Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-03T20:03:21.284Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Music Videos and the Effeminate Vices of Urban Culture in Mali

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2011

Dorothea E. Schulz
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article focuses on a number of highly successful female pop singers in Mali whose video music clips and music shows make up a major share of urban people's daily broadcast consumption. The article explores the reasons for the astonishing success of the singers by locating the consumption and interpretation of their songs in Malian popular and scholarly discourses on cultural authenticity and moral decline. Some Malian scholars emphasise that women's pop songs reflect the corruption and mixing of traditional oral genres characterised by historical knowledge, textual complexity and regional specificity. Their criticism is echoed by a number of older people in town and countryside. It is reminiscent of a tendency among urban consumers to express their fascination with and fears of life in town in the icon of the seductive, dangerous and immoral town woman. To many women of the urban middle classes, in contrast, the pop singers embody a desirable solution of women's daily dilemma: a Malian morality dressed up in the fashionable outfit of a ‘modern’ urban woman. Middle-class women respond enthusiastically to this art form because it praises them for upholding ‘traditional’ values in the face of adversity while absolving them of complicity in undermining such values.

Résumé

Cet article s'intéresse à plusieurs chanteuses pop qui connaissent un succès important au Mali et dont les vidéoclips et les spectacles musicaux constituent une part importante de la consommation radiophonique et télévisuelle quotidienne de la population urbaine. Il examine les raisons de l'extraordinaire succès de ces chanteuses en situant la consommation et l'interprétation de leurs chansons dans les discours populaires et intellectuels maliens sur l'authenticité culturelle et le déclin moral. Certains intellectuels maliens soulignent que les chansons de ces femmes reflètent la corruption et le mélange des genres oraux traditionnels caractérisés par la connaissance historique, la complexité du texte et la spécificité régionale. Leur critique est reprise par une partie de la population âgée, dans les villes et à la campagne. Cette situation rappelle une tendance chez les consommateurs urbains d'exprimer la fascination et les craintes qu'ils ont à l'égard de la vie urbaine à travers l'image de la citadine séductrice, dangereuse et immorale. Pour beaucoup de femmes issues des classes moyennes urbaines, en revanche, ces chanteuses pop incarnent une solution souhaitable au dilemme quotidien des femmes: une moralité malienne vêtue d'une tenue à la mode de citadine ‘moderne’. Les femmes des classes moyennes accueillent avec enthousiasme cette forme d'art car elle les félicite de soutenir les valeurs traditionnelles contre l'adversité tout en les disculpant de toute complicité de fragilisation de ces valeurs.

