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Popular Music and Globalization

What does it mean to be a musician today? What does it take to be recognized as one on a global stage fraught with colonial and post-colonial power relations? Popular music serves here as the gateway to explore the representations and meanings associated with music making in the time of globalization. A brief overview of the literature in the social sciences and humanities on the relationship between music, place, identity and society and how they are intertwined in the context of globalization will act as a starting point.

Defining globalization at once as a stage upon which processes of contact and friction take place and as a process propelled and mediated by capital, I will focus in the following sections of the article on the music practices and discourses through which contact, friction, and capital are articulated, contributing to the re- imagining of boundaries of culture, place, and identity.

Beginning with contact, I retrace the history of the globalization of music as a long series of fruitful, yet violent cross-cultural encounters that took place beyond the north-south axis and the time-frame of modernity that globalization as a phenomenon tends to be limited to.

However, while contact may enable a form of mutuality, it also inevitably creates friction. I borrow the term from Anna Tsing's illuminating ethnography of globalization in which she defines friction as the ‘awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference’ (Tsing, 2005: 4). Friction is exemplified here by the music that emerged out of the Black Atlantic slave trade. It is, Paul Gilroy has argued, the violent economic and cultural maelstrom out of which the soundtrack of modernity emerged (Gilroy, 1993).

Following on this, I will highlight the contradictory ways capital enables musical contact but also exacerbates friction through the medium of new technologies raising economical, political, aesthetical, and ethical questions with regards to authenticity, representation of the Other, commodification and ownership of cultural forms such as music through copyright laws in the age of digital sampling. It is largely within this context that I discuss the emergence of world music as a globalized form of mass-produced popular music intended for the cosmopolitan audience of the twenty-first century (White, 2012).

Qualifying music as popular is a value judgment indicating the important place music occupies in everyday life, as a highly subjective aesthetic experience, as an essential part of shared social activities, as a mediated and mass-produced cultural product and as a means for engagement with power and with Otherness (Harrington and Bielby, 2001). When examined through the prism of contact, friction, and capital, popular music is, therefore, better understood as an umbrella term encompassing a wide variety of genres, practices, and meanings that go beyond its general association with Anglo-American inspired pop culture.

Popular Music and Musicians in Society: From the Local to the Global

When the terms globalization and music are put together, they tend to conjure up critical reflections regarding the notions of culture, place, and identity. They also underline anthropological and ethnomusicological understandings of music making as an important catalyst in the generating of various representations and ideologies associated with such notions. Indeed, music participates at once in the reinforcing of boundaries of culture and identity and in subverting them. It is no surprise, then, that music should be just as implicated in subject formation and identity politics, particularly in ‘playing out’ a sense of common nationhood or belonging in a context marked by uneven transnational social, cultural, political and economic transactions. Taking that into account, popular music makes a compelling case for elucidating the complex dynamics of globalization, not only because it is popular, but because music is highly mediated, is deeply invested in meaning, and has proven to be an extremely mobile and resourceful form of capital.

Sociologists have been ahead of the game in this. Engaging critically with Adorno's (1991) seminal work on the intimate relationship between musical structure and social structure, they paved the way for what Tia DeNora has termed, ‘the production of culture’ approach which ‘signalled a shift in focus from aesthetic objects and their

content to the cultural practices in and through which aesthetic materials were appropriated and used to produce social life’ (DeNora, 2000: 6). Paul Willis' (1978) work on the music bike boys listened to, for instance, and Antoine Hennion's (2007) exploration of the mediating qualities of music, highlight the many ways music at once echoes, enacts, communicates and comments on values and social formations.

Along the same lines, Hall and Jefferson (1976) and Simon Frith (1981), among others, emphasize the links between popular music and social change. The music of youth, in particular, precisely because youth is conceived as liminoidal (Turner, 1970) – that is, representing a moment of ambiguity, transition, even crisis – have been central to investigating the class, racial, and generational tensions that permeate and inevitably lead to change in society. These groundbreaking studies lead the way for the socio-cultural analysis of other genres of music like reggae (Martin, 1982), rock'n'roll (Frith, 1981), heavy metal (Walser, 1993), rap and hip-hop (Mitchell, 2001), all of which would eventually become globalized, prompting further studies on their transformation as they are performed in new contexts and are appropriated by musicians and audiences carrying increasingly transnational biographies and transcultural references (Davis and Simon, 1982; Maira and Shihade, 2012).

Other sociologists opted to focus on the concrete, step-by-step, work of making art and music happen. Howard Becker (1982) demonstrates in Art Worlds how any form of cultural production, including music, even that which is individual in appearance, results from the interaction of a large network of actors, hence providing a sense of community and identity through the collective work of producing music and other forms of art. Taking this analysis further in Producing Pop, Keith Negus (1992) unravels the mechanisms and strategies multinational record companies employ to produce popular music and to develop and promote successful new artists. He sheds light on the internal organization, logistics and interrelations between the various branches of the industry (recruiters, managers, promoters, producers, broadcasters, etc.), offering a critique of the way value-laden notions such as musical talent and authenticity are constructed and then legitimized on a global scale through the branding and marketing of new artists.

All of this underlines the political and economic undercurrents that run through popular music, an issue that is taken head-on by cultural studies scholars. Drawing on Marxist and postMarxist critical theories of the Frankfurt School (Benjamin, 1968; Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972), Gramscian hegemony (Gramsci, 1971), semiotic analysis (Barthes, 1977), scholars mainly associated with the University of Birmingham (see During, 1993) put the spotlight on the political economy of culture and the representation, resistance to and appropriation of dominant cultural tropes. As C. Lee Harrington and Denise B. Bielby note, cultural studies' major contribution has been in showing that consumers of popular culture ‘are not passive dupes but rather active participants in the creation of meaning’ (Harrington and Bielby, 2001: 4).

While culture production and cultural studies analysis have tended to put the emphasis on the consumption of culture and the cultural brokers that mediate it, anthropologists and ethnomusicologists have directed their attention to the role of musicians themselves and their status in society. Merriam's The Anthropology of Music (1964), for example, discusses the ambiguous social position of musicians, describing it as a wandering between marginality and power. This is also the case of Indian musicians, whose vocation, as ethnomusicologist Regula Qureshi has noted, allows them to temporarily neutralize inequities that cut across Indian society (Qureshi, 2000). In other contexts, like the Arab world for example, it is a deep belief in the power of music, that is, its ability to stir the soul and provoke strong emotions that has tended to shape perceptions of musicians and their place in society (Racy, 2003: Shiloah, 1995), hence the emphasis on ethics, morality and the art of good manners (adab) as a criterion for the social legitimation of musicians and for the recognition of their talents (Racy, 2003; Sawa, 1989).

Western musicians are no exception. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they were subject to religious or royal patronage. With that came the privilege of circulating among the nobility and the possibility of being listened to, figuratively and literally, by those holding power (Elias, 1983, 1993). Three centuries later, the avant-garde composers of the early twentieth century would in some ways capitalize on marginality and turn it into a political manifesto by posing as representatives of a future society (Adorno, 1962: Williams and Pinkney, 1989).

Today, the dynamics of centrality and marginality, power, and submission that continuously shape the lives and livelihood of musicians, perceptions of their work and the social place it occupies play out on a much larger scale, compounded by the asymmetrical encounters made possible by globalization, postcolonial identity politics and the commoditization of music. Some of these issues have been raised through ethnographies of the marketing and performance of African music and musicians on the world stage (Klein, 2007; Meintjes, 2003; Taylor, 1997). Other studies have looked at the emergence of hybrid music practices in multicultural urban centers (Maira, 2002; Stokes, 1994; Wong, 2004). In all of these case studies, theories of globalization (Appadurai, 1996; Augé, 1994; Tsing, 2005), global capitalism (Harvey, 2006; Jameson, 1991), cosmopolitanism and belonging (Appiah, 2005; Breckenridge, 2002; Hedetoft and Hjort, 2002) and critical theories calling into question isomorphic configurations of culture, nation, place and identity (Bhabha, 1994; Gupta and Ferguson, 1992) provide fruitful concepts that elucidate how transcultural encounters act upon and are themselves enacted through musical practices. One may safely assume following this brief overview of the literature, that music makers – be they located in the northern hemisphere or in the southern hemisphere – are inevitably entangled in the cultural, economic, and political dynamics of globalization. They engage with it as musicians through the points of contact and friction that the circulation of capital provides. In the following pages, I will unpack these three components that together make the globalization of music possible.

Contact: Re-Reading the History of Music and Globalization

As archaeologist Stephen Silliman notes, the term ‘contact’ has been very useful in contemporary archaeology for documenting the interaction between Europeans and indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, and Australia, among others (Silliman, 2005). However, uncritical uses of the term, he argues, have led to the downplaying of the colonialist nature of these encounters and of the unequal dynamics of power that informed these interactions. It also tends to reify cultural traits, neglecting the ‘creative, creolized and novel cultural products’ that resulted out of these encounters (Silliman, 2005: 56). It is precisely those utopian qualities of the concept of contact and it's equally dystopian inflections that make it a particularly useful analytical tool.

Globalization, as we know it today, that is, as the compression of time and space through the flow of people and capital, has been part of human history for centuries. The discovery of the new world and the following European expeditions of the sixteenth century tend to be referred to as a marker. In Journeys to the Other Shore (2006), however, Roxanne Euben argues for decentring a largely North Atlantic interpretation of globalization, recalling intense trade and transcultural relations that circulated throughout the Indian Ocean between Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and South Asia. Echoing Euben, ethnomusicologist Jean During tells the story of the transcultural musical tradition that emerged in the ninth century as the Muslim empire expanded out of the Arabian Peninsula, westward towards North Africa and eastward all through Central Asia and the northern tip of the subcontinent into China (During, 2011). The Arabic maqams, the Indian ragas, and the Persian radius which have been canonized as national traditions are all related in that they can be traced back to a set of performance practices, theoretical principles and aesthetic values that spread throughout Africa, the Middle- East and Asia during the Muslim empire (During, 2011).

These contacts do not fit into the Eurocentric map inherited since the sixteenth century from cartographers such as Gerardus Mercator. They are therefore often neglected in contemporary histories of globalization, which tend to focus on a polarized north–south, east–west axis pitting civilizations with fundamentally different world-views against each other.

Take for example the written history of Western music which tends to emphasize its emergence in Europe and subsequent expansion to North America and beyond, thus undermining the impact of its encounters with other musical traditions of the world and the intercultural relations that contributed to the making of the Western musical canon. Consequently, historical records indicating the import into Europe of martial music, first by the Crusaders and then by various political, cultural and military mediators during the Ottoman era, the strong presence of Arab and Muslim scholars and artists in the court of Roger II and Frederick II in Sicily, the impact of Arab-Andalusian performance-practice on the development of European song, its influence on the lyrical style of troubadours in Provence, or traces of Arab-Andalusian poetry in the Cantigas de Santa Maria, tend to fall on the sidelines of history (see Farmer, 1930; Ribera y Tarrago, 1929; Shiloah, 1995).

In fact, cultural exchanges continued for centuries beyond the fateful date of 1492, not only in the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages, but in port cities like Venice. Reciprocal transfer of cultural knowledge and influence in terms of techniques, styles and aesthetic value judgment in arts and crafts endured over a period of at least three centuries (especially between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries) between the Venetians and various representatives of Arab and Muslim sultanates and caliphates. They were of such depth and intensity that in the case of many of the artifacts that remain from this period, experts struggle to determine if objects are in fact Venetian or Arab and Muslim in origin (see Carboni, Kennedy, and Marwell, 2007; Howard, 2000; Mack, 2002).

Meanwhile, in 1534, following a treaty between the king of France, François I, and the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, the king sent a Western orchestra to Istanbul as a sign of friendship. The visit resulted in the introduction of two new rhythms in Turkish music, whose names refer to their French origin, the frenkcin frengi feri (Shiloah, 2002). As musicologist Amnon Shiloah notes, ‘Anxious to expand the Empire to other horizons, Ottoman rulers accorded special privileges to European ambassadors of arts and culture in general, showering poets, musicians, painters, writers and historians with favors’ [my translation](Shiloah, 2002: 203). The movement of artists was not unilateral. In 1872, Sultan Mahmud II sent a first Turkish mission composed of 158 students to train them in various Western conservatories (Shiloah, 2002: 207).

