This week on Afropop Worldwide, we took a look at how technology is shaping music production and listening practices around the world with Afropop Soundsystem 3: Nu-Whirled Music. Over the course of the program, we explore the question – is there such as thing as World Music 2.0? And if so, what are the consequences? Here, you can read our full interview with our guest Wayne Marshall, who has some pretty interesting things to say about the topic.

Wayne is an ethnomusicologist, blogger, and DJ, currently doing a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT. He is the co-editor of Reggaeton, an excellent anthology of essays on the Puerto Rican reggae-rap. He works, more broadly, digging into the “sonic circuitry” of contemporary global music.

You can read Wayne’s thoughtful rambles on technology, culture, and electronic dance pop from the globe at his blog Wayne & Wax. In fact, the colorful analysis on Wayne’s blog was the prime inspiration for this week’s program!

Marlon Bishop: Hello Wayne, welcome to the show. Can you tell us a little bit about your area of study?

Wayne Marshall: I guess you can say I was trained as an Americanist. When I call myself an Americanist I mean it in the broadest sense – North America, South America, the Caribbean, thinking about flows across the Americas more generally. I’m increasingly interested in how American pop culture circulates abroad, about mass media flows, and looking at global networks.

MB: In the bio on your blog, you refer to yourself as a “rapper-ternt-blogger.” Was hip-hop the jumping-off point for your aural explorations?

WM: I grew up in Cambridge, MA, a fairly diverse community. I went to public schools here and hip-hop is what my peers were listening to, so it’s what I was listening to too. I give hip-hop a lot of credit for drawing me into the world and into the power that music has to represent ideas of selfhood and otherness, of nationhood, of race. And thinking about hip-hop outside of the US is what drew me into the wider world, eventually to dancehall reggae but then to all sorts of other forms as well, which seemed to splinter off from hip hop’s global spread.

MB: In your writing, you often talk about the idea of  “sonic circuitry.” What is that all about?

WM:  When I’m talking about socio-sonic circuitry it has to do with a sort of feedback loop between sound and the social imagination. How we imagine ourselves in the social world, and how sound ends up informing our sense of place.  Sound also allows us to tell these really audible stories about social history-  so the way hip-hop travels outside the U.S. or the way that something like reggaeton circulates across the Caribbean, through  North America into South America and so forth -  these allow us to tell really interesting stories about society and culture.

MB:  Let’s get right to the point – what is World Music 2.0?

WM: I guess if we’re going to use the term World Music 2.0, we should sort of draw that analogy very directly, which is to say that World Music 2.0 is world music that is traveling through social media, through social networks. It’s music from around the world that’s on YouTube, that’s on MySpace, that’s appearing on various kinds of blogs.

What ends up seeming new to me about the stuff we’re talking about today is that it’s not mediated by the old networks, the old industry – that it’s not the same relationship between audiences and producers. You don’t really have a first world superstar on the level of Paul Simon or David Byrne or any of these other avatars of what was called World Music 10-20 years ago.

Today it seems much more likely that you have somebody accessing an artist’s MySpace page or looking at a video on YouTube. The intersection can be a more level playing field – I don’t want to stress “level” too much because there are still hierarchies and there are still asymmetries in all of this – but I think part of what makes it so exciting is less distance between producers and audiences.

MB: What music are we talking about specifically – is it a set of genres?

WM: I guess I’d say it’s set of genres – funk carioca from Brazil, Angolan kuduro, coupé décalé from the Ivory Coast, kwaito from South Africa, the various strains of nueva cumbia from Argentina and around Latin America more generally, even juke from Chicago. It’s more about a kind of meta-genre.

MB: The genres you included come from all over the world. What are the commonalities that group them together? Can we make any generalizations?

WM: What do they all have in common? To me, they all are basically localizations of global forms, and a small number of global forms, namely hip-hop, reggae - dancehall reggae in particular - and techno or house, those club musics that are the templates worldwide for all kinds of interesting and not-interesting happenings.

MB: Did you invent the term World Music 2.0?

WM: I think we’d have to do some googling around, I don’t want to take credit for that. At a certain point I started using the term “Nu-Whirled”, and that has a little snark in it – some critical distance that I’m trying to put in there, in part because I’m aware of the kind of baggage that World Music as a concept is going to always bring with it.

You see the N-U spelling often as a way of reviving a dead genre, and usually in the form, I think, of a kind of cynical marketing. So the idea that that could be built into the concept seemed, to me, useful.  My problem with the term World Music 2.0  is that it seems to carry with it a sort of techno-optimism, a sort of utopian ideal that the digital-er, the social-er, the better.

MB: At what point were the cosmopolitan DJ/blogger types getting into these musics?

WM: People had been interested in global hip-hop for a while, but to me, it was really the appearance of funk carioca – so called “Baile Funk” - that broke things open a little bit. Here was an example of—“sure, we could call it global hip-hop, but it wasn’t Brazilian hip-hop as others would define it.” When people think of Brazilian hip-hop they think of the Sao Paulo scene—traditionalist, boom-bap style hip-hop, still in touch with contemporary currents in New York and such—funk carioca is something else.

You’re hearing the baile funk thing and you’re hearing Miami Bass from 20 years ago, having gone through this pretty interesting, distinctive localization. (Ed: Miami Bass was an early hip-hop sound coming out of Southern Florida, famous for its liberal use of the booming 808 electronic bass drum.)  You hear lo-fi production values, you hear that people are making this stuff in their basement, or in their bedroom, or in some cyber-café studio down the hill.

There are a number blogs that I started reading because they were into dancehall and they were into hip-hop from all over the world. They got into reggaeton as well, and then they got into funk carioca. Then you saw something like kuduro from Angola come in, which was sort of coming at it from another angle. You heard Afro-Caribbean style rhythms, but you also heard techno and house. And it was while starting to observe that constellation of things, when it felt like “oh, there’s an openness to hearing these global forms in various local guises.”

At the same time, I also started to see that there was almost a progressive interest in the next big foreign hype, the next new thing. You would even see phrases like, “Kuduru is the new baile funk.” It started to get into that kind of economy of hipness, in a way.

MB: Kuduro, funk carioca, reggaeton – they’re all dance music? Is that the common thread?

WM: Well it’s interesting that that the dance genres are what end up really resonating in this World 2.0 scene. In the case of Puerto Rico, as with Sao Paolo, you can also find traditionalist, head-nodding style hip-hop, but then you also find reggaeton, which without a doubt comes out of hip-hop but is also engaging really strongly with dancehall reggae and other kinds of pop forms, but really is geared toward the dance floor, that place which inhabits clubs and inhabits bodies and which makes people move.

MB: So in a sense, are we just talking about a generational divide? Is it just that older world music fans grew up on rock and roll are attracted to music that reflects those aesthetics, and today’s generation is more attracted to hip-hop oriented sounds?

WM: I think that is certainly a part of it. For me, another big difference, which is also in a certain way a generational difference, is that the World Music 2.0 audience, a lot of the bloggers and the DJs who live in London or New York or Montreal or wherever, they’re also living in cities that are a lot more cosmopolitan than they were 20 or 30 years ago.

All of these cities, Paris and Lisbon included, are the sites of massive immigration from the former colonial world, so these places have become alive with these sounds already. It’s not a purely internet-fueled phenomenon. I think that the internet has really accelerated it, but I think it’s also about listening and hearing your own city a little bit better, and understanding the sort of composition and the changing social and cultural texture of your own city.

I feel that the old model of world music allowed people to live out this fantasy that this other world was precisely that, this other world across the ocean, but for a lot of the World 2.0 folk, that other world is here, it’s here too, it’s in our own cities. It’s a way of listening to this stuff and cultivating an appreciation for these differences and these distinctive samenesses too, and trying to accommodate ourselves to living in diverse places. To cultivate a certain kind of every day appreciation for that otherness, not a kind of festishizing love for otherness, but something that acknowledges it and appreciates the more subtle differences that we can perceive between people, between art forms.

We elected a black president--not to pat ourselves on the back too much for that--but it’s a sign of something, it’s a sign of some change, and I do think there are some fairly profound generational differences, which in part just result from something so mundane as increased everyday exposure to difference.

MB: Let’s switch gears a little – a lot of people are calling all this music “global ghettotech.” Can you explain what that is?

WM: Yeah right, global ghettotech. Global ghettotech is another one of these terms for this stuff that we’re describing, one that I’m fairly responsible for and am currently feeling quite ambivalent about.

One of the things I perceived in a lot of this world music exchange that was happening on the blogs was that the ghetto seemed to occupy such a primary spot in the imagination in all of these DJs and bloggers and so forth, and that gave me a little pause, because it seemed to me that in a certain sense that same search for authenticity that you find in World Music 1.0 -  which might instead be a sort of rural, pre-modern authenticity that people are projecting onto Africans everywhere - could be replaced by the authenticity of the ghetto. The ghetto as the new site of unmediated, unspoiled truth, because people don’t have the same level of privilege and so must be living in a realer way.

You see this all the time, even outside of the “world music” realm, even in the infatuation with hip-hop or dancehall, where often there is a feeling that the ghetto is the authentic locus of the world today. And you can see this in a few different ways, you can see how it’s obviously problematic to romanticize conditions that are so far from romantic.

On the other hand I think you can see a kind of symbolic, imaginary alignment with people who are suffering in poverty around the world. To what extent that identification leads people to take action or try to ameliorate those conditions is another question entirely.

MB: Yeah – how many kuduro fans are really taking the next step and going out and giving microloans to somebody in Angola?

Yeah, that would be great. I guess when we talk about World 2.0 as a different way of listening, I guess that’s something that maybe I have some wishful thinking about: that it’s a way of listening that is mindful of how things travel in the world and of the inability of certain people to travel, and the asymmetries of the way money flows around the world. In some sense, it’s a kind of ethics guiding people’s listening practices and downloading practices, how they’re helping, or not, to add or take value from these things as they circulate in the world.

MB: So we mentioned baile funk and kuduro – what other sounds have become part of this “constellation,” as you called it?

WM: One of my favorite examples is juke, from Chicago. The reason that it’s my favorite is that, at least in World Music 1.0, you couldn’t be from the US and be “world music.” So for me what that says is that this new world is a very decentered world. We’re not necessarily still talking about a centered U.S. consumer who wants to go out and access the world. We’re talking about a much broader network. There are certain nodes that have more broadband and have more access, so I’m not saying it’s an equal network or anything like that, but there’s a lot more horizontality to it.

So to some extent -  if you’re going to have music from the favelas of Rio and the shantytowns of Jamaica, then why not from the ghettos of Chicago? You can see interesting things like kids in Switzerland or Belgium totally devoting themselves to this style that comes out of the south side of Chicago.

MB: What exactly is juke? I’ve never heard of it.

WM:  For a long time it was known as ghetto house. In the last several years some of the younger generation have called it juke. But the stuff that’s called juke tends to be a lot faster than your typical house music. This stuff really pushes the tempos up there – up to160 beats per minute  It’s accompanied by really virtuosic fast form of dancing known as footworking. So like a lot of these other styles, you can seek out juke and get to know it by watching dance videos on YouTube.

The songs tend to take interesting turns, they can be really whimsically composed, they can have all sorts of crazy dissonances, they can shift tempo and groove very quickly, they’re kind of unpredictable, and that’s part of what made them so endearing, they often sound like what they are – made by a 17 year-old kid sitting in his bedroom making beats while he chats on MySpace.

MB: Let’s turn to the role that technology plays. What is the role of the blogs

WM: Music blogs have been around for 6-7 years now. I think a lot of people see it not just as a way of getting free tracks, but as a way finding a filter….you know there’s so much music out there now and part of the real problem is just finding your way through it, and finding your way to stuff that you like. So less than tastemakers I’d say, the bloggers are taste-shapers or something.

MB: How have computers and the rise of easily pirated production software like Fruity Loops had an affect on music, globally speaking?

