"Bourbon fanciers, who often claim for their tipple the title of "America's spirit," drink one of the most regulated spirits known. To be labelled bourbon, it has to be made with a certain percentage of corn and aged in a certain kind of barrel. But excessive regulation is not the spirit of America. Unrestricted experimentation is. Rum embodies America's laissez-faire attitude. It is whatever it wants to be. There have never been strict guidelines for making it. There's no international oversight board, and its taste and production varies widely, leaving the market to sort out favourites. If sugarcane and its by-products are involved, you can call it rum. Rum is the melting pot of spirits—the only liquor available in clear, amber, or black variations."
And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the World in Ten Cocktails by Wayne Curtis
The roots of Exotica was something I wondered about, but didn't do much about, on my previous blog. There is a lot of good writing on the subject by Sven A. Kirsten. His works, however, are mostly about the pictures that accompany the writing. There has been one academic work on the subject that I know of, Mondo Exotica by Francesco Adinolfi, but it's an intellectually lazy, sloppy work (anytime you see the term "the other" playing a big role in analytic writing, you can be sure the writer has turned his brain off so he can better spout the reassuring clichés that modern academic writing traffics in).
Adinolfi's work does, however, give us a notion of how not to go about looking into Exotica and Tiki. For starters, it's just too broad and sweeping in it's approach. It also places far too much emphasis on Romantic sources for Exotica and gives not nearly enough scrutiny to modernism and, more specifically, to modernist primitivism.
That should be an obvious move given the subtitle on the album cover above. If exotica started anywhere, it began with this 1951 Les Baxter album. "Le Sacre du Sauvage" is a pretty clear homage to Stravinsky. Baxter loved and was much influenced by Stravinsky and Ravel.
He was far from the only twentieth century popular musician to be influenced by modern music turned out by what we sometimes confusingly call "classical" composers. The most influential of whom was, although he gets little credit for it, Paul Whiteman. Through him, everyone from Bix Beiderbecke to Frank Sinatra picked up on a kind of jazz modernism.
The other big jazz influence, and this very much acknowledged by Baxter, was Duke Ellington. Ellington also used some of the harmonic ideas of the European modernists but more importantly for my purposes here, he also trucked in a certain kind of "exotica", by which I mean fantasy stories of western men going to exotic locations and finding love.
Ellington didn't invent this type of song but he certainly trafficked in it and his efforts were called jungle music at the time.
I could go on about that but I prefer to return to a little discussed aspect of Stravinsky's Sacre du printemps and that is that the ballet itself was rarely performed. It received a handful of performances in 1913 but was soon abandoned for audiences simply did not like the ballet. The music, however, was considerably more accepted. It was as program music—stuff you listened to while imagining images "suggested" by the music—that Sacre du printemps had its influence. And that is what influenced Les Baxter.
Primitivism
Ethnography didn't play much of a role in the fantasies that Stravinsky peddled. We can't distinguish the modernist primitivism of the early 20th century on the grounds that it was more authentic or better researched than that of the 1950s. The difference was more a matter of intent; the early modernist primitivism was meant to be disturbing.
By the end of the 1950s, primitivism was literally the stuff of theme parks, a fun-filled escape. This shift is usually cited to the disadvantage of the 1950s but I think it points to a fundamental failure of the early modernists. The primitive simply isn't grotesque or terrifying. It's fun, familiar and harmless seen with modern western eyes. We fully appreciate that life would be nasty, brutish and short in a genuinely primitive culture but that's not where we live. The post-World-War-2 generation, correctly saw that primitivism is not alienating or threatening but fun.
And how could it be any other way? This stuff is open to anyone and, for that reason, comforting and familiar even if you've never experienced it before. After the horrors of modern technological warfare and the brutal oppression of modern socialism, who wouldn't want to escape to the Quiet Village?
In this we are victims of our own antihistorical bias. The dizzying pace of change in the last hundred years has left us stranded. We somehow think that the way things are is the way they have always been; that the Present is the same as the Natural Order.
And yet our culture knows better. Buried in the way things are is a long chain of used-to-be's. If we get out the shovels and go below the surface a bit, we find five parallel stories that tell us why X matters.
The X, for which the above was written is rum. The book I quote here is a Short Course in Rum: A Guide to Tasting and Talking About Rum by Lynn Hoffman. His point, however, could applied to a lot of things, not the least of which is Catholicism. Much of what people declare to be the "unchanged teaching of the church going back two thousand years" is really the product of the last few centuries.
According to Tommy Bahama, and who could doubt such a source?, today is National Rum Day.
The drink in the foreground is a rum old-fashioned made with Skipper Rum. Normally, I like to make my rum old-fashioneds with a mixture of Demerara rum and Jamaican rum, specifically Smith and Cross, but the bottle of Smith and Cross in this picture is empty as of last night.
I'm not a rum expert; I just drink the stuff. I drink it because I like it, because it has cultural associations that I like and because you can buy premium rums for a lot less you can buy premium whiskey or brandy. (The only premium rum in that photo is the (albeit empty) Smith and Cross—the other two are both good.)
Today's old-fashioned is 100 percent Skipper Rum. I bought this bottle because of the name. Yes, I would judge a book by its cover. I like Skipper Rum. It's a real dark rum and you can really taste the molasses in it. To my palate, it's not a sipping rum like the Smith and Cross but it makes a fine old-fashioned. It also makes a good rum punch. And it's got a fun name and a great label. What more do you need in a rum?
Why is there Kahlua in this picture? That's a subject for a future post when I discuss spiced rum. Yes, I drink that stuff too. I'm neither a rum expert nor a rum snob.
