[ANPPOM-L] FW: Rock's Balkanized Route to the Indies

[Stela Brandao]

THE NEW YORK TIMES – EUA – 20 -10-2007  MÚSICA POP INTERNACIONAL. NOVAS
FUSÕES.

 

 

Rock’s Balkanized Route to the Indies 

By WILL HERMES

Published: October 21, 2007

SURE, the half-naked acrobat suspended by her ankles from the ceiling was
remarkable. So was the battered tuba wrapped in red Christmas lights, played
by a musician in a black cocktail dress. 

Yet the most striking thing about DeVotchKa’s circuslike show at the
Spiegeltent at the South Street Seaport in Manhattan in August was the
music, a quilt of sounds from the international section of the iTunes store.
One could hear mariachi ballads, polkas, horas and Gypsy tunes played on
accordion, bouzouki, violins. But those sounds informed songs that also
echoed the rhythmic bluster and vocal drama of 1980s alternative-rock acts
like the Smiths and Talking Heads. The band’s cross-cultural recipe was made
explicit when the young crowd began sloshing its beers to a bouncy,
Balkanized version of the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs.” 

On any given night in an American rock club you can hear bands like Gogol
Bordello, Man Man, Beirut and Balkan Beat Box playing odd-metered songs
drawing on the rhythms of Eastern European Gypsy music. You might encounter
Antibalas or Vampire Weekend riffing on African sounds, Dengue Fever making
psychedelic Cambodian pop or a D.J. like Diplo spinning Brazilian funk. On
the recent “Kala,” a contender for the year’s most exciting pop album, the
British-Sri Lankan rapper M.I.A., who works from Brooklyn, draws on Indian,
African and West Indian sounds. The folk-rocker Devendra Banhart creates
fusions with Mexican and Brazilian musicians on his recent CD, “Smokey Rolls
Down Thunder Canyon.” And the veteran musical adventurer Bjork toured this
year with a West African percussion troupe and Chinese pipa virtuoso.

Increasingly the back-to-basics movement that has characterized cutting-edge
rock this century, from the blues-based hard rock of the White Stripes to
the new wave-postpunk revivalism of Interpol, is giving way to music that
looks further afield for its influences. And one result is a clutch of acts,
many of them from New York, that are internationalizing rock’s
Anglo-American vernacular. 

This is not the first time. Artists like
<http://movies.nytimes.com/person/111574/Paul-Simon?inline=nyt-per> Paul
Simon, Peter Gabriel, the Clash and Talking Heads drew polyglot styles into
their mix back in the 1980s, often with politics in tow. (Mr. Simon and Mr.
Gabriel were exploring African pop during the Apartheid era.) But the
impulse has been largely missing from rock’s bag of tricks for a while. And
in the case of Beirut and Vampire Weekend, it is producing some of the
year’s most buzzed-about new music — music that often feels less studied and
less overtly political than that of these groups’ fusion-minded forebears. 

Why now? Partly it seems the natural cycle of genres; every back-to-basics
art movement dead-ends and requires an infusion of new ideas. And certainly
the Internet has made even the most obscure global music easily available. 

“Access is key,” said Bill Bragin, director of the Manhattan club Joe’s Pub,
which books a large number of international acts. “A blogger or someone
says: ‘Check out this cool record by Konono No. 1. It’s really bizarre,
super loud Congolese thumb piano music.’ And suddenly all these people are
checking them. Also, bands like Antibalas and Balkan Beat Box and Gogol
Bordello and Beirut are very good about positioning themselves in the
context of youth culture. They’re not pigeonholed as speaking only to the
age-30-to-50 world-music crowd.”

You might guess that current global politics have also had a role in
spurring the trend. And they have, though not always explicitly. M.I.A. and
Bjork both address politics directly on their recent albums. Gogol Bordello
and Antibalas, two of melting-pot New York’s fusion-minded veterans, also
make politically charged music. Fronted by the Kiev-born Eugene Hutz, Gogol
Bordello mixes Slavic and Balkan music with punk rock and plenty of other
styles, peppered with lyrics addressing the immigrant experience and
“cultural revolution.” Antibalas has revived and advanced Afrobeat, the
Africanized funk fusion pioneered by the Nigerian bandleader Fela Kuti, from
whom they have also adopted a strong anti-authoritarian demeanor. Both bands
have addictively kinetic new records and are beginning to attract wider
attention. (Mr. Hutz recently performed with
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/_madonna/index
.html?inline=nyt-per> Madonna at the Live Earth festival, and he and his
band have contributed to her forthcoming short film, “Filth and Wisdom.”) 

But a new wave of bands is using ethnic styles in less pointed ways. One of
last year’s more left-field Internet success stories was the debut by
Beirut, a project initiated by Zach Condon, a 21-year-old singer-songwriter
who began a love affair with the Balkan brass-band tradition while exploring
electronic music at his parents’ home in Albuquerque. Mr. Condon played
almost everything on that album, “Gulag Orkestar,” and its arrangements for
trumpet, accordion, ukulele, mandolin, violin and percussion conjure the
image of a street-corner Gypsy band somewhere in postwar Europe. For the new
Beirut record, “The Flying Club Cup,” released this month on the tiny Ba Da
Bing label, he employs a full band to play his Eurail rock, which continues
to roam. 

“I’m going for a style that’s really outdated: 1940s French chanson,” Mr.
Condon said over Korean barbecue and beer at a restaurant in his
neighborhood in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “I’m really obsessed with Jacques
Brel,
<http://movies.nytimes.com/person/80302/Charles-Aznavour?inline=nyt-per>
Charles Aznavour and early
<http://movies.nytimes.com/person/90849/Serge-Gainsbourg?inline=nyt-per>
Serge Gainsbourg.” Mr. Condon, waifish and blue-eyed, was dressed in an old
T-shirt with a bedhead hairdo, and it was easy to imagine him ministering to
swooning jeunesse back in the day. Yet his dramatic, warbly vocal style also
conjures ’80s rock crooners like Morrissey and the Cure’s Robert Smith. 

While Mr. Condon, whose ethnic heritage is primarily Irish-English, has been
spending time in Paris of late, he admits his approach to international
styles is more instinctive than studied. Nick Urata, lead singer of the
Denver band DeVotchKa, operates similarly. Speaking from a tour stop in
Germany, he noted that while some of his band mates were schooled in Eastern
European music, he was not, and in any case stylistic accuracy was not the
point. “The ‘authentic’ Gypsy brass-band stuff is great, but it’s better to
leave it to the masters,” he said. “We figured we were never going to nail
it exactly, so why not just take it into our own realm?”

Vampire Weekend, which came together while its members were students at
Columbia and has a debut CD slated for January on the independent label XL,
makes its music in the same spirit. It’s noted for using African-flavored
rhythms and guitar phrases in its upbeat pop-rock, notably on its signature
“Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” ( <http://myspace.com/vampireweekend>
myspace.com/vampireweekend), whose title refers in part to a Congolese
style. But rather than replicating an “authentic” sound (the song isn’t, in
fact, kwassa kwassa), the band is more interested in collage, understandable
for a young group weaned on the cut-and-paste aesthetic of hip-hop. 

“I was always a big rap fan,” said Ezra Koenig, 23, the group’s singer and
guitarist. “I’d go to that Web site  <http://The-Breaks.com> The-Breaks.com
to find the sample source for a song, and I was always excited when the
music came from some weird place.” 

Mr. Koenig also noted his affection for older rock acts that experimented
with reggae and/or world music. Records like “Remain in Light” by Talking
Heads and “Sandinista!” by the Clash were cited as touchstones by nearly all
the artists interviewed. Which makes sense: Just as those bands were
reacting to punk rock’s creative cul-de-sac in the 1970s and ’80s, many of
the current bands are reacting to a modern retro-rock trend that has grown
stale. “That was definitely something we didn’t want to do,” Mr. Koenig
said. “And one way to do something new was to look at different sources.” 

Some groups have gone to greater lengths to tap these sources. Ian Eagleson
and Alex Minoff, who played together in the indie-rock band Golden in the
late 1990s, formed Extra Golden with local musicians in Kenya, where Mr.
Eagleson was working on a doctoral dissertation in ethnomusicology. Their
experience has been more challenging than that of many of their peers. For
instance there was the time Nairobi police showed up at a party at Mr.
Eagleson’s apartment and discovered an uninvited guest had some marijuana
cigarettes, an incident that cost the band roughly $10,000 to keep the
members out of jail. 

Then there was the problem of getting the band’s Kenyan members, some of
whom lacked passports, to the United States for a debut tour last year. The
process took months and was not complete until an 11th-hour intervention by
staff members for Senator
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/i
ndex.html?inline=nyt-per> Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, who were
assisting promoters of the Chicago World Music Festival, where the group was
scheduled to play. By way of a thank-you, one of the standouts on the
group’s spirited new album, “Hera Ma Nono” — a fluid mix of American rock,
New Orleans funk and the guitar-based Kenyan benga style on the indie-rock
label Thrill Jockey — is a traditional-style African praise song titled
“Obama.” 

American pop musicians adopting styles of other nations have often been
accused of cultural colonialism or dismissed as dilettantes. In the Web
magazine PopMatters ( <http://popmatters.com> popmatters.com), one critic
wondered if Beirut’s music is simply “a tourist’s picture postcard” that
devalues its cultural source material. Vampire Weekend, perhaps hoping to
pre-empt criticism, cheekily calls its music “Upper West Side Soweto.” But
neither group is pretending to be anything but what it is: an indie-rock
band with diverse musical appetites.

Yet in an age when an Anglo-Sri Lankan pop act like M.I.A. raps over samples
of Brazilian dance music that reshapes American electro-funk, ideas of
authenticity and cultural ownership are slippery. And there is something
encouraging in the way younger acts like Beirut and Vampire Weekend can draw
on world music styles without needing to turn the act into a political
statement, an imperative that doesn’t always serve the art in question. It’s
also worth noting, as Mr. Bragin points out, that musicians outside the
Anglo-American axis of indie rock, like Nação Zumbi and DJ Dolores from
Brazil, are busy making cutting-edge fusions. “There’s a lot more dialogue
lately,” he said. 

A result, in some cases, is a new breed of fusion that keeps its politics
implicit and exists in a nether region between genres. That’s a place Jeremy
Barnes is happy to be. A former member of the influential ’90s indie-rock
band Neutral Milk Hotel (which he notes was strongly influenced by Bulgarian
traditional music) and briefly a participant in Beirut, Mr. Barnes now lives
in Hungary, where he records neo-traditional music with local musicians and
his collaborator, Heather Trost, under the name a Hawk and a Hacksaw. 

“Aesthetically I love indie rock,” he said by cellphone from Tura, a small
town where he was collaborating with the cymbalon player Unger Balazs. “And
I find the world-music industry nauseating. There’s a lot of bad recordings
and bad artwork. But when people define us in either of those categories, I
cringe.”

“We love Hungarian music and think it’s beautiful, so how can we ignore it?”
he added. “You can’t lie to yourself.”

 

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