The musical community at Northpointe Christian church is what takes center “stage.” For those unfamiliar, many contemporary Christian churches, such as the non-denominational Northpointe, replace the long tradition of altar, pulpit & chorus with stage, microphone & rock band. The “worship band” is responsible for “leading” the service—and, along with the “teacher” (preacher-type role), the “worship leader” is the central figure of the service at Northpointe.
I have been visiting Northpointe for a few months now while working on this project. After missing a couple weeks of the services, Jordan Plumier (Worship Arts Director at Northpoint & my main contact/informant) got in touch with me about playing for a special Mother’s Day service. Jordan wanted to put together a group of musicans to play the usual worship songs but with a more intimate, quiet sound than the regular group (which includes a full drum set and a Marshall Stack). The ensemble ended up being Jordan on vocals and acoustic guitar, Jon on electric bass, James on Djembe, and myself on the violin. How a classically trained violinist paired up with someone playing a West African drum to play contemporary, American, Chirstian pop-rock songs is probably too culturally complicated for a short performance ethnography to try and explain and analyze.
For the sake of this ethnography, I was lucky to have a very direct performance role in the community with which I have been involved.The musical community at Northpointe is ostensibly focused around the musicians in the Worship Band, however, the congregation always can participate by singing along to the lyrics (projected on the screen of the movie theater). Additionally, the members of the Worship Band change from week to week and are typically culled from the congregation—James and Jon both go to Northpointe and aren’t professional musicians—one is auto-body mechanic and the other is a biology professor.
For the first time, Northpointe was planning on having two services on Mother’s Day, an early bird flight at 8:45 and then another at 10:00. This meant the call time was close to 7:00AM, for which I admit to being considerably late. Every Sunday, the team of around 10 people who make the Northpointe services happen arrive at the church’s theater at the Lincoln, RI Cinemaworld before the crack of dawn to load-in PA and A/V equipment for the sound and projections used during the service. When I arrived, I was handed a minute-by-minute schedule of the morning’s setup, rehearsal, and two services (The band was already behind schedule, on my account…), and we did an abbreviated run-through of the entire service. Then church leader’s gathered all of us who were participating in the service in a neighboring theater for a prayer, a “team-meeting,” and a communion. Most of this set-up leading up to the service feels like setting up for a rock n’ roll show—there are soundchecks, lighting checks, monitor mixes, video/projection tests
The day before, I had rehearsed the songs with Jordan and Jon (the bass player). Some of these I recognized from earlier services, and a couple I had played (when I played at an earlier Northpointe gathering). We practiced 4 songs for the service: “Cannons” by Phil Wickham, “My Deliverer” by Chris Tomlin, Daniel Carson, Matt Maher & Jesse Reeves, “Mighty To Save” by Reuben Morgan and Ben Fielding, and “Glory to God Forever” by Steve Fee. All of the songs have a poppy structure—3 verses with choruses in between and usually a bridge. The tunes were in easy keys—“A”, “D”, and “G”—for Jordan to hit all of those “high notes” and for the congregation to easily learn and follow along.
The first service went off without a hitch—the sound was full and clean—and although there were not as many people as usually attend the 10AM service, the theater felt reasonably attended and attentive. Parishioners weren’t as keen on singing along as one would expect, but maybe that was because it was earlier than normal. The band takes a break while Jerry, the “Teacher” for the day, gives his long talk or sermon. He was in the midst of his “ATM” lecture series, and the services was broken up by a short video of kids from the congregation talking about their mothers, and then again by a video of a newly baptized family from the church.
In between services, we tweaked some of the sound, changed some levels, then we threw on some “house” background music of other contemporary Christian songs via iPod. For the second service went along much in the same fashion. I noticed several faces from the first service who stuck around for round two, but overall, there were more people and more families, which ended up meaning more singing. For some of the quieter parts in songs, I could hear the many voices in the congregation overtaking the output of the PA speakers. It’s typically too loud to hear anyone other than the band—whether you’re sitting out in the seats or up on stage. Hardly anyone sits up close to the stage/screen/altar, because, as Jordan points out, it’s really just too loud.
When I established Jerry’s talk was the same as in the first service, I stepped outside of the theater to relax with the band and have a cup of coffee and a bag of popcorn. We talked about “the sound” of our performance, Iron Man 2, a reliable nearby auto mechanic, and how attendance panned out this week considering there were two services instead of one. When we heard the baptism video come on, we made our way back in to finish up.
Personally, I received positive feedback on my playing and participation. I think people were mostly happy to see another new face playing an instrument they don’t usually hear. As always, everyone on the Northpointe staff as well as the folks in the congregation was overtly friendly and helpful. As a playing experience for me, playing at Northpointe was something very different. I’m a classically trained violinist who ended up playing in bluegrass bands and some honky rock n’ roll. Stylistically, it was inappropriate to play up either of the sounds I had most the most experience playing—I had to fashion a middle ground that wasn’t flowery like classical/orchestral music but also wasn’t flashy or twangy like the bluegrass/fiddle sounding stuff I have done. In a way, the genre or sound of the Worship Band is hard to pin down as well. Apart from calling it pop music that features lyrics with Christian themes, it is maybe easier to define it by what popular forms it is not… Surprisingly, the four of us made a relatively cohesive product, considering we had only had minimal practice. Jordan’s voice and guitar playing so distinctively fit into the particular genre of music he was trying to communicate to the Northpoint congregation that if the rest of the band played to him, we were able to make it sound natural. Even with a djembe, violin, and electric bass on the same stage.
It was valuable to have the opportunity to participate in this performance and help cultivate the “worship sound” at Northpointe. This type of music has never been an interest of mine before now, and throughout the course of my project I had a lot of learning to do to become familiar with what exactly “Contemporary Christian Worship Music” is and what kind of music Jordan et. al. are trying to make at Northpointe. Clearly, they are using this very distinct, bounded, and mainstreamed sound to carve out their own identity as an infant church, and how much they choose to change or build on the existing contemporary Christian foundation will be up to the church leaders and congregation. Nevertheless, my relative outsider status allowed me to start from the ground up in terms of shaping my knowledge and opinions.
Novak's article does a good job in demonstrating remediation through tracing "Jan Pehechan Ho" from its original context to isolated context to the Heavenly Ten Stems to Ghost World. I didn't know anything about the song, the band, or the movie, so in learning about them, I thought it would be a stretch to link these three examples together. Nevertheless, Ghost World's super-reflexivity on "nostalgia" was a very meaningful end to the analytical trajectory.
Remediation just sounds like a fancy term for how people interpret the art around them to make art of their own. I suppose it has its specific uses (e.g. graphic novel to movie) or clear, distinct examples ("Jan Pehechan Ho"), but I think its hard to draw the line between what is cultural diffusion and "remediation". I think the example from the movie, where Enid claims something that is "so bad it has gone past good and back to bad" is what draws that line.
