Afrofuturist pedagogy

Väkevä, L. (2010). “Garage band or GarageBand®? Remixing musical futures.” British Journal of Music Education, 27(01), 59.

I believe that music education should engage with the music that’s meaningful to students. The field is coming to agree with me. School music programs have been gradually embracing rock, for example via Modern Band. Which is great! Unfortunately, rock stopped being the driver of our musical culture sometime in the early 1990s. The kids currently in school are more about computer-generated dance music: hip-hop, techno, and their various pop derivatives. We live in an Afrofuturist world.

Classical, jazz and rock may sound different from each other, but they share basic commonalities: humans playing instruments live in real time, working toward the production of a stable finished product: a score and/or a recording. Lauri Väkevä observes that in the dance music of the African diaspora, there is no corresponding need for a canonical finished product.

Such practices as DJing/turntablism; assembling of various bits and pieces to remixes; remixing entire songs to mash-ups in home studios; collective songwriting online; producing of one’s own music videos to YouTube; exchanging and comparing videos of live performances of Guitar Hero and Rock Band game songs – all of these indicate a musical culture that differs substantially from conventional ‘garage band’ practices.

The move to Modern Band has been mostly a shift in repertoire and instrumentation, not pedagogy. A move to hip-hop and EDM culture is going to require a pedagogical shift as well.

This has been certainly uncharted territory for myself: for years, I thought – and taught others – that popular music’s artistry culminates in original songs or albums that can be discussed in such terms as genre, style and personal idiom. Moreover, I thought that production of these works is based on tedious practice of using such tangible equipment as guitars, basses, drum sets, microphones and mixing consoles to compose, arrange, perform and record one’s own music, further distributed to the listeners as ready-made ‘listenables.’

It does represent progress to think of the canonical work as being a recording rather a score. But we’re still stuck on the idea of the canonical work. The idea of music as a set of discrete works with clearly identifiable authors is itself a European-descended cultural norm that the traditions of the African diaspora don’t necessarily share.

Instead of limiting our notion of musicking within the modernist expert culture’s ideal of professionalism and its related exclusivist idea of autonomous art, Small suggests that we take a look at how Afrodiasporic culture exemplifies the kind of communal musicking in which strict lines between the musicians, musical works, and audience often fade out in service of more societal forms of enjoying. I would suggest that today some of the most exciting forms of this communality are related to digital musical practices that base their expression on Afrodiasporic aesthetic values. Music teachers should be familiar with these practices and the communality involved.

Väkevä uses the Amen Break as his emblematic example of Afrofuturist musical practice. I created this graphic of the break waveform wrapped in a circle through the magic of GIMP:

To get an overview of the Amen break’s history, sonic qualities, and musical impact, check out Ali Jamieson’s excellent post.

The original recording on which the break appears is a stable musical artifact with a specific group of creators. The identity of the break itself, however, is more complicated. It has been sampled, edited, blended, and recombined into uncountably many new musical works, many of which have themselves been the basis for yet more new works. The break frequently (and illegally) appears in sample libraries, and producers don’t need to have any idea of its provenance in order to use it. Even though it’s an audio recording, the break is less a work unto itself, and more a generative musical structure, like sonata form or the V-I cadence.

The Amen break’s endless repurposings have made it either a wonderful example of shared cultural property or a terrible example of rampant theft, depending on your stance on intellectual property.

One of the major cultural challenges for any people living in diasporic conditions is how to communicate its expressive ideas. In order to overcome this challenge, Afrodiasporic culture developed its own specific rhetoric, based on what DuBois ([1903] 1994) identified as ‘Second Sight’. The latter involves African-derived communicative practices that are applied to mask the critique towards the oppressive majority with terms that are fully open only for the oppressed minority. In the scholarship of Afrodiasporic literature and music, these communicative practices have been discussed in terms of ‘Signifyin(g)’ (Gates, 1988; Floyd, 1995). The term marks a set of rhetoric devices that produce levels of embedded meaning below the surface of cultural texts. These meanings have their full impact only when interpreted against the cultural background of the language users.

Can we bring anti-authoritarian music into the schools without crushing its spirit? Väkevä is optimistic.

Luckily, as exemplified by cases like the Amen break, music has a power to live on its own despite restricting institutional structures. To the degree that the digitally made and distributed ‘glocalised’ versions of Afrodiasporic music share the latter’s ability to work as social counter-critique, and to the degree they can build on its zeal to experiment with technologies of mediation to negotiate new meanings, they can be considered as exemplifying transformative praxes. This would perhaps be the most important reason not to overlook the Amen breaks of the future.

Preach! “Transformative praxis” is a highbrow way of saying “musical creativity,” and the repurposing of existing recordings is one of the most salient forms of creativity in the culture.

There seem to be certain cultural, social and political reasons why Afrodiasporic music has become so overwhelmingly popular in the last hundred years that it can be even considered as ‘the major music in the west.’

I believe that the reason for our collective love of Afrodiasporic music is precisely because it questions so many of the core assumptions of Western culture: exclusive authorship and ownership of ideas, with the attendant implications for capitalism; the musical work standing outside of time; “pure” music divorced from specific social contexts. We love Afrodiasporic music for its secular devotion. It’s exciting to us to hear music that resists the stifling strictures of industrial capitalism. Can school be a part of that resistance? Getting the Amen Break into more kids’ hands would be a step in the right direction.