A RESPONSE TO THE AWESOME TAPES FROM AFRICA CONTROVERSY
by Daniel Vila
(this piece reflects only my own views and not those of my fellow roommates at DDL)
Three weeks ago, I became aware that Brian Shimkovitz of the Awesome Tapes from Africa blog/label was coming to town, in search of Ata Kak, a Ghanaian musician who had recorded an album in Toronto sometime during the mid-'90s that he was looking to reissue. He hadn't planned on turning the trip into a DJ opportunity, but since Double Double Land (the small venue I help run, and the place where I live) had had a successful, diversely attended ATFA party the previous summer, I asked him if he'd be interested. He agreed, and with less than a week before the scheduled date, I asked a couple of friends with whom I'd DJed before if they'd like to play sets. They were down, and an event titled “Awesome Tapes from Africa Returns” was posted five days prior to the event, inviting the 1900+ members of the DDL Facebook group. Soon thereafter, local DJ Kirsten Azan (who has thrown a couple of events at DDL) asked, on the event's wall, if any of the DJs were African. When I responded that they weren't, and explained that the evening bore the name of Brian's project and that it didn't reflect what we'd all be playing, a heated discussion erupted, eventually swelling to nearly 300 posts over the course of four days. Though a handful of cogent points were made, bad behaviour prevailed. False equivalencies were cited in our defense, and reasoned, carefully considered debate was met with mockery and derision. The sole African musician invoked over the course of the thread was Fela Kuti (1). Then the white supremacists showed up, the final straw which prompted us to cancel. To attempt to have a dance party in the manner we intended seemed impossible, and to try to do so would have felt, to us, as though we were pretending nothing had transpired. We opted instead to hold a community talk in its place, at some point in the weeks following, to address the issues raised in the thread.
The amount of discussion and anger this event sparked was certainly a bit of a shock to me. I’ve been playing African and Afrodiasporic musics (among many other forms) in public for the better part of a decade (and have been a somewhat obsessive fan of them for even longer) to all manner of audiences and no one has ever suggested that I have no place doing it (this wasn't Kirsten’s suggestion exactly, but was suggested by others in the event thread). A DJ night consisting of white people playing black music seems unremarkable (though certainly not unproblematic) to me, merely due to its ubiquity. There are numerous white-DJed hip hop nights, reggae nights, house nights, techno nights, etc., not to mention Turning Point's decade-long existence. So I immediately wondered why this event had become a lightning rod for so much debate when all these others hadn't.
The first thing I considered was the use of a fragmented, post-punkified image of Alhaji Yaya Zakori, a northern Ghanaian musician, on the event page (it wasn't an image of my design). To me, this didn't seem like anything comparable to the vile minstrelsy of something like the Cleveland Indians logo, since the image related directly to the event's content. But I eventually realized that, given the context of an evening of predominantly African musics spun by whites, it could be perceived that way—and I don't use "perceived" lightly or pejoratively here, as I think perception is important, especially in matters of this nature, and I think I'm usually more cognizant of it—so I changed it to ATFA’s text-only logo. I agree that it was a mistake to use that image for the purposes of this event.
A second issue I noted was the numerousness of the DJs coupled with the invocation of Africa in the event's title and an attendant lack of African presence, where maybe if Brian were just DJing on his own, the omission perhaps wouldn't have been perceived as such an issue. I suppose it's a microcosm of the same idea that if there were 20 DJs and they were all white, the omission would be even more glaring, and, frankly, offensive. This was Kirsten's initial point, and I think it's a perfectly valid one to consider. I was trying to parse this with my fundamental belief that music is an open system and that one's ethnicity should have no bearing on one's appreciation/dissemination of said music if one is coming at it from the right place (which isn't to say there aren't all kinds of problems with much appreciation/dissemination—I'm speaking in fundamental terms here).
Nevertheless, I think the initial detractors might have benefited from a more thorough review of the DJs in question (though I'm not sure if this would have changed any minds). Shimkovitz, for one, lived in Ghana for a year while researching a project on the country's hiplife movement, interviewing dozens of musicians in the process. It merits mention that one of the questions most frequently asked of him by his interviewees was how they could get their music out into the world (though as to whether they expressed concern over the ethnicity of those dancing to their music, I remain unsure). He's DJed across Africa and Europe and also organized a festival in Berlin where he was able to fly in many Ghanaian musicians and pay them more than he earned as festival organizer. Though the ATFA name could be accused of Africa-as-country-ism, a visit to the blog will reveal coverage that its markedly specific and non-exoticising. Marcus Boon, one of the other DJs, regularly held the Mama party at Teranga, a now-closed Senegalese-owned bar in Kensington Market. He also put together the “Fire On the Water” event in 2012, which featured sets by DJ/rupture and Venus X, among many others. In his book In Praise of Copying, he dedicates the final chapter to issues surrounding appropriation. The third DJ, Valerie Uher, by her own account in the original thread, was going to give her set a global focus, and thus it feels somewhat immaterial to elaborate on her previous experience here. For my part, I regularly DJed at Teranga myself, and the owner was happy to hear me spin the occasional Senegalese track. I've also DJed with Chief Boima, who himself has been occasionally critical of white reissuers' operations in Africa. Poignantly, I had the pleasure of DJing the most recent Getatchew Mekuria + the Ex shows in Toronto. For those who don't know, in the mid-2000s Mekuria invited the Ex to tour Ethiopia with him as his backing band, and a record and further world tours were borne out of that original invitation.
