Essay on Culture Appropiation for Profit Making and Its Effect on Musicking

Christopher Small gives us this word, Musicking, which definition involves pretty much any activity related to music and all of the issues that may come from it, such as how we relate to one another by celebrating musical rituals.

One of the main peculiarities of this book that has attracted one’s attention is the depiction of the way in which our western societies have changed the way in which we listen, celebrate, and take part on musical activities over the last three-hundred years.

Small gives us a warning about the way in which we celebrate musical rituals in our western societies of the twentieth and twenty-first century.

As he explains in his book, the way in which we relate to each other is who we are, and he seems to notice a lot of problems with the way in which we relate to each other during musical recitals in today’s society, as it is a reflection of how we relate to ourselves in our daily lives to some extent.

During the 17^th century, musical performances used to take place in coffee houses and places of the kind. they were events in which people were not only allowed to react to the music being played by the performers but encouraged to do so (people did not even need to pay for the entrance, it was a social space in which people would go to see and be seen).

Small stands out the fact that in the past, in many cultures around the globe, music has been celebrated in a similar way. In many cultures, audiences would let performers know whether they liked what they were listening to by the way in which they moved or danced, influencing the music or rhythmic patterns given by the musicians. He even goes on to say that this form of musical ritual is the most natural of its kind, that this is the way in which we humans are wired to relate to one another in a musical context.

A relatively recent example of the social feature of music events can be extracted from the text.

The great rock festivals of the 1960s and early 1970s, for example, were famous as events where strangers came together for a few days in tens and even hundreds of thousands to share not just a musical but a total social experience. […] The sociability was not separate from the performances but an important element of the total musical experience.[1]

The difference between these celebrations and manifestations of music and the ones we do now in our contemporary societies with classical music is, needless to say, nearly overwhelming. Audiences are to purchase a ticket in order to be allowed into the concert hall and once they are sitting there, they are to be in total silence and listen to the music being produced by the composer/conductor (ironically almost neglecting the presence of the musicians, the ones who actually make music materialise before them) while glorifying the sheet of written music standing there, worthy of their respect.

This is probably the result of a process that has been going on ever since the first industrial revolution. At some point during the early 19^th century everybody was thinking of new ways of trading and making more money. Musicians were accustomed to travel and gather money form their performances (Which was the beginning of the change of musical rituals) and everything took a big turn when they started to divert managerial responsibilities to third parties (managers), who would try to find all sorts of events for musicians to try to make the musician’s shows as profitable as possible.

With this shift in mentality, perspective and processing, the sociability of music gatherings started to be a secondary quality that was to be thought of only after monetary issues had been sorted. In other words, the main purpose of music performing/gatherings was for the musician and the manager to make money. They started to capitalise hugely from selling tickets.

A direct result of this type of activity in this blooming socio-economic environment is that the ones making the biggest profit appropriated of the music scene and set their standards when both performing music and organising concerts. This appropriation allowed them to make this huge impact in society that changed the way in which today we perceive musicians and behave in musical gatherings. It is an appropriation of a cultural activity by an industry, which finds a way to make a profit out of it, which in turn can change standards radically.

Culture appropriation for the purposes of profit is something that has been occurring ever since and has always created trouble for the cultures themselves in many different ways. Nancy Ehrenreich gives a clear example of what happened when Latin music was marketed in the United States.

Media representations of Latino/a cultural productions are troubling […] in the way that they often conflate pre-packaged, (North) Americanized versions of Latin culture with that culture itself. Just as tacos and tortilla chips have come to represent Mexican cuisine to many non-Latino/a Americans, the danger is that Ricky Martin will come to represent Latin music.[2]

From the several issues that Ehrenreich raises regarding the appropriation of Latin music by the North-American market, she stands out the way in which this type of music was marketed and presented to audiences.

Ehrenreich mentions shallow versions of Mexican dishes that became part of the North-American cuisine even though it was not real Mexican food. It is no surprise that Chinese cuisine has nearly nothing to do with the food that westerners get served in western Chinese restaurants. These foods go through a process of study to find out how a type of food that comes from a particular cultural background could ‘’fit’’ the culture were the food is intended to be sold or the taste of the people that it would be trying to satisfy.

By doing this, many aspects and characteristics of the original cuisine get lost in a superficial attempt to make money in a different cultural background. It is quite amusing to see how this phenomenon is not exclusive of food but it extends to other cultural aspects of any society, like music.

Pop North-American music clearly has influences of an array of music genres, African music and Latin music being the most prominent ones. However, music produced by Latinos were marketed as a completely different music genre from pop music, which reinforced the thought of pop music being pure white (pure North-American), ignoring the influences that pop music may have from Latin styles.

At the same time, this modus operandi ended up producing an Americanised version of Latin music (what Ehrenreich refers to as Ricky Martin), which basically blends (just) some of the characteristics of some Latin genres, bleached and tweaked to suit the ‘’white’’ taste, which in turn becomes culture within that culture because that is what audiences will think that Latin music is (only that it is not).

If we had a listen to a few of the several versions of Ain’t Nobody we would immediately see how this song represents this phenomenon. It was originally produced by a funk band and rearranged and rerecorded countless times in an array of different genres. The intention of this was obviously selling each version of the song to a particular type of audience. The band that made the original song profited out of letting people appropriate of it for their use and the people who used it profited out of appropriating of it and changing it as they saw fit for their target audience.

These forms of culture appropriation by an industry (or company) for the purposes of making a profit are common processes that have been settled and are common practices in capitalist societies. We are all accustomed to it and most people do not even realise about this phenomenon taking place in the background.

