At the Edge (11-13 November 1999)

AT THE EDGE
Towards 21st Century Internationalism

TNI 25th Anniversary (1974-1999)

Cultural Globalisation:  MacDonaldisation  or Cultural Mélange

Culture has been a vital dimension of colonialism and imperialism (Orientalism, CocaColonisation, Donald Duck) and is presently a
dimension of globalisation. Keywords are MacDonaldisation, CNN-culture, synchronisation. The arguments are familiar—Clash
of Civilisations, Jihad vs. MacWorld, hybridisation or cultural melange ... Hein Marais and James Early take positions on the fractured barricades of culture in a multi-media session featuring
music.

Moderator: Jan Nederveen Pieterse

Culture has been a vital dimension of colonialism and imperialism, and is now a vital dimension of globalisation. A familiar concept is that of 'McDonalisation', or homogenisation as a commercialised 'American culture' is promoted worldwide through the mass media and advertising corporations.

Hein Marais argued strongly against simple homogenisation, and used excerpts from popular music to support his idea that people are not mere receptors but use their agency to adapt and create new cultural forms that help them cope with a complex world. James Early agreed that we can over-emphasise the negative effects of globalisation, holding us back from a more dialectical understanding of culture and tradition, how they change, and what their political role is, including the youth cultures of today.

Jan Nederveen Pieterse introduced the session by identifying three approaches to globalisation and culture:

• That globalisation inevitably leads to everlasting inter-cultural conflict, clashes of civilisation, wars, etc. This is a view propounded, for example, by Samuel Huntington and Robert Caplan.
• That the course of time and history is being obliteration by globalisation, leading to cultural homogenisation. This thesis has a long tradition, going back to Enlightenment universalism but in more recent times modernisation convergence theory, more familiarly known as MacDonaldisation. Remember that US exports of culture via Hollywood, the TV and media, etc. are much greater in billion $ terms than the export of military hardware.
• That globalisation is leading to hybridisation, a mixing of cultures which is resulting in ever new and different cultures. This seems a much more recent idea.

Hein Marais is a South African journalist and political analyst who has recently written the book
South Africa Limits to Change: the Political-Economy of Transition .He is South African animator for the World Forum for Alternatives.

We all have a serious concern about the homogenisation of life, especially in the South, where we get so many films and TV from the North. There is a subjection of the peripheries of the world to the centre.

The Left has tended to see people and cultures as zombies, or as sponge-like organisms merely soaking up dominant cultures, with no way of creating, re-creating or re-processing, in other words neutered as the subject of their own lives. Seeing the Top Ten charts featuring the same songs in Brazil, Malaysia, South Korea, reinforces such fears.

However, we are wrong to think this way. It is especially problematic if we view it through the lens of music. Music makes it difficult to hold on to a homogenisation argument. Condemning the influence of US culture over Third World millions betrays an arrogance of imperial power, often coming from distasteful assumptions of the subconscious. Leftist writers have offered an explanation by differentiating between 'popular' and 'mass' culture. This merely betrays our own discomfort with mass culture.

I believe that we do not have the ability to understand what I call the webs of 'affectation', of feelings and references, to understand what brings different people close to the same Top Ten tune. The web in Philadelphia is not the same as in Manila, Cape Town or Lima. For example, Bruce Springstein's song 'Born in the USA' is an ode to the common American working man. But this is not the way it played out in Reaganite America. It was the theme song of Reagan and Rambo in the 1980s. The meaning and utility attached to a song or a text is a contingent one. The link that we think is there from conception, to production, distribution and consumption is broken down as it travels through different social spaces and time. 'Born in the USA' might have a different register today, and I hope it does.

A song can develop a kind of relative autonomy despite the fact that it is transmitted by entertainment corporations. The relative autonomy is weaker or stronger depending on different settings, periods in history and society. I am concerned with a
'MacDonaldisation' of the planet, and we have a long Western Marxist tradition to draw on that allows us to understand the systemic ways that production, distribution and consumption affect the content of culture. When we look at the domestic pop music in South East Asia, it is often poor cover versions of Western pop tunes. So our dread is not without basis. But within that apparent conformity there is a wide diversity, not just of consumption - how we hear music, dance to it, etc. - but how that transforms into the production of new music too.

The same nostalgic sense of place that I might evoke when listening to the Roberta Flack song 'Killing Me Softly' is not the same as that invoked in South East Asia or Germany. We can disaggregate this further by gender, class, race and even further to the specific life experiences of individuals. Appadurai captured this with his concept of 'imaginary landscapes' where we witness "a much subtler interplay of indigenous trajectories of desire and fear with global flows of people and things. If a global culture is emerging, it is filled with ironies and resistances sometimes camouflaged as passivity and a bottomless appetite for things Western", as he put it. He overplays the concept of the US as only "one node" but he is right to figure in the 'imaginary landscapes' that come from our own experiences, histories, desires and fears.

Daniel Miller interviewed Trinidadians who watch the US TV soap opera 'Young and Restless', which is very popular there. He found "a re-creation of the soap opera as Trinidadian" and speaks of "its role in the refinement of the concept of Trinidad as the culture of the bacchanal". Miller said that, "Authenticity has increasingly to be judged a posteriori not a priori, according to local consequences not local origin". This leads us to the idea of culture as a site of struggle over meaning. Its terms are constantly shifting. It does not merely reflect history but constitutes history. Culture enables people to situate themselves in their society and navigate their lives through their societies and realities.

In the mid-late 1970s, 'Soca' took off in Trinidad. It was different from the very popular Calypso with its satirical, often scabrous, lyrics. Calypso elements can be heard in it, but Soca is just party music, with meaningless lyrics. It was conceived in New York City by Trinidadians who were into funk, soul and disco. It gained popularity during the oil boom when Trinidadians enjoyed more prosperity. By the mid-1980s, however, when the oil price plunged, Calypso made a comeback, with songs criticising the government on its over-reliance on oil among them.

It is not always that the external is expropriated and assimilated and then turned into something new, as in the case of Soca. Acts of hybridisation face huge constraints and in many cases the cultural products can be detrimental, cause alienation from other forms of local hybrids that emerged in previous times. But in music this process of pilfering and hybridisation is not a new phenomenon. It is part of musical history, as peoples and products have moved in large numbers, and out of it come many genres and sub-genres. The idea that you can fix a style of music and call it 'The Traditional Music' of, say, South Africa or Indonesia, is a complete myth.

In South Africa, Kwaito shows the breaking apart of one cultural form and reforming into another during a particular social, political and economic period. Kwaito is massively popular in South Africa. It is House music played at one third revolutions slower, and contains a lot of influence from Hip-Hop and House. It has deadpan chanting and is danced to everywhere. A young fan wrote in a South African magazine, "This music that you find vulgar and offensive means more to the youth of this country than you can imagine... It is a mirror of our lives... Once you understand Kwaito you will begin to understand us because it expresses the same hopes and questions as the Young Lions (militants on the anti-apartheid barricades in the 1980s). Who are we? Where are we going? The struggle culture gave us one answer, Liberation. But today we have our doubts." Kwaito enables its fans to navigate through the system effectively.

Japan has since the 1960s been one of the most fertile sites of free jazz improvisation. Some of the greatest Noise musicians are Japanese. Japan also has a love affair with Psychodelic Rock, and there are probably more Reggae bands there than anywhere else outside Jamaica. These predilections could be interpreted as a reaction to the social mores that the youth live in, enabling them to make sense of their own society and express their feelings. The political relationships between Japan and the USA will also play a part.

Algerian Rai music has been influenced by many factors, including the availability of cheap electronic musical instruments such as keyboards. Rai has been a vent for the cultural expression of youth, and a glue for the diaspora of Algerians in France. Inside Algeria, the regime is not friendly to Rai but the Islamic Front for Salvation is willing to live with it, knowing that it is a route to the youth.

Across the world, we see such tangles of social and political specificities taking in far flung and often incongruous sources of musical inspiration, that are often transmitted through entertainment TNCs. This is combined with appropriating new technologies, and rule-breaking by individuals. Globalisation and TNCs provide the conveyor belt.

The manner in which hybridisation occurs is not often a conscious act but rather spontaneous. In the early 1990s we saw the development of a similar genre in Germany and the UK, and yet they were differently conceived. In German Rave culture with its near insatiable demand for new music, DJs started building music out of the break-beats (rhythm interludes) in existing tracks. Breakbeat Hardcore was the outcome. Meanwhile in the UK at the same time there was a similar but separate process. The long-term use of Ecstasy was showing effects: pleasure symptoms were decreasing, leaving behind a jittery high which demanded a similar feel in the music. At the same time, Black youth in the inner cities found that Hip-Hop from the USA didn't really take off. They drifted into the Rave and Techno scenes and brought with them their Reggae sensibilities. The outcome was Jungle. By the way, Goldie from the UK played in South Africa recently to big audiences.

So, we are wrong if we try to draw a linear line of histories between these musics. Jungle was not a fad because it did make sense to the urban youth who are, as one said in a magazine, "defined not by race but by class in so far as all working class urban youth are 'niggers' in the eyes of authority". They see themselves as a ghetto of potential 'criminals', guilty until proven innocent in the eyes of the law. It is a multiracial scene. It has links back to Ska and Reggae but is a trans-racial shared experience of the underclass.

Then Jungle gets re-territorialised by capitalist industry. It takes a few years but by 1997-98, we hear a stripped down drum version in TV ads, and so on. It is made into big business. But the pioneers of Jungle have made three moves since then. Now we have Neurofunk, which is way harder than Jungle. It is because Jungle had such a profound social register and made meaning for people, it could be reclaimed and reformed, despite the entertainment TNCs trying to claim it. This does not happen with every kind of music that is as authentic as Jungle, however.

Finally, let us look at globalisation and new technology. I do not buy the line that cyberspace is going to set us free and remove the need for nation states. Using music as an example, I do not believe that technology is necessarily a deterministic factor in our lives. Some of the most vibrant music has entailed violating what the technology was meant to do. For example, take simple electronic keyboard technology. Musicians in the House scene used knobs on a particular keyboard to produce Acid House, a sub-branch of House, and a new sonic tradition was born.

In Jamaica, the idea of what instruments were meant for was upended. In the dancehalls of Kingston there is a big stress on the music industry to come up with new sounds every week. The musical engineers used four-track equipment to strip out vocals and some instruments to produce a basic track. Then DJs would talk over it, sing lyrics, and so on. This became Rap, which in turn influenced Hip-Hop. Then engineers who were geniuses turned the mixing desk itself into an instrument and produced Dub Reggae, which led on to House and Techno. In this genre, it is the producer of the music, not the singer, who has become the artist.

In sum, we are not seeing the occupation of cultural forms by capital, which merely changes it into something homogenous and conforming. Instead there is a dialectical relationship between, on the one hand, cultural innovation and, on the other, an on-going structural trend towards domesticating that innovation, towards capital appropriating it and turning it into a new channel for accumulation. The upshot is a see-saw, in music at least, between a process of de-territorialisation - the innovation, flux, change, hybrids - and re-territorialisation when it becomes popular enough for capital to make money out of it. If we are lucky, we then see it being taken apart again. This is because music has social meaning. It helps people navigate.

It is not a closed thing. Capital does not always win. But the spaces in which these innovations can be made are being cramped. I hope in twenty years' time I can still play new examples, but I am not sure that I will.

James Early is a TNI advisor on issues of culture and democracy. He is the Director of Culture Heritage Policy at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, USA, and Chairperson of the Board of the Institute for Policy Studies. He is a long-time activist on cultural diversity and equity issues in African-American, Native American, Latino and Asian-Pacific-American communities.

There is a way in which we in the anti-capitalist, pro-socialist, communist, etc, tradition have tended to dismiss culture as non-serious. We have ideas of wanting everyone to enjoy and do more pop, jazz, high art, dance, etc. But we have not been able to summarise that in ideological and practical terms. A poet from the Black Arts Movement wrote brilliant poems of power and the need to deal with issues of racism and capitalism, but was very critical of Black revolutionaries who wrote love poems. The hidebound ideological ways in which we were trained left us unable to deal with that.

But now art and culture is on the agenda, sometimes in a most detrimental way. After all, 'ethnic cleansing' is an issue of culture, identity, language, music and art.

The homogenisation of globalised culture is real, but we in the Left sometimes develop a poetics of globalisation. We savour the savage elements of it describing it in the most intricate detail with a kind of ascetic. We re-reify it and thereby make it bigger than ourselves in ways in which we then stymie a dialetical proposition to it - that globalisation is a social relationship. It reflects dominant society and it is true that the dominant commercial culture in the world today is an Americanised culture. However, there is also what we used to call 'inter-imperialist rivalry'. The biggest battle around globalised culture is between French elites and the USA in the WTO. The French are not only interested from elite perspectives of protecting their market share - they have one of the most developed film industries of the world. They are also interested in a deeper meaning of culture as ways of knowing and expression that make us distinct as human beings. We do not all feel, think, create alike. That is what cultural diversity is about.

The macro-question is what is to be done when we've finished discussing all this. The micro-question is what is to be done concretely? One is a call to action by the Emerging World Coalition on Cultural Diversity. It has come up with some principles:

• Culture is a fundamental part of human society
• Human society is diverse
• Market forces cannot ensure the creation and sustainability of cultural diversity
• Trade rules developed for goods and services are not appropriate for culture
• The adoption of policies and programmes, which support cultural diversity is fundamental to the existence of organisations involved in all aspects of creative cultural expression, including conservation, creation, production, presentation and dissemination.

This statement reflects an official notion of culture. It does not reflect local, grassroots, community cultures - the cultures of different ethnic, racial, regional groups who are the compositions of the nations of the world. But if we join in this fight as a tactical front, we have an opportunity to engage people who make power decisions about culture, and open up simultaneously another front about the kinds of cultures emanating from the grassroots, whether popular or traditional.

To understand what we can do politically about homogenisation or hybridisation, we can go back to Amilcar Cabral, perhaps the only one to really put culture at the heart of the anti-colonial struggle. He wrote in 'History, Culture and National Liberation,' "History teaches us that certain circumstances make it very easy for foreign people to impose their domination, but history also teaches us that no matter what the material aspects of that domination it can only be preserved by a permanent and organised control of the dominated peoples' cultural life. Otherwise it cannot be definitively implanted without killing a significant part of the population". Or, in another quote, "The community's need to protect its symbols does not exclude the possibility of absorbing and integrating external elements. These may be considered alien for a certain time but in the long run they may become part of a new cultural matrix that is open to the outside world even while the community alertly preserves its own values for the survival of its own identity".

Amy Harwood, who is Jewish-American, works on a project at the Smithsonian Institute on the issue of Palestinians and Jews. She wrote that her article, 'Israeli Mediterranean Music: Straddling Disputed Territories', "explores hybridity as a process by which musicians combine pre-existing and often seemingly disparate genres in their creative practice. For musicians, this hybrid composition involving their choice of musical forms and poetic lyrics is a conscious strategic act". These societies are not mere victims, inanimate objects just waiting to be filled up with Americanised global culture. With their very being, they transmit from one generation to the next who they think they are and what they think they should value. This is a basic human circumstance.

One can romanticise this, particularly in the face of the overwhelming power of capitalist culture and consumer process. So we must be careful. But I think a materialist response is along the following lines. Homogenisation does take place. We can see how American culture is engulfing other cultures, appropriating and eroding traditions at grassroots level as well as among higher classes. But we are talking about social relations. People do have agency, are self-determined to the best of their ability. They try to preserve some sense of themselves even if it has to be expressed in a new form, a new rhythm or a new dance. Amilcar Cabral is telling us that, short of outright genocide, people will work with that.

We are concerned with synthetic views of the world, finding the characteristic issues and seeing how they add up to systemic notions of power, how they feed into the foundational elements of the system. Yew Street in Washington is an old 'negro' area of downtown culture. Today the young people spill out of the joints onto the sidewalks. No alcohol but Slam poets. They are this generation's expression of an inherent human capacity that goes back to the beginning of humankind. Our task is to recognise the importance of that and help foster a broader perspective of where it fits into the picture of power. We should not romanticise it as an abstract as everybody has the right to say and be who they are. Our task is to recognise that this is the generation that is coming and will inherit the positions that we have, exhibiting these forms of culture.

From a policy or political organising point of view, what do we do with it? First, we must help them understand the system in which they are operating, the production-economic system. Youth always has a notion of its own invincibility. But they don't understand the whole world and we have a responsibility to engage them critically. We must recognise the creativity in Hip-Hop, which has had such a resonance around the world, across cultures. One might call it an Americanisation because it started in the USA with Black and Puerto Rican youngsters. But that is a misnomer. It is a universal power that is now owned by youth all around the world. But we also have to demarcate with them the misogyny, the homophobia, the violence, and the vulgarity. Our tendency as parents or on the Left is to say that it is an alienation, totally diverted from what the real world is. No. Think back to the youth that we went through.

As I move around the world on projects with grassroots cultural communities in Brazil, Cuba, South Africa, China, people are looking for threats from Americanised global culture and asking how do they tap into their local 'traditions' or cultures. In South Africa, there is a project called, 'Integration of Indigenous Knowledge Systems into the Transformation Process of South Africa'. It has a broader sense of culture beyond music and art. In a country of 45 million, there are 20,000 doctors of western medicine and 300,000 traditional healers, Sangomas. The intellectual and political struggle is to discuss what they have to offer for social health. The most conscious among them have said they will make an alignment with doctors who also do not have all the answers to human health. If we are going to fight this globalised culture, we fight it with what people have, in struggle with them, not as a nice romantic image but about what does and what does not fit.

UNESCO is philosophically advanced compared to other bodies with regards to culture transnationally. In Western society, property rights are concentrated in the individual. Even the corporation in the USA is incorporated as an 'individual'. Western companies are engaged in bio-piracy. They will extract information from Sangomas and then copyright it. But in South Africa and Brazil there is a precedent in copyright law, which says that this is knowledge that belongs to the community. If there is remuneration, it should go to the community, not the individual. We do not know if this will work in practice. These are the kinds of issues we must engage in at the level of policy and politics.

Discussion

Part of the debate focused on the notion and worth of tradition. Ari Sitas felt that there is a danger that globalisation is killing his authentic voice and all that is left is his ability to manipulate and show his agency in reaction to it. He questioned whether there really is a dialogue or dialectic.

James Early replied that many have described the killing of that voice, and the result is a call for dialogue. It is a power relationship. Culture is about the power of definition. What will I be called? How will I see the world? What is my epistemology, my ways of knowing, my ways of doing? There has always been a struggle in human history about this. Now we are looking at it in the context of the trans-nationalisation of capital, a social relationship facilitated by the advance in technology. Globalisation is not going to disappear, even though it is only 10 or so years old, which is a drop in the bucket of human history. We cannot put the genie back in the bottle. The question is what we do with it.

That authentic voice would change anyway, even if capitalism did not exist. No cultural form that exists has remained the same. He thought that Hein and he were both saying that we should be careful with this word 'tradition' or the notion of 'the authentic'. Culture is going to change, because of the unequal struggles between men and women, new city spaces and rural areas, whether or not capitalism ever existed. Culture has always been mediated, since it is a social phenomenon.

So we have to deal with how people are putting forth their agency to meet this oppressive power, saying, "No, you cannot move me around the chessboard of capital life. I have a mind. I have an intelligence. I have a sense-making apparatus, and I am going to do my best to engage this power with who I am rather than fill me up with who you would have me be".

The most vibrant resistance comes from indigenous peoples around the world. The UN has identified 300 to 500 million as indigenous out of the 6 billion on the planet. There is an agency in these people. They have trained themselves as autodidacts, not to demonstrate their intellectual acumen but to defend themselves. They have a new movement, and are fighting in the WTO, UNESCO, other UN human rights fora. In 2000, the World Health Organisation is organising a conference on indigenous peoples' health, on traditional healers, what they know and have to offer. UNESCO in 2000 has a conference on intellectual and cultural property rights. This is not because UNESCO and the WHO came up with these ideas but because they are being pushed to do it by indigenous peoples. They are revolutionising international law that protects the sovereignty of states. This is a very important counter-fight against the forces of globalisation from which we can get a spark of hope.

There is a way that we talk of tradition as something static and we romanticise about it. We discuss why it was functional at an earlier time and why it emerged. But it also has its own contradictions. It is never all good. Just find the women, or the coloured people, and ask them. But we do have to grapple with the tradition that expresses some core human values, that continues to find different forms. We can trace its morphology over a long period of time, but the meaning is changing with each new moment of history.

Hein Marais agreed that we have to distinguish between what is good and bad in tradition, and recognise that it is historical, constantly in flux. In South Africa there are attempts to salvage a good tradition that says, 'I am through you. I am through others', from which come solidarity, trust, collaboration and a sharing of both good and bad times. But it is a tradition, which is in tatters.

We should respect traditional forms but also be aware of the way that tradition is played out in the contest for political power. Excluded groupings in society can elevate and romanticize tradition.

In the Philippines, according to Ed de la Torre, the Left thought that it should develop an 'alternative tradition' or strengthen the 'alternative tradition' that was already there. They analysed the dominant traditions in their culture as top-down, authoritarian or elitist, including among the resistance. The alternatives seemed largely fragmented, anarchist or localist. The struggle itself had a centralised tradition and those in the underground embodied this and yet were also fighting oppression and pushing for democracy. But what was positive at one moment also bore the seeds of what was wrong in the next.

Those on the Left who fight for change pose tradition as the enemy. However, we should recognise that tradition is powerful because it is handed across generations. What is powerful about tradition is that its legitimacy is presumed, while innovation has to be argued for, as in Gramsci's 'common sense vs. good sense'. As a popular educationalist, he had argued that when participatory methods such as street theatre are the dominant mode and a lecture has to be argued for, then we will have subverted!

What does culture consist of? He suggested it is made up of little things, day-to-day habits and customs, and tacit knowledge, as well as the big symbolic events. We need both.

The crisis of political movements is reflected in the absence of songs. During the resistance in the Philippines they had very good songs. He was part of a group that recorded a series of prison songs, in the prison toilet. Their problem was they had no erotica, no songs for courtship. They realised that people make love in the struggle, sometimes even more so! But there were no revolutionary erotica. Perhaps it was because they were men, or repressed, or because being Marxist is a kind of priesthood!

However, now he doesn't know which songs to sing. In moments when the traditional shape of politics, power and markets is unclear, we experience seemingly fragmented and not quite theorised forms of culture, both in terms of music and habits. When we talk of culture transformed, we are not only talking of remembering but also creating.

James Early responded by talking of the example of Bernice Reagon Johnson who founded the Black American women's
acapella singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock. The daughter of a preacher, she became involved in the Black civil rights movement at the age of 16. She used song as a weapon and was called a 'song leader', a long tradition coming from the plantations. She and Sweet Honey take traditional songs such as 'I'm Gonna Stay on the Battlefield Until I Die' which was about going to heaven, and use them where people are not sitting in church but are fighting racism, homophobia, and so on. He has discussed with her who comes to Sweet Honey concerts and why. There are black cultural nationalists who think that white people are devils sitting next to white people. There are religious women who think it is a sin to be gay sitting next to lesbians. There are Communist Party members and US Congress people.

In January 2001, there will be a major concert in Revolution Square in Havana, Cuba, with artists like Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. They will not be making big pronouncements about the embargo. They will be there because there is a relationship between African-American culture and foundational elements of the culture of all Cubans, not just 'Afro-Cubans'. As citizens, we want to know about our familial and heritage connections. These artists from the popular culture front may not share this or that ideology but share enough about human values to give their time. We have to be careful not to raise this too high, but also not drop it too low because they are conscious people.

'Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains' is a poetic metaphor but we have to see how to extend it to people who are not in a trade union though they know that their family members worked in a mine or a factory. We tend to speak in sterile language about the class struggle or patriarchy. We need to bring artistry to the struggle, to put it into symbols that resonate in everyday lives.

Jan Nederveen Pieterse returned to the theme of homogenisation and hybridisation. He asked what exactly is 'American' about 'American culture'? Is it not a hybrid itself, diaspora cultures repackaged? As John Tomlinson has said, if this is the source of homogenisation, American culture is itself by no means homogenous.