In light of the small example detailed above, the notion that appropriation is an exclusively one-way, black-to-white street, as purported by a couple of people in the thread, can be seen as the fallacy it most certainly is. Any review of music history and its attendant global flows will tell you this. A few examples: the back-and-forth flow of influence between Colombia and West Africa since the '70s; country music's enduring popularity in Jamaica; Bollywood's gleeful co-option of Every Fucking Thing; Northern Nigeria's obsession with and appropriation of Bollywood sounds; Kraftwerk's foundational influence on techno, house, and hip hop. And as we all know, hip hop is the most amazingly omnivorous musical form of all time in its scope of influence and source material (2). Though the narrative of Afrodiasporic musical forms as the most influential on a global scale is a stone-cold fact, it's far from the only narrative. Of course power inequalities structure who is able to benefit from particular acts of appropriation. But the ethics of appropriation isn't simply a matter of race or privilege: it's situational, and requires us to act in different ways at different moments. Within the downtown Toronto music scene of which we're a part, the playing of contemporary African musics is still, sadly, a surprisingly rare act.
The (non)event generated a considerable amount of commentary, some of it interesting, some of it not. I'll set aside the various Facebook threads that have sprung up following the cancellation and focus on a piece by Jordan Darville entitled “What Kind of Racism Cancelled the Awesome Tapes from Africa Show in Toronto” on the indie rock website Chartattack. The article, laced with selective reportage, commences with a factual error, asserting that the ATFA blog/label "collects tapes by small-time musicians around Africa". A quick fact check of ATFA's most recent release, Penny Penny's Shaka Bundu, a mid-'90s South African house album, will reveal this to not be the case (among numerous other examples from the blog). In its day, Shaka Bundu sold upwards of 250,000 copies and continues to remain a staple in South Africa. Penny Penny eventually became a councillor in the ANC, though is now considering a return to music, spurred by the reissue and its reception.
Darville goes on to state, "It worries me that stopping the show and replacing it with a vaguely defined think-tank allows white allies of marginalized communities and postcolonial cultures to continue to dodge questions of their own privilege, by tut-tutting someone else’s clear and present bigotry." Except that no one involved with the event has attempted to dodge his/her privilege—to say this is to conflate the reasons cited for the cancellation (“clear and present bigotry”) and the subject matter of the talk (the various forms of crypto-racism addressed in the thread). The very purpose of the talk is to address these issues head on. Furthermore, I've been organizing it with the participation of Azan, the event's original inquisitor.
Darville later hypothesizes on a global African music scene consisting of a million Antibalases. "If you don’t need Africans for a night of DJ’d African music, do you need Africans to make their music at all? If we can play it without you, maybe we can perform it too." The suggestion of this dystopic endgame scenario seems particularly poignant, given the author's record and that of his publication. Only a couple of weeks prior to the posting of this article, Darville wrote a blurb on a new "reggaefied" cover tune recorded by Vampire Weekend, a band whose glaring cooption of African sounds paired with bourgeois lyrical themes has been subject to widespread critique. But for some reason, here, the paired appropriation of Jamaican music gets an uncritical pass. Three days later, Darville wrote a blurb on John Wizards, a white South African who incorporates overt Shangaan electro and kwaito influences into his sound. Despite the obviously fraught history of the vast power imbalance between blacks and whites in South Africa, the author's ire was not raised a hair. This all speaks to a more insipid form of appropriation, one that bulldozes and obfuscates the origins of creation—one that Chartattack has evidently been complicit in.
Comparable examples of obfuscation in music can be found in the global proliferation of house and techno, two genres whose white iterations, if spun by white DJs, would in all likelihood fail to raise many eyebrows. Speaking from my own personal experience, I can assert that I have encountered many who don't even realize that these are African-American musical forms. Though Chartattack has on extremely rare occasion covered a small handful of African artists (Spoek Mathambo, who is signed to Sub Pop [no big shock that he'd therefore be on CA's radar]; Vieux Farka Toure, son of Malian crossover king Ali Farka Toure), the subject of their most extensive African coverage—and by a wide margin at that—has been Die Antwoord. Woefully predictable, but no less piteous in that predictability.
