Bidoun becomes an unlikely home for great contemporary music writing

A quick stroll through the contributors' list for Da Capo's forthcoming "Best Music Writing 2008" anthology yields many of the usual suspects (including, unfortunately but inevitably, Gene Weingarten's High Culture barricade-enforcing piece on Joshua Bell playing for change in the D.C. Metro). But a surprising small-run magazine popped up a few times with very worthy entries, the Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural journal Bidoun.

The magazine, like its contemporary peers n+1 and Russia!, is a roundabout survey of long-form political reporting, interviews and essays on cultural ephemera, but its thoughtful dissections of Orientalism in the avant-garde and pop music worlds are often revelatory.

   

Michael C. Vasquez's spring '07 piece "Disorientalism" on the problematic fetishism inherent in exploring and selling the music of foreign cultures (epitomized here by Alan Bishop's Sublime Frequencies label) is a gentle reminder of the power dynamic of how one musician's mystical lost LP discovery is another one's Top 40 neighborhood radio pop. Sukhdev Sandhu's winter '08 article "Mingering Mike Superstar" is a warm-hearted recap of the fictional soul singer's huge back catalog of album art that contained no albums.

Also worth a look is Jace Clayton's delicate and fascinating essay on the career of U.K. electronica artist Muslimgauze, whose found-soundscape atmospherics and handmade packaging revitalized and politicized the noise and experimental scenes, but through a troubling lens of radical Islamic and anti-Israel politics that some critics have decried as anti-Semitic. Muslimgauze's legacy is made even more complicated by the fact that the project's mastermind, Bryn Jones, is neither Palestinian nor a Muslim, nor has he even visited the region.

Those fearing another tedious grad-school identity politics tome shouldn't be scared off -- Bidoun is heavy but imaginative and ambitious reading for anyone interested in the cultural politics and pop consciousness of the Islamic world, which really should include everybody invested in music these days.

-- August Brown