4 - The Jewish Atlantic: Diaspora and Pop Music

Summary

TO MANY LISTENERS, no ethnic significance can be found in the emergence of ‘pop music’—a distinctive musical genre that is, according to cultural historian Timothy Berg, ‘non-classical, very mainstream, intended for very wide audiences, and often controlled by the giants of the music business’ (Berg 2000: 83). In many ways, however, pop is characterized by the specific conditions of religious and cultural minorities: historically, jazz, blues, rock ‘n’ roll, reggae, disco music, soul, and hip hop are closely linked to African American history (Frith 1981).

To this day, these genres work with a phantasm of being black: that is, with the mythical idea of an African origin of the music that can now be found in the diaspora. In an influential work, the British scholar of cultural studies Paul Gilroy, for example, defined the production conditions of hip hop as ‘transnational structures of circulation and intercultural exchange’ (Gilroy 1993: 87). According to Gilroy, an imaginary Africa is at the centre of these processes that is almost completely disconnected from the real Africa with all its problems. While this relationship between the hip hop world and the real world might have changed since Gilroy's observations in the 1990s, his insistence on the diasporic context of the ‘Black Atlantic’ and its kinship with Jewish modernity remains pivotal to any pursuit of the diaspora in popular culture. As Gilroy notes, it is precisely the dual awareness of the Jewish exile—to sense, as a community, a commitment towards the Land of Israel and towards the temporary residence, each in a different manner— that also constitutes a paradigm for the ambivalent experiences of the slaves deported from Africa and their descendants (Gilroy 1993: 205–12).

The idea and the definition of diaspora vary greatly. However, all diasporic communities keep a collective or individual connection to a real or imagined homeland. This link can be expressed in language, religion, custom, or folklore. According to Robin Cohen, the consciousness of a common migration history and a sense of co-ethnicity with other members of the community demonstrate this inescapable link to the ‘old country’ (Cohen 1997: p. xi). This wide definition of diaspora informed the ‘turn to diaspora’, as Lily Cho put it, in cultural studies. In her view, diaspora is ‘first and foremost a subjective condition marked by the contingencies of long histories of displacements and genealogies of dispossession’ (Cho 2007: 14).