Message Monopolization
“We would not have conquered Germany . . . without the loudspeaker.”
—Adolf Hitler, 1938
How can it be that for decades, hundreds of thousands of “artists” from cities like Los Angeles, New York, and London have been given deafening megaphones, while entire countries are left unrepresented globally? This computational absurdity of superiority only reflects society’s greater inequities.
Is it not in order to ensure fairness that the US Senate has a compensatory composition—one that provides the exact same number of representatives for every state regardless of the size of its population?
Perspectives must be democratized. In order to thrive as a species, it is imperative that we learn to listen to one another more attentively.
Equitable representation in music and other popular arts is critical to the health of our society and the world, and the ever-reeping corporatization of sound enacts a form of sonic and cultural genocide. Rotation of power is vital to democracy.
Relatedly, African Americans make up 12.5 percent of the US population, but 40 percent of those incarcerated in the United States. Unjustified, inequity in this and all forms is best exposed and confronted.
A dozen people can be murdered on one street in a single weekend in a city like Chicago and go mostly unreported and unnoticed nationally, but a non-story about a celebrity’s bedhead or latest online tiff in some other higher-rent district such as Beverly Hills is worldwide news for days on end—a VIP hangnail goes viral. These are manufactured controversies to keep us distracted from the more pressing issues at hand.
Eight hundred immigrants go down off the coast of Libya, capsized and drowned without a sound, and we barely hear a peep about it. Around that same period, I witnessed the immediate aftermath of a car chase and shooting in West Oakland—a teenager dangling, twisted and supine out his driver’s side door—but was never able to find even a single mention of it in “the news.”
Akin to the ancient political concept that “those who desire to lead, should be prohibited from doing so, and those who are reluctant, must be forced to,” those who most want to be noticed, should be quieted and, in their place, the humble nudged to the forefront.
Too often, less wealthy nations are treated paternalistically: like “good” children, who should be seen, but not heard.
I honor my country. I love my language. But too few people with too much power equals injustice. Ethical sliding almost always occurs in the smaller places first, where we aren’t looking or have disregarded—such as with “kid’s” music. Physical danger itself most often presents from whatever we’ve underestimated and allowed the upper-hand (e.g., being mugged in broad daylight while brunching in a “safe” area). And, it is the “little,” last-straw things that usually prove most catastrophic to relationships.
This is not about protectionism. In the end, art should always be a case of letting the best song/voice/story prevail regardless of the politics. But if only a select spattering are even allowed to speak, it is de facto censorship. And the lessons of history are weakened when only partial accounts are heard, by way of this sneaky and indirect tyranny.
For democracy to thrive, contrary voices must not be muffled and ignored, but amplified. Even on the rare occasions when “smaller” countries are heard from (and, is it not an absurdity that we can even ever dare to regard any country with millions of citizens as “small”?), it is almost always only from members of the ruling sect, who not only do not customarily voice the concerns of the masses, but frequently oppose them.
The concept that music “centers” itself is diseased at its core. Music is universal. It exists everywhere and is a necessity for survival, spiritually. The hope is to help tip the scales, even in the most minuscule way, back to fairer representation. The majority of countries in the world have been rendered so invisible that most “educated” people on the planet would have a hard time even locating them on a map.
There is a lot of discussion of physical mobility and universal access for the physically disabled, but almost no comment about regional immobility. Most citizens of impoverished countries are seen as suspects for defection just by virtue of their origins. Consequently, freedom of movement beyond their own borders is an almost unattainable dream—freedom to wander, to discover and explore, to literally become airborne. This is something that those of us with power passports, like the United States or Japan, can barely imagine, since we instead are welcomed with open arms almost anywhere we show up—even if traveling on a whim. Contrastingly, every band that I have worked with has been rejected for travel visas on their first application and a legal plea must be made for them just to be granted reluctant days-long entry.
A hallmark of totalitarianism is that it favors the one over the many.
The rich get richer, indeed. Endowment by entitlement, where opportunity is not just expected and/or demanded, but taken.
Yet, nepotism and academia are both antithetical to major pop-culture uprisings. Innovation in pop culture has almost, without fail, routinely risen culturally from the bottom to the top, not from the aristocracy that now rules much of the misnomered “indie” rock world. Folk artistry is rarely a trickle-down affair. Be it James Brown, Elvis Presley, Bob Marley, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Louis Armstrong, Grandmaster Flash, Johnny Rotten, the Carter Family, Miriam Makeba, Woody Guthrie, Kurt Cobain, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Edith Piaf, or Eminem—to name just a few—many of the most prescient artists historically have originated from less than auspicious circumstances.
It is not sheer coincidence that so many innovations incubate in garages, vacant lots, and abandoned warehouses. Yet, try to name even one great penthouse or villa-estate band. It is in the former “empty” spaces that there is a liberty to the process, an absence of fear and expectations that squarely puts the priority on results.
Cultural piracy is most often a case of downward mobility, with the well-heeled rummaging through the basement thrift shop of the underclass to try to toughen and spice up their facade. Such is the common case of boarding-school-bred boys adopting Cockney accents or suburban soccer-league kids fronting as if they are “ghetto” (which is a word borrowed from late Middle Ages’ Italian, by the way).
And the call for greater diversity is not just to right regional deficits. Any music must shine on its own, but if all other factors are more or less equal, shouldn’t whoever represents the underrepresented be the one given an opportunity to be heard—be they of the nonmajority and/or nondominant sexual orientation, gender, physical ability, or age group? Would there not be some benefit if a fully clothed female was given the nod over a thong-clad, crotch-thrusting peer?
