Ned Sublette has a new word to inject into the vocabulary of music studies. Postmamboism.
Guest blogging over at the Boing Boing site, the author of Cuba and it's Music and a new book on New Orleans called A Year before The Flood, Sublette introduces this new disciplne that....
begins with the study of African and African diaspora musics, given their historical centrality to the music of the world and their deep connection through slavery, neoslavery, and liberation struggles to fundamental questions of colonialism, capitalism, and civilization. Postmamboism calls for a thorough knowledge of music of the black Atlantic, and implicitly has much to do with the emergent field of Atlantic studies, but its techniques and perspective can work with any musical culture.
Somewhere in the past (sitting in with tourist bands in Veradero, Cuba 1981, seeing Eddie Palmieri at an upper east side club in NYC circa 1978, Bob Marley at Convocation Hall in Toronto in the mid 70's, my first encounter with a Fela Kuti vinyl) I became a postmamboist. The seed was probably planted with soul music of the 60's (Sam and Dave, Aretha Franklin, etc) with it's history and culture and authenticity compared to other pop music of the day. Or maybe it was that movie The Tami Show, (1964) when all of us white kids got to see James Brown smoke the Rolling Stones.
An interesting aspect here is this awkwardly worded passage (italics mine)
Postmamboism acknowledges a dialectic between its essential reference point of music that is popular (literally, of the people, signifying music that springs from historical roots and, relying on memory and person-to-person transmission, is infinitely renewable), and pop, which is presentist and must be mediated, consumed and replaced. Postmamboism speaks in the vernacular, deprivileging jargon, cultic language, and hyperpolysyllabicism. Postmamboism values the testimony, experience, and vocabulary of cultural practitioners, because for Postmamboists as for musicians, theory must be connected to practice.
I am spinning a gig at lula tonight.
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