“Noise performance breaks down the public scene of live music audiences into their subjective encounters with extremely high volume. The only choices are to stay to feel it or to leave. At the beginning of many Noise performances, the audience splits in two: in an instant, some press closer to the stage and the speakers, and others retreat to the back of the room. Listeners must decide, almost immediately, whether they can tolerate the overwhelming volume. Those who remain must find a way to appreciate this sound—to construct some valuable framework of personal experience through it—or they are forced from its presence. Unlike the nuanced contours of a good live sound mix, which brings a crowd together in a shared public atmosphere, Noise concerts flatten the space with overwhelming loudness. Extreme volume divides the common social environment of music into individual private thresholds of sensation. A really good Noise show confuses you, separates you from your acquired knowledge, and makes you wonder what’s going on. It is easy to know that a Noise performance will be loud, but successful Noise performances still feel shockingly and unexpectedly so.”

From Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation by David Novak (Duke University Press, 2013).

“A sheet of paper flutters against the door of a dive bar on a deserted downtown street in a mid-sized Northeastern city. The 8.5 × 11 flyer, crudely designed with hand-drawn black-and-white text, announces a live Noise show featuring two performers from the area, as well as a Japanese artist on a brief tour of the United States. Inside the bar, two distinctly separated groups of people are clustered in the small space. On one side, a motley group of college-age stragglers are scattered around the room, some standing directly in front of the pa, others leaning against the walls. On the other side, some regulars are huddled together wondering what’s going on, trying to get as far away from the amplifiers as possible, and obviously ruing the invasion of their local watering hole by these ear-blasting misfits. The Japanese performer is climbing up a pillar in the center of the room, directly above a tableful of random electronic gear that has filled the room with screeching feedback for the last fifteen minutes. He leaps from the pillar onto the table, falling backward as his equipment scatters across the room, and slowly stands up as the Noise fans applaud and roar their approval. In the sudden silence, someone sitting in the back of the bar shifts his weight on his stool, swiveling over and cupping his hand against his mouth to shout: “We don’t understand what the hell you’re doing!” One of the local performers looks up from another small table, where his gear is already half-plugged together in preparation for the next set, shoots a grin at the Japanese performer, and yells back: “It’s Noise—you’re not supposed to!””

From Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation, by David Novak (Duke University Press, 2013)

“Indeed, climate scientists tell us that dramatic shifts in weather, either too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry, will become commonplace, creating conditions where the struggles over and control of water will emerge as one of the central political, ecological, and public health issues of the twenty-first century.” - Excerpt by David Kinkela, Teresa Meade, and Enrique Ochoa, editors, from “Water,” in Radical History Review 116, Spring 2013

“We are here. We eat, we dance, we fish.

Here we are and we still live.

No eramos, somos.” (It’s not that we were, we are.)

—Don Madeleno

Don Madeleno often repeated the refrain ‘‘We’re still here.’’ The first time I heard him say this, I interpreted it as a triumphant declaration of survival. In this instance, Don Madeleno was narrating the history of the Cucapá people in the delta: a history of war, conquest, disease, water scarcity, the criminalization of fishing, and the rise of the narco-economy. After everything his people had experienced, they were still there carrying on with their lives.

I heard Don Madeleno use the phrase in this sense on many other occasions: in interviews, at festivals, and in informal conversations. Because it was part of his personal narration I was struck when I first heard him use the phrase in a much more literal sense in the context of maps. Every so often I would bring Don Madeleno a map of the delta from books or archives to elicit his reactions to these representations of the land he knew so well. Every time I brought him a map we went through the same routine: he would look over the page slowly and meticulously and start pointing to all of the places it was missing. He would comment on whether or not the map showed the Cucapá village, the fishing grounds, and the Sierra Cucapá. He would also bring up the places that were almost always missing—Las Pintas, Pozo de Coyote, and a dozen other sites important to Cucapá history. Then Don Madeleno would irritatedly declare, while pointing at the absent places, ‘‘Estamos aqui’’ (We are here). Once or twice he went on to emphasize his point by saying, ‘‘Somos aqui’’ (We are this place).

From Where the River Ends: Contested Indigeneity in the Mexican Colorado Delta, by Shaylih Muehlmann (Duke University Press, 2013)

Photos of Afro-Brazilian musicians in the early twentieth century. From Marc A. Hertzman’s Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2013). 

People Get Ready

“Avoiding artificial separations,” as William Parker writes in the liner notes to his Curtis Mayfield project cd, “is the key to understanding the true nature of the music.” So, people get ready. Get ready for the collapsing of historically institutionalized categories. Get ready for idiosyncratic admixtures of categorically disparate forms of cultural expression. Get ready for “inside songs” that move with ease into the music’s outer regions. Get ready, as Henry Threadgill might have it, to learn (really learn) how to talk about (and listen to) “everything,” and to do so with genuine curiosity, attentiveness, and openness. Parker, again: “Curtis Mayfield was a prophet, a revolutionary, a humanist, and a griot. He took the music to its most essential level in the America of his day. If you had ears to hear, you knew that Curtis was a man with a positive message—a message that was going to help you survive.” If the future of jazz is now, as indeed we believe it is, then the pertinent question, to rephrase Parker, is whether, in fact, we have the “ears to hear.”

