From Hi-fi to Wi-fi

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Ethnomusicologist Wayne Marshall examines «Treble Culture» – and not «Bass Culture» as others do. He published his first essay on this topic at the Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies. On Norient he offers insights via five tracks and clips. A must read.

1. The Extraordinary but Everyday Overcompressed Upload

This is, admittedly, an exaggerated example, and it’s hard to imagine anyone enjoying it save from a certain ironic distance. But it’s noteworthy – if not mindblowing – that someone uploaded it at all, and it speaks volumes about the political economy of contemporary music circulation. The intense compression artifacts may or may not be intentional – whether anti-piracy technique or incidental product of crappy software defaults. It reminds me of Jonathan Sterne's contention that the MP3 puts the listener on a «sonic austerity program». Illustrative because so extreme, the warped sound of this clip is deeply familiar to the MP3 generation – like cumulative tape hiss or dusty record crackles for older ears. Due to better bandwidth, the death of DRM, hi-qual darknets, and more liberal leaking practices, such distortions already strike us as «artifacts» in the archaeological as well as audio sense.

2. Necessity Is the Mother of Treblification

Video not available anymore.

Ruff Sqwad's «R U Double F» is a classic of grime’s heyday – a spectacular ascent abetted by digital DIY media yet audibly constrained by issues of access and bandwidth. From the high and midrange synths to the muted drums and flatline vocals, «R U Double F» bears the signatures of its irrepressible production and distribution. London-based music critic Dan Hancox and Bok Bok of the Night Slugs record label once paid tribute to the track as no less than «a 64kbps, straight-off-Limewire, never-released work of genius». Calling it «an mp3 dubplate» whose «grooves have been battered into submission by repeated compression», they highlight its inclusion on Bok Bok's epic Blogariddims mix, 69 Allstars, «because for us fucked-up sounding mp3s were a massive part of listening to music from this era».

3. Fetish as Feedback

Playing on and with the sudden ubiquity of phones as listening devices, and the constraints that accompany such a shift, Portland’s Club Chemtrail commissioned «ringtones» from producers working across the electronic dance spectrum. Sampling actual phone sounds as well as more widely adopting a data-crunched palette, the collection gestures toward an obviously self-reflective, celebratory, and playful side of treble culture via production aesthetics, but it is imperative to note that the phenomenon of making music tailored for phones and other bass-attenuated devices is far more widely dispersed, from U.K. bassline’s doubled and trebled melodies to the rise of brostep’s midrange riffs to the most common filters and synths used in mainstream hip hop and pop.

4. If It’s Got a Good Beat, Who Cares if You Can Barely Hear It?

I love examples like these because they bear witness to people’s willingness to use phones and other mobile but feeble sound systems to provide all the soundtrack necessary to impel a devoted dance. Why not? Here we have two examples from Europe (tecktonic and jumpstyle), but videos of kids dancing to trebly versions of the latest dance-meme-song are a dime-a-dozen. The added attenuation thanks to smartphone recording equipment, and perhaps audio encoding, are just more icing on the trebly cake.

5. Bass as Rare, Personal, Almost Imaginary

Video not available anymore.

he dancing and the general scene here have their charms, to be sure, but the moment at 0:30 when Zhani steps up and her competitor hands her the iPod & earbuds she was wearing so that, presumably, Zhani can dance to the same track, definitely takes the cake. It’s an interesting moment for lots of reasons, not least of which being the way it illustrates an improvised solution to the problem of treble culture. In the absence of a boombox, here are two people dancing for their friends & peers, in public, to music only the dancer can hear. Even the immediate onlookers have to fill in the blank until it can be overdubbed for the YouTube masses!

Biography

Wayne Marshall is a technomusicologist who writes and teaches about music, technology, and culture from Cambridge, MA (U.S.). Hip hop scholar since being knee-high to a duck, he wrote his dissertation on reggae, edited the book on reggaeton, and publishes an acclaimed blog. Follow him on his Website.

Published on May 09, 2014

Last updated on April 09, 2024

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Music Production

Technology

Perception

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Filmstill: Bonnie Banane & Waltaa (Music), Helmi (Video): «Champs-Élysées» (France 2014)

Who Deserves It?

Commentary

by Wayne Marshall

A kaleidoscopic tumble through decades of international street fashion, the video clip «Champs-Élysées» poses puzzles about class and style. Drawing from Britain’s chav, America’s ghetto fabulous, and other globally-resonant, working-class sartorial fields, the collaboration by Paris-based vocalist Bonnie Banane, producer Walter Mecca (Waltaa), and director Helmi, struts with confidence over the blurred lines between celebration and imitation, pastiche and burlesque. It’s not clear that the video transcends the pitfalls of classface minstrelsy, or even gives a shit. From the Norient book Seismographic Sounds (see and order here).

Low-fi but slick, Charni employs repetition, rhythm, and simple but delirious digital effects to furnish Banane, Waltaa, and friends with Tumblr-esque cascades of free-floating objects of desire: cash, weed, sportswear, nostalgic devices like skypagers and flip phones. Also, French fries and kebab. And faces – many faces, often close up, showcasing a crew as motley as proletarian Paris. They are so fresh that their fashion and facial gestures, in the hip register of the day, appear as flat in affect as their vintage clothes are crisp. Less like they’re looking into a camera than a mirror, or a smartphone.

For four brief measures they «put a donk on it» in classic chav style, but for the most part Banane and Waltaa nonchalantly drawl refrains of self-praise over the sort of minimal, bass-laden track that undergirds hardcore contemporary rap. Although French bars have been spit for decades, Banane and Waltaa rap as if paying tribute to the early days of European hip hop when a charmingly fragmentary English was still lingua franca. «I’m fresh», Banane drones, «I deserve it» – in a blasé delivery that threatens to slip so deep into detachment it might undermine the cool celebration of subcultural style as public power.

As the video shows, when transposed across time and place – and on the right bodies in the right space – track suits, rugby shirts, and tennis shoes can be used to gleefully cakewalk on the dress codes of the privileged, posh, and preppy – even if the signifying force of Izod or Fila as street wear inherently bears witness to structural inequality and cultural hierarchies. What good is self-fashioning, the video asks, if all it serves is a humorless rant about consumerism? In an interview Banane acknowledges that the Champs-Elysées «c’est l'enfer de la consommation», but rather than a «conscious» stance on consumption, she prefers a naive jouissance in alignment with the «eternal» style of, in her words, «caillera européenne».

This video is part of the Norient exhibition «Seismographic Sounds» and this commentary was published first in the correspondent Norient book.

Biography

Wayne Marshall is a technomusicologist who writes and teaches about music, technology, and culture from Cambridge, MA (U.S.). Hip hop scholar since being knee-high to a duck, he wrote his dissertation on reggae, edited the book on reggaeton, and publishes an acclaimed blog. Follow him on his Website.

Published on October 27, 2015

Last updated on April 30, 2024

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Money

Parody

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Seismographic Sounds

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Filmstill from «Straight OUtta Puerto Rico: Reggaeton's Rough Road to Glory» ( James Chankin and S. Leigh Savidge 2008)

Spectacular Copulative Dance Today

Short Essay

by Wayne Marshall

Rather than dance, critics have alleged, «daggering», «perreo» and the like are little more than heavy petting in public – a corruption of courtship and a shameful activity for young innocents. An Overview. From the Norient book Out of the Absurdity of Life (see and order here).

«Hagamos el amor con la ropa / siente la pasión del reggae», intones Puerto Rican reggaetonero Speedy, unabashedly linking the sensuality of reggae music to a phrase more often used to demean the risqué moves at the heart of reggaeton. Rather than a dance, critics have alleged, the perreo is little more than heavy petting in public – a corruption of courtship and a shameful activity for young innocents. Speedy’s refrain tellingly embraces this definition: making love with clothes on sounds just fine to him and his audience.

In the documentary Straight Outta Puerto Rico, producer Jorge Oquendo confesses with some embarrassment that the perreo «simulates the intercourse between dogs.» Of course, despite the obvious nod to canine copulation in the dance’s name, this is how humans do it too. Terms like perreo or doggystyle simply bear witness to our enduringly missionary position on the issue.

A Sexually Loaded History

Sexual pantomime runs deep through dance, not surprisingly, and moral panic right alongside. In the New World and trans-colonial Europe, Afrodiasporic rhythms like reggaeton’s dembow (for some, a synonym for perreo) have repeatedly engendered the kind of intimate dance that provokes policing along the lines of race, class, and age, usually under the banners of Christian moral authority or the civilizing imperatives of nation-building.

Among other predecessors of perreo, consider the European reception of the zarabanda, a high-energy dance first recorded in Panama in 1539. In his book on the music of Cuba, Ned Sublette describes the zarabanda as «a mimetic dance that simulated sexual action» which «ruled» dance floors in Spain for 30 years around the turn of the 17^th century despite clergy attempts to suppress it with threats of whippings for men and exile for women.

Another fascinating forbear appears in new research from historian Lara Putnam who turned up archival evidence of weekly «reggee» dances held in the early 1930s by West Indian migrants to Costa Rica. Propelled by jazz, mento, and tango and tarred by reports of coarse language, public drinking, and vulgar dancing, the parties appear in local newspapers as causes for concern, at odds with notions of racial uplift held by local editorialists who recommended that organizers instruct musicians «not to play any pieces which may be a temptation to those spectacular copulative gyrations.»

To this day, debates about putatively «dirty» dancing play out through nearly the same set of frames. Recent years, especially with the advent of camera-phones and YouTube, have witnessed remarkably familiar local debates triggered by strikingly similar public displays of pleasure and play.

Take daggering, for example, a particularly spectacular – indeed downright cartoonish – incarnation of this timeless dance, which certain observers and artists have linked explicitly to traditional Afro-Jamaican cultural practices, as in kumina.

The latest «slack» variation to emerge from Jamaica’s dancehall reggae tradition, long in thrall to the bawdy and the body, daggering takes its name from violent thrusting movements that suggest stabbing more than sex (and in its worst moments comes closer to gang-rape than role-play – sometimes with brutal results. Despite nearly deconstructing itself with such exaggerated antics, in 2009 daggering prompted the Broadcasting Commission of Jamaica to ban the playing of songs that refer to the craze.

Daggering as Sexual Pantomime

For its part, the perreo was nearly banned in 2002 by the Senate of Puerto Rico, which held public hearings led by Senator Velda Gonzalez. Spurred by local religious organizations, Gonzalez sought to censor reggaeton lyrics and videos and railed against «dancing in a way that incites the sexual act.»

Although these efforts proved unsuccessful – and reggaeton commercially triumphant – the spread of reggaeton and perreo to other countries in the Americas has seen the same anxieties replayed for ratings on TV news. Some critics frame the dance as an indecent objectification of women; others argue that perreo inverts the typical power relations of partner dance by letting women lead.

In 2005, fed by sensationalist media coverage and viral videos, Peru’s «perreo chacalonero» used the local sounds of chicha to propel scenes of sexual pantomime that might make a Jamaican blush, especially given Peruvian teenagers’ tendency to simulate a wider range of acts than perreo’s classic back-to-front pose. Thanks to YouTube, the dance reanimated long-stewing, racialized national antagonisms between Peru, Chile, and Argentina.

Likewise, the recent choque craze in Colombia, an acrobatic beat-matched bump that sits somewhere between the collisions of daggering and more suave forms of perreo, inspires anxiety on the nightly news as it elicits confused comments from international YouTube viewers lacking a local frame for interpreting commonplace scenes of same-sex bumping.

Aptly enough, the choque returns «the bump», known by most as a corny disco step, to its origins in New York’s underground gay dance scene of the early 1970s, where it emerged not as «the cute little hip-hugger, tushie-touching step that it became in the straight world», in the words of Albert Goldman, but as «a frank pantomime of buggery». Just as it is hardly surprising that such a dance would be cleaned up for the US mainstream, it’s no shocker that «grinding» or «freak dancing» – a North American analog to the Caribbean’s copulative gyrations – has been outlawed at high schools around the country.

Despite such efforts, making these dances disappear would seem akin to ridding the world of horny young people. Speedy’s iconic invocation of reggae’s passion and the sort of dancing it inspires was definitely something intuitively understood by me and my high school peers in the early 1990s, crowding into a pulsing mass of limbs and torsos anytime dancehall reggae’s distinctive rhythms bubbled through the speakers. Fortunately for us, the adults chaperoning our dances back then didn’t seem to mind a little bump and grind.

This text has been published first in the Norient book «Out of the Absurdity of Life».

Biography

Wayne Marshall is a technomusicologist who writes and teaches about music, technology, and culture from Cambridge, MA (U.S.). Hip hop scholar since being knee-high to a duck, he wrote his dissertation on reggae, edited the book on reggaeton, and publishes an acclaimed blog. Follow him on his Website.

Published on January 14, 2012

Last updated on April 10, 2024

Topics

Censorship

Dance

Desire

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Out of the Absurdity of Life

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