The point of this article and the point of Ghost World is to decry the effects when remediation replaces the original idea that gets mediated in the first place. When novelty, kitsch and humor replace what heartfelt meaning (not that one can't profoundly feel kitsch etc.), what is the nature of the "new" remediated product that springs forth from the old ones?
The aesthetic of interruption and disconnect used to describe the disjointed tropes and styles of Bollywood movies lays out fertile ground for this "spontaneous remediation". Remediation born out of no evident connection to the original source. But what is original source anyways?
I found Windy Chien's comment, "If you like a Bollywood song now [in 2008], you have to really like it. It's available--so it's not the exotic mystery... (63)." The article mentioned she owned Aquarius Records in San Francisco, which I have been to a couple of times. I quickly understood Aquarius as this bevy of obscure, imported I-don't-quite-know-what. Cool, but I didn't quite know why or have the money to find out why (it's hard to utilize the global current and torrent/megadownload some Columbian electronica you can't locate on iTunes/amazon etc.). Chien, one of the "protesters" at the Heavenly Ten Stems show, goes on to work for the man--for iTunes--exterminating the kitsch and novelty which seem to make a place like Aquarius Records--and the obsessive collectors in Ghost World--thrive.
Feld has a good example in "Rorogwela"--Deep Forests hijacking of the song comes off as objectively wretched and artistically perverse. The example does raise some important questions about artistic influence, copyright, and global copyright.
In Feld's conclusion, he states that it is unclear if Afunakwa had ever heard the Deep Forest song or its derivative versions and "Pygmy Lullaby". This makes "Sweet Lullaby's" multilocal histories and controversy one that really escaped the original source of the tune entirely and the controversy is one of "our" own making. With the Deep Forest recording especially, it seems as if their grasp of the song was utterly dislocated and disconnected--locally schizophonic--from the source at the Solomon Islands that I'm not sure whether it matters where they got that tune from or not. It is clear Deep Forest isn't concerned about their source and their listeners aren't either--it's only ethnomusicologist types who know the original field recordings. This is cynical, but in this instance, does it matter how flagrantly they used it? Maybe less so than how they incorrectly cited it as a Central African folk lullaby.
The questions Feld was raising about the "Sweet Lullaby"--one of rights, authenticity and copyright--could maybe have been brought up with an example where the power dynamics weren't so irrevocably on the side of the Westerners (Deep Forest). Mining ethnomusicological field recordings for pop-song sample content seems more a question of obtaining artistic clout via obscurity (an extended "nostalgia" for other music, perhaps).
The discussion in these two articles of Paul Simon's Graceland cover a lot of ground. Meintjes delves into more discussion than the Feld, but, as with Buena Vista Social Club, it's important to know as much background information on this record as possible. I'm finding it hard to make this a critical review about the Feld and Meintjes articles because I mostly want to leap from their discussion on Graceland into my own.
One of the highlights from the Meintjes article is the part on how Graceland includes a hodgepodge of African elements. This "stylistic integration" ranges from a blending of languages, as well as the album's cover art, which features an "Ethiopian effigy" when no other Ethiopian influence is present. This suggests an album that is not wholly South African, but not pan-African either. The inclusion of Los Lobos on the record made this more confusing for me. Meintjes discusses the political ambiguity of Graceland, but I found it just as aesthetically ambiguous.
From my own experiences from the record, it seems like it's purposefully avoiding any political attachment in the name of music and collaboration. I think I agree with Meintjes that this aesthetic pastiche in the actual product of Graceland disregards the collaborators and contributors in a way that disables their agency and artistic integrity. The process and touring around Graceland seems to more sensitive and interested in the collaborators well-being.
I regard this album not as something representative of Africa or African music, but as a Paul Simon record that he got some African musicians to interpret. The product is and has been, at least for me, unmistakably Paul Simon, and if anything, this wide ranging and vague degrees of collaboration detract from Paul Simon's artistic trajectory as an artist. I think Graceland isn't trying to be some Western artist-guided dialogue or exploration of a musical genre or style (unlike Buena Vista Social Club). Rather, it is a confusedly African tinged piece of pop music.
Rebecca's Challenge Question What do you think constitutes an appropriate motivation to undertake ethnography and what should its ultimate goal be? Consider the following list of reasons one might study a specific group of musicians and contribute additional vantage points as you see fit: personal interest or connection to a subject; filling a gap in academic research; the prestige of the subject being studied; promoting broader understanding, etc... You don't necessarily need to discuss each item on the list, just consider each as you discuss the purposes and goals you see as being most important in conducting ethnography.
Perhaps the question is whether to undertake ethnography as opposed to a less-personalized form of objective study (if there is such a thing). It seems as if the style of ethnomusicological writing we have been reading in class has been highly anthropological and ethnographic--the articles and chapters are typically rooted in a bounded community where the author's own experience constitutes as much of the analysis and narrative as do the experiences of the subject(s). In making a decision begin academic research, one must ask why a particular subject is worth studying as well as whether that subject should be studied using the ethnographic method.
In terms of the "vantage points" provided by the question, I feel that all of those tacts are important components of the answer to "why we study". Of course, personal interest and/or a connection are essential for the researcher to thoroughly undertake a subject so that his or her time will be well spent and enriching intellectually. Filling a gap in academic research is also essential. At Brown, it seems as if much of the anthropological thought concerning ethnography is often to "give a voice to the voiceless". This can be a key point of entry when it comes to selecting a subject, however ethical questions arise: whether ethnographic study intrudes on a particular culture, whether a particular culture should be subjected to the advantages/disadvantages of being "studied", and how power relations dictate the mood being the research and the subject? Broader understanding is an honorable goal, however, once again similar ethical questions arise. How can accurate information and understanding be disseminated when ethnographic writing is constructed by the biased author. Insider/outsider statuses affect the reliability and objective nature of the depiction. The prestige of the subject has, perhaps, some bearing, but I would like to believe that there is something worth knowing about in every person or culture. Prestige can maybe be taken to mean propensity to lend itself towards theoretical or intellectual development. It is this idea that leads into what is the unifying goal for ethnography.
That goal is to demonstrate a framework by which to understand a particular culture and oneself. With music and ethnomusicological writing, it is the music which usually becomes the linchpin for said framework. In all of the articles and chapters that we have read, the take-away points are never about the subject of the article, rather the process by which the article was derived and written or the method through which a particular person, culture, or practice can be understood. There is no simple way to write or depict a people, culture, music etc. plainly, factually, or objectively. Those facts are interesting and essential--for what they are, they broaden our understandings and allow us to develop a more complex and analytical way of thinking about them.
The essential characteristic of ethnography is its narrative nature and author-involvement. Personalizing a research project with ethnographic narrative doesn’t let the framework ascend into generalization on how the world works. The piece is bounded to its actual subjects and its author. With a theoretical goal in mind, however, the researcher/writer of an ethnography can be certain that the his/her subject is rich and interesting enough to provide something beyond a personalized survey, that the research will either fill in or expand academia, and lend an informative (albeit a most-likely hyper self-reflexive) look at a subject for the ends of broadening understanding.
