What were the political consequences of this phonograph culture? The recording sessions between 1925 and 1930, which rendered a musical revolution on discs of shellac, coincided with a vogue for primitivism and exoticism among the modernist counter-cultures of the imperial capitals. Dance “crazes” broke like waves over the cabarets of Paris, New York, and Berlin, beginning with the tango and the foxtrot just before the Great War, and followed by the Charleston, the rumba, and the beguine in the decade after the war. The modern “nightclub” assumed a colonial shape, from Paris’s Bal Nègre to New York’s Cotton Club. Empire was displayed and performed for metropolitan audiences in the series of world’s fairs and colonial expositions, which featured the “exotic” musics of the colonies. Hawaiian musicians performed at the 1914 Taishô World Exposition in Tokyo and the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, African and Caribbean musicians at the 1924–25 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, Cuban son sextetos at the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition in Seville, Martinique beguine orchestras as well as musicians from Algeria, Madagascar, and Indochina at the 1931 Paris International Colonial Exposition in Vincennes, Mexican mariachi bands at the 1934 Century of Progress exposition in Chicago, and black South African dance bands at the 1936 British Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg.
But the recording sessions also coincided with the first stirrings of anticolonial activism and thought. In February 1927, nearly two hundred pioneering anticolonial activists from Asia and Africa met in Brussels to form the League Against Imperialism. They were members of a host of anticolonial organizations: the Étoile Nord-Africaine in Algeria, the Destour in Tunisia, the South African National Congress, the Indian National Congress, the Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre. Moreover, the Brussels conference was just one of a series of such meetings that took place in various imperial cities in the decade after the Great War: the three Pan-African Congresses in Paris, London and Brussels between 1919 and 1923 initiated by W. E. B. Du Bois among others; the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East in 1920, which marked the anticolonial turn in Communist theory and practice; the congress of the Union Intercoloniale in Paris in 1921, which brought together activists from the French colonies including a young Ho Chi Minh; the First Continental Anti-Imperialist Congress in Buenos Aires in 1925; and the Pan-Asian People’s Conferences in Nagasaki in 1926 and in Shanghai in 1927.1 These meetings of young intellectuals and activists were themselves reverberations of the protest and unrest that ranged from the massive Chinese student demonstrations in 1919 (that became known as the May Fourth Movement) to the non-cooperation campaigns in India that brought Gandhi to international attention, and from the Egyptian uprising of 1919 to the Rif War of the early 1920s and the Sandinista rebellion in Nicaragua in 1927.
Were the vernacular phonograph records simply another face of the metropolitan dance crazes, a commercial exploitation of the imperial fascination with the exotic colonial “other”? Were they a form of colonial mimicry, a derivative discourse not unlike the ubiquitous minstrel shows of modernism? Or were they more akin to the fugitive meetings of anticolonial intellectuals, musical leagues against imperialism, part of the revolution against colonialism that was to shape the course of the twentieth century? The links between literature and anticolonialism have often been noted—Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s classic Decolonizing the Mind addressed the politics of language in African literature—and Fanon pointed to the role of the radio in the anticolonial struggle in Algeria. In this chapter, I want to suggest that the phonograph was equally important to decolonization: that vernacular gramophone music was a herald of decolonization, part of a cultural revolution that made possible the subsequent political revolutions.
For these vernacular phonograph musics not only captured the timbres of decolonization; the emergence of these musics—hula, rumba, beguine, tango, jazz, samba, marabi, kroncong, ṭarab, chaabi—was decolonization. It was not simply a cultural activity that contributed to the political struggle; it was somatic decolonization, the decolonization of the ear and the dancing body. Decolonization, I will suggest, was a musical as well as political event. Moreover, this decolonization of the ear preceded and made possible the subsequent decolonization of legislatures and literatures, schools and armies. The global soundscape was decolonized by the guerrilla insurgency of these new musics before the global statescape was reshaped.
There are three reasons why it may be difficult to hear these vernacular phonograph musics as a decolonization of the ear. First, there was often a profound gap between decolonization as a political revolution—the winning of formal political independence, and the indigenization of state apparatuses from legislatures and schools to armies and police—and decolonization as a cultural revolution—the iconoclasm that smashed the aesthetic and philosophical idols of everyday life, the ordinary hierarchies and inequalities that depended on common-sense ideologies of “race,” “color,” and “civilization.” For every brief moment of convergence between the political and cultural revolutions, there are long stretches where they seem completely separate. Antagonism and mutual suspicion were perhaps more characteristic than solidarity and alliance between the forces of political and cultural decolonization; anticolonial political activists and thinkers were often tone-deaf when hearing these new musics.
Second, there is a gap between the biographical time of individual musicians making recordings—and the remarkably brief window in time when the recording industry was open to these vernacular musics—and the longue durée of cultural revolution, a remaking of the very structure of feeling, as new sensibilities and new aesthetics become new ways of living. If, over generations, these musics did decolonize the ear, it remains difficult to register this in particular recordings by particular musicians. It was never self-evident what the decolonization of music would sound like, and what musics were or were not part of the colonial order. But this gap is not different in kind than the parallel one between the longue durée of political decolonization and the biographical time of political actors; the debates over figures like Umm Kulthūm, Louis Armstrong, Johnny Noble, and Carmen Miranda are not dissimilar to those over Gandhi and Bose, Nkrumah and Senghor, Mao and Ho Chi Minh, who struggled among themselves over the strategies and ideologies of anticolonialism.
Third, these were not unequivocally musics of liberation. Unlike the “movement musics” that sustained later liberation movements, like chimurenga in Zimbabwe or nueva cancíon in Latin America, these musics appear to be simply the apolitical commercial musics of the barrios and favelas. Moreover, as nationalist critics recognized early on, these musics did not easily fit into nationalist garb; they were creolized, mixed-race musics from the start. The subsequent attempts by post-revolutionary and postcolonial regimes to mobilize these music as nationalist “audiotopias,” often taking particular regional musics as metonymies of a whole nation, was a complex process, and, when successful, often ended up succumbing to an official state nationalism.
Thus if we interpret these musics solely in a frame of national liberation, we miss the fact that the circulation of these records, to Rio and Shanghai as much as to Paris and Berlin, was fundamental to their decolonization of the ear. The antinomies that haunt the debates over these musics—their initial appearance as an exotic “craze” abroad and a disreputable “noise” at home, and their subsequent vindication as a music both “national” and “popular”—depend on a too-simple geography, which reads home as the nation and abroad as the imperial metropolis. I want to suggest that the recent re-thinkings of the space and time of decolonization allow us to recast our understanding of these musics.
The pioneering accounts of decolonization generally narrated the winning of political independence by peoples in colonized territories, and the emergence of new postcolonial nation-states. They focused on the era after World War II, the age of Three Worlds, and in them, as Martin Shipway puts it in his fine synoptic history, decolonization was seen “either as a composite of the individual national narratives of each of the hundred or so ex-colonies’ paths to independent statehood, or as the ‘bigger’ story of the breakdown of a number of imperial systems against the backdrop of a major structural shift in the international system.”2 National historians narrated the emergence of an independent state, as anticolonial politics and culture fused in popular mobilizations; imperial historians chronicled the international conflicts and metropolitan political struggles as they diagnosed the end of the European empires.
However, the various forms of “postcolonial” critique (which range from Edward Said’s Orientalism to Subaltern Studies to the notions of colonial modernity in Aníbal Quijano and Enrique Dussel) have shifted our sense of decolonization in both space and time. The spatial recasting accents the transcolonial and diasporic character of decolonization. If one reads the conjuncture of mid-twentieth-century decolonization less in the light of the nation-states that resulted from it and more in the light of the uneven history that produced it, we see the crucial importance of Frederick Cooper’s insistence that “the success of anticolonial movements … cannot be explained on a colony-by-colony basis”; rather it depended on “territory-crossing politics” like the pan-Arab and pan-African movements.3 This is particularly true of the hinge decade after the crisis of the Great War, when the colonial empires seemed at their “zenith,”4 and when the utopias or promised lands of home rule, self-rule (swaraj), independence, a Negro World, an intercolonial union emerged. “Black internationalism,” Brent Edwards writes of this moment when the term is coined, “is not a supplement to revolutionary nationalism, the ‘next level’ of anticolonial agitation. On the contrary, black radicalism necessarily emerges through boundary crossing—black radicalism is an internationalization.”5
The temporal recasting suggests that, even if the conjuncture of decolonization in the era of the United Nations remains a fundamental punctual history—the extraordinary emergence of more than one hundred new nations in the three decades between the end of World War II and the defeat of the Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique in the mid-1970s—it must nevertheless be read against the longer durée of colonial modernity, during which colonial conquest and anti-colonial resistance overlapped, and which has still not ended. Since this longer history created, as Fanon argued, a Manichean world in which “settlers” dispossessed “natives” of their land, decolonization is racked by the interference between “settler” decolonization and “native” decolonization. Moreover, since colonial economies were built on plantations and mines worked by enslaved and indentured populations, often recruited across oceans and continents by ship and railway, decolonization was complicated by the interference between the emancipation struggles of slave and post-slave populations, the land struggles of dispossessed indigenous populations, and the justice struggles of contracted and indentured migrants from the east and the south of Europe and Asia alike.
