(ISSN: 1038-2909)
THE ESSENTIALISTIC, THE EXOTIC, THE EQUIVOCAL AND THE ABSURD:
The Cultural Production and Use of the Didjeridu in World Music
KARL Wm. NEUENFELDT
ound, the most abundant of Australia's natural resources, is fast becoming a significant marketable commodity... Didgeridoo music... is currently enjoying a world-wide boom in popularity -- 'didj music' is being sold in California record stores, broadcast on Tokyo radio and performed in the world's great concert halls (Chipperfield:11).
This article analyses the cultural production(1) and use of the didjeridu in contemporary popular music, especially "world music"(2). The analysis is informed by two interwoven perspectives. Firstly, Feld's identification of what he terms "schizophonia to schismogenesis", that is, "how sounds are split from their sources, and how that splitting is dynamically connected to escalating cycles of distorted mutuality between local and global practices" (1992:176); and secondly, Hanson's identification of what he terms "cultural invention", that is, how "inventions are common components in the ongoing development of authentic culture [and how] producers ... are often outsiders... as well as insiders" (899). As I have argued elsewhere with regard to Australian music (Neuenfeldt, 1993), these processes are profoundly influenced by the technologisation and cultural transposition of the didjeridu by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal musicians, sound engineers and music producers.
As the introductory quotation to this article emphasises, the function and use of didjeridu is widely diffused geographically, socio-culturally and musically. The didjeridu is no longer simply a symbol of (Australian) Aboriginality or the national state. It also serves as a cogent archetype of the workings of intra and inter-cultural musical appropriation and the socio-cultural negotiations of the elemental - and contentious - issues of authenticity and identity. These occur within the broader contexts of ethnogenesis (Hall, 1988/1991a+b); the invention of tradition (Hobsbawn and Ranger); and the struggle for control of artistic representations of indigeneity (Langton). The control of artistic representations of indigeneity within ethnogenesis, even if "invented", is important because the arts globally have become a primary site and textual space (Muecke) used by indigenous peoples to enunciate vital issues such as social justice through the use of a melange of entertainment, education and empowerment tactics (Neuenfeldt, 1991).
HE DIDJERIDU IN WORLD MUSIC
The didgeridoo will become the digital-doo when computers meet native instruments in a world music concert at the Adelaide Festival... It provides a good example of world music, where ethnic tunes meet modern technology ([unattributed], The Australian, 14/1/92: 12).
Appadurai has argued that one of the most important assets for a (local) music trying to gain access to the transnational world music market is a unique instrument or sound - one capable of being transported across the "technoscape" of the global cultural economy (Appadurai, 1990). The significance of this component is often emphasised as much by its absence as its presence. This point is underlined in the following comment on New Zealand Maori music from the influential music industry magazine, Billboard : "If there has been a limiting factor in Maori music crossing over into pop and ock culture [and world music], it has been the paucity of traditional instruments to draw upon" [my emphases] (Reid: 34). Although this point is over-stated, with Maori music having a rich, expressive vocal tradition and some unique percussion instruments; Maori music does not have an instrument or sound that is unique - at least to Western consumers' ears - in the manner of the talking drum of some West African musics, the pan pipe of Andean music or the yoiking vocal style of Scandinavian Sami musics(3). Aboriginal music, however, has the didjeridu as part of its tradition but, as Appadurai has argued, in the spirit of commodification, capitalism and the global cultural economy, it does not have sole claim to it. Partly because of technologisation and cultural transposition, the didjeridu abides in the socio-cultural, musical and aesthetic 'public domain' and as such is available for appropriation by local and global individuals, groups and musical practices - particularly those of 'world music'. This form, or marketing category has been perceived by some analysts as a rip-off (Gerson; Bloomfield); part of the economic "logic of multinational space" (Breen, 1993); or a form of "imperialist nostalgia" (Rosaldo). Others, such as didjeridu musician Stephen Kent, perceive world music as either multi-cultural exegesis or personal epiphany:
people say we play world [music], but the music [of Lights in a Fat City] transcends those boundaries... We are bringing together ancient instruments from cultures all over the world combining them with microchip technology to make a new music... which we foresaw would be tribal music for the 1990s [my emphases] (Stephen Kent, cited in Richardson, n.d.)
