Shake Your Booty!

Thanks to innovations in music consumption, practices of listening to music have changed. Since the rise of digital music, material sound carriers like CD's and vinyl are used differently then before. This however doesn't mean that the content itself changes. In order to explore the tension between the changing media and the music itself, we will use the album Sheik Yerbouti by Frank Zappa as a case study.

Since 1999, when peer-to-peer medium Napster was founded, music consumption changed on a global scale.[1] Although some state that these digital music technologies are a major source towards cultural democratization, Raphael Nowak shows that the rise of sharing and downloading music digitally doesn’t make older forms of music consumption obsolete. According to him we can't speak of a digital revolution since traditional music carriers like CD's and vinyl are still being consumed; while a revolution suggests a clear cut between two regimes in which the 'before' is replaced by the 'after', digital music files and traditional music carriers coexist.[2] According to Nowak nowadays we predominantly buy an album when we want to support the artist, or like the artwork of an album, and use digital media extensively to browse and explore interesting new artists.[4] He states that 'contemporary forms of music consumption became characterized by the heterogeneity of listening practices'.[3]

Frank Zappa's album Sheik Yerbouti was first released on vinyl in 1979. Today, the album is still for sale on CD and vinyl, while also being available on digital media such as Spotify. The rise of digitalized music has changed the way in which people interact with the media that carry the musical content, but of course the content itself stayed the same. 

Since not only cultural artifacts change, but culture itself is in a constant flux, the way in which we perceive 'older' cultural artifacts like Zappa's album is different than the way consumers perceived it back in 1979, when it was originally released. In order to illustrate how this works we will shine our light on the track Jewish Princess and on the artwork of the album itself.

On his satirical album Sheik Yerbouti, Zappa sings about the stereotype 'Jewish Princess'. We won’t go into a discussion about whether or not this song is offensive to Jewish culture, of course. Instead, we will focus on the way it interacts with contemporary conceptions of femininity. In this interview Zappa says that since he sings about an existing kind of woman, he doesn't owe the Jewish community an apology for offending the Jewish culture.[5] The lyrics caricaturally describe the jewish princess as a fragile, vicious, dainty, arrogant looking woman who can't even cook.[6] click here for the entire song text

Since, according to Robin James, women traditionally have been seen as fragile, femininity required that women performed fragility.[7] The woman Zappa describes is mereley focussed on her looks, not on her capacities. This fits in with the idea that “Fragile bodies can't do what you want them to do”.[8] In order to subjugate these fragile female bodies, they should be disciplined and controlled constantly acording to these outdated conceptions of femininity.[9] While using the idea of femininity as fragility, we can see that the woman Zappa describes is highly feminine and that the song is, how ironic it may sound, a celebration of (a certain type of Jewish) femininity.

The rise of new media made that we nowadays see femininity through a post-cinematic lens.[10] James argues that the idea that women should be fragile is outdated. She states that in order to be a 'good' woman, femininity is nowadays related to resilience. A feminine woman knows the way in which she is 'damaged' and performs that she overcame this damage.[11] According to James, a 'good' woman should acknowledge the fact that she is damaged, for instance by the numerous amounts of stereotypes that have been heaped on her, and subsequently show that she overcame the damage done by these stereotypes. When Zappa created this song about Jewish princesses, being fragile was the main thing a woman had to do in order to be considered feminine. Since our culture is ever changing, it might be possible that in a few years from now, when looked at through purely contemporary glasses, we won't be able to understand what kind of woman Zappa is referring to. ‘Jewish Princess’ says something about the stereotype he is portraying, but also about femininity, and the way in which we perceive different concepts of femininity through time.

Not only the album’s content is loaded with symbolic value, the cover is that as well. The title ‘Sheik Yerbouti’ resembles an Arabic transcription, but phonetically should be pronounced as Shake Your Booty; so both a sexist and orientalist component seem to be integrated in the album’s title. The cover image features Zappa clad in an Arab headdress. The irony seems to be undeniable. McGee states that

In our current ‘remix’ economy, the array of gendered multicultural collages increasingly betrays our continued desire for the enduring figure of the belly dancer – an image whose hybrid eroticism deflects the oblique structures of transnational corporations and their bottom-line consumerism.[12]

Although it could be considered somewhat of a stretch to state that the hybrid sexuality of the belly dancer implicitly underscores Zappa’s ironic celebration of Jewish princesses, it still is important to note that the way we perceive things in our contemporary society can or does have an Orientalist echo. To state the obvious: the meaning is dependent on the eye of the beholder and although the musical content of the album stays the same, perceptions change and with that the meaning of the content.

In conclusion, we might say that due to the innovations in consuming practices, the way in which we attribute meaning to older musical artifacts changes. This implicates a different interaction with the music that we consume, not only because the physical carriers or the technology changes, and with that the way in which we consume music, but also because cultural movements and their subtexts, in this case feminism and Orienatism, change simultaneously.

Proposition: Do we need to keep the context in which cultural artifacts are produced in mind when consuming them, in order to fully understand them?

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[1] Nowak, 2014: 146.

[2] Nowak, 2014: 148.

[3] Nowak, 2014: 153-156.

[4] Nowak, 2014: 150.

[5] Guccione, 1991: 91.

[6] Zappa, 1979.

[7] James, 2015: 80.

[8] James, 2015: 80.

[9] James, 2015: 80.

[10] James, 2015: 103.

[11] James, 2015: 83-85.

[12] McGee, 2012: 233.

Bibliography

Guccione, B. (1991) 'Signs of the times', in: SPIN. July 1991, p. 58-62 & 91-92.

James, R. (2015) Resilience & Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism. Alresford: Zero Books.

McGee, K. A. (2012) 'Orientalism and Erotic Multiculturalism in Popular Culture: From Princess Rajah to the Pussycat Dolls', in: Music, Sound and the Moving Image. 6:2, Autumn, p. 209-238.

Nowak, R.(2014) 'Understanding Everyday Uses of Music Technologies in the Digital Age', in: Bennett, A. & Robards, B. (eds), Mediated Youth Cultures: The Internet, Belonging and New Cultural Configurations. London: Palgrave Macmillan: 146-164.

Discography

‘Jewish Princess’. Frank Zappa (Sheik Yerbouti). Sheik Yerbouti LP. New York: Zappa

Records. 1979.

A vd B., V.M., J.P., J.V.