To understand the decolonization of the ear, we need a parallel reconceptualization of these vernacular phonograph musics. They, too, have often been understood either as distinct and unconnected national musics, linked in complex ways to regional folkloric musics, or as an episode in the remarkably concentrated and centralized multinational recording industry, part of the emergence of a transnational, Western popular music industry. To argue that decolonization is a musical event, that a musical decolonization preceded and prefigured political decolonization, suggests that empire and colonialism was itself a musical event. The vernacular phonograph musics grew out of the colonization of music, and they were enmeshed with the institutions and spectacles of colonial culture. These musics and records shared the ambiguity of the colonial ports and railway towns in which they took shape: they were two-faced musics, objects of suspicion, intimate with both colonial and indigenous forms and instruments. However, as we will see, these recorded musics were quickly mobilized in anticolonial struggles, and became part of the emerging cultures of resistance. Even when these musics carried no apparent political meaning, their disruptive noise challenged not only the musical codes of empires and racial supremacy, but also the improving and uplifting ideologies of many colonial elites. And their embodiment of the commonplaces of daily life in the colonial ports gave them hidden meanings, what the Hawaiians called the kaona of the hula. As they reverberated across the archipelago of colonial ports, they came to figure the utopian promise of decolonization itself, heralding a Third World.6
His Master’s Voice? Colonizing the Ear
There are two reasons one might be skeptical of the claim that these vernacular phonograph musics were heralds of decolonization. First, the musics were deeply influenced by colonialism’s musical project, its colonization of the ear. Second, as these musics were performed in colonial ports and metropolitan capitals in the 1920s and 1930s, they were often subordinated to the work of tourism and imperial display. As a result, anticolonial militants and intellectuals were suspicious of musics that seemed a product of colonial domination and exploitation. For many critics, the slogan emblazoned on so many of these discs in a variety of languages—“His Master’s Voice”—aptly captured the meaning of these colonized musics.
There is no doubt that these musics were products of the colonial era. As Kofi Agawu has persuasively argued, colonialism was a musical event.7 The imperial conquest and colonization of territory was “accompanied” by the musical occupation of the space, and the projection of a new colonial order in sound. The vernacular phonograph musics were as deeply indebted to colonial music practices as they were to the street parading ensembles of the colonial ports. Two colonial legacies were particularly important: the worldwide spread of Protestant missionary hymns and choral singing, and the worldwide creation of military brass bands. Together they sponsored the diffusion of European musical instruments and practices as well as the imposition of European common practice tonality.
The remarkable missionary energy invested in the propagation of Christian hymn singing suggests that musical conversion is a necessary condition for religious conversion: to learn to sing is to learn to pray and to “believe” in a new way. A central part of colonial missionary work was the translation of Christian hymns into local languages and the formation of local choirs. In Hawaii, songs based on hymn forms—himeni—had become a major part of Hawaiian music by the early part of the twentieth century. Many of the earliest African recording artists came out of mission school choirs, figures like South Africa’s Reuben Caluza, Ghana’s Ephraim Amu, and Nigeria’s J. J. Ransome-Kuti.8 In his influential 1928 essay on African music, Erich Hornbostel characterized the mission-school propagation of hymn music as a form of colonialism, and lamented that Africans “would rapidly forget their own music, and Africa would become what North, Central, and large parts of South America and Polynesia (and of Africa itself) already are: that is, a mere European colony as far as music also is concerned.”9
Similarly, the building of colonial forces of order—colonial police and armies—depended on their musical “auxiliaries”—the military brass bands and police bands that were developed around the globe.10 “The brass band was a small-scale metaphor for the colonial process itself,” a study of bands from Ghana and Tanzania to Surinam and Nepal concludes: “a single foreign bandmaster exerting authority over numerous native bandsmen who were expected to abandon their traditional ways of making music in favour of more ‘civilized’ European ways.”11 Many of the musicians recorded in the late 1920s received their training in military bands,12 and several of these colonial brass bands were themselves recorded, including the band of the King’s African Rifles, the British colonial regiment in East Africa.13
In these ways, the new musics of colonialism instituted new disciplines of the body—new ways of singing, of dancing, of marching, of playing instruments. Almost all of the vernacular phonograph musics adopted the mass-produced musical instruments of the European and American metalworking factories that had been marketed throughout the colonial world, not only the harmoniums and concertinas of hymn music and the trumpets and trombones of the military bands, but the ubiquitous guitar. This musical discipline also involved what Kofi Agawu has called the “violence of imposing harmony”: “tonality was part of the ‘civilizing mission’ from the 1840s,” which denied sovereignty to African languages, religions, and musics.14 To speak of the colonization of the “ear” is thus a metonymy, for the reshaping of the musical subject is not only a reshaping of the individual’s musical muscles—the articulated flesh and bones that make up the singing voice, the instrument-playing hands and lips, the dancing feet and hips; it is also the reshaping of the order of the group. The creation of marching bands and church choirs was a colonization not only of the body, but of articulated bodies.
Gandhi himself gives a good example of this when, in his Autobiography, he writes that his youthful attempt to become an “English gentleman” was as much about music and dance as language and elocution. “I thought I should learn to play the violin in order to cultivate an ear for Western music. So I invested £3 in a violin and something more in fees.” He also “decided to take dancing lessons”; it was, he writes, “beyond me to achieve anything like rhythmic motion. I could not follow the piano and hence found it impossible to keep time.” Though he gave up this attempt to cultivate a colonial ear and to keep colonial time, he later recalled that “the National Anthem used to be sung at every meeting that I attended in Natal,” and he felt that he “must also join in the singing.” “With careful perseverance I learnt the tune of the ‘national anthem’ and joined in the singing whenever it was sung.” “I likewise taught the National Anthem to the children of my family,” and “to students of the local Training College.” Only later did the text begin to “jar” on him: “As my conception of ahimsa [nonviolence or non-harming] went on maturing, I became more vigilant about my thought and speech.”15
There is no question that this musical colonization was an unfinished project, not least in the eyes of the colonizers. Musical cultures around the world remained a battleground between different musical codes, and in some places, there was little colonization of musical culture: “with the significant exception of military marching bands,” David Lelyveld writes, “one is hard pressed to find any effort to introduce European music to India.”16 The musical codes of European colonialism took root mainly in the official musicking of schools, armies, and churches in the urban ports and colonial capitals. But it was precisely in the shadow of these urban schools, armies, and churches that the vernacular phonograph musics took shape.
If the vernacular phonograph musics were shaped by the colonization of the ear, much of their international celebrity was due to the apparatuses of imperial exhibition and tourism in Paris, Berlin, London, New York, and Tokyo. As early as 1933, Theodor Adorno argued that the apparent triumph of “‘black jazz’ as a sort of a brand-name” in “the European-American entertainment business” was “merely a confusing parody of colonial imperialism”: in “the manufacture of jazz … the skin of the black man functions as much as a coloristic effect as does the silver of the saxophone.”17 So it is not surprising that anticolonial activists and militants were deeply suspicious of these new commercial musics. On some occasions, this suspicion was shared by the musicians. In China, for example, Nie Er, the radical young songwriter and violinist of a Shanghai huangse yinyue ensemble, turned against the music of his mentor Li Jinhui, arguing that “erotic sex appeal and revealing passion are the ‘achievements’ of song and dance during the past dozen years … Can’t you hear the masses of people desperately crying out? You must go down to those people, because therein lies fresh material to create a new and fresh art.” Nie left the Bright Moon Song and Dance Troupe but continued to work for Pathé, writing popular “mass songs” that incorporated Chinese work chants and folk tunes into huangse yinyue.18
Across the Americas, black activists and intellectuals often distanced themselves from black vernacular musics because these existed amid vaudeville theater’s embrace of blackface minstrelsy, stage primitivism, and tourist exoticism. This tension is dramatized in Claude McKay’s 1928 novel, Banjo, where musical episodes are regularly counter-pointed against political conversations among the black sailors about racism and colonialism, Garveyism and seamen’s unions. The clash of music and anticolonial talk culminates on the novel’s final night in the Seaman’s Bar in Marseilles. When Banjo and his fellow musicians arrive at the bar, the West African guitarist Taloufa is talking with an Indian seaman about being refused entry into England: “Colored subjects were not wanted in Britain. This was the chief topic of serious talk among colored seamen in all the ports. Black and brown men being sent back to West Africa, East Africa, the Arabian Coast, and India, showed one another their papers and held sharp and bitter discussions in the rough cafés of Joliette and Vieux Port.” In the midst of this conversation, Taloufa is lured into joining the band: “You come right along and make that mahvelous music and fohgit the white man’s crap,” he is told. Taloufa abandons the political discussion and plays “a tormenting, tantalizing, tickling tintinnabulating thing that he called ‘Hallelujah Jig’ … ‘Lay off the coal, boy, and scrub you’ hide / Jigaway … jigaway. / Bring me a clean suit and show some pride / Jigaway … jigaway. / Step on the floor, boy, and show me that stuff / Jigaway … jigaway.’” Meanwhile, “above the sound of the music the Indian was emphasizing the necessity for all colored people to wake up and get together.”19
For those in the bar, Taloufa’s music and the Indian seaman’s politics are at odds: one character stops listening to the Indian, because “the jigaway music was pounding in his ears … There was no resisting it.” Eventually the Indian seaman gives up: “it was dismaying to him that those boys with whom he had just been conversing so earnestly should in a moment become forgetful of everything serious in a drunken-like abandon of jazzing. ‘Just like niggers,’ he muttered, turning away.”20 McKay does not share the seaman’s contempt for jazzing: it is worth noting that Taloufa’s call to the dance floor—“lay off the coal … and show some pride”—is itself a version of the Indian seaman’s call to “colored people to wake up.” And the novel’s most powerful image of “the necessity for all colored people to wake up and get together” is Banjo’s repeated attempt to form an orchestra. Nonetheless, as the novel ends, there seems to be an irreconcilable gap between “serious talk” and “jazzing.”
