Notes
Field research for this chapter was carried out in Jajouka and northern Morocco in the summers of 1982 and 1983, as part of the production and distribution of the film The Master Musicians of Jahjouka. Subsequent research was carried out during the group’s 1995 tour of North America. This work developed from an excerpt of a larger presentation made at Harvard University in fall 1995. An earlier version of this chapter was delivered at the Colloquium on the Politics of Culture in Arab Societies in an Era of Globalization, held at Princeton University in spring 1997. I am grateful for the comments of many people who have heard and read this work, particularly Walter Armbrust, Virginia Danielson, Abdelhai Diouri, and Kay Shelemay.
1. When I was in Jajouka in 1982, however, several members of the older generation of musicians were living off their pensions from the post-independence Royal Armed Forces, or off remittances from their sons currently in the army.
2. Popular musicians who enter the world-music market, such as King Sunny Adé or Salif Keita, often have considerable prominence in their own countries. Thus the obscurity principle put forward here is not invariable—but it is strong. For instance, the most striking counterexample is, to all appearances, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the late qawwali singer, who was much in demand for both sacred and secular performances in his native Pakistan and for concerts and recording dates abroad. Despite the mystical, religious origins of his repertory, Nusrat was willing to collaborate with Western popular musicians like Peter Gabriel, Ry Cooder, and Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, and also to allow his music to be used in such violent films as Dead Man Walking and Natural Born Killers. As Richard Murphy notes in this volume (chap. 9), Nusrat eventually became the highest-paid performer in Pakistan, but Hiromi Lorraine Sakata (pers. com.) points out that Nusrat was for many years the victim of the same khandani snobbery that Murphy discusses. Only later in his career, after his success in Europe and America, did he achieve recognition at home.
3. To Master, A Long Goodnight: The Story of Uncle Tom, a Historical Narrative (New York: Creative Age Press, 1946). At this writing, I have been unable to find any information about A History of Slavery in Canada. It may never have been published, or it may be a joke.
4. According to Abdelhai Diouri (pers. com.), it is not uncommon for musicians in religious associations to deny that their music is used for trance.
5. As Burroughs’s biographer, Ted Morgan, points out, The Ticket That Exploded uses autobiographical experiences (including visits to Jajouka) that were modified according to his readings in science fiction and “filtered through his various preoccupations, such as the Mayan civilization, scientology, and a Reichian view of sex” (Morgan 1988, 422). The view through these filters may be distorted, but at the same time the book provides testimony to Burroughs’s acute powers of observation.
6. For a more extensive description of these events, see Taylor 1997, 2.
7. For example, my first set of field recordings was published during the same period under the title Moroccan Folk Music, a name that was neither informative nor accurate. That it was not of my own choosing does not make the title any less embarrassing.
8. Many villagers are themselves enthusiastic smokers of kif, a mixture of marijuana and strong tobacco, which is no more (and no less) of a drug for them than caffeine and nicotine are for Americans. Indeed, the kif pouch of Berdouz, the musicians’ lead drummer and master of ceremonies, was used as the centerfold in High Times magazine in the early 1970s, and the village was written up again in the magazine in 1996. The Moroccan government takes a different view, however, thanks to pressure from the United Nations and the United States and to its own interest in maximizing revenue from the state tobacco monopoly. When I worked with Michael Mendizza on the film The Master Musicians of Jahjouka, we were obliged to avoid any reference to or image of kif-smoking. The musicians also adhere to this line for official external consumption: in November 1995 Bachir Attar told Reuters World Service, “We do a song about this. ‘Brian Jones, in Joujouka, very stoned.’ It not mean stoned with drugs. Stoned with music.”
9. The name Joujouka has been borrowed by other performers with no direct connection to the village, including a Japanese Techno duo in Tokyo.
10. The Straits Times of Singapore used the term “jajouka” (lowercase) as a synonym for trance music. As it turns out, the article was plagiarized from the New York Times, but that only reinforces the generic use of the term, detached from its specific origin. Indeed, two writers for the New York Times, Jon Pareles and Neil Straus, and Paul D. Miller of the Village Voice have repeatedly used the word to describe the performances of jazz or hip-hop musicians with no apparent connection to the village. Meryl Peress, an American belly dancer in New York, has performed under the name “Jajouka” since the 1970s.