Music and Politics in 20th c Europe (HIST 311)

A question that consistently popped into my head while reading the Meintjes article was whether or not visibility trumped authenticity. There were multiple answers given within the article, but the one that stood out most prominently was on pages 55-56: “Simon ‘has filtered the [South African] sound with his own style, lyrics and Western influence to concoct a colorful collage which, while retaining its Afro elements, makes them less raw, more flowy, more gentle. And most pleasant.'” (Meintjes, 55-56). There’s a lot to unpack in this statement. By referring to South African musical traditions in this manner, the “filtering” of South African music is through a lens of palatability. Simon is extracting the “pleasant” bits of South African music in order to cater towards those that do not identify with this music tradition. I found this extremely problematic when applied to the section where Meintjes talks about white South Africans using Graceland as a portal into Black South African music culture. By using Graceland as the medium in which White South Africans entered into “their culture’s musical tradition”, this signifies that the interpreted version of Black South African music culture is what they identify with. Yet, as the article pointed out, many White South Africans would not have known that this musical tradition existed had it not been for Graceland. Which begs the question: was the visibility of Black South African music worth the inherent interpretation that had to occur for Graceland to exist?

In her article “Paul Simon’s Graceland, South Africa, and the Mediation of Musical Meaning,” ethnomusicologist Louise Meintjes invites her readers to consider how Graceland’s meaning and political stakes shift from individual to individual, depending on their positionality in relation to the context of the political implications of the work and how these implications interface with the listeners’ and producers’ identity. Meintjes notes that “the idea of collaboration is embedded in many levels of the music and musicmaking process…the ambiguity of its political orientation allows multiple interpretations of that collaboration..[and] interpretations of that collaboration are tied through icons and indices to listeners’ sense of themselves (linked to their positioning in social space [Bordieu 1984] so that their interpretations are felt to be true and natural.” (Meintjes, 38) She notes later on this page that the album’s success is predicated upon its validation of multivalent listening experiences. I’m curious about how we can consider this practice as a marketing strategy; in other words, if Meintjes accounts for the political, collective and individual meaning-making of Graceland, how does she and how can we contextualize this in neoliberal consumerist ideologies, and globalized capitalism more broadly? Can extend her argument to read the album’s success as a commodification of political engagement and political identity?

In her article “Solidarity, Song, and the Sound Document,” Andrea F. Bohlman expands upon notions of musical textuality we have previously encountered by positioning the concept of “sound document” as a crucial and explicit aspect of their methodology, their overarching argument, and their contribution to scholarship. To Bohlman, sound seems to exist both as a) what we normally consider as sonic, and b) as the implied aurality of the written word. In this sense, they explicitly redefine sound as “inscribed materially through an attempt to fix it temporally and spatially,” (Bohlman, 238) thereby expanding ‘the text’ to include both what can be found in actual sonic frequency, and material such as “written registers, song lyrics, recorded soundscapes, elicited interviews, or film soundtracks.” (Bohlman, 238) By defining their ‘text’ as not just musical (and thereby aural), Bohlman’s “sound document” expands the ‘text’ they are considering to include “written, recorded, and filmed accounts of the Polish strikes and negotiations.” (Bohlman, 239) I am curious about how we can negotiate and critically understand the concept of the “sound document” as it applies not only to Bohlman’s topic, but to other scholarship we have read and further, to our own experiences with music, sound and media. Does the “sound document” fundamentally destabilize the order and hierarchy of how we and scholars normally compartmentalize musical knowledges? In other words, does presenting a composite concept of the “sonic” which includes literal written text force one to reconsider how one engages with the unavoidably multifariousness of music as a practice? It seems that in deploying this concept, Bohlman ultimately seeks to destabilize more traditional notions of what sound is and in this sense, encourages their readers to consider the multitude of sounds and their meanings in the context of Gzansk; in other words, Bohlman encourages us to imagine and analyze the soundscape of these events through not just sonic, but written sources. In what sense does this reformulate traditional research methodologies? Or is Bohlman introducing a similar model under a different term and analytical lens?

In the selected passages we read in Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, Alexei Yurchak articulates the ways in which Soviet society and culture developed with, and because of, sound technologies, how these sound technologies in the Soviet context were developed and modified with and by Soviet social actors, and how these social and cultural formations had tangible political effects on individual, local, State, and international levels. When I read Yurchak, the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic immediately came to mind, a reference it seems Yurchak invites us to consider by beginning this chapter with a quote from Tarkovsky’s film adaptation of the novel, Stalker. In this vein, I think it could be fruitful to consider the common themes in both our reading for class, and broadly within the novel, to consider how sound technology was used in a Soviet context to essentially reformulate Soviet life, and what music’s role is in this process.

