Soapbox: Racism and the Music Industry

Decolonisation is this year’s buzzword. Or maybe last year’s, these things come and go so fast. But since the good people of Bristol drowned Edward Colston in the harbour, there has been a lot of talk about reframing history, admitting the cost of imperialism, allowing for BAME perspectives and taking positive action. Several institutions, including the Smithsonian and Great North Museum: Hancock (but not the British Museum) have returned the Benin Bronzes looted by British troops in 1897. One hundred Jamaican leaders have requested that Prince William – who recently made what could and should be the last colonial-style tour of the Caribbean – raise the subject of slavery reparations with the UK government. The old map of the Empire is changing from pink to black. But what about music, and what about you – and me?

Music does not work in the same way as museum collections, statues or textbooks. It can, largely, speak for itself. It also has an enlightened media to communicate, and analyse, its messages. Songlines profiles music without prejudices and shares a diverse range of voices. Along with veteran white writers, it has critics and contributors from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe. The magazine, and music industry generally, has moved on from an exoticist notion of ‘world music’; the collective call is for more spaces for music otherwise under-represented in the mass media or the London-centric bubble of celebrity entertainment culture.

But we can go further. Travel writers have been debating dubious terms that have, until recently, been slapped on features without guilt or critical reservation. ‘Colonial-style’ has been a near-synonym for quaint, with no thought for the colonised. ‘Mayan’ and ‘Aztec’ sites have been allotted their own paragraphs, separated from what came later, pigeon-holed into ‘pre-Columbian’ and treated as primitive while praised for their architectural feats. The tourist Inca Trail leads to picnics at Machu Picchu; the historical one to exile, murder and rape. It behoves music writers and pundits generally (I would also include readers here) to think carefully about useful, but ambivalent terms. Let’s look at three:

Roots
This word comes with all the dodgy nostalgia of the Alex Haley TV series, spiced with notions of tribal culture gleaned from old documentaries featuring drums, skirts of organic material, and audiences in khaki. Roots music is ordinarily thought of as ‘prior to’ other musics, in time and sophistication. As so many music family trees lead to Africa, roots are regularly sited there. ‘Rootsy’ is a handy adjective, but often means little more than ‘hard to place’ or ‘evocative of a received idea about Africa, Asia or Latin America.’

Latin
While we’re on that subject, let’s look at Latin, often rendered as Latino. The word derives from the fact most people who live in the Americas south of Texas speak Spanish, Portuguese or French. The ‘American’ bit is derived from the name of Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine merchant who claimed to have sailed as far as Argentina and whose name became a synonym for the New World on early maps. We could just as easily be saying ‘Latin Columbian’ or even ‘Latin Viking.’ ‘Latin American’ encompasses everything from Afro-Cuban rhythms (and even here I pause, as I always seem to be dropping ‘rhythms’ into talk of Cuba) to Andean pipe music. It’s so massive as to be almost meaningless.

Afro
How often have I seen, and written, Afro-this, Afro-that, Afro-tinged, Afro-inflected. Africa is almost 12 million square miles to England’s 50 thousand and a bit. But think how many musical genres England has that get properly named, and how rarely you see a sentence containing the expression ‘Anglo-tinged beats’ or ‘Anglo-inflected vibes. ‘Afro’ is lazy and sometimes downright offensive, a catch-all for music too hard to place without resorting to an ethnological dictionary. 

Which is, of course, the problem. Academics have time, and tenure, to fret over nuances and precise wording. Journalists and fans want to comment and move on. But they/we need to stop, slow down and think.

My travel and music writing jobs merged a couple of years ago when I was asked to guide a tour in Argentina. I was introducing the tour group to the history of tango, prior to a gig, when I threw in a comment that jazz and tango had occasionally come close after World War II, as when “Osvaldo Fresedo was fortunate enough to play with the great Dizzy Gillespie in 1956.” The tango singer piped up: “Perhaps Gillespie was fortunate to play with Fresedo.” That comment got me thinking on how white my gaze on music was, despite being forced to rethink tango’s early years by Robert Farris Thompson’s 2005 book Tango: The Art History of Love – which convincingly argues that the patterns of the dance can be traced to Angola and that Argentinian artists and critics had colluded to ‘whiten’ the story to suit their own racist ends. I had read the truth yet not incorporated it.

There is no doubt that the music industry needs decolonising. The major labels have their HQs in Europe and the US. The big festival brands derive from the same regions. The gatekeepers of musical taste are still, largely, white middle-class males. Success remains equated with a London concert or a US tour, even for bands from Asia or Africa. Decolonising starts in the mind. What may begin with the throwaway use of language ends with economic, social and artistic injustice. I need to listen more carefully to the music and those who create it. The least we can do – and this is the nub of the decolonisation dilemma – is recognise artists as individuals. It’s time to see the world without pink-tinted goggles and hear the music with new ears and enlightened minds.

This article originally appeared in the July 2022 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today