…even before the point in the trailer where the crowd turned into zombies. There sort of being, in sort of post-modern parlance, they’re sort of “othered.” They’re hidden in shadows, you can barely see their eyes, and the perspective of the trailer is not even someone who’s coming to help the people. It’s like they’re all dangerous; they all need to be killed. It’s not even like one cute African — or Haitian or Caribbean — child could be saved. They’re all dangerous men, women and children. They all have to be killed. And given the history, given the not so distant post-colonial history, you would say to yourself, why would you uncritically put up those images? It’s not as simple as saying, “Oh, they shot Spanish zombies in ‘Resident Evil 4,’ and now ‘black zombies and that’s why people are getting upset.” The imagery is not the same. It doesn’t carry the same history, it doesn’t carry the same weight. I don’t know how to explain it more clearly than that. (Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal On The ‘Resident Evil 5′ Trailer: ‘This Imagery Has A History).

But wait there are  other metaphorical issues and controversies that are much more interesting: the connection between the recent re-emergence of African zombies and the wave of xenophobia in South Africa and the solidification of a neo-liberal global capitalist world order. On July 30, 2010 La Faute a  la manette! posted an article by Game A that contended that the placing “a Resident Evil in Africa was awesome and totally appropriate” because:

The zombie (strictly speaking diphoko in Afrikaans, which is close to this) is indeed part of everyday life for many Africans, particularly South Africa, as stated by Jean and John Comaroff in Alien Nation: Zombies, Immigrants and Millennial Capitalism (1999)

Their existence, far from being the subject of gossip from distant forests or fantastic tales from the bush, is widely held to be obvious. In fact, not long ago still popular newspapers included headlines such as “zombies revenues from the dead”, illustrating their stories, like any other article, hyper-realistic photographs. Similarly, the defense lawyers in the provincial courts have sought the acquittal of their clients charged with murder, explaining their murderous acts by the zombification their parents [...] (Complexe du Blanc au Mozombique)

The article by Game A is excellent and well worth checking out but to take this argument to its logical conclusion or denouement, we need to go to one of Game A’s principal sources, anthropologists John and Joan Comoroff who have written extensively and persuasively on post-colonialism and the problems and dilemmas created by the imposition of global neo-liberal capitalism. In ALIEN-NATION: ZOMBIES, IMMIGRANTS, AND MILLENNIAL CAPITALISM, the Comoroffs ponder:

What might zombies have to do with the implosion of neoliberal capitalism at the end of the twentieth century? What might they have to do with post -colonial, post-revolutionary nationalism? With labour history? With the “crisis” of the modernist nation-state? Why are these spectral, floating signifiers making an appearance in epic, epidemic proportions in several parts of Africa just now? And why have immigrants-those wanderers in pursuit of work, whose proper place is always elsew- here-become pariah citizens of ‘a global order in which, paradoxically, old borders are said everywhere to be dissolving? What, indeed, do any of these things, which bear the distinct taint of exoticism, tell us about the hard-edged material, cultural, epistemic realities of our times? Indeed, why pose such apparently perverse questions at all when our social world abounds with practical problems of immediate, unremitting gravitas?

All safely metaphorical? Not at all! Zombies have appeared in Africa periodically at times of social upheaval and have been appearing in South Africa since the late 1990s when the hopes raised by the new South Africa began to ring hollow. People began to see zombies but the zombies they saw were usually immigrants they saw as threats to their livelihood. As the Comoroff’s write, people began to be driven by their fears to look for scapegoats and they saw zombies.

The fear of being reduced to ghost labour, of being abducted to feed the fortunes of a depraved stranger, occurs alongside another kind of spectre: a growing mass, a shadowy alien-nation, of immigrant black workers from elsewhere on the continent. So overt is the xenophobic sentiment that these workers are disrupting local relations of production and reproduction-that they usurp scarce jobs and resources, foster prostitution, and spread AIDS-chat they have been openly harassed on South African streets. Like zombies, they are nightmare citizens, their rootlessness threatening to siphon off the remaining, rapidly dimini shing prosperity of the indigenous population. Interestingly, like zombies too, they are characterized by their impaired speech: the common term for immigrant, makwerekwere a Sesotho word implying limited competence in the vernacular. Suggesting a compromised capacity to engage in intercourse with autochthonous society, this usage explains why migrants live in terror that their accents might be detected in public. (ALIEN-NATION: ZOMBIES, IMMIGRANTS, AND MILLENNIAL CAPITALISM)

There’s a lot more meat in the Comaroff’s article but I’ll leave that to you to — it’s worth the little bit of time it takes to digest it.

