems to me, is no longer simply the “first world” Orientalist who mourns the rusting away of his treasures, but also students from privileged backgrounds Western and non-Western who conform behaviourally in every respect with the elitism of their social origin … but who nonetheless proclaim dedication to “vindicating the subalterns” … they choose to see in others’ powerlessness an idealized image of themselves and refuse to hear in the dissonance between the content and manner of their speech their own complicity with violence. Even though … [they] may be quick to point out the exploitativeness of Benjamin Disraeli's “The East is a career”, they remain blind to their own exploitativeness as they make “the East” their career’ (Chow 1993: 14–15).
9 Against the saccharine multiculturalism of the Global Jukebox, Nation Records inaugurated their ‘Global Sweatbox’ club night in London, in March 1998.
10 Mute magazine is published in London from: mute: 2nd floor, 135–9 Curtain Rd, London EC2A 3BX. www.metamute.com
11 Vincent Crapanzano has usefully commented on the so-called dialogic turn in anthropology and takes issue with the ‘interpreters’ who assume they ‘can engage in dialogue’ with ‘recordings, texts, and other materials’ (Crapanzano 1992: 197). This is an error in three parts; the first of these is the error of ‘taking a metaphorical relationship (the interpretation of a text is like a dialogue) nonmetaphorically’. The second involves a failure ‘to recognise that the dialogue with which the interpreter is now dialoguing is no longer a dialogue but is a “dialogue” — the theme of another dialogue’. The third, and rather more acerbically expressed, error grants to the interpreter ‘a super-human ability to bracket off secondary dialogues and their language’ (Crapanzano 1992: 197).
12 Added later, ‘For the record’: British (as well as US and Australian) soldiers in the South East Asian theatre were kept on after the second imperialist world war to fight various communist insurrections. In Malaysia many communists were slaughtered, and this is just a part of a concerted effort to ‘cleanse’ the world of the ‘Red’ threat. A useful, if harrowing, documentation of the millions killed for the crime of wanting the best possible world for all is Kovel (1994).
13 An initial guide to resources on this issue is available at www.ozemail.com.au/~nlc95/native_title.htm
14 Crispian does sometimes respond. In an amazing reply to one journalist's reporting of the controversy over his comments about the swastika, Crispian offered a long letter, subsequently posted on the Sony www page, which in part reads:
I have travelled to India many times and have been influenced greatly by its people and philosophy, especially that of Bhakti or devotional love. It is my love of Indian culture, and its artistry, music, rich iconography and symbols that prompted my comments in the NME [about the legitimacy of the swastika and its ancient Indian origins]. My comments were not in any way a support of the crimes that are symbolized by the Nazis' use of the swastika … I apologize to those who have been offended by my comment and humbly ask that they accept that I am completely against the Nazis … Lately I have considered how confusing some of the things I have said appear, especially when they are taken as sound bites, and on occasion, out of context. Communication seems challenging at the best of times, and I now appreciate that my bundling of themes like the Grail, Knights Templars and Hinduism has not done much in the way of helping deep understanding. You are correct when you comment on my ‘complicated and intriguing mystical worldview’ saying that you, ‘find it hard to understand in simple terms’ the co-mingling of all these ideas. I think the only way one can reconcile their relationship (if indeed one accepts that there is one), is if one looks at them from a mystical or spiritual point of view. There are of course lines of thought that suggest how eastern ideas made their way to the west, especially via the Crusades, but it is true that for the most part they do not have a currency in modern thought. Thus in essence, the co-mingling is largely a personal expression of a desire to know and understand the deeper secrets of a spiritual or inner life. From the little that I know or understand, I see that somehow similar themes appear in different cultures and settings … I appreciate that my own special mix of themes is at best eccentric.
(Crispian Mills, letter to Mr Kalman, The Independent 17 April 1997. Full text www.music.sony.com/Music/ArtistInfo
/KulaShaker/reviews/inde_fax.html)
15. ‘Parachutist’ refers to the practice of white left groups ‘parachuting in’ on community-based self-defence campaigns to do publicity for their own group under the guise of solidarity. The strategy here is to get involved with the local group, recruit the advanced layer of activists, then abandon the campaign to concentrate on building the party. This seems to me to be the worst of the Trotskyite deformations evident in left-wing politics today. See Kalra, Hutnyk and Sharma (1996).
16. Kula Shaker web references:
www.shef.ac.uk/~shep/music/interviews/kulaint/index.html
www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/7772/
www.music.sony.com/Music/ArtistInfo/KulaShaker/
www.kulashaker.co.uk/kulashaker/grape/newep.html
www.gws.or.jp/home/miyuki/kula.html (Japan): (includes picture of Sir John Mills handprints in the concrete pavement of a London street, and a tif file of a $60 ticket for a KS show in Japan — comment, ‘pretty expensive huh?’).