The vernacular music recording boom ended as abruptly as it began. As the worldwide depression took hold in 1930, record sales plummeted and the electrical recording industry collapsed. “The story of the phonograph, as a self-contained, independent industry, was done,” the American Mercury concluded in September 1932.1 “In 1932 and 1933,” Fortune magazine wrote, “phonograph records had the worst years in recent history,” which led to “the strong suspicion, if not conviction, among record men that the year of 1932 or 1933 would be the industry’s last. They seemed to be experiencing not a slump but a final collapse, brought on by depression and their own neglect.”2 After a decade of start-ups, takeovers, and mergers, the record companies that had prospered in the recording boom found themselves on the brink of bankruptcy, ripe for takeover by large conglomerates based in radio manufacturing and broadcasting: “anybody with one eye could see that records were done for, that radio was the thing.”3
In 1929, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA)—which, Fortune wrote, “knew little about records and cared less”4—bought out the Victor Talking Machine Company, “the great Camden plant being remodelled for radio production.”5 Two years later, in 1931, Electric & Musical Industries Ltd. (EMI) swallowed up the Gramophone Company as well as British Columbia, which had earlier acquired the Lindström labels and Pathé. Finally, in Germany, the electrical corporation Telefunken GmbH took over much of the recording business in the early 1930s, acquiring Deutsche Grammophon in 1937.6 “By 1938,” historian Peter Tschmuck writes, “all of the traditional companies (Victor, Columbia, HMV, Lindström, etc.) were merely subdivisions of larger corporations.”7
The recording of vernacular music was cut back drastically, as export sales collapsed (see Figure 1, p. 75). Recording sessions dried up even for successful musicians, and there were fewer location trips to find new artists. Columbia had released fifty-five Hawaiian discs in 1928; in 1930 they released only six.8 Recording seems to have ceased in coastal West Africa after 1931, not resuming until 1936. By 1932 in the US, Columbia had “delete[d] almost everything in its ‘foreign’ catalogues” and Victor had also cut back.9 There were no new blues or gospel recordings during the last quarter of 1932.10 In Germany, the recording of vernacular music faced not only the economic downturn but the Nazi campaign against what they called “degenerate music,” especially “Nigger-Jew jazz,” which led to the ban on the sale of records by Jewish artists and to a series of radio bans on jazz.11 The radio ban provoked Adorno into writing his essay, “Farewell to Jazz,” in which he argued that “jazz no more has anything to do with authentic Negro music” but has “long been in the process of dissolution, in retreat into military marches and folklore.”12 The “Aryanization” of record catalogs from 1934 resulted in the destruction of recordings by Jewish, black, Roma, and Arab musicians in Germany.13 The repression echoed throughout the archipelago of colonial ports: in Havana, “Cuban critics used the fact that jazz had been banned on German radio in 1933 to justify their own campaigns against Afro-Cuban genres.”14
In 1937, Béla Bartók decried the vandalism of this moment:
It is well known that [the gramophone] companies are … busy recording the folk music of exotic countries; those records are bought by the natives, hence the expected profit is there. However, as soon as sales diminish for whatever reasons, the companies withdraw the records from circulation and the matrices are most likely melted down … If matrices of this kind actually are destroyed, it represents vandalism of such nature that the different countries ought to enact laws to prevent it, just as there are laws in certain countries prohibiting destruction or marring of historic monuments.15
In the place of the explosion of vernacular musics in the late 1920s, national radio broadcasting networks, whether state-run or commercial, pioneered programs of musical uplift as the European repertoire of philharmonic music reached new heights in commercial culture, figured by star conductors like Arturo Toscanini in the US and Wilhelm Furtwängler in Germany.16 By the mid-1930s, the phonograph boom and the vernacular music revolution it embodied looked like a minor episode, a series of musical “crazes” for novelties that would be forgotten. When Adorno drafted his critique of radio music in the late 1930s, he wrote of “the phonograph era” as a time gone by. The reverberations of the musical revolution seemed to have subsided completely.17
