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Thursday, May 14, 2009
Norwegian and Nigerian Woods: Keziah Jones and the Beatles
At the beginning of the title song of Keziah Jones’ masterpiece Nigerian Wood, an Oxbridgy voice tells us we are about to hear “African music research, long playing record, side two,” and that we’ll open up with a “a dance song with a moral.” The joke is, of course, that we are about to hear a CD of modern dance music produced by an African who delivers it to us himself, ostensibly unshepherded by any form of ethnographic mediation. And sampling Dr. Oxbridge (as he was in the act of sampling some tribal savages dancing and howling) is the postcolonial turnabout move par excellence, an assertion of cultural self-possession via the rhetoric of signifyin’ mimicry. But since Bhabha and Gates are no longer as cutting edge as they once were, I’m less interested in the fact of signifyin’ mimicry than I am in what is being signified, and in Jones’ own commentary on what he’s doing. After all, while he is clearly mocking the speaker, Dr. Oxbridge’s statement is also completely true on the most basic literal level: this is dance music, become the vehicle for social commentary. But in this case, its commentary is addressed to exactly this process, to the ways that Jones’ own music functions as a cultural commodity, and about the ways that the production of cultural texts (like this very song) gets commodified and marketed.
“You want the best Mahogany...Designed to keep you company Memories...Through all safari memories...You want the best Mahogany”
Those are the opening lines. Most obviously it’s a play on “Norwegian Wood,” a song you may have heard by some band from Liverpool, one of the most important ports of origin where 19th century slave ships and capital set sail for West Africa. But the “wood” which Jones is singing about isn’t merely a particular commodity that comes from Africa. Instead, the fact that the album is itself named “Nigerian Wood” makes these references intensely self-referential: like its creator, nee Olufemi Sanyaolu of Nigeria, now Keziah Jones of London, the album is itself a commodity come from Africa to England, and a commodity whose value derives, in part, from exactly the manner in which it has been set into circulation as a thing from elsewhere, a piece of “world music” (the Beatles, of course, were not from this world). Just as commodities acquire value by being transported from a place where they are plentiful/unwanted to a place where they are rare/desirable, so too does “world music” attach value to music (like Jones’) in places where it is desirable as a function of its rarity.
“Oh colonies...Guess what we brought from the colonies Ebony....No Ivory, just Ebony...Oh, Mahogany... Bone is from China [indecipherable] Guess what we brought from the colonies”
Keziah Jones understands this, I think, or at least his song acts like he does. And since the African-ness of black music has so often been treated as a function of its “hot” sexuality (see, for example, this Radano piece Wayne turned me on to), it is hardly surprising that his references to Nigerian “Wood” are exactly as hyper-sexualized as African music is 
constantly taken to be (albeit knowingly). He’s good at living up to that particular expectation; as a performer known for his impressively shirtless physique (as in this youtube clip) I think we are safe in assuming that when he sings lines like “Open those gates for ebony,” “Gotta have wood that’s good,” and “Nigerian timber is what you need,” he is pretty much talking about his penis. Not to point too fine a point on it. Or, rather, an allusion to the historical process by which African bodies were converted into global commodities and sold has become a kind of metaphor for the thing he is now doing: transforming his body into a commodity and selling it. And like Dr. Oxbridge, I think, what is most interesting about it all is that it’s both intensely ironic and completely sincere, both a self-conscious highlighting of the desire to commodify cultural difference and, simultaneously, a full voiced performance of that desire.
“Nigerian Wood Beatles never understood Gotta have wood that’s good, yeah For Nigerian Wood”
I wonder what he thinks the Beatles never understood. Other than the sly pun on wood-boring beetles, perhaps the fact that “Norwegian Wood” was itself built on an Irish fiddle melody even has something to do with it, as an example of the way popular music appeals to racializations we might not even register as such, melodies and instrumental arrangements that we feel as having particular racial or national connotations, but which we then studiously unspeak. I’m thinking of the way “Norwegian Wood” feels Irish without having to admit that it is, or the way a particular melody can sound “oriental” or “tribal” or “hillbilly” without having to explicitly admit that that’s what it’s doing. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course; popular music is all about stealing from and then forgetting your sources, even if copyright lawyers might remember to forget that as well. And there’s no reason, necessarily, why Lennon had to acknowledge the implicit Irishness of that kind of melody, no reason why he had to make the song about that. I like the fact that it’s a song about failing to get laid and then burning down the house of the “bird” in question, and I’m not asking it to be a different song than that.
“Oak is amazing, Teak is unique Nigerian Timber is what you need Oak is amazing, Teak is unique Nigerian Timber is what you need”
But while the Beatles were nowhere near as crass as, say, Led Zeppelin in stealing from Black American musicians – nor anything like as derivative of their source texts anyway – there is still a kind of amnesia about those sources that runs through their music, and through rock n’ roll in general, and maybe this is what makes Jones’ lyrics what they are. It’s sort of emblematic that the very word went from being a slang term for sex affiliated with “race” music to being a de-sexualized and de-racialized formal category, pretty much by virtue of leaving the hands of the black musians who coined it and becoming the provenance of white “Rockers.” Plus, did the Beatles ever really write about sex? They wrote about it all the time, in a way, but rarely admitted it; “She was just seventeen, and you know what I mean,” for example, is an exemplary early lyric, but that sort of coy unspoken reference is far more typical than anything as straightforward as Nigerian Wood. Most of the time it wasn’t sex, but “love,” and when it wasn’t that airy reference to the unspeakable, it was speaking as unspeakable, sex as obscenity (as when they chant “tit-tit-tit” in “Girl” or use obscure Liverpudlian slang like “for a fish and finger pie” in “Penny Lane”).
“I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me She showed me her room, isn’t it good, Norwegian Wood”
It would be easy, too, to be flip and note how intensely “white” a song is that that transfers desire for sex into a zest for interior decorating. And once you start down this path, it’s hard to stop: go ahead, John Lennon, sleep in the bath, try to scrape the sex off that song. But it’s also hard not to notice, as you do it, that the singer’s inability to act on his desires – sublating them into violence – nicely rhymes with the ostentatious over-euphemism of the lyrics themselves. And maybe that’s Lennon’s point. Norwegian “Wood” indeed…
Comments
’Plus, did the Beatles ever really write about sex?’
‘Why Don’t we Do It In The Road?’
The druggy shag of ‘Come Together’?
I asked it as a genuine question, actually—guessing, too, that you would be the first commenter!—but does “Why don’t we do it in the road” really disprove my hypothesis? Wasn’t the point just to write as dirty a blues as possible? (I seem to recall Paul McCartney’s ambition being something to that effect). And the wikipedia gives me this quote on the song’s origins:
“A male [monkey] just hopped on the back of this female and gave her one, as they say in the vernacular. Within two or three seconds he hopped off again and looked around as if to say, ‘It wasn’t me,’ and she looked around as if there’d been some mild disturbance ... And I thought ... that’s how simple the act of procreation is ... We have horrendous problems with it, and yet animals don’t.”
The point being that it isn’t about sex, but about the problems we humans have with sex, using inhibitions to sex as a signifier of humanity’s fallen status in a kind of neo-romanticist vein. But it’s not about sex as such. I’m open to being corrected wrt to the Beatles (this was really a post about Jones) but it seems like their songs are about inhibition, not the thing being inhibited.
”...it seems like their songs are about inhibition, not the thing being inhibited.”
This is intriguing; I’m thinking about it. It would certainly explain why I like the Beatles so much. (Would also put them in the Grand Tradition of English Art).
(Apologies, incidentally, for complete lack of engagement with the substative portion of this post; don’t know enough about Jones ... will rectify that situation).
I’m afraid I don’t have any direct comment either, Aaron, but I have some background suggestions. Are you familiar with John Storm Roberts, Black Music of Two Worlds (1998)? It’s about musical intercourse between Africa and the Americas (North, South, Caribbean) and discusses how African-influenced music from the new world made it back to Africa and thereby had an reflexive impact (e.g. Cuban records in West Africa in the 50’s). Then there’s John Collins, West African Pop Roots (1992), which has some of that Americas to Africa reflex, but also European brass bands direct to Africa & a stunning photo on p. 50 in which we see two Ghanian mistrels from 1923 in black-face make-up.
Finally, a different take on “wood” from a work-song taken down in Virginia in the 1850s:
A col’ frosty mo’nin’
De niggers feelin’ good
Take yo’ ax upon yo’ shoulder
Nigger, talk to de wood.
Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1977), p. 7.
Adam, you may actually be able to get Keziah’s cd’s; he’s irritatingly difficult to get your hands on this side of the pond. Luckily, the internet has made all spaces one, but otherwise I never would have even heard of him.
Thanks for those citations Bill; I haven’t seen the Roberts book, but it looks like good summer reading. In an alternate universe, I’d be dissertating on this stuff, but alas… Love that work song, too, though for different reasons (I think) than Keziah’s.
OK: I got the album and have listened to it a couple of times. It’s a fun, and often joyful, text, but I’m trying to work out if its more than that, for all that it does (as you note) a number of interesting things with cultural appropriation and reappropriation. It’s certainly cool, and a little distanicating for a white Englishman (not a bad thing), to have such a Lagos-centric perspective on things.
I daresay I need to listen to it more, but I’m not sure I see the ‘masterpiece’ tag. It’s very pleasant listening, in a kind-of late 1970s, Herbie-Hancock jazz-blues-jam sort of way. But although it’s rhythmically clearly very complex (more so than the Beatles ever managed, with Ringo bashing solidly away in the background) its melodically and harmonically pretty unadventurous, and the lyrics, whilst interesting, are a bit 2-D. So ‘Nigerian Wood’: that’s a song that, at its heart, says that sex is fun, fun, fun. ‘Norwegian Wood’, on the other hand, and I think more interestingly, says that sometimes sex, though compelling, is guilty and miserable and complicated.
Well, I may have been a bit profligate with my “masterpiece,” though if the Beatles are the standard, woe to anyone else! Or maybe I wasn’t; three literary critics, five opinions, right? Anyway, the question of whether or not it’s a masterpiece is so contingent on what we mean by that term that it’s probably not the best way to approach it. And the more I think about it – and thanks for forcing me to – the less I’m satisfied with the Beatles=inhibition, Keziah=sex is good distinction.
So let me just take another crack at what impresses me about this album. For one thing, “Lagos-centric” seems a step in the right direction, but maybe a step too far: the point of the Beatles reference, as I take it, is to emphasize something about being black in the Union Jack, so to speak, something like the “peculiar sensation” (as DuBois had it) of being two things at once. The Lagos of this album is the Lagos of an emigrant and the Britain that of an immigrant, and the lyrics work because they try to make sense of this fact.
But that isn’t the interesting thing itself; to observe that he’s a hybrid subject or that the album is a form of signifyin’ speech doesn’t get us very far, and – I would even say – illustrates some of the limitations on those kinds of critical terms. The point is not that he’s a de-stabilizing presence within the metropole or that his African-ness and British-ness have merged to form some new identity that’s neither, but precisely the opposite: his way of being British is fully compatible with being African too, and vice versa. It isn’t the peculiar sensation of looking at yourself through the eyes of another, but the parallax of two eyes united. The Beatles are fully his ancestor, and Lagos is fully part of what Liverpool is (its history as a port of origin for slave ships and so forth). It’s a very specifically anti-nationalist sentiment, the king of good globalization that motivates the best ideals of “world” music.
For example, in the Beatles song, the Norwegian-ness of the wood indexes the way its value as a commodity is linked to its place of origin; the answer to “isn’t it good” is yes because it marks a kind of class taste distingished from use value. A pretty basic marxish reading, but I think the Beatles song does contain the connotation (especially because of the “had a girl; she once had me” jokes): perhaps she’s turned him down because he has responded inappropriately to her gestures of class taste (do we think John Lennon praised her taste?), but at the very least, bourgeois values are somehow, elusively, to blame for the song’s sexual frustration, which seems a very typical Beatle-ish sentiment to me.