During that same period, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Asian countries such as Japan, China, and Korea were engaging in their own way with Western music. While she acknowledges that the introduction of Western music in the region occurred in the context of Western imperialism and the push for modernization by Asian governments and intellectuals, musicologist Mari Yoshihara also demonstrates that the encounter was not unidirectional, nor was it exclusively founded on importation and imposition from the West (Yoshihara, 2007). It was equally shaped by local politics and dynamics of power. For example, as Japan's power grew in the region, Western music in China and Korea was appropriated as a tool of nationalism and resistance against the Japanese. This follows on a long engagement with Western music in Asian institutions which today has translated into ‘the “reverse flow’ of Asian musicians, musical instruments and instruction methods to the West […] at once challenging and reinforcing notions of music, culture, geography and race’ (Yoshihara, 2007: 8).

Admittedly, the gradual rise of Europe's imperial ambitions and its power thanks in part to the discovery of the new world went hand in hand with the reduction of the Ottoman Empire, as well as other ‘Others’ in the European imagination to cartoonish caricatures and exotic, stereotyped formulas. As a result, many aspects pertaining to the history of the encounters mentioned above, especially those that involve Western music tend to focus on the musical representation of difference (Born and Hesmondhalgh, 2000), exoticism (Taylor 2007) and Orientalism (Al-Taee, 2010). Critical reflection on the ties between music, power, and representations of the Other and on how these have propelled the trans-nationalization of Western art music is necessary and important. However, it has tended to overshadow the fact that the caricatures and stereotypes portrayed through the music are often the reified traces of a much deeper and complex relationship. Furthermore, as Tia DeNora has noted, such ‘reflection’ theories do not pay enough attention to the concrete processes that made these relationships possible, meaningful, and, most importantly, powerful despite their dysfunctional and asymmetrical nature (DeNora, 2000).

Processes such as metropolitization and urbanization which ethnomusicologist Jean During argues have been fundamental in making cross-cultural musical encounters possible in the past are still the principal operating processes that inform the globalization of music today (During, 2011). Taking lessons out of the pages of the history of the Muslim empire, During recalls how with the expansion of Islam, thousands of musicians from the provinces and rural peripheries of the empire travelled to metropolises such as Baghdad in the ninth century, Istanbul or Tabriz in the fourteenth century and Delhi during the Mughal era (During, 2011). In the capital cities, their music met and mutually influenced each other, giving birth to new genres anchored in the urban and cosmopolitan realities of the imperial metropolis. These deterritorialized musical practices were then reterritorialized as a repertoire destined for the consumption of the metropolitan elite, consequently endowing them with a certain cultural capital. Much of what would later become known as ‘art music’ is a sophisticated synthesis of various regional genres and practices amalgamating the rural, religious, vernacular and other variety of music, appropriated and resynthesized in the imperial capital as court music. That is why, During explains, while musics of the Middle-East canonized a number of modes (maqams) as the foundations upon

which the tradition is built, the names of these modes point to their ethnic or regional origins: Hijaz, Esfahan, Nishapur to name but a few in the case of Arabic music, or Bakhtiari, Sushtar and Kord, among others, in the musics of Iran and Azerbaidjan (During, 2011).

The impact of urbanization and metropolization on the development of new genres and philosophies of music continues to be felt today. Raymond Williams would establish a similar relationship five centuries later between immigration to the metropolis and the emergence of the avant-garde schools and their modernist aesthetic ideology in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. As he notes, ‘the most important general element of the innovations in form is the fact of immigration to the metropolis, and it cannot too often be emphasized how many of the major innovators were, in this precise sense, immigrants’ (Williams and Pinkney, 1989: 45). Williams attributes this innovative reflex to the desire to belong in the transnational and alienating setting of the modern metropolis:

Liberated or breaking from their national or provincial cultures, placed in quite new relations to those other native languages or native visual traditions, encountering meanwhile a novel and dynamic common environment from which many of the older forms were obviously distant, the artists and writers and thinkers of this phase found the only community available to them: a community of the medium; of their own practice. (Williams and Pinkney, 1989: 45)

In other words, within the transcultural maelstrom of displacement, mediums such as music became the anchor upon which new imaginaries, identities and inevitably new audiences took root.

Friction: Music of the Black Atlantic

The contacts that I briefly sketched above could not have happened without the flow of people and capital. Indeed, Williams is careful to point out that such encounters and the dramatic cultural changes that ensued from them could only take place in the course of capitalist and imperialist development (Williams and Pinkney, 1989: 45).

His hypothesis is perhaps most dramatically demonstrated with the music that emerged out of the North Atlantic slave trade both within the colonies and in the metropolises they were attached to. Slavery embodied a particularly violent form of contact, as it rested upon the bio-politics of intimacy, to the point of merging people and capital into commoditized bodies. Intimacy is laden with friction, even more so when it is experienced through an encounter of such violence. It is undoubtedly for this reason that it would inevitably spawn new mediums of expression that sought to translate into art, dance, music, and words the effects and affects of life during and after slavery, creating out of a condition of utter bondage new possibilities.

In the early twentieth century, the legacy of slavery sparked contentious debates on whether what slavery produced in terms of social and cultural practices were in continuity or in rupture with the times, places and imaginaries that existed before the traumatizing experience of slavery. Had descendants of slavery in the new world preserved, consciously or not, any part of their African heritage? Had, in fact, anything other than the bodies of the enslaved survived the middle passage and the horrors that followed, including the separation of families, the deliberate tearing apart of communities that shared common languages, not to mention various forms of ethnic cleansing through rape for instance. Scholars like anthropologist Melville Herskovits, remembered today as one of the founders of African-American studies in the United States and sociologist Franklin Frazier sat at opposite ends of the debate. Working among the black bourgeoisie in the United States, the latter saw in the conservative manners of middle-class black families the irreversible impact of slavery (Frazier, 1955). He rejected romantic notions of African indigeneity which ultimately, in his view, stripped African- Americans of their claim to modernity. Herskovits, on the other hand, argued that African-Americans had not only kept aspects of their African identities but should embrace them. He drew on fieldwork in Haiti (Herskovits, 1937) but was mainly inspired by the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1920s, also known as the New Negro movement, which sought to rehabilitate black identity in America by relocating it beyond the time and place of slavery (see Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (Llewellyn Smith, 2009)).

