RY: Is there any particular reason why you're actually in London at the moment?
DT: [Tersely] Just personal reasons. Family reasons.
RY: You obviously feel passionately about the fact that you should be expressing local, parochial concerns. Why is that so imperative?
DT: OK. Well. . .
RY: There's a lot of opposition to that idea at the moment.
DT: Yeah, I know: well, people are brainwashed in all sorts of ways aren't they? Well, it's real simple: I can present you with, for instance, a reggae band from Iowa &emdash; Des Moines, Iowa &emdash; middle of the cornfields, that plays any bit as good as a reggae band from Jamaica. Which one is better to go see? Exactly the same music, played with exactly the same passion. Which one is better?
RY: Who knows? It's a matter of taste.
DT: No, it's not. Simple: the one from Jamaica's better. And always will be, because they're playing their own music. I was at WOMAD a few weeks ago, and it was very clear the number of bands that had become too Westernised. The symptoms were really simple: they'd play lots of drum solos, and they'd do lots of AC/DC crowd management techniques, and you'd just change the faces, take away their bad English and Australian accents, and you put AC/DC and blah-de-blah-de-blah from Turkey next to each other, take away the soundtrack, they're doing exactly the same thing. They've been to the West too many times, and they're doing AC/DC. Getting the audience to, you know, "Naah-na-na naah-nah": this is what's called homogenisation: this is people taking things from other cultures that they have no connection with, and they have no real understanding of, and slabbing it onto what they're doing. And it's just as culturally imperialistic for this group to rip off AC/DC as it is for AC/DC to rip off the Turkish group. If they ever would! [Laughs] We could find different people to go in the A and B slots, but it's the same concept: what are we going to learn if we all play. . . what are we going to learn if everybody's the same? What do I get out of it? Do I get a pop homogenised corporate experience? Obviously the record companies want you to believe that we're all One World, and everybody should be like everybody else, and we should all reduce our art to software, and on and on and on. Yeah, Sony's delighted for you to think the way these people think. I'm not interested: I think that you learn more about the human condition and about each other from the peculiarities that make us different, and I think you learn more by being different, or having a different focus on something. We all feel the same things, no matter where we're from; we all have the same hopes and fears and dreams as human beings. But it's how you filter those things according to your local experience, I think that you learn bigger things about. I also think that art is inextricably connected with the land, and that the geography is really what determines a lot about the art. And so the more you take the geography out of the art, the less it's capable of expressing, just as the more frequencies you take out of music, the more narrow the palate, the less you're going to be able to speak, to express. Just as the more words you eliminate from the language, à la George Orwell 1984, the harder it is to express quote/unquote 'dangerous', or unconventional thoughts. It's all connected, it's all the same thing, it's not new: Orwell was saying it in 1948 or whenever he wrote that thing. It's a long process.
RY: Do you not think that nevertheless there can be fruitful moments before full homogenisation, where different things can rub off on each other?
DT: Don't believe it. I don't believe you can learn anything from slabbing off something that comes from somebody else's experience, and just taking from it and adapting it. I think you can learn from it only in the context in which it was created. Folk music, for instance, is by definition tedious. There's nothing more tedious than listening to some lousy African band, no matter how good they are. They're tedious. Boring. Or some hillbilly group, you know, or some Turkish folk group: they're boring till you want to weep with tedium. But that's what obsession is. One person's obsession is someone else's tedium. This is why everybody wants to slab off some of this, and tart up their own wretched little pop tunes with them, cos it gives them some sort of credibility, or it's some other gimmick, you know. You have to dive into the tedium of folk music to appreciate it. And I'm a big fan of folk music, but let's not mince words: it's tedious, because it's obsessive. And it has value because of its obsession, its obsession with its own culture, its own world, its own problems, its own hopes and dreams. Obsession is tedious. Folk is tedious. So folk is obsessive, therefore folk is tedious. [Animated] But that's its strength, that's the good thing about it. That's why you like it. Huh?
RY: Is that what keeps it alive?
DT: Yes! Of course. It's obsessive.
― jess, Friday, 10 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-one years ago) link
two years pass...
sixteen years pass...
Thomas is tedious in general and the reggae comparison does not exactly follow (without qualifications) because reggae isn't folk music, but he's right about folk itself being tedious to outsiders. For instance take anadolu pop - it's always the rockier, more cosmopolitan stuff that gets excavated by western consumers (no bad thing inherently) not the more eastern/arabic influenced folk pop of Orhan Gencebay, esengül, Bergen, etc etc. In some senses as someone who grew up with this music I don't really get why Cem Karaca (or barış manço even!) are so highly rated, he's ok but over Erkin Baba, you must be kidding me! They are good, but not *that* good.
Where his argument breaks down is seeing music as being owned - and all ownership, in the final determining instance is force sanctified by legal right, be that the free market or soviet type societies which were anyhow in transition into a pure capitalism very early on. But there is also a middle class quest for authenticity here, but modern folk recording is by nature inauthentic, as it is ultimately based on earlier, antiquated peasant forms. This is why I do quibble with Spicers implied argument that turkish music stopped innovating in the 1980s, it did innovate, just not in the capital R rnr domain. And today it is innovating, albeit in globalised trap forms which I have enough of living in the UK, but I can differentiate formal innovation from aesthetics, which is the achilles-heal of all music critics, mainly because most of them talk about music as an immediate experiences of sensations, rather than as a cultural lineage. But this has absolutely nothing to do with a perceived Jamaican authenticity vis-a-vis reggae, but the way in which artists interact with the culture. For that reason I find turkish reggae cringey, because to me as someone living in London the signifiers are so out of place. I wager that had I lived in istanbul without constant access to Jamaican music I would look at it somewhat differently.
― RobbiePires, Thursday, 14 October 2021 22:26 (two years ago) link