Type
Research Article
Information
Africa , Volume 71 , Issue 3 , August 2001 , pp. 345 - 372
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Abu- Lughod, L. 1993. ‘Finding a place for Islam: Egyptian television serials and the national interest’. Public Culture 5, 493-513.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Abu- Lughod, L. 1995. ‘The objects of soap opera: Egyptian television and the cultural politics of modernity’, in Miller, D. (ed.), Worlds Apart: modernity through the prism of the local, pp. 190-210. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Adeleye- Fayemi, B. 1994. ‘Gender, sexuality, and popular culture in Nigeria’, Passages 8, 1-2.Google Scholar
Adeleye- Fayemi, B. 1997. ‘Either one or the other. Images of women in Nigerian television’, in Barber, K.(ed.), Readings in African Popular Culture, Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 125-130. Oxford: James Currey for the International African Institute.Google Scholar
Afro Music., 1976a. ‘Fanta Damba est de retour’. La vedette du mois’, Afro Music 5, 4-5.Google Scholar
Afro Music., 1976b. ‘Mokontafe Sako: vive la biennale du Mali’. La vedette du mois’, Afro Music 7, 4-5.Google Scholar
Appadurai, A. 1990. ‘Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy’, in Featherstone, M. (ed.), Global Culture: nationalism, globalization, and modernity, pp. 295-310. London and Newbury Park CA: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Auslander, M. 1993. ‘”Open the wombs!” The symbolic politics of modern Ngoni witchfinding’, in J. Comaroff and J. L. Comaroff (eds), Modernity and its Malcontents, pp. 176-98 Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Barber, K. 1987. ‘Popular Arts in Africa’, African Studies Review 30 (3), 1-78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barber, K. 1994. ‘Concluding remarks’, Passages 8, pp. 23-4.Google Scholar
Barber, K. 1997. ‘Preliminary notes on audiences in Africa’, Africa 67 (3), 347-62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barber, K. and Waterman, C. 1995. Traversing the global and the local: fújí music and praise poetry in the production of contemporary Yorùbá popular culture, in D. Miller (ed.) Worlds Apart: modernity through the prism of the local, pp. 240-62. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bastían, M. 1993. ‘“Bloodhounds who have no friends”: witchcraft and locality in the Nigerian popular press’, in J. Comaroff and J. L. Comaroff (eds) Modernity and its Malcontents, pp. 129-66. Chicago: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar
Benjamin, W. 1963. Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Drei Studien zur Kunstsoziologie. Frankfurt: Edition Suhrkamp.Google Scholar
Camara, S. 1976. Gens de la Parole: Essai sur la condition et le rôle des griots dans la société Malinké. Paris, La Haye: Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Charry, E. 1996. ‘The Music of Mamaya and its Legacy (Guinea)’. Paper presented at the Panel ‘Renewal in Mande Music, 1940s to 1990s’, African Studies Association Meeting, San Francisco.Google Scholar
Chitauro, M., C. Dube, L. Gunner. 1994. ‘Song, story, nation: women as singers and actresses in Zimbabwe’, in L. Gunner, (ed.) Politics and Performance, pp. 111-38. Johannesburg: University of Witswatersrand Press.Google Scholar
Cutter, C. 1968. ‘The politics of music in Mali’, African Arts 1 (3): 38, 74-77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Danielson, V. 1997. The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthum, Arabic song, and Egyptian society in the twentieth century. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diawara, M. 1989. ‘Women, servitude and history: the oral historical traditions of women of servile condition in the kingdom of Jaara (Mali) from the fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth century’, in K. Barber and P. F. de Moraes Farias (eds.) Discourse and its Disguises, pp. 109-37, Birmingham: Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham.Google Scholar
Diawara, M. 1997. The Mande oral popular culture revisited by the electronic media’, in K. Barber (ed.), Readings in African Popular Culture, pp. 40-8. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, Oxford: James Currey for the International African Institute.Google Scholar
Duran, L. 1989. ‘The women of Mali: Tata Bambo Kouyaté’, Folk Roots 75: 34-8.Google Scholar
Duran, L. 1995. ’jelimusow: the superwomen of Malian music’, in G. Furniss and L. Gunner (eds.) Power, Marginality, and African Oral Literature, pp. 197-207. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Featherstone, M. 1990. ‘Global culture: an introduction’, in M. Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: nationalism, globalization and modernity, pp. 1-14. London and Newbury Park CA: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Friedman, J. 1990. ‘Being in the world: globalization and localization’, in M. Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: nationalism, globalization and modernity, pp. 311-28. London and Newbury Park CA: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Frossard, K. 1991. ‘Je ne sais pas chanter, je ne sais pas parler’ Bingo 60, October-November 1991.Google Scholar
Gunner, L. 1994. ‘Introduction: The struggle for space’ in Gunner, L. (ed.), Politics and Performance: theatre, poetry and song in Southern Africa, pp. 1-10. Johannesburg, University of Witswatersrand Press.Google Scholar
Hale, T. 1994. ’Griottes: female voices in West Africa’, Research in African Literatures 25 (3): 71-91.Google Scholar
Hale, T. 1999. Griots and Griottes. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Hall, S. 1996. ‘Introduction: who needs “identity”?’ in Hall, S. and Paul du Gay, (eds.) Questions of Cultural Identity. pp. 1-17. London: Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T.. 1972. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Seabury Press.Google Scholar
Kandiyoti, D. 1993. ‘Identity and its discontents: women and the nation’ in P. Williams and L. Chrisman (eds) Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. pp. 376-91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Keita, M. C. 1995. ‘Jaliya in the modern world’ in D. Conrad and B. Frank (eds), Status and Identity in West Africa: the nyamakalaw of Mande, pp. 182- 96.Google Scholar
Mankekar, P. 1999. Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: an ethnography of television, womanhood and nation in postcolonial India. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Masquelier, A. 1993. ‘Narratives of power, images of wealth: the ritual economy of Bori in the market’ in: Comaroff, J.and Comaroff, J. L.(eds.) Modernity and its Malcontents, pp. 3-33. Chicago: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar
Meyer, B. 1995. ‘“Delivered from the powers of darkness”: confessions about satanic riches in Christian Ghana’ Africa 67 (3) 406-40.Google Scholar
Miller, D. 1994. Modernity: an ethnographic approach, dualism and mass consumption in Trinidad. Oxford and Providence, RI: Berg.Google Scholar
Monteil, C. 1977. Les Bambara du Segou et du Kaarta. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose.Google Scholar
Passages. 1994. A Chronicle of the Humanities. Supplement to PAS News and Events, No. 8. Evanston IL: Institute for Advanced Study and Research in the African Humanities, Northwestern University.Google Scholar
Schulz, D. 1996. ‘Praise in Times of Disenchantment: griots, radios, and the politics of communication in Mali’. Unpublished PhD dissertation, New Haven CT: Dept. of Anthropology, Yale University.Google Scholar
Schulz, D. 1997. ‘Praise without enchantment: griots, radios, and the politics of tradition in Mali’Africa Today 44 (4): 437-58.Google Scholar
Schulz, D. 1998. ‘Morals of praise’ Research in Economic Anthropology 19: 117-33.Google Scholar
Schulz, D. 1999. ‘“Pricey publicity, refutable reputations”. Jeliw and the economics of honour in Mali’ Paideuma 45: 272-95.Google Scholar
Schulz, D. 2000. ‘Mesmerizing missis, nationalist musings: beauty pageants and the debate over “Malian” womanhood’, Paideuma 46: 111-35.Google Scholar
forthcoming. ‘Women pop singers, broadcast media, and the transformation of performance conventions in Mali’, to appear in Peek, P and K. Yankah (eds) African Folklore Encyclopedia, London, New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Soma, I. 1991. ‘Kandia Kouyaté: la lionne du Mali’ Souka Magazine 33, p. 15.Google Scholar
Traoré, K. 2000. Le Jeu et le sérieux. Essai d’ anthropologie littéraire sur la poésie épique des chasseurs du Mande (Afrique de l’Ouest). Studien zur Kulturkunde 113, Cologne: Rüdiger Koeppe.Google Scholar
Waterman, C. 1990. ‘“Our tradition is a very modem tradition”: popular music and the construction of a pan-Yoruba identity’, Ethnomusicology 34 (3), 367-79.Google Scholar
Yuval- Davis, N. and Anthias, F. (eds). 1989. Women-Nation-State. New York and Basingstoke: Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zobel, C. 1997. Das Gewicht der Rede. Kulturelle Interpretation, Geschichte und Vermittlung bei den Mande Westafrikas. Frankfurt: Lang.Google Scholar