I'm off to a rather early-starting party for Eurovision, but I thought I'd at least write down my choices for favourite tracks in the Final. Outside the final I'd have to go for Switzerland, which is the only decent track missing frankly, and (just to be a bit controversial) Latvia. Any track that sounds like it should accompany a toy ad from the eighties is fine in my book.
One of the unwritten rules of this nervous marketing experiment that is Eurovision is that each time a country wins the contest a bunch of other countries try to copy it. (I detailed the the past few copycat years in this post last time around.) This makes the 2009 contest a bit of a dilemma, because the trend seems to have been suddenly broken: there are no obvious candidates that are formulaic copies of last year's winner.
If you don't remember Dima Bilan's "Believe", it was a mid-tempo ballad in the Walt Disney vein, underpinned by a rather clever and harmonically driving beat which supposedly Timbaland had laid a hand to. I had it in my top ten. So why hasn't anyone tried to copy the concept straight off? The only vaguely Timbaland thing in the contest is the intro to the Albanian entry, which sounds a lot like a Timbo production circa ten years ago:
Keisi Tola - Carry Me In Your Dreams
Pity it then proceeds to become generic pumping mainstream for the rest of the track. (A short section near the end provides a tantalising glimpse of how great the track could have been if they'd kept it up.) However fun the intro is, though, it's obviously the inspiration isn't anywhere near "Believe".
One thing to consider is that, maybe, the influence lies beyond the mere music. Take the idea of the blue-lit background. "Believe" had it, and this year seemingly every ballad has followed suit: Croatia, Denmark, Lithuania, Estonia, Malta, Iceland, Israel, Cyprus, Poland... That would be a visual connection. Then there's a celebrity connection - last year Dima featured ice skater Evgeni Plushenko, this year Britain is bringing in Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Germany (apparently!) Dita von Teese.
Still, not having any major musical connections at all bugs me, and even casting a wider net only a couple of tracks have similar ambitions, at least. Croatia has a bossa-nova beat behind a traditional ballad that chugs along in a similar way. Russia, which like many previous winners desperately cling to the winning idea, at least bears some similarity in the verses. But if I'm going to pick one successor to the "Believe" sound it's going to have to be Estonia: Urban Symphony - Rändajad
It's probably wont to annoy tastemakers who've compared this track to both Kate Bush and Björk, but the handclaps are there, the harmonics are relatively stable, and there's a fairly freestyle-ish pickiness to the string section. I can definitely get the sort of perpetually delayed feeling off this track that was vaguely suggested last year and which Timbaland does so well. Perhaps the "trendy indie favourite" label on this track is masking its pop qualities?
I used to regularly find new music through YouTube's video browser. A couple of months ago, though, they removed all the music genres, and there was just a generalised "music" category to search in - which sucks if you're looking for, say, hip-hop.
Well, guess what? All the old categories are still there, as hidden legacy features in the system. I followed an old link I'd set up and there was, still, the most viewed new videos in Hip-hop/Rap!
So just as a reminder of the kind of stuff you can get hold of through this feature, here's a brand new Polish, female take on the whispersnapphenomenon from a few years ago, as interspersed with weird minimal electronica elements: Mona - EKSPERYMENT
I'm telling you Poland has Europe's best hip-hop scene.
Wow. I just watched the first semi-final of this year's Eurovision Song Contest and I was really drawn back into it all. What an amazing stage set up! I'm starting to regret not spending several months analysing every single entry like I did last year.
Because there's plenty to analyse I think. Some of the things happening are quite fascinating, and some even have real-world impact. I'm thinking, for instance, of the balkanisation of Romania.
No, not that kind of balkanisation. I'm talking about how Romania has finally succumbed to using imagery, music and lyrics reflecting its place in the Balkans, something they've never done in Eurovision before.
This may not sound like much, but it runs totally anathema to what for many years was Romania's national image. Romania used to be occupied by the Ottoman empire, and its nationalist movement was very clear in emphasising its Western, romance heritage, in strong contrast with anything vaguely Turkish. The Balkan, eastern aspect of its culture was relegated to an "other" - the culture of gypsies, the poor, immigrants. That's part of the explanation why manele music is so despised in Romania.
Similar stories can be found in just about every country whose modernism stands in contrast to the Ottoman empire. But in the past decades, the hate for all things Balkan-sounding has slowly seeped out of Eurovision in most countries. Greece and Turkey let up early, and in recent years even Slavic stalwart Bulgaria has gone nearly full-on Balkanic. But this year must be some kind of record. From Azerbaijan to Spain to Moldova, the pop and folk sounds of the Balkans have spread everywhere, and obviously that now includes Romania. In a rather weak and slightly R&B-inspired way, but still.
What does this mean? Is Romania losing its antipathy to manele, and by extension the Roma? Is Balkan pop softening and becoming mainstream like rock'n'roll once did? Well, I'm waiting for the full-on manele entry to arrive first before I'm totally convinced. But it's an interesting trend nonetheless.
PS. As a fan and staunch supporter of minorities, it's fascinating to me that Elena Gheoghe is Arumanian, one of the most oppressed minorities in Greece and Albania. Update: I found a Romanian blog post which suggests manele can be seen as nationally distinctive music, something that's immediately hacked down on by commenters.
I have to admit that my blog entry from last week about extending the blackface concept to other power relations wasn't entirely my own idea. It builds, at least in part, on this article by Renee at Womanist Musings, whose extreme positions on another part of the marginalised-group-imitation matrix intrigues me:
"What is up with the black male fascination of playing black women? We are told that this is done in homage to our great strength. In actuality these women are ridiculous caricatures of black women."
Her argument is persuasive. Yet me and just about everyone I know readily accept drag, the way we wouldn't accept a blackface or yellowface performer. Perhaps, as was suggested to me on twitter, the difference is history, or perhaps it's intent: surely there's a difference between the varied depictions of women in a video like this Eurovision parody?
Sure, there's some extremely positive and loving diva portrayals. But the parody of Kikki Danielsson as overweight and barely able to move is vicious, and hits deeply into some rather nasty intersectional issues, where gay men (like Alexander Bard in this swedish-language video) project body-image hate on women with certain body types, in a patriarchal reversal of oppression.
In general, though, if the intent is positive, Renee's position can appear extreme. For most feminists, drag is not necessarily a bad thing, a performative play with the dichotomy of gender roles. By adapting stereotypically "feminine" characteristics, the drag queen is undermining the idea of a definite, essentialist masculinity. And that's before we get to drag kings!
But there's another group whose perspective on drag artists tends to be much more negative, and that's transpeople. In one way, I guess, it's possible to view drag not as making fun of women, but of male-to-female transsexuals. What's a huge life-changing position for them is reduced to a bit of fun, where cisgendered privilidged males get to play around the imagery of a real sexual reassignment. Transsexuals regularly condemn drag shows and have a strong antipathy towards drag queens...
I guess part of the problem is that transsexual activists and other feminists have conflicting interests when it comes to understanding gender identity. For many transsexual activists, the idea is essential (ha ha) that there are distinct and different "male" and "female" brains and that you can be born into a biologically "wrong" body for your mind. The more fluid sexual identities and socially constructed genders of feminism in general and queer feminism in particular have to be rejected, lest conflicting gender identities be reduced to "just a choice". Drag can be provocative because it introduces precisely the type of fluidity which undermines the essentialism.
What the idea of a "gender blackface" exposes in this case is that there can never be a unified perspective, one ideology that will cover all radical viewpoints in one. I guess that's where the need for diversity comes in. Even in radicalism we've got the archipelagos.