Two scholars who have sought to capture the complexities of African-American identity are sociologist Paul Gilroy and musicologist Christopher Small by examining the profound impact that music making among African- Americans has had on the development of a transnational black identity, and beyond that, on the emergence of a globalized pop culture. As Christopher Small notes:

Seemingly disparate musics as, say, country-and-western, reggae, jazz, punk rock, Broadway popular songs and calypso were all aspects of one brilliant tradition, which resulted from the collision in the Americas, during and after the times of slavery, between two great musical cultures (perhaps one should say, groups of cultures,) that of Europe and that of Africa, a tradition which partakes of the nature of both but is not the same as either. (Small, 1987: 3)

More importantly, in Small's point of view, all of these genres emerged out of slavery as ‘rituals for survival’ (Small, 1987). Indeed, though they were unspeakable, the terrors of slavery, as Paul Gilroy, for his part, points out, they were not ‘inexpressible. … Residual traces of their necessarily painful expression still contribute to historical memories inscribed and incorporated into the volatile core of Afro-Atlantic cultural creation’ (Gilroy, 1993: 73). Among those forms of cultural creation, music counted among the most effective and powerful precisely because it allowed the expression of these terrors under conditions where language and literacy as modes of communication and self-representation were denied (Gilroy, 1993). The centrality of rhythm, dance and improvisation transmitted through the African diaspora were translated into what Gilroy calls ‘signifying practices’ such as mimesis, gesture, kinesis, and costume, antiphony, montage and dramaturgy that allowed for the expression and subversion of the social conditions and challenges of everyday life during slavery beyond the limits of language and textuality (Gilroy, 1993).

Positioning what he calls African-Atlantic music outside binary modes of analysis that tend to conjure up discussions of rupture and continuity, tradition and modernity, authenticity or the lack thereof, Gilroy contributes their power to their ‘doubleness, their unsteady location simultaneously inside and outside the conventions, assumptions, and aesthetic rules which distinguish and periodise modernity’ (Gilroy, 1993: 73). These music offer an anti-modernity, or rather a counter-modernity which ‘appears in the disguise of a premodernity that is both actively reimagined in the present and transmitted intermittently in eloquent pulses from the past’ (Gilroy, 1993: 74).

Some of the best examples of the productivity of friction in Black Atlantic music are the spirituals that were born out of the Christianization of slaves in the United States and would eventually give birth to gospel music after emancipation. As Small explains:

The slaves brought to bear their own ways of singing, transforming the staid and plain hymns, the rhymed expressions of Protestant theology into expressive fantasies of sound. … What the slaves seized upon was not so much the repertory of songs itself, still less the details of the doctrines contained in the verses, as the opportunity it gave them to practice upon both words and music that group vocal improvisation, … which transcended the confines of the condition into which they had been thrust, and of the power to structure their community in ways which were otherwise denied to them.(Small, 1987: 83–4)

Some of the performance styles that came to be associated with the black appropriation of Christian hymns are the improvisation of hymnodies and the introduction of call-response choruses, as well as the slowing down of the beat creating a space for elaborate melisma and ornamentation (Martin, 2012).

Another example of friction in music is the minstrel shows that became immensely popular in the northern regions of the United States during the nineteenth century, where contact with black people was rare prompting mixed feelings of fear and fascination with the life and customs of the slaves who worked in the South's cotton plantations. White actors painted their faces black and performed theatrical numbers based on caricaturized archetypes of black people as they imagined them (Small, 1987). Often cited as emblematic examples of the perversion of black identity and racism, the minstrels were also the product of class conflicts through which race and racism, as Stuart Hall reminds us, were mobilized (Hall and Jefferson, 1976). Indeed, the actors who performed in these shows were themselves part of a poor white underclass, many of whom had migrated to the United States as indentured workers. They were in fact not much better off than the black slaves. Both

marginalized groups' shared predicament put them in constant contact with each other leading to many musical encounters, influences, and borrowing. As the north became industrialized, laborers, both white and black, poured into its cities and whatever sympathy poor whites had for their black counterparts eroded as they competed against newly freed black laborers (Small, 1987). Drawing on the partial knowledge and mixed feelings that such proximity engendered, white actors used it as the primary material for their black-face performances, distancing themselves from black slaves and ex-slaves by mocking them for the pleasure of the urban white middle and upper classes of the north in the United States (Small, 1987).

Beyond their emergence from the encounter of two underclasses across colour lines, what makes minstrels particularly eloquent examples of friction is the fact that black musicians would themselves to participate in the shows following emancipation introducing nuances and other forms of music making, including spirituals and other genres of religious music, into the portrayals of black culture (Martin, 2012). These minstrels were surprisingly equally popular with black audiences, complicating the semantic field the minstrels occupied to consider them beyond racist mockery and class conflict as expressions of doubleness through self-deprecating humor and self-criticism.

Questions of representation and authenticity, which are inevitably raised when faced with such paradoxes, are further compounded by the fact that many of the songs composed for the minstrels by white musicians would eventually enter the realm of folksong further blurring their provenance and violent origins. Citing composer Stephen Foster's body of work in the 1850s, Small gives a few examples of these ambiguities: 'His contributions to the minstrel stage are its most enduring, so that many today think that they are genuine Negro songs; Oh Susanna, Camptown races, Nelly Bly and Old Black Joe are just a few of them' (Small, 1987: 148).

However, the problematic of authenticity and the question of black identity would take on truly transnational proportions as spirituals and minstrelsy, among other genres of African-American music begin to circulate beyond the North-American continent, reversing the flow of music from Africa and Europe back towards them. In keeping with the example of the spirituals, their provenance, indeed whether some of the performance traits described above had already existed in Europe and were imported into the new world by white settlers or whether they should be attributed to Christianized slaves is one among the many contested accounts of the development of African-American music (Small, 1987). Another area of contention is the legacy left by the Fisk University Jubilee Singers, whose repertory of slave spirituals is considered one of the first instances of black music entering into the public domain and into popular culture. Founded as a choir whose aim was to acquire funding for their university by performing spirituals to white audiences, the Jubilee Singers would eventually introduce black music-making to new audiences in Europe, notably England (Gilroy, 1993). As black intellectual thought and criticism came into its own at the turn of the century, the Jubilee Singers' treatment and transformation of the spirituals to accommodate the aesthetic tastes and expectations of white audiences became central to critical reflection on black identity.

Small, for example, echoing the position of such intellectuals as anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston who dismissed Jubilee Singers' performances as inauthentic (see Gilroy, 1993) qualifies them as ‘harmonically “cleaned-up’ and polished versions’ of spirituals sung ‘in arrangements that would render them acceptable to the mainly white audiences before whom they appeared’ (Small, 1987: 96). Gilroy, on the other hand, follows De Bois' analysis of the Jubilee Singers' legacy as ‘the articulate message of the slave to the world’ (cited in Gilroy, 1993: 90) by underlining the many ways the Jubilee Singers introduced into the public domain of popular culture a counter-narrative to blackface minstrelsy which during that period constituted the main vehicle of encounter with black life, culture and identity on both sides of the Atlantic (Gilroy, 1993).

Indeed both spirituals and minstrelsy would have a lasting impact on the landscape of music in North America and beyond becoming, according to ethnomusicologist Denis-Constant Martin the two principal strands – the first sacred, the second secular – which will lead from spirituals to soul, reggae and rap, on the one hand, and from blackface minstrelsy to blues, country and western, jazz and rock, on the other (Martin, 2012).

Going a step further, Gilroy argues that the cross-cultural circulation of these music genres became, in turn, the anchorage on which a transnational black Atlantic identity took shape:

Facilitated by a common fund of urban experiences, by the effect of similar but by no means identical forms of racial segregation, as well as by the memory of slavery, a legacy of Africanisms, and a stock of religious experiences defined by them both. Dislocated from their original conditions of existence, the soundtracks of this African-American cultural broadcast few a]new metaphysics of blackness elaborated and enacted in Europe and elsewhere within the underground, alternative, public spaces constituted around an expressive culture that was dominated by music. (Gilroy, 1993: 83)

Take reggae, for example, which developed in Jamaica in the 1960s thanks to the popularization of the male trio format by the Impressionists, a group based in Chicago. Reversibly, hip-hop emerged in the Bronx following the settlement of the DJ from Kingston Clive Kool DJ Herc in the neighborhood. Both of these genres would later travel beyond the Atlantic to become among the most potent vehicles for ‘global youth affiliations and a tool for reworking local identity all over the world’ (Mitchell, 2001: 2). Focusing on questions of authenticity inhibits the complex and rich processes through which black Atlantic music and identity emerged and continues to be re-imagined. Black Atlantic expressive culture, Gilroy insists, should not be understood in romantic ethnocentric and nationalist terms wherein a pastoral, idealized notion of blackness rooted in Africa becomes the sole barometer of affiliation and authenticity nor should it be dismissed as a simple postmodern construction which falls apart under the weight of its intrinsic paradoxes and hybridity (Gilroy, 1993).

Perhaps the strongest example to support Gilroy's argument comes from the urban centres of South Africa, where the legacy of circulatory and cross-cultural musical encounters found common ground in the struggle of black South Africans against apartheid giving birth to a rich and complex repertory of performance styles which ethnomusicologist David Coplan refers to as black city music (Coplan, 1985). He cites, among others, the arrival of African-American minstrel-style troupes into the streets of Cape Town on the occasion of Queen Victoria's fiftieth jubilee and the memorable tours across South Africa by McAdoo's Virginia Jubilee Singers, a group that included performers that had been members of the Fisk Jubilee Singers choir:

Although their form of singing that the Jubilee Singers introduced was new to South Africa, it contained elements of call-and-response and rhythmic patterns that could be musically mapped onto indigenous African tunes. … McAdoo's last controversial tour overlapped with the beginning of the Boer War, the arrival of an influx of black and white American Protestant missionaries, and the stirring of a heightened sense of political consciousness among South Africa's emerging black elite of clerks, teachers, and professionals. The cultural persona and ‘up (very far!) from slavery’ narrative of self-improvement and race pride of the Virginia Jubilee Singers echoed the social aspirations of this social stratum. (Coplan, 1985: 51)

The influence of African-American performance culture went beyond the aspiring black middle class. In fact, it would become incremental in the development of new musical idioms in South Africa, notably the emergence of performance clubs in Cape Town among ‘coloured’ working-class South African musicians who assimilated aspects of African-American minstrels into their already hybrid local musical practices:

These clubs organized parades through the streets of the city every New Year in the famous Cape Coon Carnival, dressed as blackface minstrels and singing American Negro songs and Afrikaans moppies (comic songs to the accompaniment of Khoi-style ghomma drums, whistles, guitars, tambourines, and banjos. Highly competitive, these clubs still reflect their mixed coloured-Afrikaans-Malay-American heritage in costume and song. Club names – Fabulous Orange Plantation Minstrels, Meadow Cottonfield Jazz Singers – illustrate how century-old images of Black American entertainment styles have become a permanent part of working-class colored performance culture.(Coplan, 1985: 51–2)

Today, it is generally accepted that black identity cannot be adequately understood through formulations of either/or, rupture versus continuity. It is rather the productive friction between multiple frames of reference – that of Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas – and as many strategies of survival beyond submission including revolution (Haïti), creolization (the Caribbean), circulatory appropriation and adaptation of cultural forms (South African city music) that the descendants of slaves across the Atlantic have come to identify with (Martin, 2012). Indeed, it is this friction, that in De Bois' words produced a form of double-consciousness, that has made Black Atlantic music so powerful as to become the cornerstone of popular culture in the twenty-first century, not only in the West but around the world.

It is perhaps ethnomusicologist Denis-Contant Martin who summarizes this legacy best when he says:

Most forms of music described today as ‘popular’ or ‘mass’ music are derived today, in one way or another, from practices that appeared within societies organized around slavery in territories conquered by Europeans: From Georges Brassens to the Chinese rock of Cui Jan, from Japanese reggae to Spanish ska of Sk-P, from the vagabond rovings of Emir Kusturica to the inventions of Yothu Yindi, from the songs of Björk to the modernized rebetiko of Manolis Hiotis, beginning with the countless genres invented in North and South America and the Caribbean. (Martin, 2012)

As such, ‘the first forms of musical expression by slaves’, Martin reminds us, ‘were harbingers of what is now called globalization’ (Martin, 2012) and its musical counterpart, the globalized genre of popular music labeled as ‘world music’.

Capital: The Technologies and Ethics of World Music

Legend has it that ‘world music’ came to be as a label in 1987 following a series of meetings by music industry actors in the United Kingdom in order to decide on how to identify and then market a growing number of recordings fusing Western and different types of non-Western musics that defied the categories of genre that were established then; recordings whose sales

were demonstrating an increasing interest by audiences for ‘third world’ artists.1 The meetings came on the heels of the enormous success of Paul Simon's album, Graceland, in 1986, which was produced in collaboration with South African musicians at the height of the international boycott of all things South African in support of the anti-apartheid struggle. The circumstances of its making will mire the album in controversy but would nevertheless contribute to its success.

While this account presents yet another example of cross-circulation of music from Africa to the Americas back to Africa, it has since been called into question as the birthing moment of world music. Ethnomusicologist Steven Feld cites much earlier uses of the term in faculties and departments of music in Western academia, dating back to the 1960s as fields of study such as ethnomusicology and their focus on non-Western music cultures developed (Feld, 2000). Also, the term was already in use in other contexts. Events such as the World of Music, Art, and Dance (WOMAD) festival founded by Peter Gabriel and his production studio and label World Beat Records had become launching pads for ‘world’ artists onto the international scene since 1982 (Taylor, 1997). One can also argue, as Martin (2012) has done convincingly, that world music really began with the music of slavery.

Despite their differences, all of these stories of Genesis point to the intricate manners in which contact, friction, and capital have interacted in order to turn world music into the cultural phenomenon it has become. Anthropologist Bob White defines world music today as ‘the umbrella category under which various types of traditional and non-Western music are produced for Western consumption’ (White, 2012). Ethnomusicologist Steven Feld goes further considering it a ‘label of industrial origin that refers to an amalgamated global marketplace of sounds as ethnic commodities’ (Feld, 2012). In their critique, both underline the interplay of capital with historical inequalities and violent encounters as central to the making and marketing of world music. As such, world music as capital does not only concern globalization's consuming cosmopolitan elite but also the music makers themselves. It raises ethical questions of opportunity versus exploitation, mutuality, and reciprocity versus hegemony. Much like African-American music, it also continues to provoke debate around identity, authenticity, pluralism and belonging which have divided scholars, industry actors, consumers and music makers alike.

Feld has summed up the discussion around world music into two discourses which encompass much of what is said, written, felt about the phenomenon: the discourse of celebration versus the discourse of anxiety to which he clearly adheres (Feld, 2000).

The discourse of celebration, which highlights the virtues of world music, draws upon the concept of cosmopolitanism as the fundamental condition of ‘being in the world’ in the twenty-first century (Appiah, 2005;

Rapport, 2012). As noted by Ulf Hedetoft and Mette Hjort, this thesis is based on a utopian and utilitarian conceptualization of cosmopolitan identity according to which 'the world appears as a terrain of opportunities, mobility, networking, money-making, and so forth … It opens up opportunities but does not require sacrifices that we abide by because we belong to it. Or it allows us to cultivate myths and reveries of having our real roots elsewhere than where we happen to be, or of eventually finding real happiness somewhere else' (Hedetoft and Hjort, 2002: xix).

With regards to music, Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh argue, cosmopolitanism as a concept has led to the mystification of plurality as embodied in the increasing fusion of musical styles and traditions. ‘The implication is’, they remark, ‘that these hybrid aesthetics and movements are free of earlier hierarchical consciousness and practice, that there are no significant “core-periphery’ structures at work, and thus that these aesthetics are free also of the asymmetrical relations of representation and the seductions of the exoticisms, primitivisms, and Orientalisms that paralleled colonial and neocolonial relations. In this view, then, “all differences” are being leveled. Hybridity can rebind from its discursive origins in colonial fantasies and oppression and can become instead a practical and creative means of cultural rearticulation and resurgence from the margins’ (Born and Hesmondhalgh, 2000: 19).

In addition, by considering the deterritorialization and denationalization of identity as an end in itself, the proponents of cosmopolitanism tend to turn globalization into a place of belonging instead of address globalization as a condition that produces possibly a variety of new forms of belonging. ‘There is a world of difference’, Hedetoft and Hjort remind us, ‘between imagining that “the globe’, like material possessions, memories, and ideas, belongs to “us’ (or, rather, “me”) – and that “we” belong to the “globe” and “globality”. … In such terms, “the globe” is a material and utopian tax haven, a site of (imagined) benefits, but very little belonging’ (Hedetoft and Hjort, 2002: xix–xx).

Indeed, globalization has not ended the need to belong or replaced the structures within which belonging has been framed since the nineteenth century, i.e. the nation-state. As a result, two paradoxical realities characterize the work of globalization today and distinguish it from its past incarnations: the unprecedented circulation and consumption of cultural commodities such as music; and the resurgence and reinforcement of national boundaries through militarized technologies of security and neo-nativist policies of citizenship and migration control. Today, bio-political mechanisms made possible and effective by technology are being put in place in order to control human flow and confine it in spaces where it can be safely exploited without the perverse side effects of contamination as was the case before. The objective is to allow capital to flow with the least amount of contact thus reducing risks of friction. If world music is the child of globalization and the harbinger of a new deterritorialized identity, it ultimately incarnates these paradoxical tendencies.

That being said, the history and problematic of globalization, as reflected through world music, highlight the articulation of contact, friction, and capital in other ways. It puts the spotlight on the intricate manner in which the flow of capital interacts with the development of recording technologies and the proliferation of digital technologies of information and mediation in order to make world music a global cultural phenomenon. These technologies have made it possible for capital to flow more intensively and extensively than ever with less and less need for it to be carried across the ocean by actual human beings.

If we were to trace the history of world music as we know it today to its earliest manifestations, that is , the appropriation by Western artists of ethnographic recordings from ethnomusicological archives, one can argue that world music has tended to be generated by people who were and are increasingly confined to their respective localities. Mobility, indeed, has become a rare commodity. For many musicians, marketing themselves as ‘world musicians’ has become the only way they could achieve mobility, for, in all other contexts, it is either denied or given under dire conditions through contemporary forms of exploitation such as human trafficking. For example, in his study of the Guinean djembe drum and its transformation into one of the most globalized instruments today, anthropologist Pascal Gaudette illustrates how djembe players have taken to giving lessons and founding djembe schools targeting Western apprentices as a way to create a network of contacts that might eventually open the way for migration to Europe and North America (Gaudette, 2013).