However, fifty years later these musics had become revered and valued, collected, studied, and celebrated around the world. “It is paradoxical,” Peter Manuel wrote in his pioneering 1988 survey of Popular Musics of the Non-Western World, “that these marginal misfits in their milieu of bars and brothels should be so crucial in the development of new musical forms, especially since the genres they create are often destined later to become celebrated as national expressions.”18 Hermano Vianna called this reversal the “mystery of samba”: “Samba’s unexplained leap from infamous outcast to (virtually official) national emblem … is the great mystery of its history.”19 But it is also the mystery of hula, rebetika, and son, among others. “Maligned in the early territorial period, by the 1930s hula had become essential to the growth of tourism and Hawai‘i’s economic development,” Adria Imada points out.20 “Some decades ago, [rebetika] was scorned by puritans, nationalists, official state ideologues, and dogmatic Leftists, all of whom regarded it as an undesirable Anatolian residue of the Ottoman Empire and an immoral product of the urban underworld,” sociologist Yiannis Zaimakis notes. By the time of 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, it was featured in “the opening ceremony … as a symbol of the rich cultural heritage of the nation.”21 Or, as Robin Moore posed the question in his pioneering study of son: “how [had] the music of a ‘despised’ minority—African descendants in the Americas—… become so central to national identity in various countries that continue to discriminate against them.”22
This transformation of these musics depended on the literal and figurative remastering of the 78s, their rediscovery, repackaging, reissue, and reinterpretation by collectors and folklorists, art music composers and amateur folk revivalists, independent labels and national archives, bootleggers and, occasionally, the multinational corporations of the entertainment industry. Through these remasterings, the musics of this sonic revolution were not only preserved and transmitted but were also claimed as the fundamental and inescapable “roots” of a host of musics around the world.
It is not that the musics recorded in the late 1920s and early 1930s are necessarily the quintessential “roots” music. Rather, it was the very constitution of them as such a taproot that was at the heart of the efforts to remaster the 78s. Each remastering had its own forms and ideologies, and generated controversies and debates from which we inherit contested musical canons and counter-canons, what Raymond Williams once called the “selective tradition.”23 The history of those remasterings could make up another book; in this concluding chapter, I will briefly survey two of the most influential remasterings: the remastering of them as national “folk musics” in the middle decades of the twentieth century, and the remastering of them as “world musics” in the decades at the turn of the twenty-first century. Both of these remasterings were caught in the antinomies of mass culture, the dialectic of “reification and utopia,” as Fredric Jameson put it, in which “works of mass culture cannot be ideological without at one and the same time being implicitly or explicitly Utopian as well.” For if the remastering of these records as folk music was a form of state institutionalization, it was also part of the cultural politics of a variety of emancipatory social movements; and if the remastering of them as world music is a form of commercial enclosure, it has also figured the cultural recognition and sonic enfranchisement of a planet of slums.24
The first remastering of the vernacular phonograph musics was the remarkable and paradoxical process summed up in Vianna’s “mystery of samba”: the remaking of musics that had been largely despised and disrespected into emblems of national identity. “In the 1930s and 1940s,” the Brazilian cultural critic António Cândido wrote in 1980, “samba and marcha, practically confined to the favelas and poor peripheral neighborhoods in previous years, won over the whole country, becoming the daily bread of cultural consumption for all social classes. During the 1920s, a master sambista like Sinhô performed in restricted settings, but after 1930 sambistas … gained national recognition.”25 “The dances of the rabble,” Cuban musicologist Fernando Ortiz noted in 1950, had been “accepted by aristocrats in their palaces.”26
This nationalization of vernacular musics was a complex and contradictory struggle, as both oppositional social movements and political regimes attempted to define the nation and its people through music. If the nation was embodied in its plebeian masses, those masses were defined by their music, and those musics were reimagined as “folk” musics. This musical version of what Antonio Gramsci dubbed the “national-popular”—the articulation of common-sense notions and ideological themes to constitute a nation and its people—was achieved through a series of “folk revivals,” often pioneered by social movements and radical intellectuals, and later ratified by populist governments.
