The Political Economy of African Diaspora Music

310-34004-01

(Naeem Inayatullah with James Napoli)

Spring 2006
JJWCW – 2330
Office phone: 274-3028

Naeem Inayatullah (naeem@ithaca.edu)
Muller 325
Office Hours: Tu, Th 1:00–2:20 and W 12:30-2:00

1. Purposes:

Even more so than literature and film music seems to have stealth. Music slips in unnoticed under our critical radar or in between the gates of our implicit or explicit biases. It can make our bodies surrender, lifting our spirits, allowing us to commune with beings beyond ourselves. Yet, music’s abstractness and universality does not merely oppose the specific conditions of a particular locale, culture, or context. Rather, its capacity to enrapture us in the divine derives from its roots in specific cultural soils. Musicians make music in a specific time, a circumscribed and historically molded space, solving immediate problems, articulating some particular feeling, creating sonic utopias that expose fears and release dreams. Musical art, it is easy to grasp, is influenced by its social context. It is crucial to understand, however, that artists also respond to and shape that context. We can imagine that they do so by offering -- in musical form – assessments and critiques of current politics and by envisioning alternatives. If so, then aesthetics and ethics, art and politics, music and its message, sound and its meaning necessarily overlap. Perhaps, our most ambitious goal will be to explore this overlap by asking: What are the advantages and disadvantages of a politicized aesthetics? And, conversely, what, if anything, can we learn from an aestheticized politics?

If musical art is politicized, it seems fair to assume that different cultural locales will produce different forms of this overlap. I am particularly interested in the forms produced by African Diaspora community. Because of its confrontation with modern slavery, I believe this community offers a uniquely powerful form of cultural resistance to the homogenizing and assimilative forces of colonialism, capitalism, modernity, and westernization. Within this community political resistance to such global forces is, of course, not limited to art and music. Nevertheless, I am interested in exploring how, and to what effect, music creation in the African Diaspora community works both to counter and to humanize forceful and often brutal forces.

Then there is the issue of North American students consuming and producing music that emerges from the African Diaspora. Are we aware of this music’s political, cultural, spiritual nature? Would we consume and produce it in the same way if we had a better knowledge and appreciation of its deeper purposes? Having gained some sense of this music’s context, what can we learn about how to have a meaningful posture towards it? Does the fullness of this music highlight and speak to the lack of something in our own musical traditions? Does identifying the similarities and differences in our relative aesthetic and political postures help us reconstruct our own lives?

2. Focus

We focus on the music and lives of various artists: Stephen Osadebe, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Sunny Ade, (originating from Nigeria) Bob Marley, (originating from Jamaica), Midnite (from Saint Croix), Betty Carter (USA), and various artists from the Afro-Cuban tradition. We will listen to their music, read about their lives, and in some cases read their writings.

Caveats:

This is not a music course; it’s a course about the place of music in life and politics. By politics I do not mean just the events of international or domestic relations. Instead, I mean more of what might be called “meta-politics” – our formulation of the meaning of musical and political order and disorder. While I will be assisted by James Napoli – who is a studying to be a musicologist and is a musican – I do not have any formal training in the reading, playing, or teaching music. Besides my teaching experience, the only qualification I currently bring to this course is a passion for this music, an admiration for artists who create it, and curiosity about the society within which the music and artists are embedded.

Readings:

a) Books:

• Rodriguez, O.A., From Afrocuban Music to Salsa, CD-PIR1258, 2002.

• Chernhoff, John Miller, African Rhythm and African Sensibility, (Chicago, 1981)

• Dawes, Kwame, Natural Mysticism, (Peepal Tree, 1999). • Veal, Michael, Fela: The Life & Times of an African Musical Icon, 2000 (Temple).

• Bauer, William R., Open the Door : The Life and Music of Betty Carter, 2003 (University of Michigan).

b) Course Reader (Purchased from Gail Belokur in Muller 309):

b) Design:

Evaluation

General Statement:

Let me lay out a few parameters. First, as always with my courses, I hold to the belief that we do not "know it" unless we can "write it." So I hope to have 100% of the grade based on writings. It is, perhaps, legitimate to argue that art and music cannot be properly talked or written about. However, this belief is not consistent with my goals in this course. I hold to the view that while producing art and writing/talking about art are indeed different kinds of activities, I also think the latter is possible, necessary, and perhaps crucial to art's full purposes. If you cannot consider this premise or if you are unwilling to test it (which is different from accepting it – you need not accept), then, I strongly recommend against taking this course. It will only frustrate you. Second, in recent years, I have come to respect the attempt to assess one's learning in a retrospective and comprehensive manner. This means I would like to see a comprehensive paper at the end of the course based primarily on the readings but also an effort to synthesize all or most of the course materials. Third, while theory and history/biography are indispensable elements of this course, the music itself, it seems to me, has to be our primary focus. This means we need to incorporate listening exercises as a regular part of the course. It also means I would like to see regular writings on the music as a part of evaluation. Finally, as always, an "entry paper" and an "exit paper" are required but not graded. Details on this will follow in class.

Specifics:

A comprehensive final paper that incorporates your experience and learning within the course but which is focused on your understanding of the readings. I will give you some sense of how to do this paper in class. But in general what I am looking for is a “bibliographic essay.” Lets make it due, Noon, Wednesday, May 3. Shall we say this accounts for 40% of your grade?

6 to 7 short (3-4 page) papers that we might call “directed listening.” (N.B. you are directing me on how to listen to the music you are writing about.) I will take these papers on Thursday. One per week, please. Please do not write a new paper until you have read my comments on the prior one. These counts for 60% of your grade. I would like to see at least 3 of these by Thursday March 2nd. See below on how to write these. How I would like you to write the “directed listening” papers

I would like these short papers to contain four parts that you can arrange in any order you like. Context: Where are we? I need the name of the artist, the name of the CD, the year the music was produced, the context it was produced in, and the specific cut(s) you will focus on. If you plan to focus, for example, on the middle five minutes of the third cut, let me know that this is what you will do. Use your CD player’s minutes and seconds counter to let me know where you are when you are describing something. List for me the instruments you hear. If you don’t know the names, describe their sounds on your way to learning the names.

Summary: In about 50 to 100 words I would like you to give me an overview of what you have heard. Obviously different ears and different outlooks towards music will hear the music differently. This is not a problem. Just do your best to describe what you hear. If you have no technical language to describe the music that is not a problem at all – it might even work in your favor. If you have such technical language by all means use it but try to gage what I will be able to understand. If you don’t think I understand a particular term, say a reverse clave – teach me. the more you are able to teach me the better off both of us will be. Response: I would like you to use most of the space to give me your intuitive, emotional, bodily reactions to the listening. Knowing how you respond to the reading interests me. Pay close attention to how your body reacts to the music. Try to turn your intuitions and emotions into articulated thoughts (because an emotion may merely be a yet-to-be-articulated thought.) If your response happens to be boredom, write about that. What kind of boredom is it exactly? Resist the temptation to give me the conclusions of your emotion/thought process. I am more interested in the process than the conclusions.

You might be content to find and articulate one type of response, say, boredom, indifference, or approval. But I would like you to search more carefully. See if you can find more than one response to a piece of music. Finding is often a matter of looking, and if you look for more than one response you might find it. Specifically, I want you to try to find responses that create a tension or conflict within you. For example, you might both like and dislike a piece, approve and disapprove of it, or it might foster both fear and attraction. Try not to let any one emotion/thought dominate or monopolize your responses. In addition, I am not keen that you resolve the tensions between your responses. Instead, I would like you to sustain, develop, and deepen that tension.

Articulating Aesthetic/political Principles: This is the most difficult of the four parts. I would like you to take a step back from the text and ask yourself: By what process did I come to feel/think this way about this music ? (Try not to merely repeat your responses in this section.) I would also like you to think/write about how your responses originate. Over the semester and over the course of writing 6 or 7 of these, I hope you will develop a list of the aesthetic (and political) principles by which you respond to music at this time in your life. If you are successful at this, you will have achieved nothing less than having articulated the basis of your aesthetics and politics.

10. How to write the Final Paper: