Hidden Flows

Shzr Ee Tan

13:00

Anjeline de Dios

13:30

Rehilwe Mooketsi

14:00

Discussion led by Shzr Ee Tan

14:30

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Music researcher Shzr Ee Tan suggests alternative pathways for music and digital culture that eschew the othering hegemony of Western innovation and techno-optimism. Anjeline de Dios examines how notions of authenticity based on race are used to devalue and exploit live music circuits in Southeast Asia. Rehilwe Mooketsi introduces the »pauperised celebrities« in South Africa’s pop music sector, tracing the industry’s problematic exploitation of class and poverty. The session closes with a discussion between all three researchers and a Q&A with the public.

Digital Inequalities and Global Musical Flows

Shzr Ee Tan

Much discussion in popular culture and in academic scholarship on the latest advents in technology has touched on the possibilities posed by virtual reality and artificial intelligence (Haraway 1991, Mantovani & Riva 1999, Michalski et al 2013, Copeland 2015). Optimists have focused on how thinking machines transform the human self via prosthetic extensions of the body, using for example smartphone or augmented vision technologies that tap into ‘the cloud’ for enhanced experiences. At the same time, sceptics warn of outsourcing human agency to 'black box' situations of machine learning, where computer-led iterations create algorithms of unknown construction and ethical underpinning. With the advance of data mining and the Internet of Things, alarm bells are also ringing over privacy breaches and surveillance. Clearly, digital technologies are challenging the ways in which we think and live.

What should decolonial musicians and music researchers make of this flood of innovation and change? At the risk of cultural-ghettoising, dare they ask if digital optimism—belatedly modernist in its privileging of progress—serves only the global North, unavoidably stereotyped as white, privileged or (thinking left-field) increasingly Chinese? Could they (uncomfortably) relocate cutting-edge debates to musical societies and communities outside the proverbial 'West'? Is it the job of the ethnomusicologist to provide an 'other', 'non-Western' if not global view here— a negative image as it were of the technological advances taken for granted in urban, industrialised, cosmopolitan and elite environments? It is in this spirit, and in order to deconstruct simplistic binaries such as 'West' and 'other', that I undertake in this paper/presentation not one but three alternative views of music and digital culture. In so doing I challenge the idea that there is only one dominant discourse at work, even as I acknowledge the asymmetrical reach of different hegemonies.

Not That Black, Not That White: The Migrant Filipino Labour of Live Music in Asia

Anjeline de Dios

At the outset, the notion of live music seems self-evident and universal: music performed in situ and in real time for audiences whose act of listening is interwoven with drinking, dining, socialising, and other practices of entertainment. Considering the work of live music in urban Asia, however, reveals its profoundly contested nature.

The question of who gets to be hired in the competitive labour economy of live music is structured by a racialised aesthetics of living musical bodies, wherein performance is judged by musicians’ perceived sonic and visual fidelity to the requisite Western/Anglophone pop music repertoire. In spite, or even because, of their racial and aesthetic inauthenticity — being cover performers who are not only neither black nor white, but also Asians who don’t perform their »own« music – migrant Filipino musicians have filled the gap for »cheap, high-quality« live music labour since at least the 18th century. The phenomenon of migrant Filipino musicians enlivening hotels, bars, cruise ships, and theme parks throughout Asia attests to the persistence of colonial thinking in globalised regimes of popular music, the complexity of its mutual construction with contemporary systems of labour migration, and the peculiarity of its lived experience as a precarious but enduring form of creative livelihood. Moreover, the work of live music challenges us to examine the underlying value hierarchies of authenticity and originality which constitute our fundamental stance of listening to music – as culture and as living labour.

A Perpetual Bond: Critique of the Oldest and Present Record Label. Deflationism and Romanticism as Industry Development Areas

Rehilwe Mooketsi

The way that poverty is constituted into the popular music sector is discernible via the ever-growing critical figure of »pauperised celebrities.« Systemic change is needed to produce a more desirable situation. In this talk, I identify the issue of poverty in South Africa as having a causal effect, in the sense of complacency, on the recruitment of people to become stars.​​ I postulate that there is a class demarcation in the local popular music sector (sector as preposition, a sector »within« an industry), and suggest that the entrenchment of neoliberal and informational capitalism is unsustainable towards this industry’s future.

This presentation does not condemn the idea of the star system, but rather that the method of hiring and running this star system does create an improvement in the stars’ lives – they begin poor and end up poor.​ To what degree does this conclusion amount to a perpetual indignation of musicians? In all these areas I apply the framework of person-dignity centered and humiliation theory.