The paradox of these revivals was that the commercial vernacular musics of the 1920s had, as I have noted, been discounted by earlier folklorists. They were were now reimagined through rhetorics of folk authenticity, as a new generation of aficionados, collectors, and cultural critics began to assemble discographies, publish histories, and insist on the significance of the commercial recordings. “Some day,” the African-American critic Alain Locke (who a decade earlier had dismissed jazz) wrote in 1936, “when Negro folk music is being scientifically studied, the old cheap discarded OKeh and Columbian records of … the early ‘Blues-singers’—Bessie, Clara, and Mamie Smith and Ma Rainey, will be priceless material in showing how jazz was created.”27 In 1939, when the Cuban composer Emilo Grenet edited a “guide” to the “rhythms and melodies which have awakened universal interest in the last decade,” he highlighted the popular son recordings of such “intuitive” musicians as Miguel Matamoros and Ignacio Piñeiro, whose works “contain the purest expression of the people.”28 At the same time, the folklorist Alan Lomax surveyed the discs record companies were scrapping; he not only appreciated their value, but challenged the assumptions of an earlier generation of folklorists. “My opinion,” he wrote to the Library of Congress music director in 1939, “is that the commercial recording companies have done a broader and more interesting job of recording American folk music than the folklorists and that every single item of recorded American rural, race, and popular music that they have in their current lists and plan to release in the future should be in our files.” In addition, Lomax came away
from this listening experience with the certainty that American music, while certain folklore specialists have been mourning its decline, has been growing in new directions to compete with “thick” commercial music, and that it is today in its most “distorted” form in a healthier condition, roving across the radio stations and recording studios, than it has ever been or ever will be in the notebooks of collectors.29
In several places, art music composers were significant figures in this reevaluation of vernacular musics. This created a kind of “folk revival” within philharmonic music, as classically trained nationalist and populist composers sought to elevate and dignify the vernacular musics by incorporating them into European symphonic forms, moving their performance from the dance hall or vaudeville theater to the concert hall. In the wake of the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20, not only did the muralists draw inspiration from Mexican vernacular musics—in 1928 Diego Rivera illustrated two corridos about the revolution in his Ministry of Education murals30—but a host of young art music composers like Carlos Chávez and Blas Galindo began to explore popular genres; Galindo traveled to Jalisco for his 1940 composition “Sones de Mariachi.”31 In Spain, the composer Manuel de Falla was not only central to the revival of traditional flamenco, cante jondo, but had incorporated its sound into his music. Flamenco may be “an acquired taste,” a record reviewer wrote, “but it is of intense interest as a genuine example of the raw material used to such effect by Albeniz, Granados, Falla, and Turina.”32 In 1940, the Brazilian art composer Heitor Villa-Lobos recruited a number of Brazilian vernacular musicians, including the sambista Cartola, for a recording session on a ship moored in Rio Harbor organized by the conductor Leopold Stokowski and issued as a boxed set of 78 rpm discs entitled Native Brazilian Music.33
In the decade after World War II, as the long-playing record emerged in phonograph culture, there were a host of revivals of the musics of the recording boom. In Brazil, the sense that Brazilian music was endangered led to a remarkable rediscovery of the early choro and samba pioneers, particularly Pixinguinha, as the Velha Guarda or Old Guard, with a radio program (beginning in 1947), long-playing records, and festivals (in 1954–55).34 The United States witnessed an analogous revival of early New Orleans jazz in the 1940s and early 1950s, as figures like Bunk Johnson and Kid Ory were brought out of retirement for radio programs and the early 78s were reissued by specialist record labels.35 In the late 1940s and early 1950s, black South African writers like Henry Nxumalo and Todd Matshikiza, associated with Drum magazine, the voice of the “Sophiatown renaissance,” revived the culture of marabi in a series of essays;36 in 1952, the eccentric Beat writer Harry Smith issued the influential Folkways LP collection, Anthology of American Folk Music; and the middle 1950s marked a “turnabout in flamenco’s fortunes,” with new festivals—the 1956 Concurso Nacional in Córdoba—and the canon-making Anthologie du Cante Flamenco, produced in 1954 by guitarist Perico el de Lunar (and first released in France), “the first attempt made by anyone to record for posterity the traditional elements of cante.”37