I think this article does a pretty good job in making its claims. I don't know tons about son, danzon, mambo, or chachacha, and this seems like one of those situations where thorough listening knowledge would have allowed me to feel like she was making a substantiated and legitimate argument. Her large claims of "transculturation" across the American continents and throughout the fast-paced social and technological developments make sense to me, although it's a huge claim to make for a chapter-sized piece of writing.
That being said, I'm left grappling with her framework--"Fernando Ortiz's influential theoretical concept of 'transculturation'"--and how that relates to the formation of a Pan-Latin identity. Waxer's "genealogical" approach to mambo and chachacha invoke a lot of social/economic explanation for the development of music. Although I am sometimes skeptical when I hear these extremely developmental descriptions of how music is cobbled together by international power relations, media constructions, race relations etc., I like how in these descriptions people and places are married to their music.
What I found interesting was the part about chachacha's popularity being attributed to the intimate connection between the dance step and the rhythmic impulse of the music. In these highly anthropological styled ethnomusicology pieces, I like seeing music tangibly related to the cultural trends or behaviors at hand. This analysis values and empowers the music by giving it similar clout to any economic or racial factor. The chachacha is not simply a practice that is reflective of those economic, racial factors etc., but shaped and formed in an aesthetic way out of its practice. With the risk of sounding cliche, I like the power music has in this particular anaylsis.
This past Sunday, I interviewed Chris Link (CL in the documentation), Northpointe’s Director of Community and Generosity, along with my main contact for this project thus far, Jordan Plumier (JP), Director of Worship Arts. We met after the service in the Northpointe office, which is in the Lincoln Mall in between the Cinemaworld and the rows of shops. The office was hectic with the “kids” daycare during the service was being dispensed. Additionally, there was a movie starting at noon, so there was plenty of hustle and bustle to take down all of the equipment and paraphernalia that go into making the Sunday service happen. Despite being so busy, Chris and Jordan sat down with me amongst the ruckus for about a half hour to discuss music and Northpointe.
I tried to offer broad questions that would have Chris and Jordan telling me what they wanted me to know. As the interview went on, it might have turned into more of a conversation—I doubt this would get the Jeff Titon award for methodological excellence. Nevertheless, this in-depth interview was pretty typical of the dynamic I’ve experienced doing “research” at Northpointe. As a young church, its leaders were intrigued as to how I found them in the first place and why I have been interested in the church as a subject. Chris and Jordan have been extremely helpful and willing to talk with me and include me in the church. For that I am very thankful. In turn, they have become increasingly reflexive in their thinking, the more discussion we have about the current state of music and the church, and more specifically music at Northpointe. That being said, by the end of our conversation, I felt we were in full-fledged discussion and I pray my questions didn’t become too loaded/leading.
Here’s the majority of the interview, transcribed. My questions are in bold, and Chris and Jordan’s answers below. Happy Easter.
AS: So what exactly do you do at Northpointe?
CL: My official title is director of community and generosity and so I have all of the responsibility and leadership over community groups—which is our small group structure—and anything that we do generously in the community. We believe Christ has called us to be generous to our neighbors as well as our community and the world, and I lead those three initiatives. So those are my two official titles, but I’m kind of the fill in the gaps guy. Our main marketing strategy is called “community touches”—it’s not so much what we say we are but what we do. So I lead all of that. We do the Easter egg thing. We care about families, so we do family events. And so we let our values lead those things.
AS: Were you one of the three families that started Northpointe?
CL: Yes. Me and my wife moved out in June—we’re originally from the St. Louis area, and we were one of the three couples that moved to this area.
AS: So what did you have in mind for music when you started the church?
CL: Well, I’ve known Jordan for a while, and he has a lead over all of the music stuff. I was excited to have someone who could take lead over the music stuff. I knew where some of his talents were, but also where his heart was, and so for the first time to really be involved in church to set the trend in the church with the arts—making something happen. Just to really have music that could worship god, bring the people in together, and to really create the environment where people can worship God. So many times that just hasn’t happened in my experience where people come together and they really worship God instead of just singing songs. That’s what I really imagine the music being—more worship than just songs.
AS: So what were your past experience in other churches? Were they similar ideologically to Northpointe?
CL: Yes. Theologically, ideologically, similar. Methodologically, completely different. I came from a church that was traditionally like, “let’s sing with a piano and a choir and some old guy standing up front singing songs that couldn’t carry a tune”. But the church absolutely loved that—it was more rural, Illinois…And there wasn’t any atmosphere. So that’s what I was brought up with. When I was leaving the church which I came from, they did move to more of a style that we have here, but it wasn’t anywhere close to what we were doing.
AS: So they put together a band?
CL: Started barely getting a band. A couple of people got their feathers ruffled when we brought a drumset up on stage, you know, that kind of stuff. It was moving that direction. This (Northpointe) is completely different. There’s an environment. It’s not just about—we’ll explore this later as we get older as a church—but there’s an environment that we’re intentionally trying to create inside on Sunday with all of the arts—we really believe that arts can create an environment in which to experience God.
AS: How important do you think music is in terms of shaping the service and shaping the congregation?
CL: I think it varies on multiple levels. I think it’s very important to some people, and then not very important to some other people.Everything we do is based on “discipleship”. One on one conversations. What draws people into that conversation is going to be different for every single experience. So maybe for you guys who are just drawn in by music, it’s so important and shapes everything you do on Sunday. But for some people, it might not be that important, and so there might be different experiences that could draw them into conversation. So I guess it is important as it is to that person. I know people come to the church because of the music here. I know people here. I know people come to the church because they like the speaking… or the popcorn (laughs).
Jordan: Some people come in spite of the music
CL: Yeah, so I really think it’s important, but it’s not the goal. Everything revolves around one on one conversations. Whatever it is that draws people into that conversation is what is the most important thing. Music’s important to shape the experience, but it’s not the goal.
AS: In terms of syncing Northpointes “methodology” with the messages in the music, do you feel that they “line up”?
CL: They line up OK right now. I wish it was better, and it will only get better in time. We have a meeting every week where we get ideas together, and we talk about the environment, what we’re trying to do, what the end goal is—everything revolves around a dominant thought. Jordan creates the environment around that thought. So I think it syncs OK right now, but it’s not great. But that’s not the end goal. On Sunday, it’s important, but it’s not the most important thing. If we have conversations with people to get them into relationships, that’s all that matters to us.
AS: I’m a novice to the Christian music scene, locally and commercially, but it seems like Christian music in general is a very diverse thing. Do you see any cohesive style amongst the broad umbrella of Christian music that you can latch on to?
CL: Well, definitely. I feel like we already are latching on to a specific style. And in talks that we’ve had, we don’t want to do that forever. We really want to set the pace in a lot of things that we do because that’s going to attract certain people that will continue to do that. So yeah, there are trends that we are following—is that what you’re asking?
