Cassette Culture

by Peter Manuel

The University of Chicago
Press, 1993. xix, 302 pp., appendices, bibliography, glossary, index.

Reviewed by Gerald Hartnett

As an academic discipline, Ethnomusicology remains surprisingly unaffected by critiques of authorial presence that 10 years ago brought about dramatic upheavals in Anthropology and Ethnography proper. While the reasons why it did not are complex and themselves in need of scholarly attention, it makes sense to pay close attention to the occasional Ethnomusicological work that confronts head on the discipline's tendency to reduce an "other" culture to a quantifiable set of differences to be shelved amid volumes dedicated to primate studies and strange attractors.

Peter Manuel's copious study of cassette-based music in north India, Cassette Culture, endeavors to do just that. Its writing is grounded in old-fashioned materialism, politicized in the service of generating emancipatory consciousness, and sensitive to critical advances in old-fashioned materialism, politicized in the service of generating emancipatory consciousness, and sensitive to critical advances originating far afield from musicological scholarship. Manuel is upfront about ethnography'sperilous historical relation to colonialism--and this sensitivity to context legitimates Manuel's attempt to have it both ways, i.e.,to treat the widespread social and cultural ramifications of audiocassette technology's incursion into Indian life as a quantifiable entity and as an activist discourse.

In fact, technology is foregrounded throughout, and Cassette Culture contains an extremely valuable historical account of cultural production under the influence of media technologies (phonograph, film, audio cassette) and the recording industry. cultural production under the influence of media technologies (phonograph, film, audio cassette) and the recording industry. The phonograph's ability to mass-produce recordings altered musical content. The ghazal and qawwali, two traditional musical forms associated with classical Hindi and Urdu culture, achieved prominence during the early decades (1910s to 1930s) of the British-owned recording companies' technological monopoly on production and distribution for clear reasons: their calculated commercial success stemmed from a pan-regional appeal arrived at by removing improvisational elements from the music while introducing western pop rhythms and instrumentation. Thus, an industrialized reduction of traditional musical forms achieved commodity status during a time when an expanding bourgeois phonograph-owning audience made possible the growth of a monopoly recording industry catering to, and in some ways creating, the needs of its clientele.

By the 1930s, however, film soundtracks usurped other recorded popular musical forms, becoming Indian pop music's sine qua nonfor the next 40 years. The reason for film's natural seductiveness in a country bearing an illiteracy rate of 65% may be obvious, but several contributing factors to its appeal cited in Cassette Culture are considerably less evident. For example, the book argues that the film industry prospered in part because it offered investment opportunities for indigenous Indian capital that, unlike the post-colonial record industry, was unrestricted by government regulation or private monopoly interests.

Ironically, film and music produced under these ostensibly more desirable economic relations quickly grew sterile, generalized and formulaic. Manuel wryly notes how the emplacement of "star" and "spectacle" systems distracts attention from the material impoverishment endured by most Indians (p.44), and careful treatment is given to contentious issues regarding the meaning and use of film in its social context. One interesting section of the book follows contentious issues regarding the meaning and use of film in its social context. One interesting section of the book follows divergent Indian viewpoints on film and film music's viability as mediators of a consciousness that is either feudal and false (as maintained by many Indian intellectuals), or desirably tradition-affirming (as evidenced by the cinema's astounding commercial success with the Indian public, with 15 million people attending films daily). Whichever the answer is, it is certain that as a result of film music's mass-produced condition that an identifiable mainstream style emerged, thriving at the expense of many folk genres that "have either disappeared or survived only by compromising with film culture" (p.55).

Enter the audiocassette. Manuel cites astronomical sales growth of pre-recorded tapes, from $1.2 in 1980 to over $21 million by 1990 (p.62), while film soundtrack market share fell dramatically. Relations between established recording companies and pirate cassette lables provide a glimpse into capitalism's proclivity for fashioning strange partnerships out of conflicting values and traditions.

As cassettes enhanced the commercial viability of some marginalized song forms, they simultaneously detracted from the importance of live musical and ritual performance. One fascinating example cited is how recordings of Hindu priests supplanted the need for their physical presence during ceremonial functions (p.128). While not hesitating to borrow conceptually from a variety of interdisciplinary writers (Enzensberger, Hall and Williams), their intellectual mobility isn't Manuel's stock in the trade. The occasional offhand observation reveals a voice of disciplinary membership. For example, a somewhat gratuitous jab is taken at film theorist Laura Mulvey that is reductive of Mulvey's arguments and their usefulness to scholars. One might also question the author's decision to not define how the cassette medium is "interactive," despite its repeated application in the early chapters, especially since it has come to be a widely misused term in much writing on technology.

These reservations notwithstanding, there is much here to admire. One of the book's best sections deals with complicated and contradictory gender issues in the folk tradition rasiya, a song-based musical genre featuring the performance of women's roles by men, which enjoyed an enormous burst in popularity with the increased consumption of cassette-based music. Further, those sharing the author's ideological enthusiasm for Marxian economics and disdain for the mass media's overdetermination of much 20th century cultural production in India (if not elsewhere) will find something to cheer in the chapter entitled "Cassettes and Sociopolitical Movements." Particularly noteworthy here is the only instance of pastiche (the cut and paste to which magnetic audiotape lends itself) mentioned in the entire book. This remarkable homemade cassette, which was copied and distributed widely throughout India to the disdain of Indira Ghandi's fascist-leaning Congress Party, utilized "sardonic monologue" and sampled popular song lyrics about inflation, corruption, sugar prices and Ghandi's alleged gender reassignment surgery (p.246).

Cassette Culture is a fascinating and painstakingly researched book that formulates complex responses to some difficult questions while avoiding obvious solutions. It tries to draw out to what extent cassette-based Indian popular music has been historically and economically determined by technological "advances" before and after cassettes, whether cassettes promoted diversity or the homogenous fare so often associated with products of mass culture, and whether the availability of productive means to broader class constituencies led to a more progressive model of music production and distribution. As evidenced by the last several chapters, vital folk music and oppositional foment evolved in Indian culture partly due to the democratizing properties of a technology easily lent to personalization. Perhaps its strongest feature, nevertheless, is Manuel's methodical and detailed statement of authorial motiviation for writing the book; for this reason, Cassette Culture avoids many positivistic pretensions that trouble ethnographic scholarship,and on the basis of methodological candor alone it is recommendable to social scientists of all ideological persuasions.