Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 605
October 11, 2011
Beyoncé's German influences
Adria Petty, the co-director of Beyoncé's new "Countdown" video which lifts entire sections from the work of Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, now says the dance references come from Germany, not Belgium, and from Audrey Hepburn. She told MTV she brought Beyoncé "a number of references and we picked some out together. Most were German modern-dance references." Yes.
Meanwhile, choreographer De Keersmaeker, who wasn't mad (but 'surprised') when Beyoncé's video first came out, issued a statement yesterday:
When I saw the actual video, I was struck by the resemblance of Beyoncé's clip not only with the movements from Rosas danst Rosas, but also with the costumes, the set and even the shots from the film by Thierry De Mey. Obviously, Beyoncé, or the video clip director Adria Petty, plundered many bits of the integral scenes in the film, which the videoclip made by Studio Brussel by juxtaposing Beyoncé''s video and the Rosas danst Rosas film gives a taste of. But this videoclip is far from showing all materials that Beyoncé took from Rosas in Countdown. There are many movements taken from Achterland, but it is less visible because of the difference in aesthetics.
People asked me if I'm angry or honored.
Neither, on the one hand, I am glad that Rosas danst Rosas can perhaps reach a mass audience which such a dance performance could never achieve, despite its popularity in the dance world since 1980s. And, Beyoncé is not the worst copycat, she sings and dances very well, and she has a good taste!
On the other hand, there are protocols and consequences to such actions, and I can't imagine she and her team are not aware of it.
To conclude, this event didn't make me angry, on the contrary, it made me think a few things.
Like, why does it take popular culture thirty years to recognize an experimental work of dance? A few months ago, I saw on Youtube a clip where schoolgirls in Flanders are dancing Rosas danst Rosas to the music of Like a Virgin by Madonna. And that was touching to see. But with global pop culture it is different, does this mean that thirty years is the time that it takes to recycle non-mainstream experimental performance?
And, what does it say about the work of Rosas danst Rosas? In the 1980s, this was seen as a statement of girl power, based on assuming a feminine stance on sexual expression. I was often asked then if it was feminist. Now that I see Beyoncé dancing it, I find it pleasant but I don't see any edge to it. It's seductive in an entertaining consumerist way.
Beyond resemblance there is also one funny coincidence. Everyone told me, she is dancing and she is four months pregnant. In 1996, when De Mey's film was made, I was also pregnant with my second child. So, today, I can only wish her the same joy that my daughter brought me.
Right. Back to blogging things African.
Only in Africa
Spotted on Youtube yesterday before it went viral: A South African professional mountain biker is taken out by a buck at a game reserve in South Africa.
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Mos Def Philharmonic
Mos Def (or Yasiin Bey) is on a roll. First the Stephen Colbert performance with Talib Kweli. Now this footage of him performing 3 songs Saturday with the Brooklyn Philharmonic in Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn: his own songs "Life in Marvelous Times" (video above), and "Revelations" and, finally, a clip of his performance of "Coming Together," written by the American composer Frederic Rzewski a month before the 1971 Attica prison uprising.
Sources: deebeezy.
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The gay marriage map
The graphic above accompanied an opinion piece by Frank Bruni on gay marriage in Portugal in Sunday's New York Times. South Africa is the only African country of 10 worldwide to have national laws extending marriage rights to gays and lesbians. And as we know South Africa is not the most gay friendly countries. Here's Bruni:
It was only a little more than a decade ago that a country first legalized same-sex marriage, and that happened in precisely the kind of forward-thinking, bohemian place you'd expect: the Netherlands. About two years later, Belgium followed suit.
Then things got really interesting. The eight countries that later joined the club were a mix of largely foreseeable and less predictable additions. In the first category I'd put Canada, Norway, Sweden and Iceland. In the second: South Africa, Spain, Portugal and Argentina.
Why those four countries? People who have studied the issue note that that they have something interesting and relevant in common: each spent a significant period of the late 20th century governed by a dictatorship or brutally discriminatory government, and each emerged from that determined to exhibit a modernity and concern for human rights that put the past to rest.
"They're countries where the commitment to democracy and equal protection under the law was denied, flouted and oppressed, and the societies have struggled to restore that," said Evan Wolfson, the president of Freedom to Marry, a New York-based advocacy group, in a recent interview.
October 10, 2011
Music Break / Mo Laudi
We've posted this video by Mo Laudi during our summer break on our Facebook page (why haven't you joined us there yet?). We'll do it again. You know Mo Laudi from his past projects — The Very Best being one of them. (Talking about The Very Best: you've heard the Super Mom remix they did with Baloji?)
The African Nations Cup
The final qualifying matches for next year's African Nations Cup finals in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea were played this weekend. The big news: Nigeria, Cameroon, Algeria and Egypt were knocked out and that Botswana, Libya and Sudan qualified. The weirdest plot line, however, came in Group G.
South Africa, Sierra Leone and Niger all ended with 9 points–tying for first place. Egypt was already eliminated with 5 points. On Saturday night the South Africans played to a goalless draw with an ascendant Sierra Leone (the latter's form surprised everybody). At that same time, in Cairo, Egypt's under 23 selection beat Niger 3-0. South Africa had beaten Egypt 1-0 and played to a goalless draw when they met in group games. At the end of the Sierra Leone match the South Africans–believing they'd qualified–started celebrating; the players even taking a victory lap. However, shortly after the end of group play CAF (the controlling body for football on the continent), citing some obscure competition rule, declared Niger group winners. Basically, in terms of the rule 14 of the competition the three top teams formed a new mini-league and CAF only considered results of matches between Niger, South Africa and Sierra Leone. In terms of this formula Niger finished with 6 points and South Africa and Sierra Leone with 5. Niger therefore qualified to the final phase.
The South Africans now say they'll appeal the ruling, but it looks more like saving face with the supporters. But it is also a case of history repeating itself when it comes to the national football team. Remember the 2002 World Cup in Japan/Korea when South Africa let Spain and Paraguay decide their fate on the final day of group matches. This also happened in their final group match of the 2010 World Cup when they stopped playing after scoring 2 goals (they needed 4 unanswered goals) against a demoralized France.
* Here's the list of final participants for CAN 2012: The hosts Gabon and Equitorial Guinea (who qualified automatically), Botswana, Cote d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Ghana, Guinea, Zambia, Angola, Tunisia, Mali, Niger, Morocco; Libya and Sudan
Black Power Mixtape
When the documentary film, "The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975" first made the rounds of festivals earlier this year and went on limited release this summer, the reaction of mainstream critics and film blogs (example here) were overwhelmingly positive. I haven't yet seen the film which is directed by the Swede Goran Hugo Olsson and produced by Danny Glover. As for the Swedish connection: the documentary is organized around footage that was shot by a group of Swedish journalists in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The footage languished in a basement archive for 30 years. I definitely want to see the film. Meanwhile let's throw this verdict by a leading American political scientist who lived through and was involved in black power politics during the period covered by the film, into the mix:
I watched the Black Power Mixtapes last night and, among other issues, was struck to see that with the only technical exception of Robin D.G. Kelley, nearly if not all the non-participants who provided commentary were musical artists — Erykah Badu, Talib Kweli, and another rapper whose stage name I don't recall, as well as Abiodun Oyewole from the Last Poets, who not only had nothing to add but also was off by five years on the Medgar Evers assassination. Not even Peniel Joseph, [who dominates current scholarship] on Black Power, was involved. Although this is not at all to suggest that his presence would've made it any different. All I can say about it really is that, although the footage was a nostalgic moment for people like me and does provide a nice illustration of Stokely Carmichael's performance of Stokely Carmichael and copious display of Angela Davis's self-important emptiness, as insight into black power, the documentary is utterly incoherent and useless.
There's no sense of where it came from or went, nothing of internal tensions. At some points it leaves space for the impression that black power emerged after the King assassination, doesn't clarify the temporality of Malcolm's relation to black power rhetoric, most notably that he was dead before it emerged and always was linked to it as a martyr, juxtaposes Carmichael and the BPP without noting —except maybe through a passing, allusive reference by someone like Sonia Sanchez— the actual relations and tensions between the latter, Stokely and others in that radical wing on SNCC's carcass that merged for a minute with the BPP. And, of course, there was no hint of anything other than speeches, pronouncements and the BPP's breakfast programs.
Columbus Day
Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are Black Star
Last Wednesday the Brooklyn rappers collectively known as Black Star*–Mos Def (now going as Yasiin Bey) and Talib Kweli–were guests on the satirical news show,"The Colbert Report." They last brought out an album, "Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star" in 1998. Yasiin Bey and Talib Kweli then proceeded to effortlessly perform two songs–the first "Fix Up" from the 5:00 mark in the video above and the second, "Astronomy (8th Light)" which you can watch here. Too bad they cancelled their upcoming tour.
* Black Star refers to Marcus Garvey's fleet of ships with which he planned to repatriate Africans in the Americas back to Africa.
Something quintessentially Zambian
You must have heard by now that Zambia's new vice president, Guy Scott, is a white man. Don't be surprised at white Africans entering politics, perhaps even at the the level of highest offices in the land. As Daniel Waweru (that's a fake name) writes on The Guardian's Comment is Free site, this is not exceptional:
It might seem strange to find white Africans in African politics, and especially in elective post-colonial African politics, if only because the conventional story of post-colonial African politics has always been that of African nationalism.