AS: It seems like selecting certain songs bring particular elements to the table. Elements particular to the people who write and record these songs. When Jordan sends me mp3s etc., I look up the songwriters and some of them are mega-stars. Do you ever feel there is a conflict in engaging with these songs—between the particular individuals who make the music and using that individual’s work as a vessel to something… else?
CL: This is not me and music—I mostly listen to whatever he (Jordan) gives me… and what Justin is into as well. I’m not the cutting edge guy, you know. I just listen. I mean, I’d listen to Jack Johnson until I die.
AS: Maybe that’s a question we can direct to Jordan… what about when you’re participating in the service.How do you feel about your role as a component of the musical element in the church?
CL: I see mine as a voice of many. I don’t see the band as being any more than leading us a relationship or experience with God. They really lead in the experience. I’m having a different experience than anybody else will in that auditorium. And so, I feel like I’m part of many voices and many people having the same experience at the same moment. I don’t play any instruments, I don’t do anything—I just hang out… I talk.
JP: He plays the tuba
CL: The Sousaphone… a long time ago, in high school.The reason why we focus on music and the creative arts here is—eventually one day—Jordan might not be the one to do it, but when we create songs ourselves, there are people who will be attracted. There is a creative element to God. We believe he created everything, and he has inherently given that element to us. And so I’m excited for people to be able to experience God in that way and show their appreciationby writing, developing, doing things like that. So you ask about the mainstream guys? They’re only mainstream because we make them mainstream. The words that they say connect to our hearts for the moment. Hopefully we’ll create our own stuff eventually.
JP: The cool thing about that is that a lot of the songs we sing have somebody else’s words. They’re writing those words out of experiences from their own lives. And as we grow as a church, we’re able to tell our stories, and I think that completely changes everything for us. If I’m writing a song, and I’m thinking of a specific individual and something that’s happened in their life, every time I see those words and every time we sing those words a church we’re thinking about that. It becomes more personal.
AS: Have you ever written anything yourself?
JP: No
AS: Do you have any aspirations… hopes… dreams to do such a thing?
JP: Honestly, I’ve come to the realization that this important just recently. I’ve been wrestling with that. For a long time I was like, “Oh, I’ll just sing other people’s stuff”. But as this church grows and we accumulate stories here at Northpointe, we definitely want to make our own songs. With no real goal but to sing them here…
AS: You’re still interpreting these songs every time you play them. What goes into that interpretation? What’s your process? Do you try to make them your own or are you trying to be authentic to the recording?
JP: It’s interesting because sometimes I’m thinking about what everybody else is playing and people are watching me, and it’s hard for a worship leader to be in that place that he’s trying to lead others to. Not all the time do I think about what I’m singing. Today there were times when I probably wasn’t thinking about what I was singing, but there were other times I definitely was. Start crying and my voice gets shaking and I look like a pansy…
AS: What about the group you’re playing with? It seems from our conversations that you have a rotating cast of players in the band.
JP: It depends on the person. You met Nate… sometimes he gets lost in what he’s doing. He’s one that always sings along while he’s playing the drums. He’s fun to watch. It depends, there are some people who are just playing music.
AS: What about sonically… stylistically?
JP: Are you talking about what we do live with the recordings we have?
AS: Yeah. Are you developing your own style at Northpointe?
JP: It depends on who’s up there. We’ve got a guy who plays electric guitar and it sounds like Metallica. If he had it his own way, it’d probably sound like Metallica all the time. So that kind of comes through—there’s a little more 80s rock sound in a lot of the stuff that he plays. The way that I corral that a little kind of thing is to tell people to learn what I send them. We don’t have a ton of time to rehearse, usually a couple hours on Thursday or Saturday morning, and so we don’t have a ton of time to shake that stuff and make it our own. I tell people to do their best to learn what’s on the recording and then we can go from there.
AS: As a new church, is it important to have a cohesive style, whatever that may be?
JP: Oh yeah.
AS: It seems like you guys have put a lot of thought into having a well-defined image. As a new church you’re trying to attract people to come. Everything from your website to your logos to your signs and team of volunteers who staff the service. The service is very smooth and transitions are clean and seamless and the sound is good. How is this actually important to you?
JP: We try to limit people’s distractions. If stuff like that goes wrong—technically in the service—it can be distracting. If they’re in a place where they’re mentally worshipping God and the something like that happens, then immediately (snaps) it’s just done. We do our best. We have the battlecry of “excellence without extravagance”.We fight really hard to not make it all about that stuff. To our volunteers we say this is important, but if you get some wrong, it’s not a big deal. You’re not going to get fired or something.
CL: And I would say this. It’s important, but it’s definitely not the most important thing. Everything goes back to conversation—how do we have one on one conversations with people. I seriously spend maybe 5% of my week on a Sunday—what are we doing on Sunday. Jordan probably spends 25-30% on that kind of thing. The rest of our time is spent with people talking about discipleship, community group coaching. That can maybe gage how important, but really our battlecry is “we want to be excellent, but we don’t want to be extravagant”. We’re not going to spend tens of thousands of dollars on things that are not necessary. At the same time, we’re going to make sure we spend the right amount of money in the right places to make it look like we have it together. Which we do, but that could be a distraction to people. We want to be put together, but we don’t want to go up there with five button suits…
JP: We try and be polished and know what’s on, but never too polished.
AS: So I guess my final question is how conscious you are in developing a musical voice, both stylistically and with the words, and how much of the effort is to actually develop music or how much of that is just a tool to get to the greater ideas or purpose of the church?
CL: We’ve had a lot of conversations because there are a few areas where we want to set the trend. One of them is the in the arts. The question is “why?” Jordan will say, “I don’t get it, why would we want to do that?” Because that seems very, “look at us…” Let’s just assume that that could possibly happen, if people want to learn something about the arts, they could point to Northpointe. Isn’t that just kind of self righteous? What’s the purpose of that? And really everything has to funnel through our real purpose, which is our vision, which is to transform people led by God to change lives. A simple way of saying it is to create disciples who create disciples. If people just come to the church, we utterly fail. If people come and just want to learn some music and hear some cool music, we utterly fail. I want to be part of a place that’s changing and moving—not just within a building, but actually doing something in the broader perspective of the community and culture. I hope we set a voice. I hope we set multiple voices. I hope people see us as trendsetters, but not for our own glory, but for God’s glory. Ultimately that’s what it’s for. So our end goal—do we want to do that? Completely? I think we will do that… but if we don’t create disciples, we fail.