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, young aficionados begin to track down musicians who had not returned to a recording studio after the end of boom of the late 1920s. In the late 1950s, the Gypsy singer Aurelio de Cádiz (Aurelio Sellés), who had recorded two dozen cantes in 1929 for Polydor, was rediscovered, interviewed and recorded by flamenco fans.38 In the United States, Memphis bluesman Furry Lewis, who had recorded a dozen blues in the late 1920s (one of which had been included on the Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music), was working as a street sweeper when he was found and recorded by Samuel Charters in 1959.39 Within a few years, a “blues revival” emerged as other “lost” recording artists of the 1920s like Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, and Skip James were rediscovered and introduced to the civil rights generation, often through the mediation of the newly established Newport Folk Festival.40
In Brazil, several early Afro-Brazilian sambistas were rediscovered: in 1955, the new Brazilian label Sinter released the first LP by the veteran samba composer Ismael Silva, titled O samba na voz do sambista, “samba in the voice of a sambista,” in an implicit critique of the decades-old practice of sambas in the voice of white crooners. A year later, another veteran sambista, Cartola, was discovered working in a carwash; he returned to performing and eventually recorded an influential album, complete with cuíca, the friction drum—a sound so foreign to recording that the producer thought it was a dog barking.41 Cartola also opened his legendary restaurant, Zicartola, a center for the samba revival that, along with the emergence of bossa nova, was part of the cultural ferment of the new developmentalist and modernizing Brazil, figured by the radical Centro Popular de Cultura.42 In Hawaii, Herb Ono’s newly established Sounds of Hawaii Studio brought Lena Machado, a singer who had first recorded in the 1928 Honolulu Brunswick sessions, back to the studio in 1962; the revitalization of “slack key” and steel guitar music in the midst of a new movement for sovereignty helped spur the “Hawaiian Renaissance” of the 1960s and 1970s. By the mid-1980s, an aging Tau Moe, who had toured across Asia and the Pacific in the 1920s and 1930s, contacted the young steel guitarist and collector Bob Brozman, leading to a 1989 recording session that recreated the music of the 1929 sessions.43
These “folk revivals” of the middle decades of the twentieth century often served as the movement cultures of radical political campaigns and organizations. Many of the collectors and composers were affliated with the Popular Front communisms, which tapped popular nationalism for the struggles of industrial workers; with the nationalisms of the anti-fascist resistance; with the civil rights movements combatting racist states and social orders; with the various “New Lefts” that took shape in the early 1960s; and with anticolonial struggles in regions where political independence had not been achieved. In Trinidad, the calypsonian Atilla the Hun—by then a member of the Legislative Council—hailed the lifting of calypso regulations in 1951: “belated though it was, it marked the culmination of long and bitter years of incessant struggle by kaisonians supported by the more far-seeing apostles of West Indian culture … Politically, it heralded the growth of nationalist consciousness.”44
However, the folk revivals had contradictory political valences as nationalist and populist regimes also mobilized subaltern sounds to anchor their cultural policies. Several post-revolutionary regimes used folk revivals as part of radical attempts to reform musical practice and create a new music. The new secular Turkish republic of Ataturk suppressed Ottoman classical music, encouraged European musics, and sent out musicologists to collect and foster Turkish folk musics.45 In China, the victory of the Communist movement in 1949 marked a striking divide in the reappropriation of the urban vernacular music of prewar Shanghai, huangse yinyue, “yellow music.” On the one hand, most of the music of the Shanghai dance halls was seen as part of the colonial culture, commercial, decadent, and Western, and was rejected in the cultural revolutions that transformed China. The Shanghai record industry fled the mainland to the British colony of Hong Kong, as did most of its great singing stars of the 1930s.46 The new state emphasized the stylization of rural folk traditions by political composers, like Wang Luobin. On the other hand, since a number of the most important musicians and composers in Shanghai’s music industry were affiliated with the Communist movement—like Nie Er—some aspects of “yellow music” were adopted by the new regime, most notably in the use of Nie Er’s film song as the Chinese national anthem.47
Across the Americas, a variety of populist governments encouraged and appropriated vernacular musics. As early as 1916, the Radical Party of Hipólito Irigoyen used tangos to mobilize the urban poor in Argentina,48 and by the 1940s, tango was a key part of the cultural program of Peronism.49 In Mexico, in 1934, the Mariachi Coculense de Cirilo Marmolejo was the official mariachi of Cárdenas’s presidential campaign.50 In Brazil, samba was quickly incorporated into Vargas’s Estado Novo, becoming a mainstay of state-run radio, and Carnival parades became a “festival of civic instruction.” In the United States, the folk revival had its roots in the New Deal support by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt for the folk music initiatives of Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress and Charles Seeger in the Resettlement Administration.51
