Sensational interview with Taarab scholar Kelly Askew

Go to the original at Afropop Worldwide: http://www.afropop.org/multi/interview/ID/81/Kelly+Askew-2005

Kelly Askew-2005

Place and Date: Ann Arbor, Michigan
2005
Interviewer: Banning Eyre


Excellent book on Taarab music by Kelly Askew

Kelly Askew is a professor of Anthropology, and of African and Afroamerican Studies at the University of Michigan. She lived in Tanga, Tanzania, studying taarab music from 1992-95, and published “Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tanzania” in 2002 (University of Chicago Press). Banning Eyre interviewed her in August, 2005, for the program East African Taarab. Here’s the complete text of their conversation.



Banning Eyre.: Welcome to Afropop Worldwide.

Kelly Askew.: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

B.E.: First, why don't you tell us a bit of your story as a musician and scholar, and how you ended up in Tanzania.

K.A.: I started playing piano when I was about seven years old or so, and continued all the way through high school. I attended a school for the performing arts in California, where I grew up, in Los Angeles, and continued on in college as a music major at Yale University. But I also discovered in college anthropology, and discovered I had a second love in life, and decided to find a way in which I could merge my two interests. Hence ethnomusicology, which became my application.

Map of East African trade routes (Eyre)

B.E.: And Tanzania?

K.A.: I ended up in Tanzania because I went to Yale, which has a very esteemed African Studies program and they teach Swahili, and although I thought my heart was in West Africa. Originally, I thought I was headed towards India. But I discovered that the Swahili program was too good to pass up, and that there are Indians in East Africa as well. So I thought my original project was to study Indian music in East Africa, and try to see whether there was any sort of interesting hybrid stuff going on there, only to discover when I first went to Africa as a Junior in college for a summer project, that the Indian community is very purist about their music. They import the musicians for their events, and music is one of the ways that they maintain their separateness as a community. So what was more interesting to me was taarab music, which I discovered on that same trip in 1987. So this is Swahili coastal music, but very, very welcoming of any kind of musical influences from anywhere abroad, including the West, India, and the Middle East. It's very much an amalgam of all these different musical traditions.

B.E.: So that quality of openness and inclusiveness was more interesting to you as a scholar?

K.A.: Yes. The music was a little hard to get used to at first. Just because of the different aesthetics, and the preparation that I had as a classical pianist. The melodic structures were quite different. Of course, the rhythmic structures were different. Everything was different about it. The quality, the voice, the timbre. All of that were things I had to get used to. But once I did, I fell in love with it. And 18 years later, I am still working on it.

B.E.: Some of our listeners may be confused about the term “taarab.” We’ve talked a lot about tarab, “the art of ecstasy in Arabic music,” to use A.J. Racy’s nice phrase. This is something different in East Africa, isn’t it?

K.A.: Yes. The word itself means "to move the heart." It means to feel feelings of rapture and ecstasy, and it’s often used as an adjective in describing other kinds of music outside the East African phenomenon. When you speak about any form of Middle Eastern music, we can talk about it as having evoked taarab in them, or being a great example of taarab. But when we speak about taarab in East Africa, we are speaking about a very specific form of sung, Swahili poetry, that emerged… at some point in the 19th century, and became very, very popular in the 20th century, early 20th-century and into the late 20th century.

Excellent double CD of taarab and kidumbak music

B.E.: That’s great. Help us put East African taarab in a historical context. Let's start with a little pre-colonial history. What we know about Tanzania before the Arabs arrived, and then you can bring us up to the Arab, and European phases.

K.A.: Tanzania as it is now only came into existence in 1964. Before that, it was part of the Bantu area of Africa. The Bantu language family originated more in West Central Africa, and the Bantu people spread out through eastern, western and southern Africa. So Swahili is a Bantu language in its noun and verb forms and its grammatical structure, and there are over 120 different ethnic groups in Tanzania, which makes it very diverse, especially compared with some of its neighbors. So, for instance, in Zimbabwe I believe there are two major groups, the Shona and the Ndebele. And in South Africa you have 10 or 11 national languages. Compare that to Tanzania with 120. It's quite a diverse place.

So, you had various types of political organizations, you had some kingdoms, and no one major group that really dominated, or even two or three. Sukuma were pretty powerful, and Nyamwezi. They controlled trade routes. But the Swahili people who grew up, sort of developed or emerged along the coast. Swahili, the term, comes from the Arabic word sawahil, which means margin or coast. So the Swahili are the people of the coast. It also comes from the word sahel, which again means on the margins, sahel being the border of the Sahara Desert. So the Swahili are the people of the coast, and they really emerged as an economic power in being able to control the trade between the African hinterland, the overland caravan routes, and also the ocean trade, crossing the Indian Ocean. They were ideally situated to exploit both ocean and land routes of trade, and they did very well for themselves, developing this wonderful maritime but land-based economic trading culture that still had some agricultural elements to it as well as fishing communities and things like that.

The Swahili have been documented for at least 2000 years if not more. Some archaeological evidence implies that there were communities going back as many as 3 to 4000 years ago, and then Arabs started making their appearance in the area soon after the death of the Prophet Mohamed, coming down to proselytize, to convert people to Islam. And then the Portuguese appeared with Vasco de Gama. In the late 1400s, 1498. So Portugal entered into the region as a colonial power, only to be supplanted ultimately by Oman, and then Germany, and then England.

B.E.: So you had some 3000 years of what we call Swahili culture, but the name “Swahili” didn't come about until the Arabs came about in maybe the eighth century, maybe even later. Is that right?

K.A.: Even then they didn't really use that term. They used more the term Zanj.

Tippu Tip portrait. (2004-Eyre)

B.E.: So Zanj is older term for Swahili?

K.A.: Yes. They referred to the coast as Zanj. They also referred to it as Azania. Ibn Batuta wrote about it as Zanj.

B.E.: And he was writing in the 14th century.

K.A.: That was 1331. But Ptolemy wrote about it as Zanjian in about 150 AD. And also the anonymous writer of the Periplus, in about 48 the referred to it as Azania.

B.E.: So what is the earliest use of the term Swahili?

K.A.: I don't know that we know that. But because of the word meaning coast, people from outside simply referred to as the people from the coast.

B.E.: When we talk about Swahili culture today, it is both an island or coastal and the mainland phenomenon, and somewhat uncomfortably so it seems. This is jumping ahead a little bit, but talk about the Swahili identity today.

K.A.: Well, there aren't that many people who self-identify as Swahili, ironically. This actually served nationalist purposes later on, which we might talk about. Swahili culture doesn't have the same rigidity to it, or concreteness, as many other ethnic groups. So for instance, from Tanzania, you might talk about Sukuma culture with more concreteness. People would identify as Sukuma, they would identify as Nyamwezi, they would identify as Chagga. But people don't often say, "I am a Swahili." They will say I'm from the coast, or they will talk about the city from which they are from. Some people from Mombasa, Kenya, talk about being Sefita. People from the northern canyon coast, talk about being Waahmu. People from Zanzibar call themselves Wanguja. Swahili has oftentimes taken on negative connotations, which is why people don't self identify as such now. When people talk about, "Oh, he is such a Swahili," the connotation is that he's shifty, or not fully honest somehow, deceitful, not somebody who is straightforward, somebody that you would want to deal with.

Back view from Tippu Tip's house (2004-Eyre)

B.E.: That's interesting. I wasn't aware of that. When you think that came in? What is the history of that?

K.A.: If I would hazard a guess, it has to do with the economic position of the Swahili, being in that position to negotiate between Inland traders and overseas traders. Everyone had to place their trust in these middlemen, and then not really deal directly with the purchasers of their goods, or the sellers of their goods. So, maybe because of that, people were not 100% sure that they were being told the truth by that middleman, having to invest faith in that person, and knowing that people are in it for their own profit as well. The term has over time also had multiple meanings attached to it. In political circles, people would identify as Swahili as a way of sort of taking on a nationalist persona, not a tribal persona. So there have been occasions when, the first president of Tanzania Julius Nyerere, for example, said, "I am a Swahili." Even though it’s well-known he's not from the coast at all. In fact, he's from the place farthest away from the coast, a small island in Lake Victoria. He is from an ethnic group called the Zanaki. So for him to say he's Swahili, clearly this is not in an ethnic sense, but in national sense.

B.E.: That's fascinating. And he did that as part of his political vision of unifying people, right? You write in your book that Nyerere succeeded in Swahili-izing—if that’s a word-- the country more than many neighboring countries. He wanted to create a national culture, and this struck him as a good way to do it. Is that correct?

K.A.: Correct. The advantage of having Swahili be an ethnic term that is not necessarily a positive one is that it was lying there to be used by others for broader national purposes. So that is what Julius Nyerere did. He took this name, this label, and this language. The language is the key element there, because by that point, due to the caravan routes, due to the importance of the Swahili middlemen in those routes, the language, Kiswahili, had spread far and wide along the caravan routes, and beyond, up and down the coast. So you had this national language, essentially already in use, that was far beyond anyone ethnic area, that would be usable for nationalist, unifying purposes, when you are a new country that has just come out of this difficult colonial history, and you've got 120 ethnic groups that you've got to convince that they belong to something bigger than themselves. So Julius Nyerere did tap into that, and because the Swahili themselves don't affiliate with each other in any sort of political or jurisdictional, economic sense, as a unit, it made it very easy to use Swahili without being charged with favoritism, saying that you are elevating one group over others. Because there was no Swahili group there to be perceived as favorites.



Old Stone Fort (Eyre-2004)

B.E.: That explains a lot. Let's now shift our focus to taarab music. Maybe as a setup, you can tell us how it came to be that in the early 19th century, you had an Omani sultan in Zanzibar.

K.A.: The history of taarab, officially, began during the reign of Sultan Barghash of Zanzibar. Now, how did Zanzibar and up with sultans? I mentioned briefly that Oman came in as the colonial force. They routed out the Portuguese from East Africa, when people from East Africa went to Oman and asked for assistance to come and take out the Portuguese. They didn't like being under Portuguese rule, and Oman had succeeded in routing the Portuguese in their neck of the woods. At this point anyway, the Sultan of Oman, a man named Seyyid Said, he derived a lot of his wealth already from the ocean networks that ships travel between East Africa and the Middle East and South Asia. By that point, East Africa was a major supplier not only of ivory but of gold and rhinoceros horns, Amber, precious luxury goods that could not be obtained elsewhere. The ivory from Africa was of higher value than the ivory from India. It is harder I believe. So there were certain goods that he was already capitalizing on quite heavily. So he realized at some point in the early 1800s that he had to go and protect the trade roots, and being out on the tip of the Persian Gulf, he was quite far from where the action was. He could be encroached upon by other powers. So he picked up his entire retinue, his court, and moved everyone to Zanzibar some time in the 1830s, and established himself there as Sultan of Zanzibar and Oman, leaving behind in Oman a son of his to control that part of his domain.

So in Zanzibar, upon his death, he had numerous sons. Although he had just one wife, he had numerous concubines and lots and lots of children. There was a series of successions over the throne, and one of the sons that came to power was a man named Barghash. He did not immediately succeed his father. He tried to, but was usurped by another brother, and sent off into exile for having attempted to take the throne by force. When he was in exile, we're told that he spent quite a lot of time in India and traveling the world, and he saw court life in other parts of the world and decided that when he would return to Zanzibar-- and he was quite sure that he would at some point return as Sultan-- that he would develop a court life like he found elsewhere, a major component of which is music. There was court music, and court musicians in other courts that he visited, so when he became Sultan, as he did in the 1880s, he brought musicians from Egypt to come and play court music for having and his court, and he also sent musicians to be trained in Egypt, and he ordered instruments and created this court music that was pretty much an Egyptian court music transplanted to Zanzibar.

However, that didn't last very long, and over time, the music became very much indigenized. Instead of singing in Arabic, people started to sing in Swahili. Instead of using exclusively Arabic rhythms, and the maqamat, or modal system found in Middle Eastern music, they started incorporating African rhythms, and also a lot of Western rhythms, foxtrot, waltzes, cha-cha-cha. In the early 1900s, these were the popular rhythms in taarab music.

Sea view from Tippu Tip's (2004-Eyre)

B.E.: So you are saying that the Arabic modes and rhythms didn't last long it all. It is not a recent thing that they fell out of the music. It seems that happened even in the first 20 years.

K.A.: Yes. Some of that has remained, especially in the form of the bashraf. The bashraf are the instrumental interludes that start any given concert in Zanzibar. It's really a Zanzibar and possibly a Dar es Salaam phenomenon. Those two areas have retained more. And the proximity of Dar to Zanzibar of course is a factor. Today, it's a two-hour boat ride. It's 24 miles through this short channel. So they have retained the bashraf, which typically does use Arabic rhythms and Arabic maqam. Beyond that, there's not much that has been retained. Although, in Mombasa, Kenya, there is still some Arabic taarab that is performed today to my knowledge.

B.E.: Politically speaking, this Omani Zanzibar sultanate exercised power on the mainland as well, didn't it?

K.A.: I talked about Sultan Seyyid bin Said, the first Sultan of Zanzibar. He really was able to build up the economy of Zanzibar such that they used to say, "when the pipes play in Zanzibar, people dance at the lakes," meaning Lake Victoria, and Lake Tanganyika, all away across the other side of East Africa. Sultan Said introduced plantation agriculture, and developed the clove industry in Zanzibar, which became its prime product for 100 years or more, and really developed Zanzibar into this huge economic force. His son, the one who is often associated with the start of taarab, Barghash, ruled Zanzibar from 1870 to 1888, and he inherited this powerful domain that his father had built-up and was able to continue it. But it was substantially weakened, because by then, the British had come in and started to employ indirect rule by claiming Zanzibar as a protectorate, and ruling through the Sultan, but really being the power force at that point.

