What Can’t Be Owned?
Did Elvis steal “black” music? Is Tejano based on German waltzes brought to Texas from Europe by immigrants? Was Reggae’s one-drop rhythm born simply out of fledgling Jamaican musicians’ misapprehension of American R&B as they were trying to decipher the truncated, static-y signals coming off the coast of south Florida, ones that they could only tenuously pick up, at best, on their transistor radios?
Well, yes, to all three.
Kind of.
But, also, no. It’s never quite as simple, cut-and-dried, and orderly as that. Art and influence are a messy saga.
Like the reflexive question, “How long did it take you to write that?”
The most accurate answer would almost always be, “My whole life,” for art draws on every impression, though mostly unconsciously. And very few things on this earth are monocausal . . . except for the homage-dependent music of recent eras, where people import an entire aesthetic—lock, stock, and barrel.
Similarly, to the query, “How did you do that (creation)?”, the most truthful reply would usually be, “I really don’t know. It just sort of happened.”
To paraphrase ancient Arabic thinkers, we never really can say which person wrote what or where it came from. We only know for certain who it is attributed to.
At its most grounded, music is not used as a mirror to seek glorification, but as a microscope to better understand one’s own existence or as a floodlight to shed light where we otherwise cannot reach.
Prior to microphone technology, “quiet singing” was not ever perceptible beyond a very immediate audience. Others would have to strain to hear such insular sounds. The magic of mix-board faders enables the possibility of championing the softest sound as the loudest, and muting the loud, entirely. It can be a tool for democracy.
A friend recounted to me, how as a child in communist Hungary, a visitor smuggled in a portable tape-player for her. There was only one song on the tape, which she played endlessly until it snapped. This exposure was like a flying-saucer crash landing from the clouds. But the thing that “changed her world” more than the music was that the machine had an “equalizer” on it, where sounds could be altered and not just passively accepted, as dictated. That opened galaxies of possibility to her, in contrast to such an otherwise oppressive and regimented environment.
Art, at its best, finds an opening and lends some way out for the exiled.