The author goes on to question the very material validity of the ATFA label project. "[T]here is an inherent risk of a white non-African distributing African music, no matter how fairly or poorly the artists released on the Awesome Tapes label are compensated. […] This dynamic threatens to enforce a cultural superiority in its white, non-African audience by making them conquerors trapped in the Internet’s vacuum, unwilling or unable to see the full and beautiful vista of the music’s context. To do so would compromise their supremacy, manifested as their perceived ability to lightly entertain other cultures through the lens of their own dominant one, with little to no emotional attachment." Evidently, it is a vista so beautiful and remote that Chartattack has deemed it effectively unreportable, as if a lack of global visibility is somehow in the interest of African artists. If we extrapolate this position to its apotheosis, which would force us to dismiss all Western involvement in the distribution of African musics on a global scale, the material result would be that the vast majority of releases would vanish from the shelves. While the conditions for the physical absence of releases by African labels on Western shelves point to a problem that certainly requires interrogation, it's a problem infinitely larger than the ATFA project. It is one rooted in a lack of resources and avenues of distribution. Does ATFA benefit from this through marginally larger sales? Of course it does. However, the solution is not one of negation, but rather the much more difficult task of equitable proliferation.
In some ways, this is already happening through digital sales by African labels through avenues such as eMusic and iTunes. But to regard these developments as unproblematic would be to succumb to naiveté. For example, an album by Malian singer Na Hawa Doumbia, a reissue of which was licensed directly from the artist by ATFA, is currently for sale on eMusic by an African label. The problem, though, is that it was put there without the participation of or compensation to the artist. The act of bootlegging music for profit is an active practice in much of Africa, and it's the musicians who lose, regardless of who is putting the music out there. There are obviously Western precedents for this form of bootlegging as well, such as the academic/ethnomusicological establishment's longstanding complicity in the recording and distribution of field recordings from across the continent without compensation or occasionally even credit. Also, the more recent development of the (primarily European) bootlegging of West African funk LPs. These practices deserve to be called out. But to assert that the fair compensation is somehow immaterial is to (1) have an armchair North American perspective which relegates the equitable distribution of funds to an afterthought and (2) trivialize the exploitation of musicians through the above-stated avenues. It does not get better than ATFA's 50% profit share anywhere in the music industry, unless the musicians are self-releasing their recordings.
Darville's ultimate beef seems to be with the notion of web-based distribution itself, and the attendant omnivorous consumption it encourages. Regardless of where music originates from and where it goes to, “beautiful vistas of the music's context” will always risk being neglected. But sometimes they won't. It really depends on the listener and how serious and passionate he or she is capable of being. One thing it really doesn't depend much on, especially if we're talking about online distribution, is the ethnicity of the distributor. In any case, a globe of musics confined to a million insurmountable valleys, stringently drawn along lines of race/class/place, is a vista too miserable to contemplate. Furthermore, it's a hopeless wish to posit, a useless nostalgic turn that harkens back to before the dawn of recorded music, and certainly before the internet.
Darville also attempts to draw a disturbing parallel between genuine cultural appreciation and ironic consumption/linguistic minstrelsy. "This is the sweat-stained, hyperreal endgame of culture consumption that cares only of how it can enrich or distinguish itself. One day you’re browsing R. Kelly albums ironically, the next you’re gibbering incomprehensibly in a borrowed tongue for people you think your act is impressing but who are secretly recording for YouTube. The white people who would’ve attended the Awesome Tapes show tonight should be wary.” Coupled with a context-free image of a white woman with a “When you go black, you never go back—I love Africa” tattoo, this same slippery slope-ist line of reasoning has been used by the anti-gay marriage set—“If we let men marry men, what will we do when men want to marry horses?” It's a clear logical fallacy, and merits no further discussion.
As the story percolated through the social media rage machine, the would-have-been event's vulgar simulacrum as decreed by Darville’s piece underwent further distortions. There were accusations that claims of ownership and expertise were made, though neither was asserted or inferred. A local music journalist referred to it derisively as “an African theme party”—fever dreams of fratboys in blackface and faux-tribal garb are surely conjured. In any case, it was no more an African “theme” party than your average hip hop night is a “hip hop theme party”. The fact that I stated I had no Toronto friends of African descent who were DJs with a focus on music of the continent was variously read as me not knowing about any such DJs, not knowing any black DJs at all (whatever their musical focus), or not knowing any black people, period. Though I'm loathe to overstate this point, these are all untrue claims.
A good chunk of commenters also were compelled to call it a “celebration” of African music, as if it were somehow on the scale of Afrofest or Felabration, when in fact it realistically would have consisted of 70 or so people dancing in a room. Again, no more a “celebration” of African musics than your average hip hop night is a “celebration of hip hop”. The inference that every time African musics are played, it somehow must constitute a celebration of said musics is bizarre at best and offensive at worst. It's like: I listen to this music every single day and I'm not “celebrating” it every time I put it on! That would be far too tiresome!
