Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-s22k5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-15T15:58:08.597Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The ‘world’ before globalisation: Moroccan elements in The Incredible String Band's music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2011

Oliver Lovesey
Oliver Lovesey
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, Kelowna, BC, Canada. E-mail: oliver.lovesey@ubc.ca
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Before the advent of ‘world’ music in the culture of globalisation, The Incredible String Band in the 1960s added elements of Moroccan and other international music into their work. In the context of an exploration of the band's journey to the east, this article argues that the ISB's ‘exotic’ sounds became the aural signifier of the psychedelic, and that the ISB's aesthetic of appropriation veered from fetishisation, and also homage and parody, to ritualised adaptation. The ISB's pre-‘world’ use of international music was self-consciously naive, but it may have enabled later modes of cultural appropriation.

Type
Articles
Information
Popular Music , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , January 2011 , pp. 127 - 143
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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

Achebe, C. 1990. ‘African literature as restoration of celebration’, in Chinua Achebe: A Celebration, eds. Holst Petersen, K. and Rutherford, A. (Oxford, Heinemann), pp. 1–10Google Scholar
Adorno, T. 1962. Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. Ashton, E.B. (New York, Seabury)Google Scholar
Adorno, T. 1980. ‘Letters to Walter Benjamin’, in Aesthetics and Politics, by Adorno, T., Benjamin, W., Bloch, E., Brecht, B. and Lukács, G., afterword by Jameson, F. (London, Verso), pp. 110–33Google Scholar
Adorno, T. 2002a. ‘The curves of the needle’, in Essays on Music, ed. Leppert, R., trans. Gillespie, S. (Berkeley, University of California Press), pp. 271–6Google Scholar
Adorno, T. 2002b. ‘On popular music’, in Essays on Music, ed. Leppert, R., trans. Gillespie, S. (Berkeley, University of California Press), pp. 437–69Google Scholar
Ambrose, J. 2003. ‘Liner notes’, Joujouka Black Eyes, by The Master Musicians of Joujouka (Blue Moon)Google Scholar
Baldassarre, A. 2003. ‘Moroccan world beat through the media’, in Mediterranean Mosaic: Popular Music and Global Sounds, ed. Plastino, G. (New York, Routledge), pp. 79–100Google Scholar
Baxter, E. 2000. ‘The primer: British folk music’, The Wire: Adventures in Modern Music, 202, pp. 34–9Google Scholar
Benjamin, W. 1955. Illuminations (New York, Harcourt, Brace and World)Google Scholar
Benjamin, W. 2006. On Hashish, trans. Eiland, H. (Cambridge, Belknap Press)Google Scholar
Blake, M. 2008. (ed.) Stone Me: The Wit and Wisdom of Keith Richards (New York, New American Library)Google Scholar
Bohlman, P.V. 2002. World Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, Oxford University Press)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bongie, C. 1991. Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle (Stanford, Stanford University Press)Google Scholar
Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Nice, R. (Cambridge, Harvard University Press)Google Scholar
Bowles, P. 2003. Paul Bowles on Music, ed. Mangan, T. and Herrmann, I. (Berkeley, University of California Press)Google Scholar
Boyd, J. 2006. White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s (London, Serpent's Tail)Google Scholar
Brinkley, D. 2009. ‘Bob Dylan's America’, Rolling Stone, 1078 (May), pp. 42–9, 76Google Scholar
Brooks, K. 1999. The Incredible String Band: Gently Tender (Ludgershall, Agenda)Google Scholar
Broughton, S., Ellingham, M., and Lusk, J. with Clark, D. (eds.) 2006. The Rough Guide to World Music: Africa and Middle East, vol. 1 (London, Rough Guides)Google Scholar
Brusila, J. 2001. ‘Jungle drums striking the world beat: Africa as an image factor in popular music’, In Encounter Images in the Meetings Between Africa and Europe, ed. Palmberg, M. (Uppsala, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet), pp. 146–61Google Scholar
Byrne, D. 1999, ‘Crossing music's borders: I hate world music’, New York Times (October)Google Scholar
Clayton, M. 2008. ‘Toward an ethnomusicology of sound experience’, In The New (Ethno)musicologies, ed. Stobart, H. (Lanham, Scarecrow Press), pp. 135–69Google Scholar
Cumming, C.F.G. 1891. ‘Musical instruments and their homes,’ revised version of Musical Instruments and Their Homes by Mrs Brown, J. Crosby and Brown, W. Adams, CXLIX: DCCCCVI (April), pp. 527–45Google Scholar
Dann, T. 2006. Darker Than the Deepest Sea: The Search for Nick Drake (Cambridge, Da Capo Press)Google Scholar
DeNora, T. 2003. After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans, M. (ed.) 2009. Woodstock: Three Days That Rocked the World (New York, Sterling)Google Scholar
Farrell, G. 1997. Indian Music and the West (Oxford, Clarendon)Google Scholar
Ford, C. 1995. ‘“Gently Tender”: The Incredible String Band's early albums’, Popular Music, 14/2 (May), pp. 175–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frank, T. 1997. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago, Chicago University Press)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fraser, R. 1990. The Making of The Golden Bough: The Origins and Growth of an Argument (New York, St. Martin's Press)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fraser, R. 1994. ‘Introduction’, In The Golden Bough, by Frazer, J., abridged edn (Oxford, Oxford University Press), pp. ix–xxxixGoogle Scholar
Frazer, J. 1996. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, ed. Stocking, G. Jr. (Wrights Lane, Penguin)Google Scholar
Fricke, D. 2009. ‘Fricke's picks. New sounds of olde England’, Rolling Stone, 1078 (May), p. 71Google Scholar
Frith, S. 2000. ‘The discourse of world music’, In Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, ed. Born, G. and Hesmondhalgh, D. (Berkeley, University of California Press), pp. 305–22Google Scholar
Gallini, C. 1996. ‘Mass exoticism’, in The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, ed. Chambers, I. and Curti, L. (London, Routledge), pp. 212–20Google Scholar
Gilroy, P. 1996. ‘Route work: the black Atlantic and the politics of exile’, In The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, ed. Chambers, I. and Curti, L. (London, Routledge), pp. 17–29Google Scholar
Goodwin, A., and Gore, J. 1990. ‘World beat and the cultural imperialism debate’, Socialist Review, 20/3, pp. 63–80Google Scholar
Gould, J. 2007. Can't Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America (New York, Three Rivers)Google Scholar
Gysin, B. 2001. ‘The pipes of Pan’, In Back in No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader, ed. Weiss, J. (Middleton, Wesleyan University Press), pp. 122–4Google Scholar
Harper, C. 2000. Dazzling Stranger: Bert Jansch and the British Folk and Blues Revival (London, Bloomsbury)Google Scholar
Holt, F. 2008. ‘A view from popular music studies: genre issues’, The New (Ethno)musicology, ed. Stobart, H. (Lanham, Scarecrow Press), pp. 40–47Google Scholar
Huggan, G. 2001. The Post-Colonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London, Routledge)Google Scholar
Jameson, F. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, Duke University Press)Google Scholar
Jones, A.M. 1959. Studies in African Music, vol. 1 (London, Oxford University Press)Google Scholar
Kerouac, J. 1991. On the Road (New York, Penguin)Google Scholar
Kroetsch, R. 1976. ‘Stone Hammer Poem’, In The Stone Hammer Poems 1960–1975 (Lantzville, Oolichan), pp. 54–60Google Scholar
Lovesey, O. 1997. ‘“Post-colonial self-fashioning” in Sara Suleri's Meatless Days’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 32/2, pp. 35–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lovesey, O. 2004. ‘Anti-Orpheus: narrating the dream brother’, Popular Music, 23/3, pp. 331–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacDonald, I. 1995. Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties (London, Pimlico)Google Scholar
Malinowski, B. 1936. Sex, Culture, and Myth (New York, Harcourt, Brace and World)Google Scholar
Marshall, P.D. 2000. ‘The celebrity of the Beatles’, in The Beatles, Popular Music and Society: A Thousand Voices, ed. Inglis, I. (London, Macmillan), pp. 163–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Middleton, R. 1990. Studying Popular Music (Milton Keynes, Open University Press)Google Scholar
Mitchell, T. 1996. Popular Music and Local Identity: Rock, Pop and Rap in Europe and Oceania (London, Leicester University Press)Google Scholar
Morton, A. 2008. Tom Cruise, An Unauthorized Biography (New York, St. Martin's Press)Google Scholar
Nercessian, A. 2002. Postmodernism and Globalization in Ethnomusicology: An Epistemological Problem (Lanham, Scarecrow Press)Google Scholar
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. 1998. Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa (Oxford, Clarendon)Google Scholar
Njoku, R.C. 2006. Culture and Customs of Morocco (Westport, Greenwood)Google Scholar
Olaniyan, T. 2004. Arrest the Music! Fela and his Rebel Art and Politics (Bloomington, Indiana University Press)Google Scholar
Post, J.C. 2006. ‘Introduction’, in Ethnomusicology: A Contemporary Reader, ed. Post, J. C. (New York, Routledge), pp. 1–13Google Scholar
Sandbrook, D. 2007. White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (London, Abacus)Google Scholar
Segalstad, E., and Hunter, J. 2008. The 27s: The Greatest Myth of Rock & Roll (Berkeley Lake, Samadhi Creations)Google Scholar
Shiloah, A. 1995. Music in the World of Islam: A Socio-Cultural History (Aldershot, Scolar Press)Google Scholar
Stobart, H. 2008. ‘Introduction’, in The New (Ethno)musicologies, ed. Stobart, H. (Lanham, Scarecrow Press), pp. 1–20Google Scholar
Stokes, M., and Bohlman, P.V. (eds.) 2003. Celtic Modern: Music at the Global Fringe (Lanham, Scarecrow Press)Google Scholar
Subotnik, R.R. 1996. Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press)Google Scholar
Taylor, T.D. 1997. Global Pop: World Music, World Markets (New York, Routledge)Google Scholar
Taylor, T.D. 2007. Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Durham, Duke University Press)Google Scholar
Tenzer, M. (ed.) 2006. Analytical Studies in World Music (Oxford, Oxford University Press)Google Scholar
Turner, S. 1971. ‘Incredible String Band’, Beat Instrumental (March) http://www.rocksbackpages.com/article.html?ArticleID=1818Google Scholar
Unterberger, R. 2002. ‘Liner notes’, U, by The Incredible String Band, (Collectors' Choice Music)Google Scholar
Unterberger, R. 2003. Eight Miles High: Folk-Rock's Flight from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock (San Francisco, Backbeat)Google Scholar
Unterberger, R. ‘Joe Boyd’. http://www.richieunterberger.com/boydfolk.htmlGoogle Scholar
Whittaker, A. 1998. ‘Liner notes’, Be Glad for the Song Has No Ending (Island Records)Google Scholar
Whittaker, A. (ed.) 2003. beGLAD: An Incredible String Band Compendium (London, Helter Skelter)Google Scholar
Williamson, R. 1972. Home Thoughts from Abroad: Poems 1966–1971 (London, Deepdown Books)Google Scholar
Williamson, R. 1977. ‘Mirrorman sequences’, in Outlaw Visions (LA, Acrobat), pp. 12–46Google Scholar
Williamson, R. 1979. Five Denials on Merlin's Grave (Los Angeles, Pig's Whisker Music)Google Scholar
Williamson, R. 1989. The Wise and Foolish Tongue (San Francisco, Chronicle)Google Scholar
Williamson, N. 1997. ‘It's incredible’, Folk Roots, 19/4, pp. 37–41Google Scholar
Williamson, R., and Sherman, D. 1977. The Glory Trap (New York, Walker and Co.)Google Scholar

