Music and my place in the Cloud

Music has always found mysterious ways of permeating borders, from sea-faring music boxes containing fragments of exotic sounds to Soundcloud links proliferated online. 

Image credit: Leopoldo Metlicovitz

The world has become a cultural melting pot. Exchange, fusion, and appropriation are unrestrained in our borderless era of instantaneous communication. My home was similarly a melting pot; my ears perpetually drowning in aria (song), or isai (Carnatic music) for as long as I have lived. My father’s Opera discs monopolised the CD player. In my grandmother’s house, the pious television blared Hindu chants without a moment’s respite. A classical Indian vocalist, my mother was forever singing to the drone of a Tambura.

Whether out of habit or the fear of being alone with my thoughts, I abuse music streaming services, racking up 2000 minutes a week on Spotify. Microgenres like ‘glitchcore’, ‘post-grunge’, and ‘deconstructed club’ don’t alarm me — fluidity defines my globalised generation. However, music has always found mysterious ways of permeating borders, from sea-faring music boxes containing fragments of exotic sounds to Soundcloud links proliferated online. 

A cultural hotbed, 17th century Italy gave birth to Opera, a versatile theatrical mode of music. A similar hotbed giving rise to genre fluidity was the Internet, invented in 1983 — the ‘cloud’, that transcendental space of amalgamated artistic expression in bytes. The mechanisms of YouTube, SoundCloud, and Twitter allowed amorphous and ever-malleable genres including the now ubiquitous hip-hop to grow both its audience and its musical and aesthetic influences. 

A growing ‘postcolonial’ sentiment teases out the subtle threads of cross-cultural connections in early Western music. Opera’s multicultural influences are evident in its very beginnings in 1607 with Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. However, later opera is anything but subtle in its cultural inspiration, copiously lending itself to exoticism and Orientalism. A repeat offender is Giacomo Puccini, a quintessentially Italian composer with a voracious appetite for foreign sounds and stories. His unique, melodically intricate operas beguile and enchant. Despite having never set foot in East Asia, Puccini sets his oeuvres Madama Butterfly (1904) and Turandot (1926) in Japan and China respectively. Or more fittingly, the operas take place in ‘Far East’ imaginaries complete with stereotypical characterisations, anachronisms, and flagrant inaccuracies.

Image credit: Marty Sohl, Metropolitan Opera

In Madama Butterfly, the eponymous Butterfly is a 15-year-old geisha seduced by a U.S. naval officer, Pinkerton, stationed in Nagasaki. After impregnating the naïve girl, he abandons her to find a ‘proper’ American wife. Lovelorn Butterfly commits suicide upon learning that Pinkerton returns only to take his son to the States to be raised by his wife. Beyond the libretto (narrative), cultural fusion and juxtaposition occur in Puccini’s remixes of the Star-Spangled Banner and Kimi ga yo, the Japanese national anthem. Japanese folk tunes composed in the distinctively ‘Oriental’ pentatonic five-note scale underscore ostensibly traditional ceremonies, complementing the colourful kimonos donned by characters. Despite deceptive mimicry of Japanese instrumental timbres and typically Eastern melodies and harmonies, the Japan sonically constructed in Butterfly is a fetishised vision reflected in Puccini’s eyes. Though Puccini is lauded for pursuing authenticity, a recent discovery reveals a Chinese music box contributed significantly to Butterfly, accounting for similarities with Turandot, set in Peking. Even the music box lacks authenticity; its Swiss manufacturers transcribed Chinese melodies in Western notation, stripping them of many original stylistic features. Puccini had limited avenues to encounter Japanese and Chinese music, even desperately asking a Japanese ambassador’s wife to sing him folk songs. Marketed solely in China, these well-travelled music boxes were a rarity, steeped in mystical and exotic auras of the ‘Orient’. 

Many interesting parallels emerge between Puccini and rapper Yung Lean (Jonatan Leandoer), belonging to the Swedish collective ‘Sadboys’. Akin to Puccini’s cosmopolitanism, the nebulous ‘cloud’ may well be the hometown of Lean and the Sadboys, part of the first generation to grow up on the internet. Like Puccini, Lean doesn’t shy away from borrowing elements of other cultures. Take his 2013 single ‘Kyoto’, with its pentatonic flute melody, or his early iconography of Japanese writing and Arizona green tea. Embracing hip-hop’s practice of sampling, the Sadboys even reworked a classical Indian song for their breakout 2013 hit, Ginseng Strip 2002. The song’s virality years later on TikTok attests to the originality of Yung Lean’s curious mélange of American hip-hop, internet culture, 2000s nostalgia, and depressive suburban ennui cultivated in Södermalm, Stockholm. Despite his puzzling origins and memedom, Yung Lean has markedly influenced mainstream hip-hop.

With ethereal beats and narcotic autotuned flows, the Sadboys carved out an enduring niche in hip-hop’s unbounded expanse. Their eclectic tastes are self-evident: traces of Lil B, Chief Keef, Future, Friendzone, and Houston’s chopped and screwed beats cluster their discography of cloud-rap. Hackneyed hip-hop phrases and African-American slang pervade Yung Lean’s goofy lyrics, echoed from Mexico to Australia. While his unlikely come-up was met with incredulity, his influence speaks for itself. Lean’s early fans included Travis Scott, a then relatively underground Houston rapper whose style bears the Sadboys’ trademarks. In Scott and Lean’s 2014 collaboration ‘Ghosttown’, the rappers proudly represent their hometowns in a demonstration of the cultural circularity generated by globalisation. The Yung Lean of today is artistically hypermobile, crooning melancholic indie ballads under the alias jonatan leandoer96 and forming a punk-rock band Död Mark with Yung Gud, a fellow Sadboy.

2023 marks the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, celebrated in the White House courtesy of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, who pronounced hip-hop “the ultimate American art form”. In spite of hip-hop’s inalienable Black American origins and character, for so many to enjoy and partake in the culture is perhaps music’s purpose and power. To hear oneself everywhere, to be fragmented and scattered all over the place, brings a strange comfort. Music and identity entwine themselves symbiotically. As a migrant, I unconsciously seek belonging in every microcosmic experience: I listen to Jeff Buckley and hear instead a potential Carnatic virtuoso. In a time where generative AI is capable of ‘creativity’ (making fake Drake covers of any song imaginable), I fear that originality might never again be conjured. My only solace is that the other, more productive use of AI will algorithmically pave a Yellow Brick Road of YouTube suggestions for me, littered with musical gems.