Prologue: Consuming Globalism

I. Giraffe: ‘Global food, world music’

It’s early evening and I’m grabbing a meal at ‘Giraffe’, one of several restaurants huddled under London’s Royal Festival Hall.[1] Giraffes have been springing up all around town lately, and some have even jumped the perimeter fence of the M25, but this one, slotted in a smart new arcade of retail outlets beneath the capital’s South Bank arts centre (see Fig. 1), is perfectly located for pre-concert eating.

Fig. 1: Giraffe, South Bank Centre, London 

1

Fig. 2b: Giraffe, South Bank Centre, London

But it’s with the ‘global food’ that the eclecticism really gets going. Perusing the menu, I’m torn between Vietnamese Yellow Chicken and Summer Squash Curry, Japanese Crisp Fried Tiger Prawns, or Tangy and Spiced Turkey Enchiladas. And what to have on the side? Wok-Fired Edamame; Hot Cheddar-Garlic Focaccia Bread; or Spicy Feta, Pumpkin, Spinach and Kalamata Olive Salad? Just what genre of food is this? As with the music, anything seems possible as long as it’s a bit other (coming not from here), but not too alien; a bit vernacular (no high art music, no haute cuisine), but neither too brash nor too plain (no heavy metal, no muzak; most dishes mildly spiced). Again, the whole point seems to be to evoke a cosy global village that’s everywhere and nowhere. Even the more homely Chopped Aberdeen Angus Steak Burger seems exotic when it joins its cosmopolitan companions, Mexican Grilled Chicken and Chorizo Burger, and ‘Oz’ Lamb Burger, in the global meta-place of the Giraffe concept.

2

I can’t resist ruminating on the context of all this. The restaurant, its neighbouring retail units (also belonging to (multi-)national chains), the ethos of retailing itself and its very transience (maybe Giraffe will be history by the time you read these words): it all contrasts with the more highbrow aspirations of the arts complex above. I’m reminded of the high modernist ideals of the Royal Festival Hall’s architects, Leslie Martin, Peter Moro and Robert Matthew, who designed the building to be the centrepiece of the Festival of Britain site in the early 1950s – a time of conscious postwar national renewal of the nation state. But the building’s present makeover seems symptomatic of a now different historical moment that’s reflected in event planning as well as architecture. The South Bank’s programmers have also had to buck their ideas up with an analogous refurbishment of their concept of state-sponsored art: one responsive to more diversified markets of musical consumption. Looking through their current brochure of events, I survey a smorgasbord of Shiv Kumar Sharma, Shostakovich, Nitin Sawhney and much early music – a kind of serious counterpart to what’s going on in more playful vernacular terms downstairs in Giraffe.

3

II. Late Junction: ‘An eclectic mix of music from across the globe’

Another evening, another slice of cultural heterogeneity. Back home in Newcastle I’m having an early night. The clock-radio’s set to ‘sleep’, and I’m dozing off to BBC Radio 3’s regular weeknight music show, Late Junction. I’m an intermittently loyal LJ listener – which status is probably not unrelated to my feelings towards the programme: a mixture of affection and perplexity. It certainly offers a relaxing way to see the day out: it describes itself on its website as ‘[a] laid-back, eclectic mix of music from across the globe’. To this strapline the programme makers have on occasions added: 'ranging from Mali to Bali, and from medieval chant to 21st-century electronica’.[2] With some justification: the show has a distinct world-music stream, but also treats the past as another place to plunder for its portrayal of the plurality of the contemporary musical world. So, for all its ‘laid-back’ qualities, the ‘eclectic mix’ often produces stylistic changes of gear that jolt you back out of slumber. A case in point: it’s now about half-eleven and as a soft, ambient electronic piece – ‘Coins and Crosses’ by Ryan Teague – fades out, I’m startled by a segue across the centuries and a move up-tempo to Monteverdi’s madrigal, ‘Zefiro torna’. As much as by the music itself, my brain is momentarily kick-started back into activity by the questions I keep asking myself about Late Junction: Just what is this show about? What point is it trying to make with these juxtapositions? What kind of mindset assumes that you can unproblematically go from a Lassus motet to a contemporary arrangement of a Cretan lyra melody to a traditional Irish air with no explanation?[3]

4

Recalling my thoughts from my South Bank experience, I remind myself that Late Junction isn’t an isolated case of this mentality. It taps into an attitude that’s very much part of our times, reflected not only in the content of our arts programming, but also in the burgeoning range of musical genres offered for sale in record stores, and in the diversification of music-educational curricula. On the one hand, all this seems a sign of cultural health, and inclines me to feel positive about the fact that Radio 3 now includes programmes like LJ in its schedules. On the other hand, the questions that go with these growing tendencies towards pluralist cultural consumption (whether it be in musical or, as in the case of Giraffe, culinary terms) seem to be barely acknowledged let alone explored. Some more versions of those questions go through my mind: What does such cultural plurality actually mean? What do we make of it? What do we make with it? What ‘we’ do we make with it?

5

But lying in my bed at the end of a busy day, my attention to these questions starts to dilate. The will needed for linear thinking gives way to a random, surreal flow between Monteverdi and thoughts, ideas and images recollected from other parts of the day; and, on this occasion anyway, sleep wins out.

6

At other times, if I want to listen to Late Junction less somnolently, there’s always the ‘listen again’ facility on the website, which archives broadcasts for a week. This possibility is of course another aspect of consumption in a postmodern digital era. This sometimes fosters more attentive listening than when I’m in bed, though sometimes, paradoxically, the reverse is the case. Often I listen to LJ over the net in the daytime to take the drudge out of low-level chores like dealing with email. Usually I keep one ear open for anything particularly interesting, at which point the focus of my attention shifts. Like many of the people I’ve talked to about the programme, I use it as a way of discovering new music. And, also like them, I might order a CD or two of sounds I’m particularly taken with. Again there’s a distinctly contemporary inflection to this associated act of consumption. Whereas a few years ago you would have had to have written in to the programme for details, waited a week or so for a reply, and sent off your order and cheque by snail mail, these days gratification is almost instant. The BBC obligingly posts the playlist for each programme on LJ’s website, complete with CD catalogue numbers, so, if you’re on-line anyway, ordering with a credit card is usually only a few mouse clicks away. And since some retailers make it possible to upload music directly, gratification comes ever closer to being instant.

7

III. Everyday life, global consumption and political economy

What emboldens me to tell these personal tales of (post)modern-day cultural consumption is the recent turn in the sociology of music to the study of ‘music in everyday life’. Such an approach entails, as Tia DeNora puts it in her eponymous study, ‘an attendant shift from a concern with what music “means” (a question for music criticism and music appreciation) to a concern with what it “does” as a dynamic material of social existence’. It moves the focus of attention to the literally mundane (i.e. worldly) uses to which music is put in the lives of many kinds of people; and aims ‘to arrive […] at a gallery of practices in and through which people mobilize music for the doing, being and feeling that is social existence’.[4] This approach, then, has an ethnographic dimension that takes seriously not only people’s everyday encounters with, and deployments of, music (imbibing it as background music in a restaurant, using it to fall asleep to, listening to it as part of quest for new experiences, and so on) but also what they say about it as individuals.

8

In Music in Everyday Life, DeNora is careful to negotiate a position – rather than merely reify an opposition – between what she terms the ‘grand’ and ‘little’ traditions of music sociology.[5] Her epitome of the former is (no surprise here) Theodor W. Adorno, whose virtue was to have ‘conceive[d] of music as formative of social consciousness’, but whose alleged weakness was to have ‘provide[d] no machinery for viewing these matters as they actually take place’. I take this to imply that in Adorno’s work the actual contingencies of individual musical encounters by empirically real people are glossed over in favour of more generalised grand-theoretical accounts of homologies between musical structures and social ones. By contrast, in her account of the ‘little’ tradition DeNora refers both to the ‘art worlds’ approach – in which sociologists ‘aren’t much interested in “decoding” artworks’, but ‘prefer to see those works as the result of what a lot of people have done jointly’[6] – and to ‘the British tradition of cultural studies, ethnographically conceived’ – whose emphasis is ‘on what the appropriation of cultural materials achieves in action, what culture “does” for consumers within the contexts of their lives’.[7]

9

What’s attractive about this ‘little’ tradition is its care for the anthropological. Proceeding from the premise that the relationship individuals have with their music is in some way meaningful to them, it accords respect and legitimacy to both the relationship and the human beings concerned. However, while DeNora also remains sensitive to the claims of the ‘grand’, critical–theoretical tradition – evidenced by, among other things, the politicised tone of her ethnographic work – I wonder whether the relationship between it and the little one can be as quiescently handled as it is in her studies: that the little can act straightforwardly as a supplement or corrective to what the grand omits; that the former can gently displace niggling questions posed by the latter. There is a tension here, and indeed one that might be felt across the entire landscape of inquiry into contemporary cultural conditions.

10

For example, sitting in Giraffe, doing a bit of informal imaginary ethnography on the other diners, I speculate on what they’re making of the cultural mêlée of music, menu and murals – what they’re doing with it, what it’s doing for them. Their experience is probably not so different from my own. For one thing, we’re all here for leisure-time enjoyment. I can’t deny that even though for me this visit is an upbeat to the main event of the evening, a concert of twentieth-century art music in the tradition of aesthetic autonomy, both nonetheless form integral parts of the evening – the evening as a planned sequence of experiences in which different kinds of pleasure play no small part (did Adorno relax over a meal out before moving on to a concert of Webern?). I also suspect that my fellow punters – among them seasoned postmodern consumers, no doubt – might be no less entertained by, and no less savvy about, the fantasmatic play of signs around them (even if they might not choose to describe it that way). And yet, there’s a bigger cultural–political context to all this – the kind of thing that the ‘grand’ tradition makes its business – which presupposes a more troubling social reality behind the play of cultural appearances. For example, how many of the diners have twigged, and, if so, does it matter to them, that the demographics of the clientele – mostly metrosexual, middle-class, middle income, young to middle-aged, and white – hardly mirrors the heterogeneity of the cultural signifiers being consumed? Is this asymmetry not in some way an aspect of the problematic phenomenon of the global, to which the consumption of world music (those signifiers through which Giraffe sells itself) is also related?

11

The semiotically supersaturated experience of Giraffe (jangling combinations of signs coming in through multiple sensory channels) illustrates well Jean Baudrillard’s point about the way we consume now, and about the commodity’s metamorphosis from an exchange value to a sign-value.[8] Our desire is increasingly enflamed by our fantasmatic identification with enticingly manufactured worlds of imagery and signification. And while I can’t claim any particular originality in drawing parallels between the consumption of food and the consumption of music – especially of ethnic food and ethnic music[9] – I trust my particular purpose in juxtaposing Giraffe and Late Junction is becoming clear. Both represent imaginings of a harmonious cultural plurality; both couch this in terms of globality; and in both cases sounds classified as ‘world music’ are integral to creating this imaginary. (I use the term imaginary here both in an informal sense and in a stronger theoretical sense influenced by the psychoanalytic writings of Jacques Lacan, to which I will turn later.)

12

Giraffe plays a pretty transparent game around its real economic raison d’être. Any doubt that this is a space ultimately devoted to retailing ought to be dispelled no later than the point where the bill arrives – assuming one didn’t notice the merchandising stand on the way in. But the more important question for this essay is whether a comparable discrepancy between cultural–semiotic superstructure and socio-economic base is going on in Late Junction. To many it would be a travesty to claim that the programme is as brashly implicated in capitalist processes as Giraffe. Whatever relation it might have to political economy would seem more mediated, more elliptical (and, in any case, I will later consider critical positions countering the economic-determinist model I am entertaining here). Nevertheless,  the challenge is whether LJ amounts to anything other than more erudite fodder for essentially the same mores of cultural consumption as Giraffe. Part of my point is that both the restaurant chain and the radio programme have not coincidentally surfaced at a historical moment that has fostered a receptivity to cultural pluralism, and that has created a rich and complicated agenda around what is culturally other – an agenda that by no means precludes making the other an object of desire and enjoyment, and therefore also material for economic consumption.

13

Against this background it would be naïve to consider a term such as ‘world music’ as a neutral, merely descriptive, category. And the same would go for the epithet ‘global’, along with its cognates ‘globalism’ and ‘globalisation’. These are non-innocent signifiers that give a particular, contemporary ideological delineation to the phenomena they signify, phenomena in fact implicated in a long history. In one sense there has always been music all over the world; always therefore the possibility of encountering music that is other to one’s own – just as the trading of goods, the trafficking of ideas, the migration of peoples, the transmission and cross-fertilisation of cultural (and culinary) wares across the globe is probably as old as human culture itself (and is probably one way to define it). But what we have now – intimately related to the referent of what is currently termed globalisation – is a distinctly more graphic avatar of this process in which our collective cultural consciousness is being shaped by a major neoliberal intensification of market forces and the hyper-commodification of life. The ultimate goal and reach of such markets is indeed global, and with this comes a commensurable geographic extension of social relations involved in the production and consumption of commodities for and through those markets, commodities (including recordings of world music) that may themselves be suitably tailored and sanitised representations of the global.

14

With this discussion of political–economic conditions we seem to have reached the antipode to a music-in-everyday-life approach to the object of our study (we are clearly now in the vein of the ‘grand’ tradition). Yet these conditions are the backdrop of our everyday life, and there is the question of how we are to relate the two dimensions. Against such a backdrop, the following sales pitch for world music (taken from a ‘listener’s guide’) seems almost transparently ideological:

15

World music gives the […] listener a sense of freedom from the constraints of standardized Anglo-American pop, without the arid, over-intellectual pomposity of much ‘progressive’ music. World music is both entertaining and different. It takes the listener to a place where the world’s various cultures meet happily and in the spirit of festival. It is a force for understanding and goodwill in an increasingly dark world.[10]

The ingenuousness of the notion of ‘a place where the world’s various cultures meet happily’ – given the growing imperilment to such a possibility under the socio-political realities of globalisation – barely needs spelling out. This is the same kind of imaginary place that Giraffe conjures up and entreats us to participate in as part of our experience of the everyday – though we might reconcile ourselves to the deception by treating it simply as a game. More worryingly, the last two sentences of the quotation might justifiably also be predicated of Late Junction, and, assuming the music it broadcasts has greater cultural significance for its listeners than a meal out, this possibility seems commensurably more problematic – all the more so in the light of reports that LJ was conceived as meeting the needs of ‘a hypothetical listener reclining in a bath, surrounded by scented candles, sipping a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon’.[11] Figured in such an everyday-life situation, LJ would seem to be doing little more than play its part in a scenario of pleasurable commodity consumption – thus providing plenty for the ‘grand’ tradition to go to town on. Much depends, then, on whether and how our experience of LJ, in this scenario or any other, can be deemed to reach beyond this commodity character.

But there is more. The appearance of Late Junction (and its concomitant mission to embrace the global, through a selective representation of a musical totality) has been contemporaneous with increasing public awareness of another aspect of globalism, namely that of geopolitics post-9/11. One signal corollary of the so-called war on terror (a campaign that cannot be disentangled from the globalising interests of the neoliberal economic powers prosecuting it) has been to universalise a consciousness of geopolitics. It becomes ever harder to shut out this consciousness as we sip our Cabernet Sauvignon: cultural and economic transactions – acts of production and consumption – must in one way or another now negotiate with it. The notion of world music as ‘a force for understanding and goodwill in an increasingly dark world’ is one construction of the relationship between global culture and global politics. And for all its naiveté the sentiment suggests the important possibility that aesthetic culture might offer different ways to imagine global relations than those currently being enacted. Yet at the same time, it also raises a serious question about the ethics of enjoyment of what is culturally other, and indeed about what kinds of enjoyment are appropriate under the gravity of the contemporary situation. So if Late Junction represents one of several burgeoning forms of global consciousness, it is also representative in raising questions about the injunction to enjoy cultural plurality, including the question of whether cultural enjoyment can be ethically imagined as occupying a sphere separate from those of economic and geopolitical globalism and their vicissitudes.

