Mainstreaming Music 1: How Decreasing Diversity May Be A Good Thing

One of those supposedly unchallengeable truths about the development of music in the past three decades is the idea of fragmentation.

Music, the thinking goes, has undergone a process whereby previously unified groups of people (say: all the consumers in a country) have split up into ever-smaller fragments, listening to localised, community-based music to an increasing degree. Within each faction, in turn, there are myriads of little facets, each with its own named genre, and there's absolutely nothing any more that even vaguely unifies whole countries, let alone the whole world. This is then explained by a bunch of fancy theories involving post-modernism, long tails and so on.

I think it may be time to challenge this view, which I've definitely held myself. Because it seems to me that with the increased production values in so many parts of the world, and with the unified contemporary aesthetic covering all chart pop, we're hitting a time where, indeed, a lot of music is starting to sound pretty much the same. And for me, right now, that's a good thing.







The videos above are from Nigeria, Kenya and Haiti respectively. Different genres and backgrounds, yet they're all pretty much some sort of international pop, produced up to extremely high technical standards and with quality videos that could, for the most part, pass unnoticed on any MTV channel. For the first time, recording technology has progressed to the level where artist from the "third world" can make music that sounds just as good as any "western" pop, and they're taking the opportunity. In droves. And it's super-popular, racking in fans and awards.

Diaspora and minority populations are certainly following suit. Like bhangra? Well, the subcontinental diaspora increasingly favours RnB-soundalike urban desi instead - and so, seemingly, do the rest of us. And if urban desi is indistinguishable from other pop, it's got nothing on how much mainstream "black" and "white" music has melded completely into one genre. The biggest smash hit this year across almost all charts (including the latin one) defiantly crosses all gaps, racial and geographical, in melding what is very clearly one world pop - a multi-ethnic band with hip-hop roots doing a guitar-driven number produced by a French DJ, hitting number one from Brazil to Japan.

And this development is good, I think, in all sorts of ways. One very obvious consequence is that we're less likely to think in terms of us and them if it's all the same. Both traditional world music and global ghettotech has been extremely good at defining what The Other does as something radically different from "the west", but what happens when the music becomes so indistinguishable? Does it signal a chance to see beyond some of the steotypes, and perhaps embrace the diasporas and the rest of the world on more equal terms? That's gotta be good, right? (Next post I thought I'd have a look at global ghettotech's response.)

But I also think it can be good creatively. By my reckoning what we're seeing in terms of coming together right now is perhaps most comparable to the so-called rock'n'roll era of the 50s, where all over the world people of different ethnicities made similar-sounding music. Was that a bad thing? Not at all! The 50s are considered one of the most explosively creative periods of all time, when "black" and "white" completely came together and kept churning out great material. What's to say we won't see the same now?

Music trends move and waver back and forth. Every time and style has its own greatness and worthy moments. Yesterday may have belonged to local genres, while today even the subcultures are defiantly cosmopolitan. Perhaps, for those stuck in the metaphorical hood, it is time to think about what we can all accomplish together?

Lie To Me, MC

One aspect of analysing global ghettotech writing I didn't really go into in my article a little while ago was the fairly central idea of authenticity, which still seems to loom large over the way we think about music from outside or own environment. Happily, Rachel came along a little bit later with a piece of critique which uses precisely one form of authenticity concept to counteract another, illustrating both the usefulness and the perils of thinking about some music as more "real" than other.

In a well-constructed blog post against an article on Haitian music, Rachel criticises a group of New York music critics for not grasping the actual nature of Haiti's music history. To the article writers, music is properly Haitian in so far as it's got spiritual and political ("revolutionary") depth, alternatively if its traditional and connected to some sort of imagined history. The superficial and the ahistorical is constructed as exceedingly suspicious. Rachel on her part is happy to accept these qualities because the music that embodies them is "popular", while another strand of music is okay because "Haitians" "use" it. Two notions of authenticity are presented and contrasted (if not in so many words), one based on tradition/depth and another on usage in contemporary local culture.

But at no point is the idea that music can be real at all questioned. There's an underlying idea of "the real Haitian music" that's very hard to shake off – I frequently think like this myself.

Still, there's something about the idea of any music being realer than another in this way that makes me wary. The leap doesn't seem to be that long to an essentialist idea of national character, in either discourse. Compas is the music Haitians listen to can easily turn into real Haitians listen to compas, subtly shifting the power from the dynamic users (or their tradition) to the cultural constant. And at least from my European cultural horizon, people who claim to be "real Swedes" or preserve "real Hungarian values" are extremely scary people indeed.

In contrast, there are the fakes. In the recent US presidential elections, the idea of an "unreal American" gained a lot of leverage among feminists, left-wing minorities and others who felt left out by the patriotic definitions. Here in Sweden the leader of the (tiny) Christian Democratic Party made a speech in which he argued for "reality's people" (verklighetens folk) over the supposed left-wing cultural elite, whereupon a facebook group by the name of "unreality's people" (Overklighetens folk) immediately drew a lot of members. I certainly joined. Somehow, it feels slightly paradoxical that we "fakeys" are basically the same cultured middle-class that fights to have our version of Haitian music (or whatever) declared the most real.

This, I think, hits at one of the biggest problems with a lot of our attitude towards the subalterns (to talk poco for a while). A lot of energy is spent busting (as fake) the discourses about the Other of our compatriots. Instead, we offer up a reality based on what we are told by the othered people, never reflecting on the equally "fake"/discursive nature of their world view. In effect, the Haitians are made to be "realer" than us, their music "truer", merely by virtue of their relative global marginalisation. Again, this is true no matter what authenticity criterion is used.

This is especially important, I think, when it comes to music, because music is (at least to my mind) conclusively fake. If, like the musicological discipline of musical hermeneutics claims, music is a language that can be completely interpreted, the "writings" of music can't possibly be considered anything other than fiction, and its emotions, ideas and thoughts are inevitably make-believe. Musicians have always revelled in made-up worlds and baseless boasts, and periodically in conscious "syntheticity", making any consideration of realness in musical expression extremely questionable. Especially, I think, when quality gets so explicitly connected to the real. If the only good music is real music, then there's probably no good music at all.


Of course, the music world itself has happily gone along and produced its own authenticity discourses anyway. From the rockist "selling out" to 80s metal's "poser" accusations, to hip-hop's "keeping it real". Like any self-inconsistent dichotomies, though, these tend to pop/deconstruct themselves as time goes along. I don't think I'm wrong in saying the "tight pants" electro fad in hip-hop has gone a ways to destroy the dour "reality" stuff, together with the obviously exaggerated claims of southern rappers (eh, officer Ross?). And I love it. I don't mind being lied to, and no your women obviously don't actually behave that way.

In any case there are signs that the constant borrowing across genres is somehow destroying the "authentic genre" in any cultural-homogenous sense, too...