Those who forged the very notion that decolonization was a cultural as well as a political revolution felt a profound ambivalence about these musics, as one can see in the fraught reflections on beguine, jazz, and “national music” that occur in the writing of the Martiniquan anticolonial thinkers who came of age in the era of vernacular gramophone music: Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant. According to his biographer, Fanon enjoyed the beguine of Alexandre Stellio, whose popular Martiniquan dance band first recorded in 1930.21 However, Fanon’s only reference to beguine comes in the 1955 essay “West Indians and Africans,” where two periods in West Indian consciousness are delineated in an almost autobiographical sketch: “Before 1939, the West Indian claimed to be happy, or at least thought of himself as being so. He voted, went to school when he could, took part in the processions, and drank rum and danced the beguine.”22 Fanon’s dismissal of vernacular music as part of an unreflective colonial daily life recurs when he writes that the French radio station in Algeria, Radio-Alger, was “listened to only because it broadcast typically Algerian music, national music.”23
Fanon did take an interest in jazz, though a friend later said it was more sociological than musical.24 In his writings, he is always overhearing jazz and blues: rather than responding directly to the music, he responds indirectly, through another’s audition, as in his account of Mlle B., the white patient whose “fear of imaginary black men” had its origins in the radio programs of black music to which her Colonial Service father listened. A similar parable of listening to jazz is at the center of Fanon’s ambivalent claiming and disclaiming of “European culture” and “black civilization” in the conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks: replying to “an article that literally likened jazz to cannibalism irrupting into the modern world,” Fanon writes that, “in the case in point, I didn’t have to defend black music against white music; rather, I had to help my brother get rid of an unhealthy attitude.”25
Fanon’s overhearing the white reception of jazz and blues haunts his two famous talks on culture delivered at the Congresses of Negro Writers and Artists (in 1956 and 1959). In the earlier one, he writes that the “blues … was offered up for the admiration of the oppressors. This modicum of stylized oppression is the exploiter’s and the racist’s rightful due. … Still today, for many men, even colored, Armstrong’s music has a real meaning only in this perspective.”26 Three years later, he returns to the way
the colonialists … become the defenders of indigenous style. A memorable example, and one that takes on particular significance because it does not quite involve a colonial reality, was the reaction of white jazz fans when after the Second World War new styles such as bebop established themselves. For them jazz could only be the broken, desperate yearning of an old “Negro,” five whiskeys under his belt, bemoaning his own misfortune and the racism of whites. As soon as he understands himself and apprehends the world differently, as soon as he elicits a glimmer of hope and forces the racist world to retreat, it is obvious he will blow his horn to his heart’s content and his husky voice will ring out loud and clear. The new jazz styles are not only born out of economic competition. They are one of the definite consequences of the inevitable, though gradual, defeat of the Southern universe in the USA. And it is not unrealistic to think that in fifty years or so the type of jazz lament hiccupped by a poor, miserable “Negro” will be defended by only those whites believing in a frozen image of a certain type of relationship and a certain form of negritude.27
For Fanon, a new music was a consequence, not a cause, of the struggle against colonialism; for him the music of Stellio and Armstrong remains “frozen” in the colonial and Southern universe.
Fanon’s contemporary, Édouard Glissant, used a more sanguine view of jazz to mount a withering critique of beguine in colonial Martinique. When jazz accompanies the migration of blacks in the US to “the great sprawling cities,” he writes, “black music is reborn”: “This music progressively records the history of the community, its confrontation with reality, the gaps into which it inserts itself, the walls which it too often comes up against. The universalization of jazz arises from the fact that at no point is it an abstract music, but the expression of a specific situation.” In contrast, beguine represents the suspended state of Martinique where the plantation system has collapsed and “nothing replaces it.” “The ‘beguine’ is the true voice of Martinique, from the plantations to the intense activity of the town of St.-Pierre. But from 1902 … it no longer develops,” leaving Stellio in the limbo of the commercial dance band. “The universalization of the beguine was real,” Glissant writes, “(it is even possible that it exercised a profound and more durable influence on Europe, for example, than do salsa and reggae today), but this music is soon worn out.” “Musical creativity, cut off from the imperatives of reality, becomes folkloric (in the worst sense) … You must ‘do things’ in your country to be able to sing about it. If not, musical creativity is reduced to a numbing, neurotic practice that contains nothing but the capacity for disintegration.”28 For Glissant, beguine remains caught in colonial stasis, folkloric in the worst sense.
In the wake of Fanon and Glissant, postcolonial critics have accented the ways that rumba, tango, beguine, and hula were exploited by imperial entertainment industries. The international transculturation of stage or cabaret rumba in this period, Robin Moore argued, inaugurated the worldwide vogue of exotic musics, the “globalization of marginal culture.”29 The world circulation of tango, Marta Savigliano argued in her classic postcolonial critique of tango, was part of the logic of colonialism, “a trackable trafficking in emotions and affects that has paralleled the processes by which the core countries of the capitalist world system have extracted material goods and labor from, and imposed colonial bureaucratic state apparatuses and ideological devices on, the Third World (periphery).” This “imperialist circulation of feelings” produced a form of “emotional capital—Passion—accumulated, recoded, and consumed in the form of Exotic Culture”; these exotic representations then returned and ended up “becoming symbols of national identity” in a kind of “autoexoticization.”30 Similarly, discussing Odeon’s marketing of beguine for the gramophone, Brent Hayes Edwards concluded that “the commodification of recorded beguine is simultaneously the commodification of the colonies … another way for the European to appropriate La France d’outre-mer.”31 “In the hotel version of the hula,” the native Hawaiian sovereignty activist Haunani-Kay Trask writes, “the sacredness of the dance has completely evaporated.” It is, she writes, “a measure of the depth of our mental oppression … [that] even those who have some glimmer of critical consciousness do not generally agree that the tourist industry prostitutes Hawaiian culture.”32
Despite these powerful critiques of the exploitation and commodification of vernacular musics by a culture industry saturated in the racisms of colonial regimes as well as white-supremacist settler societies, there was also a sense among anticolonial thinkers that shifts in popular arts like music and dance anticipated the psychic and cultural transformation that was beginning to take shape. “Well before the political or armed struggle,” Fanon wrote,
a careful observer could sense and feel in these arts [dance, song, rituals, and traditional ceremonies] the pulse of a fresh stimulus and the coming combat. Unusual forms of expression, original themes no longer invested with the power of invocation but the power to rally and mobilize with the approaching conflict in mind. Everything conspires to stimulate the colonized’s sensibility, and to rule out and reject attitudes of inertia and defeat. By imparting new meaning and dynamism to artisanship, dance, music, literature, and the oral epic, the colonized subject restructures his own perception. The world no longer seems doomed. Conditions are ripe for the inevitable confrontation.33
Perhaps the “dance crazes” in which “exotic” dances and songs conquered Europe and North America were only a surface turbulence obscuring a more fundamental transformation taking place across the archipelago of colonial ports.
The most striking—if atypical—examples of this anticipation of the “coming combat” appeared in the places where the electrical revolution in sound coincided with anticolonial struggles, as in the Indian subcontinent, in parts of the Caribbean, in East and Southeast Asia, and in North Africa, or with social upheavals in settler colonial societies, as in Cuba, Brazil, South Africa, and the United States. Here the links were so direct as to be misleading, as both militants and authorities connected the circulation of records with the circulation of opposition. Vernacular recording artists allied themselves with militant movements, joining anticolonial and radical organizations and participating in benefit concerts, as well as recording satirical attacks on the colonial regime, praise songs for movement leaders and martyrs, and nationalist anthems of the land and people.