Overall, the use of didjeridu in world music is a cogent example of the complex dynamics of ethnogenesis, the invention of tradition, and the control of representations of indigeneity by cultural producers and users via the invocation of what will be schematised here in terms of notions of the Essentialistic, the Exotic the Equivocal and the Absurd.
THE ESSENTIALISTIC
If the soul of earth had a voice, it would be the didjeridu(4)
Essentialistic notions of the didjeridu are often expressed by linking it with spirituality and sometimes with the natural world - as exhibited in album titles like Songs from a Burnt Earth (Stephen Kent, 1993) and Sounds of the Earth (David Hudson, Steve Roach and Sarah Hopkins, 1990). Aboriginal spirituality is a fashionable focus for ecological, metaphysical and academic musings, and some musicians couple that spirituality with musicality by means of the didjeridu. Stephen Kent expresses his affinity to the idea of an essentialistic spirituality in his work with the group Lights in a Fat City, for which the didjeridu provides the "sonic foundation" (Richardson, n.d.):
The action of playing the didgeridoo takes me right into the earth; it's the sound of the earth. Although I'm playing it with a fresh approach from a Western cultural background, it makes no difference. I still go into a deep trance when I'm playing. It's like its my way back into my own aboriginality. Hopefully, I can take everyone else on that trip (cited in Richardson, n.d.).
Commenting on the trance-like state experienced by didjeridu players (produced by physiological and neurological responses to prolonged concentration and circular breathing); Randy Raine Reusch, a composer and trained counsellor who organised a didjeridu group in Vancouver Canada, notes that didjeridu playing needs to be treated with respect and caution:
The didjeridu is an instrument that takes you to a certain place in yourself and what happens is that it will produce a certain kind of feeling, a certain kind of trance state... So when [I'd be teaching didj] to the group and people would get into a sort of trance state, I would be showing them what happens is that their own kind of spiritual state comes out and is activated... In a room with so many people, those kind of spirits come out and come alive. Everybody has a bit of a different experience and it won't be so strong, it won't be so unified as you find [with Aborigines] in Australia. So the instrument still works and it works in exactly the same way, it's just that the experience of it is different for people because of their own belief system... People have reactions to didjeridu, they have psychological reactions to it, things happen to them. Some people find the state very exciting and very comfortable, others find the state very irritating. It is necessary to talk about it because of the power of the instrument and what happens when you play it for long periods of time, as well as even the circular breathing because if you get into circular breathing for that long, you go into an altered state (Interview with the author, 1992)
Aboriginal musician and playwright Richard Walley also recallssuch trance-like experiences:
It's just about an altered state, you're really on a high... At one stage in America I played for, I think, 48 minutes without stopping. Another time I went for an hour and 10 minutes, I was actually in a trance doing it. I was playing with African drummers so we all just got into a rhythm and just kept going, and it was just over and over and over, and dancers would come out and go back and they'd come out and go back. We didn't know, we were just playing and playing and playing and by the time we finished... my lips were swollen all over the place and I could not part my lips because they were just blown out and I was just physically drained, my head was spinning and I was in a whirl... I don't take drugs, alcohol or smoke cigarettes, any of that sort of stuff, [but] it took me about 45 minutes before I could actually get up off the chair and move and then someone said that I'd played for an hour and ten minute spell. If it wasn't spiritual, I wouldn't have done it, I wouldn't have been able to do it, but it was the spirit that was playing (Interview with the author,1992).
he potential for a didjeridu player to alter their state of consciousness has also lead to other perceptions of the spirituality of the instrument and it players. Eddie Sayer, a member of Lights in a Fat City, has for example advanced the notion of music's spiritual potential as a form of shamanism, a medium for transcendence, which in turn connects to the natural world:
You've done your research, you've got your vocabulary, and then you let go: it's a different kind of bus ticket... It is not an attempt to re-create traditional music in anyway but to find our own musical form, which reroutes us back to the essence of the instruments - those sounds and those cultures which are in direct contact with earth (cited in Richardson, n.d.).