Church built on old Slave Market

B.E.: How to slavery fit into this story?

K.A.: The East African slave trade started out later than the Atlantic one. Slaves were traded on the East African coast, but they were not a commodity of importance until quite late, relatively speaking as slavery goes. The West African slave trade was up and running certainly in the 15th through the 18th, even 19th-century. But in East Africa, slaves didn't become a commodity of importance until really late in the 18th and into the 19th century. Slaves did not become a commodity of importance until the reign of Sultan Seyyid Said, because he was the one who introduced plantation agriculture with the clove industry. At that point, they needed an influx of slaves. There were slaves being sent out early to the Middle East, to what's now Iraq. There were Zanj being sent to Iraq quite early. In 1200, there was a very famous revolt, the Zanj Revolt of black slaves in Iraq, who drained the marsh land. The revolt was so successful that Arabs in that region decided not to employ massive amounts of slaves because it proved too costly to maintain order over them. So large-scale slavery didn't really picked up on the East African side of things until the French got involved in things with the sugar plantations in Mauritius and the Seychelles, and then the clove industry in Zanzibar. That's in the early 19th century.

B.E.: You mentioned that there is an alternative narrative about the origins of taarab.

Spices in Stonetown, Zanzibar (2004-Eyre)

K.A.: Yes, absolutely. The official script is one that I have been fighting against for awhile in my work, along with a couple of other scholars. We are of the opinion that taarab often gets overlooked for the way in which it developed on the coast, not only on Zanzibar, on the island, in the Sultan’s palaces, but how taarab emerged just through ordinary interactions among musicians on boats, who came in through these Indian Ocean networks, meeting up with musicians they met on the docks, and sharing musical ideas back and forth. Through those musical interactions, those very unrecorded, undocumented interchanges between people just sharing music and coming up with some interesting sounds together-- that is where I would say taarab also developed on the coast. And there you have, as opposed to the really imposed Middle Eastern sound, you had something else emerging that was very much syncretic from the get go. It didn't have to be sycretized after-the-fact, but was syncretic from the get go, with different musical instruments being contributed to the mix, as well as musical ideas, in terms of really, melody, and form.

B.E.: So this official version about Barghash and musicians from Egypt has gained currency because people so often repeat it. But is there any political significance to these two narratives? Or is it one of just people repeating the story and not questioning it?

K.A.: I think it's that. I think people have just accepted it. It has been repeated so often that people assume that is indeed the start of taarab. What is true is that Zanzibar taarab really was very, very dominant in part because of a particular singer by the name of Siti binti Saad who became wildly famous throughout East Africa and beyond. She did some recordings in Bombay in the late 20s, and those recordings circulated, so she got some fame outside of East Africa, but within East Africa, she was certainly a big hit in the 1930s. Zanzibar's version of taarab, because it got the official support from the court, did get to get recorded and played. By the way, do you also know the book by Laura Fair? She wrote a book called Pastimes and Politics [Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890 –1945: Ohio University Press, 2001] She has a whole chapter on Siti binti Saad. [Editor: Kelly subsequently provided this chapter and it is an excellent essay, indispensable to anyone interested in Siti Binti Saad!]

BE.: Who is Siti binti Saad?

K.A.: Siti binti Saad was a woman of slave ancestry who became a very, very famous taarab singer, whose voice became known outside of Zanzibar, certainly all up and down the East African coast, and beyond, because she was lucky enough to be taken introduced a recordings in Bombay, I think on the HMV label, and became a phenomenon far and wide. So her name became affiliated with taarab in a way that nobody else has since.

Siti Bint Saad (2004-Eyre)

B.E.: You write that she became responsible for “Africanizing" the taarab genre.

K.A.: She Africanized it because, although she was one of the first women taken in to sing for the Sultan as one of his court musicians—Sultan Barghash—she didn’t only sing it in Arabic as the Egyptian musicians before her had done. She started singing in Swahili. And she also started singing outside the palace walls. There was actually a rule prohibiting the performance of taarab outside of the palace, but nevertheless it was done, and her house was one of the places where people gathered to listen to taarab and on the spot improvisation of Swahili lyrics, to comment on what ever was happening of importance in the neighborhood or in court, to talk about political matters. One could do that through taarab, and do it in such a way that you camouflage what it is that you were really talking about. [Editor: Laura Fair’s essay details Siti binti Saad’s amazing history of commenting pointedly through music on the Sultan’s law, and later that of the British courts, both terribly unfair to women.]

B.E.: Let's talk about Swahili poetry, obviously an important aspect of taarab music.

K.A.: Swahili poetry extends quite far back in time. We have some very early poetic texts. One of the earliest is called “The Advice of Mwana Kupona,” sometime in the 18th century. This was a poem supposedly written by woman to tell her daughter how she should compose yourself as a future wife, how she treat her husband and have respect for him. We know Swahili poetry goes back several centuries. We don't have a precise dates as to when it first emerged, of course, but one of the names most affiliated with Swahili poetry is that of Lyongo Fumo, who is one of the national heroes of the Swahili coast, who is said to have lived in 1600s. And he is also a credited with being a poet himself, and having sung songs that are still connected today with wedding dances up and down the Swahili coast. So there is a long, rich literary tradition, and very different forms of Swahili poetry exist. You have the utenzi, which are the epics. You have wimbo, which is a word for song, and is a more simple poetic structure of typically six syllables for each half line. The taarab line is typically eight syllables plus eight syllables. So different forms of Swahili poetry have emerged over time, but there is a very rich, very extensive tradition of Swahili poetry. Sometimes, it is in the form of dueling, where people combat each other by composing on the spot, improvisatory poetry, and hurling insults sometimes back and forth at each other. So there is a lot in terms of Swahili poetry that one could go into, of which taarab is only one component.

Inside Tippu Tip's house (2004-Eyre)

B.E.: Let's talk about this idea of duality is that you write about. Counter opposing opposites is very popular form of presentation in Swahili culture, isn't it?



K.A.: Sure. Dualism up and down the Swahili coast is something that has been commented on by both local and foreign observers over the centuries. We have a wonderful text, a book dating from the 19th century by a Swahili anthropologist of sorts named Antor Benwengyi Bakari, who wrote down the customs of the Swahili people as he saw them at the time. So we have this wonderful knowledge about how Swahili culture was lived, by local as well as foreign observers. And one thing that has been commented upon, and frequently exemplified by stories and anecdotes of various kinds, is the competitive spirit that we see in so many aspects of life. The political life certainly. We see it in sports. Whereas, say, in the United States, it is typical for each major city to have a single basketball team, a single baseball team, a single football team, in East Africa—and I think it goes even beyond East Africa—you will have at least two teams per town. And everyone in town becomes a diehard fan of one or the other.

Zein L'Abdin CD, taarab from Mombasa, Kenya

This also comes out where I lived in Tanga, on the northern coast of Tanzania, in its religious life. There were mosques that had dualistic relationships with each other, where one would announce that it's Eide, and then the other one would say, no, it's not Eide yet. This certainly comes out in music as well, and so you would have musical groups pitched against each other, singing songs about each other. Often times, ngoma societies—ngoma being the traditional dance forms, with people forming ngoma societies to perform at their weddings and also to serve as self-help groups, to assist people when they're putting on events. In the 1950s, two ngoma societies were especially popular in Tanga. One is called Fanta, and the other is called Kanada Dry, Kanada Dry being a form of ginger ale that had recently been introduced, and Fanta being a form of orange soda that had recently been introduced. So when anything appeared in twos, this made an obvious choice for naming these dualisms that keep reoccurring.

This goes back even into the spatial organization of the villages and towns along the Swahili coast, which were often divided into two halves, that in anthropological terms are called moieties. There would be a spatial division between the town, but it would also take on more symbolic meanings, in terms of newcomers versus old-timers, long-standing Freeborn people versus people of more slave ancestry. These are the ways in which these dualisms could play out. So, in 1950s Tanga, these two sodas had just been introduced, and because there were two of them, the local women's groups decided to take on new names and named themselves after the sodas. So these women's Ngoma groups started putting on performances insulting each other on the basis of their various qualities, the number one being membership in the wrong group. So the Fanta people would sing songs against the Kanada Dry people, and the reverse would be true as well.

B.E.: How did this get expressed in taarab music?

K.A.: In terms of taarab, this came out, as it did with the ngoma groups, with the emergence in the 1970s of two groups called Black Star and Lucky Star Taarab. … Taarab in Tanga has a very different style from that of Zanzibar. Zanzibar taarab, because it started at this very state supported level, had access to more instruments, and develop these large orchestras that today still number of around 30 to 40 people. The two most famous ones today in Zanzibar are Ikhwani Safaa Musical Club, “ The Brotherhood of Purity," and Culture Musical Club. You did not have that phenomenon developing in small towns and villages up along the coast. In Tanga, where I lived, Black Star and Lucky Star Musical Club still had 10 to 20 people in them. The number of musicians was much smaller, but you still had a lot of people singing chorus and back up.

So Black Star emerged in 1970, and they started their tradition of incorporating rhythms from the popular dansi groups. Dansi, now. I am using that term to refer to the popular dance music that was performed and towns primarily. That was pan-ethnic. It wasn't like ngoma, which is usually ethnically based. Often, you would differentiate ngoma on the basis of whether it was a Sukuma ngoma, a Chagga ngoma, a Nyamwezi ngoma, or what have you. Dansi is the urban, jazz music one hears in bars, and that was where Western influence was most often heard, along with Congolese music. The soukous sound in today’s dansi, is just the latest iteration of that.

Maulidi Juma and party rehearsing (Eyre)

So, Black Star Musical Club took taarab along a different path by taking the rhythms from the dansi groups of that era, and also taking the more electronic instruments, such as the electric guitar, and electric bass, and ultimately, electric keyboard, and using these to replace the older taarab instruments like the oud, the string double bass, and the harmonium. Black Star Musical Club developed a rivalry with a group that broke off from it called Lucky Star Musical Club, also known as Nyota Njema, which means Lucky Star in Swahili. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, these two bands warred with each other by singing songs about each other, but always through the employ of metaphor. They would have very rarely sung direct insults toward each other. Taarab, the poetic form, is well-known for its use of innuendo and metaphor and multiple layers of meaning to talk about social life, and comment on social life. So Black Star and Lucky Star offers only one of several examples of this competitiveness one finds up and down the Swahili coast.

B.E.: Let’s talk about some of the particular songs that Black Star and Lucky Star sighing against one another.

K.A.: One of the first songs that was directed against Lucky Star by Black Star was the song “Mnazi Mkinda,” which means “Young Coconut-Palm.” It was composed by Black Star’s composer Kibwana Said, and sung by their lead singer, Sharmila. The song describes a Young Coconut Palm, the height of which is the important part. It says, "You protect yourself, yet your wealth is destroyed. Your young coconut palm—wily people toy with it. They beat you in cunning, those thieves who desire it.” What it was referring to is the fact that because the coconut palm is still young and short, people can come up very easily and steal the coconuts off of it. This was a very oblique way of talking about a woman whose fruits are easily taken by others, meaning that she's more loose and promiscuous, and the implication was that, Black Star was singing the song directing it towards Lucky Star’s key singer, a woman named Shakila who happens to be rather short. So it was taken as an insult against her.

Now, Lucky Star didn't take this lying down, no, they had to write their response back. And their response was a song called “Kitumbiri,” which means “Monkey.” “Kitumbiri” didn't insult a particular person per se within Black Star, but tried to talk about bigger issues, saying that Black Star shouldn't be jealous about having Lucky Star also on the scene. They shouldn't be greedy and try to take all the taarab success in this one city of Tanga for itself, that there could be more than one taarab group there. So “Kitumbiri,” the song “Monkey,” says, “Even you, monkey, favored monkey, you thought yourself so great, wanting to uproot trees. In fact you are incapable of breaking branches. Goodbye, favored monkey. I think you are confused if you come looking for a fight. If the mighty tree falls on you, you will be injured." And the refrain says, "Favored monkey, you eat at your home and then come to eat against ours." So this was saying: You have your success. You have your fans. There is no need way you have to also try to steal our fans and our success. We can have ours too. Don't be greedy. So that's an example of some of the exchanges that were sent back and forth between these two groups as the rivalry was at its peak in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Globestyle CD of Tanga taarab

B.E.: People really got into this, right?

K.A.: Oh, they loved it. In the seventies and eighties, Black Star and Lucky Star, not only in Tanga. It went far beyond that, because they were also recorded by studios not too far away in Mombasa, Kenya, just across the border in Kenya. Their recordings were played on Radio Tanzania, and also in Kenya, on KBC, and the popularity of Black Star and Lucky Star spread throughout what is now Tanzania.

B.E.: So the music is one thing, but the competition creates a sense of drama that people are drawn into as well, right?

K.A.: Oh, yes. As with the sports teams, people become passionate fans of one club or the other. They come to all that club's performances and show their support in the same way as they do at sports events here are elsewhere, routing your team on, and showing your support by coming in high numbers when they perform. In

Lucky Star Musical Club of Tanga

B.E.: Ultimately, it's not really about anything, is it? It's just personal choice.

K.A.: Well, people have talked about how earlier on, especially, when slavery was recent history, not the older history that it is now, when slave ancestry still very much defined people, groups could be identified as having more slave ancestry attached to them as opposed to more freeborn ancestry. But certainly over the last hundred years, that has faded away, and the now, it is just a matter of personal choice.

B.E.: I find it interesting that in the sleve notes to the Black Star/Lucky Star CD on Globestyle, Werner Graebner does not discuss the rivalry between the groups. He stays away from that altogether. What do you make of that?

