orgtheory.net

When fans group together types of music, we tend to think in terms of “family likenesses” built from conventional (aesthetic and historical) wisdom.  I think Reebee Garafalo’s famous Genealogy of Pop/Rock Music chart illustrates this wisdom well.  As you can see here, there is a desire to represent trajectories of sounds, but these also reflect (or are contingent upon) chart success, political content, geographic location, etc.  I think the contribution of the chart is summarized well in Edward Tufte’s Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative (Graphics Press):

“With intense richness of detail, this nostalgic and engaging chart fascinates many viewers (…) Also the illustration presents a somewhat divergent perspective on popular music: songs are not merely singles – unique, one-time, de novo happenings – rather, music and music-makers share a pattern, a context, a history.”

This chart depicts the outcome of a process that fascinates Pete Peterson and I.  As Brayden kindly mentioned, we recently published the results.  Our basic idea is that the mechanisms that produce Garafalo’s “Genealogy” are organizational.  These mechanisms are represented in our manuscript as “attributes” (although we originally conceptualized them as “resources”) and include things like the scale of production, the source of funding for the genre, the clarity of purpose among musicians and fans, the degree that sites of production are spatially co-located and so forth.  After looking at sources on 60 contemporary musics produced in the U.S., we determined there were four major “genre forms”.  When ordered into trajectories, these forms organize the life course of any music, to a greater or lesser degree.

“Any music,” that is, made within the contemporary U.S.  As soon as I started to look at music created abroad, as I was asked to do for a fantastic conference held at Erasmus University last fall (and organized by the estimable Tim Dowd and Susanne Janssen), I realized we needed some new forms and it is these I wish to discuss.

The recognition that non-U.S. musics might offer an additional “genre form” came after cycling through a few sources on the contemporary “pop” music of three nations: China, Turkmenistan, and Cambodia.  Turkmenistan’s trajectory of politically-purposed genres seems to resemble those in China (more on those, in a minute):  the introduction of Soviet cultural policy in 1924 apparently sparked the transition from folk instruments and compositional styles to Western forms, while pop music made more recently was produced secretively or under the supervision of government censors.  There appears to be a rather substantial pop music scene—mostly electronic, heavy metal and rap—but the information available is spotty.  In part, this is because President for Life Saparmurat Niyazov (Türkmenbaşy) was a psychopath, as I have already discussed.

We know even less about the Cambodian pop musicians, like Sinn Sisamouth and Pan Ron, who performed before the civil war that led to the Khmer Rouge’s rein of terror.  Most of these performers are assumed to have died in the Killing Fields, and little of their music remains.  After about a year of asking everyone I ran into if they knew anything about Cambodian rock in the 50s and 60s, I finally was connected to a friend-of-a-friend who released a compilation album (Cambodian Cassette Archives) from tapes he found in the Oakland Public Library.  I also am aware of, but haven’t watched, “Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock ‘n’ Roll.” Reliable sources on both cases are really wanting, unless you can think of something…?

So China ends up having paradigmatic examples of both forms of “politically-purposed genres.” (Politically-purposed genres are those whose development is systematically facilitated by government entities or by organized groups with partisan political interests operating outside the government.  All countries have laws, regulations, and subventions that advantage domestic music producers over music made outside the country, but what is distinctive about politically-purposed genres is that the genre is purposefully created and supported to further particular government or partisan-group politico-cultural objectives.) The first kind of politically-purposed genre is customary.  These are based in indigenous folk music or the traditional fine art music of the country.  The musics are usually intended to displace western pop music and are part of efforts to build an indigenous commercial pop culture.   So, for example, the Chinese government (after 1949) mandated that the state-owned China Record Company (Zhongguo changpian gongsi), create a new form of music that combined Chinese opera (xiqu), folk songs and revolutionary art songs in order to displace Euro-American popular music.  Nueva canción (“new song”), a Chilean popular political genre that would later spawn derivative forms across Latin America, and among exile communities across the globe, is another good example we explore at some length.  In its combination of folk, popular and commercial music from Amerindian, Euro-Hispanic and African traditions, this music embodies pan-Latin identity; more than a musical style, it symbolizes an ideological stance; an opposition to the homogenizing tendencies of transnational media.

The second kind of politically-purposed genre is appropriated.  These musics adapt the lyrics of contemporary Western popular musics, most commonly jazz, rock, punk, and rap, in order to better reflect local concerns and perspectives.  In some cases the indigenous instruments, rhythmic structure, or sonorous effects are used to more completely appropriate the Western-derived music.  During the Cultural Revolution in China (1966-1976), the government commanded the creation of a form of revolutionary “model opera” (yangbanxi), which “became the core of the unitary revolutionary mass culture … and replaced numerous varieties of local opera” (Shepherd, Horn and Laing 2005: 31).  The government-owned popular music industry was directed to “serve the people” (Wei renmin fuwu) by producing Tongsu yinyue, music for the masses, including praise songs to socialism.  These songs “featured plain, folk-inflected melodies backed by Western-style orchestral accompaniment, with a few token traditional Chinese instruments to lend cultural credibility” (Huang 2001:2).  Broadcast over large, public speakers and over the radio, these songs were an inescapable part of daily life in the 1970s. Thus ironically “Chinese leaders propagated a revolutionary musical style that was highly western in its technique, instrumentation and harmonic structure.”

A closing note: I’m more than worried that politically-purposed genres are also distinct from other genre forms because their study is so much more likely to function as epitaph.  I think many of us are just as interested–perhaps more interested–in dead or dying organizational forms.  I think the study of politically-purposed genres can be a form of political intervention, if done well.  Pete and I don’t manage it, here, but it is one star by which we orient. Both Garafalo’s Genealogy and a market-based theory of musical development risk obscuring the violent history by which genres and artists are excluded from history.