The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, Modernity

3. Multisited Avant-Gardes or World Music 2.0? Musicians from Beirut and Beyond between Local Production and Euro-American Reception

89 chapter three Multisited Avant-Gardes or World Music 2.0? Musicians from Beirut and Beyond between Local Production and Euro-American Reception : thomas burkhalter The latest tracks, songs, sound montages, and noises from the Arab world, Asia, Africa, and Latin America seem to contain revolutionary meanings. On theoretical grounds, these musics suggest reconfigurations of “modernity.” They are small but passionate attempts to reshape the world into a place where “modernity” is not “Euro-modernity” or “Euro-American modernity” but where possible new configurations of modernity exist next to each other (see Grossberg 2010). These musics seem to prove claims by various social and cultural scientists: they declare the one-sided theories of modernization to be inadequate (Randeria and Eckert 2009). In other words, the old model of center and periphery is less valid than ever before. We are living in a world of multiple, interwoven modernities (Eisenstadt 2000). The “digital media-morphosis” (Smudits 2002) is often brought forward as the catalyst for this revolution. Throughout the world, musicians find new ways to produce music at low cost and to promote it globally. Ideally, they offer new musical positions, challenge “ethnocentric” perceptions of “place” and “locality” in music, and attack the focus on musical “difference” in Euro-American music and culture markets. In this article, I discuss music and musicians from Beirut in particular but include music from other cities in the Arab world, Africa, and Latin America to strengthen my argument. The focus lies on music that today thomas burkhalter / 90 reaches Euro-American reception platforms—music that is being licensed on European or U.S. labels; musicians who perform in Amsterdam, Boston, or Stockholm; and audio files and video clips that are being played and discussed on peer-to-peer networks, blogs, newspapers, and radio stations in Canada, Switzerland, or Germany. The perspective is a Euro-American one (or, to be ethnographically correct, one from a thirty-nine-year-old Swiss male ethnomusicologist who has worked for many years as a music journalist, earned experience on the board of the Swiss funding body Pro Helvetia, organized various concerts and festivals, and runs the online magazine Norient). My goal is to determine whether the strong claims around challenging concepts of modernity and place have an empirical grounding or whether they are, rather, naïve expressions of “wishful thinking.” The main questions discussed are whether these musicians and musics from Beirut and beyond are able and allowed to create independent musical positions, and thus form new multisited musical avant-gardes of today, or whether they are caught up in the old political and economic power imbalances . Are they still struggling for equal “Third World” or “Black” representation and thus continuing to create musical pamphlets—or a twenty-firstcentury version of Afro-Futurism? Or are they still being forced to mainly fulfill the expectations and adapt to the worldview of their Euro-American producers and audiences, and thus offering what I wish to refer to as “World Music 2.0,” an updated version of “world music,” instead of new vanguard positions? World music was created by British record producers in the 1980s with the goal of diversifying the Euro-American market in order to sell more music. Consequently, world music is based on “musical difference” and “Otherness” in its core idea. Due to this focus, the world music catalog for the Arab world contains mainly classical Arab ensemble music, popular taqtuqa songs of the 1930s–1970s, and folk music, but almost no psychedelic rock from the 1970s, punk, metal, electronic music, electro-acoustic experiments, or musique concr ète. This is true despite the fact that this very music has been produced not only in Beirut but also in other Middle Eastern, African, Asian, and Latin American cities for many years. It is after a long period of nonrepresentation that musicians of these genres have started to perform successfully on various Euro-American reception platforms. New Music from Asia, Africa, and Latin America Before focusing on Beirut and the Arab world, a broader overview seems necessary. New music from Africa, Asia, and Latin America is progressively reaching Euro-American reception platforms, and is being discussed with Musicians from Beirut and Beyond / 91 increased interest by ethnomusicologists, popular music scholars, journalists, and bloggers. Not many years ago, small niche audiences, exclusively, listened to music from these continents, and many of its present-day supporters merely ignored the new sounds, rhythms, and...