A number of musicians allied themselves with anticolonial movements and played benefit concerts; a few even joined movement organizations. In Egypt, the popular theater singer Munīra al-Mahdiyya, one of the first Egyptian women to record, was closely aligned with the anticolonial movement: as the musciologist Virgina Danielson notes, “her company frequently performed nationalistic songs that were summarily censored by the British, giving rise to the slogan, ‘Hawá ’l-ḥurriyya fī Masraḥ Munīra al-Mahdiyya’ (There is love of freedom in the theatre of Munīra al-Mahdiyya).” These songs and performances were part of “the widespread public attitude of resistance to foreign rule that permeated city and countryside throughout the first quarter of the century.” As early as 1921, the young Umm Kulthūm was featured in a concert honoring the Egyptian Wafd leader Zaghlul Pasha, and in 1928 she was singing at a benefit concert sponsored by the Egyptian feminist and nationalist Hudá Sha’rāwī.34
In Shanghai, popular “yellow music” and left-wing nationalist music were intertwined. Li Minghui was, according to one of her contemporaries, at “the front lines of the New Culture Movement … the more they [conservative critics] loudly and cruelly cursed her [public appearances], the more youth who had been influenced by the New Culture Movement supported her.”35 In India, the Civil Disobedience campaign that Gandhi led in 1930 and 1931 attracted the support of popular singers, particularly in Tamil south India, where the local branch of the Odeon company, Saraswati Stores, produced records by popular Tamil artists supporting the Civil Disobedience campaign.36 Perhaps the most celebrated example was K. B. Sundarambal. Born in 1908 to a poor family, she became a popular Tamil theater singer despite having no formal musical training, and first recorded for Columbia in 1926. She was drawn to the Congress movement in the mid-1920s and began wearing khadi, the hand-spun and hand-woven cloth that became an emblem of the boycott of British goods and of Indian self-sufficiency, “swadeshi.” In the late 1920s, K. B. Sundarambal and S. G. Kittappa staged a performance of their celebrated Valli-Thirumanan (Valli’s Wedding) for Madras women activists. When, in 1931, Gandhi was released from prison and invited to the Second Round Table talks in London, Sundarambal released a record celebrating it: “Gandhi has Reached London/Let Us Honor Him.”* She campaigned actively for Congress in 1937, and, after independence, was elected to the Madras state legislature.37
In South Africa, the dance bands that came out of the culture of marabi were linked with the emerging movements of black South Africans: the Merry Blackbirds played benefits for the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party through the 1930s and 1940s, as well as recording together with Makatshwa’s Choir, a working-class choral group sponsored by the leading black labor organization, the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union.38
For some musicians, these benefit concerts were just another gig: the Merry Blackbirds’ leader Peter Rezant later recalled that he “had no political leanings in any way,” and a member of the Pitch Black Follies recalled that Griffiths Motsieloa “never wanted to be involved … [but] always wanted to be on the … good side of the law.” On the other hand, there were others, like John Mavimbela’s Rhythm Kings, who explicitly endorsed the ANC in 1935.39 In the United States most of the well-known jazz bands, including those of Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Count Basie, played benefit concerts for the key Harlem political campaigns of the late 1920s and early 1930s, particularly the defense of the Scottsboro Nine.
In Cuba, many musicians were associated with the anti-Machado movement that led to the revolution of 1933. After Machado extended his presidential term in 1928, many musicians left Cuba; the songwriter Eliseo Grenet was forced to emigrate in 1932, when his popular “Lamento cubano” was deemed subversive.40 Moreover, since the musicians’ union would not accept son musicians as members, some son musicians joined Communist labor activists to form the Asociación Cubana de Conjuntos Típicos e Instrumentistas in 1932.41 Others became close to the Cuban Communist Party, including the trumpet player Julio Cueva, who had gone to Paris with Don Apiazu’s band in 1932, and fought in the Spanish Civil War before returning to Cuba in 1939 and leading a popular mambo band. As a result of these connections, in “a unique chapter in broadcasting in the Western Hemisphere,” the Communist Party operated one of the major radio stations in Cuba, Mil Diez, beginning in 1943; it emphasized Cuban music and culture, and featured leading Cuban musicians including the most popular bands of Arsenio Rodríguez and Antonio Arcaño: “Working at a Communist station,” the historian Ned Sublette notes, “often had little to do with a musician’s political affiliation. Some were enthusiastic Communists, but the intensive working schedules of most musicians suggested that they spent all their time in the world of rhythm and harmony and had little time or inclination for political involvement.”42
In Argentina, an anticolonial interpretation of tango had emerged by the 1920s and 1930s.43 In 1936, a pioneering social history of tango by the brothers Héctor and Luis Bates, based on their radio shows, argued that Paris, in adopting tango, an “exotic thing … to exhibit … before the astonished eyes of its tourists,” did not realize that “instead of being the conquerer, it would end up conquered by our popular dance.”44 Tango musicians ended up on all sides of the political struggles that resulted in the rise of the populist Juan Perón in the 1940s. The bandleader Osvaldo Pugliese joined the Popular Front Communist Party in 1936, and was imprisoned several times by Perón; the singer Libertad Lamarque opposed Perón, and went into exile in Mexico.45 The lyricist Homero Manzi, on the other hand, was a populist nationalist who began with the Radical Party in the 1930s and ended up a Peronist; and the lyricist Enrique Santos Discépolo, whose songs had been censored in the 1930s, gave radio talks for Perón.46
In some cases, insurgent movements—populist, nationalist, and communist—began to pay attention to the new sounds, and anti-colonial activists became supporters of the new musics. In Nigeria, musicologist Christopher Waterman argues,
early jùjú was a musical correlate of the tenuous political networks linking elite nationalist leaders such as Herbert Macaulay to a Yoruba-speaking wage-earning population that included civil servants, merchants, skilled craftsmen, and laborers … Descendants of the nineteenth-century literate black elite had split into two major political groups: cultural nationalists, who supported Macaulay’s Nigerian National Democratic Party and the exiled Prince Eshugbayi Eleko, and sought to associate themselves with hypostasized Yoruba traditions; and a collaborationist faction … which allied itself with the British administration. The former group provided a crucial source of support for jùjú music, while the latter generally regarded jùjú practitioners as insincere or incompetent converts performing an aesthetically displeasing hodgepodge of European and African musical elements.47
In South Africa, the leader of the Natal Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union, A. W. G. Champion, was a supporter of the vernacular musics, organizing a concert to welcome Caluza’s Double Quartet back from London after the 1930 recording session.48 In Tamil-speaking South India, the leader of the Congress Party, S. Satyamurthi, forged alliances with a number of popular singers, even though the rest of Congress was suspicious, and he hailed the “democratisation of musical tastes”: “In days of old it was only the rich people that could afford the luxury of good music. But today, modern development and discoveries had brought it to the poorer classes by means of the gramophones and the radio.”49
These links are not surprising, because the young musicians of the recorded vernacular musics often came from the same milieu as the young anticolonial activists. They lived in the colonial ports, working as shipping and railway clerks or seamen and dockers, and were mediators between the establishments of the local elites and the plebeian quarters. Like the anticolonial activists, they were often intercolonial migrants: indeed, in 1931, the South African Communist activist (and editor of the newspaper Umsebenzi [Worker]), Alfred Nzula, managed to travel from Cape Town to Moscow by “posing as one of Griffiths Motsieloa’s singing group going to London for recording.”50
In a few cases, anticolonial activists were themselves occasional musicians: such an overlap between anticolonial activism and vernacular recording can be seen in the figure of Ladipo Solanke, the Nigerian law student living in Britain who cofounded the West African Student Union in London in 1925, and published United West Africa at the Bar of the Family of Nations in 1927. The WASU not only sought to “foster a spirit of national consciousness and racial pride among its members,”51 but combatted racism against West Africans in Britain. In 1925, Solanke took time from his activism to record for Zonophone a series of discs of unaccompanied Yoruba songs, as well as tracks of Yoruba proverbs and aphorisms, on which Solanke breaks into song, exclamation and chant: as the Zonophone advertisement noted, “Mr Solanke is a close Student of his country’s laws and customs, and welcomes the opportunity of making a permanent record of some of the old ballads and sayings of the Yoruba-speaking nation, which otherwise might become lost in the course of time.”52 One sees a similar trajectory in the Trinidadian singer Sam Manning, who had recorded since the mid-1920s, leading the West Indian Rhythm Boys band in England, and then became a member of the executive committee of the International African Friends of Abyssinia, the pioneering anti-colonial organization formed in London in 1935 by C. L. R. James and George Padmore.53
As a result of these links, a number of recordings explicitly expressed political sentiments, usually cast in one of the three main forms: satirical attacks on the colonial regime, praise songs for movement leaders and martyrs, and nationalist anthems of the land and people.
