Stuff that Dreams Are Made Of: Music and the Future in Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express (1994)

Academic Text

Introduction

«Was it really alright for one’s dreams to come true so easily?» Murakami Haruki’s narrator asks in his short story, On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning (Murakami 1993, 71). This quote from a simple three-page tale inspired Wong Kar-wai’s 1994 film Chungking Express (Teo 2005, 50). The film, like the short story, emphasizes that life is a string of chances to which we react. Apprehension about chance, change, and the future permeated Hong Kong at the time of the film – in three years, Great Britain would return control of the city to mainland China. Wong grasped this apprehension and wove it into his film’s dual narrative. Many scholars (Teo 2005; Abbass 1997; Huang 2002) have analyzed Wong’s manipulation of time, space, and chance in Chungking Express via narrative and visual analysis. Teo’s argument is particularly perceptive. He notes that Wong makes time tangible via expiring objects – soap, canned pineapple, old rags (Teo 2005, 63). Life, Wong seems to be saying, is also about expirations. The soundtrack, mostly consisting of popular songs of decades past, reinforces this notion of expiration and hints at nostalgia (Teo 2005, 53-54). But more important than the fact that Wong selected old songs is the way the music appears in the soundtrack.1 Throughout Chungking Express, music moves between onscreen, offscreen, and nondiegetic space. I argue that this indeterminate positioning of music in cinematic space reinforces the film’s final theme – the future is unwritten.

Sound and Indeterminacy in Chungking Express

Before looking at specific examples of this phenomenon, we must couch Chungking Express in its historical and cultural context. The golden age of Hong Kong cinema was drawing to a close by the time Wong began filming Chungking Express, (Teo 1997, vii). Genre films, particularly kung fu, melodrama, and gangster movies dominated the industry’s output, though in the eighties a new wave of directors began challenging generic boundaries. Despite the international ascendancy of Hong Kong stars like Jackie Chan and Chow Yun-Fat, Hollywood dominated the home box office (Teo 1997, vii). An economic downturn and trepidation over the transfer of sovereignty also contributed to the industry’s decline. The transfer also provided a glimmer of hope; expansion into the Chinese mainland could resuscitate abysmal sales, yet rigid state censorship laws tempered this hope (Teo 1997, ix). It was in this setting that Wong conceived and shot Chungking Express over a three-month period in the midst of working on his epic martial arts film Ashes of Time (1994) (Teo 2005, 8). Chungking Express, though set in Hong Kong, breaks with the local film industry's generic models.

Wong’s characters, like those in the Murakami story, identify chance moments in life and struggle to act on them. The film is a dual-narrative, what Teo calls a diptych, though both stories feature policeman protagonists and characters from the second story appear in the background of the first. The first narrative is a noire drama set in an area of Hong Kong called Chungking Mansion – an arcade-like hub for multi-cultural families, small businesses, and criminal activity (Teo 2005, 50-53). It follows the intersecting lives of a drug-smuggling blond (Brigitte Lin) and a lovelorn policeman designated as Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro). The second story is an off-the-wall romance: Cop 663 (Tony Leung) has been dumped by his stewardess girlfriend. Encouraged by this, a quirky counter girl (Faye Wong) at a fast food place called Midnight Express sneaks into Cop 663’s apartment and transforms both the apartment and his life.

French film sound scholar Michel Chion’s extensive work provides an ideal platform for understanding how sound works in Chungking Express. Unlike many film music scholars, Chion does not limit his discussions to the score. Instead he deals with how the entire soundtrack – sound effects, dialogue, and music – interacts with a film’s visual elements, and how sound can transform our perception of the images.2 Chion’s definitions of the aforementioned terms, now commonly accepted in film sound circles, are laid out in Film, a Sound Art:

onscreen sound: a sound whose source we see (or believe we see) in the image at the moment the sound is emitted.

offscreen sound: a sound whose cause is not visible simultaneously in the image but that we easily imagine to be still situated in the same time as the action onscreen and in a space that’s contiguous to what’s shown in the image.

nondiegetic sound: sound emitted from an invisible source that in addition belongs to a time and/or place different from the space-time of the action shown in the image (2009, 249-250).

He relates that when we hear a sound but do not see its source, the sound is acousmatic (Chion 2009, 465). In Chungking Express, music is acousmatized. We are often uncertain if the music is diegetic or nondiegetic. This narrative indeterminacy regarding sound corresponds to the aleatoric nature of life and the uncertainty of the future in general and of Hong Kong in particular.3

As seen in the music cue chart at the conclusion of this article, popular songs dominate the soundtrack in both stories, particularly «Things in Life» by Dennis Brown in the first and «California Dreamin’» by the Mamas and the Papas in the second. «The song», Chion points out, «is what often creates a link between individual characters’ destinies and the human collectivity to which they belong» (Chion 2009, 428).4 In the case of Chungking Express, songs do this and more; they do create a link between the characters, but via their delivery as indeterminate sound sources, they also create a link between time as experienced by the characters, and, by extension, the future of Hong Kong. «Things in Life» and «California Dreamin’», emitted from a juke box and radio respectively, are «on-the-air» (Chion 2009, 482). They seem to be anchored to a specific space, but «they shift easily from the status of screen music to pit music» (Chion 2009, 482). Because of this shifting, these songs compel us to constantly revise our understanding of how the music is working in the scene. Are the songs merely aural settings? Do they express a character’s psychology? Do they portray a relationship between characters? Can they simultaneously do all this and more?

The songs compel us to revise our understanding of what is real and what is imagined.

«Things in Life» and Forging Fate

«Things in Life» appears four times in approximately the first forty minutes of the film. Initially, it is associated with the jukebox at the Bottoms Up bar and by extension, with the bar’s owner/drug boss (played by the cameraman Christopher Doyle). When the tune is first associated with the drug boss and his bartender-lover (a different woman who occasionally dons a blond wig herself), the music is diegetic, contained within the machine.5 It is stuck in a tedious, mechanical reality; symbolically it hints at the trope of mechanically reproduced music and the «murderous impulse» (Chion 2009, 434).6

Chungking Express, story 1. Copyright Buena Vista Home Entertainment/The Criterion Collection, 2008

Indeed, the second time the song appears, Brigitte Lin’s character has just received a death sentence from the drug boss via a can of sardines-she has until the expiration date on the can to recover some stolen goods. But this time «Things in Life» occurs as diegetic offscreen sound. That is, the music is playing in the bar, but we do not see the jukebox. With its source concealed, the music enlarges the film’s spatiality-we hear beyond to frame. The music gives dimension to space outside the ocular. It opens up possibilities.

The song continues, smoothing over a cut to Brigitte Lin’s character wandering the streets of Hong Kong. By this point, the music has clearly traversed the diegetic space and time of the bar and entered into the nondiegetic. The function of the music thus changes from that of portraying space (the bar and the drug boss who seemingly resides there) to portraying emotion. The song lingers in the blond-wigged woman’s mind as an aural memory. We speculate that it represents her now-over romantic relationship with the drug boss, but nothing is certain. The lyrics comment on the idea that nothing is certain in relationships and in life, stating that «It’s not every day we’re gonna be the same way.» The line echoes a voice-over by the blond-wigged woman, in which she explains why she wears both a raincoat and sunglasses: «You never know if it’s going to rain or be sunny.»

In this sequence the song acts as a sound bridge between the blond-wigged woman and Cop 223 – the music smooths over a cut to Kaneshiro’s character eating a McDonald’s hamburger on a street corner. By connecting Lin’s character with Kaneshiro’s, the music predicts their chance meeting. The second line of the song, «There must be a change somehow», seems to encourage both Cop 223 and the woman to become active rather than passive agents in life. By moving from diegetic music to nondiegetic music, first empathizing with the woman and then with the cop, the tune becomes as free-floating between emotional representations as it is with spatial ones.

«Things in Life» returns twice more in the first story. In its third incarnation, it appears as diegetic sound, accompanying shots of the jukebox and the bartender dancing. The final time we hear the song, it begins with a similar scene. This time the camera follows the drug boss as he exits the bar, but as he leaves the music does not fade. «Things in Life» does not situate itself from his point of audition. Instead of being muffled, the music rises in volume, indicating that the song has once again crossed the boundary between diegetic and nondiegetic sound. The woman in the blond wig shoots the drug boss and the music fades as the camera shows a close-up of the can of sardine and its expiration date-the «today» in the narrative – May 1, 1994.

Via this shot, the music has been elevated beyond representation of any one character and instead comments on the expiration of all things in life, a topic that is at the heart of the opening, noir-ish chapter of Chungking Express.7 The sardine cans give time a tangible quality; they express the human desire to contain the future while the music declares that we can never truly know the future, i.e. whether it will rain or shine. The deft «on-the-air» delivery of «Things in Life» throughout the first vignette creates and dissolves links between characters. Moreover, it gives a voice to inhabitants both of 1994 Hong Kong and human beings in general – there must be a change somehow. And in order to enact that change, we must dream.

Dreams of Time and Space

The film’s two stories are tied together by Cop 223’s visit to Midnight Express, a sandwich shop. He notices Faye, a counter girl at the shop, and seems to be smitten with her despite the fact that she will fall in love with another man in a few hours (and despite the fact that he was hitting on Brigitte Lin’s character a few moments prior). For Cop 223, memories of romance are fleeting, more like dreams than fact. The past, when the concreteness of it (cans of pineapple, sardines) is consumed or rejected, becomes little different from the future. History is as mutative as the unknown future. Though facts cannot be changed, perception of the past can; in this, both the future and the past, Wong Kar-Wai suggests, are fantasies. It is through this idea that the music and the stories’ disparate narratives can be brought together.

Both Faye and her romantic interest, Cop 663, are in a kind of sleep-walking dream state. Like his colleague, Cop 663 wallows in the past. He talks to inanimate objects, infusing them with his excessive nostalgia for the woman who broke his heart. Faye, on the other hand, dreams not of the past but of a future. But the future is full of uncertainty; likewise the music associated with Faye is «on-the-air» – it floats between diegesis and nondiegesis, concomitantly expressing exterior settings and characters’ interiorities. Music shapes the second story from Chungking Express into a dream romance, a fantasy of the heart.

The Mamas and the Papas’ «California Dreamin’» exemplifies «on-the-air» music in the second story. It dominates the soundtrack, occurring eight times in the hour-long episode. Though ostensibly onscreen and diegetic in its first appearance, the song moves between onscreen and offscreen space, and arguably into the nondiegetic realm. The first time we hear the tune, it begins during Cop 223’s voiceover regarding Faye, as seen in the following excerpt (Chungking Express, «California Dreamin’»). What is never explained is how he knows Faye will fall in love with Cop 663 in exactly six hours. Cop 223’s voice shifts from an embodied character to an omniscient narrator. This curious transfer of Cop 223’s voice foreshadows the peculiar way «California Dreamin’» fluctuates between diegetic and nondiegetic sound in the second story:

Clip 1: Chungking Express, «California Dreamin'». Copyright Buena Vista Home Entertainment/The Criterion Collection 2008.

When the instrumental opening starts, we are uncertain of its origins; it could be nondiegetic accompaniment enhancing Cop 223’s bittersweet remorse at missing his shot with Faye. But, as the film cuts to Cop 663 we discover that the opening was a sound advance and that the music is indeed diegetic, though still as empathetic as any orchestral underscore. We still have not seen the source of the music as Cop 663 approaches the counter. The volume does not change with his approach. Instead it remains constant, just as the camera depicts a point of view shot seen from behind the shop counter. When we get a reverse shot, we realize that the music and previous shot were from Faye’s point of view and audition. Instantly, the music compels us to empathize with her. When Cop 663 arrives at the counter he orders a chef salad and the two have a brief conversation:

Cop 663: You like listening to loud music?

Faye: Yeah, the louder the better. Keeps me from thinking so much.

Cop 663: You don’t like to think?

Faye shakes her head «no» while dancing to the music

Cop 663: What do you like?

Faye: I’ll tell you when I find out. And what do you like?

Cop 663 beckons Faye closer. They both lean over the counter in a two-shot from the side

Cop 663: Chef salad!

Faye: Hey!

The above scene is noteworthy in that the music has a function – Faye turns the volume up to prevent her from thinking too much.8 An additional side effect from the loud music is that it also inhibits communication. Both Cop 663 and Faye have to shout to be heard over «California Dreamin’». The music is not just Faye’s shield from her own thoughts but also an aegis protecting her from the world. But the music’s volume decreases when Cop 663 motions Faye to attend to his reply. This change in volume is not diegetic; no one has actively turned down the offscreen boom box. Instead, this shift in the volume is a way of marking a shared auditory moment. It aurally creates a personal space for Cop 663 and Faye to share. This moment is the crux of communication between them enables the story’s narrative.

Chungking Express, story 2. Copyright Buena Vista Home Entertainment/The Criterion Collection, 2008.

The lyrics and musical components of «California Dreamin’» are atypical of popular songs about California – there is no mention of beaches, bikini-clad girls, or convertibles.9 Rather the song suggests melancholic uncertainty. Additionally, the song is in a minor key; this mode is mutative; its sixth and seventh scale degrees change depending on the surrounding notes. This makes the minor key less stable than its major counterpart. The opening phrase’s deceptive cadence of V7-bVI (set to «…sky is grey/I’ve been for a walk…») contributes to a sense of harmonic uncertainty. The song concludes with a harmonically weak cadence of bVII-i. This progression lacks the tonally centering movement of a leading tone. It is ambiguous; just as Faye and Cop 663 are unsure of themselves and their futures, so too is the music of «California Dreamin’».

Throughout the second story, the song struggles to break away from its diegetic container, the boom box behind the counter at Midnight Express. In a jump cut following the first conversation between Faye and Cop 663, the music also cuts to a different point in the song. It does not smooth over an abrupt edit, the way music typically does. In dancing and mouthing the lyrics while performing her mundane tasks, Faye embodies «California Dreamin’». Faye, like Brigitte Lin’s character in the first vignette, appropriates a song and actively forges her own future.

The song is always connected to Faye’s presence, whether the sound source is visible or not. When we hear the song at Cop 663’s apartment, we recognize that Faye occupied this space aurally as well as physically. The music continues after she’s left the apartment – it is a musical memento for both her and for Cop 663. The song is part of her interior being, one that ricochets in Cop 663’s apartment and mind. Faye, like the song, defies containment. And it is through this defiance that Faye is able to leap from the uncertainty of «California Dreamin’» to the transformative fantasy of «Dream Lover».

Unlike «Things in Life» and «California Dreamin’», «Dream Lover» is never definitively placed as onscreen sound. Yet, like the preceding episodes, «Dream Lover» confuses notions of diegesis and nondiegesis, of reality and fantasy, in Chungking Express. This song, too, belongs to Faye and is even more strongly part of her interior soundtrack than «California Dreamin’». This interior empathetic sound is augmented by peculiarities on both material and semiotic levels. The recording, unlike the other pop songs in the film, is not the original version. Instead it has been transformed from the Cranberries’ alt-rock style into a Cantonese pop song (Chungking Express, «Dream Lover»). Faye Wong herself sings the lyrics, infusing the song with both her «real» pop star persona while simultaneously giving musical self-expression to her quirky Chungking Express character.10 Because of this, «Dream Lover» erases boundaries between fantasy and reality, manufacturing emotion and empathy on a level beyond the other music cues. The music video gives a sense of this effect.

Clip 2: The Cranberries, «Dreams». Island Def Jam Music Group, 1993.

Video not available anymore.

Clip 3: Chungking Express, music video for «Dream Lover». Copyright Buena Vista Home Entertainment/The Criterion Collection, 2008.

As a montage, this music smooths over edits that signify the passing of time. We are so absorbed into Faye’s fantasy world that the passing of days (weeks?) in Cop 663’s apartment seem to be a fleeting five minutes. Time is suspended. The joy of watching her in this sequence is the joy of her insouciance and naïve affection for Cop 663. Though she still cannot face him directly, she has clearly determined what she likes. The music of «Dream Lover» mirrors this certainty. It is the opposite of the insecure «California Dreamin’» in that is not ever part of the diegesis, excepting Faye’s own fantasy world.

The harmonic structure of the song is the most basic and most stable progression possible: I-IV-V-I. Likewise, the verse/chorus structure of the lyrics typifies pop songs and the major key implies a sense of optimism. The song’s aural simplicity is innocence and charm in musical form. Indeed there is hardly anything truly dreamlike embedded in the music. It is more a fantasy than a dream, a fantasy that has more substance musically than the songs in the «real» world of the film.

But the grain of Faye Wong’s voice, breathy and high-pitched, endows the audible with shades of dreaminess. The song’s bridge also portrays a kind of extraordinary dream world. The chords in the bridge oscillate between V/bVI to bVI. This harmonic movement is outside the realm of the diatonic key of the song, but its effect is notable. It is the same cadential movement present in «California Dreamin’» This progression ties the two musical facets of Faye’s personality together. The tonicization of the lowered sixth scale degree suggests a movement from one realm (the original key) to a different one (the key of bVI) in both songs. But in «Dream Lover», the absorption into a fantasy world is made more complete, thanks to the lyrics.

During the bridge, the lyrics move beyond the realm of logos to the realm of the ineffable – the singer no longer sings words, but rather a melismatic «la». It reflects a fantasy that cannot be uttered. Via the song’s connection to Faye (the character), we realize that this parallels her inability to express her feelings directly to Cop 663. When she is finally confronted with the opportunity to do so, she flees. Faye is still unable to reconcile fantasy and reality. She is afraid to share her dream.

Conclusion: Music, Optimism, and the Future

In the final scene of Chungking Express, Faye has returned to Midnight Express for a visit after a year-long trip around the world as an airline stewardess. She is surprised to find Cop 663 there renovating the space and listening to «California Dreamin’» on high volume. The song in its final appearance begins indeterminately. We see Faye’s heels and hear the tune – it could be diegetic or nondigetic.

We are unsure until Faye raises the storefront gate and the music increases in volume. Though we are still aligned with Faye’s point of audition, the song itself no longer represents her desires. Rather, its meaning has been transformed by Cop 663’s appropriation of it. For him, it represents Faye, adventure, hope, and change. It is his aural memory of her and the carefree joie de vivre she represents.

As the couple struggles to communicate, Cop 663 turns down the stereo’s volume. They are finally able to express their feelings directly, unmediated by music. Though the ending initially seems uncertain, with Faye writing out a boarding pass on a napkin for Cop 663, the music hints at an optimistic future. The final shot is of the boom box, the source of «California Dreamin’» in numerous scenes. But before cutting to the end credits, we hear the opening of “Dream Lover” in conjunction with this shot.

It is not actually playing on the boom box. Instead the sound advance suggests that the dream has been captured and transformed into a tangible reality. It is the climactic conclusion of a shared interior auditory moment that mirrors the moment in the first scene between Cop 663 and Faye.

Just as the characters traverse Hong Kong space so too does the music traverse between different orders of filmic space. Its indeterminacy contributes to the dissolution of spatial and temporal boundaries as well as the ones between dreams and reality; the music undermines the physical world and absorbs us into a murky world in which anything is possible. In this it mirrors the future of the city in which is set – nebulous, uncertain, torn between hope and reality. Music in Chungking Express reveals the uncertain atmosphere of 1994 Hong Kong and Wong Kar-wai’s cautious but optimistic dream for the future, a dream still unfolding almost twenty years later.11

Music Cue Chart

Time Code	Scene Description	Sound Description
0:44-2:50	Inside Chungking Mansion, blurry shots of woman in blond wig and Cop 223. Title card. Shots of chimneys and sky.	Opening theme: Synthesized strings and winds play cyclic tune. In Mansion shots, we hear the murmur of the crowd underneath the music. Thunder accompanies shot of the rooftops and sky. At 1:42 Cop 223 enters in voiceover. Nondiegetic.
6:05-6:42	Bar interior, man puts coin in jukebox. Shots of jukebox and woman in blond wig.	«Things in Life», onscreen sound.
6:54-8:00	Woman recruits Indians to smuggle drugs, counts out money and prepares them for smuggling	Indian popular music, Bollywood style. It seems to be offscreen, but is unclear. The text is not translated.
10:13-10:58	Close quarters of smuggling operation, preparing clothing and shoes to be filled with drugs	Indian music; it fades as woman approaches the airport ticket counter, suggesting that by this point the music is nondiegetic.
12:31-13:26	Woman in blond wig and female bartender chat cattily. Woman leaves, walks Hong Kong streets in voiceover.	«Things in Life» begins with scene in bar, as if onscreen but continues as woman walks, turning into nondiegetic. It fades as 223 exits McDonald’s and calls his pager. The music works as a sound bridge between the two characters.
14:33-16:05	Woman in blond wig walks hallways looking for the hired smugglers. She kidnaps an Indian shop-owner’s daughter	Opening theme
16:40-16:43	Shop-owner ponders his conflict-betraying the smugglers or letting his daughter die	Indian music in background, offscreen sound.
17:18-17:39	Cop 223 chases a criminal in blurry scenes.	Generic action music in synthesizer and voiceover. Nondiegetic.
20:37-22:17	Woman in blond wig smokes alone in a hallway. Chase sequence after she shoots someone, blurry visuals.	Indian music and gunshot; seems to be offscreen diegetic sound because of reverb. Nondiegetic drums rise in the soundtrack. Generic action music enters at 21:40
26:19-27:30	Cop 223 rests outside of Bottoms Up Bar before entering.	Eighties-style hard rock music faintly heard while 223 is outside bar, heard while he is in bar bathroom. Offscreen sound accompanied by voiceover. The music transitions into a different style when he mentions the song “Love Dies at Dawn.”
27:32-31:33	Woman in blond wig enters the bar, Cop 223 hits on her.	Generic easy listening music with synthesizer and saxophone. Nondigetic.
31:41-32:31	Drug boss puts coin into juke box and makes out with bartender while she wears a blond wig	«Things in Life» onscreen sound. Rises in volume in conjunction with shots of the jukebox.
33:52-38:40	Cop 223 eats hamburger, French fries, chef salad while woman sleeps. He polishes her shoes then leaves for a jog.	Generic easy listening music. Thunder heard at 36:38.
39:42-41:00	At the drug boss’s bar. The bartender dances by juke box. Woman in blond wig shoots the drug boss while kittens eat a can of sardines. The body lies on the ground.	«Things in Life» begins as onscreen sound, becomes nondiegetic as it increases in volume when woman leaves. Ends with final shot of her.
41:47-43:21	Faye runs into Cop 223 and music begins during his voiceover. Scene changes to night, Cop 663 approaches the counter of Midnight Express.	Cop 223’s voiceover then «California Dreamin’» by the Mamas and the Papas. The music begins as nondiegetic (could also be interpreted as a sound advance) then becomes diegetic, switching between offscreen and onscreen sound. Song is cut off during musical interlude.
43:22-43:59	Faye dances to «California Dreamin’» while working the counter. She pretends to sing. Cop 663 makes note in book. Midnight Express boss turns radio off.	Cut from previous scene, but still «California Dreamin’». Assumed offscreen/onscreen sound.
44:16-45:09	Faye turns the radio on, though a little quieter than previously. She dances while eyeing Cop 663.	«California Dreamin’» onscreen/offscreen sound.
47:35-50:00	Cop 663 voiceover about ex-girlfriend. Shots of them inside his apartment, they make love.	«What a Difference a Day Makes» nondiegetic sound.
50:43-51:23	At Midnight Express, Faye cleans while boss and 663 discuss ex-girlfriend and relationships	«California Dreamin’» onscreen/offscreen sound.
53:51-55:32	Faye working at counter, everyone leaves when Cop 663 approaches.	«California Dreamin’» onscreen/offscreen sound.
1:07:31-1:09:32	Faye breaks into Cop 663’s apartment and plays with his stuff
1:10:55-1:15:12	Faye redecorates Cop 663’s apartment	«Dream Lover», a Cantonese cover of the Cranberries’ «Dream» sung by Faye Wong. Music decreases at ex-girlfriend’s phone message. Nondiegetic.
1:18:42-1:19:32	Faye and Cop 663 relax in his apartment. Cop 663 says his ex-girlfriend liked «California Dreamin’» though Faye knows the CD is one left by her.	«California Dreamin’», it clips off as Faye falls asleep, aligning us with her point of audition. Onscreen/offscreen sound.
1:21:21-1:21:29	Electricity has gone out at Midnight Express so everyone is lighting candles	Workers sing «Happy Birthday» to Faye. Onscreen sound
1:24:47-1:25:11	Faye cleans Cop 663’s apartment, tries to knock down stewardess shirt from clothesline	«California Dreamin’» offscreen sound, but could be nondiegetic.
1:26:06-1:28:29	Cop 663 approaches Midnight Express and requests letter from ex-girlfriend. He returns Faye’s CD of «California Dreamin’» and asks her out on a date. The scene cuts to her serving customers and then to him packing away ex-girlfriend’s belongings.	«What a Difference a Day Makes», goes from nondiegetic to onscreen sound back to nondiegetic.
1:28:59-1:31:35	Cop 663 waits in California Bar for Faye	There is a brief saxophone cue, then Cop 663 puts money into the jukebox. Instead of a popular tune, we receive the generic easy listening music from the first story. Nondiegetic-the music is immersive rather than being sourced in the juke box.
1:33:51-1:36:24	Rain pours on Faye’s letter to Cop 663; he rescues it and tries to dry it out.	Generic easy listening similar to the previous entry’s. Music with synthesizer and saxophone. Nondiegetic.
1:36:34-1:38:10	Shot of stewardess approaching Midnight Express. We discover it is Faye and that Cop 663 is behind the counter.	«California Dreamin’» at first unclear if it is nondiegetic or offscreen sound. When Faye lifts the grating, the music becomes louder, proving that is diegetic. As they talk, Cop 663 turns down the music-the song goes from offscreen to onscreen.
1:40:20-1:42:46	Shot of boom box at Midnight Express followed by end credits.	«Dream Lover» nondiegetic

