Scrawled in Wax

WHERE MODERN THINGS MELT INTO OTHER MODERN THINGS

Category: Immigration and Diaspora

Digital Dilution

SCRAWLED IN WAX, ALL COKE STUDIO, ALL THE TIME!

Ahem. So, the “Chakwal Group” (as they’ve been dubbed) have another song up on Season 5 of Coke Studio Pakistan. I loved it immediately; it seemed both sad and celebratory at the same time. Surprisingly, the lyrics seem to bear up to my initial ‘aural impressions’.

But watching the behind the scenes video for the song**, two things stuck out. First, producer Rohail Hyatt tells the house band in a mix of English and Urdu “this isn’t a downtrack track, so you guys will have to play with them, catch them.” That in and of itself seemed interesting just for the use of the term downtown (which downtown? why is folk music not downtown? etc.) Secondly, only after watching the Chakwal Group rehearse–and then comparing that to the finished performance–did I realize their voices had been autotuned to hell.

I… felt betrayed somehow. Even though I constantly try and resist purism in all its forms, I felt like I’d had an emotional connection with something that “wasn’t true”. For someone who’s all about the weird multiple self online, that’s a pretty weird reaction. Since when did I care about that awful idea ‘authenticity’?

But that’s my own shit, I guess. Yet the raw practice singing sounds out of tune to me. And it’s worth pointing out that “out of tune” isn’t quite as universal an idea as it seems. A lot of South Asian folk music can sound “out of tune” to the untrained ear because of the way it deliberately moves on and off key. It’s what I’ve always thought of as ‘tension and release’: you invoke a specific key with a background drone instrument, and then veer off it–the tension–and then come back to it for the emotional release. Then again, some of it just out of tune because the singers rarely get access to playback. Some of them just suck. So who knows?

At the end of the day, though, given my druthers I’d rather hear the finished track. It fits with both what I know and the frame of evaluating aesthetics that I adhere to. But does it “dilute the purity of the music” to do this? Moreover, would one ask such questions if the music in question weren’t “traditional”?

And more generally, the point seems to be that fusion music and fusion aesthetics are so difficult and complicated because it seems almost impossible to fuse hermeneutic frames-i.e. the interpretive systems rooted in culture and ideology by which we judge–in the same way that notes, stories etc. can also be fused.

In my last post, I argued that fusion produces a space of identification for ‘a subjectivity that cannot be’. Now, I’m wondering if fusion is always sublation – if the meeting of cultures is never an act of mutuality, but a subsumption of one into the frame of another.

**The behind the scene videos of Coke Studio Pakistan are about the most perfect subject matter for thinking through fusion aesthetics.

