REBEL MUSICS
Preface
From Thomas Mapfumo to Bob Marley. William Parker to Frank Zappa. Edgard Varèse to Ice-T. Negativland to Rage Against the Machine. Plunderphonics to Chilean canto nuevo. Blues to West African drumming. Abbey Lincoln to Ani DiFranco. Paul Robeson to Gil Scott-Heron. Hip hop to son. Chicano punk to Zorn and Braxton. Gospel singing to rock 'n roll cabaret. Screaming panic noise to folk lyricism. Free jazz to diasporic, intercultural mix-ups.
Rebel musics are aligned with some of the most trenchant critiques of global politics, colonialism, neoliberalism, and degrading democracy. And their expressive powers speak directly to the worldwide struggles for civil rights and meaningful justice that remain the most pertinent of human concerns in the here and now.
What does it mean to practice political resistance through music making? What sounds animate liberatory, solidary discourses? How has music come to be the "weapon of the future"? How are human rights and music making explicitly linked? How do rebel musics, in spite of forces that seek to either commodify or marginalize them, continue to activate diverse energies of critique and inspiration? Why are truly rebel musics so often a function of intercultural collisions? What kinds of concrete models for alternative community practices and political organization do rebel musics provide? How does musical activism resonate in practical, political terms?
Rebel Musics examines some of these questions in relation to a diverse range of musical practices and performers. Written with a wide audience in mind, the book is one of the first to juxtapose human rights issues with different forms of music making. If rights discourses are founded on expressive freedoms, then surely music making, the most universal form of human expression besides language, must play a key role in imagining what it means to achieve social justice, freedom, and meaningful community.
Little work has been written on the specific relations between different forms of music making and human rights theory and practice. Rebel Musics foregrounds musical discourses of resistance in relation to pertinent issues of human rights, globalization, political theory, identity politics, cultural critique, and the development of new networks of social interaction and responsibility.
Bringing together leading voices on the topic of music and human rights, Rebel Musics represents an original and needed contribution to discourses of resistance that seek to effect social change via non-traditional means. The book focuses its attention on the ways in which musical resistance is enacted and informs the social movements that oppose neoliberalism, globalization, and transnational corporatism. Essayists examine the meaning of oppositional musics in relation to specific political, cultural, and theoretical issues and provide a unique glimpse into the stunning array of resistant social formations in which musical expression is a key feature.
Loosely based on both Ron Sakolsky's and Fred Wei-han Ho's seminal Sounding Off!: Music as Subversion/Resistance/Revolution and the film Musiques rebelles Québec produced by Productions Multi-Monde, and released in concert with the 10th annual Guelph Jazz Festival--a festival long-recognized for the way in which it programs rebel musicians--this book provides, we hope, a fascinating entry into the contentious arena where music, politics, and cultural theory meet.
A final note to readers: we have deliberately sought not to produce a comprehensive approach to rebel musics and have structured the book to represent interventions into a range of areas, from personal reflections by artists through to major pieces on jazz, blues, Chilean protest music, and youth culture. Moreover, we have avoided the trap of using the introduction to summarize the individual essays, instead opting for what we think is a more innovative structure in which issues taken up in the introduction and in the contributors' various essays are re-examined in a critical postlude. Readers are invited to free-fall through the materials presented here, a sampling of a much larger palette of musickings that envision alternate possibilities of engagement with the social and political practices that shape lives around the globe.
Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble