Gentleman Troubadours and Andean Pop Stars: Huayno Music, Media Work, and Ethnic Imaginaries in Urban Peru
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Gentleman Troubadours and Andean Pop Stars: Huayno Music, Media Work, and Ethnic Imaginaries in Urban Peru
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| ISBN-13: | 9780226923970 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2013 |
| Series: | Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 242 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Gentleman Troubadours and Andean Pop Stars
Huayno Music, Media Work, and Ethnic Imaginaries in Urban Peru
By JOSHUA TUCKER
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2013The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-92396-3
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Distributed Society: Andean Sounds, Mediated Scenes, and Urban Space
Ethnographic work tying media use to subjectivity has yielded accounts of great subtlety over the last decade, as constructivist notions of identity have engaged the "experience of mass-mediated forms in relation to the practices of everyday life" (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1995: 4) and revealed the fluid popular uptake of the social identifications in circulation. At the same time, these very works have made the task of media ethnography seem more vexed than ever, insofar as the genre at its best helps to illuminate "the contingent way in which all social categories emerge, become naturalized, and intersect in people's conception of themselves and their world" (Rofel 1994: 703). The sheer profusion of media forms, each bringing new points of reference to large, dispersed groups and transcending culturally or territorially bound models of shared substance, defies attempts to align one system of symbols and meanings with a single class, culture, or nation. It has become hard to specify the range of categories and discourses available within a given situation, and it is increasingly clear that consumers are promiscuous and fickle, using different media forms for different purposes at different moments. The very language of identity, with its connotations of deep psychosocial convictions that guide character and action, seems inadequate to describe the transient, ephemeral bonds that accrue to contemporary media objects. In short, there is still no single, all-encompassing "means of theorizing the formation of collectivities that cross ruptures of space and are outside formal definitions of 'culture'" (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002: 5).
My approach rests ultimately upon Jürgen Habermas's ([1959] 1989) seminal study of the public sphere, and more proximately upon its resonance in recent work on public culture. His account of the public as a type of collective that arose with democracy, and specifically via rational-critical discussion about the priorities of civil society, provided an elegant, anti-essentialist model of the way that people come to share a sense of commitment and common cause. The ties that bound the emergent public were built through mutually engaged discourse about collective rights and obligations, and they grew from the mutual recognition of evolving interests rather than from antecedent categories of culture or class. Insofar as such discussions moved dialogically, the bases of group sentiment were elaborated collectively; they were the creation of all and none, and their very anonymity gave the public its air of legitimacy. And if group sentiment was contingent, then the principles of identification were very real for the actors involved.
However, Habermas's idealized model depended upon the independence of communicative channels from forces that might bend public discourse to their interest. He condemned the colonization of the commons by commerce, arguing that the promotion of consumer goods had split the public into competing constituencies of style and reduced its role to that of spectator, choosing among "products designed to please various tastes ... none of [which] reaches the whole of the public" (Calhoun 1992b: 25). Though accurate enough, this account pathologized the mediated transactions that make up much of contemporary life without offering an analysis of their generative particularities. If consumption rarely promotes rational-critical discussion, for instance, then it is powerfully implicated in the growth of shared investments (Appadurai 1986; D. Miller 1994, 1995; García Canclini 2001). Commercial media also channel images or sentiments dear to subcultural groups who lack the social capital necessary for rational-critical discussion, building subaltern "counterpublics" (Warner 2002) that act through the resources of the corporatized public sphere (Fraser 1990). Later accounts deploy Habermas's processual insights against the grain of his own theory, describing publics as social bodies organized around "folk notions about groupness, interest, and communication" (Gal and Woolard 2001: 7), and emphasizing the sense of mutuality that develops when people are identified as members of markets—that is, consumers with common investments in material culture—and understood to have a historical endurance as such (Kunreuther 2006; Mazzarella 2004; Pinney 2001; Warner 2002). Habermas's critique of the public sphere's undemocratic topography remains compelling, but taking it seriously cannot mean abandoning analysis of the publics produced by the actual conditions of the media landscape. Instead, it means accounting for the conditions that grant certain individuals the capability to speak and act publicly and analyzing the means by which their models of groupness become persuasive.
Simon Frith's model of genre, which describes the way that the popular music industry stabilizes the relation between sound and market, echoes many of the concerns raised by these theorists of public culture. Here industry workers read the purchasing patterns of consumers, seeking to determine the persuasive elements of successful recordings. They use the insights gleaned thereby to develop a set of "genre worlds," which shape the sound and imagery applied to future productions, and which are in turn marketed to the same consumers who generated the initial series of discourses (Frith 1996: 88). Audiences, in other words, are initially defined in relation to an amorphous set of musical attributes and later serve as the basis for the consolidation of those attributes as a genre, as mediators and artists refine them in ways that they think will satisfy emergent tastes. Markets and genres gradually become defined in terms of one another, and though everything has the appearance of a spontaneous social manifestation, production is part of an ongoing and commercially negotiated dynamic involving listeners, who make their will known through acts of consumption; media workers, who help musicians create sounds that win audience approval; and musicians, who may or may not resist such imperatives.
To be fully effective, Frith's model needs to be placed into a broader context, because musical genres are ineluctably defined not only in relation to their listenerships, but also against one another. Useful here is the concept of the scene as defined by Will Straw, who describes it as a "cultural space in which a range of musical practices coexist, interacting with each other within a variety of processes of differentiation, and according to widely varying trajectories of change and cross-fertilization" (Straw 1991: 373). The styles that define a scene are mutable and stand in constant, transformational dialogue with one another, but the structure of the scene may be elucidated by specifying the elements that differentiate genres and their devotees at any given moment in time. The task of the analyst is to explain the "specific forms of connoisseurship central to an involvement in" a given music culture, and the social institutions that disseminate those forms of connoisseurship (Straw 1991: 372).
Straw's model allows that differentiation may be articulated in terms of cultural or class-based identities. This is certainly the case in Peru, where such social distinctions are aspects of everyday interaction. Here his ideas are most useful when they are placed in dialogue with Pierre Bourdieu's account of the field of cultural production (Bourdieu 1984, 1993). Departing from the insight that "a class is defined as much by its being-perceived and ... by its consumption—which need not be conspicuous to be symbolic—as by its position in the relations of production" (1984: 483), Bourdieu shows how notions of good and bad taste both derive from and reproduce existing class relationships. His ideas depend upon the notion of cultural capital, which may be thought of as "an internalized code or a cognitive acquisition which equips the social agent with empathy towards, appreciation for or competence in deciphering ... cultural artifacts" (Johnson 1993: 7). Such competence is rarely acquired through formal schooling. Instead, it is learned gradually over time, in myriad everyday rituals that, owing to their unremarked nature, come to inhabit a subconscious realm (the habitus; see also Bourdieu 1977). However, precisely because its acquisition is mystified and understood as innate, this nebulous sense of propriety makes the aesthetic habits of different social classes seem like instinctive tastes. In this way, performances of musical taste classify listeners according to the position of the evaluated style, product, or art object within the overall social field (Bourdieu 1984, 1993), and "by discriminating among the world of goods, people distinguish among each other and naturalize their position in a class-divided society" (Colloredo-Mansfeld 1999: 200).
It is precisely such modes of differentiation that act to produce distinction within the contemporary Andean music scene, and the insights of these theorists provide a nuanced way to approach the changing dynamics of Andean popular music in Peru. Highlanders inhabit a deeply overdetermined ethnic category, and persistent reminders of that fact lead most to adopt a particular stance toward Andean heritage. However, the interpretation of what it might mean actually to be Andean is more volatile than ever. Music provides a way of anchoring a conception of this subject position, but different musics compete for the right to capture it, using very different sounds and cultural discourses. As contemporary performers of Ayacuchano huayno fused local folk and international popular styles, for instance, their music became a site of identification for those who valued highland ancestry, but not its traditional terms. Their targets in Lima and, later, the highlands increasingly recognized themselves as the objects of radio broadcasts, news reports, and buyers of concert tickets or CDs. Insofar as its fans share other attributes, including ancestry and class, their style retained the aura of a spontaneous manifestation. But "consumers must be made rather than found in order to create a market" (Ang 1991: 32), and the identification between style and public depended upon the capacity of media actors to stabilize relationships between sound, audience, and a kind of social capital that is understood in relation to transnational cultural savvy.
Music and Media Work
Musical sounds may acquire social markers at several distinct sites of mediation, ranging from club advertisements aimed at a particular clientele (Thornton 1996), to the A & R department of record companies, where performing careers are designed in light of preexisting genre discourses (Negus 1999). In the case of contemporary Ayacuchano huayno, record producers and radio DJs were central in crafting the style's image and tying it to images of social progress and upward mobility. As elsewhere, such mediators have received little scholarly attention in Peru, owing to the long shadow cast by the Frankfurt School and its vision of an artless, avaricious culture industry herding consumers toward bland, easily replicable musical parameters. However, in light of ample evidence that consumers actively negotiate the meanings of the media products they use, and that artistic, personal, or societal commitments inflect the actions of industry workers, serious consideration of "the many human mediations which come in between the corporate structures and the practices ... of musicians" (Negus 1999: 16), not to mention between all of these actors and their audiences, seems long overdue.
