Identity and Identification

Music-making and identification are appropriately studied together. Music-making is a "technology of self,"³³ whereby the self is produced as an object in the world. It is a practice of self-constitution, one that forces recognition of, and reflection on, both the inside and outside worlds. Music is a mirror, and new musics produce new views of the self. Furthermore, music-making and identification are connected by performance. As we make æsthetic choices regarding the music we make and listen to, we are making a decision of affiliation. In the performing of an identity, the ego both showcases itself and subordinates itself to a group. Music-making, too, involves this constant commute between individuation and affiliation. Furthermore, group identification and musical performance serve the same end: Groups are formed through performance. In societies community solidarity often needs reinforcement, and group performance can achieve that. Said another way: getting together encourages playing together; playing together occasions getting together.

Identification, when seen as a discursive process, is an auto-developmental process, where the process itself develops and changes methods. Because this identification does not draw on something natural or essential, identification is a process of creation and continual re-creation, and identity becomes the creative, manufactured object. Over time the desired identity-image, the "who-I-want-to-be" object, changes. Different interests are served by different identities, thus group identity may be a fiercely contested site. As a bulwark against intrusion from competing, excluded identity-images, the excess beyond the borders, claims of authenticity are made, but are only fleetingly reliable. Whichever voice or vision is most passionately presented, most cleverly entered into the cultural debate, and most a propos the short-term needs of the people will, temporarily, win out. No identity-image is a perfect fit, however. The universal incorporation promised by identity-images is a fantasy. Identity becomes a strategy.

Since identification is a strategic process, it focuses our analysis on the becoming rather than on the being. The task is then to witness this dressing up, as it were, watch as this hat, that cape, these breeches and those boots -- each item chosen from a different wardrobe, possibly -- are donned to effect a particular image. The next step is to follow the subject and observe what means are employed to express or enunciate the chosen identity. Does our subject attend social events, like dances and luncheons? Does s/he take roles in the theatre, or appear on television? Does s/he teach a class or lead a band? As we note our subject's movements, we should observe the interactions with others. In this way we may begin to speculate on why that particular image was chosen. This choice may make more sense even after the subject's appearance has been noticeably remade, after the breeches, say, have been exchanged for a dress.

This characterization of identification as a dress-up process points to its playful aspects. "Precisely because identities are constructed within, not outside, discourse, we need to understand them as produced in specific historical and institutional sites within specific discursive formations and practices, by specific enunciative strategies."³⁴ This complex web of actions and reactions involves deft play as the frameworks themselves within which identities are constructed shift. Furthermore, the jostling of competing identity-images, each set off from the next through the play of différance -- the playful marking of alliances and oppositions as well as the deference to recognized hierarchies -- pushes the whole process of identification onto a playing field, or a stage. Each match or performance constitutes an effort to temporarily resolve difference and present a unified, collective, homogeneous Self. The curtain or final whistle is the naturalized closure to this tussle over a fictionalized ontology, an artifice to achieve temporary consensus. As the participants walk off, they acknowledge amongst themselves with furtive glances the excluded, "out-determined" other, looming in the wings and on the sidelines for another sortie.

The problem with the dress-up metaphor is that in identification the authoring act is performed by multiple individuals, variously aligned and cognizant of one another. There is no single fountainhead. Some degree of collective agreement or mutual recognition is necessary. It is similar to Michael Chekhov's notion of "atmosphere," the feelings which belong to no individual actor, but to the performance itself. An example is the street accident, where a definite and particular atmosphere is generated. The emotions of individuals in the crowd, the policemen, the paramedics, the victims and those at fault will all contribute to the catastrophe's own palpable atmosphere. The atmosphere is to Chekhov the best director, because it influences people to act in ways that no human director could so persuasively suggest.³⁵ Likewise, with identification the creative power lies with many, and it is largely unorchestrated. The resulting atmosphere will for a time move the actors of this community theatre to imagine themselves to be part of some determinative whole. Their actions, thoughts, speech acts and creative energies -- in short, their performances -- will issue from their perceived role in this whole. Again, like a particular identity-image, an atmosphere is never stable, but constantly in formation, blown about by new fronts, the fickle winds of prevailing political change.

Stuart Hall argues that, "all identities operate through exclusion, through the discursive construction of a constitutive outside and the production of abjected and marginalized subjects, apparently outside the field of the symbolic, the representable . . . which then returns to trouble and unsettle the foreclosures which we prematurely call 'identities'."³⁶ The lacunae I espy in this theorization are the following: Firstly, it promotes a reverse-powered process of identification, in which the subjects back into an identity, as it were, involved in an elimination-identification, where the negative space is prioritized over the positive space. It allows only for an identification that must first locate and identify the other, before proceeding to define the self in relation to the other; it does not permit an identification whose "constitutive outside" is a by-product of self-representation. Secondly, I believe the "abjected and marginalized subjects" must be within the representable in order to be produced. I would go so far as to say that they may be nothing more than symbols, symbols of that in the spectral interior of the self which is repressed -- the landscape of denial. This is where my two points merge: the constitutive outside of excluded, symbolicized others is the offspring of identification, not the reverse.

I argue these points because they are important in the case of the Congo. In my reading of the creation of a new genre of music, I see a shift in the process of identification. The strategy becomes an inclusive one, so that as many people as possible are drawn into the community. The outside shrinks as more people identify with the image of Congolese-ness as manufactured by Rumba Lingala. The borders of this identity are permeable and so require a purposeful withdrawing by individuals in order to exclude themselves and traverse the outer realm. This could have been achieved by allying with and degrading everything save Europeans and their artistic culture. Furthermore, in the 1940s and 1950s, the "abjected" others of the Congolese identity, primarily the colonizers, are not passive, victimized by a change in Congolese self-definition. Rather, they constitute themselves as outsiders, as much as they are excluded by the insiders.

The marginalized colonizers are fully, if elliptically, represented in Rumba Lingala in the lyrics, the European instrumentation, and the hybrid musical figurations, structure, and style. Moreover, the symbolized other, the oppressor within the self, can be seen in the dominating, hegemonic sound that develops in Rumba Lingala. After independence, the commercialization of Congolese music forced bands to imitate each other, and a typical sound emerged, confining innovation within narrow limits. The two chief schools of the 1950s and 1960s, African Jazz of Grand Kallé and O.K. Jazz of Franco, trained scores of musicians and influenced innumerable others, some of whom started their own bands, such as Tabu Ley Rochereau, Dr. Nico, Jeannot Bombenga, Kiamuangana Matete alias Verckys, Vicky Longomba, Mose Se Sengo alias Fan Fan, Shaba Kahamba, and Siongo Bavon Marie-Marie. It was not until the very end of the 1960s that a third sound emerged. This period could be called the "garage rock" era of Congolese music, when teenagers broke the mold of their predecessors.³⁷ Bands like Thu-Zaïna and then Zaïko Langa-Langa dispensed with the lavish sound of the big bands, replacing nearly every instrument with an electric guitar. This new style caught on and became the third major influence on bands of the last 30 years. Before independence, however, the genre of Rumba Lingala was still coalescing, full of innovation. The Latin-influenced music did, nevertheless, push out competing styles, such as fanfares, polkas, likembe-based maringas (these terms will be explained in chapter four), and the Katanga sound of Jean Bosco Mwenda wa Bayeke and Losta Abelo.

Simon Frith has pointed out that much musical analysis approaches questions of identity with the assumption that artistic expressions flow from social identity, an identity often cast in essentialist terms.³⁸ He finds the challenge to be how music can produce a people, create and construct their experience. I see the two approaches to be two halves of the same whole; both must be employed to fully understand the cycle of cause and effect that binds art and society. This study will attempt to approach Rumba Lingala and Congolese society from both sides.

Super-, Sub- and Intercultures

Mark Slobin’s framework of superculture, subculture and interculture may prove useful for grappling with the forces at work in the production of Rumba Lingala and trying to pin them down for taxonomic analysis, before letting them go again. Supercultures are composed of three main components, as regards music: an industry, including its techno-, finance- and mediascapes; the institutionalized rules and venues of the structural entity, be it state, province, clan, etc.; and the shadowy, yet more insidious tentacles of ideology intertwined into everyday activities as “shared assumptions.”³⁹ What I find appealing about the notion of superculture is that in the colonial context we clearly see two giant forces competing. It may be reductive to interpret the overarching battle as being between just two forces, European and African, but in looking for an incontrovertible and distinguishing feature to separate them, I can think of no other more so. As “everyday” entities, referring to Erving Goffman’s approach to examining the forces that shape our lives, African and European meet Slobin’s requisitely sketchy pre-conditions. Both express and impress upon people a non-monolithic, non-uniform, dominating and consciousness-forming ideology that is at times internally contradictory and contrapuntal (i.e., oppositions are composed into this “cultural fugue,” allowing for dissonance and harmony).⁴⁰

Slobin’s analysis of the notion of subculture is a titration of sorts -- an experiment to determine which and how much of a variety of factors, such as ethnicity, class, politics, history and heredity affect the production and appreciation of music. What he leaves us with are more anti-results than conclusions. The crucial feature of the concept is that subcultures are far from tightly bounded entities, but are constituted by webs of affiliation, partially voluntary and partially super-mandated, sometimes visibly, other times not. I find the nebulosity of this analytical perspective to be one of its credentials; its interactive nature, which complicates analysis and discourse, would seem to reflect the lived experience of Victor Turner’s communitas, “a socially sanctioned feeling of oneness that both affirms and erases everyday boundaries.”⁴¹ We connect with a subculture to submit to and be subsumed by a larger, social whole, yet the personal is defined and projected onto the whole.

Subcultures are intrinsically performative, circumscribing identity-determinative choices, affinities and belonging, making the perspective doubly appropriate for ethnomusicological analysis. Everyday we alter ourselves, and music plays a role in this performance, larger perhaps in some societies than others. Rumba Lingala was a subcultural voice whose æsthetic appeal was the source of its power: It drew people in, created a sense of belonging, encouraged new affiliations, and spoke for a growing sector of Congolese society. Did it pass from status of subculture to superculture when it became the dominant musical genre? The answer seems to be yes, it did, begging the questions why and how. Locating the subcultures within, intersecting and peripheral to Rumba Lingala is another important challenge.

Lastly Slobin addresses interculture, of which he finds three types -- industrial, diasporic and affinity. No easier to define, these are the forces that work across boundaries and interface with hegemonic discourses. The subtype industrial group includes the “big-guy-on-the-block” record companies that penetrate local music scenes the world over and control to varying degrees the production, reproduction and commodification of popular musics. This kind of interculture played a mammoth role in the development of Rumba Lingala, as Greek businessmen established the recording industry in the Congo. The diasporic interculture refers to mobile communities, linkages established between subcultures and supercultures across national boundaries. In the context examined in the present study, a particularly important interculture existed in the settlements of West Africans and Caribbeans as laborers and soldiers in cities such as Matadi, Boma, Léopoldville and Brazzaville. They brought with them highlife, palm-wine guitar, and other musical styles that proved formative in the milieux from which Rumba Lingala sprang. Affinity intercultures are the connexions of choice that musicians and audiences establish to learn from one another’s music across national boundaries. The most important affinity interculture in this case would be the circulation of Cuban records throughout the Congo and the resultant imitation of, particularly, the son montuno.⁴² I would also include as both diasporic and affinity intercultures the mixing of ethnically specific musical styles in the urban environments, to where people from all over the Congo region migrated. They carried music with them in both directions.

Slobin's "cultures" will prove useful as this study proceeds, not only for their suggestion of a model of explicit, structural viability, but also for an implicit one. The blurriness of the different "cultures" allows for multiple analytic strategies that can move across planes and up and down through levels of activity and energy.

* * * * *

In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon presents a model of the revolutionary arts in a colonial setting.⁴³ In this model the arts proceed from contact with the colonizer’s arts, to the imposition of these forms and demise of traditional forms, to the rediscovery of tradition and eventual demise of the imitated forms. The interaction between colonial and indigenous musics in the Congolese context could be seen to have followed this course: Local, ethnically specific musical styles encountered European religious and military genres and, later, Latin popular musics; musicians opened to these influences and imitated them, while discarding local musics; they rediscovered what had been lost; and eventually purged the colonizer and his music. But this scheme is far from complex enough to understand what went on. Instead, we need to inspect the syncretisms. It would be more appropriate to view the colonizer’s music on the one hand and the local styles on the other as converging and confluent tributaries that together with others created a river (a music that one day would become the mainstream). Like all rivers, it could not possibly split downstream into branches containing the same waters as the constituent tributaries; they forever contain one another.

The river does not look the same in all places. It is swollen in some, meager in others. To me what occurs after Latin music becomes popular is the most crucial. When the son montuno, rumba and bolero join this swiftly flowing river, the Congo River, it floods, and the alluvium left behind fertilizes both banks for revolution. Artists in Brazzaville and Kinshasa embrace these familiar forms and give birth to Rumba Lingala, the sound that signals the demise of colonialism and the birth of a new nation.