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discussion

a conversation about music and history

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dan
Jul 10 2005
10:56 pm

grant and i have been having an e-discussion about music and history, and various related topics that we thought might be interesting to some cino readers, so we decided to post the conversation here. Of course everyone is welcome to join in.

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dan
Jul 12 2005
09:22 am

Hi Grant,

Speaking about grad school and modes of communicating ideas, I think one of the issues you’re up against is a medium’s truth claim. In our society, the written word carries the most weight, has the most legitimacy, packs the biggest punch. Not necessarily in terms of impact but in terms of how seriously the author is expecting to be taken. A message communicated through music has a different truth claim than on communicated through the printed word. Similarly a novel, though it may be more true than a history book, does not claim to be as true. The nature of a novel is that it doesn’t claim to be true in the same way that a history book claims to be true. Same goes for different types of music: for example, I’m not sure you can effectively communicate the same truths through r&b as you could through rock. for one, the music itself communicates emotions that may be at odds with certain spoken truths, and for two, the listener of one may perceive a different truth claim for each. What do you think about this? I haven’t worked through any of these ideas outside the history/fiction debate til now.

In choosing to present your ideas in songs, more people will hear them, but they will also be received in a different way than a book would be. In your case, correct me if I’m wrong, you’re saying that the medium is the message, ie your music is not only the medium for carrying your ideas, it embodies your ideas. But in our lifetime I don’t think you’ll be able to shake the problem that a CD does not have the same truth claim as a book. It’s a fight worth fighting though.

Re. permanent versus non-permanent, my questions come from my furtitive ventures into anthropological literature. I used to think that the word ‘indigenous’ was just a clever term to hide what we really mean, namely ‘primitive’—in other words, the people without European technologies such as guns, alphabets, and top hats. The assumption still simmering under the surface of politically correct academic talk is that our European ancestors were somehow better and smarter than indigenous people because of their technologies (which are, we assume, the result of hard work and intelligence). I was also confused by the use of the term for saying things like “I’m indigenous to this area” meaning that I grew up here, but people of European ancestry (and others like Asian-Americans, for example) can never say “I’m indigenous.” It doesn’t work. Why can’t I be indigenous?

These ideas are still in their infancy, but I think the difference between indigenous and non-indigenous is about ambition. What are my ambitions compared to the ambitions of an Amazonian native 300 years ago? I can’t say this with certainty, but I think it means something, that indigenous people (by definition) didn’t create MTV, didn’t publish Harry Potter books, and didn’t build cruise ships. Similarly, I think it means something that we collectively call someone who can’t buy a TV “poor” and someone who can’t read a book “uneducated”. All that to say that I think Europeans and their heirs can’t be indigenous because they want to change the world—they want to leave an everlasting mark on nature. The term “indigenous” more slippery than I would like it to be because, for example, many heirs of indigenous cultures are now part of the capitalist world economy and may be building cruise ships for all I know. I hope I haven’t offended anybody and can move back to music now.

Back to music, I think it means something that you make music to change the world. I think you make music for a very different reason than a group of Garifuna drummers and dancers in Belize. And I think the difference lies in your ambition. Do you agree?

Besides all this, what do you think about the fact that we chose to have this conversation by email, then by cino? Could we have gotten together and sung a song about it? Maybe an Eminem style rap-off…

Dan

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grant
Jul 25 2005
01:52 pm

Excellent. Right to the point. Yes, I think ambition is close to the way the “spirit” of a people operates. Other words I might use are “motivation”, “urge”, “drive”, “heart-direction”. Joel and I have talked about how some indie bands never make it big, not because their music isn’t as good as a band like U2, but because it doesn’t come from that “change the whole world through mass media” spirit. Some bands, you can just feel the bigness about them, as if they belong to some larger canon alongside Dylan, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, etc.

What I’m also using as a backdrop for this conversation is the issue of what makes an event “historical”. We could say that an event becomes historical later in the context of how it affected certain events of the future (a cause and effect model). But there is often a sense that one is in a history-making moment as the moment is happening, before anyone has started writing about it.

The bias toward the written word: I’m starting to get a better handle on the anxiety that often strikes me when I’m in a typical American Protestant church. The sermon is right on, even good, but then, when it’s over, the praise band begins to play and I feel like we Christians are the most hypocritical luke-warm people on this earth. Didn’t the pastor just say that Christ is a double-edged sword come to bring his resurrection power down on all who are slave to sin? Then why the f… are we singing this timid, self-helpish crap with all the sincerity of a piece of driftwood? It’s because emotion doesn’t have as much of a claim to truth as the written word. And so Protestant Christians therefore don’t know how to voice the word in a way that is authentic and truly spiritual. Though this is an example from the Christian community, I think we can see other examples elsewhere. This just happens to be the one I see firsthand.

