Episode 98: Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica
Exotica is a kind of music that was popular in the 1950s, when it was simply known as "mood music." Though somewhat obscure today, the sound of exotica remains immediately recognizable to contemporary ears. Its use of "tribal" beats, ethereal voices, flutes and gongs evoke a world that is no more at home in the modern West than it is anywhere else on earth. With its shameless stereotyping of non-Western cultures and its aestheticization of the other, exotica rightly deserves the criticism it has drawn over the years. But as we shall see in this episode, if you stop there, you just might miss the thing that makes exotica so difficult to expunge from Western culture, and also what makes it a prime example of how the "trash stratum" sometimes becomes the site of strange visions that transcend culture altogether.
\n\nREFERENCES
\n\nPhil Ford, \u201cTaboo: Time and Belief in Exotica\u201d
\nFuture Fossils, Episode 157
\nWeird Studies, Episode 21: The Trash Stratum
\nWeird Studies, Episode 79: Love, Death and the Dream Life
\nJack Smith, \u201cThe Perfect Filmic Appositeness Maria Montez\u201d
\nYma Sumac, Peruvian singer
\nLes Baxter, "The Oasis of Dakhla"
\nSteely Dan, "I Heard the News"
\nStravinsky, Rite of Spring
\nLes Baxter, \u201cHong Kong Cable Car\u201d
\nJacques Riviere, review of The Rite of Spring
\nNenao Sakaki, Japanese poet
\nLew Welch, American Beat poet
\nJF Martel, \u201cStay with Mystery: Hiroshima Mon Amour, Melancholia, and the truth of extinction\u201d
\nJeffrey Kripal, Mutants and Mystics
\nCaptain Beefheart, \u201cOrange Claw Hammer\u201d
\nMartin Buber, I and Thou