Music and youth: between us and the world, the future.

Jewsiewicki, Bogumil ; Letourneau, Jocelyn

Come what may today, Tomorrow's world belongs to us. NTM, band from Saint-Denis, France

It is a truism to say that music is one of humankind's most-used and best-loved channels for rendering and externalizing its joys and sorrows, its euphoria and failures, its experiences and expectations. Music is at the heart of both self-expression and interpersonal communication. It is a bearer of identity as much as it is a way of interacting with other people, near and far. And to do this, it draws on a repertoire of signs that are much more universal than words -- although the increasing use of a trite, almost over-polished kind of American English (the "desperanto" of a globalizing world?) may force us to moderate this assertion somewhat.

Such are the general hypotheses that inspired the production of this special edition of Ethnologies. Readers will perhaps be interested to know that this issue marks the end of a research project that we initiated a few years ago on the highly topical question of the expression of identity in the context of globalization. This project was funded by the SSHRC and the FCAR,(1) and led to several individual and collective publications, including many contributions from students (Jewsiewicki 1995; Jewsiewicki and Letourneau [eds.] 1998; Letourneau [ed.] 1997; Demers 1999; Leblanc 1999).

If there is a single conclusion that emerges from these works, it is that current processes of globalization by no means annihilate "local" dynamics of the expression of identity. They do, however, play a part in bringing their meanings up to date. They infuse them with new rhythms, lexicons, sounds, body movements and so on. In this way, bridges are built between the "local" and the "global". Some links revitalize, others destructure, but all are part of the endless regeneration of human groupings within a complex dialectic of referents that mixes tradition and escapism. This is definitely a factor in the transition of communities towards the mutant and moving cultural places where the real gains and losses of meaning are transacted, thanks to which these communities are redefining themselves in a curious dynamic of self-recognition and self-rejection that is at once alienating and liberating (Letourneau 1998, 2000).

The context of these transformations is thus composed of here and elsewhere, of heritage and emancipation, of the performance and production of "I" and "us" in relation to "them" on the contemporary world stage. In this theatre of immediacy and globality, young people's music contains a wealth of social, cultural and identity resources -- which it is out aim to apprehend in this special edition.

In this respect, our own point of view can be presented as follows. If the various musics of the world to which young people listen, dance and play out their global identity organize the fields of their experience and their aesthetic sensibilities, then they also reveal the horizons of their expectations. For this reason, it is essential to investigate these musics in their broadest register, in terms of what new meanings they signify. Unfortunately, social scientists often try to grasp contemporary youth culture using a repertoire of rather stale, outdated references -- i.e. their own, those that dominated the western cultural universe of thirty years or so ago. This anachronism is inopportune. Young people today the world over think about themselves and the world in terms of world beat and world music. Their musical universe, and hence their social universe, is polyrhythmic and polysemic, just as their way of approaching the world is plural. This composite reality can be expressed by the following phrase, formulated from various extracts of music lyrics in this issue: when "reality hits you (Dragusanu, p. 106), between us and the world (Kalulambi, p. 130), the future is unlimited (Dragusanu, p. 113), even though the past never dies (Hadj Miliani, p. 240)."

Contemporary world music offers young people a fin de siecle (or debut de millenaire) glossolalia. It gives them the power to speak a language, the language of portable music -- for what young person today is not rigged up with a walkman, discman or other roving electronic kit? -- which encompasses all languages, all ways of living and communicating in a globalized world. Simultaneously, they invent their plural universals. Wherever they find themselves, young people reject the symbolic status of immigrants awaiting integration or deportation. For them as for Django Reinhardt, one of the great jazzmen of the twentieth century, music "gives you the chance to be something else -- and not something else instead for the time being" (quoted by Williams 1998: 18).

To be honest, our postulate was and remains quite simple: instead of waiting for young people to come and express themselves in the places where sociery would like to establish a dialogue with them, we should go and listen to them, and interact with them if possible, in the places where they debate their own fundamental questions, using their own communicational codes. These debates may include the discomfort of living in the present and the difficulty of living in a future that represents both continuity with and rupture from the established past.

In western society, poetry has long been a genre -- and therefore a social space -- in which the limits of the possible, the sayable and the conceivable were tested, on an existential as much as an aesthetic level. However, for at least the last ten years, music, and more accurately, young people's music, has become the incubator for new forms of communication, interaction and cultural statements. The frontispiece headline of the March 30, 2000 edition of L'Evenement du jeudi could not have put it more eloquently: "Rap, the triumph of the new poets." In our view, the music of young people seems to share with avant-garde poetry the same potential for positive confrontation with the establishment, which seeks to convert all emergent forms to its own tried and tested registers of meaning. This situation is worthy of serious interest and not, as is often asserted, cultural panic.

For a long time, probably since the West interiorized the French Revolution's invention that state sovereignty and power should be founded on popular majorities, social knowledge has been constructed on a double misunderstanding. The Other, whether from "here" (the internal foreigner) or "elsewhere" (the ordinary foreigner) is always understood as being at a distance from what is presumed or imposed as the norm. This approach can be seen as basically an anthropological reading of the particular. As a result, political perception of what the "Other" does reduces him or her to the sum of the tactics that he or she mobilizes to survive for or against the established order. In this interpretative approach, the "Other" is only capable of reacting to the actions of the political centre. And he or she is reputed to do this badly.

Young people's music, the worlds it designs and the rules that it conveys are usually seen from just this rather derogatory perspective, with its limits of reaction to / provocation of the dominant society. Their music is understood as mere stirrings on the fringe, mutterings from a margin that covets the centre. The consequences of such a political reading of youth music are obvious. It leads to a denial of the autonomy, personality and independence of the bands, a denial of the sociopolitical spaces that young people gingerly stake out, as well as the aesthetics that they elaborate in their music. These aesthetics are ways of launching themselves into new modes of cultural and existential being, and include the aesthetic of body modification (piercing, tattoos, brightly-coloured hair, etc.).

More often than one might think, however, young people's music is not a reaction to the centre or to the normative majority. It consists of autonomous creations that rework, reorient and bring up to date myriad elements of a common culture. It makes a positive, even necessary contribution to the renewal of established societies. Moreover, it participates in the reconstitution of these societies, or even calls for and precedes that moment. Is this not this what Claude Sirce, leader of Fabulous Troubadours, a band from Toulouse, France meant when he declared: "It's not the rough suburbs that invented rap, it's rap that invented the rough suburbs" (quoted in Askolovitch and Nassif 2000: 9).

From one region to another of the French-speaking world, from central and eastern Europe to the Congo via Montreal and Paris, music helps young people to live in a world (or worlds) that they would like to be different and that they wish to reinvent. One of the characteristics of this world (or these worlds), identified by Denis-Constant Martin in his meticulous analysis of Afro-American gospel music (Martin 1998: 98), resides in the ambiguity between human love and divine love or, as Dessislav Sabev writes in this special issue, between the love relationship and the social relationship.

Young people's music, in the grace of its lyrics put to rhythms and sounds, must be taken for what it is: an ensemble of conversations about the world, its future and its past. Young people's music is a complex affair. Some of it provokes reactions while some of it is swallowed up by the indifference of the fans and the market. Some is listened to avidly, some is ignored. Some swiftly makes its mark, only to fizzle out abruptly in the fickleness of fashion. The sonorities and messages of still other music, anonymous at first, can turn out to become a perennial presence. All of it remains at people's disposition for the resolution of any problems that might suddenly arise and require an alternative interpretation of the world.

In this respect, Dominique Caubet's note is of particular interest. The author describes the calm but thorough migration towards the acknowledged centre of the French aesthetic of "foreign" musical forms, which the centre would rather detain at the margins. If music of North African inspiration and execution is becoming increasingly accepted by French society, then its incorporation into French popular culture is well under way. Such a cultural ingestion is by no means exceptional. It has already happened many times to immigrant groups and cultures. According to Caubet, the adoption by young French people from the rough suburbs of expressions that come from Arabic or one of its many dialects could possibly indicate a structural mutation in the common cultural baggage of French youth. If new research were to confirm Caubet's hypotheses, then the pertinence of this special issue would also be vindicated, on the strength of its premise that no identity can endure without renewal and intermixture.(2)

(1.) J. Letourneau, B. Jewsiewicki, "Conscience d'appartenances. Entre l'histoire et le present, l'individuel et le collectif, le local et le global, sur le mode narrative et performatif" ["Consciousness of belonging: Between the past and the present, the individual and the group, the local and the global, in narrative and performative modes"], SSHRC grant 1995-1998; J. Letourneau, B. Jewsiewicki, G. Breton, "Entre la mondialisation et l'individuation. Horizons de l'Etat-Nation contemporain" ["Between globalization and individuation: horizons of the contemporary nationstate"] FCAR-equipe grant, 1994-1997.

(2.) As Denis-Constant Martin so rightly reminded us (1999).

Reference

Askolovitch, C., and P. Nassif. 2000. Rap. La victoire des nouveaux poetes, L'Evenement du jeudi, 20, 30, June 2000: 9.

Demers, Frederic. 1999. Celine Dion et l'identite quebecoise. La petite fille de Charlemagne parmi les grands . Montreal: VLB.

Jewsiewicki, Bogumil. 1995. Mots savants, paroles indisciplinees et musiques pop: quelques reflexions sur la normalisation des memoires. In La memoire dans la culture, Jacques Mathieu (ed.): 95-112. Quebec: Presses de l'Universite Laval.

-- and Jocelyn Letourneau (eds.), with collaboration of Irene Hermann. 1998. Les jeunes a l'ere de la mondialisation. Quete identitaire et conscience historique. Sillery: Septentrion.

Leblanc, Genevieve. 1999. Felix Leclerc en tant que figure rassembleuse d'une communaute memorielle. Incursion au coeur du pantheon franco-quebecois. Departement d'histoire, Universite Laval.

Letourneau, Jocelyn (ed.). 1997. Le lieu identitaire de la jeunesse d'aujourd'hui. Etudes de cas. Paris: L'Harmattan.

--. 1998. La nation des jeunes. In Les jeunes a l'ere de la mondialisation. Quete identitaire et conscience historique, B. Jewsiewicki and J. Letourneau (eds.): 411-430. Sillery: Septentrion.

--. 2000 [in press]. Passer a l'avenir. Histoire, memoire, identite dans le Quebec d'aujourd'hui. Montreal: Boreal.

Martin, Denis-Constant. 1998. Le gospel afro-americain. Des spirituals au rap religieux. Paris: Cite de la musique/Actes sud.

--. 1999. review of P. Williams' book Django. In Ethnologie francaise, 29, 1 (1999): 146-148.

Williams, P. 1998. Django. Marseille: Parentheses.