In 1995, Kuo Ying-nan, a 76-year-old Taiwanese farmer, was not a little astonished when a friend from Taipei rang him up: »Hey, your voice is on the radio!« And, indeed, it was Kuo’s singing that could be heard - in the world hit »Return to Innocence« by the Rumanian-German music producer Michael Cretu, better known under the name »Enigma«. This, without Kuo’s knowing about it, let alone having given permission. The long journey of the vocal part had taken it through many different stages that are today prototypical for processes of global exchange and transfer: in 1988, at the invitation of French (and Taiwanese) cultural authorities, a group of Taiwanese musicians from various ethnic backgrounds – Kuo belongs to the Ani group – toured through several European countries. The tour resulted in a CD that, as well as including other earlier ethnomusicological recordings, adapted the polyphonic Taiwanese songs for the Western market. This meant that musicians like Cretu could immediately start helping themselves to bits and pieces from this sampling pool. Although Cretus’ music publishers did very wisely pay 30,000 francs in license fees to the French »Maison des Cultures du Monde«, this money never reached Kuo, one of the sampled artists.

This story, which incidentally had lengthy legal repercussions and has now resulted in an out-of-court settlement, is no rarity. Timothy Taylor,1 who has given a detailed account of the case, first points out the contrapuntal elements in global culture sampling: for example, the massive objection raised by Enigma fans, who were of the opinion that Kuo’s voice would never have attracted world public attention if Cretus’ genius had not made it widely known; or the gesture of self-empowerment by a »subordinate« musician who unexpectedly asserts his right to the recordings that were used and takes legal action against the Western music industry. According to Taylor, however, there is also a much more comprehensive cultural phenomenon at work here: for Enigma and other Western musicians, »ethnic samples« act primarily as raw material from an exotic cultural pool that has not yet been sullied by technology and the modern age – thus the song’s programmatic title, »Return to Innocence«. The way in which this glorifying view is accompanied by an exploitation of that very innocence encapsulates a central paradox of the globalization of pop music. The same applies to the cover-up tactic of seeing the »indigenous« - regardless of what sampling sources it comes from – as the seemingly natural stanchion of a global spiritual awareness.

The ethnomusicologist Steven Feld also has a few such tales to tell. For example, the one about the copy of a vocal and whistling part that was recorded in the sixties in the Central African Republic and cropped up again in 1973 in Herbie Hancock’s jazz-rock hit »Watermelon Man«. Hancock neither credits this sound element to the Ba-Benzélé Pygmies, from whose music it comes, nor were the original producers able to participate in the success of the piece in any way – something Hancock shrugs off with a set phrase of legitimation: »A brothers kind of thing – a thing for brothers to work out«.2 But even beyond the orbit of Afro-American music, where claims to a diasporic counter-modernity are always being made, samples from the music of Central African rainforest dwellers are extremely popular. For example, in the productions of the French duo Deep Forest, some of whose most important resources are ethnomusicological recordings. The Pygmies, for instance, serve Deep Forest (and others) as an almost cynical projection surface: »Somewhere deep in the jungle are living some little men and women. They are your past; maybe they are your future«3, they say.

The story of the piece »Sweet Lullaby«, which is also recapitulated by Steven Feld, is particularly characteristic.4 In the years 1969/1970, the ethnomusicologist Hugo Zemp made recordings on the Solomon Islands in the Pacific. These included a lullaby sung by a member of the Baegu tribe called Afunakwa. The vocal sample, reissued in 1990 on a UNESCO CD, found its way into the studio of Deep Forest, among others. Enswathed in sugary synthesizer sounds and provided with a leisurely swaying dance beat, the a-cappella piece mutated into »Sweet Lullaby«, Deep Forest’s first big world hit and subsequently the background music for countless advertisements. Zemp, who had been the first to bring this recording within the audio horizon of the West, raised an objection to the use of this and other samples. Here, too, a long debate ensued about the legitimate usage of ethnic sound material, a debate that has not yet led to any unanimous solution. Whereas one side – the commercially successful one – claims that its respectful care of the great cultural traditions of the world promotes global harmony5, the other side – the academic, critical one – can only respond by shaking its head with ethical demean, maintaining that this alleged respect is nothing more than a primitivist caricature of old colonial attitudes, that the hunt for samples simply does not take any claims to copyright seriously, and that not a single cent of the profit gained by the culture industry flows back to the cultures that have been sampled. This all clearly illustrates a power set-up in which the airy-fairy talk about supposedly democratized or democratizing world music seems like sheer mockery.

This conclusion is given added credibility by the fact that, as recently as 1996, the Norwegian saxophonist, Jan Garbarek – and he was not the only one – took the aforementioned singing from the South Pacific for a piece of Central African Pygmy music and used it to make his own »Pygmy Lullaby«.6 Here, the prototypical »schizophony« of contemporary musical production – i.e., the separation of sounds and samples from their original contexts of creation and usage – has reached a new level. After all, Garbarek had simply taken his sample from the Deep Forest piece and did not himself undertake the journey to this remote oral, indigenous tradition, as his predilection for ritual forms of music might have one suppose.

Which is something that is no longer necessary, anyway, especially in view of the fact that the globalized adaptation of ethnic sounds has now taken on industrialized forms.7 For example, companies like Roland or Spectrasonics today specialize, among other things, in putting together whole sampling databases of musical cultures defined in ethnic or territorial terms. The results, with eloquent titles like »Heart of Africa« or »Heart of Asia«, again highlight the inner contradiction of this kind of globalization. On the one hand, there is mostly little fuss made about appropriate compensation for the use of the recordings – often, this is limited to once-off symbolic (if that) payments and an anonymous thank-you to »the many gifted musicians who contributed to the project«.8 On the other, these sound packages, removed from their context and digitally polished, are marketed as the epitome of authentic world culture – ideational added value that mainly benefits its users.

The flair of the supposedly authentic thus acts as camouflage – not for expropriation per se, but for potential appropriations that function primarily in a »schismo-genetic« manner. The musical object is detached further and further from its original sources and broken down into more and more volatile by-products. All without relinquishing the symbolic profit that these sources can help to generate. »Tele-music« is what people used to call it. »Sampling Safari« would have been a more appropriate name.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

---