These books provide answers (of various sorts) to two questions. Do we have a right to music? And how has music contributed to the identification and realisation of cultural and human rights? The first question is about whether music is to be included in the package of rights to which people lay claim – most obviously, the right to free expression. The second question is more about music's role as an instrument in achieving rights such as freedom of expression, equal treatment before the law, rights of assembly and franchise, and the cultural rights of collective identities and histories.
The literature on music and rights is limited, save in discussion of the important issue of copyright. This is a pity because viewing music through the perspective of the law, and more broadly through the perspective of human rights, can provide insights into what we understand by ‘music’ and how it operates within our different societies. The field is growing, particularly as digitalisation has focused on issues of ownership and its associated rights, but nevertheless, the topic remains under-analysed. For this reason alone the books being reviewed here represent a welcome addition to music scholarship, and provide suggestions for how we might develop further the relationship between music and rights.
One approach to the topic, that adopted by most of the contributors to the two volumes edited by Ian Peddie, is to treat human rights as a given. They are ‘given’ in the sense that it is assumed that there are a set of established rights to which all people are entitled – rights of free speech, freedom from slavery, the right to life, and so on. These rights are inscribed in constitutional form or in documents like the UN Declaration of Human Rights. The problem is the failure of those in power to recognise or concede these rights.
From such a perspective, the relationship with music emerges in the ways in which musicians and other actors use song (predominantly) to give voice to claims based on these pre-given rights. Indeed, Peddie argues in the Introduction to Volume II (p. 2) that popular music has proved to have a better understanding of, and to be a more effective response to, human rights issues than politics itself. I am not sure what exactly this claim entails, but it gives an indication of the general predisposition of the two collections.
Both collections of Popular Music and Human Rights include chapters on specific artists (e.g. Billy Bragg, Victor Jara, Gil Scott-Heron, Bruce Springsteen) and particular issues. There are chapters on heavy metal in Nepal and folk songs in Latvia. In discussing UK punk, Kevin Dunn argues that it provided ‘actors and communities with musical and cultural resources that can be employed in local political struggles around how rights should be understood and realized’ (Vol. I, p. 28). Dunn suggests that this capacity to create resources (‘for agency and self-expression’, Vol. I, p. 29) was not shared with other musical forms. If true, this is a fascinating insight, but I worry about the foundations upon which it rests. The claim for punk's special powers derives almost exclusively from a reading of the discourses of punk bands. The Clash, we are told, ‘employed a cosmopolitan understanding of human rights’ and demonstrated an ‘awareness of Third World political and economic issues’ (Vol. I, p. 30). Crass's ‘human rights discourse was framed primarily as a critique of capitalism’ (Vol. 1, p. 32). Bad Brains ‘reject[ed] particularist notions of rights based on positive laws’ (Vol. I, p. 34). It is not altogether clear whether reading music in these terms is entirely appropriate, but there is, in any case, the question of whether (and why) punk was special. Later chapters (e.g. Stephen King on the blues) make explicit that other genres – not surprisingly – also addressed the issue of human rights. And Sam O'Connell helpfully compares the ways in which benefit concerts have represented compassion (if not human rights per se).
David Thurmaier adds something new, I think, in his attempt to identify the distinct musical characteristics of Bruce Springsteen's ‘human rights songs’, but even here it is not clear what these specific features capture. Do they produce a deeper sense of empathy and understanding in listeners? A greater willingness to act? It is one thing to reveal the possible connections between music and human rights discourses; it is quite to another to ground these claims empirically.
Several chapters deal with music's role in constructing the identities of communities and groups, but in such cases the reader is left to impute the connection with human rights. What seems to be missing – and this is no easy task – is the connection between wider political, economic and social changes and the musical forms. Or, when claims are made – as in William Anselmi's discussion of musical politics in Italy – they tend to be asserted rather than demonstrated. Paul Greene's discussion of heavy metal in Nepal does go further than most chapters in its attempt to trace direct connections between the politics of rights and the emotions engendered by the music. He writes (Vol. II, p. 27): ‘As urban Nepalis explored and shared emotions of loss and rage through music, they worked from intense emotion toward a sense of human rights.’ Angela Impey, too, detects that local music in apartheid South Africa was able to register a sense of the injustice. Impey talks of an ‘ethnographic register of human rights violations’ (Vol. II, p. 41), which were not to be discerned in ‘protest songs’, but rather in ‘seemingly frivolous musical genres’ (Vol. II, p. 51). Something similar emerged in Deborah Finding's chapter on Tori Amos and sexual violence. Finding suggests that Amos's music provides a source of comfort and community to the survivors of violence.
Throughout both volumes of Popular Music and Human Rights interesting parallels are drawn between human rights abuses and the concerns of musicians and the subject matter of music, but what is less clear is how the two connect and intersect. Many interesting stories are told, but their veracity is rarely tested. Reading them, I got a strong sense of a missed opportunity. Neither volume contains a lengthy introductory chapter explaining or exploring the general relationship between rights and music, preferring instead to summarise the contents. In doing this, there is little explanation as to the selection of the chapters, which in any case are presented in alphabetical order of their author's names. Nor is there any account given of why the two volumes are crudely divided between ‘British and American Music’ and ‘World Music’. Would not themed sections – rather than an arbitrary geographical division – have presented a more insightful and provocative approach? A further frustration is that there are some chapters in which almost no reference of any kind is made to human rights (and one where music is all but absent), and the reader is left wondering what warranted their inclusion.
A different approach and a different focus are evident in the collection edited by Andrew Weintraub and Bell Yung. Their concern is less with human rights, understood to apply primarily to individuals, but rather with the cultural rights of groups and communities. And their approach entails studying the complex processes that see the emergence of rights claims in the playing out of particular processes. As Weintraub writes (p. 14): ‘Questions about music as a right bring into focus emergent social relationships among a variety of social actors, including musicians, cultural policy makers, commercial music producers, academics, and activists, among others.’
The rights with which they are concerned are those inscribed in Article 27 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights: ‘everyone has the right to freely participate in the cultural life of the community’ and ‘to enjoy the arts.’ This general statement of principle is then shown to have real and very practical implications. On the one hand, it helps to ground the copyright laws that allow artists to claim ownership of their labour, but insofar as such rights are focused on individual rights of ownership, they do not afford protection to those forms of culture that are not ‘owned’ by individuals. Much of the book is taken up with the issues of cultural rights in these areas of ambiguity and potential vulnerability. What Music and Cultural Rights also does is to treat rights, not as a given, but as the product of a dialogue between putative universal claims and specific cultural contexts, in which questions are raised about exactly what it is in music that is to be protected by rights claims. Is it to be, as Weintraub (p. 9) illustrates, the work of art itself or the creative process that generates it?
This issue is dealt with at length by Ricardo Trimillos' discussion of negotiations over the representation of national cultural heritages (in this case, that of the Philippines and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, DC). Trimillos distinguishes between the ‘right to access’, the ‘right to steward’ and the ‘right to control’, and the different activities implicated in each case. What is at stake is the relationship between researchers and curators, on the one hand, and national representatives of the culture, on the other. Rights discourse provides a way both of understanding the nature of the relationship and a guide to how its tensions might be resolved.
Political context, as well as cultural context, play into the relationship of rights and music, a fact vividly illustrated by Helen Rees's invocation of rights debates in China. Here the tensions between group and individual rights are mediated by the presence of ethnic minorities. Until the 1980s, says Rees (p. 45), folk music provided the ‘raw material’ for musical propaganda that was deemed to be communally created. It was only in the 1990s, with the introduction of China's copyright laws, among other changes, that folk musical culture was granted the right to respect and protection (even though China's copyright law did not, in fact, recognise the rights of folk music). The story Rees tells is of the grudging acknowledgement of folk music, and of the part that the law and rights discourse played in grounding the claims of recognition.
Politics, too, features in Javier León's account of the allocation of the status of national ‘cultural patrimony’ in respect of the cajón in Peru. This put the instrument under the guardianship of the state, and seemed to entail a straightforward assertion of the cultural rights of communities to lay claim to their heritage, but as León (p. 116) points out: ‘In practice, however, such claims of ownership are often mediated through a complex web of political and economic interests that places some individuals and groups in more privileged positions than others.’
States are not the only actors in the ambiguous history of musical cultural rights. Transnational bodies such as UNESCO also play their part. Bell Yung traces the consequences of UNESCO declaring China's qin music as one of the ‘Musical Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity’. As a result, says Yung (p. 152): ‘It [the qin] became a symbol of the best in China's own music and a way to counteract the rampant dominance of pop music, an import from the West.’
Cultural rights – as they apply to music – do not just serve to resist the market; they may also apply for participation in it. That, at least, is the contention of Nimrod Baranovitch (p. 190), whose discussion of Tibetan music makes this argument: ‘I consider access to the cultural market to be another important cultural right, despite the apparent discrepancy between the idea of cultural rights and the commercial character of the market.’ To be excluded from the market, he continues, ‘constitutes a violation of [the] right to representation’.
The use of rights discourse in music is not just about establishing cultural heritage. It is part of a larger political terrain. Adriana A. Helbig (p. 183) notes, for example, how the discourse of cultural diversity places the emphasis on individual freedom, whereas a multicultural agenda is concerned with the rights of communities. How policy makers frame their agenda, and how rights play into it, have an impact not just on music but on the way people live through it.
The questions raised by Baranovitch and Helbig provoke thoughts of how the argument about, and understanding of, the relationship of rights to music might be developed further. By exploring the tensions between notions of cultural diversity and multiculturalism, and by asking whether participation in the market is a right (specifically, a right of representation), the importance of rights to music policy and music practice becomes more apparent. But there is a further dimension to such a project: how rights themselves are conceived.
There are, as I mentioned earlier, at least two ways to conceptualise rights. The one sees them as inscribed in law, and subject to interpretation by lawyers and courts, and argued over by political actors of various kinds. An alternative, less legal-essentialist view, sees human rights as a construction or indeed as an ‘invention’. This latter approach sees rights as being constructed in the process of recognising and interpreting them.
Which approach you adopt will have considerable consequences for how you understand the relationship between music and rights. With the first approach, music serves simply as another means of engaging with those established rights. With the second approach, music – potentially at least – exists as a means by which rights might be constructed. This is true for both cultural and human rights. The books reviewed here have important things to say about this relationship. They help to draw attention to a neglected field of study and of practice. They also suggest that there is more work to be done, both theoretically and empirically.