K.A.: I don't know why. But you know, the kind of rivalry it was, even though it could occasionally, as in the case of “Young Coconut Palm,” take a nastier tone to it, in fact, most of the time, I don't think it was terribly nasty. It was just good fun. It was just supporting your group, and your family would be more aligned with a certain band than another. But ultimately, all the musicians had started out together. They were all members of Black Star at one time, before they broke off. This is a pattern that would then be repeated further on down the line in 1980s and nineties, when Lucky Star would break apart, and other people break apart from Black Star, to form yet another group. You saw the emergence of Golden Star Taarab and White Star Taarab, and then Babloom Modern Taarab, all through the same process of groups breaking apart on the basis of sometimes personality differences, sometimes disputes over the finances, or what have you. Or just wanting to have the opportunity to have more creative authority. So I don't think there was always a very nasty component to it, although it could take that route.

B.E.: OK, I've got some terms I want you to define for us. Talk about mipasho, mafumbo, and vishindo.
Babloom Modern Taarab (K. Askew)



K.A.: Well, when we talk about taarab music, especially talking to people of an older generation, the word that will often come up is mafumbo. Mafumbo means metaphor. That's being able to talk about something by employing metaphor or simile. An example would be the song "Monkey." This is Lucky Star talking about Black Star, but not referring to them by name, referring to them instead as a monkey, trying to employ the attributes of monkeys—monkeys that are always trying to eat anything and everything that they find in a very greedy manner—trying to employ those attributes in reference to Black Star Musical Club. Taarab as very often performed in the context of wedding ceremonies. So love and marriage and sex or key elements of that. So, because of local concepts of etiquette, if you don't want to speak about sexuality openly, you would employ mafumbo to talk about sexuality. You might also employ metaphor to describe your lover in very positive and admiring ways, so mafumbo is a very important word in terms of taarab poetry.

Mipasho is another word that gets used these days, in fact much more than in times past. Mipasho means messages, and sending messages through the text, often by employing mafumbo. So in the case of Black Star and Lucky Star, the monkey is a mafumbo. It's a metaphor, but also there is a message being sent is well saying, "Don't be greedy." So that's the mipasho that is being sent through that song. Mipasho these days oftentimes don't employ mafumbo, which is one of the ways people talk about taarab today being very different from the taarab of a couple of generations ago. They say that mipasho are now right out there, very direct. And it's true. A lot of the lyrics that we have today are more direct. They will be saying, "Don't take my man. You are nothing compared to me. I can beat you any time." Instead of, as in the case of “Monkey,” trying to use a metaphor to and say the same things.

Bi Kidude CD-Zanzibar

Vishindo is another term that comes up in the context of taarab, and that is challenges, challenging somebody in terms of their moral upstandingness, or their character, or their reputation. Vishindo is a word that gets used describe how taarab lyrics can incite or provoke people, especially women—unfortunately so, because that's a relatively recent development in the history of taarab performance. Before, it used to be very sedate and cordial. There would be these undercurrents certainly of critique being passed back and forth through lyrics, but nevertheless it would be very much under the surface. You wouldn't notice. Even when I started doing my research in the 1980s, and early nineties, it was still very much under the surface. I mean, the first time I ever experienced taarab being employed in this way. I didn't know what had happened. It happened so quickly that I hadn't caught it. All I knew is that I was sitting there with a group of women at a wedding event. There was a song being played. The next thing, a woman was running out of the room in tears, and she had been publicly insulted. I completely missed it. And the only way you could have known was if you understood the lyrics and you also understood the gossip in town, and you knew that the lyrics that had been sung at that particular moment, which were saying something the effect of, "Oh, I know you for what you are. You are a snake. You are coveting my husband. But I am not beguiled. I am fully aware of your character." So the song is saying that and then at that moment, during that song, another woman out of the audience going up to tip the musicians. Ostensibly, it's just to show appreciation for the music. You could be implying that you like the particular vocalist singing, or that you just like that song. But everybody else knows that these things are often very meaning-laden. By choosing to tip at a certain moment in time, or who you look at when you tip, or in what direction your face is pointed when you are tipping, or perhaps a nod of the shoulder, or any sort of indirect gesture with your hand, could send the meanings of that lyric towards somebody else in the audience. So in the case that I first experienced in 1987, this woman had been publicly accused of coveting another woman's husband, and ran from the room. But it was very much under the surface.

B.E.: You talk about "taarab interventions," how in some cases these kinds of the events can actually change the course of people's lives. Can you give an example of that?

K.A.: Sometimes, the use of taarab can actually have long-lasting implications, or consequences that can change people's lives. So for instance, there is a case that I was told love but did not actually witness, of the wife of a taarab singer who heard rumors about her husband's wandering ways, and left him. And when his group was out performing somewhere at a distance—it was an overnight tour, and when he came home, he discovered that his wife had packed up the children and her belongings and left and returned to her familial home. So he was now separated. The town knew about this. It was quite the talk of the town. Life went on, but eventually, the time came when he and his band performed in town, and his wife came to the performance, and during the song that's called “Jamvi la Wageni,” which means “The Visitor’s Mat,” she came up to tip. The song says, "Truly, I believe that a person's character is revealed through their behavior. I never would have believed it. I, your friend, was taken by surprise. In fact he is a visitor's mat on which many have taken rest. He considered me at dupe, the world's biggest fool. He could not get used to being inside. He went seeking out others to sit on. I've had enough of him, my friends. It's not that I hate him. It's that it's not right for one person to remain true and faithful, while the other becomes a visitor's mat on which others sit."

Culture Musical Club singers

So, here again, we have an example of how a mafumbo is being employed, namely a visitor's mat, which is very common. When you go visit somebody in the Swahili household, they would pull out a special mat for you to sit on. Now in this case, the song employs that to mean something else, an unfaithful and promiscuous spouse. So this wife went up and tipped her husband during this song. He was not singing it. Someone else was singing it. She didn't even look at him. She just went up and tipped and went back to her seat, but because everyone knew the gossip going on, that she had left him, and he was there, it was recognized that she was sending a message to him. And then, soon after that, the negotiations between his family and her family picked up, and a lot of pressure was put on them to reconcile, and in the end they did. And so people say that was a case where, by taking it out of the private domain, and putting it in a very public place, yet in still a very oblique way-- it wasn't a public accusation in the sense that we normally think of, although it was-- it had the impact by resounding throughout and causing yet more talk about their situation, that the elders picked up their pace in trying to negotiate peaceful solution to the problem, and in the end were able in fact to bring about a reconciliation.

B.E.: While we're on the subject of negotiations, you talk about the Tanzanian national identity as being a negotiated phenomenon. It's a complex world with lots of contradictions and paradoxes. Is it possible to connect the kind of story you just hold on a personal level with the broader, more political, realm?

K.A.: Although people think of taarab as being most linked to these kinds of domains, the personal, what I call the politics of the personal, and social relationships, and very intimate communities, people who know what's going on, people who hear the gossip about each other—that’s where taarab is very particularly potent, because that's where meaning can be drawn out from a person's actions as they go up to tip the musicians are not. Nevertheless, despite having a great amount of potency and consequence in those local, intimate settings, still, taarab has managed to have relevance at the national level, not the same relevance, not the same significance, but nevertheless a great deal of significance.

In my work, I talk about how in 1992, Tanzania officially embraced multipartyism. Up until that point, it had been officially a single-party, socialist state. Now, socialism as an economic program had been dispensed with in the 1980s. Liberalization started in the mid-1980s with the second president, Ali Hassan Mwenyi. But socialism still was kind of the official line, and actually it still is. The Constitution has been recently amended, but it still says, "Our goal is to create a socialist society." But in 1992, due to pressure from the World Bank and the IMF, in terms of loan conditionality, it was required that Tanzania adopt a multiparty, democratic system. A lot of money was poured into the country to support the emergence of new political parties that would be able to contest the elections, and oppose the ruling party of Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM), which means Party of the Revolution. That is still the ruling party of Tanzania today. So this other political party came up into existence, but they have been very weak and very young. The didn't have a whole lot to them, besides having the support of the West, and of international power brokers. CCM very much had an advantage in terms of having inculcated a couple of generations of Tanzanians into believing that CCM was the end-all and be-all of political life in Tanzania. And so they had that advantage. They also have the advantage of control over the major media resources, the radio, and in Zanzibar, they had television. The Tanzanian mainland, surprisingly, did not get television until 1994, two years after multipartyism was introduced.

Culture Musical Club with Bi Kidude (Eyre)

So, the problem became for the ruling party was how did they convince people that they still deserved support, despite the terrible economic situation that had emerged by the early 1990’s. The eighties were a terrible time for Tanzania in terms of economics. There had been the war with Idi Amin in Uganda where the Tanzanian's went in and single-handedly ousted this guy who was threatening them and many others. The oil crisis had terrible ramifications for Tanzania. There were a whole series of droughts and famines and climatic problems, issues with rainfall, such that Tanzania and much of Africa in the early eighties was suffering terrible economic problems. So the ruling party had to convince people that despite having all these problems they were still the party to lead into the next new phase of multiparty democratic Tanzania. How could they do that?

Well, one of the things they did in 1992 was to create a brand-new cultural troupe called TOT, Tanzania One Theatre. The main attraction for this troupe would be the taarab. This was pretty interesting a development, because although there had been some government support for taarab groups, it was really minimal compared with the government support for, say, ngoma, the traditional dance forms that peppered the country. Ngoma got a lot of government support because it was seen as indigenous, unproblematically African, very authentic. Whereas, taarab was problematic in that it sounded mixed, as it is. It is a syncretic form. It sounds Middle Eastern. It sounds Indian. It sounds African. It's all of that. And therefore it is not so automatically authentic to the newcomer. So the government had not really put a lot of money into taarab.

In Tanga, Lucky Star got a lot of government gigs to perform for visiting dignitaries, and to go and tour and represent Tanzania outside, but not as much as ngoma societies, and not even as much as dansi groups. So TOT, this Tanzania One Theatre, was something quite new in terms of cultural policy, and it burst onto the scene after the government had laid all these rumors in the press about how something new was coming, and it was being hidden, sequestered in the army barracks in Bagamoyo. And this was their new weapon. It was actually called that in the newspapers, “the new weapon of the ruling party." And it turned out it was this taarab group. It wasn't only taarab. They also did ngoma, and dansi, and theatrical performances, but really, the main attraction was taarab. This group merged the sort of large, Zanzibar, orchestral sound with elements of modern taarab from the mainland and places like Tanga. They took the faster beats, such as one that's very popular called chakacha, and also took the lyrics to a new level of directness that had not yet really been seen. Although there were still some songs with mafumbo, there was a lot more directness, and some people even say matusi, which means profanity, very thinly disguised references to sexuality.

Culture Musical Club with Bi Kidude (Eyre)

B.E.: Tell us about one of their early hits, the one about the high-class a prostitute.

K.A.: The first big hit of TOT was a song called “Ngwinji.” “Ngwinji” means "High-Class Prostitute." The song lyrics say, “A prostitute puts on airs! For what does she put on airs? She also boasts! Of what can she boast? Even if she puts on makeup, who will want her? You prostitute, don't include yourself in the group,” meaning in our group. "She sits and groups, telling people lies that every weekend she spends US dollars. But who will give you money, prostitute. You are not included among those who are loved." So that was one of their songs, very direct, not using metaphor at all except maybe in US dollars being used to represent sort of high-class, foreign status. So to be able to sing about prostitutes in so bald a fashion, by the government troupe, this being their number one, debut song, was considered rather shocking, but exciting at the same time. It really broke new ground in terms of taarab performance, because once the government could do it, then of course others could be equally bald in their references.

Another big hit that the government group did was a song called “TX Mpenzi,” which means "Expatriate Lover." And that was kind of a mafumbo song in that the song is technically about a doctor, trained abroad, so he's an expatriate-trained doctor, which makes him a better doctor supposedly than one trained in Tanzania. It says, "Expatriate lover, my doctor from long ago, he has been removing tumors from my abdomen since long ago. TX, cut me open. Remove my inner illness. I am his only patient. Lady, step aside. I love his injections. They do not hurt my body. When he applies his medicine, my body goes numb. Cut me open, doctor. Cleave me. I await your operation." So this was a metaphor of sorts, but very bald in its meaning.

Sign outside headquarters of CMC (Eyre)

B.E.: Would this qualify as matusi, or profanity?

K.A.: Yeah, this would be an example of what was making people say that now taarab has entered the realm of matusi. It is no longer mafumbo. It is now matusi.

B.E.: Let's go back to the nationalists for the moment. At that time, you write there were really four kinds of music, taarab, dansi, ngoma, and kwaya. Can you just go through that list and tell me how the nationalists used and viewed each of these genres?

K.A.: The way in which the government of Tanzania approached culture changed very much over time. I would say that in the nationalist period, say 1954 to 1967—that would be the period leading up to independence and immediately after, before the introduction of the Arusha Declaration, which introduced socialism—during that period, the two forms of music which were much more privileged were dansi and ngoma, dansi much more so. Dansi had a lot of influences from not only Congolese music, but Cuban music, and Westerns swing. Foxtrot, cha-cha—these were the beats that were very popular in dansi at the time. This was the music that was danced to by the colonial elite. It also became the music danced to by the African elite, who were aspiring to be their own leaders, so this was a way of establishing cultural parity by saying, "We are your cultural equals. We dance to the same music. We can create same kind of music that you do." So dansi was very much privileged in the nationalist period.

Immediately after independence, however, the first president of Tanzania was Julius Nyerere, and he said, "We don't want to be black Europeans. We want to be ourselves, Tanzanians.” So, suddenly, ngoma became more important than dansi at that point. And ngoma, the traditional dance forms, were sort of a turning of the eye inward to the roots, to try and celebrate that which had been denigrated by the colonial order. So the colonial order thought of ngoma as being incessant drum music that didn't have much meaning, and now finding beauty in that, finding that to be a source of pride, was very important for the new nationalist government in the early sixties.

