Yes, you know the economy really sucks when you turn on the TV at 8am Sunday morning and find Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson on three different channels talking simultaneously to three different interviewers, giving the same little dog-and-pony speech to all, explaining that the $700 billion bail-out is not government spending like health care or education (i.e. BAD) but is actually something like a long-term investment, a sweetheart deal complete with parachutes for those bailing out (i.e. GOOD). No, Republicans don’t raise taxes on your wallet; they raise unholy Hell. So even if Obama gets elected he’ll never get any social programs passed anyway, since all the money’s already gone to Baghdad and Wall Street. At least the surge has pacified Iraq, you say? Not if the funding dries up, since that ‘peace’ apparently has been bought just like that of Israel and Egypt before it. Fortunately this is not a political or economic blog, so I mention all this strictly for entertainment value. No I’m not a conspiracy nut. Yes it’s a good time to be a Communist. Russia just might win this thing after all; witness new deals with Evo ‘Coca’ Morales and Hugo ‘Che’ Chavez. “Without Communism to keep it honest, capitalism no longer is.” You heard it here first.
So the Sixties may not have accomplished jack shit politically, but it certainly left musical DNA over a hugely scattered landscape, the mestizo bastard sons of which are only now coming back to face the folks here. If the first example of that was Dengue Fever with their kick-ass Cambo-rock otherwise previously only available on old B&W ‘Battambang Bandstand’-style videos, then the latest is Chicha Libre and their genetic modification of a lost-in-time Peruvian style of ‘Cumbia Amazonica’ that is as dreamy and psychedelic (under the influence of yage maybe?) as it is exotic. The sixties were about more than psychedelia too, including folk and blues and protest, which also caught fire elsewhere. A good example of this would be Thailand’s Carabao (in direct descent btw, no GMO stuff), but they’re just too freakin’ famous in Thailand to take a pay cut and come play for us Homies here in back yards and parking lots. Having lyrics at the Dylan-Lennon-Marley level of accomplishment will do that for you.
Chicha Libre was at the Japanese American Museum here in LA to open a show for Etran Finatawa, and I think they probably landed a few new fans with their quirky yet compelling music. In fact the only real concern about Chicha Libre is authenticity, the lack of a real physical link to their subject matter. None of these guys singing in Spanish is Latino, after all, and they’re apparently from Brooklyn, not Pucallpa or Iquitos. Maybe the Pistolera girls taught them; or witness Dan Zanes’ DIY ethic. Whatever’s fine with me; if it takes PhD musicologists to give world music a shot in the arm, then that’s cool with me. They could punch it up a bit though. It’s almost a little bit TOO dreamy. Of course missing a key member of the band doesn’t help, especially when it’s the vocalist and leader, so they performed admirably. I’m just trying to figure out why Joshua Camp was playing a squeezebox that he never squeezed (squoze?).
Etran Finatawa (‘stars of tradition’) themselves played at Amoeba Music on Tuesday and again at the Museum on Thursday. Whether you like their music or not, you’d have to admit that these guys from Niger have got to be the coolest-looking band in show business, what with their Tuareg desert robes and their Wodaabe tribal costumes. The music is highly listenable also, if not quite as compelling as Tinariwen’s hooks nor as musically accomplished as some others. This was as much a cultural performance as a music concert. The Wodaabe are famous for their men’s beauty pageants in which men will flash big toothy smiles and roll their eyes to impress the women, and they do some of that in concert, too. While there’s nothing especially musical about these cultural affectations, it DOES add to the overall hypnotic atmosphere, which is what Etran Finatawa does best. They’re best seen and heard in the overall context of their relation to ‘Saharan Blues’, a genre which maybe took a cue from Ali Farka Toure’, but found its voice in the rebel training camps of Moammar Kaddafi. In addition to the aforementioned groups, other members of the genre include Tidawt and Toumast.
With DNA as the metaphor we now come to its analogy to language, not music. For me the best multi-cultural confluence of the past week was the All Roads Film Festival sponsored by National Geographic at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, featuring films, photography, and music by and about the world’s endangered minority cultures. The program I saw was called a ‘Wave of Change’, about ‘new challenges and changes’ to traditional cultures, but the underlying theme was heavily about their imminent acculturation and demise of their language. The best of the lot was a film entitled ‘The Linguists’, about two linguists David and Greg in an Indiana Jones-like quest to document endangered languages before they die and their encoded way-of-life with them. This they did in four widely scattered terrains and circumstances- Arizona, Bolivia, Siberia, and northern India, united only by the essence of their timeliness. For as they say, “a language disappears every two weeks.”
