Page 42 - Effable Encounters
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The African Dog
charts in America, and everyone and his brother in Tin Pan Alley
jumped on the bandwagon with fusion and cross-over studio
recordings, I tried to put together East African tarabu and Cole
Porter-ish Broadway musicals. ‘Djibouti Cutie’ was another disaster. I
had tried to meld two styles that were just too different. But this is
the price of an education, Professor; you must appreciate what we
call the ‘school of hard knocks’.”
“Indeed I do, Señor Mosca. My own efforts in producing folkloric
records, although critically successful, were extremely modest in
financial returns. And it has been years since I was involved in such
things. My country has not had the money to invest in the music
industry.”
“I know, and that is why I came over here as soon as the economic
and political climate became friendlier to North Americans. My
search for information I could use in my business turned up your
article in La Revista del Historia Mundiale. I had it translated into
English, and that brought me here. Your analysis of twentieth
century popular music is brilliant, particularly the analogy of the
African dog.”
Mombeau inclined his head slightly, a perfunctory act of self-
deprecation. “You flatter me, Señor. ‘Music of the African Diaspora:
Creole or Mongrel?’ was merely an attempt to record certain thoughts
of mine concerning the broad sweep of stylistic development, relating
it to theory in other disciplines.”
“Ah, yes, it is now quite the vogue to apply Darwinian models to
every sort of human activity, from automobile design to neural
networks. But you, Professor, went right to the heart of the problem
of so-called ‘world music’. I mean cultural relativism, of course. After
I got through all the technical jargon—niches, isolation, cross-
fertilization, inbreeding—I found a new basis for understanding
music’s decline into mediocrity. I was already familiar with the
creolization of dominant-subordinate elements in the music crazes of
the modern era: how the Caribbean, from New Orleans to Trinidad,
served as a melting pot of European, Native American and African
modes of expression. And I certainly agree with your claim that this
music—including its components of song and dance—is the major
cultural development of the twentieth century; the tired old forms of
European art and literature, and the dying folk traditions of the rest
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