Carling Music

Carling is a dreadfully bad lager beer served in second-rate pubs and rock nightclubs all over England. It has an unpleasant, chemical taste, made with cheap ingredients in as cheap a manner as possible, and sold at a premium.

And yet a lot of people drink Carling. Whatmore, for a lot of people Carling (and similar overpriced "brand" lager) is the only beer they have ever drunk. What always makes me scratch my head, though, is that these are the same people who claim to not really like beer. Now, if I honestly don't like something, and yet would want to learn to like it, I would absolutely not start with what the real fans think is disgusting! I don't much like coffee, never have, but if I'm forced to drink it I obviously try a cup of freshly made cappuccino over some old perculator gunk (just like the experts claim I should) - and yet most coffee drinkers start from the bad end and work themselves up to the cappuccino.

It's an eternal mystery of human pyschology that I think can't adequately be explained away by marketing and gullible consumers, nor by price. The most plausible theory I've heard involves the fact that the drinkers think they're making a compromise. If I don't like beer, they argue, the people who like beer must be wrong; therefore if I pick the stuff they hate, it must be the closest to non-beer - and thus acceptable. It's wrong, of course, but not the most stupid conclusion to make.

And so there grows up an industry of deliberately non-good-beer-like beer, your Budweisers and Heinekens and Carlings. And of course, there's plenty of music that somehow tries to emulate it.

One of my favourite Swedish language music bloggers at the moment is Inanna, who writes the uncomfortably personal and insightful You Care Because I Do. In a retrospective review of M.I.A's "Galang", she notes that music magazines when picking their "best of the year" lists will fall for what she calls "consensus pop", music that appeals both to the indie faction and the hip-hop faction as they vie for power in the magazine newsroom. Her examples are stuff like Gnarls Barkley, NERD, latter-day Outkast, The Avalanches or Hot Chip, and of course M.I.A herself. And yet this sort of middle-ground music is often just not very good - at least when compared to the stuff either faction would actually have liked to put in there.

I think this is certainly a kind of Carling music. The people involved think they're compromising, yet what they end up with is just mostly bad. And, just like Carling drinkers, it's so surprisingly predictable what a person who doesn't really like hip-hop (or whatever) will listen to in a given genre. I had dinner with an record collecting friend in the summer and I could almost have used my Derren Brown-like telepathic powers beforehand to deduce what kind of hip-hop he likes, which came up in our conversation: Dead Prez. The Roots. "Dirty detroit stuff" like Immortal Technique. Him and seemingly literally every other Swede.

Dude is only 21. It's not an age thing. But he's got his musical background in indie, and so he listens for stuff that's present in indie, "live-sounding" breakbeats, "grit" (whatever that is), political sensitivity. And he believes that the hip-hop as present in the working class he doesn't trust is its literal opposite, thus making this particular universally-selected subset of groups acceptable. In short, he's a musical Carling drinker.

I think this would kinda be my answer to Sasha Frere Jones, too. I realise the guy has a background in funk and thus likes hip-hop insofar as it sounds like funk, what he sees ahistorically as "blues-based swing". And then he notices that hip-hop has shot off in this entirely other direction, sounding swish and effervescent and harmonically complex, and he doesn't like it at all. A smart listener, at this point, would go down the cappuccino route: pick the most extreme music of the new generation, the stuff that the young kids make and like, perhaps even the stuff with the most extreme qualities other than what you previously liked. Try to force yourself to listen to it and like it, and notice the sheer quick-moving dynamism of a style hurtling off in a totally unexpected direction.

Instead what we get is Carling music. SFJ somewhat pathetically champions dull boom-bapper Freddie Gibbs, who is totally a cop-out to the "blues-based swing" and steadfastly sitting in that old Tupac-shaped hole and not moving anywhere. It's not counter-edgy or a compromise, it's just bad.

Perhaps if you don't like beer, dude, you should stick to alcopops.

