Corbis Sygma

CHAPTER NINE

¿Y TÚ, QUÉ
HAS HECHO?

The Re-creation of
Cultural Authenticity

Havana, March 1996

[The 1999 movie Buena Vista Social Club] was a German fairy tale in which the good wizard flies in from California and rescues the humble bootblack who was really the greatest singer in the land and they all live happily ever after.

Music historian NED SUBLETTE,
author of Cuba and Its Music,
when interviewed for this book

RECORDED IN JUST SIX DAYS with a stellar cast of Cuban musicians, the album Buena Vista Social Club was a musical phenomenon. Awarded a Grammy in 1997, it has sold well over five million copies to date and might be said to have reintroduced the world to Cuban son. But why was it Ry Cooder, a musician from remote Los Angeles, who achieved this breakthrough?

Cooder used to be best known as a hired studio musician who played atmospheric slide guitar with everyone from Captain Beefheart to Randy Newman. He also worked successfully in film soundtracks—for instance, his guitar underpinned the sweeping, somber atmosphere of Paris, Texas. His solo recording career was a mixed affair, although he made some memorable records in the 1970s. In albums such as Chicken Skin Music and Paradise and Lunch he roamed restlessly around different “roots” styles: blues (including several Leadbelly songs), gospel, early rock’n’roll, and folk music of America and of other cultures such as Hawaii, Africa, and the Caribbean. Cooder had a particular fascination with the songs of the pre–World War II era. But he seemed sometimes to struggle to find the right way to express himself, whichever style he played in. His unusual musical eclecticism made it hard for him to forge a distinct identity for himself as a performer. It was as though, living in Los Angeles, the world’s final melting pot, he was never sure where he belonged. Or perhaps, like an actor, he just felt most comfortable speaking in a variety of voices.

He had little patience with the personal approach to music exemplified by singer-songwriters such as Joni Mitchell and James Taylor. He went out of his way to denigrate “this white, middle-class introspective stuff—people elevating their neuroses to mythic heights.” His aims were quite different from those who sought personal authenticity in music.

Cooder frequently collaborated with other musicians, including many from an older generation who performed in the styles that fascinated him. The jazz pianist Earl Hines, the Chicano accordionist Flaco Jiminez, the Malian singer and guitarist Ali Farka Toure—Cooder has worked with an extraordinary array of talented people in his career. His musicological enthusiasm for the styles he adopts reflects a genuine willingness to learn from the players he admires, a diffidence about his own personal importance, and a belief that he can make better music by playing with others. In spite of (or perhaps because of) his broad and skillful approach to music, Cooder found it hard to project himself into the limelight, and his records were less successful than they deserved to be. He also disliked the grind of publicity tours, and by the late eighties he had mostly withdrawn from solo work, concentrating on film music and working on other people’s projects.

A collaborative plan led to the Buena Vista project. Cooder went to Cuba in 1996 to record with a group of musicians from Mali; when that fell through, he tried to find the oldest and best group of Cuban musicians around and form a “supergroup” to make an album. Local producer Juan de Marcos González helped him track down performers such as Rubén González, Ibrahim Ferrer, and Compay Segundo. The resulting sessions produced a hybrid of Cuban and American styles. Rather than simply capture these musicians playing the styles of music they had originally created, “authentic” Cuban son, guajira, and bolero, Cooder largely removed the bongó drums—the archetypal Cuban percussion instrument—from the standard lineup and replaced or overlaid them with his son Joachim on African drums. He then added his own slide guitar (a Hawaiian guitar method picked up by country and blues musicians in the 1930s), at times using volume control to produce a pseudo-violin sound. He recorded the percussion sounds off-mike and distant, deliberately replicating one of the worst flaws of the Cuban records of the 1940s. All of these sounds had a nostalgic air, reminiscent of a film soundtrack’s idea of retro music. He had thus managed to create a facsimile of authenticity—a distant echo of the sound he had glimpsed at the Havana Film Institute in the tantalizing film reels of Cuban musicians of the 1940s and ’50s.

In spite of everything, it was a beautiful record in its way. And because of that faded beauty, it was also one of the most successful examples of “faking it” in the past ten years—this knowingly inauthentic, hybrid music ended up being marketed as “the real thing.” The huge success of the record is emphasized by the Web site All Music Guide’s opinion that “Cooder brought just the right amount of reverence to this material, and it shows in his production, playing and detailed liner notes. If you get one album of Cuban music, this should be the one.”

Cooder’s bowdlerization was driven partly by necessity. He wasn’t reassembling an original band or trying to exactly re-create a musical scene. The aging musicians’ natural styles came from various stages of the island’s past, and Cuban music had long since moved on to new styles. He was thus gathering together a group of talented musicians who would not necessarily have played together in other contexts. He recalled that “Compay (Segundo) and Rubén González had never been in the same room, probably on the same block. Stylistically, this was pretty clearly defined. If you were Rubén González you were in cha-cha-cha bands with Enrique Jorrín, playing cha-cha-cha rhythms and chord progressions like he did. If you’re Compay, you’re doing the old song period, not cha-cha-cha music.” So faced with a group of musicians who knew more about what they were doing than he did but who would not necessarily cohere, Cooder consciously reshaped elements of their approach. He tried to create a record that derived from their shared background but that would nonetheless be distinct from the original musical forms on which it drew.

He also faced the problem that it is all but impossible to replicate a big band style with limited resources. Even if he had had access to enough musicians and skilled orchestrations, the big band sound depends on a group of regular players who have played together long enough for their sound to become tight and coherent, something extremely hard to achieve in a few short weeks. So instead Cooder pictured the Buena Vista Social Club as an idealized version of the real (long-gone) Havana club—a kind of 1960s gathering of Cuban musicians jamming together in a looser style. This imaginary reference point led him to the final sound.

Modern Cuban music is available in many forms, but is not as popular outside Cuba as Cooder’s rather dusty representation of a golden age. And it is important to remember that the golden age Cooder is trying to represent is not real—there was of course a great period for Cuban music in the 1940s and ’50s but it was not the music that appears on the Buena Vista recordings.

Should we chastise Cooder for making an inauthentic record? From his point of view, it was a sincere attempt to preserve the remnants of a fading culture, even if those remnants had to first be adulterated to sell them to the world. He never claimed any more than this. And it is not entirely his fault that the record has come to be treated with such reverence in spite of its shortcomings as an authentic Cuban record. However, in this respect, it is entirely characteristic of the most successful world music of the last few decades. Rather than importing the music that Cubans were listening to at the time (most Cubans have never heard the record, and would probably not care for it if they did), Cooder attempted to re-create something that sounds (but isn’t) more authentic, less “commodified.”

ONE OF THE successes of the Buena Vista project was the rediscovery of the vocalist Ibrahim Ferrer. In the 1940s and ’50s, Ferrer had performed in legendary Cuban bands such as the Orquesta de Chepín and those led by Pacho Alonso and Beny Moré. But he had a gentle voice that matched his laid-back demeanor and he was rarely credited on records. He lacked the star quality of a performer like Beny Moré (or even of the more obvious showmen in the Buena Vista setup such as Compay Segundo). As a result, the relatively introverted Ferrer drifted out of the spotlight as the big band era of Cuban music passed.

Ferrer was living on a pension and shining shoes for spare cash when he was tracked down for the Buena Vista Social Club project. At first he was reluctant to go back to singing but he came to be a central figure in the project, and Cooder returned to Havana in 1998 to record an album devoted to his singing, one of several follow-ups to the original record.

(Ironically, one of the best things Ferrer did was a collaboration with the British cartoon band Gorillaz on a song called “Latin Simone (Que pasa contigo),” which never tried to sound the least bit “authentic.” “Latin Simone” was most likely heard by just as many people as Buena Vista Social Club, since the Gorillaz’ debut album also sold five million copies.)

Ferrer loved to sing bolero, but had often been denied the chance in the bands of the 1940’s and 50’s, when the preference was for a stronger voice. But in the quieter context of the Buena Vista Social Club’s impression of backyard spontaneity, his voice shone. Cooder said that it was “the last chance in the world to work with such a voice,” a view that emphasizes Cooder’s ethnographic (and slightly patronizing) approach.

Ibrahim Ferrer became a star around the world in the wake of the Buena Vista Social Club, and no one could wish otherwise or deny such a gentle man his time in the spotlight. He was unthreatening, charming, and mild. He represented a kind of musical innocence and apparent lack of self-consciousness that hit all the right buttons for those who look for cultural authenticity in music. He unintentionally projected an image of Cuba as a ramshackle idyll, island home to centuries-old traditions of music. In the Buena Vista Social Club film he spoke passionately of how strong the Cubans are, saying that “if we cared about possessions, we’d have disappeared years ago.” But he spoke joyfully, celebrating Cuban life and survival, rather than with any sense of bitterness. Someone younger or feistier, someone who stressed the origins of Cuba’s political state, might have been more off-putting for the target audience.

Ferrer’s late acclaim is reminiscent of the way Mississippi John Hurt was perceived by the 1960s blues audience. Like Hurt, he was unsuccessful in his own time but lionized by a future generation. And like Hurt, Ferrer was to some degree fortunate in that his attributes and mild manners were a perfect fit for the romantic aspirations of the audience that took the Buena Vista Social Club to heart.

The world-music audience has shown traits similar to those of the blues audience: both have at times emphasized gentler, rural forms and both have been guilty at times of patronizing or misunderstanding the music they sought out. And in the case of Cuban music, Cooder was looking back to a golden age while disregarding more modern developments, an approach in which he might be compared to John Lomax and blues fans who preferred a fictionalized past to the realities of the modern day.

RY COODER is not the only one to find the problem of how to interact with the music of other cultures a vexed one. Western approaches to world music have always tended to distort their source material: witness the exotica of the 1950s or Peter Gabriel’s addition of synthesizer washes to the world music of the 1980s. Those who sought authenticity relied on ethnographic recordings, which emphasized the sounds of the most remote areas rather than the cities in which cross-pollination had occurred.

This raises the problem of what present-day world music really is. It is essentially a marketing term rather than a genuine category. There has been a lot of debate about whether or not the term is a good one to use. Some have suggested alternatives such as “roots music,” although this doesn’t really address the problems inherent in the term. World music is now broadly taken to mean the music of isolated, undeveloped cultures. Forms such as Finnish techno or Israeli pop music do not really qualify because they originate from affluent countries and because they are too sophisticated. Bulgarian choral singing qualifies because of its undoubted antiquity, while Bulgarian punk clearly doesn’t. So “world music” as a label aims to group together music that is culturally specific, that seems unadulterated over time, and that expresses the soul of relatively unadvanced cultures. Anything that smacks too much of professionalism or sophistication tends to disqualify a music from being described as “world.”

Given this, what is it about Western musicians dabbling in world music that makes us uncomfortable? Paul Simon had to defend himself against accusations of exploitation after his work with South African musicians on Graceland, and similar criticisms have been made of David Byrne’s post–Talking Heads solo work, Damon Albarn’s post-Blur solo work, and others. But the criticism tends to be confused. Is the real problem that the Western musicians are gaining reflected glory from the third-world musicians with whom they perform, or is it that they are not doing enough to help those musicians (or their countries)? If you benefit from a musical culture, it does seem fair to give something in return, although you could argue that any exposure to the Western music market creates an opportunity for local musicians to sell more records and is therefore helpful in itself. Also, any self-conscious attempt to help the local culture can look even more patronizing than simply collaborating with local musicians on as equal a basis as possible. It’s probably a no-win situation for any Western musicians who get involved in such collaborations—they can be damned for trying too hard and seeming worthy yet condescending or they can be damned for not trying hard enough.

