Orientalism & Electronic Music
I’ve been listening to the Monsoon Wedding soundtrack in my car for the past week. I picked it up at the library remembering how much it was played at every party while I lived in NYC. (About which I have recently been revisiting more positive memories. Speaking of which one of my Cambridge friends has finally found a job in Germany where she will be teaching in the fall.) It brought to mind melted_snowball’s question about the ‘moaning women’ in electronic music to mind. We briefly discussed objects of desire and climax when he brought up the subject, but for some reason it hadn’t occurred to me to mention the obvious: Orientalism!
One of the keystones of Orientalism is not just a position of power from which one can project one’s fantasies, but deliberate cultural appropriation and obfuscation to support those fantasies. Prof. Morton discusses this tendency in his lectures on Romantic Consumerism using the text of Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. (Available in two parts on his itunes lectures at UC Davis under ENL130: English Romantic Literature.)
One of the examples he uses is the idea of hieroglyphics. The word literally means ‘sacred carvings.’ We still tend to approach these pictorial renderings as though they contain some kind of sacred (and secret) meaning. This approach not only reflects our fantasies in approaching the carvings, but also covers a blind spot in our knowledge. So long as we do not understand that it isn’t the ancient equivalent of a ‘bus ticket’ we can continue to project and appropriate, owning, in essence, something we don’t truly understand.
I would say that there’s something similar at work in the process of sampling. Electronic music is fascinating because there is---for the most part---no actual generation of sound by persons present. By futzing with samples, sound waves and software a person can be a musician without actually having to master an instrument (okay a computer!) or even make a noise. There is a similar kind of appropriation going on in this sphere, and much of it is Orientalist in scope. Not only can the music of the Other be appropriated, (and I’m thinking specifically of Moby’s sampling of blues recordings, not to mention some of the first mass-electronic hits by Deep Forest incorporating tribal music/lullabies) many times the samples selected are deliberately obfuscated (the ‘moaning woman’) so that meaning remains opaque. (Even spoken samples in ‘plain English’ are lifted out of context.) The fact that it is the feminine voice that is so often used to convey a sense of both exoticism and climax… well read into it what you’d like.
Of course, as I’m writing this statement all I can think is that he Prof. would probably have something more profound to say with much better examples (he writes electronic music, as well as having 'mastered' the violin)> He would strongly encourage me to state it as a question whether than a position: "According to blah blah, Orientalism can be defined as... Is it possible that a similar approach is found in the sampling of electronic music?")
On a related note: Laura Miller on a Richard Bernstein’s East, West, and Sex., I think she kind of misses the point, but oh well…
Her other article this week is about banning Francesca Lia Block’s Baby Be-Bop. The article uses the inflammatory (pun intended) phrase that ‘West Bend Citizens for Safe Libraries’ (wherever the hell West Bend is… the article doesn’t say) intend to burn the book at stake. The article does not, however, go on to describe burning activities, instead it involves the usual civic disobedience of trying to overturn board members or persuade the librarians to place youth books in the adult section.
My biggest comment in response to this article is: 1. Where the hell are your reporting skills, Ms Miller? And 2. Baby Be-Bop? Are you serious? While I can certainly understand while the ‘Christian Civil Liberties Union’ would find this book offensive, I might question why they’ve chosen it while there are so many newer, more offensive, books to ban. This seemed particularly lame to me. 3. The entire article reads like a satirical piece one might find in The Onion.
Which reminds me, I finished Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature by Robin Brande (and self-professed Biblegrrrl) last night. Thanks to dawnoftheread for recommending this YA novel about a Xtian girl who is shunned by her community after she takes a stand against their harassment of a fellow student. It does a really great job dealing with the kind of cognitive dissonance that results when trying to overcome long held beliefs in the face of moral and ethical dilemmas, not to mention overwhelming social odds.
I really loved the tone and narrative, but I did take umbrage at the evolutionary metaphors. “Survival of the fittest” is dragged out again in association with Darwin (no thanks to you, Mr. Spencer!) and the author continually uses evolution as a metaphor for personal development, which is also a gross misuse of the theory. She also never effectively deals with the problem of whether or not compassion is a positively adaptive behavior. However, I really loved the portrayal of the moral and social development of a hardline Xtian. I think there should be more books like this to bridge that gap.
Also, an announcement courtesy of the Boulder Bookstore involving people you might know:
Boulder High School graduates Jon Goldman (writer/director) and Anna Salim (producer,) [probably best known to most of you as ‘Evan’s sister’] have been named one of ten Semi-Finalists in the Netflix Find Your Voice Competition, out of two thousand original applicants. The promotional trailer for the film (Paul Sussman's Eleven-Step Guide to Self-Actualization ), was shot over three days in eleven locations throughout the City of Boulder.