I went to my first Northpointe service on 3/7/10—the services are held in Theater 8 of the Cinemaworld at Lincoln Mall in Lincoln, RI every Sunday at 10 A.M. The picturesque city of Providence thins out as you drive North, and Lincoln’s mall is in a relatively non-descript suburban setting. There are signs at the entrance of the mall ushering folks around to the Cinemaworld parking lot, and more signs on the path to the entrance—I was welcomed many times during the walk from my car to the door of the theater. Outside of Theater 8 are a few tables with piles of study Bibles and “connect cards”, along with some refreshments (coffee and movie popcorn).
The “church” itself is simply a movie theater. Those familiar with churchgoing might feel that going to church in a movie theater is non-traditional, but it is becoming more and more common and clearly working for people. Jordan et. al. set up a projector in the middle of the space, along with a soundboard with all of the accoutrements. A 5-piece band (drummer, bassist, electric guitarist, acoustic guitar/vocalist—Jordan, and second harmony vocalist) is set up and fully mic-ed and amplified. There is some light background music playing before the service starts, and some church notices are cycling through on the screen. There are somewhere around 150 people in attendence, and when 10:00 rolls around, Jordan leads people to stand up and join in song.
Jordan is the Worship Arts director at Northpointe, and the “lead singer” of sorts in the church band. The band’s style is tight, and the sound is very clean—the electric guitar is very distorted but not overwhelming, the vocals soar out above the mix, and the drummer is behind one of those plastic sound-shields. They all have music stands with the lyrics/chord charts, make transitions between songs/parts of the service seamlessly, and all and all have a very professional feel to their group.
The service is structured like this: there are a couple of songs, some announcements, another song, the sermon, then communion which is accompanied with a song, some final thoughts, then a last song. There’s quite a lot of music in the service, with the other major elements being mainly the sermon and the communion (although there is music during that). During the songs, the lyrics are projected behind the band so that people can sing along. Most people seem to be singing, however it is difficult to hear people singing—even when there’s a 100+ people—when the band is playing full force. Apart from singing, there is a fair amount of dancing and arm-raising. I question whether the congregation/audience can hear themselves sing, if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, and if there is an element of church being a safe place where people can sing and dance.
Here is a live recording that I captured from out in the audience using an M-Audio recorder. While not as good as soundboard recordings, listen for people singing around me:
There is definitely an overall aesthetic to Northpointe. Despite not having their own brick-and-mortar structure, there is a specific mood and ambiance created in Theater 8 of the Lincoln Cinemaworld. Outside of the service, this is done with conspicuous and branded signs and pamphlets, plenty of materials to read as well as connect with the Northpointe community more in depth, and swaths of volunteers who are identified with some sort of Northpointe nametag or sticker who welcome the congregation and engage in one on one conversation. Inside the service and apart from the genre/style of music, there’s the actual structure of the movie theater with its cushioned seats, cup holders, and stadium seating, plus the images, lyrics, words and graphics projected up onto the big screen. Unlike a traditional service, there is no alter, just a mic stand up front, and you don’t go forth to get communion. Volunteers bring it to you in small, disposable cups on a kidney-shaped plastic platter.
The preacher at this particular service—Ron—was “pinch hitting” for the “Christ’s Game Plan” sermon series. Ron is from Louisville, KY originally, but moved to Nashua, NH to run the CrossWay church (another “church plant”, like Northpointe). The sermon—looking at Mark chapter 10—took up about as much time as everything else in the service put together and was clearly the focal point of the morning.
Using Aymara Peruvian musicians as his case study, Turino seems to be making a claim to "naturalize" the musical tradition and performance practice of these people by showing some interchangeability between social practices and musical practices. One is reflective of the other and vice versa. He invokes C.S. Peirce's definition of "icon" when explaining his concept of "iconicity", that is, "a nonarbitrary sign that signifies something through some kind of actual resemblance between the sign and the thing signified." This is important in that the Aymara music in aesthetic and practice is not arbitrarily "symbolic" of the Aymara culture. Rather, it actually is representative of the culture, and the culture is representative of it. Is this not true for most cultural practices to some extent? Isn't this the case we try to make when analyzing music or literature or art?
Turino describes the Aymara as being viciously distinct as Aymara, yet while this unified identity is important, they can't help but divide up into smaller communities. Turino says this is so that they can avoid conflict altogether and maintain they're consistent Aymara integrity. Can this really last for that long?
Regardless, this unquestioning homogeneity is reflective in the Aymara's music (or rather, Turino would say, the music is reflective of the unquestioning homogeneity?). They value "playing as one". Clearly the communal experience of playing music is what is important in this article and in this study. Turino mentions disconnect when his informants don't understand his practicing by himself.
If social practice and music are so closely intertwined--practically inseparable, is it really music? Is it more clear to contextualize the music as a mere social activity of Aymara men? Or is it a sly outlet to assert one's individuality. Obviously the maestros are the self-selecting group that rise above the rest, despite the culture's practice of affording equal opportunities to all adult men. The dynamic in these ensembles strikes me as the inverse of how I have always perceived bebop jazz. In bebop, I like to imagine the combos as a group of individuals who are fiercely attempting to be distinct and outplay the rest, but to frame themselves, they must work in tandem with other players. Here, the individual players are attempting to make their group sound as unified as possible, with all wind instrumentation and parallel harmonies. Nevertheless, to attain that "ideal sound", groups must have creative, inventive, yet tempered individual players.
