If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you have come across the track “Tezeta (Nostalgia)'', most likely the version by Mulatu Astatake from the compilation Ethiopiques, Vol. 4: Ethio Jazz 1969-1974. It may have been presented by a friend, or a lover, in an intentional act of divulgence. More likely it surfaced on a streaming platform (probably the Swedish one) but nevertheless the song resonated, didn’t it? The wandering of the piano, the assuredness of a softly strummed guitar, a saxophone floating in and out like the breeze. All of it under the smoky fidelity of a recording over a half-century old that feels, somehow, pristine.
“Tezeta (Nostalgia)” has about 21.5 million plays on the Swedish streaming platform at the time of writing this piece. A modest figure by most standards, and yet the song has a certain ubiquity that makes it a frame of reference for a phenomenon of the digital music era. The discovery and dissemination of music from supposedly “obscure” corners of the world to Western listeners is not a brand new enterprise. The African Record Center Ltd. began distributing and promoting African music in the States in 1969, and opened a store in Harlem in the early 1970s which became a cultural institution showcasing music from all areas of the continent and is still going strong today, here in Brooklyn.
In the little window of time that was post-Napster/pre-streaming, a number of music blogs cropped up with the mission of showcasing music from parts of the world that fell mostly outside of the Western sound palate. In 2006, Brian Shimkovitz started a website called Awesome Tapes from Africa. You are correct in assuming that Brian is white. After completing a Fulbright Research Grant documenting hip-hop and youth culture in Ghana, Brian returned to the U.S. with literal cassette tapes of African music that he knew were nearly impossible to find stateside. He started with posting the cassettes digitally and grew ATFA into a record label with dozens of titles, both archival and new recordings. The label not only contributed to a resurgence of popularity of African music in the 2010s, several of its releases have transformed the careers of artists and allowed them to tour in the US and Europe.
In late 2017, a friend showed me a song while we were sitting in his car. On the dashboard display, I saw the photograph of a handsome and well-dressed man, one foot perched and his hand folded, the photo held in a double border of yellow and unforgettably bright pink. My friend explained it was an Ethiopian Jazz artist from the 1970s. It seemed impossible that a song recorded five decades prior in an Addis Ababa nightclub would be touching the innermost region of my soul in the passenger seat of a car in San Jose, California. But it was no accident.
The song was “Wede Harer Guzo” the eponymous track from Hailu Mergia’s 1978 cassette with the Dahlak band, re-released by Awesome Tapes From Africa in 2016. The album means a great deal to me. It brought me a lot of peace of mind in that turbulent period after college, when I was still finding my footing in the world, and I return to it whenever I need a moment of refuge. But despite my admiration for Hailu, and the music he has created and continues to create, I feel guilty. It’s a very white guilt, as a caucasian person consuming African music, pressed and published by a record label that is owned by another white man. It’s a quandary that Shimkovitz has written on at some length in the “about” section of the ATFA website. I fear that I, not being from Africa or the diaspora, am actively removing the music from its cultural context and turning into something else: a personal soundtrack, an audio aesthetic, a token of cultural cache. The fear is not unfounded, and it should be felt, as it remains part of the legacy of white people consuming culture extractively, taking from what is not theirs without a second thought to the consequences.
Mulatu Astatke’s song is an evocation of something deeply cultural: tizita. It’s a word from the Semitic language of the Amhara people of Ethiopia. Its English translation is nostalgia, but the word more accurately describes the folk music genre that is meant to evoke strong feelings and memories for the Amhara people. Today, thanks to a number of factors, the song has become something of a coffeehouse staple by way of Ridgewood, Queens.
I worry about a “Tezeta Effect” whereby the richly varied landscape of global music is flattened into a singular stream of consumption. The Swedish music streaming platform has propagated this through its signature algorithm, which recommends songs based on playlists created by other users which overlap with your own taste. If the algorithm brought you “Tezeta (Nostalgia)” it has likely also presented “Homesickness, Pt. 2” by Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, an Ethiopian nun and classically trained pianist. The song is similarly gorgeous and frequently aestheticized.
The algorithm has subsumed the work of reissue labels and music blogs and supercharged it. In an instant you can wander from 1960s Peruvian garage rock to Thai psychedelia from the 1970s, to bossa nova from artists not named João Gilberto, and back again. The digital music ecosystem enables the listener to sail across a proverbial ocean of music they might not otherwise encounter. The problem is that the ocean is miles long but only an inch deep. The Swedish streaming platform emphasizes its role in “discovery”, but listeners should proceed with caution and remember that just because someone claims to have discovered something, doesn’t mean that thing didn’t exist prior. And it doesn’t mean that discovery is guaranteed to be benevolent.
The Tezeta Effect is keenly felt in the adjacent mediums of film & TV, especially as music supervision (licensing existing music for a soundtrack as opposed to using original score) has become a more prestigious and scrutinized craft. Contemporary television has raised the profile of music supervisors, and the supposed off-the-beaten-path songs they choose to add to the unique flavor of certain shows in order to separate them from the fold. HBO’s High Maintenance is a prime example, its soundtrack credits include Astatke and several Awesome Tapes from Africa releases, not to mention Ghanaian soul singer Ebo Taylor, and the West African outfit Volta Jazz. The soundtrack of High Maintenance is meant to evoke the music that people in New York actually listen to, and as someone who lives in New York and listens to this music I can attest to their achievement. But it is always worth noting that the creators and executive producers of the show are white, and share a complicity in the flattening of deeply cultural music by removing it from its essential context.
Episode 6 of the severely well-intentioned High Fidelity tv show opens with Ebo Taylor’s “My Love and Music” and at about the 4 minute mark there is a cut to William Onyeabor’s “Fantastic Man” which is both scoring the scene and blasting in the headphones of a white patron at Zoë Kravitz’s record shop. He’s clearly enjoying the song, and he removes the headphones to tell the store clerk, also white, that his mind is blown. I always wished Sly was more like Fela, and Fela was more like Sly, he says. Meaning Stone and Kuti, respectively, but that’s for the viewer to infer. In response the clerk says, “that’s Onyeabor.” I’ve remembered that brief scene since I first saw it, now years ago, and it has only aged poorly in its hamfistedness. William Onyeabor was no doubt influenced by his contemporary and fellow Nigerian Fela Kuti, and it’s certainly possible he was inspired by Sly Stone, but such a triumvirate is worth so much more than being conveniently shoe-horned into a winking joke.
Is there an upside to the Tezeta Effect? Certainly there is. As my friend Shyam, creator of last month’s playlist, pointed out to me: people like to feel rewarded for exploring. And why shouldn’t they? There is a risk in going off the path in search of something outside of the norm, and the feeling of personal discovery as it pertains to music is a special one. It’s unfortunate that The Algorithm has exploited that feeling by creating shortcuts to music that will be deemed “cool” for the scarcity of awareness around it. But in my opinion it remains indisputably good that so much music from the world is available on-demand. The tricky thing is what we do with it.
I’m hardly in a position to offer advice on consuming music from a culture that is not one’s own, having been complicit in all of the problems I’ve already mentioned. But what I try to do is take a two-fold approach of acknowledge, then dig deeper. Acknowledge that I am not discovering music, I am hearing it for the first time. Then, when the music resonates, take the time to dig into the story of it - who made it, when, and under what circumstances. The greatest sin in the act of listening is to strip away the context in which a song came to be.
I cannot claim any sort of kinship with Hailu Mergia or his songs, but upon learning more about him I have only come to admire him more and deepen my relationship with his music. I think of this most of all: in the late 1970s, the Ethiopian government instituted a strict curfew which threatened to extinguish the nightlife of Addis Ababa, in which Hailu was a central figure. No one could be out on the street between 12am and 6am. Instead of adhering and letting the music go quiet, when midnight rolled around Hailu Mergia and his band kept playing all the way through the night, their music no doubt giving refuge to those who truly needed it.
This month’s playlist is from the one and only Colleen Devine. I asked her to concoct an Official Start of Summer Playlist for us, and appropriately at the moment of posting this, Colleen is in Barcelona taking in the sounds and scenery of Primavera Festival. Here’s a quick editorial note from her:
For me, the start of the summer is synonymous with my birthday (June 11th) so I always have a great excuse to make the most unhinged playlist my friends have ever heard. Enjoy!