Culture Musical Club with Makame Faki (Eyre)

In 1967, Julius Nyerere introduced socialism into the political and economic system of Tanzania. And his brand of socialism came to be known as Ujamaa. Ujamaa means “familyhood.” He meant it in the way of coming together of people as members of a family, working together, helping each other, and sharing responsibilities for the growth of the nation, the big family, writ large. So in the Socialist period, Ngoma became again the preferred form of music, because it was music of the people. It wasn't associated with an elite class the way that dansi was. And taarab was also associated with an elite class, because it had been associated with the Sultan’s court in Zanzibar. So that was very much upperclass, bourgeois stuff. Even though it really wasn't always. Siti binti Saad was not at all a member of the upperclass. She brought taarab down to every day, ordinary people's music. But nevertheless, it was affiliated with that, with the Sultan’s palace, and certain people's minds, especially the policy makers and the intellectuals of Tanzania during the Socialist period. So ngoma was their preferred form of music, because it represented the music of the masses.

Ngoma, however, had to be altered sometimes to be completely in tune with the Socialist agenda. So when there were ngoma that were either exclusively female or male, if they were going to the representative of the Socialist, gender-equal nation that Tanzania was aspiring to be, then they had to be modified to include both men and women. So you saw the re-choreographing of a lot of ngoma to sort of fit that. They also got re-choreographed to be more Socialist in an aesthetic sense. Oftentimes Ngoma were danced in circles, and this was seen to be somehow backward by some of the people who were in charge of culture in the Ministry of Culture at that time. They thought that it would be better to dance in lines, that that was more modern. Because socialism has a modernist element to it. It sees itself as a rejection of the past, especially in Marxist socialism, and Maoist socialism. Nyerere socialism is less so. He did embrace the past, but he nevertheless did sort of modify it to suit the vision he had for the future. So ngoma were modified to be more Socialist in the eyes of these policy makers.

After the Socialist period ended in the 1980s, now we had economic liberalization occurring. Things started to change, especially with the introduction of political pluralism in 1992. And that’s when taarab had its turn as part of the scene. A fourth kind of music that did have a place in all this was a form of music called kwaya, which is a form of the English word "choir". And it is derived originally from religious music, from choir music found in churches that missionaries had introduced into East Africa. So hymns and choirs were introduced, but they were changed in Tanzania to also be a form of secular, political music. So you have choir music that is not at all religious, but sings about the government, about party leaders, and is very much used especially in Youth Congresses and youth groups. I was an ironic twist, because it really is very much of foreign import, not at all like ngoma with indigenous roots, but nevertheless was included in the national policy of cultural support because it was tweaked to become a form of political praise song.

Culture Musical Club with Makame Faki (Eyre)

B.E.: Let's talk about taarab music beyond Tanzania. You write that the trained ear can easily distinguished taarab of Mombasa, Zanzibar, Tanga, or Dar es Salaam. What would the trained ear be listening for in making those distinctions?



K.A.: Regional styles can be distinguished on the basis of their musical attributes. So for instance, Mombasa taarab is thought of as more influenced by Indian music, especially Bollywood, Hindi films, or being more purely Arabic. I'm thinking of Zein l’Abdin who does still adhere to some of the maqamat [classical Arabic modes] when he plays the oud. Maqamat are not really relevant any more in other parts such as Tanga or Dar es Salaam. The oud is still played in Zanzibar, so Zanzibar and Mombasa are the two places where you are still regularly hearing the oud. Mombasa groups tend to be smaller, very small, four or five musicians maximum. They will have a lot of acoustic instruments, the oud as I mentioned, but also sometimes the ney, tabla or dumbek.

Female singers for Culture Musical Club (Eyre)

B.E.: Taishkota?

K.A.: Taishkota? Nowadays, yes, because of Werner [Graebner]. It had died. Werner resuscitated it. But also sometimes the violin or fidla, which is what they used to use before the taishkota. Linguistically, you can also pick up Mombasa songs because there are certain ways in which they pronounce things in Swahili that are different from places in Tanzania. So the small sound, the more common use of Indian melodies, and sometimes the use of the maqamat would be the ways in which you would distinguish Mombasa taarab. And also, in the Mombasa a region, they would use ngoma rhythms from that area. Mombasa is close to groups such as the Digo and the Giriyama, and other groups that you don't have in Tanzania. So whatever rhythms are unique to those groups, those could find their ways into Mombasa taarab, and that would be different from taarab elsewhere.

On the northern coast of Tanzania, not too far from the Kenyan border, is Tanga, with about 200,000 people in it. As I mentioned, Black Star and Lucky Star are the two groups that most became identified with Tanga. These groups, their sound, was unique in that they were among the first to really incorporate electric guitar, electric bass, and electric keyboard, and they were among the first to start introducing the western drum kit as well. Again, like the Mombasa groups, they are smaller. They tend to be five or six musicians, several vocalists and then backup singers, for total ensemble of 10 to 12 people. But what distinguishes the sound of Tanga is more use of and Ngoma rhythm called chakacha, which you can also find in Mombasa. You can find it anywhere, but Tanga is particularly famous for that. Chakacha is a fast, triple beat. We might consider it a 6/8 beat in western notation. And the nice thing about chakacha, as with any beat felt in six, is that it is divisible by three, and also by two. So you can feel it as 1 2 3, 4 5 6, or else 1 2, 3 4, 5 6. So that you're feeling a strong two downbeat or else a three downbeat.

The Zanzibar sound, because of its supposedly courtly origins, developed these large orchestras. You didn't exclusively have large orchestras in Zanzibar. In fact, Zanzibar used to have quite a number of smaller groups. A lot of those have died out, especially the women's taarab groups. There used to be exclusively women's taarab groups, but they've all pretty much died out now. You have smaller groups called kidumbak, which is taarab that's got a very fast pace to it. It's almost necessary to draw that distinction, because what does get associated first and foremost with Zanzibar is the large orchestra sound. Now you have these modern taarab groups in Zanzibar which are quite small because they are very heavily dependent on the synthesizer and drum machines. So the quintessential Zanzibar sound would be the orchestral sound with the string ensemble of several violins, cello, string double bass. You would also have oud and the ganun. Zanzibar and some few groups in Dar are about the only places on the East African coast where you will find the ganun, which is the trapezoidal zither. You will also have various percussion instruments, bongos, and the dumbek, tambourine, maracas, “timing sticks,” which we call clave in English. So you would have a wide range of acoustic, percussion instruments. Nowadays, the orchestras in Zanzibar also have electric guitar, and sometimes electric bass as well, and electric keyboard.

Taishkota used by Maulidi Musical Party (Eyre)

The songs in Zanzibar are also something that are different in terms of their length. The typical Zanzibar taarab song last 20 minutes. A typical Tanga taarab song lasts eight. So in Zanzibar, the lines are repeated more, and their much longer interludes between verses. That also is sedate giveaway for a Zanzibar song. And then Dar es Salaam is identifiable in being sort of an amalgam of the Zanzibar, large orchestral sound, with the more fast-paced chakacha beat of Tanga. TOT, the Tanzania One Theater group, is perhaps representational of Dar es Salaam, along with Muungano Cultural Group, which actually predates TOT, and was doing a lot of what TOT does, but an earlier point in time. Muungano and TOT became rivals, and still are until today.

B.E.: Let's talk about a few more these songs. How about “Kubwa Lao,” “The Toughest One,” by Babloom Modern Taarab?



Kidumbak CD

K.A.: Another example of a song that employs mipasho, the more direct accusations, even vishindo, these challenges back-and-forth, is a song called "Kubwa Lao.” It really means "The Biggest of Them All" or "The Toughest One." In this song, the composer, a man called Seif Kassim Kisauji, tried to incorporate his knowledge of English, so it's a mix of Swahili and English, let me read you one verse so that you can get a sense of that. “I have already prepared myself for today's event, and I'm sure all challenges end here with me. The floor has cleared. Let the toughest one stand up." And the chorus to the song says, "For calmness, I have no match. And for evil, I am number one." Evil, perhaps, wasn't the best word, but I couldn't find a really good corresponding term for that. It just means for doing that somebody, if I want to. Not that I evil through and through. But if I want to do something against you, I can. This song is a direct challenge to somebody. It's a direct song in a sense of being a mipasho. There are no metaphors all. It's just telling someone: watch out. I'm the toughest one. Don't try to challenge me because you will fail. That song is used a lot, but it became very popular in the mid-1990s, towards the tail end of my field research.

By this time, the decorum of a typical taarab event had started to lift, and started to fragment. By the end of my time in the field, some men I knew were not allowing their wives to go any more to taarab events, because the decorum had fallen aside so much that people were overtly fighting at events. It was not uncommon any more to go to a taarab event and have one woman tipping at the same time another woman is tipping, and they're both tipping for the same reason, so for instance, during this song, they're both saying, "I am number one." "No, I'm number one." "No, I'm number one." "No, I'm number one." And for things to devolve to the point where they would start shoving one another or even tearing at each others' clothes. So that’s a big difference from even the start of my fieldwork and what I understand taarab to have been like in 1970s and 1960s, and certainly earlier, when civility and courteousness and decorum were very much the mode of the day.

B.E.: That's fascinating. And while we’re on that, do you have an update on that situation having just being in Tanzania?

Werner Graebner and Makame Faki (Eyre)

K.A.: I was just in Zanzibar to film a documentary about Ikhwani Safaa Musical Club, which celebrated its 100th anniversary this year, which I'm pretty excited about because very few people know that Africa even has orchestras, much less ones that are as old as that. It fact, that's older than the London Philharmonic, so that's pretty amazing. When they are performing, there's still a lot of decorum, because it's very much considered the more classical, ideal form of taarab. That's not to say that it's not an exciting event. Women still jump up in large numbers. At this 100th anniversary concert, huge swarms of people came up to tip, and tipping multiple times sometimes during the same song. There was a lot of excitement and dancing, although technically you are not really there to dance.

I once made the mistake when I was in the field of saying to my friend, "Come on, let's go and dance." And she said, "No, no, no. I will go tip, but I won't dance." She corrected my Swahili. I was saying kuchesa, to dance. Kutunza is to tip. That is acceptable for Swahili women. You can go and tip. That is decorous. That's civil behavior. The dancing is questionable. You might call your reputation into question that way. So there's still a lot of tipping. I don't know that it has devolved any more. That moment of violent behavior has come and I don't know whether it's gone, but it's certainly been tamed. I think in certain situations, depending on where the taarab is being performed, it might be more likely to occur than in other places. But you still have very much the courteousness of taarab, still even as you have some more riotous behavior breaking out.

B.E.: How about the song “Kumanya Mdigo?” That is the song you used to sing with Babloom Modern Taarab, right?

K.A.: I had trained as classical pianist all throughout college, and I went to the field for my first time in 1987. But when I went to do my doctoral research, it was 1992 to 95. My first year, I was very much the observer. In anthropology and ethnomusicology both, one of our main field techniques is participant observation. So that first year of my three years was more on the observing side. If I participated, it was as an honor on cultural officer. I would go to offense and the given a special, honored chair, and I would sit and watch them, and people would come and ask me for advice on how we do things in the West, and how they could improve their performance practice, and things like that. I didn't really particularly want to be in that role.

Kelly Askew with Babloom Modern Taarab

But eventually, some of the bands that I was getting to know by attending their rehearsals invited me. One band in particular was a group called the Babloom Modern Taarab. They had been invited to perform on Kenyan television. And it's not that far away. Depending on how long you set the border—the border crossing was always the long part of it—but it could be as short as a three-hour drive from Tanga to Mombasa. So we went to Mombasa for them to perform at KBC, the Kenyan Broadcasting Corporation studios, for a show called Borodani, which means entertainment. It was a show that featured mostly local, East African musicians. We had all this time to kill on the bus, and at the border, going and coming back, and they asked me, "Why are you so interested in our music?" And I mentioned, "Well, you know, in my country, I am also a musician." And they said, "Oh really? What do you play?" And I said, "I play piano." I tried to describe what I piano was, but most people had never seen one. Being the tropical, equatorial place that it is, pianos don't live very well in such conditions. But they had a keyboard with them, a small Casio keyboard. And I said, "It's kind of like that, but many more keys, and bigger."

So they urged me to play for them, and once they discovered my ability, they decided that they would teach me to play with them. And as happened so often in these taarab groups, they break apart, and members leave to join other groups, and to form their own new groups. So part of Babloom split off and ended up forming a different group called Freedom Modern Time. And one of the people that left to form Freedom was the keyboardist. So suddenly a spot was open, and a very much needed a keyboardist, and it just so happened that I was there. So they trained me to be their new keyboardist.

An interesting thing about instrumental music in East Africa is that women are not typically instrumentalists. If they play anything, they play small percussion instruments like the daff, which is a larger, snare drum type thing. Or the tambourine, or clave, which they call timing sticks. So one of the most famous pictures of Siti binti Saad is one where she's holding this daff. So it is certainly not impossible for women to play instruments, but to play something like the keyboard or the guitar or the oud, this is not typically seen. So when I was invited to play, there was a funny story about how they decided to give me a band uniform. My first day to play, I was so honored that I was being incorporated into the band to this degree. I was so honored that they had thought to make me a uniform, and they so proudly presented me with this brand-new shirt. They were all going to wear black pants, and so I wore a black skirt with my new shirt, and impressed upon me how they had made sure to tell the tailor to sew it as a woman's shirt rather than a man's shirt. And yet when I got to the performance, I discovered that all the women were wearing yellow polkadotted dresses, and I was dresses as a classificatory male. I was classified as a male because of my role as instrumentalist, because men are the only ones who normally play instruments. So I became a classificatory male, until they discovered I could sing! Then, I got to wear the uniform of the women. So that was an improvement in my stature, I thought.