And all of this is not nearly so much for any given artist’s gain as for ours. To feast on as wide a range of information and perspectives as possible is enriching. It nourishes, strengthens, and even heals the listener. Is it really healthy and balanced for a “just” society to still have an estimated 86 percent of the voice-of-God emcees be male?
When was the last time you heard a lesbian, Filipino Canadian group or a double-amputee singing in Oriya (hardly a fringe language, with over thirty-three million speakers)? Ever? Didn’t think so. Yet, how many whining, upper-middle-class Caucasian boys playing standardly tuned guitars have been shoved down our collective throats for decades, through every possible distribution outlet, traded as if they are the gold standard?
Variety benefits us in diet. It also benefits us mentally. To challenge ourselves cerebrally helps build new neural pathways, which literally helps keep us alive since ongoing curiosity is the strongest predictor of longevity. This is likely why so many scientists live long lives.
And often when “alternative” voices are heard, they serve more as phallic or racial substitutes, guests in someone else’s world, slotted into an otherwise unaltered aesthetic framework.
Instead, we are offered unity through shopping, with calculatedly integrated fashion campaigns chock-full of ecstatic cross-cultural chums, rainbow-hues that rarely appear in real life. Worse, do we ever see an actual Benetton or Esprit store in the ’hood or the barrio? They visit these corners only via the wish-fulfillment land of propaganda.
This is much the same as bastions of “freedom” like the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany celebrating “world peace” and the abolishment of slavery. Yet what has changed in actuality is applicable only to the richer regions of the globe, since the same sufferings have been displaced or continue elsewhere, without ever breaking stride.
Overemphasis of any one individual or region can only beat a path to facism. Just as a body must have a circulatory system and a method for dealing with waste, so should culture.
Is not the very basis of any just justice system that every last person is entitled to a “fair hearing”?
Alfred from the Malawi Mouse Boys’ vocal take is crashed by some uninvited groupies.
MALAWIAN MIRACLE:
THE MEEK SHALL INHERIT THE GROOVE
It was just around the corner from the “Pack-and-Go” coffin shop that any trace of music was found in Malawi, on a skinny stretch of road that marks the only place where the tradition of selling barbecued mice-on-a-stick as snacks for passing travelers continues.
Literally working around the clock, whistling and waving their wares at oncoming traffic, the Malawi Mouse Boys spend the downtime of their days (and nights) beside the highway, strumming rudimentary guitars tailored from recycled scrap-metal parts.
Using stones for kick-drum mallets, they are a literal “rock” band. And, their hand carved and sheet-metal guitars give true thrust to the term DIY (do-it-yourself). One of the member’s mother gave him a birth name that translates to “I hate you,” expressing the not-so-subtle hostility of the environment that they were born into.
Having crisscrossed almost two thousand miles along the bumpy dirt roads and undivided two-lane, main highway of this tiny, agricultural, and narrow land, until then—in over two weeks—not a single instrument of any kind at all had been sighted.
At one roadside bar-stall that served banana-beer by the half gallon, “Play that Funky Music, White Boy” came blasting on the cracked speaker teetering on the counter, upping the irony quota to post post-modern dimensions. Whether the song had been put on intentionally as mockery or was just a case of someone simply liking the tune with or without knowledge as to its literal meaning seemed beside the point.
Along the journey, the person driving had made a wrong turn, dead-ending into an outdoor market. There was a standoff as he and one of the shopkeepers argued back and forth. The vehicle was soon surrounded by dozens of onlookers and other proprietors. The fact that the person with us was white seemed to only worsen matters. Finally, after many minutes of suspense, the crowd erupted into uproarious laughter, due at least in part to their befuddlement that a “British” person (who actually was Italian) could speak Chichewa so well and was willing to stand his ground so fearlessly. It turns out it had all been for amusement. To be allowed passage, we had paid a toll in theater.
Rural Malawi is a place where wealth is demarcated by whether there is a thatch or tin roof over one’s hut. This alternating pattern dots the countryside in bursts, like some sort of patchwork binary code.
Subsisting in one of the poorest countries (e.g., the mean income is less than forty cents a day and life expectancy narrowly surpasses forty years of age) with nearly the highest rates of AIDS, the populace seems poised, just one gram of protein a day away from revolution. The group of young villagers that founded the Malawi Mouse Boys live in one of the most impoverished districts of an already ravaged land and have been writing songs of faith and love together since they were young children. The earnestness and passion of their voices hark back to an earlier and more trusting, pre-“modern” time.
After spotting one of the members beside the road, strumming a guitar, we made a hasty U-turn and introduced ourselves. Following some negotiation through a translator, a recording session was organized for later that week.
What had started out as a plan to record one single singer-songwriter snowballed into a full collective of eight musicians that piled in along the way, overfilling the truck-bed for a chance to play their handmade and repurposed instruments (e.g., the hi-hat was made from two rusted bicycle gears) for prosperity’s sake.
People talk of one-stoplight towns. Malawi could be called a one-stoplight nation. A place where shoes remain a luxury item. There literally is no road into the Mouse Boys’ small village since cars never go there, so the band had to improvise a way through the bush.
It is an area where people define themselves not by what they have, but what they can do. The only real obstacle to catching something magic musically with these men was the tiny, manic spiders that kept racing into the slots of the hard drive.
Yes, dogs, chickens, and children are audible in the background of the recordings. But the great thing about animals and kids is that they always bark, chirp, and/or whine in time to the music. Intuitively, they blend.