How To Disappear Completely

Inuit Throat-Singing

Me to roommate: Hey I'm off to the Small World Music Festival with my classmates!
Roommate: Oh, I remember that song from when I was a kid. I HATED that song...
Me: Um....no....that's actually NOT world music....

My world music class (so much easier to put it that way than to rattle off Music and Subjectivity in the Global Context) went to a concert in Toronto. Since it is part of the class experience, we went on a departmental dime, much to the rejoicing of some of the living-off-credit-cards-because-we-don't-get-paid-till-Thursday graduate students.

Stuck in the wall surrounded by Brazilian groceries and Portugese Soccer Clubs, the Lula Lounge was easy to miss. And we did miss it, at first. The inside was painted in intense solids with tapestries and oriental lanterns forming the bulk of the decorative scheme. Kinnie Starr, a First Nations woman, sang first. She was probably in her late twenties or early thirties but she seemed young and unaffected. She related stories of her tomboyish childhood. She didn't strike me as someone who could play an instrument, but her capital was her voice. She sang to a few chords strummed on a guitar, she sang to dubbed tracks, she sang to nothing at all. And the final song, her voice mingled with the recording, obscurring the live/canned performance dichotomy. Only when you watched her face did you discover she was the one singing back-up to the recording's lead singing.

Then Tanya Tagaq entered. If any of you are familiar with Bjork, you may remember Tagaq from Medulla. If I had been feeling somewhat ambivalent about Kinnie Starr, I was blown away by Tanya Tagaq. You just have to see Inuit throat-singing performed live. The recording destroyes the visual, which is such an essential component of the experience.

Inuit throat-singing originated as a game that the women would play with each other when the men were away on extended winter hunting forays. It is a contest between two individuals, to see who can make the other break concentration and laugh. The singing patterns get more and more complex and can go on for some time. Tagaq related how she wasn't so good when she first started: "I was always laughing."

My first and deepest impression of the event was an awe of its sheer altheticism. Tagaq sang continuously for the entire set. The man behind me whispered to his friend, "So, this must be a one track CD, then." I cannot even begin to describe the throat-singing parts: I considered what heavy breathing mingled with animal snuffles and snorts might possible sound like and decided to give up on finding anything more accurate. And Tagaq's stage presence was commanding, mesmerizing.

She started unaccompanied but her DJ (grooving by his Apple laptop) soon started layering tracks underneath her voice, to accentuate the complex beat. The gutteral percussive singing was interspersed with long melodic fragments in English and other languages.

On the ride back, we talked a bit about the performance. "To the Inuits, that form of singing was simply a game, a relation of community between the group members. But transferred to our particular context...well....it was extremely sexualized," observed the professor.

And it does seem strange to me that in Western culture, the exotic is so often equated with the sensual. But there was a particularly captivating moment during the performance in which Tagaq caught Kinnie Star singing along in the audience. And as if someone had unplugged the lights, the whole aura completely desexualized, replaced by playful competition as the two singers locked eyes and began a sing off. Back and forth, trying to drown the other out, singing with, over, and for each other. It was as if for one brief moment, we got to see what Inuit singing was really about, transported out of the performance mode and transformed into observers crossing deep cultural boundaries.

That's perhaps a bit magical. But the others agreed (even the professors) that that special moment had struck them as well.

And now I have to get ready for class. I'm giving a brief discussion on an article regarding language choices in music. I'm going to play a track from the English-speaking Finnish band Nightwish and a track from the Romanian-speaking Romanian band Ozone. Both are popular, but both made different decisions about language. I might also play some Jay Chou that I got from Sanskey. Someone mentioned we should play Sigur Ros' () album. I once wrote a poem entitled [^] and thought I was so cool because no one could ever pronounce the title. But then I found about Sigur Ros and was a bit disgruntled. Cies la vie, n'est pas? And don't tell me the French is misspelled. I already know that.