Culture Musical Club violinist (Eyre)

So the song, “Kumanya Mdigo,” is one of the songs that I was assigned to sing, and it is unusual in taarab, because it is not in Swahili. I have talked about taarab as being Swahili poetry, but it does not exclusively have to be in Swahili. There are cases where other languages from Tanzania and Kenya are employed, so you have the occasional Giryama taarab song, or Haaya song. And it so happens that this song, “Kumanya Mdigo,” is sung in the language Kidigo. It was written by a Digo member of the group, and it's a very interesting song. I mean, some people would think of it as self-deprecating, because the song says, "Watch out for the Digo. When you see a Digo going about town, don't look down on him. When you see him growth thin, it is due to hardship. Don't do to him things that he doesn't like. Despite his appearance, he is as hard as nails. When he walks, he looks weak because his body is aged. But don't be frightened of him. Don't play around with them. The Digo has no friends. His friend is the millipede. Do not laugh at him or mock him. So if you don't know the Digo, ask, and you will be told. You should be afraid of him. Don't play around with him."

It's sort of pointing out the fact that a lot of Digo are poor. The common occupation for a Digo is to be a fisherman, or a small-scale agriculturalist, a small-scale farmers. Still, he's saying they are tough as rocks. It was composed by a Digo person, and that is the song I became affiliated with singing, even though I am not at all Digo, much less Swahili.

B.E.: You seem to argue that music has played a role in building Tanzania's national identity. How has that worked?

K.A.: In my work I talk about how people employ music, people in all different positions of social life, the wife of the taarab singer having to comment on her husband's unfaithful ways, up to the ruling party trying to harness the potency of taarab, trying to let taarab groups sing songs that would support it. When Tanzania One Theater were performing songs that were very bald in their meaning, more so than any other group had ever attempted before, it seemed rather ironic that they were linked to the government, which had very strict censorship rules. Songs would all have to pass before a censorship board before they could be aired on the radio or recorded by the national recording company at the radio station. It seemed an abuse of power that now that this government troupe should now be absolved of having to go through the same hoops that the other groups had to go through. They could sing whenever they wanted. You would have expected, if you thought about government groups singing for the government, you would expect of them not to be singing about prostitutes or foreign doctors injecting women, but in fact singing about the government, singing the praises of the government, and the ruling party, and the president. And it's true that some of the groups did that, some of the songs did that. But taarab's power is in the realm of social relationships, and people use it to negotiate different things in terms of their social relationships.

Culture Musical Club violinist (Eyre)

Political relationships are certainly one aspect of social relationships, as in songs such as “Mwanya.” A mwanya is a hole, the gap between the two front teeth. It is considered a mark of beauty to have a small gap, and this song called “Mwanya,” that was very popular in Tanga in the mid-1990s, was very popular in the wedding circuit because it talked about small holes that became big holes, and became a metaphor for chaste women who became loose women. It said, "You used to have a beautiful, small gap between your two front teeth. You let down your guard. You got punched in the face. You lost a tooth. Now you have this terrible, gaping whole.” And a whole song went on to describe the consequences of this gaping hole, terrible snoring at night, drooling, on and on. This was a metaphor. It was a rather bald metaphor, but it was a metaphor nevertheless to say that you had something that was valued and something that was considered beautiful and now you lost it, and now you have a terrible life as a result.

So in the wedding circuit, that song came to talk about sexuality, and a woman having lost her good reputation. But other people put different meanings to it. One person told me he thought it meant a person had a good wife, and then he was unfaithful, and he lost his good wife. Or someone else said you had a good job and you are drunk or late all the time, and then you lost your good job. Nevertheless, it's something that you had that was good, that you lost through your own negligence, and as result you are suffering. But ironically, the local ruling party structure in Tanga adopted this as their theme song for the campaign of 1995. This became the song that got performed at each and every political rally, and it would seem again at first glance to be an odd choice. A song that other people knew to be talking about sexuality in very explicit ways to be suddenly representing the ruling party? But because it could be used to mean you had something good, now the ruling party was ridiculing the opposition saying, "You had something good. You had to support of the IMF and the World Bank. You had all this foreign support behind you, and yet what will happen? You will nevertheless lose this election." And, low and behold, they did. You had something good, but it doesn't matter. You lost it.

B. E.: To end, let's go to the big picture. For all Tanzania's problems—the economic failure of socialism, the ineffectual efforts of the culture ministries, and so on—you have to see Tanzania as something of a success story, especially when compared with its neighbors, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Congo, even Zimbabwe. Can we make any connections between the music and that success?
Culture Musical Club with Saada Mohamed (Eyre)



K.A.: Some people think that the attempts to institute socialism in Tanzania mark it as one of the failures of African history, but in fact, Tanzania was one of many countries that were suffering in the 1980s, irrespective of political and economic platform. All of Africa suffered in the 80s as a result of poor terms of trade, and the global market for their agricultural products, because of the oil crisis, and yet, despite that, Tanzania gets a bad rap for the socialism, and for the problems that it had. Nevertheless, in terms of culture, and in terms of national unity, one cannot say that Tanzania is a failure. Tanzania is in fact a great success story in that respect, because it managed to unite 120 different ethnic groups into something that is really remarkably strong as a nation, especially when compared with some of its neighbors. One needs only to look at Rwanda and Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Even Kenya has had some of the ethnic problems that Tanzania has been blessed to not have. There have been some problems with the union with Zanzibar, but by in large, Tanzania has not been plagued by ethnic conflict, and some of that can be attributed to the policies of Julius Nyerere, and his attempts to really put culture and the arts at the forefront, and support them in ways, and draw attention, and encourage people to think of themselves as Tanzanians, having this shared culture, having this shared language, and having shared musical tradition. Maybe the best example of that is that when Julius Nyerere died in 1999, just about every kind of music put forth songs honoring his life and his accomplishments. They were called Nyimbo za Maombolezo, “laments songs." Bands across the country, hundreds of bands turned out and composed these songs honoring him. They really came together, and that's one example of how music shows the national unity Tanzania has managed to create.

Niche Music Markets Online

New York Times
January 9, 2006
Buying Music From Anywhere and Selling It for Play on the Internet
By ROBERT LEVINE

Working in the media and entertainment group of the consultants McKinsey & Company, Greg Scholl got a firsthand look at the inefficiency in the music business: the major record labels focus on creating hits, and they rarely make money on releases that sell less than a few hundred thousand copies.

Now, as chief executive of the Orchard, a music distributor that sells to iTunes, Napster, Yahoo and other digital music services, Mr. Scholl is trying to exploit that inefficiency.

The Orchard is seeking to make money by purchasing music from small independent and foreign labels, and then distributing it to digital music services. In most music stores, CD's of, say, Chinese or Kenyan pop music would be consigned to the world-music bin as a good will gesture. But the economics of online stores is changing the financial calculations of the music business, making it profitable to sell a relatively small number of copies of a song, as long as a compact disc is not manufactured and distributed.

So instead of trying to sell millions of copies of hundreds of albums, the standard music industry strategy, the Orchard hopes to sell hundreds of copies of thousands of albums. In that way, the company is anticipating that sales will follow a pattern known as "the long tail," in which a large number of only marginally popular items can eventually produce significant revenue.

"We're not trying to make something a hit in order to make a business work," Mr. Scholl said. "We cast a very wide net, and we're going to catch some hits in it."

So far, the Orchard has made deals to sell about 650,000 tracks from 72 countries to various services, including ring tone outlets. Those tracks include music from relatively well-known bands like Black Uhuru as well as thousands of Chinese pop songs. Much of that music is not yet online, and the company is not sure if all of it will ever be. The plan is to add music to various services gradually, so it can be promoted appropriately.

The Orchard is not the only company looking to strike gold in the more obscure parts of the music business. One of the Orchard's rivals, the Independent Online Distribution Alliance, recently got the rights to digitally distribute 60,000 albums worth of music from a Chinese state-owned record company. The Orchard also faces competition from distribution companies owned by major labels.

The bet that executives of these businesses are making is that online services will increase demand for music that was not previously popular, just as eBay stoked the sale of old books and trinkets once considered largely worthless.

As Ted Schadler, an analyst at Forrester Research, put it: "In the world of shiny plastic discs, there are two barriers to getting the music you want: It's not in the store, or you've never heard of it. With digital distribution, the first barrier disappears. The second gets eased because of search engines, recommendation engines, technology like that."

The Orchard was founded in 1997 as a distribution company by Scott Cohen and Richard Gottehrer, a songwriter whose hits included "My Boyfriend's Back." Named after its original location, on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, it began losing money and eventually acquired a reputation as being less than prompt with payments.

In 2003 the Orchard was purchased by Dimensional Associates, the private equity arm of JDS Capital Management, for what Mr. Scholl indicated was less than $10 million. Dimensional also owns the online service eMusic and a music publishing company, and was interested in the Orchard partly because of the digital distribution rights it had acquired.

"We were aware of the reputation," said Mr. Scholl, who was brought in to run the company, "and we worked to pay everyone back and begin more transparent accounting."

The Orchard, Mr. Scholl said, is a "digital aggregator," a middleman between small independent labels and digital music services. Major labels, as well as most sizable independents, deal with such services directly or through an established physical distribution company like the Alternative Distribution Alliance, owned by Warner Music.

The Orchard, as well as the Independent Online Distribution Alliance, mostly represent small labels in quantity. Along with a smattering of tracks recorded by stars before they signed with major labels, they offer an embarrassment of niches: free jazz, black metal and, in the case of the Orchard, a label that specializes in calliope music. And as the cost of putting tracks online is low, anything that can sell a few copies is worthwhile.

"I'd say we more or less want everything," remarked Kevin Arnold, founder and chief executive of the independent alliance.

Most digital distribution deals give the distributor 15 percent of the wholesale price of a track, usually somewhere around 65 cents, according to several people in the industry. Mr. Scholl said that the Orchard generally receives a higher percentage because it can effectively promote music to the services that sell it. To generate attention for some of the music from China, for example, it arranged for Jackie Chan to provide a list of his favorite tracks.

"It's the equivalent of taking the music from the backroom, where you'd have to look for it, into the store," Mr. Scholl said.

For some of the Orchard's international partners, the strategy is working. Epsa, an Argentine tango label, distributes about 500 albums through the Orchard. Laura Tesoriero, the label's chief executive, who also works with the Orchard as a representative in South America, said it had sold 10,000 digital tracks last quarter - no more than a rounding error by the standards of the United States pop music market, but enough to leave her feeling encouraged about the future of digital sales. A significant number of those sales, she expects, were to Argentines living in this country.

The most significant growth in the sale of foreign music could come as the idea of buying online gains traction among such immigrant communities.

"People in China don't think of Chinese music as world music and neither do Chinese people in the U.S.," said Yale Evelev, president of Luaka Bop, an independent label owned by David Byrne that specializes in pop music from Africa and South America.

The Orchard will face greater competition as major labels sell the music they release internationally in the United States. The EMI Group, for example, plans to make available in this country a majority of the music it sells anywhere in the world, Adam Klein, a vice president, said. As an example of the potential of this, Mr. Klein said that Hotei, a band signed by EMI in Japan, had one of the top 10 rock albums on iTunes after one of its songs appeared on the soundtrack of "Kill Bill: Volume 1."

Even with a business model that does not rely on hits, they would be welcome. "One man's niche is another man's mass market," Mike McGuire, a Gartner analyst said.

Second chord sounds in world's longest lasting concert

Second chord sounds in world's longest lasting concert

Yahoo News
Thu Jan 5, 11:12 AM ET

A new chord was scheduled to sound in the world's slowest and longest lasting concert that is taking a total 639 years to perform.

The abandoned Buchardi church in Halberstadt, eastern Germany, is the venue for a mind-boggling 639-year-long performance of a piece of music by US experimental composer John Cage (1912-1992).

Entitled "organ2/ASLSP" (or "As SLow aS Possible"), the performance began on September 5, 2001 and is scheduled to last until 2639.

The first year and half of the performance was total silence, with the first chord -- G-sharp, B and G-sharp -- not sounding until February 2, 2003.

Then in July 2004, two additional Es, an octave apart, were sounded and are scheduled to be released later this year on May 5.

But at 5:00 pm (1600 GMT) on Thursday, the first chord was due to progress to a second -- comprising A, C and F-sharp -- and is to be held down over the next few years by weights on an organ being built especially for the project.

Cage originally conceived "ASLSP" in 1985 as a 20-minute work for piano, subsequently transcribing it for organ in 1987.

But organisers of the John Cage Organ Project decided to take the composer at his word and stretch out the performance for 639 years, using Cage's transcription for organ.

The enormous running time was chosen to commemorate the creation of Halberstadt's historic Blockwerk organ in 1361 -- 639 years before the current project started.

That original organ, built by Nikolaus Faber for Halberstadt's cathedral, was the first organ ever to be used for liturgical purposes, ringing in a new era in which the organ has played a central role in church music ever since.

As part of Halberstadt's John Cage Organ Project, a brand-new organ is being built specially, with new pipes added in time for when new notes are scheduled to sound.

Cage was a pupil of one of the 20th century's most influential composers, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951).

Cage's avant-garde oeuvre includes works such as the notorious "4'33", a piece comprising four minutes and 33 seconds of total silence, all meticulously notated.

The organisers of the John Cage Organ Project say the record-breaking performance in Halberstadt also has a philosophical background -- to "rediscover calm and slowness in today's fast-changing world".

