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The Haitian Music Industry and the Institutional Structure of Music Production. Most Haitian music producers, then fall into one of the four categories I've mentioned: pirates, boutikyč producers, vanity label producers, and the more professional domestic entrepreneurs. None owns production facilities; nearly all work with independent pressing plants in Canada or the United States. There are also few direct linkages to transnational music corporations. Such are the institutional, market, and political constraints faced by commercial musicians in Haitian music. Responding to the conditions of the Haitian music industry, many musicians turned to external markets to survive and prosper, crossing over from geographically and demographically limited markets to more lucrative and deterritorialized ones. In a series of three articles (in 1993 and 1995), I charted how Haitian musicians have responded to three subsets of their market: diasporic, linguistic, that is, French and Creole, and global or world beat. The critical factor is that Haitian musicians see each of these markets as confronting them with peculiar marketing problems that place contradictory demands on performers.
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Musical
commodities that are intended for wide circulation throughout these markets are
often compromise texts; the musicians, along with their promoters, labels, and
producers, have "read" the aesthetics of markets and have positioned their creations
for success to the greatest extent possible given their resources, abilities,
and creative sensibilities. The effort by musicians to cross over takes longer
than is generally understood. The Ensemble Nemours Jean-Baptiste was already the
most popular band in Haiti when they bragged openly on their album liner notes
in the late 1950s of their appeal overseas: "Thus, this humor, this poetry, intelligently
orchestrated, harmonized, gives to Haitian music its great originality. It is
in hearing the Super Ensemble de Nemours Jean-Baptiste that the foreign connoisseur
truly understands this. Nemours Jean-Baptiste, creator of the Compas Diquest of
the continents, because this rhythm...makes a sensation wherever it is heard,
in the Americas as well as in Europe."
In a song called "Compas mondial" (World beat), Nemours Jean-Baptiste wrote of the group's international markets: Toupatou kontan pase(english tranlation) Everywhere they're more than happy "Yon sčl paw'l k yap pale" They're talking about a single word "Se konpa yo rekalme, Ayiti a letranje" They ask for konpa in Haiti and abroad "Sa son nesesite" It's a necessity Se li tout moun admire It's what everyone admires55
Over the years, the inability of Haitian bands to achieve lasting success in global markets has been ascribed to many factors: the unwillingness of Haitian producers to sign away their artists (stranding their artists in local markets because of a fear of losing control); artists unwillingness to agree to the terms of the international labels owing to a special sensitivity to issues of exploitation, linguistic isolation (the comparatively small number of Creole speakers), prejudice against Haiti, and culture conflicts over contracts and monetary dealings. A member of the band Zčklč discussed a problem they had with a French label:
We were with Warner in France, but I realized that it was just a FISC [tax scheme] so they could have compensation for the next album they were making after ours. They just declare ours bankrupt, a loss, so the next one that comes doesn't pay taxes. They're just using it. They make the money that they spend on you by producing 10,000 albums. But this is not their interest. They want to make 400,000 of the next LP without paying taxes. A lot of little groups have been drained out because of this. Right now, they can't mess around with me because I know the business too well. Automatically, you're not interesting [to them] anymore because you know too much. But that*s the only way not to get swallowed up by the jaws, especially when you're coming from a little country like Haiti.
Foreign
validation is a recurrent theme in Haitian popular music, and Haitian commentary
on this subject often implies that it is a matter of national honor and prestige
that Haitian music compete favorably with musics of other developing nations in
global markets. previous
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Day for the Hunter a Day for the Prey : Popular Music and Power in Haiti (Chicago
Studies in Ethnomusicology)
by Gage Averill (1997)
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Permission to use this material was granted to Heritagekonpa by The University of Chicago & Dr. Gage Averill.
Reprinted from A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey published by the University of Chicago Press, Copyright @ 1997 BY The University of Chicago. All rights reserved
The Haitian Music Industry and the Institutional Structure of Music Production.