This state mobilization of popular music was a contradictory process, as one can see in the relations between fado, flamenco, and rebetika and the southern European fascist regimes. In Portugal, fado was at first condemned and censored by the fascist regime; by the 1960s, however, it was increasingly incorporated into fascist nationalism: the regime depended on the popularity of fado, football, and Fatima.52 There was a similar trajectory in Spain, where flamenco was ultimately incorporated into Franco’s nationalism. In contrast, in Greece, rebetika was rejected by the dictatorship of Metaxas in the 1930s; censorship and “Metaxas’s concerted efforts to stop the further recording of café amán songs” led to “the virtual disappearance of smyrnéïka by 1937.”53 Regarded as a legacy of the Ottoman Empire, the music became the subject of debate on the Greek left during the 1940s.54 In 1949, “toward the end of the bitter civil conflict between the royalist government and communist guerrillas that followed the Second World War, the famous ‘high art’ Greek composer Manos Hadzidakis used rebetika to rally the nation, claiming that it was a true music of the people, beloved of all Greeks regardless of class or region.”55 The first mythology of rebetika, Elias Petropoulos’s Rebetika Traghoudhia, which linked the music to the Greek underworld, was published in 1968 and immediately banned by the junta; a rebetika revival emerged in the mid-1970s, after the fall of the junta.56
In the moment of political decolonization—the three decades after the end of World War II when more than one hundred new states joined the United Nations—the recognition of vernacular music was often a fundamental part of a new nationalist consciousness. If, in India, raga-based music was reframed as “simultaneously classical and national,”57 in Indonesia, popular kroncong became an emblem of nationalism. Though the Japanese occupation during World War II encouraged kroncong (having banned most Western popular music), the very popularity of the genre led to the emergence of kroncong revolusi that served as “fighting songs for the masses.”58 After independence, the new postcolonial government attempted to establish kroncong as a national music, a process later criticized by novelist Pramoedya Toer: “kroncong still had a power before independence, it still contained a vitality—the vitality of a nation that was not yet free. As the Revolution erupted and as it passed, kroncong remained just a kind of narcissism, a bouquet of empty words, a culture of masturbation. Equal to the culture of great speeches, and of puppet shadow theater.”59
Across postcolonial Africa, the vernacular gramophone musics became the soundtrack of independence, and entwined in a complex audiopolitics that involved the creation of new national recording industries, the postcolonial state’s mobilization of folklore, and the emergence of global Afro-diasporic musics from soul and reggae to Afrobeat in Nigeria (associated with the figure of Fela), rumba and soukous in the Congos, and taarab in Tanzania.60 In Tanzania, for example, the postcolonial “nationalization of taarab” involved the revival of the early taarab recording artist Siti binti Saad, first as a nationalist figure, and later as a feminist figure.61
The elaboration of these musics as national musics often required the reinterpretation, and even remaking, of them. These were not simple or uncontested processes, and the “folk revivals” were sites of constant struggle over music and ideology. Indeed the key contradictions of these folk revivals lay at the crossroads of race, music, and the nation. Who were the nation’s people? What was their music?
In many cases, there was a process of folklorization, as hybrid and syncretic urban musics were reinterpreted as authentic traditional musics, untouched by modernity. In other cases, the music of a particular region was adopted as the music of the nation: one thinks of the successful postwar effort by musicians, critics and collectors to establish Rio’s samba de morro as the mythic heart of Brazilian culture, or the way that “mariachi, out of all the regional musical traditions in Mexico, achieve[d] the status of national ensemble.”62 In yet other cases, a line was drawn between respectable and disreputable aspects of the musics: in Brazil, for example, Vargas’s regime sought to prescribe sambas that glorified the nation, while proscribing the popular genre of malandro—outlaw, bad man—sambas.63
In many cases, these newly respectable musics became part of the emerging tourist industry. In Cuba, after the 1933 revolution against Machado, the ban on the carnival comparsas was lifted in 1937, with the active support of the National Tourist Commission.64 In South Africa, ingoma dancing was transformed, between 1929 and 1939, “from a militant, oppositional, and suppressed form of popular culture to a tourist attraction.”65 And in Trinidad, when the regulations on calypso were amended in 1951, Atilla noted that “economically, the new status accorded the kaiso stemmed from the realisation of its tremendous potential, especially as a tourist attraction.”66