View and vote here until July 1:
http://www.netflixfindyourvoice.com/?id=10
Previous discussion referenced in this post can be found here:
http://zalena.livejournal.com/873457.html
One of the keystones of Orientalism is not just a position of power from which one can project one’s fantasies, but deliberate cultural appropriation and obfuscation to support those fantasies. Prof. Morton discusses this tendency in his lectures on Romantic Consumerism using the text of Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. (Available in two parts on his itunes lectures at UC Davis under ENL130: English Romantic Literature.)
One of the examples he uses is the idea of hieroglyphics. The word literally means ‘sacred carvings.’ We still tend to approach these pictorial renderings as though they contain some kind of sacred (and secret) meaning. This approach not only reflects our fantasies in approaching the carvings, but also covers a blind spot in our knowledge. So long as we do not understand that it isn’t the ancient equivalent of a ‘bus ticket’ we can continue to project and appropriate, owning, in essence, something we don’t truly understand.
I would say that there’s something similar at work in the process of sampling. Electronic music is fascinating because there is---for the most part---no actual generation of sound by persons present. By futzing with samples, sound waves and software a person can be a musician without actually having to master an instrument (okay a computer!) or even make a noise. There is a similar kind of appropriation going on in this sphere, and much of it is Orientalist in scope. Not only can the music of the Other be appropriated, (and I’m thinking specifically of Moby’s sampling of blues recordings, not to mention some of the first mass-electronic hits by Deep Forest incorporating tribal music/lullabies) many times the samples selected are deliberately obfuscated (the ‘moaning woman’) so that meaning remains opaque. (Even spoken samples in ‘plain English’ are lifted out of context.) The fact that it is the feminine voice that is so often used to convey a sense of both exoticism and climax… well read into it what you’d like.
Of course, as I’m writing this statement all I can think is that he Prof. would probably have something more profound to say with much better examples (he writes electronic music, as well as having 'mastered' the violin)> He would strongly encourage me to state it as a question whether than a position: "According to blah blah, Orientalism can be defined as... Is it possible that a similar approach is found in the sampling of electronic music?")
On a related note: Laura Miller on a Richard Bernstein’s East, West, and Sex., I think she kind of misses the point, but oh well…
Her other article this week is about banning Francesca Lia Block’s Baby Be-Bop. The article uses the inflammatory (pun intended) phrase that ‘West Bend Citizens for Safe Libraries’ (wherever the hell West Bend is… the article doesn’t say) intend to burn the book at stake. The article does not, however, go on to describe burning activities, instead it involves the usual civic disobedience of trying to overturn board members or persuade the librarians to place youth books in the adult section.
My biggest comment in response to this article is: 1. Where the hell are your reporting skills, Ms Miller? And 2. Baby Be-Bop? Are you serious? While I can certainly understand while the ‘Christian Civil Liberties Union’ would find this book offensive, I might question why they’ve chosen it while there are so many newer, more offensive, books to ban. This seemed particularly lame to me. 3. The entire article reads like a satirical piece one might find in The Onion.
Which reminds me, I finished Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature by Robin Brande (and self-professed Biblegrrrl) last night. Thanks to dawnoftheread for recommending this YA novel about a Xtian girl who is shunned by her community after she takes a stand against their harassment of a fellow student. It does a really great job dealing with the kind of cognitive dissonance that results when trying to overcome long held beliefs in the face of moral and ethical dilemmas, not to mention overwhelming social odds.
I really loved the tone and narrative, but I did take umbrage at the evolutionary metaphors. “Survival of the fittest” is dragged out again in association with Darwin (no thanks to you, Mr. Spencer!) and the author continually uses evolution as a metaphor for personal development, which is also a gross misuse of the theory. She also never effectively deals with the problem of whether or not compassion is a positively adaptive behavior. However, I really loved the portrayal of the moral and social development of a hardline Xtian. I think there should be more books like this to bridge that gap.
Also, an announcement courtesy of the Boulder Bookstore involving people you might know:
Boulder High School graduates Jon Goldman (writer/director) and Anna Salim (producer,) [probably best known to most of you as ‘Evan’s sister’] have been named one of ten Semi-Finalists in the Netflix Find Your Voice Competition, out of two thousand original applicants. The promotional trailer for the film (Paul Sussman's Eleven-Step Guide to Self-Actualization ), was shot over three days in eleven locations throughout the City of Boulder.
View and vote here until July 1:
http://www.netflixfindyourvoice.com/?id=10
Previous discussion referenced in this post can be found here:
http://zalena.livejournal.com/873457.html