Satirical attacks on the colonial regime were perhaps the least common, though one finds them echoing throughout Trinidad’s calypso in the 1920s and 1930s. When stevedores in Port of Spain went on strike in the fall of 1919, backed by the nationalist Captain Cipriani and the Trinidad Workingman’s Association, the calypsonian Connie Williams recorded two songs about the strike; the following year’s carnival saw what has been called the “first political cariso,” by Patrick Jones, known as Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector. As calypso singer Atilla the Hun later recalled, “Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector, sang a kaiso that in the opinion of the audience was a castigation of colonialism: ‘Class legislation is the order of this land/We are ruled by an iron hand/Britain boast of equality/For the dominant race in this colony/But all British coloured subjects/In perpetual slavery.’ He gained the second prize.”54
Praise songs, on the other hand, were a particularly prominent genre for anticolonial sentiments. In addition to her song about Gandhi, K. B Sundarambal recorded a tribute to Congress leader Motilal Nehru on his death in 1931, as well as one of the many songs recorded about the March 1931 execution of the revolutionary nationalist Bhagat Singh in Lahore.55 In post-revolutionary Mexico, the vernacular phonograph music boom led to the recording of many corridos about revolutionary leaders—the musical equivalent of the murals of Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco.56 The earliest Yoruba recordings in Lagos, released by Odeon in 1931, included praise songs for Herbert Macaulay, the pioneering anticolonial activist who had led a successful mass campaign for the return of the Eleko, the traditional ruler of Lagos, from exile in 1931. After the Eleko returned “amid scenes of jubilation unprecedented in the history of Lagos,”57 both the sakara musician Abibu Oluwa and the jùjú singer Tunde King recorded tributes to Macaulay.58 And, in South Africa, the pioneering 1930 London recording session by Reuben Caluza included a praise song for John Dube, the first president of the African National Congress.59
A host of such praise songs came out of the strike wave that erupted across the British Empire in the mid-1930s. In Nigeria, the Jolly Orchestra, a popular working-class palm-wine band led by a Kru sailor and pennywhistle player, recorded a praise song, “Wallace Johnson,” about I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson, the West African Marxist anticolonialist who had helped to form the African Workers’ Union in Lagos, and was forced to flee Lagos when the police raided his house.60 Meanwhile, in Trinidad, the strike wave that led to the 1937 “Butler riots” (and a major colonial investigation) became the subject of a series of calypsos recorded by Atilla the Hun, who had become the voice of ordinary Trinidadians over the previous decade—not only in the annual competitions among bands in the carnival tents, but on Decca recordings made in New York and shipped back to Trinidad for carnival season.61 Atilla’s first recording was a straightforward critique of the colonial commission’s report, but the record was banned in Trinidad,62 as he himself later wrote,
another aspect of state interference which presented a terrifying proposition to the kaisonian was the banning of his records. Arising out of the 1937 riots and the visit and report of the Forster Commission, a kaiso record of the song on the strike was made for the Decca Recording Company, but it was banned and not allowed entry into Trinidad. The offending passage ran: “A peculiar thing about this Commission/And its 92 pages of dissertation/Is that there never arises the question/Of capitalistic exploitation/Read through the lines and there is no mention/Of the worker and his tragic position/Which leads one to entertain the thought/And wonder if it’s a one-sided report.” The kaisonian lost his royalties.63
In response to the ban, Atilla recorded two songs that ventriloquized his critique of the colonial commission by praising the colonial officials who had been dismissed or transferred for defending the workers.64 In the following weeks, he also recorded and released a carefully worded narrative of “The Strike”*—“Different versions have been stated/As to how the strikes originated/Well you may draw your own conclusion/Atilla will reserve his opinion”—as well as a praise song for Butler himself, who was still in hiding.65
If the praise songs were topical and timely, vernacular recording artists also recorded songs that became nationalist anthems, praising the land and its people. A good example is the 1930 recording of Ignacio Piñeiro’s “Incitadora Región”* by the Sexteto Nacional, which celebrated the beauties of “splendid Havana” “in spite of the tyrant.”66 In China, the left-wing composer Ren Guang was hired as the Pathé Asia musical director in 1928, and he “became instrumental to the release of almost fifty leftist screen songs and national salvation anthems from 1932 to 1937”; similarly, the radical songwriter Nie Er wrote “most of his compositions … either for the musical screen or for gramophonic reproduction,” including “The March of the Volunteers,” a film song that was to become the national anthem of the People’s Republic.67
In Vietnam, Dinh Nhu, a participant in the Nghe Tinh uprising of 1930 who is credited with having written the first modernized Vietnamese song—“Cung nhau di Hong Binh” (Let’s Go Together to Hong Binh) (1930)—set anticolonial lyrics to French popular songs like “La Madelon” as well as to the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise.”68 In Egypt, Umm Kulthūm’s nationalist songs like the 1936 “Ljmay Ya Misr!”* (Egypt, Let’s Gather Together) became emblems of Egyptian anticolonialism, both through recordings and through her immensely popular monthly radio broadcast concerts.69
Both of the South African musicians at the London sessions of 1930 wrote and recorded these kinds of nationalist anthems. Griffiths Motsieloa recorded “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika,”* the 1897 Xhosa Christian hymn that had been adopted in 1925 as the anthem of the African National Congress; and Reuben Caluza recorded “Umteto we Land Act,”* his 1912 anthemic protest of the Native Lands Act that had dispossessed black farmers: “We are the children of Africa/We are crying for our land/Zulus, Xhosas, Sothos unite over the Land Act issue.”70 Similarly, the Akropong Singing Band from the Gold Coast made a 1931 Parlophone recording of “Yen Ara Asase Ni” (This Is Our Own Land), the 1920s nationalist lyric by the choir leader and composer Ephraim Amu which later became “Ghana’s unofficial national anthem.”71 There were also anticolonial versions of the socialist and communist anthem, the “Internationale”: Ho Chi Minh set it to Vietnamese words in 1925 and an instrumental version played by two guitars, an eight-string banjo, ‘ukulele or cavaquinho, and percussion, was issued in 1929 by the West African Instrumental Quintet under the title “Bea Tsin No. 2.”72
Nonetheless, the political stances taken by musicians and their lyric commentaries on the politics of anticolonialism are perhaps the least significant part of the cultural revolution worked by these musics. The anticolonial meaning of a record often lay neither in the politics of the musician nor of its lyrics, but in the way its very sound disrupted the hierarchical orders and patterns of deference that structured colonial and settler societies. “Insurgency was a massive and systematic violation of those words, gestures, and symbols which had the relations of power in colonial society as their significata,” Ranajit Guha argues in his classic account of the elementary forms of subaltern struggle. “This was perceived as such both by its protagonists and their foes. The latter were often quick to register their premonition of an uprising as a noise in the transmission of some of the more familiar signals of deference.”73 The vernacular phonograph musics were such a noise—disruptive and unsettling—and were heard as a violation of the musical order, an active challenge to the social “harmony.” Their sound carried political connotations. For example, kroncong, a hybrid Eurasian genre that was initially associated with Jakarta youth gangs—“kroncong crocodiles”74—became, as a result of gramophone records and radio broadcasting, an emblem of resistance to Dutch colonialism; kroncong, the Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Toer later wrote, had “the vitality of a nation that was not yet free.”75
This disruptive noise was met with a variety of forms of official repression. “Post-midnight noises in the Colony” were banned by a 1934 ordinance in Singapore, which prohibited gramophone music as well as “any drum or tom-tom, or blows [of] any horn or trumpet, or beats or sounds [of] any brass or other metal instrument or utensil.”76 “State interference in kaiso,” the calypso singer Atilla the Hun wrote,
conforms to the general accepted thesis that conquering powers, in their effort to consolidate their rule, have always sought to suppress native cultures and wage a withering war of ideas against the cultural manifestations of native peoples. Kaiso has not escaped this common fate and the cultural ramparts have been … the scene of many skirmishes and battles between the conquerors and the conquered even down to the present day.77
Indeed, the vernacular phonograph musics often inherited a history of repression, since forms of percussion, dance, and public parading had been subjected to censorship and bans throughout the first quarter of the century. In his study of the censorship of Ghanaian popular performance, John Collins notes that popular musics regularly attracted the attention of both colonial authorities and missionaries: in 1908–09, Cape Coast brass bands were forbidden from playing “objectionable native tunes or airs”; the drums of an aṣíkò group were confiscated for playing “obscene songs”; and osibisaaba players were jailed for playing “a banned dance associated with social protest.”78
In Hawaii, there had been a series of attempts to ban the performance of hula through the middle decades of the nineteenth century—in part because of missionary objections to its morality, in part because it was thought to encourage idleness—and “editorials against the hula continued to run in the newspapers and establishment press until as late as 1918.”79 Atilla the Hun recognized that the repression of kaiso was connected to the long battle over carnival celebrations: “That kaiso has been and is inextricably bound up with carnival is an accepted fact. Any measure affecting one has affected the other. In the war of derision and suppression against kaiso and carnival the trinity of state, press, and pulpit were united in a common crusade of condemnation.”80
In white-dominated settler nations, the recording and circulation of the musics of post-slavery black populations appeared as a genuine musical revolution, as these musics had long been the object of repression. In Cuba, son musicians were occasionally jailed in the 1910s, and “throughout the 1910s, police routinely confiscated or destroyed instruments associated with son music.”81 This was part of the larger repression of Afro-Cuban culture in the first quarter of the century, which led to prohibitions of Afro-Cuban drumming and dancing by the Zayas administration in 1922.82 The Sexteto Boloña, the son ensemble who were members of the Abakwa secret society and who had recorded in New York, were given jail sentences for disturbing the peace. During Machado’s second term, at the height of the recording boom, he prohibited carnival comparsas and the playing of son in public, and in 1929 the mayor of Santiago even banned bongos and congas.83 In Brazil, there are many accounts of the repression of Afro-Brazilian musicking. Though Marc Hertzman has recently challenged this “punishment paradigm,” arguing that musicians were rarely targeted as musicians, he nonetheless vividly shows how sambistas were regularly jailed for vagrancy.84 In South Africa, “noise” was invoked as a pretext for police raids on the slumyard shebeens where marabi was played: “the police used to come there just to stop the noise,” recalled marabi pianist Ernest “Palm” Mochumi.85
This history of musical repression was closely linked to a history of anti-black race riots and massacres. Scholars have found persuasive if often silent connections between, for example, the 1900 Robert Charles riot in New Orleans and the culture of New Orleans jazz, and between the 1912 Oriente massacre in Cuba and the rise of Havana’s son among communities of migrants from Cuba’s eastern provinces.86 In the nations of the Americas and Southern Africa whose independence had resulted from a settler decolonization, the “noise” of black music marked a powerful challenge to the sonic order. Throughout the ports of the settler colonial societies, controversies raged over the “blackness” of popular phonograph musics, since, as Gisèle Dubouillé wrote in 1932, “most of the modern dance music—from the tango to the rag-time, passing through the biguine and the blues—proceeds from the sources of African songs.”87
Within these debates, two distinct ideologies took shape: on the one hand, a valorization of black musics, usually as a component of a mestizo or mulatto national identity, or, on the other, a rejection of black musics in favor of a valorization of the musics of rural white settlers, particularly ranchers and farmers, what might be called the “country” ideology. In Argentina, Vicente Rossi’s Cosas de Negros, published at the height of the recording boom in 1926, argued, in the words of Borges’s review, that “the tango has black blood.” “The child of the Montevidean milonga and grandchild to the habanera … it was born in … a Montevidean warehouse used for public dances attended by compadritos and blacks … [and] emigrated to the Buenos Aires Bajo, … (where it was received by blacks and camp followers).”88 In Cuba, the composer Eduardo Sánchez de Fuentes argued that there were “no African elements of any sort” in the Cuban danzón. “Sánchez de Fuentes’s repugnance in admitting the black rhythms in Cuban music,” Carpentier wrote in 1940, “can be understood as a reflection of a general outlook during the first years of the republic.” The Afro-Cuban music movement “provoked a violent reaction from those opposed to anything black,” he argued. “Guajiro music was pitted against Afro-Cuban music, the former purveyed as representative of white music, more noble, melodic, pure.” In contrast, Carpentier insisted that “attempts to create a work of national expression always return, sooner or later, to Afro-Cuban and mestizo genres or rhythms.”89
The new phonograph culture emerged in the midst of these battles over popular musicking. But phonograph records had a different relation to the social order of the colonial ports than either street parades or hotel ballrooms. Though the musical idioms were shared, there were three ways in which the shellac discs being sold in colonial ports and mill towns around the world constituted a different musical culture than the live performances in the streets or in the metropolitan music halls.
First, phonograph culture itself was less of a colonial culture than other aspects of music. To say that the “gramophone goes east,” as the pioneering record producer Fred Gaisberg put it,90 suggests that recorded sound was received, not only as a Western invention, but also as a Western practice. But this was not really true. Earlier mass-produced musical commodities distributed around the world had been accompanied by implicit musical cultures and practices. The export of sheet music and hymnals had depended on the acquisition of literacy in European musical notation. Mass-produced musical instruments carried with them implied ways of playing, in some cases fixed or standardized tunings, even if musicians adapted and transformed them. In contrast, when the phonograph appeared around the world, there was not a right way to record music nor to play a phonograph. Rather, as a historian of the gramophone in China has argued, the “shock” of the new technologies of recorded sound “took place nearly simultaneously in both Europe and Asia, Paris and Shanghai.” Since recorded music circulated “roughly at the speed of the steamships that plied the colonial trade routes,” it was not seen as “an ineffably and unalterably foreign cultural form.”91 Moreover, just as the first commercial musical recordings of the acoustic era took place in rapid succession around the world at the turn of the century, so the electrical microphone-loudspeaker complex—radio, electrical recording, and sound film—spread equally quickly in the 1920s.
Second, the circulation of phonograph records often evaded control by colonial authorities. In the Gold Coast, gramophone records were a way around the pass laws: “the legacy of British rule has made it impossible in some towns for musicians to perform in public since they must always obtain a ‘pass,’” J. H. Nketia noted, “Fortunately one does not need a ‘pass’ to play the gramophone.”92 In India, colonial authorities did not immediately recognize the influence of gramophone records. “Only towards the end of the Civil Disobedience Movement, by which time there were already hundreds of gramophone records of patriotic songs in circulation, did the government seem to wake up to their importance,” historian S. Theodore Baskaran notes in his discussion of the place of song in the Indian anticolonial movement. In contrast to the popular song booklets that were proscribed under press censorship laws, “there was no specific law which could be used against gramophone records,” and few were banned.93
Even where they were censored or banned, it was more difficult to monitor discs than print or film. In Algeria, the historian Rebecca Scales notes, “the staff of the Bureau of Native Affairs … began to transcribe and translate the lyrics of hundreds of Diamophone records (and those of other labels), underlining particularly subversive passages with red ink.” When a record of a “piano solo,” issued by the North African company Rsaissi, was discovered in 1937 to contain no piano solo but rather a singer calling on Algerians to join Messali Hadj’s recently formed Algerian People’s Party, the colonial authorities tracked the distribution of the record from Algiers to cafés, market stalls, and brothels in tiny villages, seizing records and closing cafés.94 In the British Caribbean, the calypso singer Atilla the Hun captured the contradictions of the colonial censorship of calypso. Trinidad’s Theatre and Dance Halls Ordinance
set up the benighted police and more particularly alien high-ranking officers as the supreme authority over the kaiso, a most anachronistic situation in 1934, bearing in mind the difficulty if not impossibility of an itinerant Englishman understanding the subtleties, innuendos, insinuations, and nuances connected with this art medium. The kaiso singer was now at the mercy of the police … In addition to this, the Colonial Secretary, usually another bird of passage, reserved the right to ban kaiso records.95
Third, though there is no doubt that the metropolitan music industry exploited the labor of colonial musicians in the recording studio as much as in hotels or nightclubs, the movement of gramophone discs was, as we have seen, paradoxically both narrower and wider than the live performances. On the one hand, it was more narrowly focused on the local market in the colonial ports; on the other, it was more open to accidental and contingent distributions and appropriations around the world.
Like the copies of Marcus Garvey’s Negro World, George Padmore’s Negro Worker, and Ho Chi Minh’s Le Paria, gramophone records were carried around the world by sailors and students, militants and migrant workers. For example, a region-wide market in Arabic-language records developed, just as movements for independence—the Wafd in Egypt, the Destour in Tunisia, the Étoile Nord-Africaine in Algeria—emerged across North Africa in the wake of the Great War and the Rif anticolonial uprising in northern Morocco. Noting that the imported Baidaphone records disseminated “the official and unofficial songs of the different Muslim countries,” an Algerian agent in the Bureau of Native Affairs wrote: “while this might appear anodyne, in fact they inculcate in the native the idea that there exist in the world peoples having his faith … who have kept more or less the façade of Arab states and who proclaim their desire for liberty in their maternal language and not in that of a foreign Marseillaise.”96 The records of Umm Kulthūm not only traveled across North Africa and the Middle East but, by the mid-1930s, they were also being broadcast on the radio in the Dutch East Indies, making up much of the Arabic programing.97
Often the most innocuous songs and sounds carried anticolonial and nationalist connotations in the eyes of the population and of the authorities. This is particularly true of one of the most common song forms, the romantic lyric tribute to the land, often built on the simple musicality of place names. An example is the classic kroncong river song, “Bengawan Solo,” written in 1940: “Because [it] described the historic beauty and magnificence of Central Java’s river Solo, it qualified as an ‘Asia for Asians’ song,” the musicologist Margaret Kartomi writes. “Under the Japanese Occupation and ensuing Indonesian revolutionary independence struggle, the song assumed national importance and spread from village to village in Java and then throughout Indonesia via Republican and private radio stations. President Soekarno himself told Indonesia’s Ambassadors from the 1950s on that they should sing and promote the song in all their overseas postings.”98 Such songs of the land made up much of the repertoire of commercial Hawaiian music and are usually interpreted as versions of a tourist picturesque, the aural equivalent of the popular color postcards of the early twentieth century.
Indeed commercial Hawaiian music stands as a central instance of the contradictory relation between the vernacular phonograph musics and decolonization. The international vogue for Hawaiian music seems the perfect example of the expropriation of a music for a colonial and tourist exoticism. After all, Hawaiian music came to international attention through its presentation at Tokyo’s Taishô World Exposition in 1914 and at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, which celebrated the US’s recently acquired Pacific empire. Traveling theatrical troupes exploited the allure of sexualized Hawaiian women dancing the hula; the cult of the hula dancer echoed the cult of Josephine Baker in Paris. There is no doubt that much of the 1910s Tin Pan Alley boom in pseudo-Hawaiian songs fit a paradigm of tourist music. Moreover, by 1927, “Hawaiian Records” had become a separate category in the US recording industry journal, Talking Machine World, alongside “Race Records,” “Old Time Tunes,” “Dance Music,” “Vocal Music,” and “Instrumental Music.” Unlike most records of vernacular musics that were mainly exported and sold to local markets, Hawaiian records were clearly being purchased by metropolitan audiences.
