{"id":348,"date":"2020-11-19T20:26:00","date_gmt":"2020-11-19T20:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gcolemanmn.wordpress.com\/?p=348"},"modified":"2023-08-25T11:19:59","modified_gmt":"2023-08-25T11:19:59","slug":"satellites-over-the-sundarbans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/2020\/11\/19\/satellites-over-the-sundarbans\/","title":{"rendered":"Satellites over the Sundarbans"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Originally published as part of the Digestable<\/a> newsletter<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last week after playing trivia with some friends (shoutout to Trivia Mafia<\/a> in Minneapolis which is doing free trivia games online pretty much every night during the pandemic) we were trying to find the Ganges delta on a map \u2013 this was after the game of course, no cheating here!  When we finally found it in Bangladesh I was surprised that I recognized it.  Specifically I recognized an Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar<\/a> image of the delta that the indie band alt-J used as the cover of their 2012 album An Awesome Wave<\/a>.  \u201calt-J\u201d are the keystrokes for the delta symbol (\u2206), the satellite image is of a delta, I see what they did there.  I pointed this fact out to my friends and we moved on with our conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fast forward a couple of days and Disclosure comes out with their new album ENERGY<\/a> and I\u2019m intrigued so I look it up and BAM there it is again \u2013 the same shot of the Ganges delta on the album\u2019s cover.  I should note that this part of the delta is called the Sundarbans.  It\u2019s a huge protected mangrove forest in southern Bangladesh and it\u2019s one of the only intact habitats for the endangered bengal tiger.  If you look it up, the protected forest stands out impressively against the farmland that makes up most of the rest of the region.  As a fun project I juxtaposed both album covers onto a map of the Sundarbans for you to see.  alt-J\u2019s cover is the smallest, with the Disclosure album behind:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

So why do these two bands both have the same shot of the same landscape on their album covers? For alt-J there are some pretty literal reasons: alt-J = \u2206 = delta as I noted, and the abstracted colors of the satellite image indicate change in surface height over time and \u2206 is used as a mathematical symbol to show change.  Similarly for the Disclosure album, the dynamic shot of all this water flowing from so many rivers into the Bay of Bengal does evoke the \u201cENERGY\u201d of the album\u2019s title.  But I think there\u2019s something more here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A satellite image is an abstraction of a place \u2013 it\u2019s not an image that can be perceived by the human eye or even a bird\u2019s eye.  The ways a satellite \u201csees\u201d a landscape is not even analogous to a film or digital camera \u2013 instead the satellite uses an array of sensors, picking up visible light, infra-red, ultraviolet, and other spectra, laser inferred elevation data<\/a>, and other kinds of data that can be just as readily run through an algorithm as compiled into an image.  That\u2019s the reason the alt-J cover looks so strange, it\u2019s not a photograph put through a filter, it\u2019s a visual representation of a data set.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So here\u2019s the leap I\u2019m making: Just as a satellite abstracts a landscape into an evocative and alien image, alt-J and Disclosure are in the business of creating and selling evocative and abstracted images of otherness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

alt-J\u2019s musical style is interesting, unique, and\u2026 exotic.\u00a0\u00a0When I first heard singer Joe Newman\u2019s voice on\u00a0Fitzpleasure<\/a>\u00a0I, first of all did not realize he was speaking English (I still can\u2019t tell what the lyrics are) but I also did not expect him to be a\u00a0boring white British art kid<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0Now I am not against white folks having unique singing voices but I think there\u2019s a difference between folks like\u00a0Joanna Newsome<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Tom Waits<\/a>\u00a0and Newman\u2019s suspiciously accented little-bit-of-everywhere-but-not-quite-anywhere intonation.\u00a0\u00a0This coupled with the cover image of a culturally important river and the fact that the band was originally called\u00a0Daljit Dhaliwal<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 borrowing the name of the former British news anchor for Al-Jazeera leaves me\u2026 skeptical.\u00a0\u00a0Maybe it\u2019s just me but it seems like the band was trying to surreptitiously wrap itself in this guise of vaguely south Asian-y or maybe middle eastern-ish vibe to give itself some flair.\u00a0\u00a0Like\u00a0Lady Gaga wearing a burqa<\/a>\u00a0vibes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I love Disclosure\u2019s new album. I\u2019ve been listening to it nonstop these past couple of weeks but there are still some things that give me pause.  First of all, all of their features \u2013 and there are only three tracks and two \u201cinterludes\u201d on the 20 track album that don\u2019t officially have a feature \u2013 are from Black folks. I think this would be okay if they did it right, but there are some weird crediting things.  For instance, the lead single \u201cMy High<\/a>\u201d features two verses and choruses from Amin\u00e9<\/a> and one verse from slowthai<\/a> \u2013 but on the album only slowthai is credited \u2013 what\u2019s up with that?  Additionally, the title track \u201cENERGY<\/a>\u201d includes a generous sample (read: the whole track is a sample) of motivational speaker Eric Thomas<\/a>.  Disclosure also \u201csampled\u201d Eric in their breakout album Settle<\/em> on the tracks \u201cIntro\u201d and \u201cWhen A Fire Starts to Burn<\/a>,\u201d but Eric Thomas isn\u2019t listed as a feature on any of these tracks.  I know there\u2019s a difference between a sample and a feature, but if Beyonc\u00e9 can list Blue Ivy\u2019s 6 year old baby babble<\/a> as a feature and if Fiona Apple can credit her dogs by name<\/a> for their backing barks on Fetch the Bolt Cutters then Disclosure should probably give Eric his due for launching their career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other thing about Disclosure that frustrates me is that they\u2019re two white British guys making house music.  They credit Chicago house<\/a> and Detroit techno<\/a> as their early influences \u2013 both genres pioneered by Black folks \u2013 and their music is carried by the features and samples of Black artists.  For example, I love that there\u2019s another track in the world with Fatoumata Diawara<\/a>\u2019s voice on it, but the packaging of the album decontextualizes and exoticizes her Bambara lyrics, reducing them to just their ~ ~ENERGY~ ~.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

White artists like myself who benefit from centuries of slavery, colonialism, and oppression have to learn to ask ourselves hard questions about our work and the work of our peers.  Personally I often wonder what my training in the Black art forms of tap dance and jazz music mean for the art I make.  What does it mean that my training in both those practices came exclusively from white people?  When DJing I grapple with how and when it\u2019s appropriate for me to include Black artists in a DJ set that then becomes my <\/em>artistic product.  Should I be editing out the n-word when it comes up in a set or even just stick to mixing myself and fellow white artists?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These questions do not have easy answers and they have big implications on the work an artist makes.  I really like alt-J and Disclosure, and I think these albums are both worth engaging with and listening to \u2013 but I think both bands need to ask tough questions to separate their genuine artistic voice from the predatory guise of exoticism that uses others and otherness to generate artificial interest (in all fairness I think alt-J\u2019s second album<\/a> is a little further along on this trajectory.)  After all, what appears dynamic and complex from the eye of a satellite must be so much more so once you reach the ground.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally published as part of the Digestable newsletter Last week after playing trivia with some friends (shoutout to Trivia Mafia in Minneapolis which is doing free trivia games online pretty much every night during the pandemic) we were trying to find the Ganges delta on a map \u2013 this was after the game of course, no cheating… Continue reading Satellites over the Sundarbans<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[22,16,20],"class_list":["post-348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digestable","tag-culture","tag-environment","tag-music","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=348"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":693,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348\/revisions\/693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}