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dan
Jul 27 2005
09:34 am

I like that way of explaining the problem of worship music. Perhaps a way to help people understand it, is to describe a whole range of God-pleasing emotions which are felt by people everywhere and which were also displayed by God-fearing people in the Bible. Since most evangelicals (or North Americans/North Europeans in general) are incapable of singing and dancing spontaneously, perhaps worship bands could have dossiers of songs that correspond to different emotions. For example, if the sermon was about the evils of gay marriage one could sing some songs denouncing gay marriage, maybe some angry ones, or maybe some militaristic ones that encourage people to get involved in policy making and protests. If people are mourning someone’s death, maybe they could have some songs ready that are truly mournful and that express the questions that people feel at times like that. If the message is about how big and great God is, then one could dig out the old praise and worship pop songs that might put a smile on people’s faces if they weren’t used every week. By the sounds of another post recently, there are people doing this kind of song-writing for their communities, which I think is great for everyone involved.

I’m curious what you think is the value of music which does not have the ‘change the world’ spirit. What’s the point of music if the ambition is not “big”? What’s the importance of an event that does not become ‘historical’? I’m thinking of an event like Montreal’s tamtams, which is a drumming event that happens every Sunday in a parc. Several hundred people in various circles beat their drums, families have picnics, jugglers juggle, people dance, venders sell homemade stuff. The smell of pot, sweat, the driving beats, the swirling colours—they are all things that make this event a satisfying aesthetic experience. But it never makes history. Nothing ever happens. What is the value of this event if it can’t be sold as a cd and never finds its way into a newspaper?

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grant
Aug 02 2005
04:14 pm

Your question about the value of doing something not deemed ‘historical" is precisely what I’m trying to get at with my criticism (informed by Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” and Tarkovsky’s “The Sacrifice”, which is also informed by Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”) of modern historicism.

I’m reading a book by Paul Tillich on the history of christian thought and I am fully aware at times of the limitations of the story. Tillich’s story is an excellent account of how the thoughts about God developed through different times and cultures. But no matter how thorough Tillich is, we are only getting the written documents which are merely a reflection of the spirit of the people of that time. So this is what I’m asking. Is it possible to actually “tap into” or “experience again” the true spirit of an age? Or are we to understand our past only by these “after the fact” reflections. Is history really only a phenomenon of writing? Does it cease to be history when our pasts are spoken or recorded in our genes or sung etc.? Is narrative the only or best way to encounter our past? Or is it possible that some other field of study or practice can bring us closer to the past? How might we include those small and seemingly insignificant meetings between friends, the personal experiences of laypersons in the middle ages, the feelings that might have arose in one’s soul on the morning of August 6, 523AD? Is it possible to feel those feelings again only through history? Or is this where the realms of art and science part ways. Perhaps it’s the modernist seperation of science from art that makes these questions necessary. Or a distorted view of symbol that is too detached from the “thing itself”.

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grant
Aug 02 2005
04:50 pm

And I’ll add this to the mix. Early hip hop and the great rap albums that currently are heard all over the U.S. and the world started out as shout-outs to their neighborhoods, to their small communities. But what happened when these albums, intended for their own small communities, became nationwide hits, is that names and terms that were known among small groups are now known among the general public. White kids growing up in wealthy communities and clinically clean suburbs can now fluently speak the local slang of people who’ve lived their whole lives in Compton. Even though early hip hop albums were originally made to reach a small audience in some New York City neighborhood in the late 70’s or early 80’s, they have a “bigness” to them that is universal. These are somehow “historic” albums. According to Tolstoy, this phenomenon displays the reality that spirits move of their own volition. We recognize that historic spirit moving in rap and hip hop albums, most of us, after the fact, after reading about it in Rolling Stone Magazine or after it became valid on radio, tv and with music awards. But there were people who, like prophets, felt the “bigness” of this music before it even showed itself to the broader world, felt the spirit before it was documented in writing. They knew it was worth devoting their lives too without any written or evidentiary validation.

Something seems to be moving in us, convincing us at times to follow it, and when we arrive onto this SOMETHING BIG, it seems like we knew we would get there all along. There is more going on in history than just people making up meaningful narratives after the fact.

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dan
Aug 09 2005
10:58 am

If I understand you correctly, you want to argue that history is something pre-narrative, that there are certain things that happen which are intrinsically historic. That some things are just big and will therefore be remembered. 9-11 for example. There’s just something about suicidal pilots flying airplanes full of people into the world’s most recognisable skyscapers. It’s not something that historians had to write about to make it historic. I sort of agree with you here, but not quite.

I agree because it’s common sense to say that 9-11 and hip-hop are intrinsically extra-ordinary historic events…if you’re an American living at the turn of the 21st century. On the other hand, if you’re a Sri Lankan 16 year old raised on Bollywood movies and Paki-pop, hip-hop music might be a foreign sounding curiosity and the images of 9-11 might be catalogued in your brain beside various Sylvester Stylone movie stunts. For him, the intrinsically historic events might be the tsunami and the Sri Lankan civil war.

