Authentically Confused

Not long after I published my recent post presenting videos of Romanian folk group Taraf de Haidouks, I came across an academic paper that had the band as its subject.  The paper deals particularly with Maškaradă, their 2007 album of ethnomusicologically-inspired classical music by Bartók, Khachaturian, Kosma, Albeniz and others, ostensibly scrubbed of its classicism and returned by the musicians of Taraf to its gypsy roots.

Very early in my dabblings in Romanian music, I had come across Taraf de Haidouks videos-- in particular the longer set from which the Turcească clip had been extracted.   Here they were, in glorious black and white somewhere in, I presumed, Eastern Europe, just pouring out of a limousine driven into the cavernous bowels of some industrial structure like characters out of a Tarantino movie,  and bursting forth with stunning feats of gypsy musicality.   Impressed by their virtuosity, and no less by their sense of style, I filed them under the category of "for further consideration." Extreme acoustic music is not usually "my jam" to use an expression I've overheard the youngsters say,  but something about the way the Taraf laid into their tunes spoke to me and worked on me in the intervening weeks to the point where taking up their music once again I was "ripe for the picking".

It was in this context that I was moved to post about them and in this state of mind that I subsequently came across Julia Heuwekemeijer's paper for Cultural Musicology iZine soon afterward.  In the paper, subtitled A Critique on the Seductions of Authenticity, Heuwekemeijer concerns herself with the topic of Authenticity as a commodity, particularly in the marketplace of World Music.  The term "World Music", invented or at least popularized only within the last 30 post-modern years, is itself laden with implications about authenticity.  As one writer puts it, it is music "out of context".  Within Romania, as Heuwekemeijer says, one would assume that Taraf de Haidouks play simply "Music".

In the West certainly, listeners (some more than others) have certain expectations not only about the embodiment of ideals of authenticity that ethnic musicians should, and possibly naturally do, represent, but also about the intrinsic purity and goodness of music that is judged to be authentic. Ethnic folk music is eternal, closer to the origin of what it means to be human than contemporary popular Western music. Folk musicians make music instinctively from an elemental place untainted by technique or theory, irony or ennui, doubt or guile. It's an interesting paradox that on the track of Maškaradă chiefly discussed in Heuwekemeijer's paper -- Bartók's Romanian Dances-- the goods that are sold appear to be a purification of Bartók's romanticizing of Romanian music by way of a romantic "Re-gypsifying" (to use Heuwekemeijer's colorful term) of Bartók's music.  But this kind of alchemy is child's play in the context of "World Music".

In my previously superficial experience of the band, I'd taken at face value the readily proffered mythos about them as a band of local musicians from Clejani, a town of musicians, who practically by the sheer force of their Romanie essence had amassed a global fandom.  Granted, when I first encountered them I was sipping, not gulping. But as Heuwekemeijer's piece recounts, it turns out that the reality of Taraf de Haidouks' origin was more ... Belgian.

In Heuwekemeijer's telling:

Considering Clejani’s fame, it was no coincidence that Swiss musicologist L. Aubert found himself recording musicians from this specific village in the 1980s. In collaboration with the Romanian musicologist S. Rădulescu, this recording was released in France in 1988. Two Belgian men, the later managers of Taraf de Haïdouks, stumbled upon this recording by chance and became so interested that they travelled to Clejani. There, they picked out the musicians they thought to be most suitable to sell in a western market and named them Taraf de Haïdouks. 

"This, however,"  Heuwekemeijer goes on to say, "is not the story that is told in the promotional material about the band.":

In the liner notes of the third CD... an adventurous discovery-story is told, in which the two men from Belgium travelled to a village in a faraway, other, communist world, where they discovered a street full of amazing gypsy musicians. Reinforcing the image of explorers ... Winter and Karo (the managers) have told in interviews over and over again how hard it was to find the village, because maps of Romania did not exist at the time. 

Heuwekemeijer quotes a particularly bathetic vignette from the official story before delivering a devastating observation:

"Out of the window he has seen a very tall man walking along the tracks of Gypsyland…It seems to Nicolae he heard the man pronounce his name: “Neacsu Nicolae”. Is it possible? A foreigner, come to this god-forsaken hole to bring him, Nicolae, back from the dead?…The foreigner is from “the land of Belgium”. His arrival marks the beginning of the incredible saga of the “Taraf de Haïdouks” and their travels throughout Europe." Besides painting a superficial, one-sided story about the life of the musicians before their “discovery”, the earlier recordings which had led Winter and Karo to Clejani in the first place are never mentioned, as if they want to make sure everybody understands the musicians were their, and only their, discovery.

Winter and Karo's choice of name for their project gave a nod to the Romanian tradition of naming a band 'Taraf de' whatever municipality it originated from; however tellingly (as Heuwekemeijer suggests), instead of naming them Taraf de Clejani, the Belgians chose Haidouk,

a legendary, romantic figure in Romanian folklore [that] calls up three images. Firstly ... an exotic image, as it is an unknown word to most western people. Secondly ... western images of romantic gypsies: the “haïdouk” symbolizes “freedom and social justice, the smartness of the people as opposed to the naivety of the lord”... Images of freedom and reversal of social hierarchies closely intertwine with images of gypsies on the road, living outside the law. Thirdly, the “haïdouk” is a figure ... intertwined with medieval associations... As a result, the name which was chosen by the managers clearly demonstrates how they wanted to present the musicians: as exotic, romantic gypsies, coming from a faraway Romanian past.

Heuwekemeijer suggests a somewhat darker motive and modus operandi than mere preservation and curation at play.