Obituary: Filmmaker Documented New Orleans' Music

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-palfi29dec29,0,3363139.story?coll=la-home-obituaries
From the Los Angeles Times
OBITUARIES
Stevenson J. Palfi, 53; Filmmaker Documented New Orleans' Music
By Dennis McLellan
Times Staff Writer

December 29, 2005

Stevenson J. Palfi, a New Orleans musical documentarian best known for "Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together," a 1982 look at three generations of Big Easy piano greats, has died. He was 53.

Palfi died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound Dec. 14 at home, his family told the Times-Picayune of New Orleans. Palfi, who left a suicide note and a will, had been severely depressed after Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters destroyed years of files, photographs and other possessions at his home in the Mid-City area.

"His death was a tragedy for everybody," Jan Ramsey, editor and publisher of OffBeat Magazine, a New Orleans music publication, told The Times on Wednesday. "Stevenson was a valuable asset to the music community here in terms of preserving the culture."

"Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together" focused on New Orleans keyboard luminaries Isidore "Tuts" Washington, Henry Roeland "Professor Longhair" Byrd and Allen Toussaint. Toussaint's songwriting hits include "Working in the Coal Mine," "Mother-in-Law" and "Southern Nights."

The documentary, which was frequently shown on PBS and is still in distribution, provided insight into the way the three players influenced one another's styles and showed the only time they ever rehearsed together for a joint concert.

Byrd died two days before the scheduled performance, and his jazz funeral, along with the Washington-Toussaint tribute concert, became part of the documentary.

"Piano Players Rarely Play Together," Times-Picayune movie writer David Baron said, was "a last-chance document of one key thread in the Big Easy's inimitable R&B tradition."

Ramsey said, "In terms of a preservation piece, it's remarkable, because there is very little [previous] footage of Professor Longhair or Tuts Washington, and when you get all three of them together in a studio, it's unprecedented."

Once described by his city's newspaper as "the Big Easy's big encyclopedia of music," Palfi also documented other Crescent City musicians, such as singer Ernie K-Doe and Preservation Hall banjoist Manny Sayles.

Palfi co-produced "Played in the USA," a 13-part series of video and film documentaries about American music for the Learning Channel. The 1991 series included "Papa John Creach: Setting the Record Straight," Palfi's documentary on the onetime fiddler with Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship.

As a filmmaker, Palfi once described himself as a slow, meticulous worker. At the time of his death, he was nearing completion on "Songwriter, Unknown," a feature-length documentary on Toussaint. Funding for the project had been aided by a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993.

"My friend Stevenson Palfi's life's work was immortalizing others, and, in so doing, he has immortalized himself," Toussaint told the Times-Picayune this week. "His work will outlast all of us."

Palfi's love of music began while he was growing up in Chicago, where his earliest memories included listening constantly to Harry Belafonte calypso records and recordings of speeches by 1950s Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson.

"I listened to Stevenson because my parents named me after him," he told The Times in 1991. "I'm not sure his speeches were especially musical, though there was a cadence to them."

Palfi started using video as an aid while student-teaching.

He later taught documentary production, although he had yet to make one himself. But after buying a camera and getting a ride with a friend to Mardi Gras during spring break, he found not only his calling in life, but also a new home.

His survivors include a daughter, Nell Palfi; his father, Alfred M. Palfi; and a sister, Cynthia Penfold.

A tribute to the filmmaker will be presented at OffBeat's Best of the Beat Awards ceremony Jan. 21 at the New Orleans House of Blues.

In Praise of Enya

Slate
music box
The Faerie Queen
The secret to Enya's success.
By Jody Rosen
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 27, 2005, at 6:06 AM ET



Who is Enya? More to the point: What is she? It's a question you can't help but ask of the 44-year-old singer from County Donegal, Ireland, who, over the past 20 years, has carved a niche as popular music's faerie queen. She's slathered her songs in otherworldly reverb, overdubbed her voice into angelic choirs, and appeared in music videos gliding through mist-shrouded landscapes. When we last heard from her, in 2002, she was crooning songs on the Fellowship of the Ring soundtrack—in Elvish. On the cover of her new album, Amarantine, she gazes out with big dewy moon eyes, wearing what appears to be a spinnaker. Search beneath its billows and you would undoubtedly find a pair of wings and a wand.

Enya may not be of this earth, but she's done rather well here. She began her career in 1980, singing with her brothers and sisters in Clannad, which blended pop tunes and traditional Irish folk music. She left the family band two years later, hooking up with producer/composer Nicky Ryan and lyricist Roma Ryan, the husband and wife who remain her collaborators to this day. The trio worked on film and television scores for several years before graduating in 1987 to proper albums, but those early gigs left their mark. To call Enya's music "cinematic" is an understatement—nearly every song plays like the soundtrack for a majestic film montage, with the camera swooping from lush green valleys to craggy coastlines and upward, zipping past mountain peaks, punching through cloud cover, soaring into the blue and beyond, to touch the face of God, or Gandalf.

On the opening song of Enya's self-titled debut album, "Play MediaThe Celts," this potent formula is already in place. A synth bassline provides a gentle throb; a major key melody swells, crests, recedes, and swells again. Rising over the music is Enya, or rather, Enyas—her voice multitracked into what sounds like a Gregorian choir on helium. The production values have been refined in the years since, with a synthesized string orchestra sound replacing the debut album's garish keyboard gusts. But Enya and the Ryans haven't altered their basic musical template one bit. And why should they? Enya broke through to a mass audience with Watermark (1988) and has gone on to sell 65 million records worldwide. The arrival of Amarantine, currently No. 10 on the Billboard album chart, is a reminder that Enya is one of the savviest operators in the music business and, well, an original. Twenty years ago, no one dreamed that there would be a huge audience for an ethereal female vocalist singing pseudo-classical airs with misty mystical overtones—and Enya remains the genre's only practitioner. No one has even tried to imitate her.

On Amarantine, Enya delivers her usual goods. The mood is worshipful and the tempos stately. There is a great deal of plinking and plucking; Enya is fond of harpsichords (or synthesizer approximations thereof) and, especially, pizzicato, the engine of many of her songs, including her signature hit, "Play MediaOrinoco Flow (Sail Away)." The new album's Play Mediatitle track (and first single) is an Enya song par excellence, with every beat of every measure marked by little string stabs, the singer's voice majestically inflated by reverb and the lyrics a string of fuzzy beatitudes: "You know love is with you when you rise/ For night and day belong to love." The song is insipid and insufferable; it may be the worst thing I've heard on the radio all year. It's also a fiendishly effective mood-piece.

Enya has sold more records than any Irish artist besides U2, and she has leveraged her roots, flavoring songs with uilleann pipes, singing in Gaelic, and gesturing in other ways to Riverdance enthusiasts. But Enya's real musical sources are less Old Eire than High Church. There is a maxim variously attributed to Bob Dylan and Elton John—"When in doubt, write a hymn"—and Enya and the Ryans have written hymns ad nauseam. Their signature trick is the use of multitracking to create the soul-stirring lushness of a full vocal choir. It's a cost-saving measure, for one thing. Why hire a roomful of monks when you can conjure a plainchant choir by simply overdubbing Enya's voice to infinity? The result is a singular sound—unreal, inhuman, spooky, and "spiritual"—perfect for those who desire the mystique of medieval choral music without, you know, the medieval music or the chorus. Naturally, it's impossible to replicate this effect in live performance, and Enya has never mounted a concert tour, which has only added to her air of mystery. Roma Ryan, meanwhile, has made the churchy connection explicit, writing several songs for Enya in Latin.

On Amarantine, though, there's a different kind of linguistic stunt. Inspired by their Fellowship of the Ring experiment with Elvish, Enya and Roma Ryan decided to create their own language, Loxian. I wish I could report that this gambit involves smoked salmon; in fact, it revolves around the more banal topic of extraterrestrials. The Loxians, Ryan told the Guardian, "Are much like us. They're in space, somewhere in the night. They're looking out, they're mapping the stars, and wondering if there is anyone else out there. It's to do with that concept: are we alone in the universe?"

Ryan has written a book about the language, Water Shows the Hidden Heart (also the title of a song on Amarantine), in which we learn, among other things, how to ask a Loxian if he'd like a cup of tea ("Hanee unnin eskan?"). The lyricist claims that it was necessary to invent an alternative language because "some pieces that Enya writes, English will just not sit on." But judging by songs like "Play MediaLess Than a Pearl," one of three Loxian numbers on the new album, Loxian is not appreciably more mellifluous than English or Gaelic or Latin or any of the other terrestrial tongues in which Enya has sung. I suspect other, cheekier motives: an effort to deepen Enya's reputation as a mystic and to tighten her grip on the Hobbit crowd. What's Loxian for "brand extension"?

The truth is, it really doesn't matter what language Enya is singing in. No one is listening to her words; the beginning and the end of her appeal is that big gauzy sound. Even if you hate the aesthetic, you have to respect the craft. Beneath Enya's billowing sonic mists, you can discern the structures and symmetries of classic pop songwriting: the melodic hooks that leap out from every song, the revitalizing excursion of an eight-measure bridge, the triumphal return to the main theme. It all might be perfectly tolerable if it weren't so queasily feather-light. As Enya's career has progressed, and her air-goddess shtick has become more entrenched, the bottom end has disappeared from her songs, to the point where, on Amarantine, there is virtually no bass, no lower-register sounds, nothing to ground the music. Enya would do well to remember that, once in a while, everyone—earthling, Middle-Earthling, and Loxian alike—needs to bang on a drum.
Jody Rosen is The Nation's music critic and the author of White Christmas: The Story of an American Song.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2133149/

Last Piece of Hip-Hop Culture Is Co-oped

What Looks Like Graffiti Could Really Be an Ad

By Mike Musgrove
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 26, 2005; A01

The images are painted directly onto building walls in urban areas, graffiti-style. Wide-eyed kids, portrayed in a stylized, comic-book rendering, pose with a mysterious, hand-size gadget. One licks his like a lollipop. Another is playing paddleball with the thing.

What looks like artful vandalism, though, is really part of a guerrilla marketing campaign for Sony's PlayStation Portable, a device that can play games, music and movies.

In major cities such as San Francisco, Miami and New York, Sony has paid building owners to use wall space for the campaign, and the images have become a familiar sight. It's the latest effort by a big corporation to capitalize on the hot world of street art to reach an urban market that has learned to tune out traditional advertising.

Nike Inc., Time magazine and even stodgy International Business Machines Corp. are among the growing list of companies that have dabbled in street art to get their marketing messages out.

The trend makes some artists squeamish even as others start marketing firms or open galleries. In Washington's Adams Morgan neighborhood, cell phone maker Nokia Corp. used sidewalk chalk drawings to promote its N-Gage, a cell phone aimed at gamers, when it launched the product in 2003.

Advertising Age critic Bob Garfield said that an increase in such edgy advertising campaigns, which attempt to create "buzz about buzz," are a sign that traditional advertising methods are failing.

"Marketers are desperate to find ways to reach people," Garfield said. "Especially young men, who are far too busy playing Grand Theft Auto to notice, say, a 30-second TV commercial."

Sony spokesman Patrick Seybold said the company's PSP campaign is aimed at a consumer segment he calls the "urban nomad," which he described as "consumers who are enjoying their entertainment on-the-go in an artistic and creative way." Sony's ads have not appeared in the District; according to the city's Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, they would violate outdoor advertising policy.

The increasingly blurred lines between street art, graffiti and marketing is leading to strange situations. One graffiti artist was detained by police in Chicago last summer after he was caught spray-painting over a paid graffiti ad for Axe deodorant.

Among artists who risk arrest to put up paintings and posters they hope will surprise, provoke or delight passersby, the co-opting of street art by corporate America is touchy issue. Patrick McNeil, a member of a three-person street-art collective called Faile, accused Sony of "trying to cash in on an art movement where they and the product they are selling don't belong" and derided Sony's painters as "an army of pimped-out artists."

But street artists who do corporate work to pay the bills say they are doing the same creative work they did before, just in a different medium.

Artist Dave Kinsey was one of the pioneers in the field when he opened his design studio, Blk/Mrkt, in the Los Angeles area a decade ago. His shop, which has helped market such products as Mountain Dew soda and the band Black Eyed Peas, includes a gallery to promote up-and-coming artists.

Kinsey said his commercial work has helped clients get in touch with an audience they weren't communicating with effectively before. "If you do good work and you're happy with what you do, it can be in any environment," he said. "If you're an artist, you can apply your talents and your ideas to whatever it is."

Other street artists who do corporate work are critical of the stealthy aspects of Sony's campaign. Artist Shepard Fairey said he steers advertising clients away from trying to hide their sponsorship.

"Corporations are much better off being very open and being proud enough to say: 'We think this is a cool enough product to stand up under hipsters' scrutiny, we don't have to try and trick you,' " said Fairey, who used to be a business partner with Kinsey. "If it's not cool enough for that, they need to rethink the product itself."

Fairey gained underground fame for creating a perplexing series of stickers featuring a grainy image of wrestler Andre Roussimoff, accompanied with the line "Andre the Giant has a posse." For those who became hip to the project, spotting the stickers on street signs and in obscure urban areas across the globe became a minor pastime.

Now Fairey sells a line of clothes at his Web site, was commissioned to design the movie poster for the new film about Johnny Cash and does commercial graphics work for commercial clients such as Honda. In February, he will star in a video game about street art from Atari. MTV Films announced that it bought rights to make a movie based on the game.

For corporations, graffiti and street art can be a tempting way to get noticed. When Time magazine paid a graffiti artist to festoon a wall in the SoHo section of New York this summer, a local politician denounced it as underwriting the work of vandals. Time magazine Associate Publisher and marketing director Taylor Gray said the stunt was a success because it "cut through the clutter" of marketing messages to which New Yorkers are exposed every day.

Many street artists say they can intuitively grasp this strategy, even if it makes them cringe. For New York-based street artist Michael De Feo, the PSP campaign seems to elicit a shrug. "Who are we to say they can't do it?" he said.

De Feo, a high school art teacher who spends his evenings decorating cities with cartoonish paintings and stencils of flowers and sharks, said the worse crime in Sony's PSP ad campaign is a lack of originality.

"People seem to get all bent out of shape with campaigns like this, when the fact remains that most of the public has the ability to tell good art from bad," he said.

De Feo does not rank the PSP campaign as good art. "I think it really lacks creativity," he said. "It's boring."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Year's Best jazz albums are decades old

New York Times
December 21, 2005
Critic's Notebook
Jazz Gem Made in '57 Is a Favorite of 2005
By BEN RATLIFF

My favorite jazz record released this year, and one of my favorites of any year, was made in 1957. I first heard "Thelonious Monk Quartet With John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall" (Blue Note) at the Library of Congress in April, after the news of its discovery had been made public. It sounded pretty good then, but you can never really tell when hearing something over a high-quality sound system in front of interested parties. I have listened to it repeatedly since, and it seems to be much better than I first thought - solid, juicy, truly great.

Another of the year's new jazz records - John Coltrane's "One Down, One Up: Live at the Half Note" (Impulse) - was made in 1965. It disqualifies itself from consideration for my list of the year's best jazz albums only because it has been heard, in bits and pieces, on illegal tapes for 40 years. (I got mine from a great saxophonist who wanted to spread the word.) But it is also, I think, a masterpiece.

There's a reason why these records stand out as the year's best, and I get the sense that many people feel they know that reason.

They believe, or have heard, that jazz crinkled up and collapsed after Coltrane. That the musicians have defaulted on audiences, going deep into their own heads instead. That there's been no successor, because Coltrane broke the mold, threw away the key, set the bar too high, stretched the envelope as far as it would go, established a holding pattern, and other truth-obscuring clichés.

It would simplify things, but no. In fact, I don't think the reason has much to do with Coltrane per se - other than the obvious fact that he made superior music. (He did create a few stock models in jazz that persisted for an impressively long period after his death, but that's a different matter.)

These are among the year's great albums because they are high-quality proofs of one of jazz's basic properties: the possibility for transcendence on the gig, for a great band to be even better. This is true in any kind of music, but it is much more true in jazz.

There are a lot of great jazz musicians in New York, and in the world. But the number of great and economically sustainable bands has declined, along with an international audience and a circuit of clubs that encourages those bands to feel a sense of competition, and opportunities for those bands to play repeatedly for regular audiences in the same small places. A. J. Liebling once wrote that French food declined after World War I with the rise of highway driving, since small restaurants weren't committed to satisfying the same clientele night after night. Instead, they could serve the same dishes and not worry about improvement; regular waves of new diners would chew away, unaware of the stasis.

In a way, the same goes for jazz. Both bands, the Monk-Coltrane Quartet of 1957 and the Coltrane Quartet of 1965, had places in New York to take root. Monk and Coltrane played as many as 75 nights within a five-month stretch at the Five Spot Cafe in the East Village. The Coltrane Quartet played 14 weeks at the Half Note in the span of a year, from spring 1964 to spring 1965. Fourteen. It was a different time in many ways: it seems that anytime I meet someone who saw either of those bands at those clubs, they won't say that they went once, as if to cross it off a list; they went twice or three times a week, as part of their lives. (No Internet. No TiVo. Cheap rent. No risk of being thought a loser if you liked to go to jazz clubs at night.)

So there were hundreds of new jazz records this year that weren't as good? It gets forgotten, so it needs repeating: the studio is an unreliable gauge of what the best jazz groups are really up to, even at the highest levels.

Monk's quartet with Coltrane recorded three songs in the studio in summer 1957, at the beginning of that band's short existence. They can be heard on "Thelonious Monk With John Coltrane" (Riverside/Fantasy). They're very good, and they contain a newly advanced Coltrane. But they are dry-runs when set next to the 51 minutes from Carnegie Hall, which were discovered for the first time in January.

The Carnegie tape comes from late November 1957, after five rigorous months of Five Spot gigs, toward the end of the band's six-month life. (Very little taped material of this band in that year at the Five Spot, and with low fidelity, is known to exist.) On the Carnegie album the band is relaxed, limber, magnetic; the tempos are more wakeful. Compare the tune "Nutty" between the studio and stage versions, and you will hear it quickly. Coltrane has become agile, finding a flexible way of running his original patterns. Monk balances an inscrutable serenity against driving, almost violent figures. And everything coming from Shadow Wilson, the drummer, is to be savored: he guards and upholds the groove, while building small, richly detailed accents around it.

But the band ended a little more than a month later, and contractual issues between Coltrane and Monk's record labels made it impossible for them to record again. We're lucky to have this.

The Coltrane "One Down, One Up" recordings were made by the radio station WABC-FM, in 1965, for a radio show called "Portraits in Jazz" with Alan Grant. Even more than the Monk-Coltrane recording, the music is completely based in the rhetoric of the band's live performances; it is a different discipline entirely from studio recordings. The longest piece on the Monk-Coltrane, "Sweet and Lovely," is nine and a half minutes; the title track of "One Down, One Up" runs to nearly 28. The Coltrane band had been playing pieces at this length for at least four years, but was still making fairly structured music in the studio. What we hear is a band's shared language in its highest period; Coltrane and the drummer Elvin Jones rarely sounded more individually free, and still elastically tethered to each other.

The same principle has generated other good records this year, too. An excellent, previously unknown Charlie Parker-Dizzy Gillespie concert from 1945, released on Uptown Records. A new Wynton Marsalis record, "Live at the House of Tribes," recorded in front of an audience of 50 - his best, to a certain way of thinking, since "Live at Blues Alley" in 1986. And coming in February, a recording from 1996 of the Omer Avital Sextet at Smalls, an excellent band of its moment that played hundreds of nights at that tiny club and never got to put out a record properly during its life.

Whenever history tells you that a masterpiece was recorded in the studio on a certain day at a certain hour - Charlie Parker's "Koko," Pat Metheny's "Bright Size Life," Ornette Coleman's "Shape of Jazz to Come" - it's probably not a patch on what those groups did later that night.

This is how jazz works. It is not a volume business. (Its essence is the opposite of business.) Its greatest experiences are given away cheaply, to rooms of 50 to 200 people. Literature and visual art are both so different: the creator stands back, judges a fixed object, then refines or discards before letting the words go to print, or putting images to walls. A posthumously found Hemingway novel is never as good as what he judged to be his best work. But in jazz there is always the promise that the art's greatest examples - even by those long dead - may still be found.

Iranians Shrug Off Ban on Western Music

Iranians Shrug Off Ban on Western Music

By ALI AKBAR DAREINI, Associated Press WriterTue Dec 20, 9:52 AM ET

Hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's ban on Western music fell on deaf ears Tuesday, as shop owners and music enthusiasts in the Iranian capital continued selling, buying and listening to everything from hip-hop to country rock.

The official IRAN Persian daily reported Monday that Ahmadinejad, as head of the Supreme Cultural Revolutionary Council, ordered the enactment of an October ruling by the council to ban all Western music, including classical music, on state broadcast outlets.

"This president speaks as if he is living in the Stone Age. This man has to understand that he can't tell the people what to listen to and what not to listen to," said Mohammed Reza Hosseinpour as he browsed through a Tehran music shop.

The shop's owner said he did not expect the president's ban to be implemented.

"Clerics and officials speak about imposing restrictions every other day. I don't think it's going to be enforced," said Reza Sadeghi as he counted some bills he received from the sale of an Eric Clapton tape.

The order was an eerie reminder of the 1979 Islamic revolution, when popular music was outlawed as "un-Islamic" under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In the revolution's early years, police stopped cars to search for Western music tapes, destroying any they found and sometimes arresting those caught listening to them.

But little seems to have changed in Tehran since Monday's ruling.

State radio and TV stations sometimes play Western music — without lyrics — in the background of newscasts and other programs, but more often they play Iranian pop or traditional music. On Tuesday, there was only Iranian music, but it was not immediately clear if that was because of the ban.

The ban applies only to state-run radio and television. Tehran residents, accustomed to the relaxed rules and rare enforcement of such restrictions in the past 10 years, seemed unconcerned that it might signal a return to the wider restrictions imposed during the revolution.

"Don't take this man (Ahmadinejad) seriously," said Pari Mahmoudi, a teen driving in the capital, as the Eagles' "Hotel California" blared from the car speakers.

The expectation among many was that the new ban would fall by the wayside as others have recently. Iran's government has banned the sale of music by female singers in the past and has forbidden women from wearing heavy makeup. Neither order has been enforced.

As the revolutionary fervor started to fade, some light classical music was allowed on Iranian radio and television, and some public concerts reappeared in the late 1980s. Since Khomeini's death, pop music has been creeping into Iranian shops.

In the 1990s, particularly during the presidency of reformist Mohammad Khatami, authorities began relaxing restrictions further. These days in Iran, Western music, films and clothing are widely available. Bootleg videos and DVDs of films banned by the state can be found on the black market.

Also, Iranians with satellite dishes can get broadcasts originating outside the country. Satellite dishes are banned but the government currently does not harass citizens whose equipment can be seen on the rooftops.

Ahmadinejad's ban required the "blocking of indecent and Western music from the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting," according to a statement on the Web site hard-line Supreme Cultural Revolutionary Council. The council's members are hand-picked by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to rule on cultural issues.

The ban also includes censorship of content of films.

"Supervision of content from films, TV series and their voice-overs is emphasized in order to support spiritual cinema and to eliminate triteness and violence," the council said on its Web site.

Ahmadinejad's latest order means the state broadcasting authority must execute the decree and prepare a report on its implementation within six months, according to the government-owned IRAN daily newspaper.

Ahmadinejad was elected in August on a platform of reverting to ultraconservative principles, following the eight years of reformist-led rule under intellectual Khatami.

During his presidential campaign, Ahmadinejad promised to confront what he called the Western cultural invasion of Iran and promote Islamic values.

Since then, he has jettisoned Iran's moderation in foreign policy and pursued a purge in the government, replacing pragmatic veterans with former military commanders and inexperienced religious hard-liners.

Iran bans Western music (again)

Iran's President Bans Western Music

By NASSER KARIMI2 hours, 28 minutes ago

Hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has banned Western music from Iran's radio and TV stations, reviving one of the harshest cultural decrees from the early days of 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Songs such as George Michael's "Careless Whisper," Eric Clapton's "Rush" and the Eagles' "Hotel California" have regularly accompanied Iranian broadcasts, as do tunes by saxophonist Kenny G.

But the official IRAN Persian daily reported Monday that Ahmadinejad, as head of Iran's Supreme Cultural Revolutionary Council, ordered the enactment of an October ruling by the council to ban Western music.

"Blocking indecent and Western music from the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting is required," according to a statement on the council's official Web site.

Ahmadinejad's order means the IRIB must execute the decree and prepare a report on its implementation within six months, according to the newspaper.

"This is terrible," said Iranian guitarist Babak Riahipour, whose music was played occasionally on state radio and TV. "The decision shows a lack of knowledge and experience."

Music was outlawed as un-Islamic by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini soon after the revolution. But as the fervor of the revolution started to fade, light classical music was allowed on radio and television. Some public concerts reappeared in the late 1980s.

Western music, films and clothing are widely available in Iran, and hip-hop can be heard on Tehran's streets, blaring from car speakers or from music shops. Bootleg videos and DVDs of films banned by the state are widely available in the black market.

Following eight years of reformist-led rule in Iran, Ahmadinejad won office in August on a platform of reverting to ultraconservative principles promoted by the revolution.

Since then, Ahmadinejad has jettisoned Iran's moderation in foreign policy and pursued a purge in the government, replacing pragmatic veterans with former military commanders and inexperienced religious hard-liners.

He also has issued stinging criticisms of Israel, called for the Jewish state to be "wiped off the map" and described the Nazi Holocaust as a "myth."

International concerns are high over Iran's nuclear program, with the United States accusing Tehran of pursuing an atomic weapons program. Iran denies the claims.

During his presidential campaign, Ahmadinejad also promised to confront what he called the Western cultural invasion and promote Islamic values.

The latest media ban also includes censorship of content of films.

"Supervision of content from films, TV series and their voice-overs is emphasized in order to support spiritual cinema and to eliminate trite and violence," the council said in a statement on its Web site explaining its October ruling.

The council has also issued a ban on foreign movies that promote "arrogant powers," an apparent reference to the United States.

The Rock Star's Burden

December 15, 2005
Op-Ed Contributor
The Rock Star's Burden
By PAUL THEROUX

Hale'iwa, Hawaii

THERE are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment. If Christmas, season of sob stories, has turned me into Scrooge, I recognize the Dickensian counterpart of Paul Hewson - who calls himself "Bono" - as Mrs. Jellyby in "Bleak House." Harping incessantly on her adopted village of Borrioboola-Gha "on the left bank of the River Niger," Mrs. Jellyby tries to save the Africans by financing them in coffee growing and encouraging schemes "to turn pianoforte legs and establish an export trade," all the while badgering people for money.

It seems to have been Africa's fate to become a theater of empty talk and public gestures. But the impression that Africa is fatally troubled and can be saved only by outside help - not to mention celebrities and charity concerts - is a destructive and misleading conceit. Those of us who committed ourselves to being Peace Corps teachers in rural Malawi more than 40 years ago are dismayed by what we see on our return visits and by all the news that has been reported recently from that unlucky, drought-stricken country. But we are more appalled by most of the proposed solutions.

