Exotica

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.

The subjects of "civilization" are trapped in an alienating, inauthentic culture, but can escape by cultivating the "primitive" hidden within themselves: grotesque, even terrifying, but authentic in its drives, desires and relationship to the world. Known as primitivism, this diagnosis of cultural failure and its purported cure profoundly influenced modernist artists.

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?