Moreover, the commercial Hawaiian music of Kalama’s Quartet and Sol Ho‘opi‘i with its steel guitars and ‘ukuleles seemed far removed from the traditional meles and chants that were being collected and recorded at the same time by the folklorist Helen Roberts, whose Ancient Hawaiian Music lies in the ethnographic tradition of folk-music documentation. When one of the characteristic timbres of the commercial Hawaiian music of the 1920s—that of the steel guitar—was almost immediately adopted by US country music (not least by Jimmie Rodgers, who hired Hawaiian musicians to accompany him), it was separated from Hawaiian music and was often heard as an artificial or inauthentic sound of Hawaii.99 As a result, commercial Hawaiian music has usually been interpreted by anticolonial critics as a form of Orientalism, and, unlike the blues, it has rarely been given much attention or respect by historians of popular and vernacular musics.100
The ambiguous situation of Hawaiian vernacular records is, I would suggest, a consequence of timing. In Hawaii, the recording boom of the 1920s coincided not with the initial stirrings of anticolonial sentiment but with a deep trough in the wave of decolonization. It was at once too late and too early: a generation after the anticolonial struggles that erupted around the colonial conquest of Hawaii (from the settler-imposed Bayonet Constitution of 1887 to the 1893 coup that created a settler-dominated “republic” and the 1898 annexation by the United States); and a generation before the explicit project of cultural and political decolonization in the Hawaiian renaissance of the 1970s and the sovereignty struggles that followed. Ironically, the modern hula with ‘ukulele and steel guitar accompaniment—hula ku‘i—originally had clear anticolonial meanings. It had taken shape in the 1880s and 1890s as part of the effort, sponsored in part by Hawaii’s king, David Kalākaua, to preserve and revitalize Hawaiian culture in the face of colonial dispossession. In the crisis that followed Kalākaua’s death in 1891, a strike by members of the Royal Hawaiian Band was a significant symbolic gesture of resistance to the 1893 overthrow and imprisonment of the new queen, Lili‘uokalani, herself a well-known composer. A number of musicians refused to sign a loyalty oath to the new US-backed settler regime, and formed a new band, the Hawaiian National Band, led by José Libornio; their resistance was embodied in a well-known song, “Kaulana Nā Pua” (Famous Are the Flowers). When the band performed the song on the anniversary of the strike, it had, according to an imprisoned Hawaiian, “on the Hawaiians the effect of the ‘Marseillaise’ on the French.”101 This explicitly anticolonial song was not recorded or re-published until the 1950s, even though it remained “a favorite political statement of bitterness and rebellion for the people of Hawai‘i who seek a return to sovereignty” through the twentieth century.102 When it was included in a path-breaking 1970 collection of Hawaiian songs, the editors wrote that it was “the only bitter song in this collection.”103 Thus the hula ku‘i that was recorded in the 1920s was a music without “Kaulana Nā Pua,” a music of a moment of defeat, unable to express explicit bitterness even in the midst of significant social struggles, particularly the strikes of the multiracial working class of plantation workers who had been recruited from Japan, the Philippines, and Madeira.
However, as the early scholar of hula Mary Kawena Pukui pointed out in 1940, the chants of hula always had a “kaona, or ‘inner meaning’”: “The inner meaning was sometimes so veiled that only the people to whom the chant belonged understood it, and sometimes so obvious that anyone who knew the figurative speech of old Hawaii could see it very plainly.”104 And there may well be a political kaona in the many songs recorded through the 1920s that praise the land itself, like the well-known place name chant “Nā Moku ‘Ehā”* (The Four Islands), recorded by Sol Ho‘opi‘i, by Kalama’s Quartet, and by William Ewaliko (at the historic 1928 Columbia sessions in Honolulu).105 At first glance, the verses of “Nā Moku ‘Ehā” seem to have little political meaning, alternately invoking the flower lei of each island and its characteristic mountain—“Majestic Maui, rose is the lei/The beautiful mountain is Haleakalā”—before concluding with the simple “This is the end of my song/Of the four islands of the Pacific.”106 However, if one recalls that the verses of “Kaulana Nā Pua” (Famous Are the Flowers) alternated the song’s political dissent—“No one will fix a signature/To the paper of the enemy/With its sin of annexation/And its sale of native civil rights”—with a simple place-name chant—“Hawai‘i, land of Keawe answers/Pi‘ilani’s bays help/Mano’s Kauai lends support/And so do the sands of Kakuhihewa”—it seems likely that the place names carried their own kaona, the shadow of an unsung, unwritten verse.107 Place songs are not only “an extension of preexisting practices of using place names in poetry,” hula scholar Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman argues. They are also “a logical extension of nationalist sentiment at a time when national sovereignty had been usurped.”108 Given the centrality of land in colonial dispossession, and given the unambiguous association of many of Hawaiian lyrics, including the oft-recorded “Aloha Oe,” with the deposed and imprisoned Lili‘uokalani, the reclaiming, in the Hawaiian language, of the winds, waters, and rains of Minnehaha and Hanalei, may have been as powerful an anticolonial lament as Atilla’s humorous calypsos about the Butler riots.
If the political revolution of decolonization was the assertion of political independence and sovereignty, it depended on a cultural revolution of decolonization, the countless small declarations of cultural independence in subaltern daily life that Adria Imada, writing of hula, has called counter-colonial tactics.109 The circulation and social recognition of vernacular musics was a fundamental part of this cultural revolution, as recording became a form of subaltern self-representation. What Walter Benjamin said of the crowd scenes of early film might be said of the vernacular phonograph records: they embodied “the human being’s legitimate claim to be reproduced.”110
Thus an aspect of these records that was recognized by many contemporaries, their lyric invocation of everyday life, may have been as political an act as any explicit protest. It was said of Umm Kulthūm that “her voice was full of our everyday life.”111 The sonero, the musician Ismael Rivera said, “is like a poet of the people. He has to make up a story from a chorus that is given to him, without departing from the theme. He must know the vernacular, because he has to inject things from our daily life. He has to come from a humble background in order to touch people. He has to use the words that one uses on street corners.”112 And Atilla the Hun wrote that Chieftain Douglas, the barrack-room kaisonian, was “kaiso’s novelist … his themes were poor people, resentment to catching and destruction of stray dogs, … landlord and tenant relationships, police court matters, rows between neighbors, the eternal triangle, the whole gamut of topics from every life, but street walkers or jammette girls were his favorite themes.”113
The lyrics of beguine, Andrée Nardal notes in an early record review, “written to comment upon a political or sentimental adventure … are satirical or of a certain wistfulness always relieved by a shade of humor. In their dialect, the crudeness of the words often offends decency.” 114 Tango lyrics “form a vast, unconnected comédie humaine of Buenos Aires life,” Jorge Luis Borges wrote in his “A History of the Tango.” They are “the true poetry of our time.”115
The lyrics of the vernacular phonograph musics captured the language of the barrios and slumyards; their commonplaces mapped the colonial ports and gave voice to their characteristic inhabitants. In South Africa, Reuben Caluza’s “best-known song” sang out the call of Durban’s ricksha driver;116 in Argentina, Carlos Gardel’s “Organito de la Tarde”* was a tribute to the organ-grinders of the streets of Buenos Aires;117 and in Shanghai, Zhou Xuan’s famous “Tianya Genü”* (The Wandering Songstress) was a lament of a Shanghai “sing-song girl.”118 Bessie Smith’s recording about a common urban inhabitant, the bedbug, was singled out by reviewer Abbe Niles in 1928 for his “own periodical prize for a contemporary American lyric. Comparing it to classic rural songs about the boll weevil, he wrote: “On the Columbia record 14250-D the Negro Empress of the Blues, Bessie Smith, raises her immense voice, and, in tones of great bitterness and haunting sadness, … and to the accompaniment of the strangest sounds known to the banjo, she sings in part: ‘A bedbug sure’s evil, he don’t mean me no good.’”119
Perhaps the most characteristic inhabitant of the port cities was the migrant, and the topoi of the migrant lament are pervasive in these country-haunted city musics. There are tales of migrant singers, like the Trio Matamoros’s “Mamá, Son de la Loma,”* with its juxtaposition of eastern Cuba and Havana—“They’re from the hill, and they sing on the plain”;120 tales of migrants who go wrong, like Reuben Caluza’s “Ingoduso,”* which tells of a brother who is framed, beaten, and jailed in Johannesburg, after forgetting his fiancée at home;121 and tales of migrants who return, as in George Williams Aingo’s “Akuko Nu Bonto,”* a Fante lyric backed by highlife guitar, castanets, and a chorus that sings “Old man Bonto/I’ve brought money home/Back from abroad/Living is hard, ayeee.”122
The lyric commonplaces mapped the social divisions of the city’s geography. In Rio, the very genre of samba came to be divided between the samba de morro (the samba of the hills, the favelas) and the samba da cidade (the samba of the middle-class neighborhoods). In Buenos Aires, tango not only celebrated the city in anthems like “Mi Buenos Aires Querido,” but also invoked the working-class arrabales, as in the 1926 recording of Celedonio Estaban Flores’s “La Musa Mistonga” (The Muse of the Poor) by Rosita Quiroga, who, Flores said, had a “colloquial tonality”: “The muse of the poor in the arrabales/Writes in a droll fine vernacular/… Unaware of the glories/Of life in Versailles,/She goes out happy, when the night comes,/To watch the boys’ street games/To study the smiles of couples sitting down/And the face of heaven, turning dark with the stars/And listen to old tunes/An organgrinder plays.”123 “There is no one who doesn’t feel that our word arrabal is more related to economics than to geography,” Jorge Luis Borges wrote in 1927:
Arrabal is any tenement in the Centro. Arrabal is the last corner on Uriburu, with the final wall of the Recoleta cemetery, bitter compadritos standing in an entryway, a broken-down store, and the whitened line of low houses waiting in calm expectancy—I don’t know if they’re waiting for social revolution or the organ-grinder. Arrabal are those empty, vacant neighborhoods where Buenos Aires collapses into disorder in the west and where the red flag of auction—sign of our civil epic about brick kilns, monthly payments, and bribes—reveals the reality of our America. Arrabal in Parque Patricios is the anger of workers and the setting to words of that anger in shameless newspapers.124
The meaning of these geographical and linguistic commonplaces has been much debated: were they an integral part of the popular idiom, or merely local color added for tourists and visitors? For example, Borges argued that the use of the argot of lunfardo (the criminal slang that became a Buenos Aires dialect) was the result of the commercialization of tango in the 1920s: “The first tangos, the old, wonderful tangos, never had lunfardo lyrics.” Rather, he continues, “the common people don’t have to add local color to themselves … The substance of the snappy milonga” (a style that preceded the tango) was the soul of the arrabales “combined with a vocabulary that belonged to everyone … international banality and an underworld vocabulary are what we have in today’s tango.”125
More recently, the musicologist Carlos Sandroni has made a similar argument about the recorded sambas of 1930. The lyrics of “Na Pavuna,” the celebrated recording by the young white middle-class band led by Almirante, were a catalog of Afro-Brazilianisms, and functioned, like the studio use of the batucada on the same recording, to signal their identification with Afro-Brazilian culture. The lyrics of the less well-known recording of Heitor dos Prazeres’s “Vou Te Abandonar,” sung by Paulo da Portela (a founder of the Portela samba school), were more typical of samba songs, even though they appear less local and apparently more universal, dealing with the ruptures of love.126
One can see this same paradox in one of the emblematic songs of the era: the Cuban son-pregón “El Manisero” (The Peanut Vendor), which, as I noted earlier, has long served as a figure for the transnational reverberations of the vernacular musics. The English lyrics recast the song as a form of exotic and racist local color: “In Cuba, each merry maid/Wakes up with this serenade … If you’re looking for a moral to this song/Fifty million little monkeys can’t be wrong.”127
But the song was actually built around the call of a street vendor selling peanuts—“Peanuts, peanuts/If you want a snack/Eat a handful of peanuts”—elaborated into a double-entendre of seduction: “Young girl, don’t go to bed/Without eating a paper cone of peanuts/When the street is empty/Sweetheart/The peanut vendor sings his song/And if the girl listens to this tune/She will call him from her balcony.”128 Street vendor calls were an ordinary part of the urban neighborhoods of the colonial ports: in 1933, Rodney Gallop transcribed one of “the pregões (cries) with which the street vendors of Lisbon hawk their fish, fruit, vegetables, and even lottery tickets. If many of these are no more than raucous cries, or a recitative on two notes, others, within their limited register, are little gems of song, such as the cry of a seller of Setubal oranges who passes my house every day.”129 In Shanghai, one historian notes, “nightclubs frequently played … songs sung by street vendors for selling fried dough (youtiao) and newspapers.”130 Such cries became the kernels of popular recorded songs, including the Cuban Ignacio Piñeiro’s “Échale Salsita”—put a little sauce on it—which praises the sausages sold by a street vendor,131 and the song that launched the career of the Bahian samba composer Dorival Caymmi, “A Preta do Aracajé”* recorded by Carmen Miranda, which uses the cry of an Afro-Brazilian acarajé (beancake) vendor.132 These musical street traders are a figure not only for the routines of daily life, but for the place of gramophone music in daily life, itself a kind of street singer, calling out its wares in commonplace double entendres.
Music constitutes subjects as social subjects: the rhythms of songs, dances, and marches merge bodies and voices. Thus one might say that a people or movement must be constituted musically before they can be constituted politically. If, as Benedict Anderson suggested three decades ago, the nationalisms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries depended on the books and newspapers of “print capitalism,” one might conclude that the popular movements of the era of decolonization depended, ironically, on the electrical acoustics of a “sound capitalism,” and on the new, urban, plebeian musics they circulated around the world. The new song topoi refigured the commonplaces of everyday life, the new dance steps remade the rhythms of everyday life, and the new sounds were a noise uprising.
Nonetheless, the relation between the vernacular gramophone musics and decolonization cannot be captured by a single overarching narrative in which music gave birth to the nation. Rather there are several reverberating trajectories in which these musics and the conflicts over them constituted the relations between colonial intellectuals, the migrant workers of ports and railway centers, and the masses of rural peasants, miners, and plantation workers. Though there is no clear separation between a moment when the ear was “colonized” and when it was “decolonized,” the battle over the ear was central to the struggle over colonialism, as one can see in the ambiguous formulations of the theorists of decolonization themselves.
However, these vernacular phonograph discs were, in their very sound, a “working out of the social order to come,” an improvisation of a postcolonial world. They were not utopian in the classic sense; they rarely projected a perfected world, unlike, for example, some of the musical utopias imagined in the early Soviet Union, with their leaderless, unconducted orchestras. Rather the records often prefigured the contradictions to come, the trials and tribulations of the decolonizing movements and states: the divide between a democracy of improvisation, and a cult of populist stars and bandleaders; the divide between male instrumentalists, inheriting the craft ideologies of artisan music-making, and a now open, and openly sexualized, ambivalence toward the woman singing star; the divide within new territories, as the musics of particular regions and peoples became emblems of the nation; and the political metaphysics of rhythm—the inversion of the disparagement of rhythm and “rhythmic” peoples into the celebration of a sometimes essentialized, naturalized somatic rhythm.
If these musics figured anticolonial opposition, they did not necessarily figure anticolonial space—home rule, swaraj, the Negro World—as national space. Rather, like the forms of black and anti-colonial internationalism, these vernacular phonograph musics took shape in an archipelago of colonial ports and mill towns, on an imperial commodity chain whose links were not only banana boats and coal trains, but gramophone records and steel guitars. And, as in the case of anticolonial thought, we should not see the musical cultures of this archipelago through a model of center and periphery, source and echo. It was commonly thought at the time that these musics were simply echoes of US jazz. But this is no more accurate than the analogous idea that anticolonial movements and theories were simply echoes of Soviet revolution. Jazz was a central instance of the new vernaculars, but the fact that contemporaries heard the new musics as forms of “jazz” is really more akin to the equally common perception that every anticolonial activist was a “Bolshevik”—even Gandhi, in the eyes of some British colonial officials.
Rather than this image of jazz echoing around the planet, in various delayed repetitions, one might adopt Ron Radano’s use of “resonance”: resonance, he writes, is “the sounding after an unlocatable origin … the ‘afterlife’ of a negative sonic inception, the ‘absent cause’ represented in the audible outer world.”133 However, in the era of electrical recording, the gramophone seems less like a resonant instrument, sympathetically vibrating, than a reverb unit. Reverberation—the “acoustic context of a sound”134 constituted by the multiple and overlapping repercussions from the surrounding surfaces of the sound’s space—suggests the timbral chaos and sheer noise of the gramophone boom.
Just as different spaces amplify certain frequencies and deaden others, so the trans-colonial soundscape amplified some musics over others. There is no necessary or direct relation between the size and resources of a colonial territory and the influence of its music. Glissant may have been accurate in his sense that beguine did not develop as richly as jazz, but his oddly direct sense of the relation between communities and musics is misleading. Just as a handful of Caribbean intellectuals, from George Padmore and C. L. R. James to Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, had a disproportionate impact on anticolonial thought, so particular musics seem to have had disproportionately long reverberation times. Paradoxically, it was precisely the musics that seemed most entwined with tourist ideologies of exotic tropical resorts—those of Cuba and Hawaii, island outposts of empire—that had the widest trans-colonial reverberations.
The commercial names these musics acquired—rumba, hula, jazz, beguine—do stand as signs of their expropriation by the cultural apparatuses of empire. But as these musical signifiers reverberated across the colonial ports, they were reappropriated to name new and unexpected trans-colonial hybrids that linked the black Atlantic, the gypsy Mediterranean, and the Polynesian Pacific: “kroncong rumba,” “hula blues,” “flamenco tango,” and “gypsy jazz.” These unlikely reverberations were, one might say, a musical Bandung conference (the historic Afro-Asian political gathering of 1955), the sound of the transcolonial political and cultural project that was to be called the “Third World.”