Pop Culture Fragment: My 1920s Hungarian Wall Hangings

I've just spent some time getting my apartment in order for a big party (therefore the seldom-posting), which has given me time to put up what's one of my most-treasured pop culture artifacts: my small collection of circa 1920 Hungarian wall hangings. Unlike the communist-era poster art I've also got tons of around the house, no-one comments on how "cool" these are, and indeed they can be got almost for free on flea markets in Hungary, down-valued like all traditionally female crafts.

Still, I think they're extremely interesting and (since they're made by the women themselves) they reveal a lot about the attitudes and lives in the villages of Hungary ninety years ago.

"My husband, my good sir, don't wander about in the kitchen, wait for lunch in the sitting room"

This one is a favourite of mine, despite the extremely gendered and sexist message which is typical of a lot of these. Part of the reason is the details of the "dream" home most peasants wouldn't have afforded at this time - running water, metal pestles, fashionable clothes - which seem humble and naive in retrospect. The details of that upward aspiration are fascinating and revealing. I also love the cartoonish expressiveness of the needlework.

But the message also has an undertone of, well, sass. The woman is asserting the limited power she's got in her home, and doing it in an underhanded way with a jocularly dismissive, mock formal tone. The third-person tense used is either over-respectful or talking down, and it's definitely from the woman's point of view.

"I've driven my geese onto the pasture, that's where I'm expecting my darling tonight"

This one is considerably less challenging and indeed bears the hallmark of a professionally-designed pattern with its composition and carefully measured size. Still, it's also got a bunch of interesting details, not least the wading and the considerably more everyday dress than in the first one. The at once romantic and highly mundane message is typical of these.

"My rose is beautiful, has no flaw, her kitchen is excellent"

A very common theme on these hangings is boasting. Usually, it's boasting about how good a housekeeper you are (again, gendered, sexist, I know) and here it's unusually enough the male who gets to be the voice. Otherwise it's almost always the woman speaking.

Lots of marvellous details here, too, like the Trangia stove and the teapot-patterned border. Based on the hairstyles and clothing styles I'd place this one somewhat later, maybe in the forties, and the text and image are almost certainly not designed to be together since they're made with different thread and rather clumsily spaced.

Feminine Men's Peculiar Misogyny

Despite the precence of the patriarchy, women have been prevalent in some of the most extreme hard subcultures on the planet. But what about the soft subcultures...?

A couple of months ago I posted about the new subculture, täbb, which is making inroads into the Stockholm social scene. (I saw a couple get off at Rissne tube station last week, and if it's there too then it's spread far.) Donnie followed it up with an admirable post connecting the phenomenon to the guidos of New Jersey and the pretty boys of Denmark, two other subcultures of feminine-looking men. I'm especially fond of the latter group, whose sense of style is marvellous and radically different:

Look at the pictures in that last link and one thing should become obvious: the overwhelming Y-chromosome dominance. there aren't any "pretty girls". Nor, in fact, are there any female täbb or guidos. It's as if the very adoption of traditionally feminine gender roles in these subcutlures has come at the expense of actual women.

And, I think, that's hardly a new phenomenon. Take hair metal from the eighties, possibly the preceding wave of androgynous male fashion. For years, until it finally collapsed and let women in, it was extremely dismissive of female fans and strongly misogynistic. When it started to appeal directly to girls, it was pronounced dead. Glam rock in Britain in the seventies has a similar story of late-coming female bands, all previous efforts failing, but at least there the female fans were allowed to be glam too.

Let's see, what else? Gay men and their subcultures, of course, but that's obvious. But then there are all the "soft, feminine" musical styles where the bands almost always consist entirely of men: power pop, for instance. The female fronted Shivvers are an exception, but why are there so many more female "masculine" crust punk bands than "feminine" power pop bands? Or so much crunk- and booty-bass based R&B but so little "softer" G-funk R&B?

Perhaps (and I'm venturing into territory way beyond my level of ethnological knowledge here) the very act of being subcultural is about breaking boundaries? There aren't any "feminine" female subcultures (except otherwise boundary-breaking ones like femmes or sweet lolitas) because mainstream culture already casts women in that role. Still, I think that explanation misses the fact that it's probably the men doing the exclusion. It's a curious thing that all these extreme-looking men hang around and promote fairly normal-looking women - or is it simply that we've got a distorted view of what a "normal woman" is supposed to look like?