…one cannot revolutionize a (artistic) field without mobilizing or invoking the experiences of the history of the field, and the great heretics inscribe themselves explicitly in the history of the field, mastering its specific capital much more completely than contemporaries so that revolutions take the form of a return to sources (1996, pg. 238).

Previous writings on:

Tim Eriksen:

• • Postmodern Traditional Music How Tim Eriksen became perhaps the only musician to play with both Kurt Cobain and Doc Watson.
  • Finding a Voice (Interview of Tim Eriksen)
  • “Northern Roots,” “Americana,” “Traditional Music” — The Strategic Nature of Genre Definition

Carolina Chocolate Drops:

• • CAROLINA CHOCOLATE DROPS DROP NEW ALBUM: “GENUINE NEGRO JIG”

Histories of American popular music have tended to create a clear bifurcation of “White” and “Black” musical genres. Country music has been portrayed as a genre primarily drawn from Anglo-Scottish roots. The significant influences of African Americans on the genre have been diminished or placed in a carefully constructed pre-history. African American musical genres have also been defined within strict boundaries—stripped of areas of inter-cultural contact, influence and collaboration. This separation was largely created by the commercial music industry during the 1920′s when widespread recording of “blues” and “hillbilly” artists began in the South. A&R representatives of northern record companies were instrumental in shaping the repertoire of black and white artists along perceived lines of marketability. The “blues craze” of the 1920′s had a particularly dramatic effect on the future of African American popular music. Most African American performers had a large repertoire of different types of songs but the only material most record companies wanted to record were blues. This had a powerful effect on shaping the perception of  African American music that was subsequently reflected in scholarship on the blues. Early blues scholars were often preoccupied with looking for “authentic” blues, material uncolored by intercultural contact, not only with “White” music but also with commercial forms of African American music that they perceived as less authentically “Black.” Styles of the blues were legitimized by separating them from other styles of music and by constant reference back to their roots in rural black culture. (Callen, “A Deconstruction of a Constructed Genre: A Critical View of the Oakland Blues” presented at the 44^th Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in Austin, Texas. October 1999.)

The quote is from my first conference presentation as an ethnomusicologist based on research I’d done on the West Coast Blues in which I’d found that the clear separations made between Black and White musical traditions in the U.S. were a misrepresentation of a history of continual exchange. It was something that was obvious and I should have known but ran contrary to the common sense version of American history that I had accumulated. My research on the West Coast Blues began my interest in the process of genre definition and those frequent moments when genre categories are inadequate and transgression is necessary and inevitable. Lately, it’s been interesting to watch the rediscovery (again) of the connections between jazz and country music — did everyone really forget Texas Swing and Bluegrass? Below are a couple of excerpts from an excellent Jazz Times article by Geoffrey Himes on the history of jazz / country collaborations and a new crop of “fusions” worth checking out — and advocacy for a definition of jazz less as a genre or style than as a process that can be applied to any musical material. The article is well worth reading in its entirety.

Jazz and Country Fusion: The Searchers

December 2008 Geoffrey Himes

When Sonny Rollins released his Way Out West album in 1957, the cover featured the tall tenor saxophonist standing out in the desert between a bleached cow skull and a multi-armed cactus. In the William Claxton photo, Rollins cradled his horn like a six gun, planted his fist by his holster and peered out slyly from beneath a big gray cowboy hat. The cowboy theme carried over into the music as the trio of Rollins, bassist Ray Brown and drummer Shelly Manne played “I’m an Old Cowhand,” “Wagon Wheels” and the leader’s title tune.

It was an important record for several reasons. For one, the piano-less format allowed Rollins the harmonic freedom to break with bebop orthodoxy and to follow his melodic inspiration wherever it led. For another, it challenged the assumption that only blues, ballads and show tunes were the proper materials for jazz improvisation. The album proved that country music, even ersatz country music like Johnsy Mercer’s “I’m an Old Cowhand,” could inspire great jazz performances.

Rollins wasn’t the first to point this out. After all, in 1930 Louis Armstrong had played trumpet on “Blue Yodel No. 9” by the “Father of Country Music,” Jimmie Rodgers. Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys had recorded “Basin Street Blues,” one of Armstrong’s signature tunes, in 1946. But Rollins was one of the first jazz musicians to embrace country music so emphatically.

It has taken a long time, but country music is now winning grudging acceptance from the jazz world. One of 2008’s best-selling jazz releases was the Wynton Marsalis and Willie Nelson collaboration, Two Men With the Blues (Blue Note). This country-jazz hybrid was new territory for Marsalis, but Nelson has been singing and picking jazz standards all his life and even recorded a jazz-guitar record, The Gypsy, with Jackie King in 2001.

Another key release last year was Charlie Haden’s Rambling Boy (Decca), a collection of old country songs he sang as a young boy in the Haden Family. Before he moved to Los Angeles and joined the Ornette Coleman Quartet, Haden sang with his parents and siblings on the radio in Iowa and Missouri. Haden first hinted at those origins on his 1997 duo album with Pat Metheny, Beyond the Missouri Sky. Now Haden revisits the actual songs of the Haden Family with help from his kids, Metheny, Elvis Costello and such country stars as Rosanne Cash, Vince Gill and Ricky Skaggs.

Jenny Scheinman, the jazz violinist who has recorded with Bill Frisell, Norah Jones and John Zorn, released two KOCH label albums in 2008. Crossing the Field is an instrumental jazz record with Frisell and Jason Moran, but Jenny Scheinman is a vocal project, featuring country and folk songs recorded with fellow members of Frisell’s band. (to read the rest)

Rollins, Haden and their fellow fusioneers take the approach that jazz is primarily a process, not a repertoire. Almost any piece of music can be given an elastic syncopation, substitute chords and theme-and-variation improvisation. Some tunes may work better than others, but Rollins has demonstrated that a successful tune might as easily be a calypso as a show tune, a Hank Williams song as readily as a George Gershwin number.

“Jazz can use any source material,” argues Scheinman. “Jazz is an approach, and you can start with any melody and make it work for improvisers. The tune is just the conversation topic, and you can take the topic anywhere you want.”

“That’s what’s so amazing about jazz,” Frisell agrees. “That’s why it’s such a perfect world to be in. I don’t think there are any rules as far as what you use as source material. It’s more about having the opportunity to take what you know, to draw from your experience, and do whatever you want with it. All my heroes—Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk—took the music that was around them, the music that they liked, and transformed it through their own eyes.”

If this is true, if jazz is a process that can be worked on any ingredients, what are the advantages of turning to country music for raw materials? Well, the genre is full of gorgeous melodies, aching emotions and rural textures that have been largely untouched by the jazz world. While blues, ballads and show tunes have been worked to exhaustion, country music represents a largely unplowed field. Here is a wealth of material just waiting to be alchemized into jazz, if only musicians and audiences can overcome their prejudices.

Classic Appalachian Blues from Smithsonian Folkways

Various Artists SFW40198

The “mountain cousin” of the Delta blues, Appalachian blues bears the stamp of a distinctive regional blend of European and African styles and sounds born at the cultural crossroads of railroad camps, mines, and rural settlements. Drawn from deep within the Folkways collection and from historic live recordings at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the music of bedrock blues performers such as Pink Anderson, Lesley Riddle, Etta Baker, John Jackson, and Doc Watson shines bright, claiming Appalachia as a key cradle of American acoustic blues. 21 tracks, 66 minutes, 40-page booklet.

And a review from NPR:

New Collection Explores ‘Classic Appalachian Blues’

by NPR STAFF

May 15, 2010

Josh White

Blues fans have long looked to the Mississippi Delta or Chicago for a taste of authentic Americana, but a new compilation draws attention to another region: Appalachia. Classic Appalachian Blues, from Smithsonian Folkways, features acoustic finger-style blues assembled by music professor Barry Lee Pearson and archivist Jeff Place.

Place says that Appalachian blues is distinct from Mississippi blues because it’s more melodic. It’s dominated by fingerstyle guitar, rather than the percussive playing of Delta blues, and is heavily influenced by ragtime. Also notable is Appalachian music’s mixed racial influences: In mining towns, black and white workers lived in segregated housing, but they played music together.

“You could listen to some 78s of music from there and not know if it was a white or black [musician] playing it,” (to read more click here).

Billy Bragg and Mick Gordon

As part of the nine-month Identity exhibition at London’s Wellcome Collection (Identity: Eight rooms, nine lives – 26 November 2009 – 06 April 2010) Billy Bragg and his band are performing Pressure Drop, a play ‘of passion and prejudice” written by Mick Gordon. The play (19 April-12 May, 2010) explores what it means to be English.

From the Wellcome Collection website:

Pressure Drop’ is the latest work from On Theatre and Mick Gordon. Asking a central question – what makes me who I am? – it explores the individual, familial, social and political reference points that make a person definable and recognisable to themselves and others.

Part play, part gig, part installation, the event presents three generations of a white, working-class English family struggling to define themselves both in relation to one another and within a changing social landscape. At the heart of the work lies a paradox. Our identities are continually in flux, but at the same time we need a firm sense of rootedness, of belonging to something stable.

‘Pressure Drop’ sees Gordon join forces with legendary singer-songwriter Billy Bragg. In his book ‘The Progressive Patriot’, Bragg explores what it means to be English in contemporary Britain. Reflecting on his family, their history and revisiting the music that originally inspired him, Bragg challenges versions of patriotism proposed by the far right. For the production he will write and perform new work.

A review in Spinner and the trailer below:

Earlier this year, China picked Ding Hui, a young man from Hangzhou, for its national volleyball team. Last month a 20-year-old Shanghainese, Lou Jing, made the last 30 in the Chinese version of Pop Idol. Neither event would have attracted unusual notice but for the one thing the two young people have in common: they are in a small, and for China, novel category of mixed-race citizens, children of black fathers. Their emergence into the limelight has forced the country into an uncomfortable and often shocking debate about what it means to be Chinese.

Both have been widely discussed on the Chinese internet in terms that have not been publicly acceptable in the US or Europe for half a century. Both Lou Jing and Ding Hui have been treated as frank curiosities: netizens comment on their white teeth, Ding Hui’s athleticism and Lou Jing’s sense of rhythm. On the show, the presenters repeatedly referred to Lou Jing as “chocolate”. Contributors to the nation’s websites indulged in altogether cruder epithets, indulging their imaginations on the subject of sex between a black man and a Chinese woman. (from a column by Isabel Hilton of the Guardian:  ”How volleyball and pop have shaken China’s idea of race”)

Ding Hui

Lou Jing (and her mother)

Hilton’s column discusses issues that were glossed over or completely ignored in much of the media coverage (check out CNN’s story on Lou Jing for a prime example). Chinese racism persists despite decades of avowed solidarity with the developing world, including Africa. For non-Han Chinese, acceptance as civilized” is granted to the extent that they come to resemble the Han (90%) majority. The reaction to Ding Hui and Lou Jing reflects an ongoing debate on the definition of Chinese identity. And, it isn’t going away. There are pressures from “minority” groups for equal rights, if not territorial autonomy, and Hilton reports that there were 3000 “mixed-race” marriages in Shanghai last year and that up to 100,000 Africans have settled in Guangzhou (known as China’s “chocolate city”). Pop culture will undoubtedly be one arena in which the struggle to define Chinese identity will be played out. And racial issues will surely come into the foreground again. If only to be cashed in on. The Chinese reality show, Go Oriental Angel (an American Idol / Britain’s Got Talent knockoff) had only gotten moderate attention from the Chinese public until the producers included Lou Jing, the daughter of a Chinese mother and an African American father, as one of the five young women chosen to represent Shangai. As the story unfolded, it appeared that Lou was chosen more for her appearance than for her talent. Although to this listener, as bad as she was, she didn’t stand out from the other contestants. Lou quickly became a media phenomenon, provoking an onslaught of attacks (mostly by anonymous internet postings) and  a rare debate in the media about questions of race and racism in China. The producers of the show exploited the public interest as much as they could, including having Lou rap.

From the Guardian: