Music and Cultural Production

Practice: Musical and Cultural Production


Louis Armstrong - Go Down Moses

Kool DJ Herc - Viva Freestyle

Historical and Cultural basis for Practice



Music and Cultural Production in relation to Culture, Identity, Power and Freedom


"Identity in hip hop is deeply rooted in the specific, the local experience, and one's attachment to and statues in a local group or alternative family.” (Rose 1994)

"Hip hop emerges from complex cultural exchanges and larger social and political conditions of disillusionment and alienation." (Rose 1994)


Spirituals

"Religious singing also enables slaves to express their despair over their statues a chattel.” (Cruz 1999)

"It is a well established fact that music was one of the primary means by which slaves cultivated collective knowledge and solidarity.” (Cruz 1999)

Cuba and Nigeria's Relationship

 

The movement of the Yoruba religious music between Nigeria and Cuba contributed to the African diaspora. The Yoruba is an ethnic group of people from southwest Nigeria. Music is highly important within the religion, with drums and drumming as the most significant. The different sounds the drums produce is seen as its own language. The Bata drums are believed to be the oldest Yoruba drum, which also communicates with the deities."The spiritual power of the instrument is often illustrated by narrations of how it was used by ancient Yoruba warriors. Bata drumming, it was believed, had the power to energize warriors in battle" (Omojola 2012). In present day, the Bata is only used for sacred and ritual events, and typically only men have the honour to play the Bata since it is believed the have the physical strength and spiritual power to play the drum. The bata drum was restricted to just men to play in Cuba since its religious significance in the Yoruba and different laws in Cuba. 

"In Nigeria, unlike in Cuba, no strict prohibition against women playing the bàtá exists, and this newly acquired transatlantic knowledge has, in turn, potentiated enormous gendered break within the landscape of ritual music in Cuba" (Meadows 2021).


Below is a video of Bata drumming, "Galí, Regla & Nagybe Santiago" "

"Since 2013, Orozco Rubio’s academic research has focused specifically on what he frames as the “emancipation of women” in Cuban Ifá-òrìṣà and includes a thesis and academic conference presentations on gender, Ifá, and òrìṣà worship in contemporary Nigeria" (Meadows 2021). 



Limitations of the Archive

There were unfortunately many research limitations when looking for primary source documents. For example, the original “Come Down Moses” sheet music, appears to be lost, along with many primary sources, potentially intentionally made absent. When looking into hip hop, it was a bit easier since the emergence of it has been more recent, but still had many limitations. For example, on the right, is a picture of DJ Bill Hawkins, who was Cleveland’s first African American DJ, and there are no recordings or audio of his work, only a few pictures in the NMAAHC.


”It is important to distinguish the makers of songs from the users of songs. Makers are of course users, but not all users are makers. Nonetheless, in the larger historical context in which social production of musical practices took place, it is not possible to reduce‘black’ music to black producers and white consumers. Consider a slave who is forced to sing: Who is producing music?”(Cruz 1999)


Patrolling and Controlling the Absence

One can choose to make the present absent when it comes to music, because the musician produced it full of presence, but the listener now has the power to choose what is present and absent in the song. Since Spirituals were brought and passed down through oral translation, much of its original meaning is absent. The commodification of hip hop has lead to the production of absence within the music. To combat these experiences of absence, we can turn to affect theory, as music enacts feelings of home, identity, and the connection to the diaspora in our body.

The Diaspora between Nigeria, Cuba, and the United States 

The Yoruba religion moved from Nigeria, to Cuba, and finally to the United States, and with those movements, the religion evolved and changed, as we can see above with the differences of the religious music in Cuba -Mules and Men (1935) by Zora Neale Huston describes African American folktales and hoodoo that were influenced by the Yoruba religion and African tales from the past and part of the diaspora -"While there are other African as well as Native American and European sources for other examples of African American orature, the folktales from Mules and Men that I analyze below have clear antecedents in Yoruba ese Ifa." (Washington 2012)

 "Both the African American and Yoruba works center on creative control and feature entities of dubious repute." (Washington 2012) 

Carl Van Vechten, "Portrait of Zora Neale Hurston," April 3, 1938. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, Van Vechten Collection, Washington, D.C.

Below is an excerpt from Mules and Men that describe the hoodoo or ‘“Ritual to get a man” 

Mules and men.pdf

Asaphs of Seraph: Yoruba Christian Organization based in the United States, hold an annual convention every year 

Akande, Ezekiel. 2018. “Cherubim and Seraphim Youth Retreat NC 2018 4k Revival video"

Akande, Ezekiel. 2018. “Asaphs Of Seraph 2018 main convention chicago 4k resolution clip 1” 

"The group of Yoruba men and women living in the United States who belong to the Asaphs of Seraph are characteristic of a 'new' African diaspora that has recently received attention from scholars" (Brennan 2012)

 "Music serves both centripetal and centrifugal roles, allowing both reproduction and creativity in the production of diasporic identities and communities" (Brennan 2012) 

"Music is not only central to the practices of evangelism that animate the community, but it is also the 'essence' of their identity, no matter where they are located" (Brennan 2012) 


"Musical performances at the annual conventions are a way of producing a transnational community of Yoruba Christians, of keeping migrants connected to Cherubim and Seraphim church communities back home in Nigeria, and most importantly, of producing a form of intersubjectivity through the performative act of singing together" (Brennan 2012) 

"Music is thus a cultural practice of diaspora with distinctive embodied, sensory, linguistic, and commodified mediations and circulations" (Brennan 2012) 

Works Cited


Videos