Or maybe it's this: all subcultures have misogynistic men in them. But the ones where you're supposed to be "tough" allow women to fight themselves in. How are you supposed to smash your way into a subculture where soft and smooth is the ideal? Anyway, it's a complex issue and I'd welcome people's thoughts on the matter.

Let's see some insightful analysis AROUND the music!

A comparison of the apocalyptic visions of T.S. Elliott and Cormac McCarthy. A harrowing tale of union rigging and horrendous work conditions in a cultural environment. An in depth discussion on the idea of "disruptive design", creativity intentionally hampered by limitations in order to create greatness. Conceptual procedural art. A discussion about gender and cultural budgets.

What snobbish literary journal am I describing? The July issue of video gaming magazine Super Play. Which is the best selling in Sweden for its subject, selling tons more than music magazines do.

Specialist magazines for other pop culture subjects have really been stepping up their game recently. I leafed through some in the library and found football mags about economics, larp mags about queer theory, skateboard mags about the concept of art. The question is, really, why isn't music writing pushing to catch up?


As I understand it, music journalism has a history of being fairly advanced. But to be honest, as long as I've been reading music mags it's been fairly tepid. Fan-oriented, full of meaningless "personality-establishing" interviews, occasional opinion pieces that deal purely with the actual music and the experience of listening to it. You don't get very much of the world around the music. This insularity worries me a bit - is there any other type of culture that should be open to deeper analysis as part of society? And why isn't it?

Is music too abstact to get decent reporting on the working conditions of musicians, and union issues? Even music creation articles tend to be very sketchy, perhaps because music writers don't tend to know the technicalities of musicianship, but equally likely because there's no tradition of this kind of writing.Why are there no "design principle" articles for music? Why are there no articles on music technology in fan-oriented music mags, only in specialist ones? I know I'd be interested.

Where are the big society-oriented questions? Where are the gender analyses of the music industry? "It's been done" you'd say, but why isn't it done more often, as a big source of new articles? And where are the articles dealing with culture around music, beyond just "look at this cool subculture"? Super Play have huge features on the music of video games, why are there no features on the visual (or something) aspects of music?

Let's face it, music journalism is the granddaddy of all pop culture journalism. But maybe this initial advantage has been wasted in our arrogance. If even video games magazines can effortlessly blend in deeper questions, why can't we?

Täbb: What the internet age means for subculture

I love having a 15 year old nephew-in-law - he clues me in on all sorts of youth culture stuff I'm too old to catch spontaneously. (Oh, and Wayne, he claims that it is indeed Ludacris.) Last month I indirectly got the heads-up from him on a new subculture that's big around where he lives in an affluent suburb of Stockholm: the täbb.

Apparently coming to wide attention just a couple of months ago via a now deleted Facebook group, it's got a lot of the trappings of a traditional subculture. There's the group-identifying name (possibly derived from Täby, the suburb where they first appeared, and possibly derogatory). Obviously, there's the look (via):



Which is seemingly based on the style ideal of Swedish Idol 2006 contestant Danny Saucedo, and consists of, among other things, hair gel (not wax), 96 brand jeans from G-Star, visibly orange-looking fake tan and lip gloss, rubber bands around the ankles, Open shirts with folded-up collars and tacky souvenir necklaces. It it, as yet, exclusively male. Nor does it seem to have a musical style attached, beyond normal-ish post-electro house - but of course music is uaully no more than an accessory among others in these cases, so I'm sure a specific set of artists will soon develop.

Still, somehow, somewhere, it all feels slightly wrong. It's like it's almost a play at, or a superifical gesture towards a subculture rather than a real one. At the end of their lives, subcultures are reduced to clichés - people have "70's parties" over them. Here it's almost like all other stages are bypassed in the subcultural process, and people are dressing up as täbb instead of being täbb. Even the original practitioners.