Perplexingly, a person claiming to know “the DDL organizers” went on to refer to us as “white”, though only 2 out of 5 of us actually are (I'm speaking here of DDL's residents, not the event DJs). This person, when asked how we should move forward materially following the controversy, stated that we should “hire” some black DJs and “pay them equitably”, which ignores the fact that in the many times we've had black DJs at DDL, we haven't had to “hire” or “pay” them. Rather, they often approached us about doing an event, controlled all avenues of presentation (from promotion to music), and paid themselves in the form of doing their own door (from which DDL never takes a cut). But this is just how we usually run events that we aren't putting on ourselves, regardless of who is doing them (barring full-on rentals). Later in the same thread, this same person cited an event to which it was implied that we should hold up as a standard of how to do things properly, moving forward. When I followed the Facebook event link, I discovered a hip hop party called Run the Line that (1) used black imagery incorporated into a Maoist theme, (2) had three event hosts, all of them non-black (3) featured a video by DJ Mustard entitled “Fuck That N***a” posted on the event wall by one of said hosts, and (4) boasted an attendance list of 23 people, none of whom are black. Evidently a shining beacon of culturally sensitive inclusivity.
Darville closes his article with a summary taken from one of Azan's FB posts: “Really this event is a trivial and transient manifestation of a larger insidious western post and pre colonial ideology of cultural dissection. Separating product from producer…To create an event and not feel compelled to involve and EQUALLY collaborate with the producers is to further this silencing and splicing of an important and intricate narrative that involves not only oppression but triumph and self determination.”
There have been a lot of comments about how the organizers and DJs have no connections to diasporic African communities in Toronto. The irony is that Shimkovitz's Toronto visit ultimately led to him make contact with Ata Kak, the Ghanaian musician he came to Toronto to find. Through connections he made with the local Ghanaian community, he was able to contact Ata Kak's son (who still lives here), and through him, Ata Kak himself (who has since moved back to Kumasi). If Azan and Darville are right, and what's at stake here is reversing long histories of colonial cultural dissection, then what Shimkovitz is doing is totally relevant to this. It's not like one can simply say that in his work he's able to "EQUALLY" collaborate. Maybe his project will ultimately fail. Just as we sometimes fall short of our own aspirations towards this kind of equality at Double Double Land. In attacking this particular DJ night rather than the broader set of conditions that Azan outlines, people have missed the larger point. There are no simple resolutions to problems at this scale. The real question at hand is: why does the downtown arts/music scene not reflect the diversity of the city at large? What are the sources of its overbearing whiteness? Why is my workplace in the financial district far more a beacon to diversity than the average Queen West art opening? To confront this issue is to confront a host of power matrices involving race, class, place, and culture.
Speaking personally, how can DDL—as a DIY space and a project rooted in aesthetic concerns, not merely demographic ones—address these issues moving forward? What's clear to me is that it's not as simple as inviting a person of African descent to DJ should some future event feature African musics. The risk that such a gesture would be read as a cynically tokenistic exploitation of an actual person for the purposes of personal validation is too immense. While the ethnic make-up of the DJ bill was in many ways accidental (insofar as I hurriedly contacted friends of mine whom I felt would be interested), the social conditions that allowed for such an accident were not. As such, it is these broader social conditions that need to be addressed. It seems, from DDL’s perspective, that we need to make connections with scenes and communities outside of our own and gauge interest with respect to partnerships on future events. From there, real organic bonds might be formed and true crossover events can occur.
If you think you have insight to offer in the fulfillment of this vision, DDL will be hosting a community talk regarding the topic at the end of February (date TBA). We look forward to hearing from you.
FOOTNOTES
1. Fela! While I wasn't surprised by the fact that his mention was the sole invocation of an actual musician from the continent, I was somewhat bemused to find that this invocation was made, unproblematically, in relation to his politics. While the bulk of Fela's macropolitical agenda was fully righteous—and his suffering through imprisonment and harassment at the hands of the corrupt Nigerian military regime was immense—on a micro level, he was a tyrant and an exploiter. Though he came from a prominent and wealthy family—his mother was a well-known Nigerian feminist—Fela was a rampant misogynist who married his 27 dancers in a single ceremony, and recorded "Lady" to detail his position on the women's lib movement and "Mattress" to compare women to a thing for men to lie on. His musicians were only sporadically paid a pittance and, with the exception of Tony Allen, were explicitly banned from recording their own projects. When Pax Nicholas, one of Fela's sidemen, recorded an album in secret, Fela eventually found out and suppressed the recording, but only after some copies had made it out into the world. A German reissue label owner came across the recording over 30 years later, tracked Nicholas down, and rereleased it with the artist's full participation. But should Nicholas have rejected this offer so as not to fit into the grand white saviourist historical narrative?
