Covering the flip side to “world music” The Guardian’s Tony Naylor in his “Is Ethno-techno exploiting world music?”reports some musicians love the freedom this genre grants and others think that freedom is a shameful lie:
Matias Aguayo, however, is less enthusiastic. Born in Chile, raised in Germany, now resident in Buenos Aires, the electro maverick concedes that it may be a matter of taste – “and, in most cases, putting samples of traditional songs on a techno beat is in very bad taste” – but he rejects any deeper reading of this “ethno-minimal” trend. To him, such music is cheap “exoticism”, in a colonial tradition. Where you, in La Mezcla, might hear a joyful intermingling of ideas, he hears a Western techno producer imposing order: “It doesn’t seem very ‘free’ to me. Adding a few congas and a ‘Latino’ vocal does not reflect a willingness to learn from other cultures.”
Such musical references feed into the idea of techno as this fluid global community, but Aguayo is scathing: “Maybe for techno’s easyJet set it’s a small world. But ask young musicians in Santiago or Buenos Aires how easy it is to move around. It’s naive, in a brutal way, to say that we’re all world citizens.”
Think on that next time you’re whooping it up to La Mezcla.
Read the article.
Rashaan Alexis Meneses 