The liner notes for the eponymous album by Trance Mission 1993), of which Stephen Kent is also a member, associate Aboriginal spirituality and the natural world and globally expand this to embrace all indigenous peoples, stating: "The didgeridoo is played with respect for Australian Aborigines, in solidarity with all First Nation peoples and our common relationship to the Earth."
This statement makes a connection between the didjeridu and pan-Aboriginal politics, even though the didjeridu was not traditionally a pan-Aboriginal instrument. The back cover of Lights in a Fat City's Somewhere album (1993), also features a similar dedication: "The didjeridoo is played with the greatest respect for the Aboriginal people of Australia and their struggle for land rights in their homeland". Similar sentiments are expressed on the liner notes for Jamiroquai's CD album Emergency on Planet Earth (1992), which notes that "The yiddaki (didgeridoo) was played by Wallis Buchanan with the uppermost respect for the Aboriginal people and their struggle for land rights and peace". These sentiments have been enlarged in Stephen Kent's dedication on his solo album Songs from the Burnt Earth to include the other Australian indigenous people, the Torres Strait Islanders (who historically did not use the didjeridu): "The didjeridoo is played with the greatest respect for the aboriginal peoples of Australia and their struggle for land rights in their homelands" [my emphases]. Excusatory rationalisations or disclaimers of this sort are quite routine given the sensitivity about accusations of "cultural kleptomania" pertaining to the consumable culture of indigenous peoples, such as music, by what Reusch refers to as the "culture police"(5); however, they often simultaneously assume essentialistic affinity.
At the level of essentialistic notions of the didjeridu as instrument and cultural artefact, there is a fine line between respect for the didjeridu's potential spirituality and insensitive exploitation that often comes down to a matter of personal ethics and informed responsibility. Randy Raine Reusch has had to negotiate that dynamic in his use of didjeridu for musical composition:
In terms of the traditional spirituality of Australia, as I've not been initiated, I don't take it on, it's their spirituality. When I was taught [in Australia], I was given a couple of pieces of music that I should not have been given because I was not initiated. They said `we'll teach them to you but you must never play them'. [Physically I can play them] but spiritually I can't and that's fine with me. It's not the first time things like that have happened in travelling around the world learning about other peoples' music. [But] when you take on an instrument like didj, if you are a responsible human being, you have to learn the history, you have to learn the cultural context of the instrument. You must, otherwise it's absolutely totally insensitive of you, and unfortunately there are many musical thieves who just take an instrument as a toy and throw it in a piece of music and don't understand that. (Interview with the author, 1992)
For some players, the didjeridu is also an integral part of a reclamation and revitalisation of their indigenous heritage that transcends the business of world music and its promotional and compositional strategies. Steve Edgell, an Aboriginal university student and musician, has a heartfelt recollection of his experience of learning to play the didjeridu:
Before I was actually shown how to play it [my Aboriginal teacher] said `listen to the sound, place your ear up against the opening and just listen to it'. It was a spiritual thing that happened, I heard this something like electricity... And then I could hear the actual sound of what I was to play. I would listen to that for a minute and then I actually started playing what I heard. The only way I can describe it is that it was spiritual (Interview with the author,1993).
Explicitly or implicitly, what all of the preceding diverse, yet interrelated quotes have in common is an accent on two main aspects: one is an essentialistic spirituality which is sometimes conflated with notions of indigenous peoples as stewards of the natural environment, still in touch with its essence, where the didjeridu becomes a resonator, if you will, of Mother Earth; the other is a perception of the didjeridu as a conduit between the sacred and the profane. These take place even in the hedonistic world of popular music, which has a history of appropriating the exotic to camouflage and commodify what might otherwise be unexceptional.