Nevertheless, for every musician who acquires mobility and tours the world by capitalizing on music from his or her country of origin, thousands of digital samples of world music, either taken from actual recordings or entirely composed, circulate through the networks of the music industry, the Internet, and social media.

These music excerpts are divorced from their original contexts and sources but made accessible through the power of technology and the flow of capital. They constitute what Feld has termed as ‘schizophonia’, a concept he borrowed from composer Robert Murray Schafer which refers to the splitting of sounds from their sources and which, in his view, has transformed the contemporary listener's relation to music and music making: ‘Our era is increasingly dominated by fantasies and realizations of sonic virtuality. … As sonic virtuality is increasingly naturalized, everyone's musical world will be felt and experienced as both more definite and more vague, specific yet blurred, particular but general, in place and in motion' (Feld, 2000: 145). This is a blurring, which in Feld's experience as an ethnomusicologist, has been to the detriment of the music that are being harvested. Citing the case of an ethnographic recording from the Soloman Islands made by ethnomusicologist Hugo Zemp in 1969 and 1970 and produced by the UNESCO Musical Sources Collection, Feld traces the migration of a particular lullaby titled Rorogwela, sung by a woman named Afunakwa. From a little-known recording familiar mostly to ethnomusicologists, it became a music hit when it was digitally sampled in 1992 for the music group Deep Forest: ‘The song … includes Afunakwa's voice … singing to a dance beat provided by a drum machine. The recording also includes synthesizer accompaniments and interludes of digital samples from Central African forest water-splashing games and vocal yodels' (Feld, 2000: 154). More interesting to the discussion here is Feld's analysis of the progression within the recording from Afunakwa's solo voice accompanied by the drum to it being doubled digitally and accompanied by a chorus to the last chorus in which her voice is no longer heard having been taken over by the studio chorus: ‘Through this progression one hears how what was once distinctly Afunakwa's world is now up for a new sharing, becoming, ultimately, a world where her voice is no longer necessary to her imagined presence' (Feld, 2000: 155).

Another case relates to the use of Qur'anic recitation on the album titled My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981), produced by Brian Eno and David Byrne both of whom had built a reputation as pioneers in avant-garde electronic and ambient music. Sampled from an ethnographic recording titled The Human Voice in the World of Islam, the Qur'anic recitation, originally recorded in Algeria by ethnomusicologists in 1970, would also find itself immersed in what aptly Feld describes as a ‘world of pre-digital ambient atmospherics, electronic effects and multi-track processing and prominent bass and percussion dance grooves’ (Feld, 2012). The track would later be deleted from re-editions of the recording as fears overreaction to the representation of Islam in the Western popular culture rose, but the album itself will continue to be re-issued with much success.

In both cases, the splitting of the music from its context would prove to be extremely profitable for both artists and their music production houses, indeed demonstrating the capital that lies in the commodification of the music of the Other. In both cases as well, the original musicians have been completely absent from the discussion around the aesthetic, ethical and material value of these ‘makeover’ recordings. These examples raise questions relating to intellectual property on the one hand and the propagation of primitivist stereotypes through futuristic mediums such as electronic music on the other. They also highlight the intimate relationship between music, public culture and capital and the important role technology has played in blurring the lines between them. Musicologist Timothy Taylor has examined the increasing engagement with and treatment of music in the public domain as a commodity through an extensive study of the use of music in advertising (Taylor, 2012a). World music is but the latest in a long line of musical genres to be sampled and put to use, not only to sell music and imagined access to the world of the Other but to sell products targeting specific audiences. In fact, he argues that it is through samples of world music used in advertising and not through records by Western or non-Western artists or world music festivals that world music, as imagined by the culture industry, has had the strongest impact on the soundtrack of the twenty-first century (Taylor, 2012b). Citing the growing presence and popularity of sample libraries which offer artists and composers a digital archive of excerpts of pre-recorded music of all kinds which they can, in turn, select, copy and paste onto their computer-generated compositions, Taylor explains how, through these samples ‘world music has insinuated itself into more mainstream kinds of pop and rock music, including … music used as soundtracks for film, television, and advertising, where world music has been replacing classical music in commercials for expensive goods’ (Taylor, 2012b).

Known as ‘library music’, these samples are not only convenient but cost-effective, so much so that composers are constantly solicited to compose music samples for these libraries which are then used by the advertising industry. In cases where real life artists are hired to record and perform for advertising music compositions, they are expected to be able to mimic a variety of vocal and instrumental styles of world music which are then sampled and archived for later use. One such artist, Taylor notes, is vocalist Lisa Gerrard who has gone so far as to invent her own language thus marketing herself as an all-purpose world music singer (Taylor, 2012b).

The sampling of world music is, as I mentioned before, only the latest trend in a long history of appropriation of popular culture forms for the purposes of capital with the help of technology. In Sounds of Capitalism (2012a), Taylor traces the history of music and advertising in the United States from its beginnings in the twentieth century linking the gradual amalgamation of popular music into advertising music with the development of new mediums of communication, namely radio, then television, then the Internet. Starting with ‘goodwill’ advertising strategies wherein the tastes and preferences of the listeners were taken into account in the choice of music accompanying their commercials, the advertising industry moved to more aggressive tactics with the jingle starting in the 1930s up to the late 1980s (Taylor, 2012a). Songs were composed for the sole purpose of selling goods, in some instances moving out of the commercial world to become popular music hits in their own right. Taylor gives the example of 1971 Coca-Cola song I'd like to Teach the World to Sing (Taylor, 2012a). These were mostly derived from the popular music genres of their time and as the jingle evolved, the industry sought to recuperate counterculture and more subversive music preferred by youth in order to impart a sense of ‘coolness’ to their products. Today, Taylor argues, the line between advertising music and popular music in all its forms, including world music has all but disappeared. By serving as vehicles for communicating consumer capitalism through music, new technologies have helped the advertising industry to succeed not only in the conquest of ‘cool’ to sell their products but, in the conquest of culture itself (Taylor, 2012a).