Jordan, the Worship Arts director at Northpointe and my main contact at the church, sent me a .zip file with lyrics (with chord changes!) and mp3s of 3 songs the band typically play at services. This is the file he usually sends to people who are interested in participating in the band. These are pretty clear, clean recordings--taken off of the soundboard at a service. Thanks to close mic-ing and good isolation, I thought this was a studio demo until I heard Jordan (the singer) encouraging people to sing along to the lyrics in the chorus. Take a listen below:
The Highest and Greatest by: Nick Herbert & Tim Hughes A/C# - D - E-A - A || A/C# - D - E-A - A
Verse 1: A/C# D E A A/C# D E A Wake every heart and every tongue To sing the new eternal song E D A/C# D E D F#m E/G# And crown Him King of Glory now Confess Him Lord of all Chorus: A E Bm7 A E You are the highest You are the greatest You are the Lord of all A E Bm7 A D Angels will worship Nations will bow down To the Lord of all
Verse 2: A/C# D E A A/C# D E A A day will come when all will sing And glorify our matchless King E D A/C# D E D F#m E/G# Your name unrivaled stands alone You are the Lord of all
Chorus: A E Bm7 A E You are the highest You are the greatest You are the Lord of all A E Bm7 A D Angels will worship Nations will bow down To the Lord of all
Bridge: Bm7 A/C# D Let every heart let every tongue sing of Your name sing of Your name Bm7 A/C# D Let every heart let every tongue sing sing sing Bm7 A/C# D Let every heart let every tongue sing of Your name sing of Your name Bm7 A/C# D Let every heart let every tongue sing sing sing
Chorus: A E Bm7 A E You are the highest You are the greatest You are the Lord of all A E Bm7 A D Angels will worship Nations will bow down To the Lord of all A E Bm7 A E You are the highest You are the greatest You are the Lord of all A E Bm7 A D Angels will worship Nations will bow down To the Lord of all A E Bm7 A E You are the highest You are the greatest You are the Lord of all A E Bm7 A D Angels will worship Nations will bow down To the Lord of all
Verse: A D Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised A F#m E Great are your works in all the earth A D The skies declare the glory of Your name A F#m E The heavens tell of Your great worth
PreChorus: D A E D A E And now we join and sing Father, we bless Your name
Chorus: D - A F#m E D - A You are holy We cry with everything that’s in us F#m E D - A F#m E D - A Singing the praises of our glorious Our hearts are bowed before Your majesty F#m E We worship You our King D - A - F#m - E || D - A - F#m - E
Verse: A D Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised A F#m E Great are your works in all the earth A D The skies declare the glory of Your name A F#m E The heavens tell of Your great worth
PreChorus: D A E D A E And now we join and sing Father, we bless Your name
Chorus: D - A F#m E D - A You are holy We cry with everything that’s in us F#m E D - A F#m E D - A Singing the praises of our glorious Our hearts are bowed before Your majesty F#m E We worship You our King D - A - F#m - E || D - A - F#m - E
PreChorus: D A E D A E And now we join and sing Father, we bless Your name D A E D A E And now we join and sing Father, we bless Your name
Chorus: D - A F#m E D - A You are holy We cry with everything that’s in us F#m E D - A F#m E D - A Singing the praises of our glorious Our hearts are bowed before Your majesty F#m E We worship You D - A F#m E D - A You are holy We cry with everything that’s in us F#m E D - A F#m E D - A Singing the praises of our glorious Our hearts are bowed before Your majesty F#m E We worship You our King D - A - F#m - E || D - A - F#m - E - D
Verse 1: G D Am Em It’s falling from the clouds A strange and lovely sound C G D I hear it in the thunder and the rain G D Am Em It’s ringing in the skies Like cannons in the night C G D The music of the universe plays
Chorus: G C You are holy great and mighty Em7 D The moon and the stars declare who You are G C I’m so unworthy but still You love me Em7 D Forever my heart will sing of how great You are G - C - Em7 - Am7
Verse 2: G D Am Em Beautiful and free Song of galaxies C G D It’s reaching far beyond the Milky Way G D Am Em Let’s join in with the sound c’mon let’s sing it loud C G D As the music of the universe plays
Chorus: G C You are holy great and mighty Em7 D The moon and the stars declare who You are G C I’m so unworthy but still You love me Em7 D Forever my heart will sing of You
Bridge: C G D All glory, honor, power is Yours, amen C G D All glory, honor, power is Yours, amen Am Em Dsus D All glory, honor, power is Yours forever, amen
Chorus: G C You are holy great and mighty Em7 D The moon and the stars declare who You are G C I’m so unworthy but still You love me Em7 D Forever my heart will sing of You G C You are holy great and mighty Em7 D The moon and the stars declare who You are G C I’m so unworthy but still You love me Em7 D Forever my heart will sing of how great You are G - C - Em7 - Am7 || G - C - Em7 - D - C - G
It's interesting to think about where these songs come from and how they are getting inducted into the cannon of worship music--or at least at the blossoming community at Northpointe. I looked up some of the writers of these songs to contextualize them a little bit.
One of the writers of "The Highest and Greatest" is Nick Herbert, who is the Worship Pastor at St. Mary's church in London (founded 1997). It seems his role is similar to Jordan's at Northpointe--leading the music during the services. Looking at the St. Mary's website, I found it a little hard to find out where the church was coming from. The website is very nice and has good information of the values of the church and such, but I don't see anywhere where it explicitly states what kind of church it is. It appears to me to be non-denominational. In the "history" section, it references the bishop of London, so I am assuming some sort of heirarchical structure within the non-denominational churches, or maybe amongst a group of churches in the UK--this is something I would like to learn more about. My assumption was that non-denominational congregations are independent churches. The non-denominational churches I have encountered throughout my lifetime are remarkably similar in their worship practice & share some basic beliefs and approaches to Christianity. If there is a formalized, international community of non-denominational churches, or are they linked together by common ideas or practices like, say, Nick Herbert's "The Highest & Greatest" song.
It was hard to pick out the Chris Brown I wanted from, you know, Chris Brown. But there was plenty of interweb info on Phil Wickham. Wickham seems to be less involved in a particular ministry and more of a "star" than Nick Herbert. He's got a slick website, myspace (along with all of the other social networking outlets that go along with that), and even a lengthy wikipedia article. He's got tour dates across the world from what looks like huge venues to smaller "chapel" performances, and his myspace has over 6 million listens! The "Cannons live" on his myspace page, as well as link to the "Phil Wickham singalong" available for download from his website tells a lot about this music--the music written for service and worship is meant to be communal art. Accessible, catchy, and based in melody. I'm thinking a modern day kind of hymn. Across the board of these representative examples from my friend at Northpointe, these songs share a pop-rock styled aesthetic and instrumentation. It all sounds as if it has come out of the past 15 or 20 years--it sounds very current, modern, and up to date.
I wonder how genre-preferences and music tastes interact with people's church-going. How music that clearly is based on a rock n' roll form and based around a "lead singer" can break away from the cult of personality that surrounds musicians or rockers in a popular band. It seems as if many of these churches are young and are attempting to attract new members--Northpointe in particular. There is clearly an emphasis on keeping current with musical style. Beyond that, it is clear these churches want to be current and relevant in all aspects of their existence: the websites are very well done and well maintained, if the church has a permanent home, the buildings are often modern in design and architecture, the personalities (e.g. Phil Wickham) have a very polished look: and keep up to date with all of the latest societal demands (especially online w/ facebook, myspace, twitter, rss feeds, etc.). The role "being new" is playing with this music, and in the bigger picture, this style of church and worship, is a big one. Just some casual thoughts...
I spent a lot of my reading time trying to discern if I thought Waterman's article was horribly old-fashioned, out of date, and potentially demeaning to "African" music tradition, or if he was making an honest attempt at legitimizing African music amongst the greater realm of world music, European and American folk and art music included. Agawu's claim that "the choice of an appropriate comparative frame is already ideological" is a good one, although I think it could be argued that Waterman's history of acculturation is not a comparative one but a linear one. Agawu has a very powerful position in the world of ethnomusicology in that he is African, yet has mastered (better than most "Western" ethnomusicologists) the Western styled forms of study and research. I feel like he is easily the most "legitimized" writer we have read on African music because of his well informed and educated insider position. Like the very end of his article stated, however, the problems he outlined in his piece, along with the problems evident in Waterman's article, aren't ever going to end (at least in our Western-centric realm of academia) until "the postcolonial African subjects" have been empowered to represent themselves. Until then, are attempts at "translation" necessary? Or are do we risk overwhelming the "subject" culture with our translated constructs?
First off, apologies for this coming somewhat late. These past few days, I finally settled on a community with whom to study contemporary Christian worship music. I had an idea of the "sounds" I wanted to learn about--stuff I've most heard on the radio or seen on TV--but didn't really know where or in what context to find it in Providence. I tried some basic googling, but it was difficult to discern what each church was like and how they ran their services. I knew the churches, of which there are many, in my immediate are pretty traditional--Catholic, Episcopalian, Unitarian. Since very few of my friends go to church (let's face it, Brown does not have the most church-savvy student population), it took a while to figure out where to look. But after getting word from a friend of a friend and a bit of emailing, I got in touch with the "Worship Arts" director at Northpointe Christian Church, Jordan Plumier.
Jordan and I grabbed some coffee last week, and I got to learn a lot more about Northpointe. Jordan has been extremely helpful and interested which has made this endeavor fun and quickly informative. The drummer from the church band, Nate, came along.
Northpointe Christian Church just started this past October and has been convening at theater 8 of the Cinemaworld in the Lincoln Mall (about a 15 minute drive from Providence proper). They are a non-denominational church based on scripture--the Book of Acts in particular. Jordan tells me that his family, along with two others, started Northpointe in conjunction with Restoration House Ministries, which is a group out of Boston that helps to "plant" new churches in areas that are "un-churched". To some Providence might seem like one of the most church-dense places in America, but as I mentioned earlier, most of these are old and more traditional-styled. Jordan told me that there are very few contemporary-styled churches in the Providence area and that there has not been much of a church scene to attract people looking for something "new".
Jordan told me that when him and his friends started the church, he intended for the music to be "awesome" and begin to explode some of the norms set for contemporary "Christian Worship Music". The genre seems to mean a variety of different things for different people, so I'm still going to leave the definition of it relatively open-ended: music written within the past 30 or 40 years for worship services that, stylistically, resembles pop-rock songs in instrumentation and form, but with lyrics drawing on Christian themes.
We talked about how there is a big industry for this type of music, mostly based out of Nashville, and how ubiquitous some of this music can be, especially in the South--Nate mentioned the nationally syndicated KLove radio. Jordan claimed there are swaths of "Christian" bands that many music-savvy people will never have heard of but who could probably sell out the Dunkin Donuts Center in a heartbeat. We made the distinction between "Christian" music and music meant to be sung at services. Of course there is crossover between the two types, but there are many quasi-mainstream bands released on what Jordan referred to as "the indie" Christian labels (such as Tooth and Nail). Bands like Reliant K, Lifehouse, Tampa-based Underoath etc. broke into some more mainstream rock acclaim by taking their "Christian" identities out of the spotlight.
As far as the music at Northpointe goes, Jordan wants it to be upbeat and engaging, and described it as very "electric-guitar driven". As the church got up on its feet, they've had a rotating cast of musicians. Some musicians from other Restoration House Ministries churches came for the first few weeks, and then a few different musicians from Berklee. Nate offered some insight into a lifetime of playing in a variety of bands loosely-identified as "Christian", and even spent some time trying to get picked up with a bigger band in Nashville. The worship band has a rehearsal space set up in a studio specifically geared towards these types of worship bands.
All in all, Jordan and Nate were great guys, and I set a date to come to Northpointe's service on Sunday.
Deborah Wong tells the story of her friend whose musical taste shifts as he moves in and out of certain cultures--specifically certain class and racial spheres. The quote she invokes from Martin's "Agency & History"--"To deny what the audience produces in performance is to disavow its capacity to produce its own associations..."--suggests that audience and listening is as important to the cultural impact of music as the music is itself. On page 377, wong claims, as an ethnomusicologist of course:
I don't ever think it is ever 'the music itself' that attracts or compels--music has no agency of its own, people do, and they make choices about what they like or hate; indeed I would venture a guess that all Americans go through changes in taste during their lives for reasons that are always already politicized.
I think that personally, I would like to disagree. As a cultural historian, I can respect the claim to audience's impact in constructing music--in constructing art, but never entirely in composing art. What music communicates as a piece of art cannot always be reduced to an "already politicized" sentiment. That sentiment can be extremely influential, especially in more communal musics, but consider the ingenuity and creativity that goes into some sounds, and I believe that there is some music that can stand for something (the already politicized sentiment) and that music that can transcend its original meaning for something different or even something new. So, I suppose my question for discussion is that newness or transcendence I just mentioned possible?
I'm not so sure Agawu's take-away point of the "ethical attitude" helps sort out any of the problems and power disparity of representation. He describes it as "a disposition toward frameworks and styles of reasoning that finally seek--actively, rather than passively--to promote the common good." This reflexive stance is helpful in as much as it admits that we as researchers, insiders or outsiders, are going to do it wrong--at some point in time, our historical or ethnographic product is going to be flawed. I can't say that I am especially critical with Agawu because,insofar as I understand what he's getting at, I think I agree with his reflective tact and, were I writing ethnography would be constantly conscious of my place and my ethnographic constructions and how my own formulation as a person influences those constructions and what sort of perceptions my "subjects" would make of me etc. These types of pieces make me nervous, like stepping into a philosophical house of mirrors. At what point can we draw a line at making research and ethnographic a constant and active "process" for the sake of commodification? At which point does "the line"--or the reflexivity--become the commodification? It seems like Kisliuk's book is a bit more biography than it is a study of the BaAka.
Berger's proposition of a phenomenological ethnomusicology is clearly a convoluted one, if not one of platitude. Perhaps the joke (the platitude) is on me because I'm far off from beginning to understand the idea of "phenomenology"--I did a touch of google-research/reinforcement to walk away with this conception: "An experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which represents the object) together with appropriate enabling conditions."
OK. I'm not quite sure if I buy Berger's argument that phenomenological ethnography is that distinct from how "the new ethnographers" value experience anyways. Maybe the step back to separate experience from object (from content/meaning) takes the next step in ethnographic reflexivity? This could very well be the case, but I can't help but think this added philosophy burdens the discussion of musical and cultural content that are contained within ethnographies.
Did we read Kiri's piece because her case study is representative of a phenomenological tact? This piece was fun and seemed to push the limits of anthropological and ethnographic work just in that the world of GTA has so many layers of cultural significance and experience. As a piece of mass-media, Kiri's fieldwork with the GTA games is interesting in how all of her experience with the game and it's community is perhaps made up most of content and meaning (and maybe not "object" because the game is the common denominator regardless of locale/community).
Perhaps what is more astonishing than how much Ethnomusicology (and Ethnomusicology) has changed in the past year is simply how young the journal is. 50 years is merely an infancy for any discipline--that is if we take Ethnomusicology as a formal substantiation of the discipline being codified and called "ethnomusicology". Even today, the field is still enduring intense growing pains, hence the focus on definition, theory, and method. What surprised me about the 1950s issues was how small they were (initially), and how few case studies there were. Most of the writing in the early articles (once the subscriptions creeped past 500 or so) is littered with titles like "A Dialectical Approach to Music History", "On the Subject of Ethnomusicology", and other field, historical, and research method type articles. 1958 seems to be the year when the journal shifted to include a consistent number of case studies and special topics.
