Bugger me! I'm a folkie

I've had a chance to look back over some of the stuff I've written in this blog over the past months recently, and it struck me that a lot of the material has a common theme. From this very early post to this rather recent one, I've fairly consistently argued for community, community, community in music, prefferably working only with and for itself. Boima commented on the last post: "Is this what you mean by no outside influence?! ;) Your perfect genre?" and I think he might be totally right.

I do like musical isolates too much. It's dawned on me that I might have become some sort of folkie. And thinking about it, this modern age might well have brought out a bit of the folkie in all of us.


Well, let's not get too hasty. Obviously there's loads of aspects of the folk revival I don't sympathise much with (to the extent of having hated plenty on folkies in my time) and that seemingly are slowly dissapearing as important musical values. "Rootsiness", the virtue of traditionalism for traditionalism's sake, might have been a big thing as late as a decade ago but you have to feel it's on the wane and relegated to the blues rock of old men. The Nu Whirl crowd aren't buying the roots argument, nor the opposition to mechanical reproduction (what aura of originality?) or the dogged opposition to commercialism.

But we are buying the village. Sure, today the idealised village of "merrie england" is a favela somewhere, but the same basic principles still apply: we want to be outsiders, we want to observe a homogenous, tightly-knit group from outside, we want to be the ones in charge of the story. We're all folkies, trying to escape from information overload and globalisation by embracing the easily identifiable and readily categorisable, and possibly the real.

I can already hear the disagreement, but consider how despised "inauthentic" acts like Bonde De Role are, however close their music is to the one produced "in the village". Also consider the fact that working-class groups that attach themselves to the wrong large world-wide trends aren't nearly as loved. I think whatever we say it cannot be denied that we're very fond of "scenes", today's new villages.

Maybe it's time I admitted this connection openly. I generally think music is produced better in communities, feeding off each other and creating music for each other with no second thought. I also think traditional "world music", that strange outcrop of the folk revival that has cast away its most central aspect and makes ethnic music without an ethnos, is generally a really bad idea with loads of problems attached.

It is said, often by self-help specialists, that what we most despise is what we're denying and supressing in ourselves. So maybe, despite how much crap I've heaped on the folk revival myself over the years, I'm a folkie myself at heart.

Who gets to decide?

Music and the music business is a damn complex thing. Trying to rule over it is never going to be easy, no matter who you are. And it sure as hell is never going to be good.

I picked up this article from Washington Post-owned The Root, and you just have to marvel at just how naïve it is. Whatever you think of the central issue involved, and I'm really in no position to judge in my privileged, distant cocoon, handing over power to consumer groups is clearly a big mistake. Consumer groups are profoundly evil. They're the kind of philistines who vandalise modern art, support ridiculous, small-minded censorship, bowdlerise movies and start racist campaigns against hip-hop. She's jawdroppingly arguing for this group rather than against it.
But, I mean, who else could you possibly give power to? Well, she's also arguing for the positive influence of corporations. Corporations! You want GM's marketing department to decide over your music? Media strategists at corporations can't think beyond statistical groups and established patterns, and are never going to want music to be edgy or interesting or forward-thinking because of the risk involved. Plus of course they're hegemonistically ideology-establishing, or whatever.

On the other hand, you wouldn't want the TV channel itself to be in power. TV channels are just as conservative and statistically oriented, really, plus usually very short-sighted (fifteen-second judgements of tracks are not unusual) and sacrifice every thought of a unified profile at the altar of whatever song happens to be popular a given moment.

But what about the critics? We couldn't possibly have us ruling over the music business either. We're way too trend-oriented and anxious to please, or else we're just controversial for controversy's sake. Can you imagine music TV filled with ghastly critic-genres like post-rock? The kids are another no-no. If we let high school kids decide over their own entertainment then pretty soon they'll be setting fire to the homeless. Then there's the artists themselves who're conceited and run off to do vanity projects as soon as they don't have to worry about money.

Then of course there's neolib reliance on "the market". Which, if I understand the idea correctly, is what the music department at BET thinks the marketing department at GM believes the nasty vagrant-burning teenagers would want to listen to in such a way as to want to buy more cars. Which is just an ungodly mess of out-of-the-arse statistical second-guessing.

It'd be tempting to replace it all by some organically growing anarchy, but the truth is that all of these groups are probably influencing music a little bit. It's a wonder anything good makes it through at all.

100 posts

There, I've made 100 posts in my blog. Now it would be nice for you to do something for me.

I realise others have thousands and that it's not so much to celebrate really. But I'm fairly happy that I've carried through with this project long enough to reach a century, plus I want to take this opportunity to ask for a bit of general feedback.

See, I've played around a bit with the blog in that unsettled way that everything has as a start, and I'm not sure what works and what doesn't. I was hoping you guys would tell me.


The blog is doing fairly well in general. I've got a decent amount of readers, good subscription numbers and a growing Technorati rating. I seem to have settled into a format (mid-length posts mostly) and I've gotten into the habit of posting regularly.

One thing that does bother me a bit is how few comments I get, comparatively, to other similar-size/age blogs. I put myself totally in the blame for this one - I obviously don't make "commentable" enough posts. My last post is a good example. I actually got a comment there but all it did was tell me they liked what I was writing; for someone like me whose background is in the forum world and whose express intention was to create threads that's pretty much a failure. I want discussion, I just don't know how.

So, please, tell me what you've liked and what you haven't in my blog so far. Do it anonymously if you like. But even better, tell me what a blog needs for you to want to comment on it. MP3's? Controversy? Lists?

I probably worry too much, but sometimes I think I just throw stuff randomly into cyberspace.