WM: I don’t have the stats necessarily, but I think a lot more people are producing music today than ever before in part because of the ease of access to the tools and the ease of use of the tools. There is a whole world making music and circulating music in a manner that really has never been true before, in a manner that is, in a way, unprecedented.

MB: And since so much of these musics are being made outside the radar of the music industry, what are the tools available for dissemination?

WM: Nowadays there are lots of ways of selling your tracks: you can sell them right through your MySpace account (there’s a service called SNOCAP that does all the sales for MySpace); or you can use any number of services – CD Baby, Tune Core, etc. So that’s one way to go, you might set up a MySpace account. You might email a track to DJs you know locally and just ask people to get it out there. You might have local bloggers share the tracks, and they might post them directly on their servers or they might upload them to a third party hosting sight like Rapidshare or Megaupload, and then it might get picked up elsewhere.

MB: So is all this music being passed around the internet – is this theft? Do any of the people involved have any scruples about sharing?

WM: Well it’s hard to say whether any of this is old or new. The idea that we’re going to “own” a musical product is a relatively recent one, less than 100 years old, and has taken a lot of turns over the course of the 20^th century. The idea of music as something that is promiscuous and gets shared very easy is a much older one, and so you might see us as just coming around to that now that we have the technology to do that again.

In terms of value – I think that’s a really interesting question.  Some people argue that, well, if your sharing it for free, then you’re not valuing music – I don’t see that really. To me it’s a different notion of value. I think you could just as easily see the activity of a lot of these intermediaries as adding value. In a certain sense you could argue that all of this activity of sharing music shows that it’s more greatly valued than ever before. 

MB: Well in a sense, sharing is the basis of remix music like funk carioca or hip hop, where some huge percent of tracks borrow drum beats from old records.

WM: Definitely. All this mixing and remixing these days is quite part and parcel of a lot of these genres and has been for a very long time. Hip hop and dancehall are really prime examples of this, where re-use and allusion and the recyling of certain forms has been absolutely central to their development, their aesthetics -  and to their ethics as well, to some extent.

And you know, I think a lot people see music as public culture, especially in an environment now where it’s absolutely ubiquitous.  You can hardly go anywhere in the world without hearing music and that was in part achieved by great efforts of the recording industry to get music into every corner of modern life. But they sort of unleashed a monster as they did that because once they made music increasingly public, sure, they could find ways to recoup various kinds of revenue from that, but they also made it into a sort of public good. 

When music goes out into public culture, I think people feel a sort of communal ownership of it eventually. So to some extent I think that one of the things we hear in so many of these genres is a folk approach to digital culture. You had people always recycling rhythms and incorporating new melodies and returning to old melodies in pre-digital, pre- recording traditions, and you’re seeing those same practices extended into the digital era.

MB: To wrap things up – what do we have to gain from these new musical happenings? What are the consequences of World Music 2.0?

WM: For me, when I’m talking about this so-called World 2.0 music, I try to temper my excitement. I do find it terribly exciting in a way, and yet I’m aware that it’s very easy to fall into certain kinds of modes of reception, certain kinds of clichés about self and other, certain kinds of fantasies about some other place or even about my own neighborhood, or how I imagine myself living in it.

Yet what is so exciting about it to me, at bottom, is the possibility of connecting. And not just to some other place in this vague way, or some other people, but to another person. There might be another person on the other end of this kuduro track that I just downloaded. There definitely is, and hey, it was a London blogger, but where did he get it from? If I look a little bit further, I see there is a guy in Angola running a kuduro podcast, and I can hear what’s happening right now in Angola.

I can correspond with this person. It doesn’t have to be this fantasy mediated by Paul Simon or mediated by Starbucks or even mediated by my favorite blogger. I can go to an artist’s YouTube page or his MySpace. I can encourage him. I can leave him a comment. I can see if they need a microloan. I can do a variety of things that for me might express the kind of value that I derive from listening to that music, from playing it when I DJ, or from sharing it with my readers, my friends, my peers.

This interview was conducted by associate producer Marlon Bishop – reach him at marloniousthunk@gmail.com

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