16

By this point, which has extended well beyond the scope of an introduction, I have rehearsed in outline much of the basic argument of this essay. What follows, then, is an investigation of LJ itself, that seeks to examine various facets of the programme against this background – to see whether there is indeed more to the show than meets the ear.

17

Approaches to Late Junction

IV. Theoretical perspectives

As the word ‘decoding’ in my title suggests, my premise (also reflected in everything I have said so far) is that beyond the manifest content of Late Junction there may be other, latent meanings that could be read out of it. If this is correct, then so too is the argument that LJ calls for a critique that is suitably theorised. Refuting the common-sense objection that this exceeds what is appropriate to an ordinary, everyday phenomenon such as a radio show, I would proffer the no less commonsensical observation that it is only through such alternative critical registers that we can disclose the wider cultural and political significance beyond the ordinary everydayness that is common sense’s creation.

18

One potentially productive theoretical strand is psychoanalytical. The Freudian notion of LJ as a kind of dream-work is suggested by the surrealism of its manifest content: sequences of sonic images whose logic is only sometimes explicable through the rational narratives of waking life – narratives based on, say, historical or cultural connections.[12] Pursuing this conceit a little further, one might speculate whether the programme doesn’t have a kind of unconscious: a place of latent cultural knowledge whose repression is the work of ideology. What also prompts such an interpretation is Late Junction’s very inscrutability. For the programme makers provide little in the way of explicit factual statements about their own intentions. In this underdetermined state the rationale for LJ’s manifest content remains something of an enigma – a void into which we, the listeners, might project various kinds of fantasy. These terms, which are in fact more redolent of Lacanian (i.e. post-Freudian) than of Freudian psychoanalytic theory, trigger the thought that LJ’s inscrutability may only be an act of semblance, a suggestion of a deeper significance that may not ‘actually’ be there – at least not in the programme itself, or in the minds of the programme makers. We should therefore not be oblivious to the work of the community of listeners, who play their part in both constructing and filling the programme’s voided meaning. Which might be to say that LJ’s unconscious is in the public domain.

19

If the issue of meaning is at the heart of this enquiry, then semiology suggests itself as a further theoretical strand. So far, we have identified both programme makers and listeners as sources (however problematic) of the show’s meaning; to these two terms we might now add a third: the programme itself, as a material phenomenon or object that can be analysed for traces of the agency of the other two. On the face of it, then, this might suggest a semiological framework along the lines of Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s tripartition.[13] Under this scheme, well known to music theorists, meaning is understood as distributed across three levels: poietic (emanating from the point of creation or production); esthesic (emanating from the point of perception or reception); and neutral (emanating from the work or object itself, which is a trace of the other two levels, but may be a source of meanings not assumed a priori as belonging to either). Yet what’s lacking from Nattiez’s tripartition is any sense of the dynamics between its terms; any sense of attraction, anxiety, power or (to sum these up in a single notion) desire. This brings us back to psychoanalysis; or, more precisely, it suggests potential mileage in a convergence of psychoanalytically and semiologically inflected theory – which is very much the realm occupied by Lacan’s critical corpus. Overwriting Nattiez’s tripartitional model with a kind of Lacanian transform will quickly generate a suggestive reading of the relationship between the players in Late Junction’s game.[14]

20

At Nattiez’s esthesic level (the domain of the listener, the pole of reception), we might locate the Lacanian subject. For Lacan, the subject’s sense of self is not taken as a given, but as something that is produced precisely through (among other things) his/her involvement with language – with what Lacan more broadly terms the symbolic order. On Lacan’s view it is only by engaging with signifying systems (which, we might add, could include music) that we create our selves. But entering the symbolic order, becoming linguistic creatures, comes at a price. It renders subjects as divided, non-whole entities. This is because the very symbolising systems that enable me to know the world (and that generate the ‘I’ that does the knowing) simultaneously cut me off from the reality that is not identical with them (and simultaneously split me off from my pre-linguistic self) – all of which generates a sense of lack, from which comes desire. In Lacanian terms, a subject listening to Late Junction is a divided subject whose listening acts represent some kind of search for pleasure and fulfilment, and some way of finding him/herself in the symbolically constructed social and cultural world.

21

Further following Nattiez’s scheme would situate the programme makers of Late Junction at the poietic level, the pole of creation. From the perspective of the Lacanian (listening) subject, this domain, the source of his/her objects of perception or aesthetic consumption, is that of some other – in fact not just any other, but what Lacan calls the big Other. To put it another way around, those involved in institutionally sanctioned acts of making, and hence identified as the authoring agents of culturally legitimated cultural forms, carry an authority that exceeds their everyday personhood and that aligns them with the symbolic order, and hence renders them representatives of some big Other. Hence, in the case of LJ, ‘the programme makers’ denotes not only a set of contingent individuals (actual presenters, production teams, managers etc.) but also a function within a larger order – concretely, an order of programme making within the BBC; more abstractly, an order of meaning making (that is, a signifying or symbolic order) legitimated under the banner of a significant authority (or even an authorising signifier), in this case a national organisation.