THE EXOTIC
[Trance Mission] employs obscure instruments from all over the world taking their exotic and often haunting sounds out of context and putting them back together in dramatic and startling combinations. Most of the tunes are based on the ominous, low drone of the Australian aboriginal flute [sic], the didgeridoo. But the band also plays African percussion instruments, electronic rhythms and samples, a half-dozen or so Indonesian flutes of varying shapes and sizes... playful clarinet... [and] various toy instruments. (6)
Exotic notions of the didjeridu are often constructed by juxtaposing it with advanced technology and complex multi-cultural musical instrumentation, arrangements and compositions - with the implicit inference that Aboriginal instruments, music (or musicians for that matter) are primitive, unsophisticated and low-tech. There is, in particular, a recurrent emphasis on the didjeridu as a low-tech instrument in a hi-tech environment (as if Western music has always been electrified and/or synthesised, with no acoustic instruments or percussion).
Perhaps the piece of didjeridu music heard by more people than any other is on a recording by the North American rock group Aerosmith. The didjeridu features on the song Don't Get Mad Get Even on their 1989 album Pump (which went platinum - selling over a million copies). Its recording is a cogent example of the didjeridu as an exotic addition to a soundscape, since it only appears on the first thirty seconds of the song and was added as an overdub after the rest of the song had been recorded. The musician who played the didjeridu, as well as thirty or so assorted "flavouring" instruments on the album, was Reusch. He recalls the original recording and subsequent live performances with the band as follows:
[Aerosmith and producer Bruce Fairburn] wanted a whole bunch of different sounds, they wanted the album to sound different... so I was the person that they used to fill the album out into something else, to make it an entity. [On] Don't Get Mad Get Even Steve Tyler came in and said `Well, I've got the singing part that goes `yaba dadee, yaba dadee' and I want something to go with that'. And I thought, `Wow! he's giving me a didj score'. [So] I picked up the didj and played it back to him. I did that sound on the didj and he goes `Wow! That's it! That's it!'. So we took the didj into the studio [and vari-speeded the tape] to get the didj to sink into the track. I did a stereo didj so we had two of them coming at you. It ended up we took out his vocal part because the didj did it better... [Then when] I played [extended versions] with them twice on stage... the sound of the didj through those huge speakers was really incredible. It was a really interesting example of one culture meeting another. I guess all those kids in the huge audience... didn't know what to do with the sound because they are so attuned to rock and roll... There was a stunned reaction, everybody just sort of stopped and looked up, and there was absolute silence. They didn't know [what was going on]. I expected them to yell or scream, but no, none of that, there was just a stunned silence, like `what's that?'. Although the sound wasn't in their cultural repertoire, obviously they reacted to it. It stopped them from being rock `n' rollers for a minute and let them just be human beings. It stopped all that insanity that went on there [in the concert]... it just sort of cut them for a minute... It was like this giant question in their minds, `What is it?'. (Interview with the author, 1992)
The didjeridu was also perceived as a key part of an exotic soundscape by a writer reviewing Trance Mission's album Somewhere who noted that the album was: "a fascinating fantasia of droning didgeridoo textures, polyrhythmic drumming, and high-tech effects and engineering" (Richardson, n.d.). The band's own promotional material (1993) is along similar lines:
EEP GROOVE! PRIMAL FUNK! ANCESTRAL BOOGIE! Any one of these word-combinations describes part of the music of San Francisco's Trance Mission, but none of them covers it all. A virtual feast of global sounds, as presented by the didgeridoos, clarinets, percussion, and samples. Trance Mission play with all the relish of a hired band at an international wedding, connecting the music of Australian Aborigines with that of Indonesia, Africa, Middle-East and North America. ... The `ancestral boogie' description fits perfectly. Like the phrase itself, the music is an insoluble mix of the ancient and the modern, animal horns and microchips... .
P. Anderson writing in the British weekly New Musical Express provides similar descriptions of the music of the British group Tribal Drift: "Like This from Tribal Drift [is] one of the strangest dance records you'll ever hear, and one of the most beguiling. It features a wailing call to worship, a whispered invocation to dance and the tuneful drone of a didgeridoo, eased together with Indian percussion" (Anderson:12).
The exoticisation of the didjeridu has also extended to a politics of cross-cultural association perhaps only possible within world music: Irish and Aboriginal experiences of genocidal and ethnocidal British colonisation communicated through the use of ancient (ie Irish Bronze Age and traditional Aboriginal) musical technologies and instruments. These disparate strands entwine in the Irish/Australian group Reconciliation, who released an album in Australia entitled Two Stories in One in 1993. It is an apt example of how the temporally and spatially disjunctive musical syncretism widespread in world music can, nonetheless, produce aesthetically interesting music. Reconciliation's promotional material for the album profiles the band as being comprised of two Irish musicians, percussionist Maria Cullen "from County Kerry" and Irish horn player Simon O'Dwyer "from Dublin"; and two Australian musicians playing didjeridu, Alan Dargin, "an Australian Aboriginal" and Philip Conyngham "a European Australian". The following description from the Australian Aboriginal newspaper The Koori Mail summarises succinctly the rather convoluted context and evolution of the band:
[The Irish Bronze Age instruments, the adhrac, dord ard and dord iseal] were re-discovered 200 years ago but no-one really knew which technique to use to play them, so they sat on display in the national museum in Dublin. That was until Simon [O'Dwyer] borrowed the didgeridoo playing technique from Aboriginal people he [had] met... in Arnhemland [in Australia]. So the horns were given a sound -- once more!... And yet it took the ancient, powerful sounds and traditions of Aboriginal Australia to help make the horns speak again. Not only are their music traditions reconciled, but also the spirit of Aboriginal and Irish people, who have suffered genocide and cultural victimisation through their histories of oppression from the British (Green:11).
O'Dwyer had re-castings of the Irish horns made and took them to Australia where the visa he needed to enter the Aboriginally controlled area of Arnhem Land read, "Permission to enter to explore common ground between Irish and Aboriginal culture through musical instruments" (cited in Green: 11).
Reconciliation's politics are innately connected to the specific instruments they use. As their (1993) promotional material states:
What's in a name? For members of Reconciliation, performing Irish horns and didjeridus not only reconciles two musical traditions: it celebrates the spirit of two people who have proudly resisted centuries of cultural victimisation. Reconciliation responds to this shared political experience positively: in their music the endlessly modulating drone and the haunting fall of the didjeridu and Irish Horns reveal their common origins -- their universal appeal. Reconciliation invites us to take listening out of the concert hall and back into the community; and to this end it is creating a new sound, a new community of listening -- a new future
This politics also extends to the internal dynamics of the band itself since, as they emphasise: "In the spirit of reconciliation [they] have learned to play each other's instruments" (ibid).
Considered as a conscious packaging of an atypical combination of politics and music, Reconciliation are a cogent example of world music's seemingly boundless capacity to absorb the exotic. It is able to package Bronze Age Irish horns and the pre-colonial Australian Aboriginal didjeridu, mixed with contemporary Irish sectarian politics and Aboriginal aspirations of self-determination, into a saleable commodity; one which, to paraphrase Mark Slobin, is surely one of the triumphs, or tragedies, of the business of music. This task is facilitated by exoticising the didjeridu as musical and political practice and praxis -- a process which often approaches the Equivocal, and, in some instances, crosses over into the realm of the Absurd.
FROM THE EQUIVOCAL TO THE ABSURD
You wouldn't be far from the truth if you said there was a lot of hot air floating around [Victoria's] Parliament House yesterday. Didgeridoos were part of the Aboriginal Employment Strategy launch and [Premier] Mrs. Kirner decided to test her musical skills (7).
Exotic uses of the didjeridu in world music involve the (self-conscious) deployment of the instrument in a significantly different context to that of its cultural origins. Questions of context are also significant for uses of the didjeridu is less overtly exotic contexts. Yothu Yindi's producer, Mark Moffat has, for instance, remarked that the band was initially taken aback when they heard the didjeridu being played in urban areas:
They actually laugh about the city guys that play a few riffs and do a bit of circular breathing and imitate them. They laugh because they are just doing bits and pieces. The whole thing [for Yothu Yindi] is songs... so it doesn't really worry them if someone samples a couple of bars and makes a [tape] loop of it. It doesn't mean anything to them, it's just this noise, it's just a sound... It's like a car horn in the middle of the city, it's just `eh, eh, eh, eh' (Interview with the author, 1991).