The examples cited above tend to lend support to the ‘anxiety’ discourse that Feld had identified as one of two ways different actors have engaged with music and globalization. However, more celebratory perspectives have also been put forward, namely by artists and state actors. In the spirit of ‘if you can't beat them, join them', many have been actively using new technologies not only to promote local music but to subvert current hegemonic structures with regards to globalized cultural capitalism by redefining culture in the era of globalization, first and foremost, as a resource. 'Culture-as-resource ', remarks anthropologist George Yudice in The Expediency of Culture (2003), ‘is much more than a commodity; it is the lynchpin of a new epistemic framework in which ideology and much of what Foucault called disciplinary society (i.e., the inculcation of norms in such institutions as education, medicine, and psychiatry) are absorbed into an economic or ecological rationality, such that management, conservation, access, distribution, and investment – in “culture”’ and the outcomes thereof – take priority’ (Yudice, 2003: 1). Further on, he adds: ‘Everyday aesthetic practices such as songs, folktales, cuisine, customs, and other symbolic practices, are also mobilized as recourses in tourism and in the promotion of the heritage industries’ (Yudice, 2003: 4).

It is no coincidence that, with the rise of culture as the resource, cultural policy on a national and international level would become a hot-button issue. It would culminate with the ratification of the 2007 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. Signed against strong opposition by the United States, the convention makes two principles legally binding: one which recognizes ‘the distinctive nature of cultural goods, services and activities as vehicles of identity, values and meaning’ and the second which serves as a reminder ‘that while cultural goods, services, and activities have important economic value, they are not mere commodities or consumer goods that can only be regarded as objects of trade’.

On a local or national level, reaction to the globalization and commodification of culture, music, in this instance, would call into question the ideological foundations and framework of copyright and intellectual property law.

As Kembrew McLeod explains, the notion of copyright law, as it is used today around the world is actually based on a ‘historically and culturally situated notion of authorship and ownership that is rooted in Western Enlightenment philosophies that emphasize individualism, originality and property rights’ (McLeod, 2003). However, music genres such as folk music, rap and hip-hop, and world music, challenge in one way or another individualistic notion of authorship and ownership as they all share a common characteristic in that they are based on the borrowing of pre-existing lyrics, melodies, and rhythms. In other words, says McLeod, they are intertextual in nature (McLeod, 2003).

In some cases, these music' collision with copyright law has had a profound effect on their mode of production and even their aesthetic characteristics. McLeod gives the example of rap and hip-hop, which is founded on the principle of collage:

With the help of drum machines and digital samplers, by the mid-1980s, hip-hop artists were able to use these tools to make easier the collaging of beats and sounds that used to be the job of the DJ. Sampling was an extension of the intertextual practices that were developed by hip-hop DJs, practices which are deeply rooted in aspects of African-American cultural production. (McLeod, 2003)

As hip-hop became a worldwide musical phenomenon, copyright infringement lawsuits, which had already started to rain on artists and producers, became epidemic making it financially debilitating to create hip-hop by sampling old records. According to McLeod, this has prompted artists to abandon the practice opting instead to use live instruments to closely mimic records. Not only has this completely transformed the way hip-hop is produced, replacing ‘dense collages’ with either one or two existing samples and mostly recreated instrumental ones, but it has ‘limited hip-hop's aesthetic potential' (McLeod, 2003).

While McLeod attributes hip-hop's impoverishment to copyright law's incapacity to integrate intertextual modes of cultural practice, he acknowledges that its overly restrictive definitions of authorship have had other adverse effects, especially with genres of music that are produced in the context of globalization as is the case of world music. World music, especially in its early incarnations, falls outside the protection and restrictions of copyright law as it does not recognize oral tradition or folk music as copyrightable since there is constant ambiguity as to who is the ‘original author’ of the music. Is the original author of the lullaby used by Deep Forest, for example, the singer who was first recorded, or is it the person who recorded her, in this case, the ethnomusicologist? It is generally recorders who obtain copyright of their recordings of traditional music giving them control over their dissemination (McLeod, 2003). This may lead to variant forms of exploitation as was seen in the examples given above, but it has also been used for the benefit of world music artists who took it upon themselves to reinvent the notion of copyright by using the same technologies that have made world music accessible as a commodity. This is the perspective defended by black Brazilian recording artist Gilberto Gil.

In her aptly titled article, Slave Ship on the Info Sea, Barbara Browning shows how Gil became one of the most active artists fighting in favor of the Creative Commons initiative which makes use of new technologies to propose an alternative to current copyright law's ownership driven criteria (Browning, 2012). Indeed the Creative Commons initiative capitalizes on new technologies' capacity of making the sharing of music possible. Making some music downloadable without copyright restrictions, Gil believes, releases the subversive potentiality of contamination across boundaries as the music of the slaves had done in the past. Indeed, notes Browning:

The slave ship, to Gil, continues to serve as a metaphor for not only the historical but also the contemporary commodification of black people. But he simultaneously envisions the possible liberatory potential of new technologies, which might allow black artists, in particular, to critique, and contaminate, the circulation of their political and artistic productions. (Browning, 2012).

Gil would eventually become his country's minister of culture, illustrating the close ties between music, public culture, capital, and politics.

Conclusion

Today, technologies of transport, of information and of mediation, including social media platforms, have made possible the unprecedented circulation of cultural commodities such as music from around the world, which are then consumed to gain cultural capital and social status. In terms of music, such dynamics may reinforce unequal relations of power, leading to hegemony and homogenization just as they may provide possibilities of subverting them resulting in the emergence of entropic forms of musical expression that had not been imagined before. The histories of musical interactions throughout the Indian Ocean and the Muslim empire from the ninth onto the nineteenth century, as well as between Europe, the Middle-East, and East Asia illustrate how these encounters occurred over a period of centuries. Although not exclusively so, trade in goods and commodities

were the catalyst that set globalization in motion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For goods and commodities to be exchanged, people had to move, either willingly as traders, bureaucrats, politicians, explorers, cultural ambassadors such as artists and musicians, or forcibly, as slaves, giving birth eventually to a whole range of African-American and Afro-Caribbean music (Small, 1987). As the examples cited throughout the chapter shows, genres as varied as pop, world music, art music, and folk music, have been and continue to be ‘popular’ in some way. Each provides a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how globalization translates into a complex set of music practices that may follow different rules in terms of production, transmission, and reception but are nonetheless subject to the same dynamics of contact, friction, and capital.

Reference:

Stegger, M., Battersby, P., & Siracusa, J. M. (2014). The SAGE handbook of globalization (2nd vol.). Thousand Oaks: SAGE.