Episode 98: Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 12 May 2021

⏱️ 81 minutes

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Summary

Exotica is a kind of music that was popular in the 1950s, when it was simply known as "mood music." Though somewhat obscure today, the sound of exotica remains immediately recognizable to contemporary ears. Its use of "tribal" beats, ethereal voices, flutes and gongs evoke a world that is no more at home in the modern West than it is anywhere else on earth. With its shameless stereotyping of non-Western cultures and its aestheticization of the other, exotica rightly deserves the criticism it has drawn over the years. But as we shall see in this episode, if you stop there, you just might miss the thing that makes exotica so difficult to expunge from Western culture, and also what makes it a prime example of how the "trash stratum" sometimes becomes the site of strange visions that transcend culture altogether. REFERENCES Phil Ford, “Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica” Future Fossils, Episode 157 Weird Studies, Episode 21: The Trash Stratum Weird Studies, Episode 79: Love, Death and the Dream Life Jack Smith, “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness Maria Montez” Yma Sumac, Peruvian singer Les Baxter, "The Oasis of Dakhla" Steely Dan, "I Heard the News" Stravinsky, Rite of Spring Les Baxter, “Hong Kong Cable Car” Jacques Riviere, review of The Rite of Spring Nenao Sakaki, Japanese poet Lew Welch, American Beat poet JF Martel, “Stay with Mystery: Hiroshima Mon Amour, Melancholia, and the truth of extinction” Jeffrey Kripal, Mutants and Mystics Captain Beefheart, “Orange Claw Hammer” Martin Buber, I and Thou Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:03.3	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:23.3	For more episodes or to support the podcast, go to weirdst. I'm J.F. Martel.
0:52.5	Our topic for today is an essay by Phil that was published in
0:56.3	the esteemed academic journal Representations back in 2008. Entitled taboo, time and belief in
1:03.2	Exotica, it argues that 1950s mood music, later called Exotica by record collectors, was really
1:10.0	just one instance, though a particularly strong one,
1:13.0	of a background operation that is always at work in modern consciousness,
1:17.1	namely the aestheticization of life and quote the absorption of the real into the imaginary.
1:23.8	Exotica has been rightly criticized for its shameless colonialism,
1:35.0	its embrace of cliche and stereotype in the name of seeking the exotic and the erotic beyond the boundaries of the white American suburb.
1:45.4	But Phil argues that if you stop there, you might miss the element that makes Exotica and its various manifestations, not all of which are seen as controversial, so compelling for modern Westerners and so prone to reinserting itself into our collective imagination again and again.
1:51.6	In eroding the boundary between living and dreaming and bringing forth strange visions of other
1:56.7	worlds where the things we think are most stable and secure have betrayed their brittleness and fluidity, Exotica can become for us a pathway to the marvelous. Exotica calls
2:06.6	on us to believe in what we have been told we ought not to believe in, to become, quote,
2:11.4	the primitives of an unknown culture, even as we remain the decadence of a culture we know
2:16.4	all too well. Phil's essay was recently
2:19.4	included in a Best-Dove anthology of Representations articles called Weird Scholarship, the links in the show
2:25.1	notes. In what follows, it serves as a map for an expedition into that liminal zone that straddles
2:31.2	the world of facts and the realm of phantasm.
2:39.6	Of the brave souls who ventured into that zone in the past, few have returned to tell the tale,
2:45.3	of course. Those who have speak of strange sites and landmarks, among them something called the Weird Studies' Patreon community. Their expatriates of the real world have established a colony reminiscent of the boldest
	...

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