But that strangeness is only possible if you rely on, say, the Telegraph for your African news. Begin with the main reason for the surprise: the view that African politics is necessarily and uniformly tribal, because Africans identify chiefly by ethnicity, and hence, presumably, wouldn't vote for a white politician because being white would clearly signal ethnic outsiderhood. The view is defective as it stands, for even if African voters were inveterately ethnocentric, it quite often happens that in ethnically partisan elections, candidates who don't identify with either side are acceptable to competing groups precisely because they're ethnically neutral – at least part of the success of candidates of Somali origin in Kenyan electoral politics, for example, is explicable this way.
And don't be surprised if middle class Africans keep voting for white men, he adds:
Research shows that the most popular form of self-identification across Africa is by occupation and class (40%). Identification by class is particularly salient in Uganda and Zambia: of the countries in the sample, only Tanzania scores higher. Where voters identify by class and occupation, a candidate who can present evidence of solid professional qualifications and professional success is at an advantage; competence is a mighty electoral boost. I'm willing to bet that this substantially accounts for Stamps, Scott and Clarke's successes, especially since they have demonstrated competence in key professions (medicine and agriculture). Additionally, none of the six have any strong connection with the wrong side of the colonial order, and several of them have a well-documented record of opposition to it.
Where that condition is in place, we should not be surprised to find more white male African professionals doing well in African electoral politics.
But Zambia's long had a lassiez-faire attitude about who calls oneself Zambian–in fact, at least during the height of its economic miracle (at independence, Zambia had the strongest economy of all the newly independent states in Africa; by 1974, its GDP per capita of US$504 was near that of Portugal; but by the late 1980s, this figure dropped to US$380, before any adjustment for inflation – figures attributable to the fortunes of copper prices on the global market), multiplicity was publically embraced. And as James Ferguson illustrated in his excellent analysis of the fall of copper prices, and the subsequent economic and social decline in Zambia, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), Zambians had never solely identified with the static, self-contained tribal affiliations assigned to them by the colonial office – affiliations that only suited the colonial systems of governance, "since it served as the basis of a social policy which denied [urban workers in Zambian cities] adequate housing and other services on the grounds that they were merely temporary sojourners in urban areas" (Gerhart). Rather, most viewed themselves as dynamic figures, composed of ties to family, rural village, school, modern belief system (much as Kaunda himself embraced a quintessentially Zambian evolution of 'Humanism'), as well as loyalty to church and traditional religions. In other words, they were like any other modern subject, who saw themselves through the "dynamic processes of incorporation into a global capitalist system through migration and urbanisation" (Gerhart).
When I was a kid, there was an earnest television show called "They Came to Stay" on ZNBC, in which the presenter went from town to town, interviewing various people who once arrived in Zambia thinking that they would be there for a two-year contract with the mines, etc. but …you guessed it – they fell in love with the place, and decided to stay. At the end of every segment with some septuagenarian or octogenarian Brit, Greek, or Italian, the presenter ended the show by looking significantly into the camera and saying, "She came to stay."
For a kid, the show was boring, and my sisters and I sat around making raucous jokes about the interviewees and the interviewer. At the time, there was only one channel in Zambia, and mostly, we watched the camera spanning over yawning ministers while KK or someone else made a 3-hour speech. "They Came To Stay" was as good as it got, after endless repeats of vintage Woody Woodpecker and Chilly the Penguin cartoons.
But looking back at the significance of a whole television show centred around why foreign-born people decided to 'stay' (in a peaceful, beautiful nation where, as my British biology teacher said, one knows that one does not worry about needing to take a raincoat with one when one went bird-watching for a good eight months of the year), I think that Zambia is like many countries that are disregarded by its powerful neighbours. It had a simultaneous insecurity complex (and thus, a desire to display that we were significant enough to be beloved and chosen by people from Europe, who came not just to visit, but to stay), as well as a humble pride in our special place as bastion of peace and semi-good governance in a whirl of civil war and crises: nothing much happened here, and anyone could just be.
Zambia's new VP wears the same ill-fitting suits, replete with an nshima belly spilling out of the confines of his trouser belt: just like every Zambian politician. Having a 'white' vice president (albeit nominated to the position by the president) just seems like something quintessentially Zambian. It is only recent lunacy that brought about charges of 'foreign birth' to discredit rivals in elections. And next to Dora 'Tender Bums' Siliya, who took to decrying homosexuality at campaign rallies (vintage Siliya at her frothing best: "You men here, are you not admiring me? Are you admiring each other's beards? You women can you get pregnant from a fellow woman? Isn't that the end of the world? You men can you enjoy touching each other's hard bums instead of a woman's?"), and "Foreign-born" Rupiah Banda, Michael "King Cobra" Sata's VP looks quite staidly Zambian.
* Scott, btw, also has some backward views. When asked why people would vote for him, he told a reporter: "People are nostalgic, not for exploitation and division, but for the standards of colonial times. When you went to the hospital there was medicine, when you went to schools there were books, when you went to the shops there were goods to buy. There is a sense of these as being 'white man's standards'. Whether rightly or not rightly is another matter."
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