Dangers of the crossover

When I attended Rosehill College, the pride of Papakura's educational system, back in the late 1980s and early '90s, the school had two official uniforms.

The first uniform, which was worn grudgingly and scruffily, consisted of the sort of grey shirt and blue jersey with which so many institutions, from schools to prisons to mental hospitals, homogenise their inmates.

The second, unofficial uniform, which was worn underneath those colourless shirts, and which burst proudly out of its hiding place on the school's rare and coveted mufti days, showed the letters AC and DC on either side of a lightning bolt and featured either a nihilistically black or garishly purple background.

By the end of the '80s the Aussie metal band was fifteen or so years old, and its members had acquired stock options and golf club memberships. At Rosehill, though, AC/DC's deadhead lyrics and two chord drones were still seen as a symbol of rebellion. The band was so popular that anyone who spurned it was seen as a cultural traitor. I got teased for months after I wore a T shirt that honoured The Smiths rather than the Aussie metallers on mufti day.

I felt like I was entering familiar territory, then, when I turned up at the waterlogged campus of the 'Atenisi Institute this year and heard AC/DC blasting from a stereo. I soon realised, though, that loud guitars are not as popular in Tonga as they are in South Auckland.

After one of my first days teaching at the Institute, I accepted a car ride home with Salise and Hai, two of the school's biggest metalheads. As our vehicle skidded and roared through the crumbling backstreets of Nuku'alofa, launching chickens into the air and pigs into puddles, Hai put an old AC/DC cassette onto the stereo, cranked up the volume, and hooted with a strange anticipatory delight. Soon 'Highway to Hell', the title track to AC/DC's most famous album, was bringing Tongans onto their doorsteps and verandahs. An old man stepped out of a Free Wesleyan Church and frowned meaningfully at the din. A couple of boys sprinted down the drive of their 'api and stared at us, wondering if we were the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Men and women in passing cars gave us thumbs down signs and shouted curses from which I was magically protected by my ignorance of Tongan.

"Tongans don't like loud music" Salise explained when we got back to my place. "They don't even like rock. Kava songs, love songs, reggae - anything mellow, island style, that's what they like. Not AC/DC." In Nuku'alofa, fans of bands like AC/DC are not snotty-nosed bogans but avant-garde provocateurs.

I soon learned that Salise doesn't need a stereo to play music. He's an extraordinarily talented musician, who can knock out a classical piece for Spanish guitar as easily as the riff to 'Highway to Hell' or 'Smoke on the Water'. I've been working on winning Salise over to my tastes in guitar music, by lending him CDs by Nick Drake and John Fahey, but he remains a devotee of the heavy stuff. Together with a couple of mates, he has formed a band called One in Blood, which is battling against the Tongan distaste for rock music.

This semester Salise is doing a research project - autoethnography is the fancy term I'm using for it - in which he reflects on the difficulties of making loud guitar music in Tonga. I've been giving him music and texts which relate the struggles of path-breaking musicians in other countries, and asking him to relate them to his own experiences. I'm not so much interested in discussing the technical aspects of music, which are beyond me, as in hearing Salise talk about the sociology and politics of rocking out.

Here are some of the notes I've given to Salise. Some of the musos who frequent this blog, and in particular the great Bill Direen, might have their own responses to the questions I ask.

The art and politics of crossover music: Miles Davis and Death considered

You have been listening to Miles Davis, and reading Nick Kent’s classic portrait of the trumpeter. As Kent notes, Davis was a compulsive innovator who repeatedly crossed from one genre of music to another during his career, as he sought out new sounds and new bandmates.

You have heard Kind of Blue, which Davis released in 1959, and Bitches Brew, a double album which appeared in 1970. While Kind of Blue is considered a jazz classic, Bitches Brew upset some jazz fans, and helped create a new genre of music, which is usually called ‘fusion’ or ‘jazz-rock’. As his use of electrified guitars and pianos and the wah wah and other effects pedals shows, Davis had become a fan of Jimi Hendrix by the time he recorded Bitches Brew. The sound of the album also owes something to James Brown, whose funk sound was very popular amongst black audiences in the late ‘60s.

Miles Davis hoped that by bringing Hendrix and Brown into his sound he could attract a younger and blacker audience. After the release of Bitches Brew he began to leave behind the relatively small clubs where jazz musicians usually play and instead perform on the same bill as rock bands in stadiums. He went on tour with the Stevie Miller Band, an outfit which played middle of the road rock, and appeared alongside bands like The Who and The Doors at the Isle of Wight festival, which was Britain’s answer to the massive outdoors concert at Woodstock.

Davis’ desire for a blacker audience was connected to his anger about the racism that he and millions of other black Americans faced in the decades after World War Two. As a young man, Davis was attacked by a policeman outside a jazz club. The musician loved to drive fast sports cars, but often got pulled over by cops who were convinced that a black man in an expensive vehicle must be a thief.

Davis often referred to the battles of African peoples against colonialism in his music. In the early 1970s he composed a half-hour track called ‘Calypso Frelimo’, which paid tribute to the Mozambican guerrillas fighting to throw Portugal colonialists out of their homeland; in the ‘80s he released an album named Tutu, after the anti-apartheid leader the Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Davis was perplexed that so many of his fans were well-off white people, and that it was much easier for him to find an audience in a prestigious American college or a fashionable Parisian music hall than in Africa or one of America’s black ghettoes.

 Despite the changes he made to his sound, Davis found it hard to attract large new audiences. In the years after Bitches Brew he achieved, instead, what one critic called a ‘negative crossover’. Davis’ use of rock instruments and funk rhythms alienated traditionalist jazz fans, but his long, intricate, turbulent songs – as you may have realised, the title track of Bitches Brew ran for a whole side of vinyl! – were too much for many fans of rock and funk to absorb.

Between 1975 and 1980 Davis retired from music. When he returned, he played in a much more accessible style, and began to incorporate ‘80s pop into his repertoire. He made a cover version of Cyndi Lauper’s hit single ‘Time After Time’ and worked with several rappers before his death in 1992.

You have read about the black Detroit band Death, whose members created a punk-like sound years before supposed pioneers of punk like Britain’s The Sex Pistols and New York’s The Ramones. Like Miles Davis, Death wanted to reach a black audience, but struggled to get a hearing for their fast, loud sound. They were working in a city famous as the base of Motown Records, and their community wanted to hear the soul and funk of Marvin Gaye and George Clinton. Death only reached an audience decades after disbanding, when their music was discovered by record collectors and historians.  

Some questions to consider:

What is your response to the differences between Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew? Which album sounds more accessible to you today? Which album did you enjoy more?

Is it difficult to cross musical genres in Tonga today? How would a band like Death, or an album like Bitches Brew, be treated in Tonga?

Can you relate to the difficulties that Miles Davis and Death had in making music that audiences were unfamiliar with and hostile toward?

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]