GLOBALISATION v FOLK MUSIC

While the Common Working (and non-Working) Man (and my dog!) gets crushed by cars, concrete, capitalism, computers and conformity, I often think "what is going on 'ere?"

A few weeks ago, I attended Ashton's Farmers' Market in Tameside to help my girlfriend with her 'Pennine Perennials - Hardy Plants for Higher Places!' and found the spirit and camaraderie of the people taking part unbelievable compared to my former full-time employment days with a global company. Then, over the local market place P.A. (normally reserved for telling people to shift their car), I heard of an exhibition at the nearby Town Hall.

Not quite knowing what it was about but wanting to stretch my legs (to avoid any DVT - Deep Vein Thrombosis), I wandered over to have a look. What I saw really opened my eyes and may give an insight to what is going on, not only here, but also worldwide!

The exhibition was produced by I.S.E.C. (International Society For Ecology and Culture) and they have kindly given me permission to use some of their material for our readers' benefit. However, the effect of globalisation is so huge that it is too big for this magazine, but in my research I came across one subject which is appropriate for BUZZ.

"Globalisation is not a policy choice, it is a fact" - Bill Clinton

Globalisation is "irreversible and irresistible" - Tony Blair

There is another argument.

As the world's events unfold, it is becoming apparent that globalisation is a recipe for economic, environmental and cultural disaster. Local and national economies everywhere are being exploited by the activities of heavily subsidised investors and transnational corporations. Far from bringing prosperity, globalisation is in fact triggering an international 'race to the bottom' - threatening to impoverish people and degrade environments in every corner of the world.

The good news is that, whatever Bill Clinton and Tony Blair may have said, we can do something about it. The global economy is the result of deliberate policy; it isn't inevitable, it is reversible.

We often don't hear about Globalisation discussed in or on the media until we see stone-throwing, petrol-bombing mobs fighting riot-armed police and water-cannon in cities round the world.

Allow me to enlighten you without supporting any of the above 'direct actions'.

There are sinister changes happening to our world and I will explain why many folk clubs in general are going to the wall (and why my Folk At T'Mill series of concerts (12) lost nearly £20,000 of my redundancy money - despite featuring the best world folk acts on in a brilliant venue).

Do I have an axe to grind? Yes, but at least I now have found the right one instead of blaming Mossley, tight-fisted folk fans or looking for the answer in the bottom of a beer glass.

Satellites, cables, personal stereos, CDs and other entertainment technology have created the arteries through which entertainment companies are now homogenising global culture.

With the toppling of the Berlin Wall and the embrace of free-market ideology, the entire planet is being wired into music, movies, news, television and other cultural products that originate primarily in the film and recording studios of the US.

The impact on the rich cultural diversity of communities all around the world is immense!

Re-runs of Dallas and the Bill Cosby Show now fill the television screens on every continent.

Disneyland is now a global empire; its Japanese incarnation outside Tokyo draws 300,000 visitors a week, and Euro Disneyland draws more tourists than the Eiffel Tower, Sistine Chapel, British Museum and the Alps combined.

In Rio, school kids adorn their workbooks with pictures of Michael Jackson. In Kashmir, teenagers hum Beatle songs. All over, people are listening to western pop music and watching videos that offer a feeling of connectedness to a larger world. Most of the consumers of these global cultural products are young.

Musicians, teachers, social critics and politicians, especially in the poor countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, worry about the impact that the massive penetration of transnational sound will have on their children. Not only might it foreclose employment opportunities for local artists but it will doom the traditional music of their local culture.

"My fear is that in another 10 or 15 years' time, what with all the cassettes that find their way into the remotest village, and with none of their own music available, people will get conditioned to this cheap kind of music", says one Sri Lankan musician.

It typifies the anxiety felt round the globe that industrial musical products will sweep away hundreds of years of traditional music. "However small a nation we are, we still have our own way of singing, accompanying, intonating, making movements and so on", says the Sri Lankan musician. "We can make a small but distinctive contribution to world culture. But we could lose it".

The impact of the global music industry on the character of local music has been significant. The Indian pop star Babydoll Alisha sings Madonna songs in Hindi. Tunisian artists now routinely use synthesisers to accompany the traditional bagpipes at live concerts. The need for financing for expensive electronic instruments and the dependence on access to electricity is changing local music cultures.

The globalisation of the music market and the technology of multi-channel recording, however, have made it possible to create fresh sounds from all over the world. Everything from zouk, rhi and jit from Africa to salsa from the Caribbean to Indian bhangra are now mixed with a variety of American pop genres to produce a blend that is promoted round the world as "world beat". Lambada, promoted by French entrepreneurs as the dance craze of Brazil is Bolivian in origin. A recorded version of this music performed by mostly Senegalese musicians became a global hit. Paul Simon used South African singers and songs for his album Graceland, but he wrote his own words and the political message was diluted.

Local musicians are, of course, excited by the audiences, fame and money that international record companies can provide, but some are concerned that their rich cultural traditions are being mined to make an international product. The companies, though much agitated about protecting their own intellectual property from pirates, feel no compunction about uprooting the music of indigenous peoples and treating it as a free commodity.

The role of technology clearly has been important in the growth of commercial entertainment. The transmission of pictures, talk and music by satellite greatly accelerated the spread of a global market for movies, music videos and television programmes. The VCR turned homes, bars, day-care centres, waiting rooms and nursing homes into a global chain of movie theatres.

On the remote island of Siquijor in the Philippines, the inhabitants still gather at "the hangout" and watch Rambo on videotape. In Columbia, long-distance buses show Robocop.

