Filmstill: Silvana (Mika Gustafson, Olivia Kastebring, und Christina Tsiobanelis, Sweden 2017)

Deconstructing Jantelagen

Review

The Scandinavian code of conduct «jantelagen» encourages modesty, conformity and goodness. Swedish feminist and anti-racist punk rapper Silvana Imam celebrates the exact opposite: pride, individuality, and diversity, as shown in the multi-faceted documentary Silvana by Mika Gustafson, Olivia Kastebring, und Christina Tsiobanelis.

«Do not think that you are special or better than us!» This statement sums up the central theme of a code of conduct called the «jantelagen», or Law of Jante, commonly used as a term to describe a condescending attitude towards individual success and personal ambition in Nordic countries.

The code originated in the satirical novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks, written by Dano-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose in 1933. Set in the fictional Danish town Jante, the novel describes the inhabitants’ attitudes, and contains a list of ten rules that are variations of the theme: «do not think that you are special, better, smarter, or more important than us!» Although the origin of the term is not necessarily well known, the law itself is often brought up in discussions focusing on a mentality prevalent in Nordic countries.

Praise of Diversity and Individuality

The work of queer hip-hop artist Silvana Imam can be seen as a clear challenge to such a code. Imams brand of queer feminism is explicitly sexual and based in praise of diversity and individuality. With the titles of her albums and tours she advocates (queer) empowerment, as her representation of queerness provides positive recognition, both of and for her fans. An album she released in 2014 was called «När du ser mig – se dig» (when you see me – see yourself), with an accompanying tour entitled «Jag ser dig» (I see you). However, Imam revolts against more than just heteronormativity: she also speaks from a position outside of Swedish mainstream culture in terms of whiteness.

In her song lyrics, such as, for instance, the song «Hon va» (she was), Imam specifically stresses her migrant background; her mother is from Lithuania, her father is of Syrian descent, and the family came to Sweden in 1990 («hon va fyra år när hon kom hit / till Kiruna bagage utan flyttbil» – she was four years old when she arrived here / to Kiruna, luggage, without a moving truck). Growing up in a suburb of Stockholm, Imam was teased for her «strange» last name that made her different. However, in a Swedish context, the Law of Jante is explicitly based on the idea of not being special. It can therefore be argued that the Law does not apply to Imam, or others marked as «different», and thereby «special» to begin with.

Resisting Jante Through Rap

The biographical movie Silvana Imam – väck mig när ni vaknat (Silvana Imam – Wake Me Up When You Have Woken Up) contains several themes and scenes that can be understood through such a lens. Painting a close and personal portrait of the artist, the film charts Imam’s rise to fame against the backdrop of her family history, and her relationship with singer Beatrice Eli.

It shows an unapologetically opinionated artist on a mission of queer empowerment, an artist who is aware of the «jantelagen» that warns her not to think that she is «special or better than us». In one of the film’s initial scenes, we meet Imam in a recording studio, listening to a radio program in which she is announced as the artist of the year for 2016. Reacting to the announcement she exclaims: «What kind of a fucking country is this where it’s wrong to admit you are great? It’s fucked up! I’m just so great!»

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Biography

Susan Lindholm is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Malmö University, Sweden. Her research interests include constructions of self and other within and through historical and locational contexts. Her dissertation explores Hip-hop culture in-between Chile and Sweden.

Published on November 11, 2018

Last updated on April 11, 2024

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Norient Musikfilm Festival NMFF 9 (2019)

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Mohamed Abozekry (photo: Nada Elissa, 2018)

How to Escape Exotism

by Maha ElNabawi

For musicians living and performing abroad, it can be a challenge to avoid being exoticised and framed in an aesthetic prison. The Egyptian musician Mohamed Abozekry has reconciled the traditional and the avant-garde in his music.

Mohamed Abozekry’s third album, Karkade, is a collection of modernized «tarab» and «tahkt» driven tracks that offers a contemporized take on traditional Arabic music. It recalls classical Arabic music, Sufi music from Upper Egypt, and folk music popular along the Nile River. Composed entirely by Abozekry, the album is a lush collage of inventive interventions, while remaining rooted in the traditional codes of the musical forms he inhabits.

