Restless Leg Syndrome

world peace is a dance party ya'll

I read a pretty interesting interview Pitchfork did with Diplo this morning, to kill some time and get amped for this weekend’s Mad Decent Block Party, and caught him ranting about authenticity.

“What are we fighting for? You just have to do, you can’t live by the rules of what you’re supposed to do. I think every person is good at something and you just have to push that forward. If I can go from doing a record like Snoop Dogg, and then Rolo Tomassi, a punk record, and then work with Robyn and then Tiësto, I just think that’s funny….When I started working in Jamaica, being some white guy going to Jamaica to tour, someone requested some cheesy house music and Chumbawamba. Who cares about authenticity now? It doesn’t matter. All that matters is people are enjoying themselves. Authenticity–that word doesn’t exist in my vocabulary anymore.

A lot of people are bothered by me being white and doing stuff like this. I keep doing this stuff. I think I’m good at it… I’m really lucky. You know the kids that are making the ghetto stuff I can’t even reach are the ones that are inspiring me to play music for the other kids in the city they don’t even know about…. I love seeing this shit mixed together, I love seeing it go in weird directions. That’s why I started DJing.”

For those who don’t know, Diplo, a white Philadelphia native whose real name is Wesley Pentz, made himself into a household (dorm-hold?) name for himself as a DJ and producer, then invented a Jamican zombie-fighting character named Major Lazer, chewed on some dancehall and spit out the ubiquitous “Pon de Floor” – possibly the most fun dance track of last year. However, since dancehall is rather exclusive down in Kingston, he wasn’t taken seriously initially – until he proved that he had serious DJ chops.

Major Lazer – Pon de Floor

Still, Diplo and Switch purposely made their “Major Lazer” character Jamaican, half for fun and half to lend the sound some authenticity. And here comes that debate again.

Genres closely linked to subcultures tend to cling to cred as a defense mechanism against getting co-opted and diluted by outsiders, or worse, “dabblers.” This is understandable. If you’ve put all your blood and sweat and spirit into making music that really defines an experience for you, it has to sting if some impostor takes advantage of the sound without any commitment to where it comes from. The issue gets even trickier when you’re talking about music based not just in a subculture but in a different part of the world.

Suddenly it’s not just “Never been shot, never dealt crack and you’re laying down gangster rap? Poser. Never went freight-hopping or sold your plasma for food money and you call yourself punk? Poser.” Now it’s “Hey, you’re not Jamaican, where do your reggae influences come from? You don’t know a think about the Bosnian genocide, why are you putting out Balkan beats?” There’s an element of cultural purity and an impulse to protect the things people love. There is also fear of misrepresentation and fear of a sort of musical colonialism – cannibalizing and profiting off indigenous influence without paying credit where credit is due or giving back to the original community.

Recently, you can’t say musical colonialism without thinking of Vampire Weekend (they’re even the first result when you Google the term!). When these Columbia-educated upper-middle-class white kids appropriated Afrobeat into their clean-cut smooth-produced name-dropping pop songs, the backlash was ridiculous. Never mind that “black” sounds have been appropriated into “white” music throughout the entire twentieth century (remember rock ‘n’ roll taking their core sound from the blues, anyone?). Sure, Ezra Koenig’s polo shirts and puppy dog looks are almost as irritating as the trend of hipsters wearing scarves originally meant as symbols of Palestinian nationalism. But this just smacked of critics taking their instinctual annoyance at Vampire Weekend and projecting it into cultural commentary. Besides, lyrics like “walked to class in front of ya / spilled kefir on your keffiyeh” are equal parts obnoxious and tongue-in-cheek (the good old laugh plus head shake combination) and their debut album was damn catchy. They’ve since become the kind of band people love to hate, but secretly can’t stop listening to.

Vampire Weekend – Campus

The thing is, without curiosity and dabbling and mixing influences, often by someone with an outside perspective, there’s no innovation. And while some creativity comes as a miraculous inner spark, it’s more often than not catalyzed by being exposed to intriguing new things. Not to mention, people not deeply entrenched in a given scene have the added advantage of exposing the music to an audience that otherwise would never have heard it.

Globalization, at least the musical kind, has created some extremely cool things.

Besides Diplo, and really most hip hop/electronica producers, a lot of people are taking disparate sounds and making something new out of them. There’s Zach Condon, a kid from Santa Fe, who’s brainchild Beirut brought Balkan folk sounds into the American indie pop mainstream. It sounds a bit off when he’s trying to imitate Balkan folk music straight up, but when he merges it with typical indie singer-songwriter tropes, the end result is captivating and beautiful.

Yeasayer‘s two albums have invoked everything from African beats to tribal chanting to Far-Eastern orchestration into a beautiful multicultural pop mess that you can dance to. In fact, Yeasayer takes from such a wide array of diverse sources, often within the same song, that it’s hard to tell exactly where the sound is coming from.

Beirut – Postcards from Italy
Yeasayer – Wait for Summer

White guilt is fun and all, but hard-line detractors should also take a look at the flip side of the globalization coin. El Guincho, Spanish musician Pablo Díaz-Reixa, took Animal Collective’s psychedelic fuzz-pop, added some tropical beats, some Spanish rhythm, and even some dub, and made it danceable! The Tallest Man on Earth (Kristian Matsson) is not actually very tall but he’s a brilliant folk artist who gets compared to early Dylan and draws convincingly from American Southern blues. Even though he happens to be from Sweden! Speaking of Swedish artists taking on American folk, let’s not forget the beautiful cover of Fleet Foxes’ “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” done by Swedish teenagers First Aid Kit! It’s all very exciting! There’s a whole big world out there, and it’s making music!

El Guincho – Palmitos Park
The Tallest Man on Earth – The Gardener

It would be ideal if people who got into these sounds could also feel a sense of responsibility to where they came from, or sought to learn more about the original artists that inspired the spin-offs. But hey, not everyone who drinks bubble tea can tell you the difference between Mandorin and Cantonese and while that’s disappointing, that’s also just how it is. It’s 2010, the internet is providing unprecedented instant access to music from really far away. Tracks previously only found by flying to another country or digging through the back room of an eccentric record shop are now just a few clicks away, and people are taking advantage of it. So let’s try to keep politics out of it, enjoy the big global kumbaya happening here, and applaud artists who are having fun and putting out something worth listening to. As a wise band once sang, “The whole world loves it when you make that sound.” Chyea.