Chief Boima caused a bit of an uproar with a post of his reflecting on the relationship between record re-issue culture & neo-colonialism. Perhaps what sparked the controversy was his posting of this image:

This image isn’t new, and Boima said he thought it was “hyperbolic”, and he then went on at length to discuss what a service some of the record label owners named in this image do, but it is a controversial enough image that the owners named came to defend themselves in the comments section. It seems like for most, if not all, of these dudes English is not their first language because I suspect there is some serious language barrier issue preventing a deeper conversation from taking place. They seem to be defending themselves from criticism that Boima wasn’t even raising.

The more interesting issue is the one that has to deal with autonomy. In other words, no matter what great music is getting distributed thanks to these record labels, it is still the West that has the capital to organize these resources. They say, “we are providing extensive historical research & documentation, and creating detailed liner notes to demonstrate this exhaustive effort”, and isn’t that part of the problem? No one would ever pick up some random techno 12″ from Cologne, and think, “Oh my god! Where is the historical documentation of this production?” It must also be said that the very idea that music needs historical documentation is, in a sense, a very European impulse.

Again, this isn’t to disparage people putting out not very well known music and including documentation of it, I certainly appreciate reading liner notes. The point is though that you see extensive liner notes when someone is releasing someone else’s music, it is something you almost never see in self-released, independent music. It is not only acceptable, but expected that an independent rock band release records that feature arty designs with somewhat enigmatic information. Why should music from other sources be any different? This, it seems to me, gets more to the heart of the issue that Chief Boima is raising, which is a question of autonomy. Citizens in the West have it, thanks to general economic prosperity, citizens in other parts of the world have much less of it.

Ideally what we would like in the global music listening community is for all people to be able to express themselves in an autonomous and direct fashion. To this end the debate about whether the musicians are getting paid fairly or not is somewhat secondary (and a relative concept anyway, basically no one has ever been making a killing from music unless they were involved in a score of other activities that had little to do with music). The fact is, blogs,record labels, and DJs are all part of the same phenomenon: the process by which the producer and consumer, or artist and audience, is mediated by a third party. The question, again, is what is the most direct method of communicating? What is impressive about someone like Lil’ B, who I was just talking about a few days ago, has been the way he has successfully driven his career in the most direct way possible, by utilizing the internet to communicate directly with his fanbase, and he has done it in a fashion that is fairly unprecedented.

However, Lil’ B is currently something of a unique phenomenon. I would say barring that sort of direct interaction, the radio is still a way for a country to represent its music in a fairly autonomous fashion, especially in less economically successful parts of the world where there is less commercial pressure to conform to commercially successful formats, and the internet is making it possible for a more global audience to tune in. ORTM Chaine 2 95.2 is a great example of a station out of Mali that defies categorization in terms of what it plays, but it is all pretty excellent music, and is an example of the type of listening format that deserves more attention from Western music listeners exploring the depths of African music.