1. Despite the variety of genres Wong Kar-wai has worked in (noir, fantasy, melodrama, romance), his output shares some traits. First Wong tends to work with a core group of actors, centered on Tony Leung (Cop 663 in Chungking Express) and often collaborates with Christopher Doyle as director of cinematography. The movies themselves are invariably concerned with romantic relationships and the passing of time. Teo deals extensively with these topics in Wong’s oeuvre (Teo 2005). However, there is another technique common to Wong’s works: the voiceover. For Wong, the voiceover is delivered by a character in the film, implying that the character is narrating a significant moment in his or her life (Buhler, Neumeyer, Deemer 2010, 80-81). In the case of Chungking Express, the music, particularly the songs discussed in this article, assume a function similar to that of the voiceover. They express characters’ interiorities to an extent not seen in any of Wong’s other films. A comparison of Chungking Express with Wong’s preceding and succeeding films provides a case in point. Days of Being Wild (1990), like Chungking Express, is concerned with time and relationships. The music track, comprised of Hawaiian guitar and lounge music, establishes the 1960s setting of the film, but it does not express characters’ emotions in a meaningful way. The same can be said of his later films. In the Mood for Love (2000), also set in 1960s Hong Kong, uses lounge music. Similarly, Happy Together (1997), set in Argentina, features prominent use of tango music. Fallen Angels, Wong’s 1995 follow-up to Chungking Express, has much in common thematically and stylistically with the 1994 film (Fallen Angels was originally attached to Chungking Express as a third story). In Fallen Angels, characters play songs on a juke box, and these songs travel from diegesis to nondiegesis, like in Chungking Express. Yet, the only song repeated in the diegetic world is «Wang ji ta/Forget Him». Moreover, its reappearance disturbs the main character. Repetition of a song in Fallen Angels is uncomfortable – a strong contrast to the characters in Chungking Express, who absorb the repeated songs into their own psyche. Furthermore, although «Wang ji ta/Forget Him» conveys nostalgia via its lyrics and musical style, the song does not transcend the narrative. Ashes of Time (1994), the movie Wong was editing during the filming of Chungking Express, is the aesthetic opposite of the movies discussed above. A martial arts film, the music track is made up of a generic synthesized orchestra. The music, like the plot of the film, meanders and adds very little to the narrative.
2. Chion has been at the forefront of film sound analysis since his first book, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1994). His work as a soundscape artist has given him insight not only on music but also on sound design. This holistic approach to understanding film sound makes his work the natural foundation for this study. Other significant contributions to the study of film music include Claudia Gorbman’s 1987 monograph Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Although Gorbman concentrates on scores from Hollywood’s Golden Era, her ideas ricochet throughout contemporary film sound studies. Much of this article’s discussion of music and narrative is inspired by Gorbman’s work. Sound Theory/Sound Practice (1992), a compilation of essays edited by Rick Altman provides further discussion on film sound beyond the musical score. Finally, David Neumeyer, Jim Buhler and Rob Deemer’s survey of film sound history and analysis, Hearing the Movies: Music and Sound in Film History (2010), offers excellent template approaches to film sound analysis. Key to all these books is the idea that how music and sound work can be as important as the sounds themselves. Although several authors, from Adorno and Eisler (1947) to Ian Inglis (2003), and Jeff Smith (1998), have addressed mass marketing and popular music in film sound, that topic is beyond the scope of this article.
3. There are many films in which diegetic music is heard, though the source of music is off screen – usually this is done to establish a setting (i.e. a bar, restaurant, or car). Yet in Chungking Express diegetic, off screen sound transforms into “on-the-air” music; it travels freely between diegesis and nondiegesis. In this, the soundtrack for Chungking Express is much more nuanced than Wong’s other films. This kind of play with sound, though, is not necessarily unique to Wong. Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) features a theme that consistently reappears both in the world of the film and in the non-diegetic score. What is unique in Chungking Express is the way the music weaves both into the film’s narrative as well as the real-life issue of Hong Kong’s return to the People’s Republic of China.
4. Chion points out that songs can often work as foreshadowing or commentary in a film. But more than that, they sometimes seem to have an influence on the characters themselves, whether the song is diegetic or nondiegetic (428). Moreover, even «Before providing emotional resonance for a film, music is first and foremost a machine for manipulating time and space…» (Chion 2009, 409). In Chungking Express, the use of old songs (identifiable as old due to music production techniques such as the grain, timbre, and style of the recording even if we are not familiar with the tune) is as much a tool for manipulation of time as the cinematography and the concurrent plots. When we recognize the songs, we bring our own added value to the film – that is, because each person may endow a popular song with unique significance, each person interprets the relationship between sound and image differently. For more on time and the use of popular songs of the past see Teo 2004, 53.
5. Many of the characters interact with music-making machines. In the first story, the drug boss/bar owner and the bartender put coins into the juke box. In the second story, Faye turns on the boom box after her cousin turned it off. Cop 663 puts on a CD and we see a slow motion sequence of him putting a coin into a juke box towards the end of the movie. Finally, it is noteworthy that while Faye consistently turns up the volume on «California Dreamin’», Cop 663 (no longer a cop at the end of the movie), turns it down in order to talk with Faye. This action shows his commitment to removing obstacles to communication between him and Faye – a first step towards a true relationship.
6. The idea of mechanical music and the murderous impulse is derived from Chion’s conception of anempathetic sound. The music is indifferent to the actions on screen. For example, the juke box in Chungking Express theoretically continues to play its song after Brigitte Lin’s character shoots the bar owner/drug boss. The use of mechanical music to accompany murder scenes has become a cinematic trope-the most striking and well-known of these is Hannibal Lecter murdering prison guards while enjoying a cassette recording of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations (Chion 2009, 430-434).
7. The can of sardines brings to mind the cans of pineapple Cop 223 purchases. He buys cans of pineapple set to expire on May 1st. This day marks a month after his break-up. On May 1st, Cop 223 promises himself, he will give up on his ex-girlfriend returning to him. As midnight approaches, Cop 223 consumes all thirty cans of pineapple.
8. However in later scenes featuring «California Dreamin’» and Faye, it becomes clear that she is thinking – thinking about Cop 663. Even her cousin notices her dreamy state.
9. Regarding typical popular music about California, I am primarily referring to works by the Beach Boys and similar surf bands. More recently, Katy Perry’s «California Gurls» emblematizes this portrayal of the coastal state. Of course, there are plenty of songs in the punk and hard rock genres that depict California in a less optimistic light.
10. In Hong Kong, several film actors and actresses make the crossover to popular music and vice versa; Faye Wong is one of many. For example, Jackie Chan recorded songs accompanying the closing credits for several of his films including The Legend of the Drunken Master, which was released the same year as Chungking Express. For those unfamiliar with the song, The Cranberries’ original lyrics to «Dreams» are as follows: (verse) Oh, my life is changing every day, in every possible way. And oh, my dreams, it’s never quite as it seems, never quite as it seems. (chorus) I know I’ve felt like this before, but now I’m feeling it even more ,because it came from you. And then I open up and see the person falling here is me, a different way to be. Ah, la da ah…la…(verse) I want more, impossible to ignore, impossible to ignore. They’ll come true, impossible not to do, impossible not to do. (chorus) And now I tell you openly, you have my heart so don’t hurt me. You’re what I couldn’t find. A totally amazing mind, so understanding and yet so kind, you’re everything to me. (verse) Oh, my life, is changing every day, in every possible way. And oh, my dreams, it’s never quite as it seems, ’cause you’re a dream to me, dream to me. Ah, la da ah…la… The lyrics to Faye Wong’s contrafact, «Dream Lover», express a similar sentiment: (verse) Man in my dreams, I hold you tight for a minute and kiss you for hours. Stranger, you stole my heart and set it all awhirl. (chorus) I’ve been in love with you before, but never felt so close to you as now. My thoughts careen out of control. Why have you taken me by storm, bursting into my dreary dreams, sending shockwaves in every direction? (verse) Man in my dreams, I want you to be real. My heart can no longer resist. Searching in my dreams, at this minute I’m waiting to kiss you for hours. (chorus). Notably, towards the end of the sequence, a phone message recording from Cop 663’s ex-girlfriend creeps into the soundtrack. Faye erases the mechanical recording before leaving the apartment. She literally controls recorded sound.
11. Vivian P.Y. Lee has written in depth on the nature of Hong Kong cinema since the 1997 handover. Although the film industry still thrives primarily on genre films, she identifies a motif of «post-nostalgia» evident in several movies. The end of British colonial rule did not, in her opinion, rupture Hong Kong cinema’s trajectory; rather, it merely enhanced tendencies already at play pre-1997 (Lee 2009).

List of References

Abbas, Ackbar. 1997. «The Erotics of Disappointment». In Wong Kar-wai, edited by Danièle Rivière. 39–82. Paris: Editions Dis Voir.

Altman, Rick. 1992. Sound Theory, Sound Practice. New York: Routledge.

Buhler, James, David Neumeyer, and Rob Deemer. 2010. Hearing the Movies: Music and Sound in Film History. New York: Oxford University Press.

Chion, Michel. 1994. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press.

Chion, Michel. 2009. Film: A Sound Art. Translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press.

Eisler, Hanns, and Theodor W. Adorno. 1947. Composing for the Films. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gorbman, Claudia. 1987. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Huang, Tsung-yi. 2002. «Hong Kong Blue: Flâneurie with the Camera’s Eye in a Phantasmagoric Global City». Journal of Narrative Theory 30.3 (Fall 2002): 385–402.

Inglis, Ian. 2003. Popular Music and Film. London: Wallflower.

Lee, Vivian P.Y. 2009. Hong Kong Cinema Since 1997: The Post-Nostalgic Imagination. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Murakami, Haruki. 1993. The Elephant Vanishes. Translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin. New York: A.A. Knopf.

Smith, Jeff. 1990. The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music. New York: Columbia University Press.

Teo, Stephen. 1997. Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions. London: British Film Institute.

Teo, Stephen. 2005. Wong Kar-wai. London: British Film Institute.

Sounds

Bach, Johann Sebastian. 1991. The Goldberg Variations in Silence of the Lambs. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jgza7PwUr6k (accessed 22 April 2013).

Brown, Dennis. 1972. Things in Life. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-FWc1dFVIs (accessed 18 January 2013).

The Cranberries. 1993. Dreams. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yam5uK6e-bQ (accessed 30 January 2013).

Kwan, Shirley. 1995. Wang ji ta/Forget Him. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVkDgTjHKNQ (accessed 22 April 2013).

The Mamas and the Papas. 1965/1994. California Dreamin’ in Chungking Express. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAH-0GKvIrM (accessed 18 January 2013).

Perry, Katy. 2010. California Girls. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F57P9C4SAW4 (accessed 24 April 2013).

Wong, Faye. 1994. Dream Lover. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7yez4lXjBI (accessed 18 January 2013).

Filmography

Ashes of Time. 1998. Directed by Wong Kar-wai. 1994. San Francisco, CA: Cav Distribution. DVD.

Chungking Express. 2008. Directed by Wong Kar-wai.1994. Burbank, CA: Buena Vista Home Entertainment/The Criterion Collection. Blu-ray.

Days of Being Wild, 2004. Directed by Wong Kar-wai. 1990. New York: Kino International. DVD.

Fallen Angels. 2009. Directed by Wong Kar-wai. 1995. New York: Kino International. DVD.

Happy Together. 2004. Directed by Wong Kar-wai. 1997. New York: Kino on Video. DVD.

In the Mood for Love. 2002. Directed by Wong Kar-wai. 2000. United States: Criterion. DVD.

Laura, 2004. Directed by Otto Preminger. 1944. Beverly Hills, CA: Fox Home Entertainment. DVD.

The Legend of the Drunken Master 2011. Directed by Chia-Liang Liu. 1994. Santa Monica, CA: Miramax Lionsgate. DVD.

The Silence of the Lambs, 2001. Directed by Jonathan Demme. 1991. Santa Monica, CA: MGM. DVD.

Biography

Brooke McCorkle earned degrees in International Relations with East Asia (2004) and Music (2008) from the University of Oklahoma. Since then, she has continued her work at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2012, the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations awarded her a Master’s degree based on her thesis, «Nature, Technology, and Sound Design in Gojira (1954)». Currently, she is completing a PhD in musicology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation, «Searching for Wagner in Japan», analyzes the reception of Richard Wagner’s music and prose works in Japanese history and popular culture. In the future, she hopes to pursue a project on film sound in East Asian cinema. Follow her on LinkedIn

Published on July 05, 2013

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Can’s «Mother Sky» in Skolimowsky's «Deep End» (1970)

Academic Text

by Benjamin Court

Psychedelic Echoes of German New Left Negative Utopianism.

In tracing the historical context of German psychedelic music (also known as «Krautrock» or «Kosmische Musik»), a convenient musical/political narrative arises as a result of the events of 1968.1 In this year, the Zodiak Free Arts Lab (founded by Conrad Schnitzler and Hans-Joachim Roedelius) began its earliest concerts, exposing West Berlin to new forms of experimental and electronic music. The Internationale Essener Songtage brought some of the stranger sounds of British and American rock music to Germany (e.g. Frank Zappa, the Fugs, Family) as well as early concerts by German psychedelic bands Amon Düül, Guru Guru, Xhol Caravan, and Tangerine Dream. In Cologne, two former students of Karlheinz Stockhausen founded a new rock group named Can. 1968 was also the year of intense leftist revolutionary political action amongst students in Germany and across continental Europe. The student protests during May of 1968 were particularly violent in Germany, primarily as a result of the death of Benno Ohnesorg during student protests the previous year and the assassination attempt of Rudi Dutschke in April of 1968.2

However, this narrative that aligns West German music post-’68 and West German politics post-’68 presents a serious historical problem. Namely, how directly engaged with politics was West German rock music? In addressing this general question, this essay contains two specific purposes. First, I will attempt a broad understanding of the impact of utopianism on German psychedelia. Second, by analyzing Can’s song «Mother Sky», and how it fits within the Jerzy Skolimowski film Deep End, I hope to exemplify some specific ways that these political and theoretical influences materialized within the formal aesthetic features of German psychedelia. In particular, Deep End demonstrates a dialectic between material (or «realist») themes and the psychedelic aesthetic of imagination that reflects the negative utopianism of Ernst Bloch and Herbert Marcuse.

One thing I do not argue is that Can and their music have a direct link to the radical politics of ’68. Instead, I argue that if there is a political element to their music, it is in an indirect reflection of social changes in West Germany at the time. Can keyboardist Irmin Schmidt described this relationship as «symptomatic» of the events of ’68:

We’re musicians. To make that clear: our music had no political implications and there was no political message in its content – nothing like the ‘68ers. But something of the feeling of the times shows in that each of us at some point left what we were doing to join the band Can. If I talk about myself now: someone who had a career as a conductor before him, but then suddenly formed a rock band – well, that doesn’t happen every day and is therefore symptomatic for the sixties…We agreed to change something, to start something new. (Schmidt and Kampmann 1999, 399)

Thus, Schmidt, despite his objection to the idea that Can were a political band, recognizes that their music reflects some of the principles of the youth movement. Can saw themselves as constituting a different kind of social formulation that did not engage in «politics» in the sense of explicit interaction with the actions of parties, protests, or platforms. Instead, Can’s music was a trace of the political imagination of cultural possibilities in 1960s West Germany. As Schmidt makes clear, the desire «to start something new» recognized a different conception of the functions of popular music than mere entertainment. While his quote evades the concept of politics, clearly what is «symptomatic» about his description of the group’s social stance is its reflection of certain historical political ideals.

The idea of symptomatic or even «reflective» relationships between music and politics implies a direct correlation between text and context that may seem to evade agency. Despite my historical argument's reliance on the political contexts of the music and film, much of my primary evidence relies on the individual subjective accounts from the members of Can. As composers and performers, Can did not merely «reflect» by representing the contexts of their surroundings, but «reflect» in an interpretive sense that involves critique and creativity. Moreover, the reimagination of cultural forces like music and politics were not entirely unique to Germany, and indeed my argument does not contain any sense of an essential German national identity. One could make the same arguments about psychedelic musicians in any part of the world that experienced the symbiotic creation of psychedelic music and New Left politics (and indeed, both were global occurences).3 I have chosen to focus on Can and the German New Left because of personal interest, but also because of the richness of scholarship available on German politics during this era.

While there are definite overlaps between the German psychedelic scene and the radical leftist politics that both carried over into the 1970s, the interactions are not entirely clear. Arne Koch and Sei Harris (2009) identified a stance that they referred to as the «politics of the unpolitical». Borrowed from Gordon Craig’s analysis of Goethe’s artistic context, Koch and Harris read a political potential into the band Faust’s unwillingness to attach their music to specific worldly contexts.4 By maintaining a notion of musical autonomy «in seeking to create a music all their own… Faust without a question strove to create a world that was all their own» (2009, 581). For Koch and Harris, this idea of new musical worlds allowed for an escape from the criminal politics of twentieth century Germany and into a realm that simply provided something different. Lloyd Isaac Vayo (2009) saw the German psychedelic band Neu! as a part of a musical attempt to create a new German identity in the post-war era. Michael T. Putnam (2009) portrays German rock music from the 1970s as a musical response to the radical politics of the Red Army Faction. Instead of arguing a correlation between music and national identity, Putnam sees German rock (particularly the band Ton Steine Scherben) as reacting against German identity and the «Auschwitz generation» in order to establish an international position that is isomorphic with the RAF’s ideal of «proletarian internationalism» (2009, 596-597). While many rock journalists have associated German psychedelia with Baader-Meinhof and the RAF, Putnam is careful not to overreach the boundaries of his claims.5 Indeed, there is little evidence that bands from this era supported the radical left-wing beyond their relationships with communes and squatters, but Putnam limits the scope of his argument to the rare examples of «Krautrock-affiliated» groups that did support political violence – Ton Steine Scherben and Einstürzende Neubauten (2009, 600). Similarly, Ulrich Adelt (2012b) interprets this period of rock music as attempting to cope with the Stunde Null («Hour Zero«) era of German history. Adelt (2012a) saw Can as eliding their identity as a «German band« in favor of a more «global» musical identity. While all of these scholars provide useful models for understanding psychedelic music in this era, for this particular essay, dealing with the concept of utopia, Koch and Harris's model of musical escapism provides an excellent starting point. In order to comprehend the context of the utopian ideals at this time, an explication of the social/historical use of utopianism is necessary.

The German New Left and Utopian Theory

One major distinction between the German New Left (of the 1960s and early 70s) and previous generations of post-war leftists was their rejection of Theodor Adorno. While Adorno held extreme intellectual capital amongst the German left wing during the post-war era, his work fell out of fashion during the New Left movement of the 1960s, partially due to his outright dismissal of popular culture. Famously, Adorno’s final course at Frankfurt University in the summer of 1969, «An Introduction to Dialectical Thinking», was interrupted by student protestors angered by Adorno’s condemnation of the New Leftist student movement.6 Leftist student groups like the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (or Socialist German Student Association) heavily criticized Adorno’s view on art as lacking praxis and encouraging an artistic «intellectual domination» that was a «precondition for domination in all other areas» (Von Dirke 1997: 52). In 1967, the young philosopher Helmut Lethen critiqued Adorno during a public debate on the merits of Walter Benjamin’s theories of mechanical reproduction by claiming Adorno «feared the eruption of aesthetic barbarism if all privileged aesthetic education were to be abandoned» (Von Dirke 1997: 56). While some Adornians theorized from within the student movement (such as Michael Scharang), they still largely rejected Adorno’s valorization of high art while favoring Adorno’s critiques of aesthetic autonomy.7

Instead, the younger generation of leftists looked toward utopian thinkers like Benjamin, Bloch, and Marcuse as theorists that radically rejected authoritarian politics and capitalism while maintaining an anti-elitist view that blurred the capabilities of «high» and «low» art. Marcuse, in particular, was one of the most popular theorists amongst student movements around the world. Authoritarian society, for Marcuse (1968), no longer functioned through overt dominance and control, but rather through the draining of consciousness that made resistance nearly impossible. Equally informed by Freud and Marx, Marcuse established a number of guiding principles that influenced the student movements: radical political action, a focus on selfhood (and the metaphysical concepts of Mind, Consciousness, Will, and Soul), and creative imagination. While Marcuse explicitly argued revolution as an active, subjective process, his views on utopia argued not for the ideological installation of free society, but rather the forceful elimination of unfree society (or «Great Refusal»). Fredric Jameson articulated this stance under the term «negative utopianism»:

If you know already what your longed-for exercise in a not-yet-existence looks like, then the suspicion arises that it may not really express freedom after all but only repetition; while the fear of projection, of sullying an open future with our own deformed and repressed social habits in the present, is a perpetual threat to the indulgence of fantasies of the future collectivity. (2000, 385)

For Jameson, Marcuse’s utopian thought does not convey a specific narrative account of the future (evading the conventional understanding of utopia as a «perfect world»), but instead describes a «mechanism» or «machine» which allows for a free social narrative.8 And for Marcuse, this mechanism resides largely in the aesthetic realm: «Like technology, art creates another universe of thought against and within the existing one. But in contrast to the technical universe, the artistic universe is one of illusion, semblance, Schein» (1968: 238). These new ideals greatly influenced the German leftists of the 1960s and 70s, particularly the notion of creative imagination. The phrase «Phantasie an die Macht!» («All Power to the Imagination!») became the rallying cry of much of the protests around ’68, and the link between utopian imagination and material political change placed art into a privileged position. In the Maoist influenced political environment of ’68, the idea of cultural power over political situations was an attractive feature of Marcuse.9

Prefiguring Marcuse, Bloch’s particular brand of negative utopianism not only influenced the theoretical ideals of the German New Left, but also provides a useful lens for music history. Two of Bloch’s major texts, The Spirit of Utopia (2000, originally published 1918) and The Principle of Hope (1986, originally published 1938-1947) established the nature of the undefined «not-yet» in negative utopia. As opposed to Marcuse, who argued for direct utopian political action, utopianism for Bloch lies latent in society as a «spirit» waiting to be realized. What most clearly realizes this utopian spirit for Bloch is, in fact, music.10 Yet, this spirit does not remain solely in the realm of the imagined, the unreal, or the abstract.11 The utopian function of art is to build a surplus of anticipatory imagination, which materializes beyond the realm of culture and into politics and society.12 In other words, art, through the power of imagination, fosters utopia by blurring the borders between the present and the not-yet. Music is the pure expression of spirit because of the special stance of the «tone» in Bloch's philosophy. The tone largely opposes the «word», and while music is not entirely outside the realm of the word, the two are in conflict and can never fully resolve. This theory seems to be modeled after traditional notions of musical autonomy, and while Bloch does argue an ineffability of the tone that is «unencumbered by the world», his focus is on the tone as a «phenomenal» (i.e. listened to) entity (2000, 120). Thus, music is both a phenomenal object and something that points outside normal existence. This dialectic is more than just allegorical, it is the essential core of Bloch’s utopianism. Dialectical music of the tone is the highest order of music for Bloch: «absolute music», a somewhat idiosyncratic term for Bloch. Instead of its usual nineteenth century associations, Bloch uses the term «absolute» to mean that which is most closely related to the «pure» utopian tone and specifies that this music should be «spontaneous, speculative» (2000, 93).

While all of Bloch’s musical examples are from either Western art music or speculative interpretations of ancient songs, his musical-utopian writings make an explicit point not to reduce the political potential of music to one specific type. Bloch is clear to point out that the absolute in music is not only confined to the nineteenth century German Romantic examples he uses and that the theoretical focus on specific musical properties «only conflicts with music as a utopian existence-sound when the world of laws… become a kind of auditory formal fetish» (1986, 1074). Yet, there is no doubt that Bloch favors Western art music. He refers to Wagner’s transcendent operas, Beethoven, and Bruckner as the most genuinely utopian (Bloch 2000, 15). But more importantly, in order to exceed the mere «laws» that conflict with the not-yet, the absolute tone (regardless of style) is what holds the spirit of utopia. While both Bloch and Marcuse were important thinkers with connections to the undeniably elite Frankfurt School, both were influential thinkers amongst young New Leftists.

Can, «Mother Sky», and Deep End

How then, can we understand the historical context of psychedelic music amongst the utopian ideals supported by the New Left in Germany? Certainly, Marcuse and Bloch could not prefigure psychedelic music in their writings and were not referring to anything near what we understand as a «psychedelic experience». And as mentioned, most bands, including Can, did not see themselves as overtly political in the sense of the student movement or the RAF. Thus, the connection between utopian theory and psychedelic music is an indirect one. In this particular case, Can functioned as a cultural actualization of many of the New Left ideals. Specifically, the band reflected three politicized notions of aesthetics from the era: (1) a blurring of the boundaries between high and low art, (2) a conviction regarding the possibilities of creative imagination, (3) a conception of communal, anti-hierarchical creation. As an example, I will focus on their song «Mother Sky», composed and performed for the soundtrack to the 1970 Jerzy Skolimowski film Deep End.