2. Which, of course, has not been without its problems. One small example of this is Mos Def's sampling of Turkish revolutionary singer Selda Bagcan's track “Ince Ince Bir Kar Yagar” for his single “Supermagic”. Bagcan, who had been imprisoned several times in Turkey for her political views, wasn't contacted or compensated for the sample (which, untreated, constitutes nearly the entirety of the track's instrumental), and ended up suing.
by Daniel Vila
(this piece reflects only my own views and not those of my fellow roommates at DDL)
Three weeks ago, I became aware that Brian Shimkovitz of the Awesome Tapes from Africa blog/label was coming to town, in search of Ata Kak, a Ghanaian musician who had recorded an album in Toronto sometime during the mid-'90s that he was looking to reissue. He hadn't planned on turning the trip into a DJ opportunity, but since Double Double Land (the small venue I help run, and the place where I live) had had a successful, diversely attended ATFA party the previous summer, I asked him if he'd be interested. He agreed, and with less than a week before the scheduled date, I asked a couple of friends with whom I'd DJed before if they'd like to play sets. They were down, and an event titled “Awesome Tapes from Africa Returns” was posted five days prior to the event, inviting the 1900+ members of the DDL Facebook group. Soon thereafter, local DJ Kirsten Azan (who has thrown a couple of events at DDL) asked, on the event's wall, if any of the DJs were African. When I responded that they weren't, and explained that the evening bore the name of Brian's project and that it didn't reflect what we'd all be playing, a heated discussion erupted, eventually swelling to nearly 300 posts over the course of four days. Though a handful of cogent points were made, bad behaviour prevailed. False equivalencies were cited in our defense, and reasoned, carefully considered debate was met with mockery and derision. The sole African musician invoked over the course of the thread was Fela Kuti (1). Then the white supremacists showed up, the final straw which prompted us to cancel. To attempt to have a dance party in the manner we intended seemed impossible, and to try to do so would have felt, to us, as though we were pretending nothing had transpired. We opted instead to hold a community talk in its place, at some point in the weeks following, to address the issues raised in the thread.
The amount of discussion and anger this event sparked was certainly a bit of a shock to me. I’ve been playing African and Afrodiasporic musics (among many other forms) in public for the better part of a decade (and have been a somewhat obsessive fan of them for even longer) to all manner of audiences and no one has ever suggested that I have no place doing it (this wasn't Kirsten’s suggestion exactly, but was suggested by others in the event thread). A DJ night consisting of white people playing black music seems unremarkable (though certainly not unproblematic) to me, merely due to its ubiquity. There are numerous white-DJed hip hop nights, reggae nights, house nights, techno nights, etc., not to mention Turning Point's decade-long existence. So I immediately wondered why this event had become a lightning rod for so much debate when all these others hadn't.
The first thing I considered was the use of a fragmented, post-punkified image of Alhaji Yaya Zakori, a northern Ghanaian musician, on the event page (it wasn't an image of my design). To me, this didn't seem like anything comparable to the vile minstrelsy of something like the Cleveland Indians logo, since the image related directly to the event's content. But I eventually realized that, given the context of an evening of predominantly African musics spun by whites, it could be perceived that way—and I don't use "perceived" lightly or pejoratively here, as I think perception is important, especially in matters of this nature, and I think I'm usually more cognizant of it—so I changed it to ATFA’s text-only logo. I agree that it was a mistake to use that image for the purposes of this event.
A second issue I noted was the numerousness of the DJs coupled with the invocation of Africa in the event's title and an attendant lack of African presence, where maybe if Brian were just DJing on his own, the omission perhaps wouldn't have been perceived as such an issue. I suppose it's a microcosm of the same idea that if there were 20 DJs and they were all white, the omission would be even more glaring, and, frankly, offensive. This was Kirsten's initial point, and I think it's a perfectly valid one to consider. I was trying to parse this with my fundamental belief that music is an open system and that one's ethnicity should have no bearing on one's appreciation/dissemination of said music if one is coming at it from the right place (which isn't to say there aren't all kinds of problems with much appreciation/dissemination—I'm speaking in fundamental terms here).
Nevertheless, I think the initial detractors might have benefited from a more thorough review of the DJs in question (though I'm not sure if this would have changed any minds). Shimkovitz, for one, lived in Ghana for a year while researching a project on the country's hiplife movement, interviewing dozens of musicians in the process. It merits mention that one of the questions most frequently asked of him by his interviewees was how they could get their music out into the world (though as to whether they expressed concern over the ethnicity of those dancing to their music, I remain unsure). He's DJed across Africa and Europe and also organized a festival in Berlin where he was able to fly in many Ghanaian musicians and pay them more than he earned as festival organizer. Though the ATFA name could be accused of Africa-as-country-ism, a visit to the blog will reveal coverage that its markedly specific and non-exoticising. Marcus Boon, one of the other DJs, regularly held the Mama party at Teranga, a now-closed Senegalese-owned bar in Kensington Market. He also put together the “Fire On the Water” event in 2012, which featured sets by DJ/rupture and Venus X, among many others. In his book In Praise of Copying, he dedicates the final chapter to issues surrounding appropriation. The third DJ, Valerie Uher, by her own account in the original thread, was going to give her set a global focus, and thus it feels somewhat immaterial to elaborate on her previous experience here. For my part, I regularly DJed at Teranga myself, and the owner was happy to hear me spin the occasional Senegalese track. I've also DJed with Chief Boima, who himself has been occasionally critical of white reissuers' operations in Africa. Poignantly, I had the pleasure of DJing the most recent Getatchew Mekuria + the Ex shows in Toronto. For those who don't know, in the mid-2000s Mekuria invited the Ex to tour Ethiopia with him as his backing band, and a record and further world tours were borne out of that original invitation.
In light of the small example detailed above, the notion that appropriation is an exclusively one-way, black-to-white street, as purported by a couple of people in the thread, can be seen as the fallacy it most certainly is. Any review of music history and its attendant global flows will tell you this. A few examples: the back-and-forth flow of influence between Colombia and West Africa since the '70s; country music's enduring popularity in Jamaica; Bollywood's gleeful co-option of Every Fucking Thing; Northern Nigeria's obsession with and appropriation of Bollywood sounds; Kraftwerk's foundational influence on techno, house, and hip hop. And as we all know, hip hop is the most amazingly omnivorous musical form of all time in its scope of influence and source material (2). Though the narrative of Afrodiasporic musical forms as the most influential on a global scale is a stone-cold fact, it's far from the only narrative. Of course power inequalities structure who is able to benefit from particular acts of appropriation. But the ethics of appropriation isn't simply a matter of race or privilege: it's situational, and requires us to act in different ways at different moments. Within the downtown Toronto music scene of which we're a part, the playing of contemporary African musics is still, sadly, a surprisingly rare act.
The (non)event generated a considerable amount of commentary, some of it interesting, some of it not. I'll set aside the various Facebook threads that have sprung up following the cancellation and focus on a piece by Jordan Darville entitled “What Kind of Racism Cancelled the Awesome Tapes from Africa Show in Toronto” on the indie rock website Chartattack. The article, laced with selective reportage, commences with a factual error, asserting that the ATFA blog/label "collects tapes by small-time musicians around Africa". A quick fact check of ATFA's most recent release, Penny Penny's Shaka Bundu, a mid-'90s South African house album, will reveal this to not be the case (among numerous other examples from the blog). In its day, Shaka Bundu sold upwards of 250,000 copies and continues to remain a staple in South Africa. Penny Penny eventually became a councillor in the ANC, though is now considering a return to music, spurred by the reissue and its reception.
Darville goes on to state, "It worries me that stopping the show and replacing it with a vaguely defined think-tank allows white allies of marginalized communities and postcolonial cultures to continue to dodge questions of their own privilege, by tut-tutting someone else’s clear and present bigotry." Except that no one involved with the event has attempted to dodge his/her privilege—to say this is to conflate the reasons cited for the cancellation (“clear and present bigotry”) and the subject matter of the talk (the various forms of crypto-racism addressed in the thread). The very purpose of the talk is to address these issues head on. Furthermore, I've been organizing it with the participation of Azan, the event's original inquisitor.
Darville later hypothesizes on a global African music scene consisting of a million Antibalases. "If you don’t need Africans for a night of DJ’d African music, do you need Africans to make their music at all? If we can play it without you, maybe we can perform it too." The suggestion of this dystopic endgame scenario seems particularly poignant, given the author's record and that of his publication. Only a couple of weeks prior to the posting of this article, Darville wrote a blurb on a new "reggaefied" cover tune recorded by Vampire Weekend, a band whose glaring cooption of African sounds paired with bourgeois lyrical themes has been subject to widespread critique. But for some reason, here, the paired appropriation of Jamaican music gets an uncritical pass. Three days later, Darville wrote a blurb on John Wizards, a white South African who incorporates overt Shangaan electro and kwaito influences into his sound. Despite the obviously fraught history of the vast power imbalance between blacks and whites in South Africa, the author's ire was not raised a hair. This all speaks to a more insipid form of appropriation, one that bulldozes and obfuscates the origins of creation—one that Chartattack has evidently been complicit in.
Comparable examples of obfuscation in music can be found in the global proliferation of house and techno, two genres whose white iterations, if spun by white DJs, would in all likelihood fail to raise many eyebrows. Speaking from my own personal experience, I can assert that I have encountered many who don't even realize that these are African-American musical forms. Though Chartattack has on extremely rare occasion covered a small handful of African artists (Spoek Mathambo, who is signed to Sub Pop [no big shock that he'd therefore be on CA's radar]; Vieux Farka Toure, son of Malian crossover king Ali Farka Toure), the subject of their most extensive African coverage—and by a wide margin at that—has been Die Antwoord. Woefully predictable, but no less piteous in that predictability.
