Chalga, Pig Flu and Wall Street

Just participated in an exhibition in Sofia on the role of chalga. I wrote an essay placing chalga in the context of nu-whirled music and globalist hipsterism: a network (or even networks?) of cultural flows and exchanges seems to have emerged as a specter double of the economy of monoculture (organized along a center-periphery logic of power) and chalga has come to inhabit a unique niche in that ecology. Disdained by the Euro-Balkan DJs, it has achieved some underground popularity in the US, falling between the cracks of a racialized bass culture (even though sometimes compared to funk carioca) and the Balkanist authenticity invoked by brass music.

[Then over the weekend finally completed the XAYC project in Syracuse, NY and met Dusan Bjelic - his brilliant and often funny analysis of Julia Kristeva's internalization of the power system played a major role in the final definition of the project. But more on that hopefully later.]

Culture, it seems, has developed its own style of globalization. The copyright paranoia of the RIAA, though somewhat akin to the financial meltdown and the current flu pandemic, has never reached the intensity of a "crisis". While it has affected the agents of distribution of music and is gradually condensing the experience of live music in the hands the Live Nation behemoth, it has also permitted the development and spread of hybrid genres along completely different modes of organization than the monoculture power structure. So in light of Mike Davis' fantastic essay (via rupture's mudd up!) on the link between global capitalism and pandemics, how useful would it be to interpret chalga (or cumbia or kuduro or tomorrow's "x") as a viral mutation?