Moreover, the folk revivals often used these reclaimed “folk” musics against newer forms of commercial popular music. For the revivals combined a powerful new respect and recognition for the vernacular musics of the 1920s and 1930s with a sometimes stultifying purism and cult of authenticity. The first national samba congress convened in 1962, and issued a “Carta do samba” to preserve the traditional characteristics of samba.67 “The crystallization of a set musical formula for samba … based principally on what is known as samba de morro, or favela samba, became,” Hermano Vianna notes, “a model to be preserved at all costs by musical nationalists. When bossa nova emerged to violate that formula in the late 1950s, many defenders of ‘true Brazilian-ness’ attacked the new music as if it were high treason.”68 Similarly, in Spain, the new “flamencology” associated with the Gypsy vocalist and scholar Antonio Mairena not only documented and codified the classic repertoire but insisted on the recognition of the Gypsy role in creating flamenco; however, as Peter Manuel notes, “his purist insistence that the repertoire was thenceforth fixed and inviolate promoted a kind of ossification.”69
Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to read these musical revivals as essentially conservative. In spite of their preservationist rhetoric and traditionalist ideologies, these “folk” revivals often proved to be prophetic. The “traditional” musics revivalists sought to collect and preserve proved, ironically, to be close cousins of the new urban plebeian musics they rejected, musics that accompanied the massive displacements and migrations that created a planet of urban slums and shantytowns. Looking backward for an authentic musical past, the folk revivals often heralded the latest urban sounds brought by the most recent migrants.
Beginning in the 1980s, the recorded vernacular musics that had been revived over the previous half-century as “folk musics” began to be systematically marketed under a new rubric: “world music,” a term invented by the recording industry to designate a specific sector of the music market, and an early symptom of the more general “globalization” of the culture in the neoliberal era. 70 In retrospect, the early decades of vernacular music recording now look like a period of national cultural enclosure, when national recording industries and states used popular vernacular music as a kind of “import-substitution industrialization,” not only commodifying musics that had largely been in the public domain, but also protecting the autonomy and profitability of a national music industry from the foreign competition of imported musics.
The emergence of a specific “world music” market sector that specialized in the transnational trafficking of “ethnic” musics was a byproduct of the collapse of this import-substitution model in the 1970s and 1980s, as the enforcement of “free trade” imperatives led to a consolidation of the global recording industry, based on the production of a handful of global stars sold in markets around the world—albeit with a huge shadow trade in pirated discs and tapes. If the moment of “folk music” brought regional vernacular musics to national audiences as the nation’s music, the moment of “world music” brought those same vernacular musics to global audiences as the world’s beat.
Two elements of the world music era stand out. First, whereas earlier companies, whether foreign or domestic, had aimed primarily at the internal national market, the US and European independent labels that pioneered “world music”—like Virgin and Island—targeted external markets, attempting to sell distinct vernacular musics to a transnational audience. For the recording industry, it marked the shift from the moment of import substitution—when local music was the basis of a national industry, a “national champion”—to a moment of export processing, when the work of local musicians would be exported around the globe. This promotion of “world” musicians—like the iconic Bob Marley—to a transnational audience took a variety of forms: introducing musics to North Atlantic audiences through collections curated by rock musicians, as in David Byrne’s successful series of Luaka Bop anthologies of Brazilian music; mimicking earlier transnational crossovers, as when Island Records attempted to replicate Marley’s success by backing Nigerian highlife bandleader Sunny Ade; and mixing different versions of the same tracks for different markets in order to resolve the tension between local demands for cuttingedge, hi-tech musical production and the “world music” demand for “rootsy,” “authentic” sounds and production values.71 Perhaps the most successful—and controversial—strategy brought rock musicians together with “world music” artists in the studio, as in Paul Simon’s collaboration with the South African isicathamiya group, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, on Graceland, and the US slide guitarist Ry Cooder’s series of collaborations with Ali Farka Toure, V. M. Bhatt, and the Cuban musicians who became known as the Buena Vista Social Club. In the wake of this “export-processing,” national recording industries that had emerged and flourished in the postcolonial decades declined sharply, as they found themselves under pressure not only from new technologies of music “piracy” (ever since the 1970s boom in street-vended cassettes), but also from the movement of musicians to the global cities of transnational music production and promotion: Paris, London, New York, Hong Kong.72
The second element of the moment of “world music” was the globalization of copyright battles over vernacular music, figured by a series of cases that centered on songs that had been recorded in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In part, this was due to the general neo-liberal turn: by the 1980s, international financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank were strong-arming postcolonial states to adopt neoliberal trade and property regimes, one of which was a stricter delineation and protection of what were coming to be called “intellectual property rights,” notably copyright. At the same time as the World Intellectual Property Organization was promoting copyright standards, the postcolonial struggle to combat the expropriation of national resources by foreign corporations was being extended to cultural resources—forms of indigenous knowledge and arts—as part of the campaign, taking shape in the late 1970s out of the Brandt Report on North–South inequalities, to create a “new world information order.” These converging if somewhat antagonistic tendencies condensed into a series of fascinating and contradictory disputes over the ownership of early recorded vernacular music: the decades-long struggle over “Guantanamera,” the Cuban guajira-son made popular by Joseíto Fernández on his 1930s radio broadcasts;73 the 1990 lawsuit over the ownership of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” which was actually “Mbube,” orginally recorded by the South African isicathamiya singing group of Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds in 1939;74 and the 1990s battle over the Ghanaian highlife standard, “Yaa Amponsah.”75
In each case, the very dynamic that had made the moment of recorded vernacular music a musical revolution and renaissance—the dialectic between informal popular musicking by street and café musicians that was only loosely connected to the world of copyrighted sheet music, and the formal objectification, even reification, of particular performances by distinctive musical personalities, vocal and instrumental, on shellac discs—became the bone of contention. Who was the creator, the owner of “Yaa Amponsah”? There had been copyright controversies from the beginning of recorded music, but these tended to be relatively minor skirmishes on the ever-advancing front where the recording industry was steadily and inexorably enclosing the musical commons, copyrighting arrangements of unclaimed “folk songs” in the public domain.
The “Yaa Amponsah” affair in Ghana was triggered by a Paul Simon “world music” project. On The Rhythm of the Saints, a 1990 recording featuring Brazilian and African musicians, Simon recorded “Spirit Voices,” based on “Yaa Amponsah.” When he approached the Ghanaian copyright authorities to pay royalties on the song, it triggered an investigation into the song’s origins. The initial finding was that it was created by Kwame Asare, the guitarist of the Kumasi Trio who had first recorded it for Zonophone in 1928; subsequent research led to the decision that the song was folklore, and thus owned by the Ghanaian government, which used Simon’s royalties to establish a National Folklore Board in 1991. This led to a decade-long debate in Ghana over the nature of this national ownership of folklore: though there was little objection to collecting royalties from foreign users, like Simon, when it was extended to Ghanaian citizens it appeared to be, in John Collins’s words, a “folklore tax.” Moreover, it raised the question of the national state’s right to a claim on a “folklore” that was associated with particular regions and communities (did not the local ethnic or language community have a claim to their “folklore”?) as well as with neighboring countries (“folklore” rarely respected national boundaries, and, as Collins notes, the distinctive guitar pattern of “Yaa Amponsah” was brought to Ghana by Kru seamen).76
If “world music” was in one sense a form of transnational marketing and the global enclosure of the cultural commons, it might also be understood as a cultural recognition and sonic enfranchisement of the urban syncretic musics that circulated across a planet of slums. In the 1980s and 1990s, ethnomusicologists who had hitherto focused on non-Western learned traditions or rural folk musics, began studying urban popular musics. Bronia Kornhauser’s landmark essay of 1978, “In Defence of Kroncong,” began with a critique of ethnomusicologists’ dismissal of syncretic musics like kroncong as “degenerate hybrids”; and it was followed by such pioneering works of urban ethnomusicology as David Coplan’s 1985 study of South African township musics, Chris Waterman’s 1990 study of Nigerian jùjú, Hermano Vianna’s 1995 study of Brazilian samba, and Virginia Danielson’s 1997 study of Cairo’s Umm Kulthūm.
These accounts of urban musics in the era of world music often challenged the reified notions of folk purity and authenticity that had prevailed over the previous half-century. An important part of this critique of folk authenticity was the reevaluation of female vaudeville and theater singers, as in Hazel Carby’s influential essay on blues women, taking apart the marked tendency in folk revivals to celebrate traditions of male instrumentalists while disparaging female vocalists.77 Established canons and apparently natural national musics were revealed to be products of an invention of tradition, and there were parallel critiques of the nationalist appropriations of tango in Argentina, rebetika in Greece, and samba in Brazil.78
By the final decade of the century, alongside the highly visible “world music” projects of Paul Simon, Ry Cooder, and David Byrne, collectors of 78s began to reissue the early vernacular recordings on the new media of digital compact discs: Revivendo Musicas in Brazil (from 1987), Kalan Müzik in Turkey (from 1991), Hano Ola Records in Hawaii, Sonifolk in Spain, among others. Even China’s “yellow music” of the 1930s began to be reclaimed during the “culture fever” of globalizing 1980s, beginning with cassette releases of the Shanghai songs of Zhou Xuan in 1985 and 1993. The rehabilitation of Shanghai’s commercial culture was amplified when EMI found hundreds of Chinese Pathé masters in Mumbai, and began releasing them as “The Legendary Chinese Hits of Pathé.”79
If Paul Vernon’s carefully annotated collections for Heritage and Harlequin, his pioneering discography of Ethnic and Vernacular Music, 1898–1960, and his essays in Folk Roots were examples of the kind of systematic study that Sam Charters had brought to the country blues in the 1950s, then Pat Conte was the Harry Smith of this “world music” on 78s: his five-CD collection, The Secret Museum of Mankind (1995–98), echoed the brilliance, obsessiveness, and idiosyncrasy of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music a half-century earlier.80
In many ways, it was this very work that made the present book possible. It has allowed us to hear the vernacular phonograph music revolution not simply as “Musics of All Nations”—the title of the pioneering Parlophone series in the 1930s—but as a fundamental remaking of the world of music. The Marxist musicologist Günter Mayer once argued that two revolutions in music occurred between 1200 and 2000—the visualization of music (through notation) in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the electrification of music in the twentieth century. “Just as in the eleventh and twelfth centuries secular music (folk music) … penetrated into the sacred realm,” he argued, “in the twentieth century, everyday music (popular music)—now a global phenomenon—is invading the quasi-sacred realm of ‘art’ music. With these developments, the distinction between ‘serious’ and ‘entertaining’ music is at first sharpened, but then, with the electrification of the latter, increasingly effaced.”81
If we take this long view of music history, we see that the age of sheet music, of notated, composed music—which coincided with the age of the public concert—was itself the first wave of musical mass culture. It was not only the earliest form of the mechanical storage of music, but was tied to the emergence of an entire musical industry, with publishers of piano-extract sheet music, instrument manufacturers, and concert impresarios. Moreover, the peculiarity of the European trajectory stands out in greater relief: for it was in Europe that the print interregnum—the brief centrality of printed music in the long historical shift from the aural transmission of both courtly and popular (refined and vulgar) musics to the electrical storage and transmission of music—was longest and most developed.
This second musical revolution—triggered by the noise uprising of the late 1920s—demands a revision of our sense of the audiopolitics of recorded music. Adorno’s aesthetic, which placed the highest value on intense modes of musical contemplation, underestimated the emancipatory powers of the distracted musics of everyday life, even under the sway of the commodity form. One might well agree with his argument that “the social alienation of music … cannot be corrected within music, but only within society: through the change of society.” But his claim that “it is the prerequisite of every historical-materialistic method … that under no conditions is music to be understood as a ‘spiritual’ phenomenon … which can anticipate through its imagery any desire for social change independently from the empirical realization thereof” is less persuasive.82
Moreover, the schizophonia of recorded sound—the rupture of the spatial and temporal union of musical performer and audience, long regarded with suspicion by social and cultural theorists—is the very condition of our musical world. There is no question that recording, organized as a multinational industry, leads to the expropriation and exploitation of musical labors, as well as the isolated, repetitive, and fetishized consumption of its commodities. But it also makes possible new and unexpected reverberations, new forms of affiliation and solidarity across space and time.
If the vernacular phonograph musics were not just a technical revolution but also a cultural revolution; if their very noise promised a music beyond the racial orders of colonialism and settler colonialism, a music beyond the commodity forms and labor processes of capitalism: this remains an unfulfilled promise and an unfinished revolution. Ernst Bloch once wrote that “no one has yet heard Mozart, Beethoven, Bach as they truly call, name, teach; this will happen only much later, in the fullest after-ripening of these and of all great works.”83 Nor has anyone yet heard the full reverberations of the vernacular shellac discs of hula and samba, kroncong and tzigane, jazz and marabi.