From the onset, the group formed around a mixture of musicians experienced in separate avant-garde and popular musical cultures. The group was dedicated to crossing between supposedly high and low realms of art that echoed the rhetoric of the student movements in the late 1960s. As mentioned, keyboardist Irmin Schmidt was in school at the Rheinische Musikschule to be a conductor and studied, along with bassist Holger Czukay, under the famous avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.13 Can originally comprised Czukay, Schmidt, Germans Michael Karoli (guitar) and Jaki Liebezeit (drums), and American Malcolm Mooney (vocals), though the band replaced Mooney with Japanese Damo Suzuki (vocals) when Mooney returned to America in 1970. Schmidt and Czukay claim to have decided to start a rock group in 1968 after hearing the Beatles' «I Am the Walrus» (from Magical Mystery Tour) for the first time, and many of the popular Anglo-American records that influenced German psychedelia showed an interest in avant-garde music (including the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa, the Pink Floyd, and Captain Beefheart) (Stubbs 2010, 7-8). Schmidt noted, «I saw that in the States there was not that difference being made between high and low culture, between the classical music and entertainment and pop...That was a turning point. Jazz and rock and pop was a new phenomenon, and for me became as necessary as theory. So I wanted to bring it all together» (Schmidt 2012a). While most of their music is in a clear tradition of rock music from the 1960s, the extended improvisations not only demonstrate the influence of jazz and fusion groups, but also experiments with chromatic extended, and occasionally atonal, harmonies. For example, in «Mother Sky», the blues-based guitar solo (an extremely rare occurrence in Can’s music) frequently diverges from the traditional blues scale and utilizes extended noise and feedback techniques.14

Moreover, the extreme repetition in the drums and bass display the influence of the trance-like ideals associated with minimalism.15During his tutelage with Stockhausen, Schmidt befriended and collaborated with famous minimalists like Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and LaMonte Young (Czukay and Schmidt 1998). Often referred to as the «motorik» drum style, Liebezeit considered his role to be a formal one, providing emptiness: «I can only work with space when I let go of something. Contrastingly, if I play a lot of fill, there’s no more space in the music. I’ve always aimed to play space… That creates room for the imagination, something I’ve always strived to do» (Schmidt and Kampmann 1999, 301). Interestingly, Liebezeit’s use of the term «imagination» accords extremely well with Marcuse and Bloch’s notions of negative utopia. In his repetitive beats, Liebezeit created an empty form that allowed for the imagination of others, rather than providing a specific content. Schmidt affirmed this idea when he claimed, «Jaki wanted to make music in which anything could happen» (Schmidt and Kampmann 1999, 60).

This use of the word «imagination» is not at all incidental. In particular, Can valued the creative potentials of composing for film. Karoli recognized the freedom accorded by the «background» nature of film music: «The film scores were not judged on musical criteria, but dramaturgical; so you could play any kind of shit and have lots of freedom to experiment… The individual musical ideas and aspirations were unimportant… Film music was very important for Can because it helped us to continue breaking musical taboos» (Schmidt and Kampmann 1999, 213-214). Indeed, the band’s method of composing for film was highly unusual. First, the filmmaker would show Schmidt (and only Schmidt) a rough cut of the scene that needed to be scored. Then, Schmidt would relay the details of the scene to the rest of the group in what they referred to as his «tales». From there, the group would work to create a structured improvisation around their particular memory and imagination of what the scene was like. In order to foster a sense of imagination, Can used Czukay as an intermediary: «There is a difference if someone is telling you a scene or you are seeing it on a screen. When somebody tells me a story, your fantasy is so unlimited because you're not limited from what you see on a screen» (Czukay 1997). This peculiar method of composition is not only reminiscent of the Marcusian aesthetic theory of eliminating unfreedom, but also Bloch’s idiosyncratic conception of the musical absolute. The object that this music aspires to accompany (the film) is both a tangible thing, and yet outside the known existence of the musicians’ world. Yet, the music is still programmatic, and was intended to be so.16

The idea of selfless creation abounds in interviews with every member of Can. Schmidt commented, «When I started to make music, I wrote. But for a concept like Can, you can't write. This is obvious, because the author is Can. It is creating on the spot» (Czukay and Schmidt 1998). Czukay claimed, «We never came off as particularly German. We focused more on international music scenes. You could even say that we behaved autonomously. Behind all of that was the idea that we were a collective» (Quoted in Schmidt and Kampmann 1999, 132). Moreover, Karoli professed, «I can’t imagine music any other way. Musicians in a group should resonate together in the same way that strings on an instrument do», (Quoted in Schmidt and Kampmann 1999, 213).17 Journalists later termed this idea of collective musical creation as the «Can Virus» because of its widespread impact on other groups (Schmidt and Kampmann 1999). The idea of the commune was extremely important to the German New Left. Rural communes like Kommune 1 offered active alternatives to mainstream German society. In the case of the psychedelic band Amon Düül, the group started as an arts commune that eventually developed into a core ensemble of recording and touring musicians. In urban areas, the residential Wohngemeinschaften became popular amongst student activists. While Can's communal ethos is indicative of this historical context, the group was careful to distance themselves from explicit politics:

We weren’t considered political. And we didn’t take sides, so I guess you could call the band non-political. But in a wider Beuys-like sense, coming together the way we did and forming and working as the collective that we were was a political action. For example, as a collective, we rejected the role of the author, as well as every form of hierarchy. We even split the royalties when one of us hadn’t even played on a song. Jaki once famously said: «Not to play is a musical decision, too!» ... We were totally aware of the importance of owning our means of production, and we were in full control of all the processes that led to musical results. Of course, this is very political. But we refused to comment on daily politics. (Schmidt 2012b)

Deep End presents a style that relates directly to many 1960s aesthetic ideals, and indirectly to the specific ideals of psychedelic art. The film functions as a much more phenomenally «objective» (in Bloch’s words) portrayal of realism. Ewa Mazierska (2010) describes Skolimowski’s films as an oscillation between realism and non-realism, via related concepts like poeticism, surrealism, romanticism, and expressionism. Formally, Skolimowski is often compared to the documentary styles of the French New Wave, as well as his close friend Roman Polanski. Skolimowski’s films reflect a renewed interest in literary realism amongst German leftists of the era. Ingo Cornils identifies a number of persistent themes across literature from the German student movement, many of which correspond to Deep End, including a focus on difficult sexual experiences, the impact of popular music, and «inability to communicate with one another» (2003, 298-301). While made by a Polish filmmaker, the cast and crew of Deep End were largely British and German.

The film tells the story of a young teenaged boy, Mike (John Moulder Brown), and his infatuation with an older coworker, Susan (Jane Asher). Throughout the film, Mike physically pursues Susan while she goes on dates with other men, often while Susan intentionally taunts Mike to arouse his jealousy. The scene using «Mother Sky» shows Mike confusedly searching the streets of the red light district for Susan or for anyone that might have any information about her. Mazierska describes the scene as such:

In Deep End, the music of Can appears when Mike loses touch with reality and either cannot control his emotions or starts dreaming. An example is the episode of Mike searching for Susan in a night club and on the streets of Soho, accompanied by Can’s «Mother Sky». On this occasion Mike appears to be as frantic and uncontrollable as the song we are hearing. (2010, 159)

The most crucial point that Mazierska calls attention to is the idea that this song accompanies a break from the reality of the narrative. While the film maintains many of the formal long-shot documentary features during this scene, a number of absurdities begin to pile up, including Mike’s continuous purchase of hot dogs from a street vendor, his theft of a nude cardboard cutout from a strip club, and his encounter with an out-of-work prostitute with a broken leg.

While Mazierska’s description accurately frames the thematic content of the scene, it lacks a description of some of its most crucial musical-visual traits. The scene cuts directly from Mike receiving his first weekly pay from the bathhouse. In this preceding scene, Mike displays many of his usual sex-frightened qualities as the older, female administrator enters his small changing room, removes her glasses, and playfully chews on them as she stares at him. Mike tenses up, avoids eye contact, and remains silent, until the administrator commands him, «Just sign», as she hands him a clipboard with his pay. Immediately after the scene cut, Mike coolly struts into a dining club, wearing a suit and accompanied by the opening guitar solo of «Mother Sky». Karoli described this solo as the only guitar solo he had ever played in his career and that he only played it because «that’s what was wanted» (Schmidt and Kampmann 1999, 211). Thus, the solo seems to signify an ironic sense of masculine bravado as the coy child makes his best attempt at manhood. As Mike enters the dining club to find Susan, Skolimowski shoots the scene primarily with long circling shots around Mike and the hostess. As the shots continue, and the solo becomes increasingly chromatic, Mike’s plan to find Susan unravels; his attempt to assert masculine adulthood fails to convince the hostess that he is a member of the club and his meager paycheck is not enough to buy even a single drink. This solo ends just as Mike exits to the street and begins wandering. After Mike completes his embarrassing attempt by bumping into the doorman and a group of well dressed club members, Suzuki’s vocals begin. From this point on, Suzuki’s vocals are timed perfectly to end during sections with dialog and begin during sections without dialog. The semiotic significance of the guitar solo, as well as its timing and the vocals’ timing, provide empirical evidence that Can composed the song with a programmatic objective in mind.

An excerpt of the scene from Skolimowsky's Deep End featuring Can's «Mother Sky»:

Mike’s character is constantly performing a type of imagining, yet having this imagination squelched by the harsh realities of his existence, usually regarding capital. His failure to pay into the dining club is only the beginning of a series of rejections in the delirious scene featuring «Mother Sky». When he spots a nude cardboard cutout of what he thinks is Susan in front of a strip club, Mike asks the doorman where he got it from and the doorman responds, by calling her «Angelica» and saying, «Why do you ask her yourself, if you can afford her. Very expensive girl». His fervent defense of this cardboard cutout as he wanders the streets provides an appropriate allegory. Mike is not even entirely sure this woman is Susan, or why there is a cutout of her. Yet, he clutches an objectified, topless version of her – quite literally a two-dimensional version of Susan upon which he can project his own imagination. As he stumbles into the room of a prostitute with a broken leg, the woman incessantly questions him about money: how much he makes, how many tips he got, how much money he gives his parents, how much she was worth, how much she’s worth with a broken leg, and «the things we could do for 3 quid». As she steals the cardboard cutout and runs her own leg across it, Mike expresses his usual sexual ambivalence, trapped between the intimidating advances of the older woman, and his own sexual imagination. The only way Mike can assert control over his own situation is by continuously purchasing hot dogs from a street vendor, an expense within his means.

Importantly, the music cuts completely when Mike stumbles into the room of the injured prostitute. While the song was completely non-diegetic up until this point, the prostitute puts the needle on a record, resuming the song where it had left off. This use of music elicits a number of possible interpretations. By shifting the song from non-diegetic to diegetic (and eventually back), Skolimowski blurs the boundaries between interior and exterior space. As Mazierski theorizes, one of the primary functions of music in Deep End is to act as the «voice of the soul of the main character, Mike» (2010, 159).18 In this regard, «Mother Sky» functions well within Bloch’s dialectic of the phenomenal contextualization of music with its emancipatory ineffability. In other words, the diegetic border that the song crosses alludes strongly to a border between a material exterior (as «real» existence), and some kind of subjective phenomenal expression of Mike’s interiority. From the viewer/listener’s perspective, the music feels like something that is curiously both an object of Mike’s world and an imagined result of Mike’s affect.

Conclusion

In the relationship between music and politics, the imagination of utopia acted as a suture. Can's unwillingness to participate in politics as such resulted in a «symptomatic» trace of the utopian in their musical creation, particularly their work on Deep End. It is the dialectical nature of negative utopian theory that provides a space for music of imagination to work within such a starkly realistic film. While it is difficult to think of utopianism as having a fruitful relationship with realism (as a genre), the utopian artistic imagination, as conceived by Bloch and Marcuse, is much closer to realism than fantasy. This idea is most easily grasped when considering Can’s film compositional aims. Can were not trying to create some type of total musical abstraction, or send listeners to a distant dream world, but instead had their musical imagination oriented toward a material objective. Their open improvisations were still structured – their film imaginings were still based on an idea of the scene. As the New Left proposed, art, regardless of its status as high or low, is something capable of pointing outside of the everyday. Yet, this imagining is not pure escapism. The function of music, in Can’s case, is to reflect a material form of imagination (that is, imagining an actual set of characters) without the taint of forcibly projected content. The interaction between Can’s psychedelic imagination and Skolimowski’s stark realism is more than just an allegory of utopian theory, it comprises the actual material of these ideals. For the artists of this era, imagination was not an empty wondering, nor was it ideological projection, but rather it was an unmarked hope. Bloch’s idea of the «not-yet» perhaps best summarized this idea; the importance was not in what was not yet, but rather that there was something yet to come.

