Page 43 - Effable Encounters

The African Dog

of the world, cannot hold a candle to the profusion of jazz, blues,
gospel, rumba, merengue, calypso, cumbia, rock and roll, reggae—the
list goes on and on!”
The professor raised his eyebrows. “Please do not become too
excited, Señor. It is a warm evening, and it never pays to draw
attention to oneself.”
“Yes, yes, I’m sorry. The point is that African diaspora music
underwent rapid and profound evolution from the late nineteenth
century until the nineteen-seventies; at that point, it appears to have
run out of gas. That exhaustion parallels the end of cultural
boundaries triggered by the diffusion of electronic communication.
This cannot be a coincidence. In Darwinian terms—or should I say,
Mombeauvian terms—the creolization becomes transformed into
mongrelization, ultimately reproducing the African dog.”
“Then you have read my article. But did you grasp the principle of
selection involved in my analysis?”
“I think so. Just as traditional culture fits (in the Darwinian sense)
whatever conditions of life its human carriers experience, so have the
music and art and literature and language of urbanized
technologically-sophisticated societies evolved in their cultural matrix.
But our world has gone through incredible changes in the last
hundred years. The pace of contemporary evolution has blinded most
people to its nature, which is mongrelization; instead, they see only a
relativistic sort of ‘equality’ or desirable movement toward
interspecies harmony through a universal culture. And here is where
your theory provided me with a great insight. The fitness of musical
forms today only makes sense when you see them as intermediate
forms, their hodgepodge of incompatible, clashing elements possible
only in an environment of flux and chaos; they have no solid niche in
any settled form of human existence. As you point out, evolution has
been explained by most scientists as a process manifested quite
differently depending on the type of environmental change that is
occurring: either catastrophic like the nemesis asteroid (as an extreme
example), sudden drought and forest fire; or slow but inexorable like
the ice ages. The former wipes the slate clean of all except those
forms already fit for the new conditions, while the latter forces
genetic drift in the direction of fitness.”
“And what did I conclude, Señor?”

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