Coke Studio and Dreams of The End

  1. I think identification with art is a desire for wholeness. When we find a song that seems to express something fundamental about us we say “yes, this is so me.” It’s a conscious sort of provisional feeling: in this moment, this thing out there represents or stands for this indefinable thing in here. It is, in a way, a desire for an end point to the dialectics of subject constitution: an end to the ongoing performative production of the self. This aesthetic object manifests my desire to become my whole self. It bears noting that this ‘resolution’ occurs in the virtual space of the imagination.
  2. With a new season, I’ve once more become obsessed with Coke Studio. It is a strange sort of obsession, one where my emotional response seems “inappropriate” or, at least, incommensurate with the material. Something about it strikes a deep, almost uncomfortable cord – though strangely, it is one touched far more by jouissance than fear or sadness.
  3. According to some, the hybrid postcolonial subject is always-already an impossibility. If the hyphen of Indo-Canadian reasserts the solidity of the two pure, un-corrupted halves, then there is always some kind of incompatibility at work. There is always a falseness to the hybrid, always an incompleteness. This is old hat and probably outdated theory, but let’s roll with it for a bit.
  4. Coke Studio Pakistan’s defining trait is the signature style of producer and musical director Rohail Hyatt: the fusion style that, in a way that I think is truly remarkable, “blends east and west”. Yes, you are probably right to roll your eyes at that phrase, but the more you watch, the more compelling the statement becomes. If it’s fusion that asserts the primacy of the west or dilutes its constituent elements, goddamn does it do well.
  5. Let us return to identification. What does it mean to identify with fusion aesthetics? The important thing, I think is this: the anti-referential nature of music makes the false appearance of wholeness possible. And furthermore: only in music’s internal system of signification that doesn’t “actually” signify can hybridity function because aesthetics is the production of a false appearance of wholeness and completeness. This is one of the things that defines the art object, yes?
  6. Now you can perhaps guess where I’m going with this: the craving for wholeness of the hybrid postcolonial subject finds an interesting locus of desire in fusion aesthetics like Coke Studio Pakistan. It asserts that the false wholeness of a fusion aesthetic object can stand in for a wholeness that is always-already lacking.
  7. Now, music of course isn’t as immune to signification as I’ve initially suggested. We connect instruments and modal progressions etc. to cultures and history. Good, fine. We should keep this in mind. But what I’m arguing is that a virtual a-referential unity is produced by the combination of the ‘significatory’ elements of music – instrumental texture, lyrics etc. – and the internally coherent system of music – scales, chords etc. – that, because of the experiential impossibility of separating them as one listens, become a kind of whole. Not an actual whole, of course. Simply something that cannot be but experienced as a whole.
  8. This is where I think Deleuze goes wrong with the virtual. In his ontology, the virtual is akin to the Real, an always out-of-reach epistemological field. But because aesthetics and the digital give us some kind of here/not-here presentation of something, the virtual–or what I call the holographic–can still have “material” effects. Princess Leia can still communicate her message to Obi-Wan even though she is not there.
  9. So all I mean to say is the fusion of the Coke Studio, in the production of a false whole, offers a site of identification for the hybrid subject to experience a virtual wholeness of an identity that ‘exists out there’.
  10. Oh, Viccaji sisters! Wait, what? Who mentioned them? Stupid desire!

“And may all your Christmases be white…”

Christmas is the one time of the year that my family does what people on TV do. Mad rushing to get presents? Check. Grand Christmas feast with a turkey and all the trimmings? Check. Indulging in icewine and gorgonzola in front of the fire like they do on those Food TV specials? Super-gluttonous, you-best-believe-it check. Yeah, when it comes to late December, we are the Christmasiest Punjabis this side of a… Gurdwara at the North Pole? Yeah, I don’t really know how to finish that.

It’s precisely that mirroring of what’s “out there” and what happens in our home that has endeared Christmas to me. Though I love Christmas for a whole slew of reasons (not the least of which is the burst of colour at the grayest, darkest time of year) part of it is definitely because it’s then that my life most resembles what I see in that odd thing we call “public space”.

That’s a weirdly conformist, assimilationist thing to say, I know. But when you’re a minority, much of the day-to-day ritual and tenor of your life is something you don’t really see reflected back at you. The little things that made up my life—the rustle of saris and salwar kameez; the sights and smells of chapatis being made; the mundane ordinariness of bi-culturalism—were always missing from popular culture. There was never that comforting feeling of watching TV and thinking “oh, right, I’m just like these people”. What was private and what was public just never seemed to quite match up

It’s no coincidence, then, that my parents started celebrating Christmas for precisely those reasons. What, after all, is assimilation other than a desire to make public and private one and the same? So we did and still do Christmas very British/Canadian style, just like they do on TV; it’s all decorated trees, cheese and crackers, and ole’ Bing on the stereo. If during January to November we mostly live life in our own hybrid, bi-cultural way, then in December it’s Whitey McWhitetown in the Alang household.

We form our identities in the back and forth between public and private. Much of the time, there’s a pleasure in the ways those things don’t match up, particularly when you’re privileged enough to be able to move back and forth between cultures like it ain’t no thing. But in as much as British and Canadian tradition is part of my life and identity (i.e. a lot), sometimes it’s nice to uncritically embrace that side of things, even if it is just one month a year. It’s almost like sometimes you need relief from not seeing your own life reflected in popular culture, and you just want to take a break. And while there’s something undeniably great about hybridity or celebrating festivals like Diwali, it’s occasionally nice to claim “Western” culture as your own, and simply kick back and have a white Christmas.

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