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Euronoize

Music is a form of dialogue between the global and the local, exchange and use value, authenticity and interpretation, colonizer and colonized. Like pop music, the idea of Europe belongs to everyone and no one. But perhaps because of the emptiness of this concept, a new Europe is possible as a cypher for a post national world where borders between states would become as irrelevant as the causes for the thirty years war.

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27 views2 pages

Euronoize

Music is a form of dialogue between the global and the local, exchange and use value, authenticity and interpretation, colonizer and colonized. Like pop music, the idea of Europe belongs to everyone and no one. But perhaps because of the emptiness of this concept, a new Europe is possible as a cypher for a post national world where borders between states would become as irrelevant as the causes for the thirty years war.

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kollectiv
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© © All Rights Reserved
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EuroNoize

By Pil and Galia Kollectiv

Broadcasting authorities rarely have the best intentions at heart. The British Broadcasting
Corporation, for example, was set up to steer the working classes away from their unhealthy
cultural consumption habits of rowdy American entertainment. Broadcasting authorities are
mostly state instruments designed to regulate and influence public taste, to stimulate markets
and to exert cultural colonialism. It is unlikely that the European Broadcasting Union, an
organisation set up primarily to resolve frequency disputes between various European
countries, with a tainted war era history of its own, considered setting up Eurovision in the
1950s as anything but cold war propaganda. United against their communist foes, west
European countries needed to experience themselves as a cohesive ideological unit, fighting
Stalinism with NATO’s strategic missiles on the one hand and the CIA’s ‘Goodwill Jazz
Ambassador’ Louis Armstrong on the other. Following Charlemagne, Napoleon and Hitler,
Europe was born yet again as a fictional entity, this time in the image of an American ‘dream’ as
a free, white and liberal-capitalist continent. Not that this fantasy was any weirder or more
removed from real life as the fantasy of the nation-state on which it is built, of course. That too
needed to be reinforced through colorful kitsch rituals – the Dutch windmill logo on a block of
butter, an Eiffel tower postcard from Paris, the national pride of Germany winning a football
trophy. But this is why the Eurovision is so fascinating as a cultural event: it is not a competition
between the singing talents of a reality television star from Moldova or a boy band deserter
from Denmark, Eurovision is a competition between two forms of political fictions, the national
and the pan-European. As a television spectacle, viewers are served a smorgasbord of national
clichés: little colorful flags, the odd national symbol rendered as stage furniture here and there,
the coat of arms of Albania tattooed on a contestant’s back, a high-ranking bureaucrat calling
other broadcasting ‘ambassadors’ on the red line, simultaneous translation to Greek that goes
out of synch mid back-stage interview.

The greatest thing about music is that it is at the same time completely abstract and completely
concrete. As a mathematical system based on tonal relations and the sub particle qualities of
sound waves, it is the most intangible of all the arts. Yet, more than any other, music is rooted
in ritual, performance and the social organization of bodies and technologies. Music is about
group listening and playing, dancing and harmonizing, all requiring very material situations and
environments. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, it might be making a
sound, but it is certainly not making music. The same is true for pop music. Pop is pure
abstraction built on a minimalist approach to rhythm and melody with some sub-poetry
stripped down to bone (“It’s so good / I’m in love / I feel love” is a legitimate song) and as that it
is very well suited to its status as universal cultural commodity. It fits many uses, many modes
of interpretation and can sustain many cycles of rebirth: the longing for freedom (of African
Americans in a segregated south) found in a Mississippi blues song melts with ease into the
longing for freedom of the 1950s middle-class teenager and even the longing for freedom of an
East German citizen in the 1980s. The structural simplicity of pop music is matched by its
complex and nuanced decoding and recoding in millions of subcultures, where the same three
chords and twelve bars gain an infinite number of permutations. Pop music is the most
impersonal of global commodities, the fruit of the labour of A&R people, professional song
writers, producers, arrangers, technicians, sequencers, session musicians, designers, branding
specialists, voice coaches and managers. But when this cold industrial lump of noise attaches
itself to a person or group it opens up dimensions of specific localized meaning. It doesn’t
matter that Russian two-tone fans might not care about the racial politics of the English
midlands in the 1980s or that Iraqi death metal supporters might ignore the millennial Christian
anxiety that defines some of the genre: the ‘authentic’ essence of music only exists in the
contingent moment of its use. Music is a form of dialogue between the global and the local,
exchange and use value, authenticity and interpretation, colonizer and colonized.

Like pop music, the idea of Europe belongs to everyone and no one. Via colonialism this idea
has been universalized and exported as a unified fantasy that collapses together Alexander the
Great, Marco Polo, Picasso, Napoleon and Heidi. It is this abstract concept, or rather the gap
between it and a lived reality, that makes Japanese tourists faint under the spell of the ‘Paris
Syndrome’. Meanwhile, on the continent, no one defines themselves as European and there is
clearly no underlying unifying European culture, language, religion, ethnicity, geography or
political institution. But perhaps because of the emptiness of this concept, a new Europe is
possible as a cypher for a post national world where borders between states would become as
irrelevant as the causes for the thirty years war. In this new Europe, we will all exchange
novelty records and band t-shirts, bands will share instruments and practical advice and travel
to other cities to play gigs in obscure venues without the need for visas and passports. If
EuroNoize is a celebration of any kind of Europe, it is not the fortress that we live in today, but
the infinitely expanded freedom of movement, collaboration and cultural exchange that it
allows us to imagine.

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