1. The term «Krautrock» was developed initially by the British press and is an (understandably) unfavorable term to some German musicians. Kosmische Musik sometimes refers to artists released by the record label of the same name. Thus, I prefer the term «German psychedelic» because it provides the most general understanding of diverse German musical scenes.
2. Andreas Baader’s first act of revolutionary destruction occurred in April, 1968 when his group destroyed a Frankfurt department store with explosives. West Germany passed emergency anti-terrorism laws shortly after (Passmore 2011, x-xi).
3. By «New Left», I mean the largely student-based leftist movement that grew around the globe during the 1960s. This movement rejected many of the class-based teachings of orthodox Marxism in favor of a more socially and culturally based form of leftism.
4. Martin Scherzinger has explored the political potentials of formalism in his dissertation, «Musical formalism as radical political critique: From European modernism to African spirit possession», (2001). Moreover, other scholars recognize the influence of Romanticism on this era of German art (Cornils 2000; Peucker 1984).
5. One notable example is David Stubbs’s introduction to Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and Its Legacy (2010, 4-18).
6. Jillian Becker describes this event and other examples of student «abuse» of Adorno, while implying that these protests inadvertently caused Adorno’s death, in her controversial book Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang (1989, 44-45).
7. While the Red Army Faction criticized many leftist intellectuals including Adorno, Ulrike Meinhof was personally interested in his writings, particularly his theory of «broken communication», (Passmore 2011: 20). For a full history of Adorno’s place in the German student movement, see Von Dirke 1997, 49-60.
8. Despite the anti-ideological core of Marcuse’s beliefs, critics of utopianism maintain that all utopian Marxists are necessarily «totalitarian» (see Kolakowski 1978). For a neo-liberal critique of utopianism within musicology, see Taruskin 2008.
9. «Marcuse follows Freud, maintaining that only art has been able to resist capitalism’s reality principle – instrumental rationality. He views aesthetic form as the essential category that prevents art from falling prey to this dominant reality principle, since ‘behind the sublimated aesthetic form, the unsublimated content shows forth: the commitment of art to the pleasure principle», (Von Dirke 1997, 41).
10. For one in-depth musicological account of Bloch, see Korstvedt 2010.
11. «The imagination of the utopian function that in this [artistic] way differs from mere fantasy in that only the former possesses an expectable not-yet-existence; i.e., it does not play around in an unoccupied potentiality and does not go astray but anticipates a real potentiality in a psychical way» (Bloch 1988 105).
12. Attractively for the New Left (but perhaps problematically for the postmodern academy), Bloch ascribes the actualization of this political process in a vitalist sense of Will, and refers to the spirit of utopia as «the ultimate material of the soul» (2000: 92).
13. Before Can, Schmidt and Czukay were inspired upon meeting a number of famous American experimentalists in 1966 including John Cage, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and many of the Fluxists in 1966 (Schmidt and Kampmann 1999, 56).
14. While the specific influence in this song is not clear, all of the members of Can had training in non-Western music. Suzuki and Schmidt had studied Japanese music (including Noh and Bugaku music), Liebezeit was interested in Arabian music, and Schmidt and Karoli both researched Balinese music (Czukay and Schmidt 1998; Adelt 2012a).
15. Vayo (2009) theorizes about repetition in regards to the German psychedelic band Neu! that it reflects Benjamin’s concepts of reproduction.
16. Schmidt confirmed that «Mother Sky» was especially composed for the film and that certain formal decisions were made to accommodate the scene (Schmidt and Kampmann 1999, 75-76).
17. This statement comes extremely close to Bloch’s ideas in the essay «Magic rattle, human harp»: «The singer really still is a beating drum, or rather, a harp that plays its own music» (1985, 143).
18. Diegesis refers to sounds assumed to be within the filmic world of the narrative, and thus able to be heard by the characters. In contrast, non-diegetic sound is sound outside of the filmic world, often heard as part of the film score (see Chion 1994).

List of References

Adelt, Ulrich. 2012a. «Machines with a Heart: German Identity in the Music of Can and Kraftwerk». Popular Music and Society 35 (3): 359–74.

Adelt, Ulrich. 2012b. «Stande Null: Postwar German Identity in the Music of Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger». Journal of Popuar Music Studies 24 (1): 39–56.

Becker, Jilian. 1989. Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang. London: Pickwick.

Bloch, Ernst. 1985. Essays on the Philosophy of Music. Translated by Peter Palmer. Cambridge: Cambridge Universiy Press.

Bloch, Ernst. 1986. The Principle of Hope. Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Bloch, Ernst. 2000. The Spirit of Utopia. Translated by Anthony A. Nassar. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Bloch, Ernst. 1988. The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays. Translated by Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Chion, Michel. 1994. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Translated by Claudia Gorbmann. New York: Columbia University Press.

Cornils, Ingo. 2000. «‹Romantic Relapse?› The Literary Representation of the German Student Movement». In German Studies Towards the Millenium, edited by Christopher Hall and David Rock. 107–23. Bern: Peter Lang.

Cornils, Ingo. 2003. «Writing the Revolution: The Literary Representation of the German Student Movement as Counter-Culture». In Counter-Cultures in Germany and Central Europe: From Sturm Und Drang to Baader-Meinhof, edited by Steve Giles and Maike Oergel. Bern: Peter Lang.

Jameson, Frederic. 2000. The Jameson Reader. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks. Oxford: Blackwell.

Koch, Arne, and Sei Harris. 2009. «The Sound of Yourself Listening: Faust and the Politics of the Unpolitical». Popular Music and Society 32 (5): 579–94.

Kolakowski, Leszek. 1978. Currents of Marxism: Its Origin, Growth and Dissolution. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Korstvedt, Benjamin M. 2010. Listening for Utopia in Ernst Bloch’s Musical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Marcuse, Herbert. 1968. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon.

Mazierska, Ewa. 2010. Jerzy Skolimowski: The cinema of a nonconformist. New York: Berghahn.

Passmore, Leith. 2011. Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction: Performing Terrorism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Peucker, Brigitte. 1984. «Werner Herzog: In Quest of the Sublime». In New German filmmakers: from Oberhausen through the 1970s, edited by Klaus Phillips. 168–94. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Putnam, Michael T. 2009. «Music as a Weapon: Reactions and Responses to RAF Terrorism in the Music of Ton Steine Scherben and their Successors in Post-9/11 Music». Popular Music and Society 32 (5): 595–606.

Scherzinger, Martin. 2001. Musical Formalism as Radical Political Critique: From European Modernism to African Spirit Possession. PhD diss. Columbia.

Stubbs, David. 2010. «Introduction». In Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and Its Legacy, edited by Nikos Kotsopoulos. London: Black Dog.

Taruskin, Richard. 2008. The Dangers of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Vayo, Lloyd Isaac. 2009. «What’s Old is NEU! Benjamin Meets Rother and Dinger». Popular Music and Society 32 (5): 617–34.

von Dirke, Sabine. 1997. All Power to the Imagination!»: The West German Counterculture from the Student Movement to the Greens. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Filmography

Deep End. 1970. Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski. London. British Film Institute, 2011. DVD.

Sounds

The Beatles. 1967. Magical Mystery Tour. Capitol SMAL 2835. LP.

Can. 1970. Soundtracks. Liberty LBS 83 437 I. LP.

Interviews

Czukay, Holger. 1997. Interview with Jason Gross. Perfect Sound Forever, accessed February 6, 2013, http://www.furious.com/perfect/holger.html.

Czukay, Holger and Irmin Schmidt. 1998. Interview with Damon Krukowsi. Terrasound, accessed February 6, 2013, http://www.terrascope.co.uk/MyBackPages/Can.htm.

Schmidt, Hildegard and Wolf Kampmann, ed. 1999. Can Box: Book. Münster: Medium Music Books.

Schmidt, Irmin. 2012a. “Irmin Schmidt: The Lost Tapes,” interview with Robbin Murray. Clash Music, accessed February 6, 2012, http://www.clashmusic.com/feature/the-lost-tapes-irmin-schmidt.

Schmidt, Irmin. 2012b. Interview with Max Dax. Electronic Beats, accessed February 6,2012, http://www.electronicbeats.net/2012/10/04/max-dax-interviews-irmin-schmidt.

Biography

Benjamin Court is a PhD student in musicology at UCLA. He is originally from Rochester, NY and received his B.A. in music and history from SUNY Buffalo (2009). He is interested in a wide variety of popular and experimental musics from the twentieth century. In particular, his current research explores noise, psychedelia, electronic music, punk and post-punk, hip-hop, and European modernism.

Published on July 12, 2013

Last updated on June 27, 2023

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Norient Academic Online Journal Vol. 2

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«Never Go Back»

Academic Text

by Florian Carl

Ghanaian Gospel Music, Born-Again Christianity, and the Nonconformity of the Ethnographer.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, make I tell you something: The world has nothing good for me. Dey go fi tell you say, make you come back. In fact, make you focus your mind, focus your eyes, follow Jesus, sotey! ‘Cause na he go give you better, better, better things! Na he go give you babies, na he go give you money, na he go give you anything that you want in this world!

(«Never Go Back», Evangelist Diana Asamoah feat. Adu Patrick)

Gospel music, today, is arguably the most thriving sector of commercial music production in Ghana, being widely visible and audible in the country’s public sphere and reaching deep into the domestic spaces of people’s everyday lives.1 In the Ghanaian context gospel refers to a conglomerate of styles with no clear-cut boundaries to other musical genres. Principally, any music can be made gospel through reference to Christian themes in the lyrics of songs. Styles range from more traditional dance-drumming types such as agbadza or adowa to popular guitar band music as well as its more recent electronic derivates. For the purpose of this paper, which more generally deals with the ethnography of gospel music and born-again Christianity2 in Ghana, I will concentrate on the latter styles of popular music that dominate Ghana’s mediascape. Most notably among these is gospel highlife which nowadays, in contrast to the classic guitar band highlife of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, often heavily relies on computer programming and synthesized sounds. The article explores the significance of gospel music in its socio-religious context and scrutinizes its role in the constitution of a cosmopolitan Pentecostal-Charismatic public sphere, stressing the centrality of gospel music performance in mediating between individual lifeworlds and global modernity through the use of both local and translocal idioms and styles.

The following discussion of the gospel phenomenon in Ghana will be framed by a critical reflection on ethnomusicological methodology. In this connection, it is particularly the notion of participant observation that will be scrutinized. More than just a methodology, ethnographic fieldwork has come to epitomize the identity of ethnomusicology as an academic discipline, constituting a crucial aspect of its practitioners’ professional self-understanding and often nourishing a profound sense of disciplinary difference (see Barz and Cooley 2008). My exploration of the ethnography of gospel music is necessarily shaped by my personal experience as a white, male researcher who in the Ghanaian context often represents the embodiment of the cultural and racial Other. It is also informed by my current status as an ethnomusicologist who has been trained in Germany and now finds himself in the Ghanaian academic system, teaching ethnomusicological theory and methodology to Ghanaian graduate students and being engaged in a critical dialogue about research methods with Ghanaian colleagues. In a sense, I personify the ambiguity of (music) ethnography in a postcolonial setting like Ghana.

While grounding the following discussion in my own fieldwork experience and ongoing research3 on gospel music in Ghana, I will, at the same time, try to avoid the self-indulgence and «narcissistic reflexivity of postmodern anthropology» that «tends to substitute the facile delights of self-exploration for the methodological confrontation with the gritty realities of the field» (Bourdieu 2003, 281–282). Instead, I want to argue for a move from the opportunistic and relativist stance of participant observation towards critical dialogue and what Pierre Bourdieu has called «participant objectivation» (ibid.). Before I proceed with my critical examination of methodology, a brief overview of born-again Christianity will help putting gospel music in Ghana into perspective.

Born-Again Christianity in Ghana

The prominence of gospel music can only be understood against the backdrop of the spectacular growth of Pentecostal-Charismatic churches over the course of the past decades, a phenomenon that is not restricted to Ghana but which is part of a larger transnational movement (e.g., Coleman 2000; Gifford 1998, Meyer 2004; Robbins 2004).4 The roots of Pentecostalism are usually traced back to the so-called Azusa Street revival that was initiated in Los Angeles by the African American preacher William J. Seymour at the beginning of the twentieth century (Robbins 2004, 120). In the West African context, however, the prophetic movement of the early twentieth century that led to the establishment of a number spiritual or so-called African Independent Churches had an equally important impact on its development (Amanor 2004, 13–19). The more recent success of Charismatism in Ghana found an important breeding ground in the political and economic crisis of the nineteen-seventies and eighties, and the subsequent submission to structural adjustment programs imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (Gifford 1994 and 2004, 3–6). While a distinction can be made between older Pentecostal churches that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century and newer Charismatic denominations that emerged in the past three to four decades (sometimes also called Neo-Pentecostal), all these types of evangelical Christianity share forms of worship and a common set of believes. These include the believe in the need for personal conversion (to be «born again»), biblical inerrancy, and the emphasis of spontaneous inspiration by the Holy Spirit,5 expressed through spiritual gifts like miracles, healing, prophecy, and speaking in tongues (glossolalia).

Poster announcing an event with the Nigerian televangelist David Oyedepo (photo: author).

Many Charismatic churches in Ghana, today, maintain strong ties to the transnational networks of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity, particularly Nigerian and American televangelists, and they are also interlinked with the networks of the Ghanaian diaspora (Akyeampong 2000, 204–213). Born-again Christianity permeates all spheres of Ghanaian society, though particularly the new mega-churches in the urban areas seem to disproportionally attract young, educated and upwardly mobile people (De Witte 2003, 178–182; Meyer 2004, 260). Some of these, such as Mensa Otabil’s International Central Gospel Church or Nicholas Duncan-Williams’ Action Chapel International, draw several thousand people to the Sunday services at their main branches in Accra (Gifford 2004, 23–27). Charismatism has, at the same time, penetrated other strands of Christianity so that «there is not a Christian church in Ghana or Nigeria that has not been affected by the revivalist trends of the last few decades» (Hackett 1998:265). Through the extensive appropriation of media technology, Charismatic Christianity is now inseparably intertwined with Ghanaian popular culture. The leaders of the highly mediatized mega-churches are public figures, preaching and performing «miracles» on radio and in TV programs that are produced by their own media companies (De Witte 2003; Hackett 1998).

It has been stressed that music and dance play a central role in Charismatic worship (e.g., Gifford 2004, 35) and they also feature prominent at so-called «crusades» and «gospel revivals» that very much resemble pop concerts. As Rosalind Hackett remarked, «music is […] one of the most important ways in which the charismatics construct their own identity and invade space» (1998, 263). The cassettes, CDs, and music videos of gospel stars such as Christiana Love, Diana Asamoah, Philipa Baafi, Kwaku Gyasi, Ohemaa Mercy, or Ernest Opoku, to name just a few, are promoted on radio and TV. Gospel bands in the churches take up their favorite songs and perform them in Sunday services. Gospel recordings are played back on sound systems at social functions such as weddings and funerals, or by shop owners to attract customers to their stores. Overall, the emergence and pervasive public presence of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity has gradually blurred the distinction between the religious and the secular realm.

Witnessing a Charismatic Worship Service

The first time I witnessed a Charismatic church service was in the Ghanaian diaspora. The so-called Gospel Believers Center International was one among at least a dozen Ghanaian-initiated churches in Berlin and worshipped every Sunday in the Church at Südstern in Kreuzberg. The wife of a Ghanaian store owner whom I had told about my interest in gospel music directed me there. When I entered the church one afternoon in March 2004, the congregation had split up into smaller bible study groups, which were busily engaged in the discussion of a particular bible passage. I was welcomed by a woman wearing a sash on which the word «usher» was boldly written. She asked me whether this would be my first time attending their service, provided me, when I affirmed, with the «Vision Statement» of the church that included a registration form for prospective members, and then guided me to a seat in one of the back rows. After the bible study groups had finished, people went to their seats and a band – made up of a drum set, bass guitar, keyboard, and saxophone – started playing. The whole service consisted more or less of music-making. The band accompanied a vocal quartet that led the congregation, their style being reminiscent of North American gospel music. The first part of the service was a «worship» section, the music being overall mellow and slow, where people sang, prayed with their hands lifted up into the air, some bowing down in devotion, others braking out in tears, or speaking «in tongues». This was followed by an upbeat «praise» section, the music being faster and more joyful, with people dancing, singing and shouting phrases like «Praise the Lord!». There was no hymn book, but the lyrics of the songs, all in English, were projected onto a large screen in front, so that those unfamiliar with them could also sing along.

In accordance with the Gospel Believers’ ambitious evangelical aspirations to build a multicultural and truly international church, the language employed in the service was English rather than Ghana’s most widely spoken lingua franca Twi (Akan), thus, attracting Africans from other Anglophone countries as well as a few Germans in addition to the otherwise predominantly Ghanaian following. In the sermon – the virtually only non-musical part of the service – the pastor spoke about the «divine weapons» each of us possessed, shouting repeatedly: «You have divine weapons! You have divine weapons!» These, he told us, had to be activated through prayer and fasting to protect ourselves from the «demonic forces» that, according to his vivid account, seemed to lurk just about everywhere. As my first personal encounter with the expressive forms of Charismatic Christianity, I must honestly say that the whole experience made me feel slightly uncomfortable, especially the, at times, aggressive tone of the sermon with its militaristic metaphors and the strong fixation on the demonic. Pentecostal-Charismatism’s fundamentalist worldview, the belief in biblical inerrancy, creationism, and generally its anti-intellectualist stance, was not only completely at odds with my rather agnostic, liberal mindset, but directly challenged it and seemed, at first, irreconcilable with the critical rationalism of scientific research.

From Participant Observation to Participant Objectivation

In African studies more generally, Charismatic churches «with their intensive links to transnational circuits, in particular to American televangelists, and their enthusiastic drive to proselytize nonbelievers (researchers included), were», as Birgit Meyer noted, «difficult to accept as viable objects of study» (2004, 448). This might also explain the relative paucity of studies of the gospel phenomenon in Ghana. Those studies that deal with gospel music primarily present narrative historical accounts of the development of Christian music in Ghana over the course of the twentieth century, examining it within an analytical framework that stresses processes of «Africanization» (Atiemo 2006; Collins 1996, 177–188; 2002, 12–13 and 2004). Gospel music both in the context of Charismatic worship as well as in its commercialized, mediated forms and formats, seems to represent one of those fields of popular cultural production that have long been written off in Africanist scholarship because they resist and ultimately dissolve distinctions between «indigenous», genuinely «African» cultural forms and those held to convey a «Western» or «modern» influence (see Barber 1997). With regard to Ghanaian gospel, what is overall lacking are more detailed ethnographic analyses of the ways in which people make sense of and use music in the context of their everyday lives.

Quite apart from conceptual problems that ethnographic fieldwork in translocal, media-saturated contexts brings about, which have been discussed at length elsewhere (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1997; Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Marcus 1995), there are more practical methodological problems that an ethnomusicology of Christianity6 faces. As Jeff Todd Titon pointed out, «fieldwork undertaken among religious groups by ethnomusicologists who are atheists or who hold religious beliefs that differ from their informants’ beliefs» poses «acute problems of stance and identity» (1985, 19) on the part of the researcher. Particularly empathetic notions of participation, as highlighted in the recent «experiential turn» in musical ethnography with its call for «a truly participatory participant observation» (Barz and Cooley 2008, 4), seem problematic in this connection, since «true participation» in the case of Pentecostalism would, as Titon (1985, 22) noted, actually mean conversion. Moreover, the emphasis on experiential reflexivity in music ethnography tends to construct «music participation as a privileged realm», which, as Michelle Bigenho convincingly argued, «works hand in hand with an ethnocentric ideology that affords music an autonomous space» (2008, 30). It seems necessary, therefore, to develop a notion of participant observation that is based less on the romantic ideal of intuitive, empathetic immersion into a different cultural reality, understood as an integrated whole, but more on a practical notion of participant observation as method, where the ethnographer enters a given social field over a period of time and, through observation, interaction and various forms of participation, comes to terms with his/her role and stance vis-à-vis that of other actors in the field.

My own way into the field of Ghanaian Charismatic Christianity, apart from occasional earlier encounters, opened up when I permanently moved from Germany to Ghana in 2006. The first consequence was an increase in mere exposure to gospel music and the soundscape of Charismatic Christianity, which is not restricted to Sunday services but includes regular prayer meetings of congregations throughout the week as well as the popular «all-night» services that usually take place on Friday nights and last until Saturday dawn. On holidays like Christmas and Easter, «crusades» and «revivals» are organized both in churches as well as in open spaces, usually lasting several days and often attracting large crowds. All these activities are widely audible and – as congregations also worship open-air and sometimes in uncompleted structures – visible in public space. In addition, I was frequently invited by people to witness their worship service, which gave me a sense of the differences and similarities between various churches—and, eventually, I even got married in a Charismatic church, involving myself on a regular basis in the activities of my wife’s church, Christ Victory Ministries, a smaller Charismatic congregation that worships in Nungua, Accra, over the course of two and a half years between 2006 and 2009. While I witnessed church activities such as prayer meetings and deliverance sessions that are held during the week, my participation in church life was mainly as an ordinary attendant of Sunday services. I also witnessed rehearsals by the choir and gospel band of the church, but I did not actively participate as a musician in these groups. Like the majority of the other congregation members, I restricted my musical participation to dancing, clapping and singing during worship services.

Performance of the gospel choir of Christ Victory Ministries International in Accra, 2009 (photo: author).

Gaining access to the church through my wife, who was an active member at the time we got to know each other, had advantages for me in at least two regards. First, my presence at church programs and services seemed – even though I was the only «white man» (Twi: oburoni) in the church – quite natural and I did not have to explain my presence over and over again. Second, other members of the congregation knew that my prime reason for being in the church was my wife and our wish to worship together, and it was quite clear to them that I am not a Charismatic myself (though some might have assumed I was gradually converting). While the pastor and other officials in the church knew about my research interest in Charismatic Christianity and readily shared their views and knowledge, my identity as husband and more «orthodox» Christian (i.e., German Lutheran)7 made possible a dialogue with congregation members in which we could talk about differences and similarities of believe and religious experience at the same time that there remained a certain distance between us. In contrast to the stereotypical anthropologist portrayed by Claude Lévi-Strauss, «who is a critic at home and a conformist abroad» (1992, 386), I always maintained my initial critical stance towards Charismatism’s fundamentalist worldview at the same time that the distinction between home and abroad became more and more obsolete.

Thus, the avenue that eventually presented itself for my research on gospel music, particularly when I became more familiar with Ghanaian social discourse in general, was to enter into a critical dialogue with Charismatic Christians (and others) about their as well as my own religious and musical experiences. Such critical dialogue is predicated on the assumption that both researcher and researched share a common social space (Berger 2008), a stance that implicitly undermines anthropological constructions of «the field» as a conceptual elsewhere and a «highly overdetermined setting for the discovery of difference» (Gupta and Ferguson 1997, 5). It is Thomas Csordas who reminds us that, despite the now mostly taken-for-granted call for reflexivity in ethnography, «ethnographic reflexivity [seldom] fully take[s] into account the reflexivity of the other» (Csordas 1997, xi). As far as music ethnography is concerned, rather than «locating the reflexive moment in shared music performance» (Barz and Cooley 2008, 20) and, thus, implicitly presuming that there is an unbridgeable gap between language and (musical) experience, I would follow Csordas in his argumentation that «language is not only a form of observable behavior, but a medium of intersubjectivity, so that it is fair to say that language gives us authentic access to experience» (1997, xii). Whose experience are we talking about in our ethnographic accounts, after all?

To engage in critical dialogue with our research participants we have to reframe reflexivity in ethnography as what Csordas calls the «dialogue of reflexivities» (1997, xi). Since there is an implicit danger in such an analysis of merely reproducing native discourse, there is at the same time the need, as Csordas writes, «for methodological care in setting up the relation between theory and phenomena» (1997, xii). The kind of reflexivity that is needed on the part of the researcher is then not so much the experiential reflexivity that characterizes writings in so-called performative or auto-ethnography, but the kind of meta-reflexivity that Pierre Bourdieu has called «participant objectivation». As he explains: «By ‹participant objectivation›, I mean the objectivation of the subject of objectivation, of the analysing subject – in short, of the researcher herself» (2003, 283; original emphasis). In contrast to the textual reflexivity that has been fostered particularly in North American cultural anthropology, participant objectivation is not meant to help us «to explore […] the ‹lived experience› of the knowing subject but the social conditions of possibility […] of that experience and, more precisely, of the act of objectivation itself» (2003, 282). It is on this methodological basis that we should now be ready to engage in a critical dialogue about the meaning of gospel music and its role in the mediation of global modernity.

Success Stories: Performing the Gospel of Prosperity

One of the most pervasive themes in gospel highlife is personal success, mostly framed through narratives about material prosperity and the accumulation of wealth (see also Atiemo 2006:154). The preoccupation with material wealth goes hand in hand with the so-called «gospel of prosperity» that features prominently in the materialistic theology adopted by Pentecostal-Charismatic churches. More generally, prosperity coupled with a «strong global inclination» (Meyer 2004, 453) are two elements that clearly distinguish Charismatism from other Christian paradigms. Narratives about personal success are highlighted in many gospel songs. The song «Never Go Back», quoted at the outset of this article, for instance, suggests that through faith and by following Jesus, the born-again Christian will eventually get anything s/he wants, including babies (fertility) and money (Asamoah 2009). Other songs tell a similar story. Ohemaa Mercy’s «Wobɛyɛ kɛseɛ», published on the same-titled album (Mercy 2009), promises the listener that she will be «big/great» (i.e. successful) and become a blessing (wobɛyɛ kɛseɛ, wobɛyɛ nhyira o). In the same vein, Christiana Love tells us in one of her songs that through Jesus Christ, she is «moving forward» (Love 2008).

The message of «moving forward» without looking back is related to another pervasive theme of Charismatism, which is transformation (Robbins 2004, 127–130). As Birgit Meyer (1998) explained in further detail, Pentecostal churches often ask their members to «make a complete break with the past», a transformation that is dramatized in «rituals of rupture» (Robbins 2004, 128), thus, constantly revisiting the moment of conversion (i.e., to be born-again) through an elaborate ritualization of discontinuity. I vividly remember a service at Christ Victory Ministries, where the pastor at some point asked the congregation to symbolically cut all ties with the past, particularly family ties, since the extended family (Twi: abusua) in Ghana is often associated with witchcraft and thus thought to block people’s individual progress (see also Meyer 1998). We were asked to form scissors with the index and middle finger of our right hand and cut the imaginary umbilical cord that symbolically connected us with our past and allegedly held us back from success. Coupled with the message of success, this moment of transformation is also addressed in gospel songs. One example is Philipa Baafi’s «Go High» (Baafi 2007). While Baafi’s song, like those discussed above, foregrounds a narrative of personal success, the enactment of the narrative of the song in the video clip is revealing (Baafi n.d.). The clip sets out with a scene in a village where Baafi tells the villagers not to be content with where they are. As the song proceeds, the traditional instruments – drums and a xylophone – that feature in the village scene are successively substituted by electric guitars, keyboard and trumpets and the dressing of the protagonists changes from traditional cloths into modern fashion.