I myself having spent large amounts of time in the study of language as well as in Arizona and Bolivia, not to mention world travel, all this is of enormous interest. Fortunately the narrative was as authentic as it was dramatic, the long searches down winding roads, the serendipitous encounter, the limitations of one’s own body. Gut instincts give way to gut reactions give way to gut aggravation that all must be finalized by the deadlines of circumstance. Unfortunately no distinction was made between the demands of different circumstances. Why is it so necessary to document the Sora language of Orissa in India, whose 300,000 speakers place it far out of the immediate danger of extinction? Why is it so necessary to document Kallawaya, which has long been a secret jargon of Bolivian healers, never used at home in the family, and definitely a mish-mash of Quechua, long-extinct pre-conquest Puquina, and magical incantation? Why is it so important to document any of this anyway? Obviously the metaphorical DNA at stake here holds no cure for cancer.
Its importance is a matter of debate among linguists, the psycholinguists led by Noam Chomsky long holding dominance over the sociolinguists with roots deep into the origins of anthropology and the holy triad of Boaz, Sapir, and Whorf, whose famous hypotheses were essentially that a language represented a way of life and a way of thought, a notion long eclipsed. That may be changing, due not so much to Chomsky’s foolish Einstein-like preoccupation with politics, nor to the imminent demise of his personality cult, but to genetic researchers’ discovery that for some strange reason, only He knows the details, the biological evolution of species and the cultural evolution of language function in eerily parallel ways. Those same genetic researchers have found no basis for the inheritance of some Chomskyan hypothetical ‘meta-language’ btw, notwithstanding the fact that Broca’s area is where it all goes down.
Psycholinguistics finds a better outlet in the quasi-psychotic manifestations that surround a language and its ‘acquisition’, a subject ‘The Linguists’ dealt with in a humorous and enlightening way, e.g. the fact that one of their drivers actually spoke an almost-extinct language without revealing it for fear of losing status; the fact that the few speakers of Chemehuevi rarely speak it to each other for reasons equally obscure and pathetic; that languages are frequently used as weapons of control and dominance by one social or governing class over another; that Sora speakers held up the lingo-party to negotiate payment, etc. Welcome to Thailand.
Given the average person’s lack of interest in the minutiae of linguistic science, the movie might have played up their protagonists’ potential star quality a bit. For instance, if they can speak twenty-five languages between them, as advertised, why did we hear only Russian, where they’ve done research for many years? Their lack of any Oriya, the Indian Orissa state’s dominant language, or even Hindi or Spanish for God’s sake, two of the world’s five most-spoken languages, frankly diminishes their impact on the story as protagonists, not just compilers. Louisiana ‘Lingo’ Jones would have I bet. Given that 96% of the world’s some 7000 languages are spoken by only 4% of the population, there is a lot of room for choice there for languages on the verge of extinction.
If they didn’t want to deal with languages that they actually know some of themselves, then they might at least have wanted to choose far-flung languages that not only span continents but that might actually be related to each other, such as the macro-Penutian languages on both American continents or ethnic Siberians from Russia to Greenland or ethnic Austronesians scattered from Hawai’i to Madagascar. In this way linguistic DNA truly imitates the bloodlines of its human vectors. They hardly had the time or space to deal adequately with four entirely distinct subjects anyway. The highlight of the evening came when one of the last speakers of Chemehuevi, hardly an academic or filmmaker, spoke it live for us after the show. He was the evening’s true star.
Don’t know where to go for world music or film this week? Me neither. If you want to stay in LA, then maybe check out the ‘Schooled in Song’ festival in Long Beach. Dengue Fever is headlining. Myself I’m going to SF for the ‘Hardly Strictly Bluegrass’ festival, petrol gods willing. I need to get in touch with my roots. The Global Drum Project with Mickey Hart and Zakir Hussain among others will be there, then here in LA next week. That’s ‘hardly strictly’ enough for me. Then there's Gogol Bordello co-headlining downtown's 'DETOUR' festival Saturday if that's your thing. World music has got its village people, too. Catch you on the rebound.