Also, who is to say how important the development of hip-hop will be to music historians in two hundred years? I imagine the invention of the accordion was a real breakthrough at one time, but who cares about that today? (I do, but I don’t consider my interests mainstream :)

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dan
Aug 09 2005
11:32 am

I think the ‘bigness’ you are talking about is relative. If you walk directly from a rock concert to an organ concert, the organ will not sound as big as organs sounded before the age of electric guitars. Hip-hop is big to us because we’re comparing it to hip-hop’s immediate predecessors and less-innovative contemporaries. Future music-historians might have a hard time explaining to the general public what was so great about hip-hop music, though the future upper-crust will no doubt buy season tickets to see hip-hop concerts and other ‘used to be big’ musical styles like jazz and classical.

Hip-hop is very important. Why? Because we think it’s important. I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically historic about anything. In fact, some indigenous groups don’t have the concept of ‘historic’ as we understand it, so i’d say that even the concept of ‘historic’ is culturally constructed.

For various historical and cultural reasons, many American teenagers, music critics and musicians agree that hip-hop is big. Most chinese teenagers, music critics and musicians don’t seem to agree. Are they less intelligent? Are they out of touch with what is historic? I say no and no. They have different aesthetic sensibilities and cultural histories which lead them to different conclusions about art.

A final note about the constructedness of history. I have no doubt that the Maya civilization experienced musical breakthroughs analogous to hip-hop in our civilization. By the time the Spaniards arrived, however, the cities were already abandoned and the people scattered in small villages. Then the Spaniards burned all Maya books. Today we know next to nothing about Maya instruments, songs, and choirs as they existed before 1200 AD. Were their breakthroughs less intrinsically historic than hip-hop? I say no. History is a narrative, and if people stop telling the stories, stop singing the songs, and if all their books are burned, then the history is gone until archeologists try to make up new stories. Then again, maybe today’s Maya are still telling stories and singing songs from that time, in which case it still shows that history is narrative or at least it is a cultural feature that is passed along from generation to generation.

It’s possible that one day people will forget about 9-11 and about hip-hop (for example, when we run out of oil and most everyone starves to death). If that happens, doesn’t it show that the historic ‘bigness’ of an event depends on the people telling the story or the people singing the songs, not on the event itself? If find it hard to believe that the hypothetical 1 million survivors of the great oil famine would continue to see 9-11 as a very historic event compared with the recent death of 10 billion people.

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dan
Aug 09 2005
01:10 pm

A final addition here: I have again erred by placing too much emphasis on the written and spoken character of history. I do believe that there are ways one can ‘feel’ history, through music for example. But even one’s sense of ‘felt history’ is unconsciously shaped by or plugged into a history narrative that already forms a part of your worldview. For example, the way I listen to and interpret a Bach fugue is shaped by how I understand the 18th century. Without the narrative, the feelings don’t make sense.

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grant
Aug 09 2005
07:13 pm

Or…“Without the feelings, there’s no urge to make a narrative”. This question about what makes something historical comes down to an assumption about what or who is in control of history. I am not comfortable with the idea that history is decided only and completely by human beings. It seems to me that people often feel they have been selected for a certain time or place. The events of history often force themselves upon us and we have no choice but to acknowledge them and to try to bring them into some kind of meaningful system for ourselves. But perhaps there is a meaning within these events already, before we even get a chance to take stock of what’s going on. I take the process of art as an example. The artist begins her task with some urge, some sense that something ought to be made and that she is the one who will make it. The artist may feel like she is in control of the situation for a time, but this notion soon seems inaccurate. It almost feels like the work itself, the art piece, forces her to follow its own rules and the artist begins to feel like the work is making itself. There’s a meaning within the piece itself that the artist must be attuned to, must follow, must engage. The artist is certainly contributing to the piece (the art doesn’t make itself), but there seems to be a relationship between the receptive artist and the stubborn work of art that forces the good artist to make it what it wants to be, what it really “is”. This is why I’m questioning whether the scientific method is fit for the task of history-making? It seems that the artistic process, which requires a keen understanding of the ebb and flow of time, might be very helpful for contemporary historical analysis. What it might mean to be more “artistic” in one’s research and articulation of history is hard to imagine at the moment because the field of history has been so “scientific” for the last couple of hundred years.

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grant
Aug 09 2005
07:24 pm

There’s another question you raise, dan, that I haven’t addressed yet. It concerns the contributions of other civilizations that get lost in our story making. Perhaps some civilizations’ (Mayan, for example) contribution to history might be that they were finally forgotten—that is, some civilizations MUST be forgotten in order for us to find meaning. There is a danger that we lose ourselves and any sense of meaning if we remember everything. Forgetting is necessary and even good. We must be diligent about what is important to remember and what is important to forget, which is the historian’s contribution. This would be a scary thought if I believed people’s stories were entirely dependent on historians, but I believe the strongest spirit will survive and that the weak spirits will be conquered (conquistador-ed), no matter what historians do. I believe hip hop comes from a strong spirit that can be traced to rock’n’roll and back to the blues and back etc. and for this reason will continue to remain “historical” as long as it remains in that spirit. If Pakistani Pop music indeed comes from a world-shaking strong spirit, I will have no choice but to accept it.