Musicians such as Simon and Cooder are essentially tourists. They valorize the most non-Western aspects of the cultures they encounter simply because those aspects seem most exotic to them. We’ve encountered similar figures throughout this book, ranging from the Lomaxes to Harry Smith. These vaunted collaborations make many of us uncomfortable because they do exactly the same thing in musical terms as what so many Hollywood films do—they send in a white hero to rescue the disadvantaged dark-skinned native from suffering and oblivion, thus perpetuating the myth of the noble white imperialist. In these Hollywood tales, just as in these “collaborative” records, it’s never the black native who initiates the successful project, it’s always the white European or American who has to come riding in to save the day and make all the glory possible. It is absolutely impossible to imagine someone like Compay Segundo having asked Ry Cooder to play on one of his records, and it is equally impossible to imagine Mahlathini having asked Paul Simon to play on one of his.

However, there is a further line of attack that betrays odd assumptions. In a recent article in the Independent, the critic Michael Church criticized the BBC’s world music policy for favoring a “degenerate tendency,” featuring bands such as Tinariwen, whose masses of electric guitars borrow equally from Malian music and the blues, rather than more “authentic” groups. He suggests that if you “go to the mountains of Georgia . . . you’ll find the same rugged harmonies that Tamerlane encountered six centuries earlier.” Church seems to see any kind of musical hybridization as problematic, or even imperialist. He criticizes “music filched from other cultures, and filtered for consumption by the West.” He goes on to complain about world music performers who play too loudly, using amplifiers in mainstream venues.

Church’s fear is that the “real music” of these cultures is disappearing as artists around the world grow in confidence, seeking markets, audiences, and collaborations in other countries. He dislikes the fact that more and more world music artists are aiming to sell their music abroad, as though the only authentic way to make music is in amateur isolation. In this view, the real music of a culture is local, acoustic, uncommercial, and pure, whereas the degenerate form is hybrid, commercial, loud, and Westernized. This conservationist viewpoint tends to downgrade styles such as highlife, a loud, vigorous African music built around the needs of local dance floors. Like other strands of African music, highlife is influenced by a wide variety of other cultures, especially Cuban, rather than being an unadulterated form. Even small towns and isolated areas of Africa have had radios and recorded music for at least the last fifty years, and it is natural that the music of these areas incorporates external influences.

Again there is an echo here of the 1960s blues fans who often preferred acoustic, country musicians to those who had moved on to electrified, hybrid styles. And like an earlier generation of blues musicians, players such as Salif Keita have taken a more acoustic approach only in response to the demand for such “authentic” music from the West.

British composer Michael Nyman has described those who hold views such as Church’s as the “world music police,” which catches well the tendency to dictate from afar what is permissible for world musicians. And behind the political or moral criticisms of some Western collaborations with world musicians, one often catches a hint that the real problem is the whole idea of hybridization—that as soon as a Westerner plays with local musicians or as soon as those local musicians incorporate any Western styles or instruments into their music, the original music becomes tainted and debased.

There may in fact be other good reasons for criticizing musicians, such as Paul Simon, who utilize the music of other cultures. For instance, his attitude toward the political implications of his actions—he was working within the apartheid system—was discomfiting at times. Other musicians have been guilty of borrowing credibility from world music by adding ethnic instruments or mannerisms to their music, thus conveying an empty idea of integrity and purity.

In the case of Ry Cooder, it may be irrelevant to criticize the hybrid nature of the music he makes. The worrying aspect of the Buena Vista Social Club is not, in fact, that it is hybrid music but that Cooder’s re-creations of ethnic styles have come to be seen as more real than the originals.

In general, disapproving of collaborations or hybridization per se, on the ground that Western influence is corrupting, seems misguided. And to insist that all world music should fit our preconceptions prevents us from listening with open ears. The conservationist approach to world music often distorts and ossifies the original culture it aims to preserve. It is also an echo of the earlier attitudes of musicologists such as John Lomax and Cecil Sharp. Both had very specific views on what kind of music they wanted to gather from the cultures they were observing. As Sharp cycled on English country lanes, or traveled through the Appalachians, he was searching for unadulterated folk material to back up his protofascist theories of a pan-European Aryan race.

The modern world-music movement is not openly imperialist or racist but it has a very clear idea of the kinds of simple local, sustainable cultures it is looking for. In this respect the world music police are more like condescending missionaries, or anthropologists of the nineteenth century, always willing to believe the best of the natives as long as they play along with our naïve ideas of their simple life.

The result of this attitude is that world music becomes a ghetto. The only way for a third-world musician to move beyond the local scene is to collaborate, or to travel and perform to foreign audiences, but both of these options are frowned on by those who prefer their world music to remain pure and isolated. This desire for cultural authenticity can easily become a kind of disdain, or paternal tolerance, for third-world musicians who aspire to improve their situations.

The world-music boom was built on the perception that the music of other cultures was innocent, that it had grown in isolation, that it was culturally authentic in a way that Western music could no longer be. But real world music has always been highly syncretic, combining traditional elements with the latest technologies and related sounds from across the world. And, particularly in today’s climate of dictatorships and brutal wars, its messages have often been urgent and highly political. Our approach to world music has often diluted or banished the “edginess” of the music and clothed it in trappings of authenticity instead. In this way, world music can sometimes be more of an obstacle to than a conduit for genuine cultural communication.

With the increase in globalization, the musical cultures of the world have become increasingly interdependent. Ry Cooder mentioned being haunted by the idea that “somewhere on some little island in the Pacific, there’s [a musician] who’s great, but I’m probably never going to hear him.” But as fast as new kinds of world music are “discovered” and marketed, they are absorbed into the mainstream via sampling, imitation, and advertising. The ever-widening search for pure musical cultures overlooks the fact that music is universal, and universally hybrid.

IN THE SAME WAY that we look to the early days of country and blues as golden ages, we have come to see world music as an uncorrupt fountain. Like folk, country, and blues, it has also become prime source material for renewing and energizing other popular musical styles. And, as with those earlier styles, certain aspects of world music have become signifiers of authenticity in themselves. Rural, simple, and acoustic sounds are generally regarded as more authentic than urban, complex, or electronic ones. This aesthetic influences the world music we hear in two ways. First, it affects the selection of existing music that is marketed to the West. And second, it affects the kind of music that is recorded, both by world musicians with access to the Western market and also in collaborations between Western and third-world musicians.

The record company Putumayo has been hugely successful in issuing well-annotated and beautifully packaged compilations of music from all over the world. These are marketed primarily through unusual trade channels such as the café market. The company also produces a widely syndicated radio show, the “Putumayo World Music Hour,” which influences current attitudes toward world music. The Putumayo slogan is that they sell music “guaranteed to make you feel good.”

Perhaps because of this aim, rather than fairly representing the music of the cultures they choose (as do the Rough Guide CDs) Putumayo celebrates acoustic and decidedly “mellow” sounds, using the same approach to world music as MTV Unplugged did with rock. For example, their República Dominicana CD almost completely avoids the most characteristic Dominican rhythm, merengue, in favor of bachata and son, in which the rhythms are derived from Cuban music. The emphasis here, on guitars over drums, partly reflects the market they are targeting, in which the CD is often used as background music in retail outlets—the owner Dan Storper based the label’s sound on the music he chose for his earlier chain of clothes shops.

Putumayo describes itself as “the place where the traditional and contemporary meet,” which at least recognizes that this is a very specific take on tradition. Its compilations emphasize the generic aspects of a culture rather than individual artists. This allows the label to dip into a wide variety of cultures without committing to long-term deals with any of the artists. But it also means that the compilations are selected in a way that reduces the culture of regions of the world to simple formulas, excluding anything that would be too challenging or idiosyncratic for their market.