Simon O'Dwyer's recollections of early attempts to play and find appropriate musical uses of bronze age horns takes this mis-match of traditional and appropriational uses to a higher plane of incongruity. As he recalls, some Irish musicians "were trying to make them [bronze age horns] play tunes... Can you imagine trying to play 'Three Blind Mice' on a didgeridoo?" (cited in Temm: 227).
One of the most interesting, and most widely heard examples of 'equivocal' didjeridu playing, is Rolf Harris's use of the instrument on his (1992) hit re-make of the Led Zepplin song Stairway to Heaven, adding a component which takes Harris's idiosyncratic quasi-polka arrangement further into uncharted musical territory. Just what the didjeridu is meant to signify in the context of the song's lyrics, arrangement or history is unclear. Harris has used the instrument in his recordings and stage shows for decades but takes pains to distance himself from the cultural implications of using a traditional Aboriginal instrument, stating (through his agent):
[My] personal use of the didjeridoo is purely for 'colour' in [my] stage presentation and [I] profess NO profound knowledge of cultural interest in the instrument other than that of the fascinating 'sound' it produces (8)
Harris's use of the term 'colour' is significant in the context of the perceived "blackness" of the instrument - and, in this case, the whiteness of the performer - and the nature of the didjeridu's appropriation as entertainment or novelty bereft of any socio-cultural context(9).
Another successful act that uses the didjeridu - and has, indeed, made a point of publicising its use of it - is the British band Jamiroquai. Their debut album Emergency On Planet Earth (1993) features didjeridu playing by Wallis Buchanan, most notably on the didjeridu feature Didgin' Out (co-written by band leader Jay Kay and Buchanan) and the album's opening track (and single) When You Gonna Learn ? (Digeridoo) (10). Discussing their use of it, Kay has stated:
People have often asked me what I have to do with Aborigines and Native Americans, and essentially nothing, but I have a capacity to feel for something and respect it for what it is. We're trying to learn about the instrument and we're not taking anybody's culture away. I think it's a good thing because it promotes interest. Inevitably I will have a much bigger voice and give it to more people, a lot more young people than an Aboriginal or Native American (cited in Dinnen: 25)
What is most notable about this statement is the question as to what authority or rationale there might be to validate Kay speaking for, or promoting, indigenous peoples. Such comments border on the paternalistic and patronising in their suggestion that Aborigines, in particular, are somehow incapable of playing their own instrument effectively or enunciating their own aspirations successfully without outside assistance.
Absurd notions of the didjeridu are often expressed in a jumble of opportunism, metaphysical mumbo-jumbo and malapropisms. There is not necessarily any overt intent to deceive or debase; however, the incongruity of some of the representations of didjeridu suggest that either its symbolic potential is limitless or some of its users/abusers are witless, at best, or unethical, at worst. The following advertisement for a series of three appearances by a non-Aboriginal Australian didjeridu player - or "didjeri-guru" to use Brian Pertl's phrase - appeared in the United States in 1991 and is included at length because it is an instructive concoction of avaricious entrepreneurship, musical esoteria and ersatz spirituality. It raises important issues concerning authenticity, such as whether the didjeridu can be used sensitively both by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal musicians; and appropriation, such as the pitfalls inherent in the exploitation of the symbolic significance and potential of the didjeridu for Aborigines and non-Aborigines.
The copy for this advertisement begins with the admonition that it is "a spectacle that leaves you gasping" performed by a man whose charisma "will stop you in your tracks...":
------------------
--uthentic Australian Aboriginal Didgeridoo Initiate
* Spiritual Healer and Musician **
ll the way from Australia
Experience the Penetrating Music of the Ancient Didgeridoo
[APPEARANCE #1]
Dreamtime - the Eternal Bridge to Creation"
ear X. tell you of his years living n the `Outback' with the Aborigines of Australia. isten to the haunting chant of the didgeridoo. ndividuals, families, anthropologists, sociologists, usic historians and psychologists will be fascinated y this experience!
Public Services Suggested Donation $10.00. ny donation will be welcome, none is required)
[APPEARANCE #2]
Magical Spiritual Healing Music to Your Soul"
Spiritual Healing Service for Members Only*
. will lead a Sacred Holy Communion Seance. earn about the secrets of the Aborigines nd the Didgeridoo as taught o X by a Wirrinum (Aboriginal for wise man', i.e. shaman).
Individual music will be played for each member!
Usual donation $100.00)
[APPEARANCE #3]
`The Mystical Sounds of Life in the Outback'
Unique Sounds of the Australian Outback ill move you to new inspiration!
Out of Australia, the oldest Continent on Earth, choes the powerful strains of the Didgeridoo, n ancient mystical Aboriginal musical instrument! xperience Aboriginal Dreamtime (11)
----------------
T he overall effect of the advertisement is either one of incredulity or certitude, given that it is a mish-mash of symbolic mis-appropriations: mercenary opportunism that suggests that Aboriginal spirituality is commensurate with New Age entrepreneurial pseudo-spirituality; metaphysical mumbo-jumbo that suggests that Aboriginal religious `secrets' are for sale; and malapropisms that suggest didjeridu music, regardless of the performer, connects essentialistically to healing, mysticism and the Dreamtime. It is an instructive example of Feld's "schizophonia to schismogenesis" in that the ethos and sound of the didjeridu has been separated from its socio-cultural contexts and supports and grafted on to "escalating cycles of distorted mutuality between local and global practices" (Feld:176).
CONCLUSION
The cultural production and use of the didjeridu within popular music, especially world music, is informed by what Feld (1992) terms a mercurial mix of "schizophonia" and "schismogenesis", produced (as Hanson has emphasised) by both cultural insiders and outsiders. Transnationally, the didjeridu impacts on the technoscape and soundscape of world music but it also impacts on the humanscape of civil society at the local and national levels. As one Australian author recently commented, somewhat caustically:
Perhaps the most noticeable elements of world music performances, commercial recordings and promotional material is the peddling of the exotic. One shop that opened for a while in a tourist area of Sydney had a window display with a forest of didgeridoos interspersed with pan-pipes, an Irish tin whistle or two and, among other things, a sprinkling of compact discs. The potential customer is promised authentic music from all of the parts of the world. The didgeridoo assures us that we, as Australians, play a part in this exciting industry, as the custom-made (frequently leather) didgeridoo cases hanging from the shoulders of middle-class Anglo males at folk festival might suggest . (Parkhill: 505)
Yet the didjeridu is also one means for Australians to authenticate and identify themselves through music (Newton, 1990). It is increasingly a part of the soundscape of both Aborigines and non-Aborigines and serves, for some at least, as a sort of "inner-outback", a connection to a continent and mythologised way of life beyond the experience of a highly urbanised population.
Although the musical instruments of indigenous peoples, such as the didjeridu, and their 'micromusics' (Slobin) may be incorporable within an insatiable, all-embracing universal pop aesthetic of sound, sight and sentiment ; and although the didjeridu's appropriation, re-appropriation or mis-appropriation is ultimately uncontrollable; world music can provide a useful, if desultory, textual space (Muecke, 1992) -- a site within which to engage education, entertainment and empowerment in the service of vital issues such as social justice. As an aural icon of Aboriginality, the didjeridu has powerful potential to communicate, both musically and socially - it is all in the why of the beholder.
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Langton, M. (1993) Well, I Heard it on the Radio and I Saw It on the Television, Sydney: Australian Film Commission
Lewis, B. (1993) 'Heritage Horns Link Cultures' in promotional material for Reconciliation
Milton, K. (1991) promotional material for Aquarian Foundation, Seattle: Keith Milton Publications
Mitchell, T. (1992) 'World Music, Indigenous Music and Music Television in Australia' Perfect Beat v1n1 July
-------- (1993) 'World Music and the Popular Music Industry: An Australian View' Ethnomusicology v37 n3
uecke, S. (1992) Textual Spaces, Aboriginality and Cultural Studies, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press
Neuenfeldt, K. (1991) 'To Sing a Song of Otherness: Anthros, Ethno-pop and the Mediation of `Public Problems'', Canadian Ethnic Studies v23n3
------ (1993) 'The Didjeridu and the Overdub', Perfect Beat v1n2 January
Newton, J. (1990) 'Becoming 'Authentic' Australians Through Music' Social Analysis n27 April
Parkhill, P. (1993) 'Of Tradition, Tourism and the World Music Industry' Meanjin Spring
Reid, G. (1992) 'New Zealand's Maori Music a Genre Melange' Billboard May 30
ichardson, D. (1992) 'Something Borrowed, Lights in a Fat City Mixes Ancient Instruments with Modern Technology to Create its own 'Tribal Music''. Promotional Material by Lipp Service (San Francisco)
Rosaldo, R. (1989) 'Imperialist Nostalgia', Representations n26 Spring Slobin, M. (1992) 'Micromusics of the West: A Comparative Approach', Ethnomusicology v36n1 Winter
emm, J. (1993) 'Reconciliation, Cultural Connections' X-Press (Perth, Australia) 25 May
ISCOGRAPHY
Alan Dargin Bloodwood, Natural Symphonies, 1991
Rolf Harris Rolf Rules OK! Phonogram, 1993
Jamiroquai Emergency on Planet Earth, Sony 1993
Stephen Kent Songs From the Burnt Earth: Didgeridoo Solos (a/f 2548 Folsom Street. San Francisco, CA 94110) 1992
ights in a Fat City Somewhere THESE 3, 1988
David Hudson/Steve Sound of the Earth, Fortuna Records, 1990 Roach/Sarah Hopkins
Reconciliation Two Stories in One, Natural Symphonies 1993
Trance Mission Trance Mission, Mushroom, 1994
Aerosmith Don't Get Mad, Get Even , track off Pump, BMG 1989
ENDNOTES
1 Cultural production, in the limited context of artworks, is defined by Jensen: 11) as: "the manifestation of interacting beliefs, policies and practices rather than as the linear creation of particular consumer objects.
2 See Feld (1988/1991/1992); Bloomfield; Breen (1993); Gerson; Goodwin and Gore; and Mitchell -for observations on world music.
3 It should however be noted that the use of various traditional Maori instruments on Moana and the Moahunters 1992 CD Tahi (Southside Records, 1993) can be read as attempts to establish just such a distinct musical sound and identity - also see Dart, W (1994) 'Te Ku Te Whe', usic in New Zealand n24, Autumn for a discussion of unique Maori instruments
4 Biondi, T, an Aboriginal student at Edith Cowan Univeristy, WA, in conversation with the author, 1993.
5 (Unattributed) 'Randy Raine-Reutsch: Musical Traveller Evades the Culture Police', Georgia Straight (Vancouver, Canada) October 2-9 1992: 37.
6 Kanter, L (1992): nd.
7 (Undated) clipping from the Herald Sun newspaper - 1991 (author's collection).
8 Harris, statement issued to the author through Regency Artists management, 11.4.94 in response to faxed request for an interview
9 In this context, it is worthy of note that the 1993 remake of Harris's 196x hit single Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport (featuring lyrical references to the didjeridu) excises the original, racially offensive lyrics which refer to Aborigines by the pejorative term "Abos". The original version featured the lines: "Let me Abos go lose Bruce/ Let me Abos go lose/ They're of no further use Bruce/ Let me Abos go lose". In contemporary Australia such lyrics might actually fall under the the purview of the Racial Vilification Act and would certainly be deemed unacceptable to many segments of society.
10 Which appears, without the didjeridu part, as When You Gonna Learn Digeridon't) on the eponymous CD remix EP (1993)
11 Milton, K (1991) Promotional material for Aquarian Foundation, Seattle - copies of this ad were sent to the author ( simultaneously) by Brian Pertl and Michael Webb.
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