Derrida, Dub and the Retirement of Beauty

I've been catching up on blogs after my break lately and I seem to have caught the end of a debate about beauty in music, which is cool, because I'm trying to structure myself up to write an essay that's on a really closely tangential topic. I thought I'd post an outline of what I'm thinking and let it be my contribution to the beauty debate.

People seem generally opposed to continuing evaluating music based on if it's beautiful or not. That's good. But while it seems we're getting little hints of why beauty needs to be retired as a concept I've yet to see a good how, which is where the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and the musical advances of Jamaican dub come in.


Jacques Derrida is an Algerian-French philosopher most famous for launching the concept of Deconstruction, which has wildly outgrown whatever he originally intended by it. His philosophy is quite interesting and makes loads of startling claims, but I'm picking out one particular aspect that's relevant to 20th century music: his work on dichotomies.

Derrida claims western thought rests on unequal dichotomies where one term dominates hierachically over another, one beautiful, one ugly. In music, this would be something like the sound/silence dichotomy - sound is defined as something positive, beautiful, while silence is considered derivative, almost parasitical, an absence. Other similar dichotomies that tend to crop up in 20th century music (especially experimental music) are pure sound/noise and composition/indeterminacy. I guess tonality/atonality is another one really.

Derrida would claim that these dichotomies are very deeply ingrained in the very basic meaning of words and that merely ignoring them is futile. For instance, there's no point in going down the route of Schönberg or Russolo and try to redefine the ugly (atonality, noise) as beautiful, because that would be mere wordplay. Likewise, the attempts of experimental composers like Cage and Schaeffer to ignore the dichotomies entirely and focus on the opressed aspects are probably futile, becuase in making "noise music" and "indeterminate music" and "silent compositions" they're still acknowledging the existence of the dichotomy, in effect (if not in intent) being wilfully negative.

The solution instead must involve the dissolution of the categories, or as Derrida would say their deconstruction, finding the flaws of the dichotomy, its internal logical problems. In order to deconstruct a dichotomy one needs essentially to move beyond it. (This is both the why and the how of why we need to retire beauty.)

Which is where it links up to dub - I think this might be the key as to why dub is so popular with latter-day experimental musicians, the kind that read The Wire. Dub plays around freely with all the categories, focusing on thier combinatronics and how to use them in interesting ways. Effectively, it's got deconstructive properties, and most of all it provides a new alternative to the traditional categories in where the intellectual effort goes. It's where we can derive a lot of producer-oriented music, where "interesting" and "unusual" and "exciting" has replaced "beautiful".

Paradigm-shift or not? I guess these kinds of valuations probably precede dub in popular music. Plus, obviously "interesting" is itself open to deconstruction (in relation to the parasitic "boring"). But that's pretty much how far I've got - I'd love to have someone pick at holes in the thought if they can.

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.

How different is Capitalism from Communism, Really?

Well, very different, obviously. But when you get right down to results?

My Hungary pictures aren't here yet, so I thought I'd post a more general, music-political post first, which I've come to think about a lot during my stay in Hungary. I even asked my mum about life in the eighties but since we only lived peripherally in Budapest, my dad being a diplomat, she wasn't sure. Still, she did give me some pointers and I've thought a lot about the conditions that produced the records I've bought.

The thing is, the records of the era are not terribly different or worse than contemporary records from the west. And it's fairly interesting, I think, to consider why.


The Hungarian elites have always been quite disdainful of pop music. Just listen to its name in Hungarian: könnyűzene, "light music". As opposed to "serious music". The pop music recorded during the communist era was not let through because of its quality or artistic merit - it was more or less purely engineered to pacify the young and the proletariat.

There you have a first, obvious similarity to capitalist pop music - not just if you listen to Adorno - in that there's a definite sense of this "youth-pacification" in commercial western pop too. It's not meant to be challenging. It goes for fairly low common denominators. In fact, in order to spread the music widely, the regime tried to keep on its toes and be trendy so as not lose its grip, and often went straight for the commercial western stuff as a model. There's a Hungarian hip-hop record made in 1984, which is quite early by European standards! This kind of trend-jumping is another similarity to western pop, too - just look at how many "crazes" have been jumped at by marketeers on major labels.

In practice, the situation in Hungary was very much like there was only one "major label" - Hungaroton and its subsidiaries - and it behaved startlingly like a western major. It censored what material was let through, and was often behind the times - much like a western major. It relied on a very small set of commercially successful songwriters and musicians, and mostly avoided real bands - much like a western major. Sure, you were never going to get through any properly edgy material - but it really doesn't matter if your counterpart is one hulking behemoth or four. If you succeed, you're considered a sell-out in both cases.

But of course, there were no indie releases in Hungary. There were no samizdat recordings in Hungary in any large quantities. No metal, no punk. And there's the big difference in the end - not in the products of the capitalist and communist churning machines, but in the commercially less viable material that happens to be an unfortunate side product of freedom of expression. The so-called "market" may think similarly to a communist regime, but it allows less viable music to flourish underneath. The dictatorship, of course, didn't.

The Hungarian elites have always been disdainful of pop music. More than ever today. Pop and rock, to them, is heavily mired in the Communist era, and they prefer to listen to "world music" and "ethno-jazz" as my journalist friend told me. And according to my mum, what anyone with taste listened to in the eighties was jazz anyway...

"Well, there's this Romanian stuff that's quite good..."

Well, it was inevitable I guess.

I went to the village market to try to buy some Hungarian gypsy disco and the heavily made up roma woman selling pirated CDs recommended me some Nicolae Guta.

To be honest she probably has better taste. Still, when I get back, I'll do some posting about Bodi Guszti's roma star parade.