As one of the Belgian managers, Winter, tells in an interview ... "Technology is a problem, too. People today want pop. Romanies are using synthesizers, and just two people can form a group. ...  so part of our work is to convince Romanies to go on playing their own music, and to keep the beauty of the traditional instruments alive." This is ... a striking example of the west deciding how the Other can present himself... 

With a maelstrom of these thoughts and self-analytical anxieties swirling about in my head, I recalled a documentary on the band produced by the Romanian newspaper, Adevărul, that I'd recently watched (and bear in mind that as a very new student of Romanian, what I mean by "watched" is literally sat with my eyes open and pasted on the proceedings, with my ears vaguely in search of a word or phrase of my understanding) in which the band is interviewed in Clejani, and a visibly eminent local ethnomusicologist (in fact, none other than the S. Rădulescu encountered above) is brought out to pronounce on the band and their music within the first 40 seconds.  

In the course of the documentary, to my surprise (and to be honest, slight dismay) Johnny Depp appears to give testimony to his friendship and admiration of the Taraf.  Here almost anticipating Heuwekemeijer's point about the potency and magic of the myth of authenticity, Depp obliges with an anecdote:

A couple of friends of mine were in town -- Jim Jarmusch and Iggy Pop -- and I'd already told them, I said, "You've got to see these guys, man! You got to see them!"  And Iggy was really excited, and Jim was very enthusiastic about it.  And before I'd introduced them, I hadn't informed the Tarafs that they were there yet, but somehow (snaps fingers) they knew, because there was Jim and Iggy standing ... about 30 or 40 yards before us, and they just started playing-- you know?-- as we're walking towards Jim and Iggy.  And ... it was one of those moments, you know, when here I'm walking amidst this power of this music-- centuries old music-- walking up to Jim and Iggy and I'll never forget their face, you know?  The faces on them, just, like (mouth agape).

I do know, Johnny Depp!  For it would be beyond cool to be the beneficiary of a spontaneous welcoming concert of Romanie music performed by the incredible musicians of Taraf de Haidouks.  (And to be Jim Jarmusch or Iggy Pop while doing it.)

Still... revisiting this anecdote I was put in mind of another, more unfortunate and uncharacteristically uninspired Taraf de Haidouks video I'd also encountered, in which, as a stunt to advertise a coming performance, they were the perpetrators on unsuspecting Stockholmers of that lowliest form of web manipulation, the Flash mob.  In spite of the swelling profuseness of rural Romanians blocking the urban Scandinavian sidewalk with furious musicality, and of Swedes doing their best to be charmed by it, by the climax of the video the forced spontaneity of the scene smacks of-- dare I say it?-- Belgian-ness.

It would be wrong to conclude from the volume of words I've spent to this point calling into question both the specific authenticity of the product marketed as Taraf de Haidouks and the very pursuit of authenticity that the product appears calculated to appeal to that I question the personal authenticity of the Haidouks themselves or of the music they make.  When the marketplace of World Music is viewed through this lens, it can't escape anyone's attention that there's nothing egregiously unusual about the real story of Taraf de Haidouks' origins.  The official version aside, it all comes back to the experience of hearing them perform.  The experience speaks for itself.  Packaged or not, I remain a fan of the musicians and the music, and it's doubtful I would have heard any of it if not for the stylish and clever efforts of their Belgian champions.

On the contrary, my real point in highlighting this topic is to confess that the discussion around authenticity fits right in with my thoughts and feelings about myself, my life, my self-worth.

I recently binge-watched all 4 episodes of Hip Hop Evolution, a Canadian documentary series that dives deeply into the origins and major developments of Hip Hop, conducting rich primary source interviews with those still around to tell the story.  Aside from this blog, believe it or not, my only social networking nod is rating the offerings on Netflix, but with the issues raised in Heuwekemeijer's article fresh on my mind, when I poised my mouse over the 5th star beneath the series' title, I had to hesitate and ask myself, "Who am I to judge?  Is there anyone to whom my opinion has or should have a shred of relevance?  Does a 5-star rating from me mean the same thing as it does from someone who is genuinely capable of evaluating the quality of the series?  What exactly do I mean by it?" (True story: Ice-T peed at the urinal right next to me at an LA showing of What About Bob? in 1991.  I clicked the 5th star anyway.)

More relevant to my time and place in the post-election America of 2016, when the smoke cleared on November 8 and it was clear that the worst of two bad candidates had won, I considered my half-hearted but strategical vote (in vain) in contrast with the enthusiasm with which the slim minority that prevailed had voted, and the outcome made sense.

The victor (due only to arcane outdated technicalities of procedure that favor, as a shrewd observer put it to me recently, "acres over people") (but the victor nonetheless) with his lack of self-awareness and with not the faintest effort to hide the extent of his unappealing qualities, had presented what looks to me like a completely authentic picture of himself as shameless con artist and panderer to the basest instincts of whoever would be pandered to, and a significant minority of the country (in just the right acres) was "ripe for the picking".  My vote was shrouded in bad faith, wishful thinking, susceptibility to blackmail and self-conscious self-doubt.  The (technical) victor's base had been sold a bill of goods.  But the point was: Someone had bothered to sell it to them!  Where was my bill of goods?  Who would sell to me?

Is authenticity reserved only for the rural parts of the world?  Are only the acres far from coasts authentically American?  Is only Romania authentic?  Isn't Belgium?

Am I authentic?  Am I even real?  Who can say?  Who will say?

(Eyes cast expectantly to Romanian ethnomusicologist)