James Early agreed that we can break 'American culture' down into its constituent elements and say that it is really made up of many other cultures. However, the USA is also the most powerful military nation in the world, with probably the biggest rate of surplus in the history of humankind and an advertising machine that is very powerful. 'American culture' is what it is at the commercial level. Meanwhile there are many good things about the citizens of the place called America, including what they have mediated through the bourgeois state apparatus called the US Congress. This is one of the contradictions which Marx wanted us to understand - that in the most developed aspects of this system we live in called capitalism will also be the tools not only of its own undoing in terms of its power, but will also set much of the basis for whatever new society, more just and possibly wholesome, might emerge.

Several younger participants raised the issue of the fight-back of the youth expressed in music such 'Rage Against the Machine'. One talked about the youth movement's rediscovery of ecstasy, meaning not necessarily the drug but the experience through dance and music. He felt it had a revolutionary result even if that was not the original intention. It brought about a 're-tribalisation' of the youth and scared the authorities. There is hardly a demonstration in the UK today, repeatedly closing down the M25 motorway around London or the financial centre of the City of London, when they do not take a sound system, he said. Another felt that some young people use the corporations to spread their own word. Others refuse to do even that. He said that there is a current of resistance that many young people want to sing and dance to.

James Early acknowledged that the youth are the coming future. However, older people have a responsibility to engage in the way that the youth name and analyse the world. He thought it important to help the youth to see that resistance has precedent in human history. Woody Guthrie's 'This land is your land. This land is my land' or 'We shall overcome' are songs expressing similar thoughts in another way in another time. We all have in our national or ethnic backgrounds such expressions of liberation.

Oppositionist behaviour is not necessarily revolutionary. It has the potential to turn into more conscious behaviour but it can be diverted. The authorities can lock up five thousand because the youth have not brought a wider frame to their parents and society at large. James Early's response to the youth was, "We did not fuck up the world. We got you here. We didn't solve all the problems you are encountering. Nor did we create them. Sometimes we didn't have the capacity to understand. Sometimes we failed to take up our responsibility. But you are not here spontaneously. You did not get here on your own but you certainly did not get here by the powers that be. We are not invested with all wisdom. You do have to challenge us. We have to figure out what is your vogue that will disappear tomorrow, like what we did before that was vogue and disappeared. We need to be careful how we use the word 'revolution'."

Hein Marais said that the excerpts he had played were not underground, and not even about resistance. They were rather about coping, the way that kids cope with their lives, have fund and express themselves artistically. He does not pretend this music will change the world, but wants to respect the kind of innovation, the messing with the system, that does occur.

He ended by quoted Appadurai from his 1996 book 'Modernity at Large' which he likes for the way it gives us some tools to understand how cultures becomes a functioning part of politics. Appadurai points out that the imagination is a social practice, not just something which happens in the skull.

"No longer mere fantasy, opium for the masses whose work should be elsewhere. No longer simple escape from a world defined principally by more concrete purposes and structures. No longer elite pastime, thus not relevant to the lives of ordinary people. And no longer mere contemplation, irrelevant for new forms of desire and subjectivity. The imagination becomes an organised field of social practices, a form of work in the sense of both labour and culturally organised practice and a form of negotiation between sites of agency - us as individuals and as collectives - and the globally defined fields of possibility that we have to live, operate and survive in."

For Hein Marais, this expresses what the kids who are nuts about Kwaito are trying to do. He is not saying the way they are doing it is right but they are doing it. Or the Junglists, Hip-Hop, etc. Tupac is not just a gangster rapper. He has some of the most incredible love-songs. We should not romanticise it, but they are dealing with life, and if we want to deal with them, then we have to understand their forms.

On a factual note, one participant disagreed with Hein Marais that the Islamic Front for Salvation in Algeria tolerates Rai music. She said that during 1993-98 they killed many Rai musicians and others were forced into exile in France. Kids who listened to Rai were also killed. Rai was not born recently. She has records going back thirty years. It was originally sung by women and prostitutes and was not very popular. But at some point it was recreated by youth as a reaction to government. The bigots and extreme right are totally opposed to it. Hein said that his source was the 'Rough Guide to World Music' and he was willing to stand corrected.