The music draws from the 1920s-1950s – Egypt’s musical golden age – both in timber, and structural codes, but also through the highly present spirit of improvisation at the crux of Karkade’s live performance. This is perhaps why the experience of watching Karkade live makes one feel temporally displaced, or quite possibly unstuck from time. This is partly due to the old styles of music, but also the juxtaposition of the old being played masterfully by young performers. In the Center Stage tour, we hear this in the performances of Mohamed Arafa on deholla (the bassier cousin of the tablah), Lotfy Abaza on violin, and their playful interventions, but also through Abozekry’s unique use of the oud. He furthermore adds contemporary jazz elements, through which he often transforms the oud into a bass instrument by means of a «slapping technique». There are, however, some caveats regarding the music of Karkade, according to Abozekry. «It’s a completely out of fashion, and possibly a little exotic, too», he says.

Questioning Cultural Roots

While skillfully mining the exotic has proved to benefit Abozekry, allowing him to produce a prolific body of work, he does not see this as his own personal pathway for artistic development. Instead, he is looking for more meaningful interactions with his root culture. Abozekry is one of many Arab artists based in France. On the tour, our discussions become an exploration of his own music, and that of his peers, to see how they perform their personal synthesis of East and West. At the age of 11, Abozekry began touring with the Iraqi oud virtuoso Naseem Shamma of Beit El Oud, and by 18 he was off to France for university. In his time abroad, he has released multiple albums, including Chaos and Ring Road with his jazz-fusion band, HeeJaz, and more recently, Don’t Replace Me by a Machine with the Trio Abozekry.

After nearly a decade of living and working abroad, however, Abozekry is homesick for Egypt. But this is more than mere sentiment. For him, moving back to Egypt is pivotal for the development of his career and escaping the exotic typecaste into which he is placed by continuing to exclusively travel through the «world music» industry. While this genre does give platform and industry to a pantheon of international musicians, there is something innately exotic at the root of its labeling - one that reinforces the colonial construction by grouping numerous music traditions into a group that might as well be labeled «the others».

«It’s great being able to live for a while in such a very professional and competitive atmosphere as a freelancer artist. But once you make your name, you end up being a representative of your people, your color rather than being exposed for your art. What I want to say is that you get classified whether you like it or not as someone who’s sort of an ambassador, which is not always a bad thing. But the bad thing is that everyone is put in the same cart. And you become an exotic icon even if what you propose artistically might be not coming from your natal culture at all». He cites Ibrahim Maalouf as an example, albeit a musician he respects.

Between Local Tradition and Global Avant-garde

Maalouf is a trumpet player, composer, and arranger, born in Beirut to Lebanese parents. He fled to Paris during the Lebanese Civil War and he has become a widely-known Arab musician performing in Europe. In his bookings, there is usually a reference to his Lebanese culture, despite the fact that his music is almost entirely rooted in Western aesthetics. We hear this even in his songs that reference Arabic music, such as in his album Kalthouhm.

Kamilya Jubran on the other hand, takes a different approach to cultural synthesis. The Palestinian oudist, singer, composer, arranger, and teacher continues to find influential ways to navigate the exotic while living in France. Regardless of the restrictions placed on Kamilya’s mobility throughout the Arab world, due to being born Palestinian within the Israeli settlement of Akka, Kamilya continues to contribute to the development of contemporary Arabic music. In the past two decades she has instructed a range of Arab musicians from Abozekry to Tamer Abu Ghazaleh, Dina El Wedidi, Abdullah Miniawy, Maryam Saleh, Nadah El Shazly, and many more.

Musically, Kamilya’s work is often situated within the niche corners of the global avant-garde, where it draws from traditional Arabic music references, alongside jazz and experimental electronic-acoustic compositions. While creating highly contemporary music, as heard in her work with Werner Hasler and Sarah Murcia, Kamilya draws upon her traditional culture through the timbral quality of her oud and voice, so as to anchor her listeners to an Arabic context, while still pushing the boundaries of what it means to be progressive.Each of these artists offers a window into the plight of Arab musicians who live in the West. For some it is a choice, for others it is a result of political restrictions, war, or exile. Thus the question at hand is less about why an artist lives abroad, but rather, how they manage to synthesize their different cultures in order to break free of exoticism, grow, and ultimately remain relevant in a global music landscape.

In October 2018, Egyptian music journalist Maha ElNabawi was sent by the American Embassy in Cairo to the Center Stage tour through multiple US cities to cover performances by Egyptian musicians Youssra El Hawary, Dina El Wedidi, Mohamed Abozekry, and their respective bands. The gigs journeyed through the east and west coasts, including panel discussions, a street concert in the micro-town of Lyons, Nebraska, with a population of 800, to Washington, DC's Kennedy Center, to the Globalquerque World Music festival in New Mexico, and an immaculate, gothic cathedral in West Harlem, New York, among other locations. The Center Stage program, funded by the US State Department, produced by the New England Foundation for the Arts and Lisa Booth Management, is now in it's 4^th year.

Biography

Maha ElNabawi is an Egyptian cultural journalist and writer based in Cairo. Writing mostly about music, in recent years she has also cofounded two independent publishing endeavours including Mada Masr and Discord music magazine. Maha is currently cowriting Ten Cities, a sociological and cultural study through the lens of dance music and club culture. Follow her on Instagram.

Published on November 13, 2018

Last updated on April 09, 2019

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Performance at the german electronic clubmusic festival Fusion 2013 (photo: Libertinus)

Music and Place

Academic Text

by Andy Bennett

The relationship between music and place has a long history. This article discusses the academic discourses regarding the relationship between music and place. From the Norient book Seismographic Sounds (see and order here).

Music and Community

At a vernacular level of understanding, perceptions of music and community often align with the idea that music situated at the community level is somehow more organic and authentic than imported mainstream music. Significantly, work such as that of McKinnon (1994) on the British folk music scene has demonstrated that such vernacular understandings of music are often as fabricated as those that pertain to understandings of more popular music forms as tied to place. Indeed, descriptors such as folk, although seemingly expressive of more long-standing, pre-modern musical traditions often encompass recent historical developments (in the case of British folk, the 1960s folk revival movement). Such romanticized notions of folk and traditional musics can also been see in more peripheral places, for example, in Serbia where turbo-folk combines traditional and electronic music elements in a discourse of national identity and regional belonging (Todorovic, 2005). Cohen’s (1991) work on local music-making practices in Liverpool, UK, engages with the way that individuals create narratives of locality drawing upon particular notions of community and weaving these together in creative and aesthetically potent ways to create their own discourses of the connection between music, space and place.

Music and Subculture

With the emergence of mass-produced popular music in the post-Second World War era, the concept of subculture gained a new lease on life as a means of explaining and theorizing the proliferation of style-based youth cultures. Originally applied by the Chicago School sociologists of the 1920s and 1930s to produce a sociological model of deviance, during the early 1970s subculture was adapted by cultural studies theorists in Britain to study a range of «spectacular» youth cultures including mods, skinheads and punks. Among the earliest uses of subculture in a post-war British context, Cohen (1972) saw palpable connections between subcultures and place as young subculturalists drew on musical and stylistic resources to engage in what Cohen referred to as the «magical recovery» of community as traditional working class neighborhoods were demolished to make way for new housing estates and tower blocks. Subcultural theory has been subsequently criticized for its metro-centric focus. Thus, Clarke (1990) observes that there is little if any appreciation in subcultural theory of the existence, and fate, of spectacular subcultures beyond the city. Indeed, such work is more frequently seen in youth cultural research outside the Anglo-American world, a pertinent example being Hafeneger et al.’s (1993) comparative study of regional and urban punks in Germany which raises the issue of the greater stigmatization experienced by regional punks.

An orchestra playing Swedish folk music with dancers performing traditional folk dances at Stockholm City Hall on National Day 2007 (photo: Peter Isotalo)

Music and Scenes

Subculture has also been criticized due to its class-based focus and lack of reliance on empirical data. In response, a new paradigm of research emerged and is referred to as post-subcultural theory. A central concept associated with the latter is «scene». Although this term has been used for many years by musicians, audiences, journalists and others to describe clusters of musical activity, it was first conceptualized as an academic approach by Straw (1991). In an effort to move beyond subculture as a defining conceptual framework for examining the relationship between music, community and place, Straw proffered scene as a more expansive and flexible means of explaining collective investment in particular music genres. Thus, according to Straw, instead of being tied to physical community settings, scenes could also coalesce around more trans-local appropriations of music: for example, in the case of dance music where networks of DJs and clubs produce an aesthetic rather than fixed sense of community organized around multiple scenes spread across a variety of urban and regional settings. This conceptualization of scene was subsequently developed by Peterson and Bennett (2004) who introduced a three-tier model of scene, incorporating local, trans-local and virtual elements. The key innovation in this model was the notion of the virtual scene which suggested the possibility of scenes in a purely mediated, on-line context with no physical basis as such. However, working on the Canterbury Scene I noted how the creation of a virtual scene can also provide a basis for reflecting on the importance of a physical space in the origins of a musical style and the production of shared aesthetic discourses of music and place by individuals who, in many cases, have no physical connection to the place in question – in this case, the city of Canterbury in south-east England (Bennett, 2002).

Music and Memory

An important current development in music research relates to connections between music and memory. Within this emerging body of work there is a significant spatial dimension. Strong’s (2015) work on Melbourne’s Laneways examines how these are increasingly being dedicated to deceased celebrities, among them a number of local rock and pop musicians. Similarly, Bennett’s (2014) study of the music scene in the Western Australian city of Perth identifies strong connections to place among individuals as they recall their memories of acquiring musical tastes and becoming involved in music scenes as young people. In the related field of music and aging there are also strong indications of particular urban settings serving as memory-scapes as individuals map their generational connections to particular clubs and venues, as seen for example in Gregory’s (2012) study of aging female dance clubbers in Toronto and Smith’s (2012) work on ageing northern soul fans in England. In all of these cases, place becomes an important anchoring point for individuals as they articulate their on-going relationship to music and its role in their biographical development. Indeed, as Bennett and Rogers (forthcoming, 2015) illustrate in their study of music venues and collective memory, even when the actual physical spaces of past musical involvement no longer exists, the memory of those places often takes over in articulating a relationship between music and place.

Summary

It is now increasingly taken for granted among academic researchers that, rather than expressing any essential truth about rootedness of music in space and place, spatial discourses about music now routinely draw on a range of aesthetic devices in making such claims. Moreover, it is frequently acknowledged that the concept of place itself can be open to interpretation. Music can play a critical role in the way that competing discourses of space and place are constructed and articulated to produce what Bennett (2000) refers to as multiple narratives of the local. The purpose of this short article has been to highlight some of the key concepts that have been used to discuss and critique the relationship between music and place.

List of References

Bennett, Andy. 2000. Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity and Place. London: Macmillan.

Bennett, Andy. 2002. «Music, Media and Urban Mythscapes: A Study of the Canterbury Sound». Media, Culture and Society 24 (1).

Bennett, Andy. 2014. «Popular Music, Cultural Memory and the Peripheral City». In Music City: Musikalische Annäherungen an die «kreative Stadt», edited by Alenka Barber-Kersovan, V. Kirchberg and R. Kurchar. Bielefeld: transcript.

Bennett, Andy, and R. A. Peterson. 2004. «Introducing Music Scenes». In Music Scenes: Local, Trans-local and Virtual. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.

Bennett, Andy, and I. Rogers. 2015. «In the Scattered Fields of Memory: Unofficial Live Music Venues, Intangible Heritage and the Recreation of the Musical Past». Space & Culture.

Clarke, G. 1990. «Defending Ski-Jumpers: A Critique of Theories of Youth Subcultures». In On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word, edited by Simon Frith and A. Goodwin. London: Routledge.

Cohen, P. 1972. «Subcultural Conflict and Working Class Community». Working Papers in Cultural Studies 2.

Cohen, S. 1991. Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Gregory, J. 2012. «Ageing Rave Women’s Post-Scene Narratives». In Ageing and Youth Cultures: Music, Style and Identity, edited by Andy Bennett and P. Hodkinson. 23–24. Oxford: Berg.

Hafeneger, B., G. Stüwe, and G. Weigel. 1993. Punks in der Großstadt Punks in der Provinz: Projektberichte aus der Jugendarbeit. Opladen: Leske + Budrich.

McKinnon, N. 1994. The British Folk Scene: Musical Performance and Social Identity. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Smith, N. 2012. «Parenthood and the Transfer of Capital in the Northern Soul Scene». In Ageing and Youth Cultures: Music, Style and Identity, edited by Andy Bennett and P. Hodkinson. Oxford: Berg.

Straw, W. 2012. «Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music». Cultural Studies 5 (3): 368–88.

Strong, Catherine, and Barbara Lebrun, eds. 2012. «Laneways of the Dead: Memorialising Musicians in Melbourne». In Death and the Rock Star. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Todorovic, M. 2005. «Inaudible Noise: Belgrade's Academy Club: Legacy, Old Locals and New Space». Leisure Studies 24 (4): 415–35.

This text was published first in the second Norient book «Seismographic Sounds».

Biography

Andy Bennett is Professor of Cultural Sociology and Director of the Griffith Centre for Cultural Research at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. He is author and editor of numerous books about music, identity and place. Follow him on LinkedIn.

Published on November 09, 2018

Last updated on April 10, 2024

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Deconstructing Jantelagen

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How to Escape Exotism

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