Nevertheless, this writing is far less anthropological than one would expect them to be, even by today's standards. Most of the articles that weren't theoretical concerned African, Asian, or South American subjects, but instead of revealing an expose of music in these specific cultures, the articles took a much more technical and historical tact. I was expecting an old-fashioned, over-exoticised, anthropological attempt that centered on music, but instead the "musical culture" seems to take a backseat to the proper analysis of the notes, rhythms, and instruments. Many of these articles amounted to aural archaeology than it did any sort of cultural study.
"The Shak-Shak in the Lesser Antilles" (Sep., 1958) is a prime example: it describes the historical and religious significance of this instrument (the Shak Shak), describes how they are made and what their function is in music. The framework here is the instrument, and the author doesn't include any personalized accounts.
In "The African Hemiola Style" (Sep., 1959), the author presents this comparative discourse on this particular African rhythm in relation to a similar Western/European rhythm. The article is full of very specific transcriptions of the different styles of hemiolas, and is representative of this acute deconstruction of music (not just the African but the Western art music as well). This focus merely describes a particular sound--the musical and cultural implications or significance has not yet emerged, and the performers and composers are not wholly accounted for or explained.
All in all, it seems as if the journal in its earliest stages was still more focused on the music rather than the music and the culture around the music. In a way, I didn't find most of what I read too unsettling (much in the way early anthropology can seem callous and Western-centric) because these early studies were most focused on the musical content for what it was and what it sounded like. This diligent analysis can clearly be valuable to a study that would later become a much more deeply involved cultural dialogue.
I plan on doing my fieldwork project on worship music in Christian churches around Providence. I have yet to determine a site in which to engage in any sort of participant observation, but I am aiming to study the pop-styled worship music is non-liturgical. This means music that is considered "contemporary" and has been written recently (within the past 50 years), and can be found in church services as well as youth groups, Sunday school, and other extra-service religious activity. As such I'm going to steer clear of Catholic and Episcopalian congregations as well as styled choirs. More to come soon.
The most salient takeaway points for me in this article was the dialogue between "heteroglossia" and irreconcilably incomplete and relative ethnography/anthropology, and this idea of "textualization" from Paul Ricouer . Clifford's subtitle to his article, "Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art", does well to situate ethnography and attempts at anthropology amongst artistic endeavors. As Clifford traced the history of ethnography and authority, I kept returning to the question, not of what lends ethnography "authority", but what the purpose and place of ethnography is in the first place. In other words, what's the point. The realist, cultural-tableau-vivant approaches don't approach scientific or even historical legitimacy, and the one tact that rectified that for me was the "textualization" theory. Behavior, culture, and discourse, taken as a text for reference and understanding seems to be the best attempt at a hands-off approach. Clifford says "text, unlike discourse, can travel", and I think as such quantifying culture not as experience or interpretation or even history is as clean and distinct as quantifying culture as a text.
The slippery slope here is there is nothing that can't be "textualized"--how much of the process/author/audience etc. gets swept up along in the process? For whom does this all end up being? What do we choose to or need to "textualize" in order to understand? If our discourses end up as texts anyways, what's the purpose of operating under the pretense of authority at all--why not just use art instead? What is the point of being real..?
This is a log of all of the music I heard over a 24-hour period. Here are a few points to preface:
a) I got home later than expected last night while logging, but had an interesting night full of sound (consider this a listening log of 24 waking hours) b) I didn't include specific song titles for the live music I witnessed/performed. Most of it I didn't know, and for the bands I played in, it would be most likely be overly detailed (is there such a thing?). c) All locales in Providence, RI or on the interweb--naturally. d) I listed a specific time for when an identifiable song took place, otherwise, I listed a range for a longer sonic experience.
This 24-hour log is listed as fully as possible and as such: Time/Artist-Song-Genre or description if unknown)/Place-Heard/Source
2/7/10 10:40PM Wanda Jackson - "You Know That I'm No Good"; rockabilly/home/iTunes 10:43PM Wanda Jackson - "Shakin' All Over"; rockabilly/home/iTunes 10:50PM David Rawlings & Gillian Welch - "NPR Tiny Desk Concert"; roots/home/NPR.com 11:10PM Ludacris - "Blueberry Yum Yum"; hip-hop/home/Youtube 11:12PM Ludacris - "Move Bitch"; hip-hop/home/Youtube 11:13PM Louis Armstrong - "various songs"; jazz/home/roommate's computer 11:20PM - 11:40PM boppin' jazz/home/roommate's computer
2/8/10(through the wee hours of 2/9/10) 1:28AM "Tunak Tunak Tum"; Indian/home/roommate's Youtube 1:30AM Michael Jackson - "They Don't Care About Us"; pop/home/roommate's Youtube 1:35AM Michael Franti - "Say Hey"; pop/home/roommate's Youtube
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz I slept for a while zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
10:48AM semi-audible generic rock/Salomon lobby/in the air 11:23AM unidentified coffee-shop "indie-rock"/Brown Bookstore Blue State/most likely an iPod 11:41AM unidentified rap/Brook and Power St./passing automobile, car stereo 2:20PM - 2:30PM loud rock/car/radio - WBRU 2:32PM - 2:35PM muzak/CVS/in-store speakers 2:38PM Beirut - unknown song; "indie"-folk/Eddy St. Antique store/iPod 2:48PM NPR "indie-rock" between segments/B-Sharp Music/ old fashioned radio receiver 3:00PM U2 - "With or Without You"; rock/car/radio - WBRU 3:05PM Rod Stewart - "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For"; rock/car/radio - WBRU 3:09PM U2 - some song off Joshua Tree; rock/car/radio - WBRU 8:15PM - 9:25PM barely audible generic rock. maybe some Strokes/Trinity Brew-House/ceiling speakers 9:40PM - 9:55PM noise-rock type music/AS220 bar/stereo 9:56PM - 10:05PM in-house music, also noise-rock-esque/AS220 performance space/house speakers 10:06PM - 10:30PM Performed a set with "Tallhassee"; folk/AS220 performance space/live band 10:31PM - 10:39PM more unidentified in-house music/AS220 performance space/house speakers 10:40PM- 11:05PM Performance by "The Detroit Rebellion"; bluesy rock/AS220 performance space/live band 11:06PM - 11:38PM more AS220 bar background music/AS220 bar/stereo 11:39PM - 11:50PM remainder of "Pepi Ginsberg's" set; rock/AS220 performance space/live band 11:51PM - 12:03AM yet more unidentified in-house music/AS220 performance space/house speakers 12:05AM - 12:55AM Performed a set with "Last Good Tooth"; rock n' roll/AS220 performance space/live band
