Musical terms like "swing," "syncopation" and "funky" have been tossed around so much we don't give them a second thought. But Merrill Garbus, the multi-instrumentalist driving force behind tUnE-yArDs, feels wary of them — an important clue about her motivations when you consider that her new album Nikki Nack was originally titled Sink-O.
"When I read the word syncopation to mean 'funky,' " Garbus explains, "as in, 'Ooh, that beat is really funky,' there's a suggestion there. These are generic, misused words that are actually being used in the place of 'black.' And the implication is, 'That sounds exotic.' So there's a lot of subtext underneath these words. That's not necessarily the case if you're a music student, because then you're just describing the shape of a musical pattern in neutral, mathematical terms. The word 'swing,' for example, has a precise musical definition, but if you said, 'That's really swingin'!' in the '30s and '40s, that would have had a specific connotation: African-American or African — different somehow. That's why these are uncomfortable words for me."
These considerations hit particularly close to home on Nikki Nack, which was heavily shaped by Garbus' intensive study of Haitian drumming and dance. Depleted and uninspired after the touring she did in support of her 2011 breakthrough album w h o k i l l, Garbus set out to find a new creative angle by studying for a month under her Oakland-based, Haitian-born drumming instructor before accompanying him on a 2013 trip to Haiti.
In Haiti, as in several other non-Western traditions, it is customary for groups of percussionists to create a dense meshwork of rhythmic patterns so finely interwoven that it's hard for the uninitiated to determine where the beat begins and ends.
"Most Western ears," offers Garbus, "will read the first thing that you hear as the downbeat. But with a lot of those boula drum patterns, the first thing that you hear is the pickup beat. That's actually pretty common in a lot of music, but when that first beat isn't necessarily accented to say, 'This is obviously where you're going to put your foot down,' that can be confusing."
Given her trademark approach to building swirls of sound out of layers of made-on-the-spot loops both on record and onstage, it makes perfect sense that Garbus would gravitate toward a tradition where cycles of varying lengths intersect with one another at shifting points to create the feeling of cycles within cycles within cycles. Still, she hasn't exactly ditched the downbeat. More than ever, in fact, on Nikki Nack she harnesses her still-rambunctious, chaos-baiting delivery into hooks and an increasing penchant for pop-oriented song structures.
"It's funny," Garbus says, "because in some of the new songs or sections of songs, the downbeat has gotten stronger. There's a lot of difficult rhythmic stuff going on with this album, so there were times where I thought, 'I want to give my listeners a break and just say here it is!' In a lot of cases, I've started with a Haitian boula beat and emphasized what the downbeat is with a kick drum or, say, a standard dance groove like mmph-mmph-mmph-mmph — a beat that I promised myself that I would never do, that four-on-the-floor hypnotic dance beat. I was always just appalled by that, thinking, 'How unoriginal and boring!' But we brought it in because, well, we're an American band."
On cue, she breaks into the chorus of the popular Grand Funk staple.
But lest anyone accuse her of misappropriation — a charge she is already accustomed to fielding — Garbus captures in a nutshell what is so bedeviling about the whole notion of what is "rightfully yours" when it comes to music: The Appalachian folk style that Garbus' mother grew up singing as a child in Kentucky sounds more distant and exotic to Garbus than, say, Janet Jackson or any of the '80s pop that informed Garbus' own youth. And if Nikki Nack appears at first to tread all over the musical map with reckless, childlike abandon, it is precisely because Garbus has grappled with the question, "What is mine?" and fallen short of a sure answer that her new music carries such an electric charge.
"What is my culture?" Garbus asks rhetorically. "Where do I come from? Am I only supposed to take from American folk and European classical music? That doesn't feel right to me. These are the sounds that I want to make — or maybe not 'want' to make, but the sounds that emanate from me. So what is mine? What is appropriation? Graceland, for instance, has been criticized and dissected around that question. I'm part of the same discourse now. It's uncomfortable — and really important. And the opportunity to dissect these things and talk about them seems like one of the rewards for making them."
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