22

But what distinguishes the BBC from a state broadcasting authority is that it doesn’t demand we identify with it in these terms. Where identification does take place, this is perhaps diverted from the place of the big Other to that of the ‘little other’, Lacan’s objet petit a: the object–cause of desire. And it is this domain that we might posit as the Lacanian counterpart of Nattiez’s neutral level. In the latter’s model this where we find the text (the musical work, the performance) in its material, quasi-objective form.[15] But in the Lacanian scheme, such objects are far from neutral: they are both the cause and the focus of desire. On Lacan’s view, these may take many everyday forms, but their role for the subject is always the same: to fill an absence, to plug the gap that renders him/her incomplete, to cover the void of what cannot be rendered to him/her through language or other symbolising systems, and which is the price of admission into the symbolic order. Could it be, then, that each time we listen to a programme such as Late Junction we are responding to it as just such an object of desire? Could it be that its pleasures involve playing out certain kinds of fantasy about our individual and our collective, social selves, so as to mask a gap in our individual and social being?

23

For Lacan such a void can never be filled: we are destined to repeat the cycle of fantasy and desire. However, the final stage of psychoanalysis involves ‘traversing’ such fantasies – recognising them for what they are, and thus divesting them of their hold over us. By analogy, then, a critical inquiry into Late Junction would involve identifying the nature and cause of our fantasmatic investment in its images of a pluralist musical world, so that we could see our way through to some revaluation of the programme and other cultural phenomena like it. This emphatically does not mean dismissing what makes such phenomena enjoyable, nor being oblivious to what might be genuinely enlightening in them. But it is to argue that, critically considered, they and our relationship with them might be re-cast to illuminate the wider cultural politics of our contemporary situation.

24

Readers might want to be reassured that the psychoanalytic tenor of the preceding paragraphs does not saturate this investigation as a whole. If Late Junction is operating on some less-than-tractable unconscious dimension, however construed, this forms one end of a continuum whose counterpole juts into the conscious daylight. Broadly (but not entirely) homologous with this, then, is a continuum from relatively empirical to more speculative approaches to LJ; and this is also consistent with the commitment, expounded earlier, to consider the show from both everyday-life and critical–theoretical perspectives. On a further continuum is a variety of modalities of evidence or materials for scrutiny. These include: (i) factual information about the programme (for even though this is scarce, it is not entirely absent, and certainly remains useful); (ii) analysis of the show itself (a kind of formalist approach); (iii) comparison with related cultural forms, which might include similar programmes issuing from the BBC as well as from other broadcasters, but might also extend to cultural forms of the heterogeneous other than radio shows; (iv) a range of quasi- or virtual-ethnographic data, found largely on the internet, and notably (but not exclusively) in the form of listeners’ posts to LJ’s website. The order in which I have listed these modalities is broadly commensurate with the various passes I make at the particularities of the programme below; but I should make it clear that I don’t intend to follow this or any of the other continua outlined here too schematically; instead they represent a framework to which the following discursive episodes can be related.

25

V. History, context, identity

Late Junction is very much a product of Roger Wright’s term as Controller of BBC Radio 3. The programme was reportedly conceived by him around the time of his appointment (November 1998), in a move reflecting his then determination to achieve musical diversification and a wider listenership for the station.[16] Wright would be among the first to point out (as he has indeed needed to do to a number of detractors of his policies)[17] that this impulse has well-established precedents in the history of Radio 3: since the incorporation of jazz into its remit in the 1960s, the station has shown a commitment to genres other than those of the Western classical repertory that nonetheless remains its mainstay.[18] However, Wright’s take on diversification has had a contemporary inflection in his desire to promote eclecticism within a single programme, and to develop within this, as well as across Radio 3’s broadcasting policy as a whole, the crucial ingredient of world music, explicitly branded as such (see section III, above). Fiona Talkington and Verity Sharp have been Late Junction’s principal presenters since its inception in 1999, and have had a largely free hand in selecting content to meet its pluralist brief.[19] They have tended to host the show by turn, usually alternating in fortnightly stints, with guest presenters occasionally standing in for a week or two at a time. It may well be that the period 2000 to early 2007 will come to be regarded as LJ's heyday: the time when it regularly went out on four nights a week (Mondays to Thursdays) in an extended slot from 10.15 to midnight. In its earlier days the show stopped at 11.30, and the subsequent extension appears related to its having reached audience figures of 300,000 not long after its launch. More recently, there have been signs that the programme’s fortunes might have begun to (f)alter; and anxiety voiced at Wright’s plans (reported in the press in late 2006 prior to implementation in February 2007) to reduce LJ’s presence on Radio 3 – not to mention to axe its sibling show, Mixing It (discussed further below) – might be seen as well founded.[20] At the time of writing, LJ broadcasts only three nights a week, and has been shifted an hour later in Radio 3’s schedule. For many non-nocturnal listeners – myself included – this has meant pretty much the end of any regular relationship with the show.

26

As intimated above, Late Junction weaves a complicated enigma around its identity. From a listener’s perspective, trying to get a fix on what genre of programme it represents feels like trying to identify the kind of food served in Giraffe. Genre identification seems to be part of the game (we need reference to genre in order to situate what we’re hearing in a socio-cultural context, and so to locate its meaning); but so too is genre subversion or evasion. This is partly because LJ plays music that is itself generically ambiguous, and partly because the co-ordinates that map the programme’s conditions of possibility – ‘music […] from Mali to Bali, and from medieval chant to 21st-century electronica’ – ambiguously extend along both geographic and historical axes. As such, it functions as a kind of open text, in which its generic identity becomes as much as anything a matter of listener inference (i.e. located in the esthesic domain, the sphere of consumption). Notwithstanding its world music strand, on some occasions one might think of LJ as a vehicle for promoting folk and traditional musics; while on others it seems more concerned with a species of soft contemporary music from both vernacular and art-music ends of the spectrum, or in a category itself defined by a postmodern deconstruction of such dualistic classifications. How, though (looking to the poietic domain, the sphere of production), has the BBC itself positioned LJ?