A subculture rising meteorically in popularity is hardly a new phenomenon but here it's as if there's just the rise, nothing before. Again, it seems like a mere surface, an ironic joke of a subculture which no-one takes seriously. Does this kind of thing say something about the internet? There's been a lot of play towards cultural detachment on the internet in the past few years. Sites like Discobelle, that post a little of everything, are clearly not out to be subcultural at all. (Ironically leading to their output being labeled blog house, but that's another story.)

Maybe täbb is what happens when kids are totally uprooted - they believe the surface is the content. Much like, I think, Discobelle. Or the entire Global Ghettotech thing. It's subculture construed as a non-cultural phenomenon - a community without a community.

Which, I think, is bloody confusing.

Where are the Diasporadic DJs?

A couple of years ago Tanzanian megastar Mr. Nice, whose music I much admire, came to do a concert here in Stockholm. I missed it. Never even heard of it. The concert took place in the immigrant-heavy suburb of Norsborg, far out on one of the subway lines, and as this video shows the attendance was almost 100% diasporadic East African. Any white faces you might spot in the crowd are very probably friends or spouses.

At the parties of DJ Thomas Gylling, who plays Soca, Dancehall, Reggaeton and other caribbean music at large upscale clubs in central Stockholm, the reverse is largely true. Here's a video montage of some crowd photos - there are probably a couple of diasporadic Trinidadians and Jamaicans in the crowd, but I'd guess not many. The majority are middle-class Swedes, some of mixed race, most white.

Now, I'm not going to tiresomely go around and try to argue that this is all somehow wrong. It's inevitable, considering the different cultures and classes involved. But what I do wonder is - why isn't there more exchange of DJs between the two club forms?
I'm a frequent RSS feed subscriber to a whole bunch of sites of DJs in the "nu whirled music" scene, like Dutty Artz and (Rupture's) Mudd Up! and (Maga Bo's) Kolleidosonic and Wayne and Wax. As DJs, they all frequently advertise club nights they participate in. I've been searching through some of the names on the bills and found almost none that regularly play events for a diaspora in the same country. I think DJ Chief Boima (weclome to the blogging world, dude) might do, from some of his comments, but it's certainly not a frequent occurence in general.

And as for the opposite, DJs who regularly do diasporadic events doing mainstream club nights, that's unheard of too, no matter what kind of music is played. Sweden has loads of interesting clubs playing non-european music, like Re:orient Club. Looking over their DJ roster you do see non-swedish DJs but none of them are from the same set that would play your local Lebanese night. No, names like "DJ Shazam" and "DJ Cheb Oman" belong to white europeans, not arabic immigrants.

It seems that deeply entrenched diasporadic DJs just never get to play to more mixed crowds in different settings than the diasporadic one. And I'm kinda wondering why. How come you never see someone like DJ Oslus DJ a party of largely college-educated white kids? If you're after knowledge of African music surely someone like that would be a good choice. Are they not good enough? Don't they send out the right kind of hipster signals?

I think there's a deep inherent danger in only allowing middle-class DJs with existing access networks to present music from the developing world. The DJ is a story-teller and manipulator and can form the discourse concerning a musical style at will - are we only ever going to hear one side of the story at party nights? I do realise that bringing a new audience and revenue stream to people might alter what they play for the worse. But is it worth the risk of one-sidedness in transmission and translation?

If Mr. Nice ever does come back to Stockholm I'll try to go see him, whatever the venue and however uncomfortable I'd feel. I'm keeping tabs on the community now through the Kenya Stockholm Blog. But wouldn't it be awesome if some club promoter would have the courage to bring him and his DJs to Berns instead?

Uncertain about Universality

I had a very nice lunch of Hanoi Chicken today at a prize-winning Vietnamese restaurant in Stockholm. It's one of half a dozen Vietnamese places in the city, catering almost exclusively to an ethnically Swedish clientele (there's just over 13 000 Vietnamese people in the whole country). Now if on the other hand I would want to buy Vietnamese music it's highly unlikely I'd find any at all anywhere in Stockholm, whether popular, traditional or classical. Maybe one CD at best at the nasty world music store with the caricature of a name.

