Culture Genericide
I went to my first hip Mumbai bar last night. They played American hip-hop. They served beer and sweet and fruity vodkas martinis. No one was wearing a sari or a salwar kameez. People were wearing jeans. The lights were low. The décor was obviously carefully crafted. People were drinking. Except that most everyone was Indian, we could have been in Paris, London, Washington D.C., or New York. Everywhere is becoming Western, but is this a bad thing, and is it even true?
New culture is not formed in a vacuum. Invading cultures invade resident cultures; they mix; a new culture results. Western Africans played music with heavy rhythms. They came over to the U.S. as slaves. They sang spirituals, and these turned into rhythm and blues in New Orleans. Ragtime and jazz developed from these roots too. Kids in Jamaica who grew up listening to indigenous Caribbean music, mento, would listen to New Orleans radio stations on their cheap transistor radios in the 1950s and impersonate what they heard. This became rocksteady, then reggae. Record manufacturers in Jamaica started putting the music tracks to reggae songs (the music without the vocals) on the B-sides of reggae albums. This was called dub. These dub records were played at beach parties in Jamaica, and DJs would add effects and loop tracks and play other tracks over the loops. They would also get on the microphone and brag about how their party was the best party and how they were the best DJ of all time. Jamaican immigrants in New York City brought these beach parties to the blocks of the South Bronx. New York City Public Schools had no money for music education, and looping records to create new music with strong rhythm really took in the City. The block parties and the bragging on the mic over looped tracks became quite popular: Sugar Hill Gang, Run D.M.C., Eric B. and Rakim, Public Enemy, N.W.A., Jay-Z, Outkast, Nelly. This is how hip-hop was created – cultures being transplanted, and one culture just ripping off another culture.
And now while the newly emergent middle-classes and the newly rich in the Developing World are emulating the West, shopping at malls and hyper markets, and buying Western luxury brands, and getting fat, some in the lower classes are trying to slip into the societal positions that the traditional upper classes were formerly occupying. These traditionally upper classes, of course, are abandoning their societal positions to emulate the West. In India, this is called Sanskritization. The upper castes were the ones who understood the ancient language of Sanskrit. They were also the ones who could spend their free time studying religion and were the only ones allowed to enter the temples and universities. Now, the lower castes are doing this, while the upper castes aren’t as much anymore. So the Indian culture isn’t dying out because Western culture is “colonizing” India. The rich aren’t clinging as much to the old culture, but the poorer are.
This can lead to fundamentalism. In the Arab world, all these bored young men can’t afford to emulate the West like their wealthier countrymen, so they spend their time in the mosques. They are so taken by their historical culture that some are willing to blow themselves up for it. (by the way, North Africa was not always Arab; there was indigenous culture, but the Arab armies invaded and conquered and brought their language and religion; India too is land populated and cultured by foreign invaders; China too; the last dynasty of China was Manchurian, not Han Chinese; two dynasties before that was Mongol)
So old cultures aren’t dying out, and maybe it’s wishful thinking, but maybe Western culture spreading throughout the world will only make it a cooler culture. Would it be so bad if rappers in New York City were using old Indian records in their samples to create beats (instead of – or in addition to – old New Orleans records)?
New culture is not formed in a vacuum. Invading cultures invade resident cultures; they mix; a new culture results. Western Africans played music with heavy rhythms. They came over to the U.S. as slaves. They sang spirituals, and these turned into rhythm and blues in New Orleans. Ragtime and jazz developed from these roots too. Kids in Jamaica who grew up listening to indigenous Caribbean music, mento, would listen to New Orleans radio stations on their cheap transistor radios in the 1950s and impersonate what they heard. This became rocksteady, then reggae. Record manufacturers in Jamaica started putting the music tracks to reggae songs (the music without the vocals) on the B-sides of reggae albums. This was called dub. These dub records were played at beach parties in Jamaica, and DJs would add effects and loop tracks and play other tracks over the loops. They would also get on the microphone and brag about how their party was the best party and how they were the best DJ of all time. Jamaican immigrants in New York City brought these beach parties to the blocks of the South Bronx. New York City Public Schools had no money for music education, and looping records to create new music with strong rhythm really took in the City. The block parties and the bragging on the mic over looped tracks became quite popular: Sugar Hill Gang, Run D.M.C., Eric B. and Rakim, Public Enemy, N.W.A., Jay-Z, Outkast, Nelly. This is how hip-hop was created – cultures being transplanted, and one culture just ripping off another culture.
And now while the newly emergent middle-classes and the newly rich in the Developing World are emulating the West, shopping at malls and hyper markets, and buying Western luxury brands, and getting fat, some in the lower classes are trying to slip into the societal positions that the traditional upper classes were formerly occupying. These traditionally upper classes, of course, are abandoning their societal positions to emulate the West. In India, this is called Sanskritization. The upper castes were the ones who understood the ancient language of Sanskrit. They were also the ones who could spend their free time studying religion and were the only ones allowed to enter the temples and universities. Now, the lower castes are doing this, while the upper castes aren’t as much anymore. So the Indian culture isn’t dying out because Western culture is “colonizing” India. The rich aren’t clinging as much to the old culture, but the poorer are.
This can lead to fundamentalism. In the Arab world, all these bored young men can’t afford to emulate the West like their wealthier countrymen, so they spend their time in the mosques. They are so taken by their historical culture that some are willing to blow themselves up for it. (by the way, North Africa was not always Arab; there was indigenous culture, but the Arab armies invaded and conquered and brought their language and religion; India too is land populated and cultured by foreign invaders; China too; the last dynasty of China was Manchurian, not Han Chinese; two dynasties before that was Mongol)
So old cultures aren’t dying out, and maybe it’s wishful thinking, but maybe Western culture spreading throughout the world will only make it a cooler culture. Would it be so bad if rappers in New York City were using old Indian records in their samples to create beats (instead of – or in addition to – old New Orleans records)?
Comments