Discography

The Incredible String Band, Be Glad for the Song Has No Ending [1970]. Edsel Records, EDCD564. 1998Google Scholar
The Incredible String Band, The Chelsea Sessions 1967. Pig's Whisker Music, PWMD5003. 1997Google Scholar
The Incredible String Band, The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter. Elektra/Hannibal Records, HNCD 4421. 1968Google Scholar
The Incredible String Band, Tricks of the Senses: Rare and Unreleased Recordings 1966–1972. Hux Records, HUX100. 2008Google Scholar
The Incredible String Band, U [1970]. Collectors' Choice Music, CCM-288-2. 2002Google Scholar
The Incredible String Band, Wee Tam & The Big Huge. Elektra/Hannibal Records, HNCD 4802. 1968Google Scholar
The Incredible String Band, ‘Willow Pattern’, BBC Radio 1 Live in Concert [1971/72]. BBC Worldwide Music, Strange Fruit, SFRSCD 033. 1997Google Scholar
The Incredible String Band, The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion. Elektra/Hannibal Records, HNCD 4438. 1967Google Scholar
The Incredible String Band, Nebulous Nearnesses. Amoeba Recordings, AR002. 2004Google Scholar
The Master Musicians of Joujouka, Joujouka Black Eyes. Blue Moon, PG 1008. 2003Google Scholar
Williamson, Robin, The Iron Stone. ECM, 1969 9876441. 2006Google Scholar
Williamson, Robin, A Glint at the Kindling [1979]. Pig's Whisker Music/Gottdiscs Limited, GOTTCD032. 2005Google Scholar
Williamson, Robin, Mirrorman's Sequences 1961–1966. Pig's Whisker Music. 1997Google Scholar
Robin Williamson and His Merry Band, Journey's Edge. Flying Fish Records. 1977Google Scholar