Maybe that’s an overly close reading, but in any case, the point for me is that Jones’ response is to skew the experience in a completely different direction: instead of taste for commodities being the determinant of social class (with frustrating results), he is the commodity in question, not only metaphorically as a descendent of the people who were transformed into human commodities (and socially marked as part of that diaspora) but he is, also, a purveyor of “world music,” a taste for which is itself a certain kind of marker of bourgeois status. I can imagine a version of Norwegian Wood where, instead of the fine wall panelling or whatever it is, she shows him her shelf full of Putamayo cds.
In other words, it isn’t simply that “sex is fun, fun, fun”; sex is the connection that doesn’t obtain in Norwegian Wood but the fact that it does in Nigerian Wood is interesting for reasons that don’t only have to do with sex itself (which wasn’t exactly what I was saying before, but oh well).
Hmmmm--I find that remark about “2D lyrics” very typical of certain debates. It seems to me that the difference here (Roberts/Bady) has something to do with “where” we locate complexity when we do close readings. [Warning: what follows may well travesty the pov of those involved in this thread. Hence, I switch to generic names...]
Critic A sees “The Beatles” as authors in a way that he doesn’t see Jones: complexity, and therefore merit, lies in the portrayal of rich states of consciousness, states that ultimately derive from the author in question. Critic B gives us a cultural-studies version of complexity, where it lies in relations between tropes, signifying and resignifying. This is “depth” versus “surface” compexity, if you will.....
My point is that with “surface” complexity, it’s much easier to resort to a “not really there” rebuttal: critic A can assert that critic B finds, invents the complexity, since the artist shows no interest in the sort of complexity that interests critic A and must therefore be just interested in simple stuff, that is, in hot dance tracks.
I get this “not really there” rebuttal from my students re. Af-Am texts on occasion. If all the words are simple, the text must be simple too! they say, more or less....
capcha: “freedom89”! Little known, truly world-historical George Michael deep cut?
I take your point, nick; although I don’t really recognise either Aaron or myself as critics A, B. Nor would I say the Jones text is less complex, qua text, than the Beatles. These are texts focused on different things. Certainly there’s a larger debate to be had about the elevation of ‘complexity’ in debates of critical value, especially the older ‘Is Keats a better poet than Bob Dylan?’ iteration of that debate. Personally I think ‘complexity’ in this context is pretty much an empty signifier (I was going to say ‘weasel word’, but don’t want to be weaselist).
‘freedom’: you see George Michael, I see Mel Gibson in a kilt bellowing at the top of his voice. Funny thing, cultural resonance.
Aaron: I agree with, at a rough estimate, 85% of your latest comment. Not sure about this:
the answer to “isn’t it good” is yes because it marks a kind of class taste distingished from use value. A pretty basic marxish reading, but I think the Beatles song does contain the connotation (especially because of the “had a girl; she once had me” jokes): perhaps she’s turned him down because he has responded inappropriately to her gestures of class taste (do we think John Lennon praised her taste?), but at the very least, bourgeois values are somehow, elusively, to blame for the song’s sexual frustration, which seems a very typical Beatle-ish sentiment to me.
‘Norwegian Wood’ is, like ‘She’s Leaving Home’ (and unlike ‘Nigerian Wood’), one of the Beatles’ exercises in short-story-in-song form. He has extra marital relations with the girl, in her chi-chi flat; but she has to go to work the next day and makes him sleep in the bath. In retaliation he sets fire to the flat. End of song. That’s almost too obvious a fable of working-class masculinist ressentiment, don’t you think?
Adam--my joke (a bad one, as is required by the norms of captcha humour) was meant to resonate with the following timeless classic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTugeLRZ6GI
“I don’t belong to you and you don’t belong to me...”
“built 11”, on the other hand, I can’t do a damn thing with....