Mediators are liable to have especially wide leeway in places such as Peru, where changes in recording technology have brought production into the hands of smaller enterprises. It is an amply supported truism that creative freedom can increase outside large corporate structures, with their need to maximize profits and minimize risk (see Greene 2005; Manuel 1993). Independent labels often empower musicians whose limited markets do not fit the economies of scale that govern large businesses, giving them unprecedented access to the public sphere and greater control over production than might be granted by a major studio. As it happens, contemporary Peru houses many independent (and often pirate) media channels, but even these nominal independents are constrained by structures of aesthetic hegemony and find themselves driven to draw upon genre discourses that are defined at more powerful studios. Furthermore, their challenge to the dominance of major labels often grows not from a democratizing instinct, but rather from the desire to tap the very markets that powerful media actors have defined. As such, their actions should be treated "neither as pure corporate manipulation nor as grassroots expression, but as contested territory where hegemonic and oppositional values symbolically or explicitly engage one another" (Manuel 1993: 10).
Ethnographic attention has already shown how the recording process, which involves manipulating and imbricating marked musical categories, stages "poetic representations of the self and others in relation to one another" (Meintjes 2003: 259). Recordings make publicly available possible models of social interaction in the proxy realm of style, acting as synecdoches for broader debates about what kinds of sounds, and hence what kinds of subjects or discourses, "go together"; moreover, they are understood to do so by creators and consumers. Recordings are driven by the need to capture audiences, but they also reflect and constitute larger debates about social and musical propriety. However, although the studio is the place where new sociomusical relations are affixed in the form of recordings, consumers are more properly recruited for those recordings in the process of distribution. And despite a dearth of research on music radio, it is often the most effective means of organizing markets, particularly where the listening public is larger than the record-buying public (Hennion and Méadel 1986).
Radio is an omnipresent force within Peruvian life and the central means whereby most people interact with music, but as elsewhere it is typically dismissed as a mere technology for delivering listeners to advertisers (Alfaro et al. 1990; Bolaños 1995). This is a mistake. In one of the few studies to seriously consider radio work, Debra Anne Spitulnik has argued that "when radio listeners have an awareness of one another and a sense of simultaneous participation, they are more than just a social aggregate of listeners who happen to use radio. They have a sense of intersubjectivity" (1994: 19). Moreover, by showing how the unique metadiscursive markers of radio broadcasting create the categories through which listeners interpret the materials that they hear, she demonstrates the analytical potential of greater attention to broadcast form. Radio workers hierarchize musical styles by positioning them variably over the day or within individual programs (Berland 1998; Hendy 2000), and DJs index the values of the music they play by linking it to other kinds of materials over the course of a broadcast (Hennion and Méadel 1986). A realistic portrait of radio's role in musical life should account for these tasks as well the structure of local radio businesses, which may encourage employees to organize musical sound according to uniquely local principles, pressures, and parameters.
The record label Dolby JR and the radio station Frecuencia A Record were both instrumental in structuring the public meanings of contemporary Ayacuchano music. As performers incorporated international sounds beyond their traditional competencies, they grew to rely heavily upon studio players, sound engineers, and multitrack recording. Recording huayno music became an exercise in piecemeal, studio-based composition under the eyes and ears of recording personnel, rather than a matter of placing a mic before a well-honed group to capture a live performance. And as new experts helped musicians tailor artistic choices to audience tastes, records came to tack between existing musical values and the bottom line, navigating between artists' respect for tradition and the "modern" sound that they believed would attract listeners. Studio workers also built links to broadcasters that could be trusted to promote the style appropriately, while DJs and radio managers chose broadcasting techniques that would attract likely audiences. The shape of the public associated with contemporary Ayacuchano music depended on the network that linked all of these actors, and most of all on the motivations of those who directed the traffic of sound through these networks. Following Lila Abu-Lughod's dictum that the goal of media ethnography is to show "how particular communities and individuals both have been subjected to and have responded to the calls of [the culture industry]" (2005: 11), then, their actions sit at the heart of the analysis I present in this book.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Gentleman Troubadours and Andean Pop Stars by JOSHUA TUCKER. Copyright © 2013 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction / Cities, Sounds, and Circulation in Twenty-first Century Peru
One / The Distributed Society
Two / The Andean Music Scene
Three / Bohemians, Poets, and Troubadours
Four / The Commercial Huayno Business
Five / Finding the Huayno People
Epilogue / Folkloric Frames and Mass Culture
Notes
Bibliography
Index