I am not speaking of humanitarian aid, disaster relief, AIDS education or affordable drugs. Nor am I speaking of small-scale, closely watched efforts like the Malawi Children's Village. I am speaking of the "more money" platform: the notion that what Africa needs is more prestige projects, volunteer labor and debt relief. We should know better by now. I would not send private money to a charity, or foreign aid to a government, unless every dollar was accounted for - and this never happens. Dumping more money in the same old way is not only wasteful, but stupid and harmful; it is also ignoring some obvious points.

If Malawi is worse educated, more plagued by illness and bad services, poorer than it was when I lived and worked there in the early 60's, it is not for lack of outside help or donor money. Malawi has been the beneficiary of many thousands of foreign teachers, doctors and nurses, and large amounts of financial aid, and yet it has declined from a country with promise to a failed state.

In the early and mid-1960's, we believed that Malawi would soon be self-sufficient in schoolteachers. And it would have been, except that rather than sending a limited wave of volunteers to train local instructors, for decades we kept on sending Peace Corps teachers. Malawians, who avoided teaching because the pay and status were low, came to depend on the American volunteers to teach in bush schools, while educated Malawians emigrated. When Malawi's university was established, more foreign teachers were welcomed, few of them replaced by Malawians, for political reasons. Medical educators also arrived from elsewhere. Malawi began graduating nurses, but the nurses were lured away to Britain and Australia and the United States, which meant more foreign nurses were needed in Malawi.

When Malawi's minister of education was accused of stealing millions of dollars from the education budget in 2000, and the Zambian president was charged with stealing from the treasury, and Nigeria squandered its oil wealth, what happened? The simplifiers of Africa's problems kept calling for debt relief and more aid. I got a dusty reception lecturing at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation when I pointed out the successes of responsible policies in Botswana, compared with the kleptomania of its neighbors. Donors enable embezzlement by turning a blind eye to bad governance, rigged elections and the deeper reasons these countries are failing.

Mr. Gates has said candidly that he wants to rid himself of his burden of billions. Bono is one of his trusted advisers. Mr. Gates wants to send computers to Africa - an unproductive not to say insane idea. I would offer pencils and paper, mops and brooms: the schools I have seen in Malawi need them badly. I would not send more teachers. I would expect Malawians themselves to stay and teach. There ought to be an insistence in the form of a bond, or a solemn promise, for Africans trained in medicine and education at the state's expense to work in their own countries.

Malawi was in my time a lush wooded country of three million people. It is now an eroded and deforested land of 12 million; its rivers are clogged with sediment and every year it is subjected to destructive floods. The trees that had kept it whole were cut for fuel and to clear land for subsistence crops. Malawi had two presidents in its first 40 years, the first a megalomaniac who called himself the messiah, the second a swindler whose first official act was to put his face on the money. Last year the new man, Bingu wa Mutharika, inaugurated his regime by announcing that he was going to buy a fleet of Maybachs, one of the most expensive cars in the world.

Many of the schools where we taught 40 years ago are now in ruins - covered with graffiti, with broken windows, standing in tall grass. Money will not fix this. A highly placed Malawian friend of mine once jovially demanded that my children come and teach there. "It would be good for them," he said.

Of course it would be good for them. Teaching in Africa was one of the best things I ever did. But our example seems to have counted for very little. My Malawian friend's children are of course working in the United States and Britain. It does not occur to anyone to encourage Africans themselves to volunteer in the same way that foreigners have done for decades. There are plenty of educated and capable young adults in Africa who would make a much greater difference than Peace Corps workers.

Africa is a lovely place - much lovelier, more peaceful and more resilient and, if not prosperous, innately more self-sufficient than it is usually portrayed. But because Africa seems unfinished and so different from the rest of the world, a landscape on which a person can sketch a new personality, it attracts mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth. Such people come in all forms and they loom large. White celebrities busy-bodying in Africa loom especially large. Watching Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie recently in Ethiopia, cuddling African children and lecturing the world on charity, the image that immediately sprang to my mind was Tarzan and Jane.

Bono, in his role as Mrs. Jellyby in a 10-gallon hat, not only believes that he has the solution to Africa's ills, he is also shouting so loud that other people seem to trust his answers. He traveled in 2002 to Africa with former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, urging debt forgiveness. He recently had lunch at the White House, where he expounded upon the "more money" platform and how African countries are uniquely futile.

But are they? Had Bono looked closely at Malawi he would have seen an earlier incarnation of his own Ireland. Both countries were characterized for centuries by famine, religious strife, infighting, unruly families, hubristic clan chiefs, malnutrition, failed crops, ancient orthodoxies, dental problems and fickle weather. Malawi had a similar sense of grievance, was also colonized by absentee British landlords and was priest-ridden, too.

Just a few years ago you couldn't buy condoms legally in Ireland, nor could you get a divorce, though (just like in Malawi) buckets of beer were easily available and unruly crapulosities a national curse. Ireland, that island of inaction, in Joyce's words, "the old sow that eats her farrow," was the Malawi of Europe, and for many identical reasons, its main export being immigrants.

It is a melancholy thought that it is easier for many Africans to travel to New York or London than to their own hinterlands. Much of northern Kenya is a no-go area; there is hardly a road to the town of Moyale, on the Ethiopian border, where I found only skinny camels and roving bandits. Western Zambia is off the map, southern Malawi is terra incognita, northern Mozambique is still a sea of land mines. But it is pretty easy to leave Africa. A recent World Bank study has confirmed that the emigration to the West of skilled people from small to medium-sized countries in Africa has been disastrous.

Africa has no real shortage of capable people - or even of money. The patronizing attention of donors has done violence to Africa's belief in itself, but even in the absence of responsible leadership, Africans themselves have proven how resilient they can be - something they never get credit for. Again, Ireland may be the model for an answer. After centuries of wishing themselves onto other countries, the Irish found that education, rational government, people staying put, and simple diligence could turn Ireland from an economic basket case into a prosperous nation. In a word - are you listening, Mr. Hewson? - the Irish have proved that there is something to be said for staying home.

Paul Theroux is the author of "Blinding Light" and of "Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town."

Queen of England honors Jimmy Page

Queen Honors Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page

Wed Dec 14, 9:44 AM ET

Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page went to Buckingham Palace on Wednesday to receive an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, or OBE, from Queen Elizabeth II — but the award was for his work with poor Brazilian children rather than his music.

The 61-year-old rocker said he was overwhelmed to be given the accolade, recalling how he first became involved with Brazilian children in 1994 when fighting broke out between street gangs while he was in Rio de Janeiro promoting an album.

"At that time in Rio the sun wasn't shining. The army was going into the favelas (shantytowns) and I heard about the plight of the street children," Page told reporters.

He joined forces with the British charity Task Brazil and set up a safe house which has so far supported more than 300 children.

"I think when you're faced with a plight that's inescapable, and there's something you can do about it, you hope you can make a difference," he said.

Task Brazil offers medical and psychological support, food, clothing and job training for street children.

Page was a member of the 1960s band The Yardbirds before helping to set up Led Zeppelin.

Stanley Crouch on Richard Pryor

New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
Pryor's flawed legacy

Monday, December 12th, 2005

This past Saturday Richard Pryor left this life and bequeathed to our culture as much darkness as he did the light his extraordinary talent made possible.

When we look at the remarkable descent this culture has made into smut, contempt, vulgarity and the pornagraphic, those of us who are not willing to drink the Kool-Aid marked "all's well," will have to address the fact that it was the combination of confusion and comic genius that made Pryor a much more negative influence than a positive one.

I do not mean positive in the way Bill Cosby was when his television show redefined situation comedy by turning away from all of the stereotypes of disorder and incompetence that were then and still are the basic renditions of black American life in our mass media.

Richard Pryor was not that kind of a man. His was a different story.

Pryor was troubled and he had seen things that so haunted him that the comedian found it impossible to perform and ignore the lower-class shadow worlds he had known so well, filled with pimps, prostitutes, winos and abrasive types of one sort or another.

The vulgarity of his material, and the idea a "real" black person was a foul-mouthed type was his greatest influence. It was the result of seeing the breaking of "white" convention as a form of "authentic" definition.

Pryor reached for anything that would make white America uncomfortable and would prop up a smug belief among black Americans that they were always "more cool" and more ready to "face life" than the members of majority culture.

Along the way, Pryor made too many people feel that the N word was open currency and was more accurate than any other word used to describe or address a black person.

In the dung piles of pimp and gangster rap we hear from slime meisters like Snoop Dogg and 50 Cent, the worst of Pryor's influence has been turned into an aspect of the new minstrelsy in which millions of dollars are made by "normalizing" demeaning imagery and misogyny.

What is so unfortunate is that the heaviest of Pryor's gifts was largely ignored by so many of those who praised the man when he was alive and are now in the middle of deifying him.

The pathos and the frailty of the human soul alone in the world or insecure or looking for something of meaning in a chaotic environment was a bit too deep for all of the simpleminded clowns like Andrew Dice Clay or those who thought that mere ethnicity was enough to define one as funny, like the painfully square work of Paul Rodriguez.

Of course, Russell Simmons' Def Comedy Jam is the ultimate coon show update of human cesspools, where "cutting edge" has come to mean traveling ever more downward in the sewer.

In essence, Pryor stunned with his timing, his rhythm, his ability to stand alone and fill the stage with three-dimensional characters through his remarkably imaginative gift for an epic sweep of mimicry.

That nuanced mimicry crossed ethnic lines, stretched from young to old, and gave poignancy to the comedian's revelations about the hurts and the terrors of life.

The idea of "laughing to keep from crying" was central to his work and has been diligently avoided by those who claim to owe so much to him.

As he revealed in his last performance films, Pryor understood the prison he had built for himself and the shallow definitions that smothered his audience's understanding of the humanity behind his work.

But, as they say, once the barn door has been opened, you cannot get all of the animals to return by whistling. So we need to understand the terrible mistakes this man of comic genius made and never settle for a standard that is less than what he did at his very best, which was as good as it has ever gotten.

Worst single of the decade?

music box
Notes on "Humps"
A song so awful it hurts the mind.
By Hua Hsu
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2005, at 12:53 PM ET

"Taste has no system and no proofs"—this much we know. But some 40 years after the critic Susan Sontag made this and other observations on the good, the bad, and the in-between, the times have a-changed: Irony and camp have recast taste as an ethical shell game and we feel no guilt celebrating things that are, in the parlance of VH1, Awesomely Bad. But are there still songs that qualify as "bad"? Consider the Los Angeles hip-hop quartet the Black Eyed Peas. Their current single, "My Humps," is one of the most popular hit singles in history. It is also proof that a song can be so bad as to veer toward evil.

The Black Eyed Peas story begins in the early 1990s, when the rappers Will.I.am and Apl.de.ap met as members of a Los Angeles break-dancing crew called Tribal Nation. After a contract with Ruthless Records went nowhere, the duo regrouped with a third member, Taboo, and renamed themselves the Black Eyed Peas. The trio's earthy, post-Benetton aesthetic resulted in two moderately successful but unspectacular albums: 1998's Bridging the Gap and 2000's Behind the Front. In 2003 they added a fourth member, the singer Fergie. Propelled by a more upbeat frat-party vibe, their songs went platinum.

For all the brow-furrowing about the precise, Pavlovian engineering of hit singles, pop music is a wholly unpredictable, unstable enterprise. Lazy artists catch lightning in a bottle, bizarre throwaway jingles are greeted as bursts of quirky ingenuity, and puffy bits of melodrama accidentally become the catchiest thing ever. This is the weird appeal of the radio (or however you get your populist fix): Anything—good, bad, or otherwise—can sound genuinely perfect for a summer. If an Awesomely Bad pop song survives a few years and enlivens a party sometime down the line, so much the better.

This is what makes "Play MediaMy Humps" such an inscrutable pop moment. It's not Awesomely Bad; it's Horrifically Bad. The Peas receive no bonus points for a noble missing-of-the-mark or misguided ambition (some of the offended have responded with parody videos and snickering anecdotes about how the group uses Hitler-approved microphones). "My Humps" is a moment that reminds us that categories such as "good" and "bad" still matter. Relativism be damned! There are bad songs that offend our sensibilities but can still be enjoyed, and then there are the songs that are just really bad—transcendentally bad, objectively bad.

As a piece of music, "My Humps" is a stunning assemblage of awful ideas. The song's playful pogo and coke-thin, ring-tone synth line interpolate Sexual Harassment's 1982 left-field electro hit, "Play MediaI Need A Freak". But where the original trafficked in something icky, sinister, and darkly sexual, the Peas' call-and-response courtship fails to titillate—in fact, it's enough to convince one to never, ever ogle again. The "humps" in question belong to Fergie, who brandishes her "lovely lady lumps" for the purpose of procuring various gifts from men who, one would assume, find the prospect of "lumps" very exciting—one lump begetting another lump, if you will.

"What you gon' do with all that ass/ All that ass inside them jeans? … What you gon' do wit all that breast?/ All that breast inside that shirt?" rapper Will.I.Am teases in response, Play Mediarendering literal what had heretofore been pretty much literal. It's a song that tries to evoke a coquettish nudge and wink, but head-butts and bloodies the target instead. It isolates sectors of the female anatomy that obsessive young men have been inventing language for since their skulls fused, and yet it emerges only with "humps" and "lumps"—at least "Milkshake" sounded delicious.

The most fascinating aspect of "My Humps" is that it is widely believed to be the most successful unsolicited single in history, and, as of this writing, it is the most-downloaded song in the country. The Peas achieved all this without releasing a single. Instead, file sharers and intrepid radio programmers were the ones who more or less discovered the song and pushed it toward hit status, eventually forcing the label to respond with a proper single release. (Shaggy's "It Wasn't Me" is another recent example of a song that hit because of radio programmers rather than label strategy.) For now, "My Humps," has become the standard-bearer for the direct-democracy cultural possibilities of the Internet. It will certainly be supplanted. Soon, hopefully.
Hua Hsu is a writer and student living in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2131640/