Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representations, and Appropriations in Music (review)

Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representations, and Appropriations in Music. Edited by Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000. [xi, 360 p. ISBN 0-520-22083-8. $60 (hbk.); ISBN 0-520-22084-6. $24.95 (pbk.).]

One significant contribution of this anthology is that it offers a glimpse beyond the familiar, tired, unidirectional model of west-east relations (read: possession, [re]definition, exploitation) that seems to be the most enduring legacy of Edward Said's Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1979). The bipolarities of Said and his post-colonial followers, while (admittedly) implied and echoed in several of the studies included here, no longer really suffice in an era when the Anglo-Indian band Cornershop can cover the proto-raga rock Beatles' classic "Norwegian Wood"--in Punjabi. Our global musical environment is one in which borrowings (and, yes, essentializations) go in all directions, often with conscious, multilevel ironies, so there is a need for critical approaches that are less brittle. Several of these studies, responding to this need, treat issues of musical borrowing (or, more polemically, appropriation) with finesse.

One of these is Claudia Gorbman's excellent "Scoring the Indian: Music in the Liberal Western," which surveys the music of the Hollywood Indian roughly since World War II. From the pre-war, savage- on-the-warpath Indianism leavened by lush romance, a much broader vocabulary evolved: authentic Indian chants, drums and other ceremonial instruments, post-tonal modernism, and even mixtures of other world musics. Gorbman tracks the changing image of the Indian through the choices of music that served as cinematic signifiers, identifying many of the pitfalls of both borrowing and not borrowing musical material for the musical commentary and accompaniment.

The problematics deepen with Steven Feld's provocative chapter, "The Poetics and Politics of Pygmy Pop." One of several stories interwoven here is the history of a sound, a beer-bottle imitation on a 1973 Herbie Hancock recording, Headhunters (reissued on CD as Columbia/Sony CK 47478, 1992) of hindewhu, "the onomatopoeic term of the BaBenzélé pygmies of the Central African Republic for the alternation of voice with a single-pitch papaya-stem whistle" (p. 257). The beer-bottle player (Bill Summers, Hancock's percussionist) sought to imitate a 1966 ethnomusicological recording, and his playing was later digitally sampled and used on a Madonna recording, with Hancock getting partial credit as songwriter (Bedtime Stories, Warner Brothers WB 9 45676-2, 1994). When Feld asked Hancock, in 1985, about the overt copying of a tribal music, he was given this answer: "This is a brothers kind of thing, you know, a thing for brothers to work out. I mean, I don't actually need to go over there and talk to them, I could do it but I know it's OK because it's a brothers kind of thing" (p. 257). The complexities abound: Summers's role (and lack of composition credit on the Madonna album), the statement that the operative principle is an unspoken African/diasporic-African understanding, and the ensuing implication that "it's a brothers kind of a thing; you wouldn't understand." While it would seem in poor taste to press Hancock on the issue, there is the case of Solomon Linda, the Zulu singer who created the tune that would eventually become "Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight)," and who (according to his daughter) didn't begrudge the song or its profits to the non-African-diasporic likes of Pete Seeger, the Tokens, or the New Christy Minstrels (Rian Malan, "In the Jungle," Rolling Stone, no. 841 [25 May 2000]: 65). Conceivably, this generosity reflects an African, non-territorial approach to music, but if so, it is lost on many recent critics, including those who indict Paul Simon and his collaborations with the African group Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

Feld prefers observation to judgment, and his meticulous de-layering of the case is fascinating...