In Roadside Picnic, written in 1971, an unexplained alien visitation to a non-major Soviet city has rendered a large area, the Zone, uninhabitable and littered with bizarre, non-terrestrial technologies. State officials secure the Zone, and forbid citizens from entering, but provide only ambiguous reasons as to why. Despite being forbidden entry, and despite the unexplainable, often grotesque, effects the Zone has on individuals, people (Stalkers) covertly enter the zone and collect the technologies the aliens left, using them themselves or selling them on a thriving black market. These technologies have polarizing effects on their users: they can completely disfigure those exposed to the technologies, or can be extremely and widely useful to its users. The technologies cultivate a culture around themselves, and social formations, economic structures, and even to a degree, the State are modified to an equal extent as the aforementioned modify the technologies themselves.

The parallels between Yurchak’s 1950s-1980s-era Soviet Union and the fictional setting of the Strugatsky’s novel share obvious and glaring similarities. Much like the Zone, the imagined West of the Soviet public becomes central to Soviet life. And just as in the novel, this West is repurposed through technology for Soviet ends. As Yurchak highlights through the examples of tape replication (Yurchak, 188) and x-ray plate records (Yurchak, 182), Soviet people engaged in the West’s music not just through their own cultural lens, but through technological modifications specific to their cultural practices. This invites the question: to what extent were Soviets, like Stalkers, using technologies less to place themselves in dialogue with the West, and more to place the West in dialogue with Soviet life? As Yurchak shows, exposure to Western media through these technologies partially created the conditions for Soviet rock, jazz and sonic technological practices to not only take hold culturally and socially, but actually impact how the State engaged with non-Soviet culture. If, as Yurchak shows throughout, the act of imagining, through sound technology, is an agentive way of articulating the Soviet self, I am interested in how we can situate the use and modifications of sound technology as both distinctly Soviet in this context, and in dialogue with technological modifications we have observed in past texts and more broadly in the history of music technology.

“The literal meaning of these songs was irrelevant. What was important was their Western origin, foreign sound, and unknown references that allowed Soviet fans to imagine worlds that did not have to be linked to any “real” place or circumstances, neither Soviet nor Western.” (Yurchak 191)

In his section entitled “Translation,” Yurchak discusses the process by which Soviet youth and other consumers of Western musical culture often “translated” the lyrics of popular foreign songs, by, as in the instance of future film actor Alexandr Abdulov and his friends, “inventing their own elaborate translations and stories for their [The Beatles] songs” (Yurchak 191). Yet, in most contexts, the meaning of the word “translation” accounts for a slightly different, perhaps more literal, product–rather, a “written or spoken rendering of the meaning of a word or text in another language” (Oxford English Dictionary 2016). To me, the “translation” described in Yurchak’s work seems to align more the idea of the x-ray disc, in that the newly created meaning of the text is overlaid over the content, rather than presented apart from it as a completely separate product. The result is a new cultural creation that owes to both Western and Soviet influences, such as Shagin’s “Beatles” piece, unlike pure translation which, arguably, simply puts the text and meaning of one language into another one.

Something I find extremely interesting about this concept is the fact that a large portion of the Russian populous would have had access to short-wave radio programming in foreign languages, which therefore allowed some degree of foreign language education, but still chose to mostly concern themselves with their own imagined lyrics. Does this have to do with a preoccupation with what Yurchak describes as the “Imaginary West?” Or is it more a product of a lack of an extensive language education (i.e. one that would result in fluency, rather than a few phrases here and there). Another possible theory here might be that audiences were unconcerned with the actual translation of the music because they were more focused on interpreting its sound “scientifically,” such as in the case of Andrei.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSkn5Mk10Y0

Both “Don’t Shoot” and “This Train Is On Fire” address the very real impact of state-sanctioned war and violence, particularly upon younger generations (in “This Train Is On Fire,” the last verse affirms “…the people who shot our fathers are now making plans for our youths”). These lyrical themes, combined with the stylistic choices of the performers (communally-sung choruses, etc.), reminded me of anti-war folk music from the 1960s. Songs like “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and “Only a Pawn in Their Game” address similar themes and employ the same singer-as-poet dynamic of earlier Russian bards (Bob Dylan seems to be a prime example of this). Yurchak mentioned that Western “songs of protest” were officially endorsed by the state, even if their lyrical messages were lost upon Soviet listeners (191). I am wondering if the content of Soviet anti-war songs was inspired at all by Western anti-war music from the Vietnam War era. Would bands like Aquarium or DDT have had access to the music of Bob Dylan or Joan Baez, and if so, was the ideological content of these songs clear?

Yurchak discusses that broadcasts in languages other than those spoken in the USSR were jammed (178) and as such the BBC World Service, amongst others, was readily available to Soviet music fans. How do we read this decision? To block broadcasts that were in Russian and the other languages of the Soviet Union suggests that the state saw broadcasts that were readily understood by the greater population as more dangerous than those that were harder to understand. This makes sense, sort of – a Russian language broadcast of Voice Of America, which could package an American agenda in a local language, was deemed more dangerous to Soviet society than an English language broadcast of the same station. Yet, Yurchak also makes clear that it was the “foreign sound,” “non-Soviet sound, and American English” (191) that listeners desired. Meanings did not matter; the broadcasts were valued by virtue of being foreign. By allowing these certain foreign language stations to be broadcast, those who did not speak or did not have the time and money to learn to speak foreign languages were excluded from the broadcasts. The “individualized practise of listening and doing it in a foreign language” (179) thus belonged to a privileged crowd. These circumstances seem to foster, rather than block, the production of so-called “bourgeois ‘art'” (185). It was, after all, groups like our dear friends the stiliagi who integrated American-English slang into their subcultural identity. How significant was the ability to speak in English (or other dominant Western language) as an exclusionary (bourgeois?) cultural signifier?

In the Hebdige article, a useful comparison is made between culture and counter culture: culture is to news photography as subculture is to advertising (Hebdige, 101). I thought this comparison really hits the nail on the head for how audiences (and band members) would have perceived the message counterculture music was portraying. Punk music was a showcase of deviancy, and sells (much like advertising does) a way of expression for those that the norm-cultural system just isn’t working. Specific to the first couple years of the Sex Pistols, the punk genre prescribed what Hebdige calls “un-fashion” (Hebdige, 107), DIY trash-searching, and creating your own, individual look. Of course this is taken over after some time by corporate interests, selling black leather jackets, creating a gradual shift towards homogeneity within the audience. Yet, this does not detract from the advertising nature of the Sex Pistols. The individuality of punk never ceases, it just becomes confronted with fans that have bought their way into the punk scene. Which, as the documentary explains, seems against the ideology of the genre. Punk was founded upon London class “warfare”, in that punk was a way for the working class to have a voice to say “tough titters” (~minute 36) towards the wealthy. Which begs the question, do wealthy fans have a place within this subculture?

As I watched Ziggy Stardust, I found myself comparing Bowie’s performative style to Weimar cabaret culture, which we discussed in class a number of weeks ago. Bowie’s frequent costume changes, theatrical makeup, and transgressive exhibitions of sexuality all signaled an emphasis towards artificiality, decadence, and display, rather than authenticity. However, whereas cabaret performances often served a guise for disseminating political ideologies and critiquing aspects of society (as we saw in Jelavich’s article), Bowie claims his performativity had no message whatsoever. Indeed, in a personal interview, he tells Crowe, “I can’t keep track of everything I say, I don’t give a shit…maybe [the audience] will come up with a message and save me the work…” (Bowie and Crowe, 310). By refusing to take semantic responsibility for his own work, Bowie permits various causes and groups to exploit and assign meaning to his performance of gender and sexuality, whether it be negative or positive. While Bowie wished to exploit the appealing and transgressive aspects of his persona (his bisexuality, his feminized stage presence) for capital gain, his refusal to politicize his persona allowed it to take on a matrix of meanings. I, for one, have seen Bowie championed as a groundbreaking genderqueer performer, whose work advocated for LGBT recognition and acceptance. Bowie himself seems disinterested in this kind of work, claiming that  “…the gays…knew I wasn’t what they were fighting for” (309). By refusing to take a strong position on social or political issues, Bowie could be championed for a number of causes, while also serving as a profitable product to be enjoyed for his entertainment value.

Also, an unrelated question: Bowie’s music and performance style is often sexually explicit; additionally, he was quite candid about his sex life during his interview with Crowe. Considering the lack of female performers in the glam rock scene, I’m curious whether Bowie (and other glam rock performers) statuses as male allowed them to speak and perform in the manner that they did. Why do we think glam was predominantly male, despite the central role that gender-play served in the genre?

Whether or not audiences were tolerant of “glam rock’s play with gender,” glam was still seen as “provocative” (48) in the US and Britain – and deliberately so. This provocation was unequivocally political: Auslander notes that in the former, the “tendency to dress lavishly and use makeup” was seen to be a sign of “sexual abnormality” (49). I find it interesting that contrary to the criticisms of Ton Steine Scherben for not being ‘serious’ enough and using, for example, glitter in their performances, glam rock was political because of its lavishness and rejection of so-called seriousness. Unlike with Ton Steine Scherben, where showmanship and artistic personality were seen to dilute the band’s political nature, it was these elements that glam artists weaponised in their provocations of audiences/critics. I’m aware of the differing contexts (glam being commercial and Scherben being anarchist/’underground’, glam upsetting conservative audiences and Scherben frustrating left-wing ones), but it is nevertheless still interesting to see different aspects of an artist’s performance being read as political and the power of ‘lavish’ dress to agitate.

In his later discussion of mod culture’s influence on glam, Auslander notes that mod culture had a “strong homosexual element” (58-9). If mod revivals have included late-70s affiliation with skins/skinhead culture and the ‘lad’ culture of 90s britpop, why is it that these subcultures have been so reliant on a perceived heterosexual masculinity? Does the popular memory of mod culture overlook its queer elements?