From People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz is Now!, edited by Ajay Heble and Rob Wallace

“Perhaps queer theory comes easily to mind here, and in many other studies on Asian Americans, to make sense of how relatively visible middle-class Asian Americans occupy the spaces afforded them by the culture at large because they are, in addition to being in many cases also gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered themselves, structurally so similar with middle-class, professional gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and, to a much lesser extent, transgendered as popularly imagined. That is, both are queer in the sense of belonging and not-belonging in America. They are thus symbols of socioeconomic upward mobility and cultural indeterminacy. As Aihwa Ong observes, Asian Americans have moved away from being perceivable as subjects of a racism that refers to a set of relations determined by structural factors intrinsic to a nation toward being figured as members of an international elite of highly skilled workers that grants them the privilege of being accepted as almost white. They are, according to this thinking, not racial minorities, as this term is commonly understood in the United States and as some out of residual commitment to the politics of the late 1960s want to argue. They are, instead, something fabulously—and dismissively— akin to gays and lesbians in the social position they currently occupy.”

From The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American, by Min Hyoung Song (Duke University Press, 2013).

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Death from Above: Drones and Virtual Warfare in the Af-Pak Theater

“The U.S. Air Force has been increasingly relying on unmanned aerial vehicles (uavs) or drones, particularly the mq-1 Predator (figure 8.1) and larger mq-9 Reaper (figure 8.2). The first uavs were used in Yugoslavia, where in 1998 the Kosovo war became history’s first virtual or postmodern war. The seventy-eight- day campaign achieved its objectives without a single nato combat fatality (Ignatieff 2000). Drones were used again during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and since 2004 in the tribal borderlands of Pakistan. During this time they have also been used to assassinate people and bomb vehicles and buildings in several other countries (e.g., Yemen in November 2002). Now, they are “preying” on people and “reaping” death and destruction in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

The drones are in use “24/7” over Afghanistan and the Pakistan tribal borderlands. These ghost planes are launched from Afghanistan, but mainly flown by joystick pilots located halfway around the world at air force bases in the United States. As Washington and the military see it, the ideal use of Predator and Reaper drones is to pick off terrorist leaders. Most of the drones are armed with Hellfire missiles or smart bombs, which the pilots can fire with the push of a button once they have spotted targets on their video screens. Killing is just a matter of entering a computer command; to the drone pilot, it is like pushing Ctrl-Alt-Del and the target dies. Ctrl-Alt-Del, also known as the “three-finger salute,” is computer jargon for “dump” or “do away with,” as in the Weird Al Yankovic song “It’s All About the Pentiums”: “Play me online? Well you know that I’ll beat you / If I ever meet you, I’ll Control-Alt-Delete you.” The uav pilots “have an almost godlike power. Their job is to survey a place thousands of miles distant (and completely alien to their lives and experiences), assess what they see, and spot ‘targets’ to eliminate—even if on their somewhat antiquated computer systems it ‘takes up to 17 steps—including entering data into a pull-down window—to fire a missile’ and incinerate those below” (Engelhardt 2009d)….

The hype and hubris surrounding this technology is immense. The mainstream media has been full of glowing reports on the drones, some of which imply that their use could win the war on terror all by itself, such as a report from April 2009 that the drones were killing Taliban and Al-Qaeda leaders and “the rest have begun fighting among themselves out of panic and suspicion. ‘If you were to continue on this pace,’ counterterrorism consultant Juan Zarate told the LA Times, ‘al Qaida is dead’” (The Week, April 3, 2009, p. 7). In an uncritical 60 Minutes television report on U.S. Air Force drone operations in May 2009, the officer in charge was asked if mistakes were ever made in the drone attacks: “What if you get it wrong?” His response was: “We don’t” (cbs Interactive Staff 2009).”

8.1 MQ -1

Predator, armed with Hellfire missile. Public domain photo. Source: http://www.af.mil/photos/media_search.asp?q=predator. Provided as a public service by the U.S. Air Force.

8.2 MQ -9

Reaper landing after a mission in support of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, 2007. Public domain photo by Sgt. Brian Ferguson. Source: http://www.af.mil/photos/media_search.asp?q=predator. Provided as a public service by the U.S. Air Force.

(pp 178-181) This excerpt by Jeffrey A. Sluka

From Virtual War and Magical Death, edited by Neil L. Whitehead and Sverker Finnström (Duke University Press, 2013)