Over there

David Toop's Exotica

Not since long-playing-microgroove manufacturers helped postwar suburban GIs mainline Polynesian paradise fixes in the '50s has the specter of the exotic loomed so heavily over the way American culture thinks about the different and the foreign. The list could start and finish anywhere: Martin Denny, Yma Sumac, and Les Baxter back catalogues getting reissued in full; DJs remixing them; Jennifer Lopez starring as Carmen Miranda, Dolores Del Rio, and Lupe Velez in a Latin Craze sequel; John Fahey and the Palace Brothers camp shaking hands with the Lomaxes and searching for primitive America; The Phantom Menace controversy; the henna and geisha booms; the Chemical Brothers doing Ravi Shankar drag on the cover of the new Urb. And then of course there's Ally McBeal: the ultimate prime-time product of years of white cultural fantasy and repressed desire, complete with its own Asian dragon queen and DA negress in heat.

All of this falls under the ambitiously wide net British music critic and composer David Toop casts in his new book, Exotica: Fabricated Soundscapes in a Real World (Serpent's Tail). Toop assembles a lush and often frustrating hodgepodge of travel writing, pseudo-fiction, micro-essays, and magazine profiles that in their own different ways try to navigate the vaguely drawn territory of exotica: that sticky web of fantasies, desires, and cultural longings that for centuries has structured the way the West craves and repudiates inventions of otherness.

Toop spends plenty of time on the '50s aural primitivism and tiki-taboo-tambu fetish fests of composers like Martin Denny and Les Baxter, but Exotica tries to be something more. The author juggles Herman Melville and Bill Laswell, Joseph Conrad and Yma Sumac, Paul Gauguin and Dr. John, not just to flip through postcards of barbarism and tribalism but to see how his own obsessions with the imaginative powers of the exotic fit in as well. At its best (the book's second section), Exotica is dazzling interdisciplinary thread weaving that connects the dots between Alice Coltrane and the birth of the bikini; at worst (the final section of half-baked fictions), it's self-aggrandizing new-ageism masquerading as important, well-researched theory.

Toop knows well that fictions of exotica -- primordial villages, naked Indians, jungle drums -- have always been utopias of white escape, and he's open about his own Gauguin tendencies. He even locates his search for exotica in his wife's suicide -- a personal meltdown that, like a redo of Rodger Kamenetz in The Jew and the Lotus, sends him searching for truth in imaginative landscapes made real by their inauthenticity.

There are moments when you can feel Toop grappling with his ambivalence as the explorer writer/explorer listener who journeys to faraway places to learn about himself (a self-consciousness I found missing from the way Wim Wenders shoots Ry Cooder driving through Havana on a motorcycle in Buena Vista Social Club). At least Toop tries to figure out how to write about a body of work -- an entire tradition of knowledge -- that gives him pleasure and that he's comfortable in and yet is one that remains racked with problems.

The entanglement of Toop the critic of exotica and Toop the participant exoticizer gets even messier with his own electronic contribution to post-Denny and post-Baxter musical utopias, Museum of Fruit (Caipirinha), which he composed for Itsuko Hasegawa's Japanese dome complex of the same name. With its squealing aquatic exhales and translucent shells of membraneous sound, Museum may be more dissonant and abrasive than the breezy frolic of standard exotica fare, but the architectural logic behind it (it's the third installment in Caipirinha's Architettura series) still dovetails with Toop's own writings on the importance of ruins and spaces to the exoticizing mindset. It makes you wonder how far Toop's sonic geography, with its flickers of Asian wind and string instruments, really is from Denny's fantasy music for fantasy savages.

These tensions flare up on the pages of Exotica in a productive way that exoticizers never count on: the natives talk back. "For years I had been collecting stories from narrators in many different countries," Toop writes early on, "I had made their tongues into my story." But in a string of isolated pieces on artists like LA Samoans Boo-Yaa T.r.i.b.e., Ornette Coleman, and former Yellow Magic Orchestra member Harumi Hosono (who flips the lens by calling American film and rock and roll "exotic"), their tongues tell their own stories. Such reversals are necessary reminders that, in the end, exotica is all about where you're at, what you need, and how much power you have to make your dreams come true.