Gospel artists themselves are an integral part of their message. As public figures, they are important nodes of identification for audiences. Their role in the efficacy of the message of prosperity and individual socioeconomic success through self-transformation is in many ways analogous to the figure of the charismatic pastor. As Meyer comments: «The figure of the charismatic pastor […] dressed in exquisite garments and driving a posh car pinpoints that prosperity and being born-again are held to be two sides of the same coin» (Meyer 2004, 459). While prosperity in the Pentecostal context is seen as an expression of divine grace (Twi: adom), charismatic figures like pastors as well as successful gospel artists can be seen as embodiment of that message and are understood by people as a kind of «living testimony». The meaning people derive from gospel music, often described in general terms as «motivational» or «inspirational», is then not exclusively, and perhaps not even primarily found in the lyrics of songs. Beyond the immediate level of semantic meaning, gospel can better be understood as a mindset, as a whole way of life for which gospel artists exemplarily stand, since «gospel musicians are supposed to display a certain type of lifestyle».8 Interview partners related, for instance, their personal experience with the song «Afunumu Ba» by Cicilia Marfo (Marfo 2010), one of the most successful Ghanaian gospel songs of 2010/11, recalling how the singer was interviewed on TV, telling the viewers how she first «suffered’» in life and then became successful through divine intervention.

In various media interactions as well as during live performances, Marfo keeps retelling her story which seems to particularly draw people to her music (see also Cicilia Marfo 2010). As one interviewee remarked: «I heard about her life story and that is what made me so passionate about the song». It is, then, through the personal involvement of their audience that artists like Marfo are able to project their message of personal success, telling listeners not just that they «made it» but, as another respondent put it, implying that «you, too, you will also become like me».

Yet on another level, the question about the meaning of gospel music in a narrow, semantic sense, is misleading. Quite apart from questions of signification, from a Charismatic point of view music does not so much represent something external to it, i.e. convey referential meaning, but actually constitutes a spiritual reality in itself. As much as words are believed to have a spiritual life of their own – as one pastor in a sermon put it: «Words are spirits» – musical utterances are a spiritual reality as well. In the context of Charismatic worship, music has therefore more than just a functional or decorative role to play. Rather, it is believed that gospel music imparts the Holy Spirit to the whole congregation, which is one of the reasons why especially singers in the church are expected to adhere to high moral standards and live exemplary, «holy» lives. Impurity on the part of performers could have an immediate negative spiritual impact on other members of the congregation. Within Charismatic theology there is an elaborate «demonology» that deals with evil spirits, witches and other demonic powers (Meyer 1995) that can afflict people and from which born-again Christians have to actively protect themselves. The performance of gospel music is one means to do so and can, in this sense, quite literally be understood as an anti-demonic device. Beyond gospel music’s mere «inspirational» or «motivational» nature, the performance of gospel music is then itself a ritualization of discontinuity, a (potentially) transformational act and a direct expression of the presence of the Holy Spirit.

The Pentecostal-Charismatic Public Sphere and the Mediation of Modernity

In this last section I want to look more specifically at the two extreme ends of the transformation born-again Christians undergo, and discuss the role of gospel music in the constitution of the Pentecostal-Charismatic public sphere. At one end of the transformation enacted in gospel music we are confronted with an imagery that indexes individual success and that conveys a specific idea of global modernity. The symbolism that is invoked, for instance, in gospel music videos comes in the form of luxurious mansions, expensive cars and clothes, jewelry, and the freedom to travel (particularly to Western countries). As it has more generally been observed, with its emphasis on prosperity and its global aspirations, «pentecostalism provides an imaginary space in which people may address their longing for a modern, individual and prosperous way of life» (Meyer 1999, 163). At the other extreme, we find the realm of the local and traditional, associated with witchcraft, «fetishism», and an outmoded, backward, rural past. Part of this domain is the extended family as well as traditional religion and the traditional political system with its ideals of communalism and reciprocity. These ideals seem directly opposed to and in many ways incompatible with the ideal of individual accumulation and the extreme material prosperity propagated by Charismatism.

As much as born-again Christians aspire to «a modern, individual and prosperous way of life», the lure of modernity is itself ambivalent and in a spiritual sense potentially dangerous. As a matter of fact, in the West African context individualistic accumulation and consumption are themselves suspicious and often associated with occult or satanic practices (Meyer 1995). Moreover, the same imagery of modernity we are confronted with in gospel music also features prominently in other West African media contexts such as popular Nigerian and Ghanaian video films (see Meyer 2008; Haynes 2000) as well as in secular highlife music, particularly the so-called burger highlife that emerged in the 1980s (Carl 2014). While it is the same status symbols that we find here (luxurious cars, houses, clothes etc.), in contrast to gospel, where they index divine grace, in the context of secular highlife they are associated with worldly things like clubbing, drinking, and prostitution (Collins 1996, 179). This ambivalence of modernity finds an expression in the discourse on gospel music in the way in which people discuss the style of individual gospel artists, style understood here in a very broad sense including musical style but also ways of dressing, dancing, bodily gestures and modes of speech. In discussing individual artists’ styles, people held, for instance, that particularly female gospel artists should always look «neat and presentable», but not tantalizing. The style of individual singers such as Christiana Love or Philipa Baafi, particularly their body movements and dressing, were felt to be «too extravagant», «pompous», or even sexually provocative by some. Moreover, the difference between telling the story of one’s own success and accumulation of wealth on the one hand, and, on the other, an attitude of selfish display of one’s wealth and achievements is not always clear. The borderline between what from a Charismatic point of view is impeccable and considered «holy», and what is seen as morally corrupt, sinful, or selfish, is rather thin. In this sense, we might say that the Ghanaian discourse on gospel music is also framed by an «ethics of style», much in the same way as it has been described by Timothy Rommen in the context of the Trinidadian Full Gospel community (Rommen 2007).

While discussions of the individual style of gospel artists underline the ambivalent stance of Pentecostalism towards the market economy and Western patterns of consumption, the discourse on gospel music constitutes at the same time an important means in the demarcation between Western modernity and born-again Christianity, and it plays, therefore, a crucial role in the constitution of the Pentecostal-Charismatic public sphere.9 It has been noted that Charismatism provides people with forms of popular culture that are «safe for consumption by ‹born-again› Christians» (Hackett 1998, 258), setting up a moral space within which they can engage with global modernity without necessarily subscribing to its supposedly negative, corrupting effects. In this sense, the Pentecostal-Charismatic public sphere can be understood as a counterpublic to both the discourse of Western rationalism as well as the realm of local tradition which, while also setting itself apart from Western modernity, is rejected by African Christians for its «pagan» implications. By drawing on a range of musical styles, including North American gospel music, reggae, soul, R&B, Nigerian and South African popular music, as well as through the use of modern musical instruments and production technology, gospel music in Ghana establishes itself as a decidedly translocal cultural form. At the same time, these stylistic influences are channeled through more familiar local idioms—patterns of Ghanaian highlife music, popular dancing styles, African fashion, as well as the employment of predominantly Twi in the lyrics of songs, with the occasional interspersion of other Ghanaian languages such as Ga and Ewe as well as English and Nigerian pidgin.

As a constitutive feature of the Pentecostal-Charismatic public sphere, gospel music, then, transcends the local at the same time that is sets itself apart from secular modernity. As a transnational phenomenon, the public sphere of Charismatism might be understood as an alternative or “parallel modernity” (Larkin 1997), as it draws on «transnational cultural flows [that] emerge from many centers and flow into many peripheries» (ibid., 434). Joel Robbins (2004, 130–31) has more generally suggested that Pentecostal-Charismatism’s global success might have to do with its ability to connect with transnational discourses and translocal expressive forms while at the same time rooting itself in local communities and fostering a high degree of active participation of its followers. Not least in this last regard, gospel music has, as we have seen, a central role to play, as its performance opens multiple ways of participation and identification for people, connecting them with the transnational sphere of born-again Christianity at the same time that they remain grounded in the local.

Conclusion

In the foregoing discussion I have highlighted the significance of gospel music in Ghana and argued for its crucial role in the constitution of a cosmopolitan Pentecostal-Charismatic public sphere. I have stressed the centrality of gospel music performance in the mediation between individual lifeworlds and global modernity, establishing itself as a translocal musical field at the same time that it remains rooted in the local. Gospel music derives its dual nature from drawing on diverse translocal musical influences that are channeled through more local idioms and styles. It thus speaks to the concerns of local audiences, creating a counterpublic to both the realm of Western rationalism as well as the allegedly anachronistic spaces of tradition and providing people with meaningful expressive forms to address the ambivalences associated with global modernity. As such, gospel music is an important medium in the ongoing negotiation of people’s identities and a crucial aspect in the creation of «moral self [that is] not misled by the glitzy world of consumer capitalism nor misguided by the outmoded world of tradition, but instead filled with the Holy Spirit» (Meyer 2004, 460).

I also discussed ethnomusicological methodology, taking the study of gospel music and born-again Christianity in Ghana as a case in point that calls conceptualizations of «the field» as integrated whole and empathetic notions of participation into question. Instead of the opportunistic and relativist stance that often characterizes participant observation in «reflexive ethnography», I suggested that a critical «dialogue of reflexivities» (Csordas 1997, xi) as well as what Bourdieu (2003) has called «participant objectivation» might help to come to terms with the fact that the analyzing subject and the subjects of research share a common social space, developing, at the same time, a more objective approach to the social realities within which ethnomusicologists today arguably work. It seems that ethnographic work in translocal, media-saturated contexts is predestined to move us towards the representation sameness rather than difference, since those we represent are «part of the same cultural worlds we inhabit—worlds of mass media, consumption, and dispersed communities of the imagination» (Abu-Lughod 1997, 128). While I still think that ethnography provides valuable tools for in-depth micro-sociological analysis and allows us to pose questions we would otherwise not be able to ask, we might, after all, have to reconsider our role as «specialists of difference» (Gupta and Ferguson 1997, 2) and start advocating a higher degree of methodological experimentation to come to terms with the changing social conditions within which we work.

1. While the prominence of gospel music in Ghana is undisputed, exact figures are hard to come by. Atiemo (2006, 160) states that gospel music productions jumped from ten to a total of seventy-five percent of all recorded music in Ghana between 1990 and 1993. Collins (2004, 418) quotes various figures ranging between fifty to seventy percent in the mid-1990s. My own assessment of the Adom FM Top 20 Music Charts, published in the weekly paper Graphic Showbiz, shows that an average of seventy percent of the most popular songs in the second half of 2010 and the first half of 2011 were gospel productions.
2. In the following, the terms «born-again Christianity», «Charismatic Christianity», and «Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity» are used interchangeably.
3. Part of the research on which this article is based was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation within the framework of the research cooperation «The Formation and Transformation of Musical Archives in West African Societies». For help with translations of gospel songs and fruitful discussions about the gospel phenomenon more generally, I am very grateful to John Wesley Dankwa.
4. The official figures on religious affiliation in Ghana from the 2000 census are as follows: Christian 68.8% (Pentecostal/Charismatic 24.1%, Protestant 18.6%, Catholic 15.1%, other 11%), Muslim 15.9%, traditional 8.5%, other 0.7%, none 6.1% (data provided by Ghana Statistical Service, http://www.statsghana.gov.gh).
5. This so-called «spirit baptism» or baptism of the Spirit is based on the report about the original Pentecost in Acts 2 (Robbins 2004, 120–121).
6. For a comprehensive overview of recent literature in this emerging field, see Engelhardt (2009, 33–34).
7. In the Ghanaian context «orthodox Christianity» refers to the older mission churches that mainly entered the country in the 19th century, i.e. the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, the Presbyterian Church, the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, and the Methodist Church, all of which are characterized by a more or less fixed liturgy, though they have, by now, also adopted elements of Charismatic worship.
8. All quotations of interviewees in the following are drawn from group interviews that took place at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana, on June 16 and June 20, 2011. In addition to the author, the group of moderators included Eric Debrah Otchere and John Wesley Dankwa. Overall three session with six participants each were organized, one male group, one exclusively female group, and one mixed group. The average age of participants was 27 years, with all except one person having a university education background. The interviews were held in English. The denominational background of participants was mixed, half of the interviewees having an «orthodox» background and the other half a Charismatic affiliation. 72% of the participants were actively involved in the music-making in their churches, either as choristers or in other music groups such as praise and worship teams. The sessions, which lasted between two and two and a half hours, were designed as feedback interviews in which gospel music videos were watched and subsequently discussed. In addition, participants were given a brief questionnaire prior to the music videos and they also filled response sheets while watching the clips. All participants were well familiar with gospel music both from their churches as well as from various media contexts and they also listened to gospel music privately. The views expressed by respondents in the group interview sessions that are included here in the text confirm many of the opinions stated by other informants in informal interviews.
9. While a more detailed theoretical discussion of the conceptualization of the public sphere would lead too far in the context of this paper, I am basically adopting a performative and pluralistic notion of publics as it has been developed by Michael Warner (2002).

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Biography

Florian Carl is a lecturer in the Department of Music and Dance at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana. He studied musicology, social anthropology and African studies at the University of Cologne, Germany, and the University of Chicago, USA, and received his PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Music, Drama, and Media Hanover, Germany, in 2007. He is author of “Was bedeutet uns Afrika? Zur Darstellung afrikanischer Musik im deutschsprachigen Diskurs des 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts” (LIT, 2004) and “Berlin/Accra. Music, Travel, and the Production of Space” (LIT, 2009). His major research interest, currently, is in music and popular culture in Ghana and its diaspora.

Published on May 23, 2012

Last updated on June 27, 2023

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