I know marketability is a bad measure of appeal, and I know food culture is equally beset with post-colonial problems as any other expression. But I still think some cultural manifestations are much more translatable, even universal than others. And that makes me wonder what gives the quality of universality, and perhaps take issue with the idea of music being a universal language.


My measure of universality is probably my mother-in-law, a tiny finnish woman who left school at 16 and spent most of her life as a cleaning lady. If I gave her a record of music outside her own cultural sphere of Elvis, Finnish tango and Ricky Martin she'd have no idea what to do with it. But she loves foreign food (she exchanges spices with a Sri Lankan friend and is open to all sorts of cuisines). And I'm sure if I gave her a craft item from a far-off culture she'd readily accept it and even display it around her home, maybe even learn the appropriate technique.

Expanding a bit to people who read books and attend classes, I'd say appropriately translated literature (especially folk-tales filled with Jungian archetypes) is fairly universal. So's dance - there's a great deal of interest in and classes of African, South Asian and South American readily available in this city, and they're also very popular. Chinese theatre goes down very well. In fact, I'm not sure the actual question is what expressions are universally appealing, but why music doesn't work the same way. The "world music" market is inappreciably small as a proportion of all music made, and most music never comes close to making it across.

(That applies to time just as much as place, by the way. It's been fascinating during my history of music course to see how the aesthetic ideals of each time period is completely overthrown by the next (cf. Ars Subtilior) and how each era has so specific criteria for what constitutes a potential hit.)

It's all very strange 'cause there's this myth (going back to Immanuel Kant, I guess) that music somehow is a language that transcends all boundaries. But for all its supposed openness to hermeneutic interpretation from every angle there's a cruel specificity to music, where something as elusive as production sound can mean the difference between success and failure. Compared to the basal human instincts of eating and dancing, and to the representational arts with their rich interconnections and possibilities for comparison, music is a language that works expressly within a cultural context. The wrong tonality, the wrong song structure, the wrong thematics, the wrong application and music is at risk of being ignored or dismissed as very dull.

I can freely confess to not understanding the qualities of Vietnamese music the way I appreciate the qualities of Vietnamese food. And that, perhaps, is part of what musicology such an interesting subject to study.

Three types of popular music, part 2: graphing theories

I hinted in my last post that there's another reason I like the triangle. In my view it's a fairly interesting tool when examining the theories of others about popular music. By positing a set of three categories of popular music we can easily look at how aesthetic theories overlap, interact and differ, and while I certainly can think of theories that don't fit the system at all a remarkable number do.

I think this has a lot to do with the perceived values, or if you like authenticities of the three corners of the triangle. Personal or artistic authenticity is key to the arty-pop corner. Cultural authenticity is what defines folky-pop (in whatever sense you put into the word, I personally don't see traditionalism as part of it for instance). And I guess a kind of populist authenticity defines the commercial pop corner - if people are buying it, who are you to say it's bad?
These kinds of values are very common in music discourse, the first since the early romantic period, the second since national romanticism and the third more recently. Although it's often not explicitly said, I think these valuations underlie a lot of the theories about popular music, concious and unconcious. The standard "music journalist consensus" for example definitely likes arty-pop, has an ambivalent relationship to folky-pop and hates commercial pop. (Remarkably similar to the romantic aesthetic that still permeates classical music, by the way, but on a smaller scale.)

For this post I'm singling out two well-known theories of popular music and one less-known, all of which posit a dichotomy but that I nevertheless think make sense graphing on the triangle.

First up is Critical Theory. Although granddaddy Adorno himself hated all popular music, even the pretentious stuff, some later critical theorists have accepted the arty end as having "truth content", freedom and creativity. Critical theory also makes the not-that-startling claim that the commercial pop corner of music is manipulating the populace into docile servility to the capitalist system.

However, the interesting point the theory makes (as made apparent using the triangle) is that the variety offered by the seemingly self-created and self-maintained folky-pop corner is in fact only "pseudo-individuality". Its pleasures are easy and escapist and serve exactly the same purpose as commercial pop, to distract from the economic hardship of the people.
So what the theory does is basically actively define away one of the corners of the triangle. Our second theory, Cultural Studies, arose at least partly in response to this curtailing - one definitely gets the sense that a basic desire there is to re-appraise the self-created culture of the working class. Cultural Studies concedes the idea of a culture industry creating according to a capitalist agenda, but its central theory is on the reception end. Some people do fall for the hegemony, but a lot of them "negotiate" the culture for their own ends and the media is a battleground rather than purely hegemonical. This focus on (essentially working class) reception means Cultural Studies hardly ever deals with the arty stuff. It's basically outside the theory (or can be constituted as belonging to either side).

A third fascinating theory, though I guess less academic, is the one presented by Martha Bayles in her book Hole in Our Soul. Her basic contention is that the real, popular, civilized music (very obviously her imagining of the folky-pop) has been destroyed by what she calls "perverse modernism", the desire to shock (which she traces from futurism to 2 Live Crew). This is interesting because not only is the bunt of the argument directed against arty-pop, but on closer reading she actually includes commercial pop in this category as well! How's that for a different perspective on the triangle?
So as a thought experiment the triangle is not a bad one. It's limited in that it does not differentiate between different conceptions of the same corners - for instance you can have two or more competing types of cultural authenticity that would be in conflict with each other without it becoming apparent on the triangle.

But enough with the triangle already. A futher discussion on the musical characteristics of the three corners will appear under the heading "Genre of the Week: Pop, part 2" in due course.

Malta Travel Report

What an interesting, beautiful, compact country!

I've had a great week in Malta with some excellent sightseeing, agreeable weather, interesting walks in historic environments and literally hundreds of pictures of cats (my fiancée asked me to take them). Malta is a dream holiday destination but its culture is equally fascinating, stuck between the east and west, between the past and the present.

Close out the modernity for a moment and you could almost be in some far-off tropical land, with gaudily painted old 50s buses, tailors sitting behind unmarked wizened doors and a strange semitic language full of harsh sounds and glottal stops. Yet it's also recognisably modern and western with all the trappings of our culture, like handicap parking spaces, a powerful environmental lobby, and skate parks.




The mixed heritage of a succession of different reigning powers has left an indelible mark on Malta, not least in the housing which happily mixes Arabic flat-roofed buildings, Spanish balconies and British terraced rows. That creolisation mixed with some other curious aspects of maltese culture (like the extreme and very public Catholicism) makes it a potential goldmine for any social or cultural scientist.

That goes for the muisic too, to some extent. Ghana, the traditional working-class music that's Malta's equivalent to greek Rebetika or portugese Fado, is a fascinating mixture of Neapolitan or Sicilan song and strange foreign-sounding microtonality. An island of its diminuitive size (roughly a third of the size of Stockholm, both geographically and population-wise) is never going to be a hotbed of cultural diversity, but it's remarkable how many unique things they've pressed out.

My mother (who is Hungarian, another frequently occupied nation) offers up the theory that an opressed culture holds on very tightly to its own visible (or audible!) expressions and will try to retain as many as possible in the face of a dominant ruler. That would also help explain why nothing very much new seems to be appearing on the music scene except for fairly dull western rip-offs and a bit of house - they're holding on to traditions and don't have room for any more.



I'm hoping another invasive group will give the music scene the boost it needs to get started. Malta, as Europe's southern outpost, recieves thousands of African refugees that travel in small boats, paretas, hoping to make it to shore. These predominantly young men are recieved with some hostility by the homogenous Maltese society and mostly (for now) live in the refugee camps of Marsa and Hal Far. The camps are free to access and free to leave and many take illegal unskilled jobs to supplement their meagre government allowance.

I visited both camps (by mistake, call me the accidental social tourist) and there was plenty of music playing all round in the little camp bars. Since Africans (from all over west and north africa, we met Ghanaians, Togolese people, Moroccans...) are increasingly becoing very prevalent in the society, that music is likely to spread. Malta has a no deportations policy and it's likely we'll see plenty of interesting mix culture coming along in a generation's time. There's definately hope.



I bought some CDs while on Malta that I will be posting assessments of in my next post. Meanwhile, here's some more photos from the journey.