The author goes on to question the very material validity of the ATFA label project. "[T]here is an inherent risk of a white non-African distributing African music, no matter how fairly or poorly the artists released on the Awesome Tapes label are compensated. […] This dynamic threatens to enforce a cultural superiority in its white, non-African audience by making them conquerors trapped in the Internet’s vacuum, unwilling or unable to see the full and beautiful vista of the music’s context. To do so would compromise their supremacy, manifested as their perceived ability to lightly entertain other cultures through the lens of their own dominant one, with little to no emotional attachment." Evidently, it is a vista so beautiful and remote that Chartattack has deemed it effectively unreportable, as if a lack of global visibility is somehow in the interest of African artists. If we extrapolate this position to its apotheosis, which would force us to dismiss all Western involvement in the distribution of African musics on a global scale, the material result would be that the vast majority of releases would vanish from the shelves. While the conditions for the physical absence of releases by African labels on Western shelves point to a problem that certainly requires interrogation, it's a problem infinitely larger than the ATFA project. It is one rooted in a lack of resources and avenues of distribution. Does ATFA benefit from this through marginally larger sales? Of course it does. However, the solution is not one of negation, but rather the much more difficult task of equitable proliferation.
In some ways, this is already happening through digital sales by African labels through avenues such as eMusic and iTunes. But to regard these developments as unproblematic would be to succumb to naiveté. For example, an album by Malian singer Na Hawa Doumbia, a reissue of which was licensed directly from the artist by ATFA, is currently for sale on eMusic by an African label. The problem, though, is that it was put there without the participation of or compensation to the artist. The act of bootlegging music for profit is an active practice in much of Africa, and it's the musicians who lose, regardless of who is putting the music out there. There are obviously Western precedents for this form of bootlegging as well, such as the academic/ethnomusicological establishment's longstanding complicity in the recording and distribution of field recordings from across the continent without compensation or occasionally even credit. Also, the more recent development of the (primarily European) bootlegging of West African funk LPs. These practices deserve to be called out. But to assert that the fair compensation is somehow immaterial is to (1) have an armchair North American perspective which relegates the equitable distribution of funds to an afterthought and (2) trivialize the exploitation of musicians through the above-stated avenues. It does not get better than ATFA's 50% profit share anywhere in the music industry, unless the musicians are self-releasing their recordings.
Darville's ultimate beef seems to be with the notion of web-based distribution itself, and the attendant omnivorous consumption it encourages. Regardless of where music originates from and where it goes to, “beautiful vistas of the music's context” will always risk being neglected. But sometimes they won't. It really depends on the listener and how serious and passionate he or she is capable of being. One thing it really doesn't depend much on, especially if we're talking about online distribution, is the ethnicity of the distributor. In any case, a globe of musics confined to a million insurmountable valleys, stringently drawn along lines of race/class/place, is a vista too miserable to contemplate. Furthermore, it's a hopeless wish to posit, a useless nostalgic turn that harkens back to before the dawn of recorded music, and certainly before the internet.
Darville also attempts to draw a disturbing parallel between genuine cultural appreciation and ironic consumption/linguistic minstrelsy. "This is the sweat-stained, hyperreal endgame of culture consumption that cares only of how it can enrich or distinguish itself. One day you’re browsing R. Kelly albums ironically, the next you’re gibbering incomprehensibly in a borrowed tongue for people you think your act is impressing but who are secretly recording for YouTube. The white people who would’ve attended the Awesome Tapes show tonight should be wary.” Coupled with a context-free image of a white woman with a “When you go black, you never go back—I love Africa” tattoo, this same slippery slope-ist line of reasoning has been used by the anti-gay marriage set—“If we let men marry men, what will we do when men want to marry horses?” It's a clear logical fallacy, and merits no further discussion.
As the story percolated through the social media rage machine, the would-have-been event's vulgar simulacrum as decreed by Darville’s piece underwent further distortions. There were accusations that claims of ownership and expertise were made, though neither was asserted or inferred. A local music journalist referred to it derisively as “an African theme party”—fever dreams of fratboys in blackface and faux-tribal garb are surely conjured. In any case, it was no more an African “theme” party than your average hip hop night is a “hip hop theme party”. The fact that I stated I had no Toronto friends of African descent who were DJs with a focus on music of the continent was variously read as me not knowing about any such DJs, not knowing any black DJs at all (whatever their musical focus), or not knowing any black people, period. Though I'm loathe to overstate this point, these are all untrue claims.
A good chunk of commenters also were compelled to call it a “celebration” of African music, as if it were somehow on the scale of Afrofest or Felabration, when in fact it realistically would have consisted of 70 or so people dancing in a room. Again, no more a “celebration” of African musics than your average hip hop night is a “celebration of hip hop”. The inference that every time African musics are played, it somehow must constitute a celebration of said musics is bizarre at best and offensive at worst. It's like: I listen to this music every single day and I'm not “celebrating” it every time I put it on! That would be far too tiresome!
