The American Prospect: Multiculture Club

[marmar]

Multiculture Club

"Kids these days" belong to the most diverse generation America has ever had. No wonder they like music that blends sounds from all around the world.

Amanda Marcotte | May 16, 2008



Say the words "punk rock," and most people, whether they're fans or not, will conjure up thoughts of The Clash and The Ramones -- drums, guitar, and bass, the sound stripped down to rock's basics, sped up and turned up twice as loud. But one self-described punk band that's been steadily creating buzz for years now adds an accordion and a fiddle to the mix, as well as women marching around smashing cymbals. The band, Gogol Bordello, calls it "gypsy punk," with the volume, speed, and bad attitude of punk rock laid over Eastern European melodies and rhythms. What's remarkable about the band is that its members, who have emigrated to the U.S. from Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Ecuador, and Ethiopia, feel no more constrained by genre than by nationality. The music is rich and inventive, drawing on not only punk rock and gypsy folk music but also American-style rap (in various languages), reggae-style dancehall singing, and dub effects.

The popularity of Gogol Bordello's genre-blending sound defies the conventional wisdom about American musical tastes -- that we never venture outside our own narrowly defined cultures. Music marketers' assignation of a band to a particular genre alarmingly depends more on the band members' races than on their sound. The local Austin "alternative rock" (read: music by white guys ages 18 to 35) station finds it appropriate to inject hip-hop by the Beastie Boys and Eminem into its rotation, but darker-skinned artists with the same sound are only heard on "urban" stations. If your band comes from anywhere but the U.S. or the U.K., welcome to the section at the back of the store reserved for middle-aged hippies broadening their horizons, titled "World Music."

Music marketers have yet to realize that American ears are opening up to a wider variety of sounds. It just makes demographic sense. Unlike the baby boomers, Gen X and Gen Y have grown up in an America with escalating immigration, affirmative action, and a general emphasis on that right-wing bogeyman "multiculturalism." Two major trends that demographers talk about, the "graying of America" and the "browning of America," are trends that largely diverge from each other, with white people still dominating the older, grayer section of the population and a much more diverse mix of races, ethnicities, and even religions characterizing the younger. Which isn't to diminish the fact that this is still a racist and xenophobic nation, but "kids these days" deserve some credit for taking steps toward more progressive views on diversity. Add the globalizing power of the Internet to the mix, and you've got a whole generation whose tastes are influenced by a hodgepodge of cultures.

The urge to borrow and take inspiration from the music of other cultures is nothing new, of course. The Beatles famously helped introduce the sitar to American and British pop music after they gained an interest in India. The band Santana made a splash bringing Latin American rhythms to American rock music in the late 1960s. Musicians in the 1950s, mostly African American at first, borrowed some of the sounds from country-western music and injected them into R&B to create what became known as rock ?n' roll. R&B itself developed from two separate arms of black musical tradition, combining upbeat jazz riffs with blues rhythms. In the Caribbean, musicians were hearing R&B and rock ?n' roll and manipulating them into the local sounds that became ska, rocksteady, and reggae.

But the concept of blending the music of various cultures kicked into high gear in the 1970s. Punk musicians in the U.K. like The Clash, The Specials, and The Slits began to borrow not just a sound here or a sound there from Caribbean music but to lift entire genres like reggae and ska and put a punk spin on them. In the U.S., the jazz fusion band Mind Power decided it would rather be a punk band and ended up combining punk with reggae to create a distinctive and widely copied sound called hardcore. In the late 1970s, bands like the Talking Heads began to borrow heavily from traditional African music for their rhythms, creating hits like "Life During Wartime." ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=multiculture_club