With Buena Vista Social Club, the success of Putumayo, and dozens of other projects, world-music marketers have hit on the perfect combination: make it sound familiar (i.e., emphasize acoustic guitars rather than African drums) yet overlay it with a patina of authenticity (i.e., focus on older or more rural musicians; add elements of other “roots” music; avoid synthesizers, drum machines, and samplers). Putumayo emphasizes these signifiers of authenticity in the music it chooses to distribute. But in other cases these signifiers have become the guiding principles behind the creation and production of music. And record companies that work in the area of world music have passed the demand for such signifiers back to the artists with whom they work, meaning that the signifiers are absorbed into their original creations.

Even long-established African musicians Baaba Maal and Salif Keita have been persuaded to record “unplugged” records in the last few years. For instance, Keita says of his album Moffou that “Universal wanted me to make an acoustic record, and I wanted that too.” These recordings minimize the innovations that Maal and Keita have brought to West African music. That’s not to say that they aren’t good records. On the contrary, at least in the case of Baaba Maal (Missing You), the album has reinvigorated not only his career but his music. His work has always been marked by a variety of fusions, but the collaborations with Western sounds he had explored in albums such as Nomad Soul seemed to be increasingly diluting his originality. His return to the complexities of traditional Malian instruments and ensembles has had a positive effect. But the pressure that leads to such acoustic records also filters out other work and artists whose music is more hybrid, allowing through only those that fit the required mold.

THE SAME AESTHETIC of authenticity was influential in the creation of Buena Vista Social Club. Ry Cooder personified the Western attitude to world music in this affectionate, confused record that misrepresents “real” Cuban music at the same time as it demonstrates his fascination with it. He was aware of the pitfalls of recording with the local musicians, worrying that they would think, “Here come the carpetbaggers, let’s just give them what they want and send them on their way”; but he went on to eulogize the Cubans—“They’re a bunch of open-hearted people. . . . They share whatever they have. They don’t drive on freeways, they don’t talk on cellular phones, or go rent videos. They have nothing else that occupies their entire being. . . . And they love the music, and of course with total respect.”

But the Cubans live in isolated poverty with a crumbling infrastructure for political reasons, not because they want to. Cooder’s wistful preoccupation with this materially impoverished yet musically rich culture is reminiscent of John Lomax’s appreciation of Leadbelly. Like the Buena Vista Social Club film he helped Wim Wenders to make, Cooder’s words steer nervously around the question of why the Cubans live the way they do. The film avoids mentioning the international treatment of Cuba as pariah or tourist destination—a child condescended to and disciplined. Scenes of poverty and degradation are used merely as picturesque backdrops to interviews with the musicians. No matter how lovely the music may be, Buena Vista Social Club partakes fully of Cooder’s naïve and occasionally patronizing attitude toward Cuban culture.

Of course, musical collaborations between rich and poor cultures look different depending on whose point of view you take. A Western musician like Cooder adding elements of his own style to Cuban music will inevitably be criticized for opportunism, whereas the local musicians who play with him can be depicted as innocents being exploited or as collaborators allowing their music to be exploited. But is this fair? Would the same be said of, for instance, an African musician incorporating Middle Eastern sounds into his music?

The film Buena Vista Social Club centers on a 1998 performance at Carnegie Hall. Ry and Joaquin Cooder’s faces were the most serious on the stage, as they concentrated on their supporting roles in the band. Meanwhile the Cubans’ faces showed exactly how much fun they were having. The sheer verve of eighty-year-old Rubén González’s piano playing was astonishing, and there were extraordinary performances all around.

Old men often like to have fun. Looking back they sometimes like to simplify and parody their past, partly to remember what was best about it and partly to tease the younger generation. This was a generation of Cuban musicians who were proud of their pasts but who hadn’t expected this last chance to enjoy the limelight, and they took their chance with glee. If they conspired with Cooder in misrepresenting the music of their past, they did it with relish and gusto, knowing that by doing so they had a chance to play the songs they loved. They appreciated the opportunity they had been given, but perhaps they sometimes also amused themselves a little at the expense of Cooder and the Americans. The film concludes with the old men (and woman in the case of Omara Portuondo) unfurling the lone-star Cuban flag on the stage at the end of their triumphant performance. One can’t help but feel that they got the last laugh.

With Buena Vista Social Club, Cooder managed to entertain, and perhaps to inspire us to discover more Cuban music, while making use of that music for his own purposes. As a musician, he took great pleasure in playing with others. By recording at Egrem Studios in Havana, by playing himself with these musicians, by including his son, he was able to feel momentarily that he was part of this scene. He was only a tourist, but for a few days he could feel that he belonged. Curiously, it is, in the end, a record that tells us as much about the man who made it as it does about the culture it aims to represent.

It is to Cooder’s credit that he seems to have partially realized this fact, recently saying that “this is the thing about music, as far as I can tell. You can go places, you can be somebody—all you have to do is just play and conjure up the sounds, and you’re there. Of course, you’re not quite there. That’s the funny part. I found that out later. It didn’t quite work. It was never enough. It was always over, or too far away, or I wasn’t that, and it was kind of a sad thing to have to finally acknowledge.”

Cooder was raised in Santa Monica, a city near Los Angeles, in an area he has described as “so flat and so dull.” As a young man he was fascinated by the more exotic areas of L.A., like the remnants of downtown and older neighborhoods such as Bunker Hill and Angel’s Flight. After the Buena Vista period, he returned to the subject of his hometown with Chavez Ravine. This 2005 album tells a stylized version of the story of the eponymous, largely Mexican neighborhood that was demolished in the 1950s to make way for the Dodgers’ stadium.

Chavez Ravine basically follows the Buena Vista formula. Cooder, fascinated by the Mexican-American music of the 1950s, enlisted a cast of older local musicians, including both the pachuco boogie star Don Tosti and Lalo Guerrero, the “father of Chicano music.” Once again Cooder created a simulation of music from a time and place that had long since disappeared, and once again he watered down the original music at the same time that he was popularizing it.

However, there is a hint of something more going on in this record. In a recent interview, journalist Derk Richardson refers to Cooder’s frustration of never feeling that he belonged to the cultures he loved and describes Chavez Ravine as serving a dual compulsion: “to bring to light a social injustice that he took personally and to find a kind of cultural ground for himself.” It seems that Cooder was trying to face the fact that part of his quest for the authenticity of other cultures had arisen from a sense of emptiness or confusion about his own background. The bland surfaces of modern Los Angeles conceal depths of fascinating hybrid cultures and the remnants of political machinations of decades past. Growing up there, Cooder was aware of the richness of the culture that had disappeared in the destruction of areas such as Chavez Ravine and Bunker Hill. At the same time he saw the homogeneity that had often been imposed in their wake.

In the end, perhaps Cooder is still just trying to find out where he belongs. If he is looking for roots in Chavez Ravine, at least he is looking in the right place—his own backyard. He has gone around the world without being entirely satisfied by what he found. Now he has come home to continue the search. However, he has once again idealized the past by failing to recognize that things weren’t always so good in the good old days; and he has once again preferred to present a numbed version of that past instead of finally making contact with the reality of the present.

It may be that the quest for cultural authenticity in popular music is always a search for something that seems more profound than the reality of our own lives. In the exotic, the nostalgic, the foreign, or the primitive, we can hope to perceive eternal truths that seem lacking in the confusion of modern life. But hunting for authenticity in other cultures or past times is unlikely to cure a perceived lack of authenticity at home. Because wherever you go, you take your own self with you.