27

On the one hand, all the signs are that the Corporation wants us to read the programme principally as a world music show. On the Radio 3 website it sits in the station’s world music section alongside World Routes (a weekly magazine programme presented by Lucy Duran) and the Andy Kershaw show. That Kershaw’s world music interests (and his strong predilection for African popular styles) have transplanted successfully to Radio 3 – he had his own show on Radio 1, the BBC’s popular music station, between 1985 and 2000 and would deputise on the John Peel show, famous for its promotion of innovative rock bands – itself tells us just how far we’ve come since the days of the old Third Programme. To the extent that tracks from Mali, Zimbabwe or South Africa are likely to surface on Late Junction, the two shows justify their appearance under the same world music banner. Likewise, the occasional inclusion of field recordings on LJ suggests some overlap with the more ethnomusicologically orientated World Routes, though it has nothing of the latter’s more extended exploration and discursive analysis of specific topics. LJ’s world music credentials are reinforced by its annual transmogrification into the BBC World Music Awards, a live televised event whose main presenters have been (again) Sharp and Talkington.

28

On the other hand, one of LJ’s closest cognates on the Radio 3 menu was Mixing It, classified, in its day, under Contemporary Music on the station’s website. MI started up in the early 1990s[21], when it heralded an alternative take on contemporary music broadcasting to the then more usual ‘classic’ modernist content of programmes such as Music in our Time, which ran from 1966 to 1999,[22] eventually to be succeed by its Wright-era counterpart Hear and Now. Mixing It could in many ways be seen as a harbinger of developments in the Wright era – which makes Wright’s decision to axe the show from February 2007 all the more puzzling.[23] Like Late Junction, MI was marked by a more promiscuous, pluralist attitude to genre, tending to juxtapose postmodernist forms of art music with left-field developments on the popular music scene (in its early days it showed, among other things, a responsiveness to the then emerging forms of dance and electronica, by exponents such as Kraftwerk and 808 State).

29

Despite overlaps between the two programmes, they have/had rather different styles. Gender has something to do with this. Mixing It’s longstanding presenters were men, and unlike Talkington and Sharp, Mark Russell and Robert Sandall co-hosted their show, providing banter, and sometimes disagreement, around the tracks. Their choice of music, however, was at the edgier, more avant garde end of the post-vernacular spectrum;[24] and while it would have been wrong to describe the programme as blokey, it gave a subtle legitimation of the notion of progressiveness and of music that in some way pushes the envelope or seeks an assertive presence on its own scene, in a way that resonates with discourses conventionally gendered as masculine. Patently, the pitfalls of essentialism need to be avoided here. In principle the only obstacles to women presenting Mixing It in the same style as Russell and Sandall would have been institutional ones. As it turns out in practice, however, the show that fell to women to deliver was Late Junction; and indeed these are women whose voices delineate a particular kind of femininity, to which the epithet ‘demure’ (with its associated connotations of class and race) would not be far off the mark. Because, then, two shows are sufficiently similar to draw attention to the contingencies of their differences, and, since medium and message are inseparable, perceptions of difference in content inevitably blur with perceptions of difference in presenter gender. Hence the fact that LJ is less concerned with pugnacious or hard-line soundworlds can get perceived as symptomatic of a particular construction of femininity.

30

Interestingly, both the (now former) Mixing It presenters have on occasions individually deputised for Talkington and Sharp, with a corresponding temporary change in LJ’s style and ethos. Messageboard posts registered this both positively and negatively – some post-ers happy about the change of content, others concerned about a drift too far in the direction of Mixing It. Saliently, one post says of Robert Sandall: ‘[i]t's funny – [b]ut I find it rather disconcerting to hear a man presenting Late Junction, especially a guy with such a patrician tone’.[25] Perhaps it would not be wrong, then, to ally these perceptions of LJ’s usually more feminine ethos with its fluid attitude to genre, an attitude that seems unfazed by the blurring of boundaries between world, contemporary, classical, popular, early and traditional musics; an attitude concerned not with modernist hostility towards bourgeois norms, but with gently extending these through an ostensible inclusivity that alerts listeners to a world of music reaching beyond what they already know.

31

VI. Composition and poetics

Whatever generic intersection Late Junction represents, its main structuring (or maybe anti-structuring) principle is the playlist – a cultural form rooted in the history of popular music radio stations, but which has arguably come into its own in the digital age, characteristically as an organising device of the mp3-player. The playlist’s essential unit is the track; indeed LJ would seem to reproduce the tendency inherent in iTunes (and similar sound library software for mp3 players and computer-stored music) to consider and consume music with, as it a were, a one-track mind. Playlists perform a double semantic action: on the one hand atomisation, which encourages us to consider all forms of music, regardless of genre, in discrete units; on the other hand recontextualisation, in which tracks acquire new meanings through being re-situated in a sequence with a more individualistic and maybe less explicit rationale. A Rameau keyboard sarabande has a certain kind of historical and generic intelligibility on a CD of Rameau keyboard suites; but what are to we make of it when, in the context, say, of an LJ playlist, it follows on from an unaccompanied Child ballad?[26]

32

Although there are moments when its playlists seem almost randomly assembled, Late Junction does in fact have a defining poetics (which nevertheless does not always preclude seemingly random assemblage); and without pushing a point too far, we might consider each evening’s sequence of tracks as a kind of composition, determined (in Jakobsonian fashion) by the interaction of two axes or dimensions.[27] An axis of selection demarcates the permissible range of styles and genres (with actual selections probably in no small part contingently determined by the piles of CDs sent in by promoters and artists hoping for air play). Meanwhile, an axis of combination determines the linear sequence of the selected genres and tracks; it represents a set of constraints on, and possibilities for, what may follow what, and for how long; in other words, it determines the temporal flow of each show.

33

While there’s no such thing as a typical LJ playlist, I will use the one from Tuesday 26 September 2006 as a case study (on this occasion the host was Verity Sharp), periodically supplementing this with reference to broadcast content from other nights from around the same period. Details are tabulated in Fig. 3, which gives track information directly downloaded from the Late Junction website, and, in adjacent columns, further factual data such as track durations, as well as more interpretive analysis. As already outlined, an important determinant in the process of track selection is genre, which functions as a kind of semiotic code at the point of reception; hence Fig. 3 includes attempted generic identifications for each track. I will talk in a moment about the related problematics of this exercise, but for now let us simply note that this reveals something of the sheer expansiveness of LJ’s horizons – encompassing on this night alone genres definable as folk, traditional, world, ‘classical’, early music, film music, avant garde pop, electronica, ambient, country, bluegrass, prog rock and blues. On other nights we could equally expect to find jazz, postmodern contemporary, indie-pop, turntablism, anti-folk, post-punk … and so the list goes on. We could surmise that, like the menu at Giraffe, what is permissible is defined as much as anything in negative terms. Anything’s possible as long is it isn’t … what? A mainstream classic, maybe – whether this be the modernist mainstream, or the wider classic–romantic European canon; and usually not orchestral music either (potentially too loud). But then, just when these criteria seem to have been nailed down, they get subverted by the inclusion of a movement from, say, Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms,[28] or (as on our chosen evening) Schumann’s Waldszenen. It’s as if the only fixed criterion of selection is the criterion of subtly undermining any fixed criterion of selection. LJ keeps its territorial borders in a constant state of flux.

34

Criteria other than generic ones also operate. One of these is duration. LJ is a bit too classy to pander to the attention span of a three-minute culture. Fig. 3 shows that, for this night at least,[29] four is closer to the norm – both as mode and mean: some tracks make it to six minutes (tracks longer than this – Indian raags, for instance – might get the fade-out treatment), but shorter ones lasting a minute or two are sometimes thrown in for contrast. This last point reminds us that track length, as well as being a criterion for what gets selected, is also a determinant of the axis of combination, which is concerned to build a gently undulating but not too predictable periodicity of tracks. Similarly, tempo and dynamic level are conditions of both axes. As genre is a determinant of the ‘mix’ part of LJ’s ‘laid-back mix’, so these other parameters contribute to the adjectival part. Tracks tend to gravitate around mid-tempo, though are often slower, and dynamic levels usually avoid extremes. Again, though, the presenters will occasionally throw in a more energetic, up-tempo number to avoid too soporific a sequence – like the exuberant ‘Magic Step’ from Sam Prekop’s Thrill Jockey album, Who’s Your New Professor?, played near the end of the 26 September show.

35

A further crucial element of poetics and formal construction is the voice of the presenter (shown as shaded entries in Fig. 3). This has several functions, most obviously to provide information about tracks just heard or just coming up, and also to plug gigs, albums and websites related to music and artists. But in another sense what the presenters actually say is incidental to the very presence of their voices – which is perhaps just as well, given that Sharp and Talkington tend not to take us much beyond the CD liner-note or website information they (sometimes slightly falteringly) paraphrase[30] (never mind: lots of listeners like them and their non-patrician style; this is quite clear from the messageboard).[31] Disembodied, floating over the ether, reciprocating the mellowness of the tracks they usher in and out, these voices are an essential ingredient in the show’s feminine ethos. If they were absent – if, say, the playlists ran without commentary – we would have a different kind of programme.[32]

36

In addition to these semantic and semiotic functions, the presenter commentaries also serve a syntactic purpose. From the standpoint of selection, the presenters have to decide whether or not to insert commentary at each juncture between tracks. Sometimes they do; sometimes they don’t. From the standpoint of combination, this in turn impacts on the sequential rhythm of the evening, enhancing and stemming the musical current, and providing moments of punctuation between sets of tracks. The ideal type, once the programme is under way, is probably three tracks followed by about a minute of commentary;[33] but, as ever, the presenters ring the changes to stop things becoming too predictable. Early in our case study example Sharp builds a sequence – admittedly exceptional – of six, arguably seven, items.[34] (The particular configuration of this syntax becomes a presenter fingerprint. On Thursday 14 September 2006, for example, when Robert Sandall was in the chair, the show took on a very different rhythm, with commentary following more or less every track – Mixing It style – in a sequence comprising almost exclusively male artists.)[35]

37

As significant as its presence is the absence of the presenter voice – again on semantic, syntactic and semiotic levels. I refer to those moments in the show when tracks are allowed to segue into one another. The segue is arguably one of LJ’s most characteristic devices, precisely because it is an option, and therefore acquires markedness – a status as something other than neutral – when it transpires. Semantically, the segue sends an unvoiced message that tends to lie at one of two extremes. Either it suggests coherence – a cultural or historical code that connects the tracks; or it suggests the opposite – a surreal code, resisting any obvious rational connection between tracks. An example of the coherent kind of segue from the 26 September show would be the passage from traditional music by the Imazighen (Berber desert people) to Moroccan singer Cherifa’s performance of ‘Ah-Ya Samra’ (items 13–14 in Fig. 3). While the latter is patently in an ‘orientalist’ mode, complete with Western orchestral string backing, Cherifa nonetheless claims the Imazighen traditional singer Mohamed Rouicha, featured on the preceding track, as a key influence – a point made by Sharp after the segued tracks, and hence retroactively illuminating a connection that might otherwise have gone un-noted. An example of the surreal kind of segue is the seemingly unfathomable logic that takes us from Arto Lindsay’s rendition of his song ‘Delegada’ (a bossa nova pastiche),[36] to the earlier-mentioned piece from Schumann’s Waldszenen (now we see the extent of its recontextualisation), to a piece of film music in American Western genre by Enrico Morricone (items 3–5 in Fig. 3).

38

In such cases the segue generates a palpable lack: a pregnant absence between tracks, which is then retroactively construed as a syntactic operator that binds them into a syntagm whose synthetic logic nonetheless remains elusive. This tiny moment of silence replete with enigma appears as the presence of an unvoiced voice – a kind of spectral counterpart to the presenter’s voice, and possibly a proxy for it. This is the semiotic aspect of the segue, and in my fantasy I hear this voice as the possessor of the ‘secret’ of LJ; the solution to its enigma; the knowledge that, could I descry it, would explain what the programme is really about. In Lacanian terms, this voice perhaps represents the ‘subject supposed to know’; it also carries the weight and authority of the big Other (though, interestingly, in a feminised avatar). It elicits the question, che vuoi? – what do you want from me?[37] It makes me feel that I, like it, should know the answer to this enigma; and it generates a frisson of anxiety because I don’t, because I can’t respond to its demand. It is also where the rustle of ideology is audible.

39

VII. The impossible map of genres

With ideological antennae now raised, I want in this section and the next to make a further, more in-depth pass at how genre and segue respectively do their work in Late Junction. We might begin our analysis of the former by noting that genres ascribed to tracks in Fig. 3 should not be regarded as objective or ‘etic’ categories. Rather, they are ‘emic’ ones, that is, mediated by the understandings of those subjects who might use them; which means they don’t escape being variously fuzzy, informal, contestable, or downright ideological.[38] For example, the opening track played on 26 September, James Yorkston performing ‘Summer Song’ from his 2006 album The Year of the Leopard, begins with a number of signifiers – solo vocals, simple guitar accompaniment, quiet foot-tapping in the background – that would not belie audience perceptions of him as a certain kind of folk singer; that is, less a singer of traditional folk music than a singer–songwriter in a more contemporary folk idiom. Yet, although associated by some with the category of ‘nu-folk’, Yorkston himself remains diffident about his folk credentials: ‘[w]hen I’m playing at what one may perceive to be new-folk events’, he has said, ‘I often tend to be the most traditional ‘folk’ act on the bill, which is pretty ironic, as I’m not really traditional in the slightest. But, who’s to say I’m right? Not me, that’s for sure. And that’s my point. Folk means different things to different people.’[39] His comments are appropriate as perceptions both about genre (in their implication that genre is a communally negotiated process) and about his own performances, which indeed could also invite other stylistic or generic readings. To my ears, ‘Summer Song’ could equally be classified as a piece of indie-pop: Yorkston’s close miked, upper tessitura, head-voice rendition of a repeated phrase over a simple guitar chord sequence comes close to the opening of ‘The State that I Am In’ from the 1996 Belle and Sebastian Album, Tigermilk.[40] And the songs follow on in similar ways too, with the introduction of fuller instrumental textures and backing vocals.

40

Here, then, we have an example of simultaneous under- and over-determination of genre: underdetermined in that the generic signifiers of ‘Summer Song’ are not unambiguously enough those of folk music to situate the performance unequivocally in that social and cultural space; overdetermined in that they belong to more than one genre, and thus set in play a relay along a chain of difference – a kind of ‘genre drift’. Whereas in the milieu of Yorkston’s own creative activity (the world of his other albums and of his stylistically significant others) these signifiers might be re-stabilised along a broadly folk axis, in the context of a Late Junction playlist they get drawn instead into a process of generic osmosis that leaches into yet a different space. For the next item on the playlist for the night is a track from The Lemon of Pink, an album by the experimental indie-pop duo, The Books (Paul de Jong and Nick Zammuto).[41] Commonalities between the two adjacent tracks include most notably the acoustic guitar sound, but The Books’ deployment of studio technology is more involved than Yorkston’s, including sampling techniques as well as guitar loops subjected to processes of repetition and systemic extension that lightly tend towards the soundworld of Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint. The generic dream-work of Late Junction, then, sets up a world in which an experience close to folk music (Yorkston) is only a couple of degrees of separation (or displacement) away from that of postmodern art music.

41