I came across this very poignant speech given by Marc Hollander of Crammed Discs after winning the WOMEX Award in 2004. Its lenghty, but worth every bit your time. His insightful deduction of music, culture, and “the biz”, really resonated with me. He’s been taking risks and “genre bending” successfully for over 25 years.

Memento Audre Semper all the way! (remember to dare always)

A lil’ bit about WOMEX:

Quality, creativity, impact. Since its introduction in 1999, the WOMEX Award has been honouring world music on the international level. Musical excellence, social effectiveness, commercial success, political impact, lifetime achievement - any or all of these might make one a worthy recipient.

Life is what music is all about … or should that be: music is what life is all about?

About Marc Hollander & CRAMMED

With 225 albums and 200 singles, Marc Hollander´s Crammed Discs is one of the seminal players on the world music field. They brought us genre heavyweights like Zap Mama, Taraf de Haïdouks, Hector Zazou and Mahmoud Ahmed, as well as the new wave of Brazilian sounds that make up their sub label Ziriguiboom: Cibelle, Zuco 103, Trio Mocotó, and Bebel Gilberto, to name a few.

They were behind fusion milestones such as the Electric Gypsyland long player, Zazou Bikaye, Bel Canto, The Honeymoon Killers. They are the market force behind electronic music innovators like Carl Craig, 4hero/Tek 9 or DJ Morpheus & his Freezone series. And they will surely come up with more of the same quality in the years to come.

If you care about your independence, artistically or economically, you have to be twice as creative as others, three times as gutsy, four times as persistent ­ that´s the story of this community. Small units of adventurous, free-thinking minds with an attitude and a lot of ideas coming together to fuse the different genres and create a unique musical vision, successfully marketing it to the resale channels and media as world music, and continuously feeding the genre with new flavours and styles.

And now on to the speech:

It’s true that eclecticism hasn´t been an easy route: you can´t brand an eclectic label like Crammed (which releases electronic, rock, world music etc…). People never know what to expect, and they don´t necessarily like that. Media, retailers and audience generally prefer independent labels to be specialized, and to stay within a given genre.

None of the existing musical churches or sects really accepts you, you always seem slightly suspect: the dance specialists would say: “these people can’t be putting out real techno, if they produce all this weird Gypsy stuff”…. The world music community would sometimes dismiss us as a rock label or something… We´d be too commercial for some, and too leftield for some others…

In the end of the day, people never seemed to realize, or never wanted to believe, that all these very diverse records were produced and worked by the same small team of people.

So, for a long time, we tried to hide, to disguise behind fictitious sub-labels we invented, SSR, Ziriguiboom, etc…

Fortunately it seems that the idea of a label which mixes styles & genres is more acceptable today, which is just as well…

Now you may wonder: why is Crammed so pathologically eclectic?

One explanation is: Brussels… the capital of Belgium, a small, culturally divided country which is open to many influences and doesn´t have a strong national identity, which for me, is actually a quality: you can’t seriously be a Belgian chauvinist… in a way, modesty and self-irony are the privilege of small countries… it´s more natural to become a world citizen if you live in a country like Belgium than if you live in France, Germany, England, America, where the national culture acts like a thicker filter between you and the rest of the world…

So, when you grow up in Brussels, you don´t automatically pick up a guitar and play the blues… you learn to play the kora from your uncle around the corner… you can´t even sing in English without sounding stupid or contrived… if you´re curious, you have to absorb things from everywhere and create your own cocktail… this is true not only for music, but culture & mentalities in general.

Beyond this geographical factor, there´s another, more personal explanation to this eclecticism:
I must admit that I have a kind of phobia of being trapped in a box, and that I tend to be restless, always trying to escape categories, to avoid being pinned down.

But I feel that this isn’t just a personal psychic disorder: it’s a bit more general, more political than that… Its related to a deep distrust for the contemporary idea of “identity”: you know, this growing tendency which drives some people to define themselves primarily through one of their multiple components, to choose one component over the others.

By “components”, I mean that, in most parts of the world today, every individual is a nexus of various influences, cultures, family history etc : most people have a nationality, belong to a linguistic group, a religion, a family, a profession, a certain social class, an age group, a gender, etc… and each person’s unique and rich identity is the particular intersection of all these elements.

But today, there’s a much too widespread attitude which reduces identity to a single affiliation, and asserts this affiliation… it´s an attitude of fear and withdrawal.

People feel safer when they huddle in communities… and this in turn brings confrontation between communities. I strongly believe that multiple affiliation is something valuable, precious, something to be proud of, and that it should be presented like that, promoted, advocated…

In other words, instead of multiculturalism (where each group retreats in its little enclosure), let´s have more inter or transculturalism… more mixtures!

The rise of globalization seems pretty irreversible now, so we might as well take advantage of some of its potentially positive aspects : as people and cultural influences are moving around, why not create your own mix, invent your own identity?

And this idea of creating your own identity applies as much to cultures/nationality/religion… as it does to music… where it can apply on several levels, music consumers, music lovers do this more & more.

You can do that as a label…. It´s what we´ve been doing at Crammed since we started 25 years now… not deliberately, but instinctively… by simply following our intuitions.

It’s also what some of the most exciting artists do when they create their music, especially people who have multiple cultural or geographical or even stylistical roots, and who enjoy playing with that multiplicity, who are creating new, hybrid forms by drawing from the various aspects of their personal history.

Mixtures, hybrids can be fresh and magical…. especially when accidents occur, when chance plays a role, or when there´s a real organic fusion between the elements… when imported elements are absorbed, appropriated & digested.

I can’t wait to hear what people in Africa or Asia will do to bend & twist music software and samplers, in the same way that Afro-Americans have taken innocuous instruments such as the guitar, the harmonica, the saxophone or the turntable, and made them do things that the inventors of these devices had never dreamed about… not even in their worst nightmares…

Just one more thing about hybrids:

Mixing styles isn’t necessarily a good thing in itself: it’s like in genetics, there are wonderful hybrids which combine certain great features of their parents… and ugly hybrids which can be freaks, disgraceful monsters… or which can be simply boring, when they’re clumsy, superficial or cynical collages: you hear so much sonic wallpaper these days, where the so-called exotic elements are there just to add a little spice, as an alibi…

In other words: in the world of musical fusion, you find the Good, the Bad and the Ugly…

Don’t get me wrong: I’m far from believing that everything we do is interesting… but let´s say that we keep trying… and that we believe in the value of creating new mixtures, and of doing it with a sense of fun, of play, with imagination…

We´re lucky that this broad, expanding, undefined area in which we all operate, and which we call “world music”, such experiments & creativity are possible…. it’s actually I think one of the most open areas in the music business.

This is a bit of a paradox, as very different things now co-exist in “world music”, you find people who care about preserving traditions, preserving and promoting cultural diversity, which is essential.

- and you also find a lot of these new, trans-genre forms which can develop freely: if you don´t sing in English and/or if you use elements of non-European music, you´re thrown in the world music bin, whether you like it or not… but once you´re there, you´re free to do whatever you like, without bothering about the dictatorship of formats… and that´s great… you´re much less limited by rules and by prejudices than in the world of rock or electronic music, which means that you can be much more inventive … and invention & creativity are very much needed these days, especially in these difficult times the music industry is going through.

And this will be my final & relatively optimistic conclusion… we really believe that there’ll always be a space, even a need for creativity, for high-quality and imaginative music.

As someone was telling me a few days ago: people don´t all want to keep eating hamburgers all their lives… and the same must be true of music…

Marc Hollander – 2004

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