Does this mean that we are destined to dilute in bleach every single music style that the western world gets in contact with and dramatically change the way in which people musick for some to make money? Would culture appropriation not exist if there were not anybody out there to take advantage of music and capitalise from it? Can we protect music from these changes?

I argue that the cross-cultural exchanges that mark today’s globalization are not merely top-down or unidirectional, but instead that distinct cultures are always in a process of give and take. As cultures interrelate, they co-construct their identities in relation to each other.[3]

What Bockenfeld is telling us here is that in occasions, different types of cultures find each other to merge together, and this is apparently not done by the push of an industry but through natural interactions of people. It is the people themselves who carry out, perhaps at a subconscious level, what eventually becomes a combination of two or more cultures into one. The way in which people appropriated of Salsa music in Senegal is the main example of Bockenfeld’s article.

Notions of cultural authenticity and tradition are not entirely self-constructed; they emerge out of processes of cultural exchange.[4] This is nothing but the result of a natural attempt by people who belong to those cultural backgrounds to define and redefine themselves as a community.

This is similar to what we students of Salsa Music in Practice do at our weekly rehearsals. We listen to a Salsa piece of music and then try to recreate it to the best of our abilities by playing traditional Salsa instruments. We are embracing a type of music that comes from a different culture.

However, how do we know that by playing these Salsa songs we are actually playing them the way we should play them? By saying should, one would mean the way in which a proper salsa Latin band would play it.

As students that may come from different countries, how do we know that our subconscious is not tricking us into playing certain musical patterns that we have already heard in the music that we have been listening throughout our lives, music that pertains to our own cultures? This would be a clash. We are trying to embrace this culture through its music but at the same time we are unavoidably changing it somehow. We are indeed appropriating of this music, calling ourselves Salsa music students (or even performers) and playing it the way we do (this is not different to Orquesta de la Luz[5], a Japanese Salsa band).

So far, it seems that culture appropriation is something unavoidable, something that is bound to happen one way or the other. Even if and industry or company does not appropriate of a music genre and modifies it to sell it to a different type of audience, people themselves will eventually come across these music genres and modify them on their own along with the ways in which they listen and enjoy it and therefore the ways in which they relate to each other in a musical context.

However, one would like to ask the reader a question. How did people in Senegal hear about Salsa music? Salsa is surely a genre with African roots, but it was certainly developed in the Americas. How come Senegal was able to listen to this music before embracing it as part of their identity? It is easy to think about somebody broadcasting Salsa songs on the radio or some shop selling Salsa albums.
Are these activities not related to profit making? Is anybody not making money out of selling those Vinyls or tapes? Is anybody not making money out of teaching Salsa music in a University that charges £9,250 a year?

Pretty much every cross-cultural activity of the 21^st century is pushed forward by companies and institutions for the purpose of profit making. The problem with this is that cultures eventually lose their essence in order to blend in a more global socio-economic landscape to eventually dilute and disappear in it. Its consideration as mere commercial formality supposes a disrespectful attitude of appropriation of the tradition[6]. Traditional ways of musicking end up disappearing in order to make way for the industry’s standards in a spiral that does not seem to stop spinning.

Bibliography

Bockenfeld, Elizabeth, ‘Adapting & Appropriating Art from Afar: Negotiating a Global Identity

Through Popular Culture, A Study of Salsa in the Senegalese Context’, Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection, Paper 1512 (Spring 2013), 1-26.

Ehrenreich, Nancy, ‘Confessions of a White Salsa Dancer: Appropriation, Identity and the ’Latin

Music Craze’’, HEINONLINE, 78:4 Denv. U.L. (2001), 795-815.

Hosokawa, Shushei, ‘’Salsa No Tiene Frontera’: Orquesta de la Luz and the Globalization

OF POPULAR MUSIC’, Cultural Studies, 13:3 (1999), 510-514.

Otero Garabis, Juan, ‘’Puerto Rico is Salsa’: Propositions, appropriations and interpretations of a

popular genre’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 5:1 (1996), 25-31.

Small, Christopher, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening, (Middletown,

Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1998).

Weber, William, The Musician as Entrepreneur 1700-1914 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana

University Press, 2004).

Discography

Alex Wilson, ‘Ain’t Nobody’, Inglaterra, (Alex Wilson Records, 2007).

Rufus and Chaka Khan, ‘Ain’t Nobody’, Stompin at the Savoy, (Warner Bros, 1983).

[1] Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening, (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 45.

[2] Nancy Ehrenreich, ‘Confessions of a White Salsa Dancer: Appropriation, Identity and the ’Latin Music Craze’’, HEINONLINE, 78:4 Denv. U.L. (2001), 795-815 (800).

[3] Elizabeth Bockenfeld, ‘Adapting & Appropriating Art from Afar: Negotiating a Global Identity Through Popular Culture, A Study of Salsa in the Senegalese Context’, Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection, Paper 1512 (Spring 2013), 1-26 (5).

[4] Elizabeth Bockenfeld, ‘Adapting & Appropriating Art from Afar: Negotiating a Global Identity Through Popular Culture, A Study of Salsa in the Senegalese Context’, Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection, Paper 1512 (Spring 2013), 1-26 (5).

[5] Shushei Hosokawa, ‘’Salsa No Tiene Frontera’: Orquesta de la Luz and the Globalization OF POPULAR MUSIC’, Cultural Studies, 13:3 (1999), 510-514.

[6] Juan Otero Garabis, ‘’Puerto Rico is Salsa’: Propositions, appropriations and interpretations of a popular genre’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 5:1 (1996), 25-31 (26).