The world’s music 2.0: Smithsonian Folkways vs. National Geographic

I received a promotional package a month or so ago from my generous and much appreciated press contact at Smithsonian Folkways. He has long been undaunting in servicing my internet radio requests, never hesitating to gin up their dreamy proprietary CD-burning machine to churn out digital transfers of extremely deep catalog releases. Is there any deep catalog more exciting than the (for-all-intents-and-purposes) endless Folkways trough? It’s not too much to ask of one to shell out $20 for a burned disc in a smart cardboard sleeve, reprinted with the original Ronald Clyne cover art, or $9.99 for a digital album download – even though the digital masters are pulled from clean LPs and not from the original tapes (we can’t expect THAT much, can we?), we’re damn lucky the music is available to us at all. The Smithsonian Global Sound site offers a peerless exploratory experience, and with PDFs available of every album’s notes and cover, SFW’s leap into the digital age sets an example for every archival outlet looking to similarly adapt and disseminate. (That’s not including their downloadable teaching manuals and quixotic – though potentially brilliant – “Synchrotext” process. As a representative of another digitized archive pursuing on-line feasibility, yes, there is plenty jealousy of SFW’s creativity and adventurousness, not to mention funding. Ah… funding.)

I do digress. The package: in addition to the specific requests that it fulfilled, the package also delivered the two CDs that have earned SFW 2008 Grammy nominations – Michael Doucet’s “From Now On…“, in the Best Zydeco or Cajun category, and the Mariachi Los Camperos’ “Amor, Dolor, Y Lagrimas,” for the Best Regional Mexican album.

I listened to, and don’t like, either of these albums. Doucet as a fiddler is above censure – he’s brilliant, and the world requires my saying so not at all – but just as I’d rather have his old-time Cajun sessions with Canray Fontenot any day over Beausoleil, I can do without his interpretations of New Orleans R&B (the unspoken other half of the title is “…Everything I Do Gonna Be Funky,” after Allen Toussaint) and the occasional blues. The arrangements are tasteful – just fiddle, acoustic guitar, accordion, and vocal at most – but they’re harnessed to a less-than-inspired repertoire, just too spit-shined, too World Cafe for my taste.

Doucet is spit-shine; the Mariachi Los Camperos are a damn Zamboni. To these ears, their brand of Mexicano Country-politano música ranchera is the Latin equivalent of those (now utterly dated) collections of folk material sung by George Hamilton IV or Hank Snow, and gussied up by Chet Atkins and Bob Ferguson. It’s slick as can be, with a pro horn section and able harpist. If I were fluent in Spanish, I’d probably find the conceits in the Camperos’ hands nearly as unbelievable as I find those concerning little graves, roving gamblers, and prisoners’ dreams when interpreted by Snow or Hamilton’s.

My complaints with these records, however, are purely aesthetic. To ignore the popularity of slick country music – whether the Nashville Sound (then or now) or música ranchera – or to ask Smithsonian Folkways to do so, would be arrogant and patronizing. I might hate it, but what Los Camperos do is a representation of a thriving vernacular music as it’s enjoyed in Mexico. It’s not exactly “folk music,” but it certainly reflects real folkways, as they continue to be reinterpreted and adapted by their inheritors. I might be giving Grammy nominators too much, or maybe too little, credit, but I have a feeling that this the kind of thing they love nominating.

Maybe the Grammies are due less for the goodness of these records, and more to Folkways, the label, for continually resisting the inclination to become a genre ghetto. This is the label that first brought us Michael Hurley; that enthusiastically pressed up Henry Cowell LPs (and, later, CDs!); Sounds of Frogs and the Human Body; Tony Schwartz’s radio collages; and some of the most poorly recorded, obscurely annotated, and wonderfully interesting ethnographic music albums ever dreamt up. Moe Asch was not a record exec like, let’s say, Alan Lomax was a producer; Lomax who would often turn a tape machine or a video camera off if his informant started playing a pop tune, of any variety, learned off the radio or a record.* Folkways never explicitly dictated the breadth of its big tent. The “folkways” themselves were never explictly defined, and 45 years on, they’re still not.

Meanwhile, “Inefficient supply chains lose $40 billion annually.” That’s what the IBM banner ad chides on National Geographic’s new Nat Geo Music site. Perhaps that’s the problem of getting “world music” to the masses? Well then, perhaps NG can help, by providing an efficient clearing house for and adequate representation of all of those international artists that go criminally overlooked by the MSMM (mainstream music media, anyone?). You know, like Femi and Fela Kuti; Cesaria Evora; Damien Marley; and this scrappy bunch of fellows you’ve probably never heard of, Vampire Weekend! Seriously, though – poking around the site, looking at the genres on offer, I’m at an utter loss. Does National Geographic truly think they’re providing a unique service, or just hoping to cash in on a wholly underwhelming aggregation of economically fail-safe “world music” artists? According to Wired, it’s the former** – a marketing experiment focused on the potentially lucrative fantasy of an international indie youth culture, and not, ultimately, with much interest in fashioning the musicological equivalent of their photo-journalism.

The site’s few artist entries that hint at any greater inspiration than can be hoped for from a Putomayo A&R suit (or, for that matter, Mat Whittington, head of Nat Geo Music and former manager of the Thievery Corporation, an “electronic music duo with international flavor”), have been cut whole cloth from the (former?) Calabash Music site, which is itself a strange and often frustrating grab-bag of mostly contemporary ethno-pop musics. The one potentially exciting program on offer here – of the endangered music and dance traditions of Gabon – is not accessible through the website; no, you must be a subscriber to National Geographic Music Television, currently only available, well, nearly everywhere but North America. In case you were wondering, that station shows no signs of greater adventurousness than that of the website; that is if I understand their stated focus on “top artists” correctly.

Michael Doucet and the Mariachi Los Camperos are, in their own genre-ific ways, “top artists.” Plenty like them, buy their records, nominate them for Grammies. But those top artists, in the SFW firmament, sit alongside the whole wild ensemble that is the Folkways catalog – not only just the one-offs mentioned above, but also the noble and awe-inspiring Central Asia and Indonesia series, among so many others. Look at their website and the first thing you see is a rotating gallery of Folkways LP covers dug up from the vaults; records that aren’t lost, or dead, but only sleeping, and that can be yours on CD, as we’ve said, for less than $20. The Folkways folks seem – and I bet they are – just as proud of those riches as they are of their Grammy nominations.

But I’m still waiting for proof that the lowest-common-denominating (with its concomitant, hopeful insistence on what was once – is still? – called the “long tail”) that outlets like National Geographic’s music site do to the world’s vernacular music benefits the local musical communities that are obscured the most by the world-beat market’s monoculture. If it did have any benefit at all, it would be because it inspires in listeners more adventurousness than they seem to be comfortable exploiting in themselves; listeners who shouldn’t be so underestimated as to be assumed to appreciate only the most highly processed spoonfuls of that murky pot-au-feu that goes by the name of “world music.” No matter how “top” the artists might be.

*There are some very funny documented examples of Lomax waxing rhapsodic about how old or authentic a song he’s just recorded – with the player agreeing, or just keeping mum – when in fact it’s some cheesy pop-cowboy number of rather recent composition.

**Indeed, Wired says approvingly, National Geographic wants no truck with “the sound of the rain forest, indigenous tribes, or things of that nature. Rather, Nat Geo Music is looking for modern-sounding bands from various countries that have the potential to attract listeners from other regions.” Ouch.