Filmstill: «In Your Eyes, I See My Country», Kamal Hachkar, 2020.

Tongues and Borders Are Immutable

Short Essay

Lacking a common language is not always an obstacle to communication. It can help to build new connections without preconceptions. An essay inspired by the film In your Eyes, I See My Country, in which two Israeli musicians travel to Morocco.

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As a Hebrew speaker I hear traces of semitic language in Arabic. As a practising Jew, I hear echoes of Arabic sounds in the liturgies I am familiar with. But this loose affinity does not allow me to distinguish different variants of Arabic. What intrigued me about the documentary In Your Eyes, I See My Country was the extent to which the protagonists Neta Elkayam and Amit Haï Cohen are fluent in Moroccan Arabic specifically. On their trip to Morocco it seems as though Neta sometimes lacks confidence interacting in Arabic, to the extent that she needs things re-explained to her.

Nations Erect Borders, Languages Cross Them

This is where subtitles make the film opaque. They do not indicate which language is spoken at any time. I don’t know whether Neta’s Arabic is standard Arabic (meaning she is uncomfortable interacting in Moroccan Arabic), Moroccan Arabic (meaning she is uncomfortable interacting in standard Arabic), or if specific local dialects of Moroccan Arabic are unfamiliar to her.

Yet sometimes a lack of knowledge of a language can offer its own insights. When a viewer cannot tell what language is being spoken, it can be easier to watch without preconceptions concerning what it means to speak a certain language at a certain place and time. There are moments in the film when it isn’t clear whether one sees Arabic being spoken in Israel or Hebrew spoken in Morocco. This is, I suspect, part of the point: nations erect borders, languages cross them. By making the connection between a piece of land and its language unclear, In Your Eyes, I See My Country questions the supposed immutability of tongues, and of national boundaries.

Origin Doesn’t Matter

The same is true of the music in the film. To someone not well-versed in Maghrebi or Middle Eastern music, it is rarely clear what style is being played, how novel the songs and their lyrics are, how innovative or traditional the instrumentation may be. We see Neta performing love songs and praise songs to Jewish rabbis; playing with orchestras and in intimate jam sessions; or accompanied by her husband on banjo and chanting with other singers.

When Neta and Amit jam with Moroccan musicians, it is hard to guess what musical borders are being crossed. Were the encounters a form of reaching out between different musical languages, or were they a (re)affirmation of a common language that was artificially sundered? What I do know: the confusion of languages is not an obstacle to the building of relationships. Rather, Neta, Amit, and the Moroccans they meet are willing to transform communication barriers into a new language of respect. In this sense, not speaking the same language can be a starting point for reconciliation rather than an obstacle to it.

The film «In Your Eyes, I See My Country» by Kamal Hachkar was officially selected at the Norient Film Festival NFF 2021. See full program here.

This text is part of Norient’s essay publication «Nothing Sounds the Way It Looks», published in 2021 as part of the Norient Film Festival 2021.

Bibliographic Record: Rhensius, Philipp. 2021. «Editorial: NFF 2021 Essay Collection.» In Nothing Sounds the Way It Looks, edited by Philipp Rhensius and Lisa Blanning (NFF Essay Collection 2021). Bern: Norient. (Link).

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Biography

Keith Kahn-Harris is a sociologist and writer living in London. He is the author of «Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge» (Berg 2007) together with many other articles on metal culture. Follow him on X, LinkedIn, Facebook, or on his Website.

Published on December 04, 2020

Last updated on April 09, 2024

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Communication

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Filmstill: «Don't Rush», Elise Florenty, Marcel Türkowsky, 2020.

Finding Refuge in Rebetiko

Short Essay

by Clive Bell

Don’t Rush is a languid film thick with affection for rebetiko, the Greek urban folk music essentially made by refugees. Musing on what is now viewed as a rich cultural tradition started by outcasts and illegals with a penchant for hashish, Clive Bell teases out parallels to our intrepid protagonists, and a telling lesson for an ongoing humanitarian crisis.

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This evening we’re going to hang out on a Greek island with three young men: Giannis, his brother and his cousin. First we see one of them alone in rapture, merging his voice with an old song of hopeless amor: «I’m burning, I’m burning/I’m drowning, I’m drowning/Throw me into the deep sea». He’s watching the 1983 film Rembetiko, but his eyes are squeezed shut and the music has possessed him. The musician’s cry of «Aman! Aman!» (alas!) shakes his whole body, as Sotiria Leonardou’s voice flows through him. The melody itself agonizes between the major and minor third of the scale, an exotic mode that sits in Europe while turning its eyes to the East.

A Cultural Tradition Founded in Refuge

Rebetiko is essentially a music made by refugees. These are the voices of outcasts, the marginalized, and the illegals who created Greece’s down-and-dirty urban song tradition, first flowering in the hashish dens of the Ottoman Empire. Central to this tradition was the Greek population of the Turkish coast, in the cities of Smyrna (present day Izmir) and Istanbul. After a war between Greece and Türkiye, in 1923 a million Greeks fled to the mainland. Key rebetiko recordings were made by these refugees in Athens and New York. Since then, Greeks tend to rediscover rebetiko whenever repression and suffering increase: Under the colonels’ junta (1967–74), and again now in the wake of Greek economic woe and mass migration across the Aegean.

Our three protagonists are devotees of rebetiko, and Don’t Rush is a luxuriantly slow reveal, soundtracked by those old songs, lovingly played by Giannis as the humid summer evening heads towards midnight. Gradually, we learn we are on the large island of Lemnos – only 60 kilometres off the Turkish coast, and close to the heart of Greece’s current refugee crisis. Thousands of migrants – principally from Afghanistan, Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo – are trapped in Greek camps or detention centers. Giannis is a pirate radio DJ, hanging with his family, talking to his listeners and badly missing his absent girlfriend, whose birthday is tomorrow. We watch him via a mirror: across the glass someone has scrawled «Me Trecheis» – don’t rush.

A Lesson for Today

The songs, mostly from the 1920s and 30s, are heady and pungent as if reeking of weed. Typically there’s a slow, heavy, nine-beat rhythm: two, two, two, and three. Back in the day, a smoker in the cafe would rise and dance a zeibekiko, a solitary male ritual. Don’t Rush gives us all the lyrics, often explicit about police raids, prison beatings, and getting cheated by dealers: «They didn’t feel high/It was only tobacco». But we also hear Giannis spell out why rebetiko still means so much: «As we listen to these songs our thoughts and our love go out to the refugees, who every day try to cross land and sea borders in order to reach Europe – that not only doesn’t welcome them but also barricades itself behind walls, thus becoming responsible for the many deaths and murders happening, whether in the Mediterranean, in Lampedusa, in the Aegean, in Farmakonisi, in Mytilene, in Chios. That’s why it’s our duty to take a stand, fight on the side of refugees, bring down the detention centres, fight racism, fascism and the ideology of the system we live in, that marginalizes people and kills them for the sake of profit. Refugees are our brothers.»

The radio studio-cum-living room gets hotter and sweat is wiped away. In a final reveal, the listeners are reminded that their radio station was raided a year ago, and one kilo was found. Trial is on May 9^th – there’ll be no radio show that day, confides Giannis.

The film «Don't Rush» by Elise Florenty and Marcel Türkowsky was officially selected at the Norient Film Festival NFF 2021. See full program here.

This text is part of Norient’s essay publication «Nothing Sounds the Way It Looks», published in 2021 as part of the Norient Film Festival 2021.

Bibliographic Record: Rhensius, Philipp. 2021. «Editorial: NFF 2021 Essay Collection.» In Nothing Sounds the Way It Looks, edited by Philipp Rhensius and Lisa Blanning (NFF Essay Collection 2021). Bern: Norient. (Link).

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Biography

Clive Bell is a musician and composer specialising in East Asian musics. He studied the shakuhachi (Japanese flute) in Tokyo, and the khène (mouth organ) in Laos and Thailand. His solo album, Asakusa Follies, is on Cusp Editions. Recent collaborators include Jah Wobble, Sylvia Hallett, Sidsel Endresen, Jaki Liebezeit, David Sylvian, Kazuko Hohki, Complicite and Karl Jenkins. Based in Tottenham, London, he writes regularly for the music monthly The Wire.

Published on December 07, 2020

Last updated on June 27, 2023

Topic

Migration

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Filmstill: «Dark City Beneath the Beat», TT the Artist, 2020.

Why Locality Still Matters: Baltimore Club

Short Essay

by Lisa Blanning

While techno and house have become widely commodified by white Europeans, Tedra Wilson’s documentary Dark City Beneath the Beat shows how Baltimore Club kept its highly localized aesthetics, and proves the richness of Black club music in the 21^stcentury.

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Tedra Wilson, aka TT the Artist, shines a light on Baltimore club music – an underrepresented, highly specific local scene of electronic music, primarily by Black artists – in her documentary Dark City Beneath the Beat. Seen mostly through the idealized lens of music video set pieces – complete with saturated colours, costume design, incredible dance routines, and even narrative flourishes – very little footage was shot inside an actual club. Instead, the key fly-on-the-wall scenes come from the city’s annual Queen and King of Baltimore dance battles, where contestants flex and contort to sometimes gymnastic levels to compete in front of large, enthusiastic audiences.

The extent to which this kind of talent competition informs Bmore’s breaks is something familiar, well-documented in Chicago footwork, New York’s ballroom walk-offs, and especially rap MC battles. Although the battle format for both dancers and vocalists came to the U.S. at least partly from Jamaica – see, for instance, how Jamaican toasting became rapping – and possibly to Jamaica from somewhere in Africa, it still thrives today in America’s Black community strongholds.

Various Cultural Lineages

This reinforces the connection, which is clear enough in the music, to a hip hop lineage just as much as to house or techno, something else Baltimore club has in common with other regional Black American club styles. Like New Orleans bounce, Detroit jit, krumping in Los Angeles, and the aforementioned footwork and ballroom, the dancing is integral to the music. B-boys, or breakdancers, were also indispensable to early hip hop culture, although this aspect faded away as the genre grew to be a pop music megalith and global phenomenon.

Zooming in on the idea of locality, one elucidating moment comes when a hot number with brassy big band samples is presented in a tableau with a trombone player in full marching band-style regalia. The city of Baltimore is situated between New Jersey and Washington DC, and this track in particular recalls not just Jersey club – which is closely related to Bmore club (and in fact Jersey club producer UNIIQU3 is responsible for several of the tracks featured) – but also DC go-go, a regional funk that often features brass.

Proximity Is Important

In another scene, the almost aggressively hetero street-styled male dancers pull moves straight out of the voguing/ballroom handbook – a club phenomenon native to New York’s queer and trans clubs. Indeed one of the film’s set pieces is performed in ballroom style and preceded with an interview with trans dancer Deniim. So, proximity is also important, in the same way that Detroit and Chicago’s dance music scenes had so much crosstalk partly due to their geographical closeness.

While Dark City Beneath the Beat is more showcase and celebration – it’s radiant in its affection, which is hard to resist – than historical document placing the music in context, it nonetheless serves to fill in some details of another part of the rich tapestry of American regional club music. While techno and house, both genres widely acknowledged to have originated with Black artists, may have been co-opted by white Europeans, these local scenes and still location-specific genres are a fascinating, living, breathing legacy of resolutely Black electronic music.

The film «Dark City Beneath the Beat» by TT The Artist was officially selected at the Norient Film Festival NFF 2021. See full program here.

This text is part of Norient’s essay publication «Nothing Sounds the Way It Looks», published in 2021 as part of the Norient Film Festival 2021.

Bibliographic Record: Rhensius, Philipp. 2021. «Editorial: NFF 2021 Essay Collection.» In Nothing Sounds the Way It Looks, edited by Philipp Rhensius and Lisa Blanning (NFF Essay Collection 2021). Bern: Norient. (Link).

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Biography

Lisa Blanning is a Berlin-based writer and editor on music, art and culture. A former editor at The Wire Magazine and Electronic Beats. She is especially engaged in movements in contemporary electronic music and digital culture art. She has led panel discussions and artist talks for festivals such as Unsound, CTM, and Atonal, as well as institutions such as University of East London.

Published on November 24, 2020

Last updated on April 09, 2024

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Dance

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