Last month I downloaded an album by Bow Wow with the extremely promising title "New Jack City II". Well, turns out he obviously did it for the search hits. I was hoping it would be signalling a nascent interest from the hip-hop community in plundering the wonderful R&B era circa 1990, but the album is not very good and has sold badly, plus the actual connection to New Jack Swing is a series of rather old-fashioned Jermaine Dupri productions:
Feel a bit sorry for the tumbling career of a fading rapper who has to release extreme low-budget videos. I guess to be charitable there's a bit of new jack swing in there with the bassline and some of the harmonies, but it's no "Poison".
But maybe there's still a scent in the air that signals new jack swing's return. Especially, it seems, in the metaphorical Baltimore. This track, rather literally, is "Poison" (via):
There's something about the natural choppiness of swingbeat, especially when like here combined with that Jam & Lewis sensibility, that lends itself particularly well to Bmore's cut-and-paste techniques. Sure, the breakbeat is an awkward fit here, and the whole thing does gel more Bmore than it does swing, but there's definitely possibilities here.
One novelty reworking does not make a revival, but there's another album coming out this spring with New Jack in the title, also in the Bmore/Brick City fold: DJ Sega's New Jack Philly. I realise after dissing Mad Decent rather badly last post I shouldn't be hyping one of their releases, but this is looking rather good and based on the sample track offered there are definite new jack swing touching points (via):
In general Jamaicans are friendly, outgoing and very proud of their nation. [...] Jamaicans keep a positive and care-free attitude toward life, answering many questions or inquiries with a "No Problem Mon" or an "Irie" - believing that it's all going to work out and everything is OK!
Most minstrels projected a greatly romanticized and exaggerated image of black life with cheerful, simple slaves always ready to sing and dance and to please their masters.
The picture I posted on Wednesday depicts two men dressed as stereotypical Jamaicans. They're selling a commodity (pineapple) whose association with Jamaica is a largely colonial one - it's where the fruit is grown for global north consumption. They're largely dehumanised, wearing a generalised-exotic lava-lava in lieu of anything specifically Jamaican. The music is pastoral and rich-world-oriented "roots" reggae, in a fake plastic version... And their proscribed behaviour is carefree and laid back, much like the fake Maori in the last set of Fanta commercials (here, appropriately, in Estonian), and indeed much like both the stereotypes above.
And yet, it seems to still be okay. And I'm kind of wondering why, and discovering the wider implication of various angles on the blackface phenomenon are disturbingly plentiful.
I've nicked the illustration above from an online costume site, where it's advertised as "Rasta Mon Costume. This costume represents the carefree life-style of the Carribean Islands Mon!". I've looked through the site, and although there are plenty of costumes with some sort of parody intent directed at the hip-hop lifestyle, there are none that directly portray African Americans as an ethnic group in this way. Because that, of course, would be blackface.
I realise the historical and activistically racist context to this discrepancy. But surely, at the base of it, the problem is exactly the same. The blackface performer perpetuates an extremely simplified stereotype with strong negative or servile implications. He pretends to be an oppressed person in order to mock. The oppressed people are denied the custody of their own culture and the voice, they are spoken for by a grossly simplified parody of themselves, often for bigoted purposes.
And yet, dressing as a "Jamaican" in this way seems perfectly okay with most people. I've got enough issues, lord knows, with trustafarianism and middle-class white rappers as well, but at least they're trying to be something, not ironically mocking subalterns from a position of privilege. I cringe when I see stuff like this:
(via) What are Diplo and Switch thinking? Seriously? Having Andy Milonakis come in and do a perfectly ridiculous number in a faux-Demarco manner, cynically ridiculing the current style of dancehall and some sort of mystical, generalised-exotic voodoo bullshit? Exaggerating all the negative aspects, the violence and the drugs? Blabbing on about "pussy" in a manner which in the class/racial context comes accross as sexist in the extreme?
I can understand a desire (however warped it is) to want to be Jamaican or to want to act authentically so. But that isn't the case here at all. For me, when it comes to putting down Jamaicans by imitating them stereotypically - whether in costume or in music - there's really only one word for it.
In the next post I'll look at the idea of blackface as extended beyond ethnicity altogether - what happens when people imitate genders and classes, and how does that fit in?