Popular culture now acts as a sponge to soak up spare time and energy that in earlier times might have been devoted to nurturing and instructing children or to participating in political, religious, civic or community activities, or to crafts, reading and continuing self-education. Political theory rests on the assumption that these activities are central to the functioning of a democratic society. Yet increasingly, vicarious experiences via film, video and pop music are a substitute for civic life and community. As it becomes harder for young people in many parts of the world to carve out satisfying roles, the rush of commercial sounds and images offers escape.

Cultural nationalists in Latin America and Asia are enraged that the most influential teachers of the next generation are Hollywood film studios and global advertising agencies. But advances in intrusive technologies are making it increasingly difficult for families and teachers to compete with the global media for the attention of the next generation.

To conclude, it feels, to me, like some sort of 3rd World War raging - not with bullets and bombs but with something which has much more stealth!

The point here is if you don't want to lose your culture, now is the time to go out to your local folk club and support them before it is too late.

This is not an Early Warning (as I know to my expense) but a realisation of "what is going 'ere………… now!"

However, a ray of hope does exist.

During July's Saddleworth Folk Festival, I called in on a session to find a host of young musicians i.e. Becky (29) on Uilleann pipes, Dave (19) on guitar, Paul (27) also on guitar, Danny (22) on melodeon, Jenn (18) on fiddle and Tommy (24) on flute playing Irish, Scottish and English tunes at a standard of almost Olympian quality - so we live in hope that there is new life in our folk culture.

Let's dearly wish it is sustainable despite the insidious influence of GLOBALISATION.

Beware the experts, politicians and businessmen that call this 'progress' - we now know better!

It is actually REGRESSION of local traditional cultural diversity worldwide - just like the destruction, also worldwide, of our bio-diversity.

But that's another story.

Pity it's the same problem!

I could say 'Money is the root of all evil' …but that's been said before by much wiser men than I.

They were right.

Dave Godwin - 01457 872494

If you require any more information, please ring I.S.E.C. on 01803 868650. They will be only too willing to advise.

Alternatively, you can get the book 'The Case Against The Global Economy', edited by Edward Goldsmith and Jerry Mander (Earthscan, £14.95) or e-mail me at chissy.godwin@btinternet.com and I'll send you (free!) a copy of my 'Globalisation Explained' - it's scary!

To which I can only reply "so what?" if they want to do that why shouldn't they? Should we romanticize the "third world" and say that it hasn't the right to do what Martyn Bennet does in Scotland? You could just as easily say, "in these decadent times African American musicians use a Spanish invention, the guitar, to play a debased form of globalized African pop bastardized and adulterated with English folksong." You'd be describing the blues in the 1920s, of course.

There is a fallacy inherent in many opponents of the globalization of culture, and that is that Globalization always has the effect of weakening local cultures. But while not all globalization is good, not all globalization is bad either. Many of the great Irish musicians you obviously care about play tunes composed by Ed Reavy in the town where I live, Philadelphia. Without global flows of culture, these great tunes would never be played in Sydney, London or Sligo. In fact, even the fact of your youngsters playing "Scottish, Irish and English" tunes together is a consequence of the colonial subjugation of Ireland and Scotland by England in the past. Colonialism is, of course, the necessary precursor to globalization as we know it. The use of the violin (an italian invention) the guitar (a spanish invention which entered Irish music largely by way of the American folk revival) the Uillean pipes (probably an Irish invention) and the melodeon (a German invention) in the same band is another example of globalization itself--albeit in an earlier, more limited form. The supposedly Local culture you love is itself a product of the insidious influence of globalization!

I am not arguing that the kind of hugely destructive globalized economy at work in Argentina and in asian sweat shops is a good thing. But it's largely different from the globalization of music.

Remember, people have been sounding the death-knell of folk music for years, mostly blaming American pop music. But folk music is still here. And there, too. Enjoy it. And remember, it, too, is globalized!

I find the attitudes in the first article to be very common amongst certain English folkies, but also find them much less prevalent amongst their Welsh, Scottish, and Irish counterparts.

Why?

Well, I don't know with any certainty of course, but I have a few ideas. One is, the attitudes expressed in the article might reflect resentment over the "Americanisation" of Anglo folk song, despite the transformation of same being part and parcel of the folk process, just as Nerd noted. Anglo American folk songs don't seem to have travelled back to England to the same extent Irish ones have to Ireland, for instance. There does seem to be genuine resistance among some English folkies to accept natural American folk influences upon English folk songs.

Then, there is what seems to be real resentment among some English people (including non-folkies) over US Anglo American culture becoming the more dominant force in the world in the post-WWII era, than than English culture had in the pre-WWII era, when Britain was still the dominant imperial/colonial force in the world.

I find it a bit ironic that some of the areas of the world mentioned in the article are much more likely to be imitating English musicians and musical influences than they are American, because their experience with colonial forces in their world were English, not American. We seem to think that everyone in the world with a TV is watching a complete diet of American junk TV. While they may get the occassional American programming, the reality is, articles like this always ignore the local programming everyone gets, which has a much stronger influence locally than the import stuff does.

I'm not arguing against the globalised "entertainment" industry at all. But the fact of the matter is, the British are exporting entertainment too. As are any economies with global clout (the Indian film industry comes to mind here, the Japanese animation industry, and of course, let us not forget the porn industries in many countries).

The true cause of American domination of the globalised entertainment industry isn't rooted in the American culture, but in the colonial language of English, which had spread throughout the world as the colonial language of power prior to the American ascendancy, which could only occur because we too spoke the colonial language.