Perplexingly, a person claiming to know “the DDL organizers” went on to refer to us as “white”, though only 2 out of 5 of us actually are (I'm speaking here of DDL's residents, not the event DJs). This person, when asked how we should move forward materially following the controversy, stated that we should “hire” some black DJs and “pay them equitably”, which ignores the fact that in the many times we've had black DJs at DDL, we haven't had to “hire” or “pay” them. Rather, they often approached us about doing an event, controlled all avenues of presentation (from promotion to music), and paid themselves in the form of doing their own door (from which DDL never takes a cut). But this is just how we usually run events that we aren't putting on ourselves, regardless of who is doing them (barring full-on rentals). Later in the same thread, this same person cited an event to which it was implied that we should hold up as a standard of how to do things properly, moving forward. When I followed the Facebook event link, I discovered a hip hop party called Run the Line that (1) used black imagery incorporated into a Maoist theme, (2) had three event hosts, all of them non-black (3) featured a video by DJ Mustard entitled “Fuck That N***a” posted on the event wall by one of said hosts, and (4) boasted an attendance list of 23 people, none of whom are black. Evidently a shining beacon of culturally sensitive inclusivity.
Darville closes his article with a summary taken from one of Azan's FB posts: “Really this event is a trivial and transient manifestation of a larger insidious western post and pre colonial ideology of cultural dissection. Separating product from producer…To create an event and not feel compelled to involve and EQUALLY collaborate with the producers is to further this silencing and splicing of an important and intricate narrative that involves not only oppression but triumph and self determination.”
There have been a lot of comments about how the organizers and DJs have no connections to diasporic African communities in Toronto. The irony is that Shimkovitz's Toronto visit ultimately led to him make contact with Ata Kak, the Ghanaian musician he came to Toronto to find. Through connections he made with the local Ghanaian community, he was able to contact Ata Kak's son (who still lives here), and through him, Ata Kak himself (who has since moved back to Kumasi). If Azan and Darville are right, and what's at stake here is reversing long histories of colonial cultural dissection, then what Shimkovitz is doing is totally relevant to this. It's not like one can simply say that in his work he's able to "EQUALLY" collaborate. Maybe his project will ultimately fail. Just as we sometimes fall short of our own aspirations towards this kind of equality at Double Double Land. In attacking this particular DJ night rather than the broader set of conditions that Azan outlines, people have missed the larger point. There are no simple resolutions to problems at this scale. The real question at hand is: why does the downtown arts/music scene not reflect the diversity of the city at large? What are the sources of its overbearing whiteness? Why is my workplace in the financial district far more a beacon to diversity than the average Queen West art opening? To confront this issue is to confront a host of power matrices involving race, class, place, and culture.
Speaking personally, how can DDL—as a DIY space and a project rooted in aesthetic concerns, not merely demographic ones—address these issues moving forward? What's clear to me is that it's not as simple as inviting a person of African descent to DJ should some future event feature African musics. The risk that such a gesture would be read as a cynically tokenistic exploitation of an actual person for the purposes of personal validation is too immense. While the ethnic make-up of the DJ bill was in many ways accidental (insofar as I hurriedly contacted friends of mine whom I felt would be interested), the social conditions that allowed for such an accident were not. As such, it is these broader social conditions that need to be addressed. It seems, from DDL’s perspective, that we need to make connections with scenes and communities outside of our own and gauge interest with respect to partnerships on future events. From there, real organic bonds might be formed and true crossover events can occur.
If you think you have insight to offer in the fulfillment of this vision, DDL will be hosting a community talk regarding the topic at the end of February (date TBA). We look forward to hearing from you.
FOOTNOTES
1. Fela! While I wasn't surprised by the fact that his mention was the sole invocation of an actual musician from the continent, I was somewhat bemused to find that this invocation was made, unproblematically, in relation to his politics. While the bulk of Fela's macropolitical agenda was fully righteous—and his suffering through imprisonment and harassment at the hands of the corrupt Nigerian military regime was immense—on a micro level, he was a tyrant and an exploiter. Though he came from a prominent and wealthy family—his mother was a well-known Nigerian feminist—Fela was a rampant misogynist who married his 27 dancers in a single ceremony, and recorded "Lady" to detail his position on the women's lib movement and "Mattress" to compare women to a thing for men to lie on. His musicians were only sporadically paid a pittance and, with the exception of Tony Allen, were explicitly banned from recording their own projects. When Pax Nicholas, one of Fela's sidemen, recorded an album in secret, Fela eventually found out and suppressed the recording, but only after some copies had made it out into the world. A German reissue label owner came across the recording over 30 years later, tracked Nicholas down, and rereleased it with the artist's full participation. But should Nicholas have rejected this offer so as not to fit into the grand white saviourist historical narrative?
2. Which, of course, has not been without its problems. One small example of this is Mos Def's sampling of Turkish revolutionary singer Selda Bagcan's track “Ince Ince Bir Kar Yagar” for his single “Supermagic”. Bagcan, who had been imprisoned several times in Turkey for her political views, wasn't contacted or compensated for the sample (which, untreated, constitutes nearly the entirety of the track's instrumental), and ended up suing.
