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January 7, 2024 • 23 mins
How a few inaccurate jingles came to represent entire cultures.
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(00:00):
This is how music does that.I'm Dale McGowan. April nineteen seventy eight.
A ninth grade boy stands with hislittle wet nose pressed against a pane
of glass at the Los Angeles CountyMuseum of Art. On the other side

(00:21):
of the glass are the treasures ofKing Tutz in Common. It's one of
the most remarkable exhibits ever to tourthe US. The boy is impressed.
Wow. Less than two weeks later, that same little nose is pressed against
the boy's family's television set as comedianSteve Martin on Saturday Night Live performs a
satirical song inspired by the exhibit theboy had just seen of now wedding was

(00:51):
a young man, he never thoughtit. People standing lives to see the
boy King, How did you getso funk A? Did you do the
bunking? That little boy was me? I know we were more prone to

(01:19):
national manias in the seventies than weare now. I think, more prone
to the one thing everybody's talking aboutor doing, disco, star wars,
cebe radios huge thing for a while, jogging, Oh my God. Apocalyptic
cults very popular, and in nineteenseventy eight it was tut Mania. Steve
Martin started the SNL performance with asomber introduction, decrying the crass commercialism that

(01:45):
had spun off of the exhibit.I'd like to talk seriously, just for
a moment. One of the greatart exhibits ever to tour the United States
is the Treasures of touton Common orKing tut But I think it's a national
disgrace the way we have commercialized itwith trinkets and toys, t shirts and
posters. And about three months agoI was up in the woods and I

(02:07):
wrote a song. I tried touse the ancient modalities and melodies. I
would like to do it for youright now. Maybe we can all learn
something from this. And then,of course the song crams in every possible
Egyptian stereotype, the walk like anEgyptian hand thing that I'm doing now for
the microphone for some reason, acouple of dancing nefertities, and a tenor

(02:29):
sax soloist who comes bursting out ofa sarcophagus. But the intro to the
song includes a little four bar musicalbit that signaled to every person in the
Western world that hey, we're inEgypt. That melody goes by many names

(03:00):
of Cairo, the snake charmer song, or when it accompanies a belly dance,
the Huci couci song I'm not kidding, And when I was a lad
it was called there's a place inFrance where the ladies wear no pants,
or where the naked ladies dance doesa brazy and where the naked ladies dance

(03:21):
evid loble so do boy. Thatlittle boy was not me, I know.
The earliest known version of this specificmelody was a little thing called Melody
Arabe Arabic melody by a German composernamed Franz Hinton eighteen forty five. But

(03:53):
it's a little parlor piece by acomposer who was so obscure that the Algamina
musicalasha Asaiga of July eight, eighteenthirty one described his music as kleinichkite ouch.
Is that origin enough to enshrine thatmelody into Western consciousness as the iconic
demarcation of Arabic culture, so iconicthat Steve Martin in nineteen seventy eight could

(04:15):
reel off those twelve notes knowing thateveryone in America, everyone would say Egypt,
No way there had to be anothercatalyst, and there was. The
eighteen ninety three Chicago World's Fair includedan attraction called a Street in Cairo with
camel ride's, fortune teller's snake charmers, and belly dancers. An Irish born

(04:38):
songwriter named James Thornton took Hinton's obscureLittle Melody Arabe, added lyrics for the
attraction, renamed it Streets of Cairoor the Poor Little Country Maid, and
gave it to his American wife,Bonnie Thornton, a hugely popular vaudeville comedian,
to perform for the fair and inher hugely popular act Now We're Cooking.
Now there's a cultural toe hold.This makes sense, but there was

(05:00):
more. Two years later, ineighteen ninety five, a guy named Dan
Quinn was an assistant to Thomas Edison. While Edison was developing the phonograph Right
Place at the Right Time. DanQuinn releases a recording of Streets of Cairo,
making it one of the first tunesto benefit from Edison's new sound recording
technology. Quinn becomes one of America'sfirst recorded singing stars and Streets of Cairo

(05:26):
I what is one of the firstbig hits Now there's a catalyst. The
melody was seared into American ears asthe iconic reference to exotic belly dancing,
snake charming Middle Eastern culture, soiconic that it became known as the Arabian
Riff. No belly dancer or snakecharmer or camel or lamp genie or pyramid

(05:57):
would appear in a twentieth century cartoonwithout the Arabian Riff triumpher. Hey,

(06:40):
it pops up in the middle ofthe Irving Berlin song in my ham And
in nineteen eighty two when the ThompsonTwins so much as mention Cleopatra lot of
zip for regions, but away sometime, and of course even Alluior plus

(07:05):
what's mo Absterdam and somewhere along theline is a bringing. Now take a
moment to notice that this emblematic Arabicmelody has passed through German, Irish and
American hands without a single Arab fingerprint, as far as we can tell.

(07:27):
This is important to the story I'mtelling. The Arabian Riff is an outsider's
idea of the Arab world. There'snothing wrong with that. As far as
it goes. Every culture looks atevery other culture from the outside. It
even extends to country names. Everycountry has an endonym that's the name they
call themselves, and a whole bunchof exonyms, the names that others have

(07:51):
for them. So the endonym ofGermany is deutschlandt but its exonym in English
is Germany, in French it's ala magna, in Norwegian it's tisk Land,
and in Polish deutsch Land is Niemse. Then none of those are wrong,
they're just correct in a specific,limited, external context. A great

(08:15):
way to understand the inside outside perspectiveis to look at the ways speakers of
different languages hear each other. Anda great way to do that is to
hear them imitate each other. WhenI was a kid and I wanted to
imitate a French person for a skitor a joke, or what to mock
a passing cheesemonger, I would pullout a five syllable string of sounds that

(08:37):
I apparently made up at some point, hallse bontaldent And here's the thing.
Everybody got it. Everybody caught theshorthand, oh he's so French. It's
also very strange to remember that wheneverI was imitating somebody of another language.
I imagined that all they talked aboutwas the fact that they spoke that language
and what they ate. So Iwould say, halls bontoldent, I am

(09:00):
so French. I eat cheese.That was my stick. Stick a pin
in that one that's going to comeback. My imitation hause Bonthoaldan worked because
I had reduced the subtle and sophisticatedtongue of La belle France to a few
sounds that, to our American ears, seem to distinguish French from English.
Those dropped jaw vowels right all,and the missing consonants at the end of

(09:24):
words. It's not what French is, it's how French seems to differ from
what we knew. You would liketo buy am balga, it's French with
the English subtracted. Our little kidimitations of Chinese always emphasize the cha sound,
right ching chang chong in a verynasal voice. I will not do

(09:46):
now. Mandarin actually has something likefour different sounds that are adjacent to cha,
like shuh ja ja. So wewere compressing nuances into a single chu
that we knew. Now turn abouthis fair play. So here's a clip
from a French language film. Seeif you can spot the moment that he
mocks a British speaker, Oh,sim atoni. And here's how English sounds

(10:20):
to Pakistani ears, Paki Strom patent. There we have the the borowing of
Donaldstrom near hamter aganisms. They're workinglauncher rowing, altering the people thirty five
launch. You can tell he's mockingAmerican English, not British and Arabic.
A to ajon pa alco title ato play too, to play in Japanese

(10:50):
many many the way is now whythey dried with five voice? Thank you.
In each case, they are hereEnglish through the filter of their own
language. They're hearing what's different.When we wanted to speak pretend Spanish as
kids, we would add oh tothe ends of English words, right and

(11:11):
carlos comado to plao. Spanish speakersimitating American English turn their own final o's
into owls. You as shoopy dowAmerican. Now it's apparently a sound we
make. English is also described bySpanish speakers as being a wash with w's
a wash with what, when?Where? Why? We want which weather?

(11:35):
We do have a lot of ws. The suffixation is also something that
sticks out to Spanish ears. Sowhen Spanish speakers want to imitate English,
they say things like voia wishwahationen irala wishwash tendation a Germans mocking English just
cranked the volume two eleven emphasize hardrs and slur everything together also Germans.

(12:00):
So yeah. The word barbarian derivesfrom the Greek barbaros, which came from
the fact that all foreigners, includingGermanic tribes, sounded to them like they
were just saying barbar bar barbar.The Arabian riff functions musically in much the
same way as these sort of pseudolinguistic babbles. It's kind of a lazy
attempt to capture the essence of anotherculture, but it ends up saying more

(12:22):
about the filter of the originating culturethan it does about its target. I
mean, seriously, how is thiseven slightly Egyptian or Arabic? Well,
it's not. It's a German imitatingArabic and missing by a mile or one

(12:43):
point six kilometers. It's in ourplain, old western natural minor mode.
For one thing. A better modewould have been the Byzantine, which is
an authentic Arabic mode I talked aboutan episode two, and Egyptian melody is
also going to include a lot moreornamentation, little turns and trills. Their

(13:05):
music sounds like Islamic architecture looks,and even that is still my cartoon version
of Egyptian music. I'm sure I'mstill off by a thousand cubits. But
trying for accuracy misses the point ofthese cross cultural rifts. Trying to make
the Arabian riff more authentically Arabian islike me saying to Spanish speakers, you

(13:26):
know, wish washation isn't even anEnglish word, guys. It is,
in its weird way, more authenticallywhat it is, in its weird,
inaccurate form, which brings us toanother part of the world. Now,
the fact that you know which generalpart of the world that signifies, and
that it makes you a little uncomfortableis captured perfectly by the dated name of

(13:52):
this trope. It's called the Orientalriff, and instead of the Middle East,
it signals to the Far East.It's not quite so common now,
but in the twentieth century it waseverywhere. Just before nineteen hundred, the
US had banned Chinese immigration because Tetathey were going to take our jobs.
Right Like Latino immigrants today, veryfew white Americans had any personal experience with

(14:16):
Chinese immigrants, so they were easilycaricatured long braid, that triangular hat buck
teeth. And here's the most dangerouspart of reductive stereotypes. Simple minds.
Once again, languages the perfect windowon this. The comedian Luis c.
K captures this when he ridicules himselffor a reductive Chinese stereotype that lives in

(14:39):
his head. And then I waslooking at the little old Chinese lady.
There was a beauty to her.She's just tiny. I was staring at
her because I was fascinated by her. I don't know anybody like her,
and I am so not a littleold Chinese lady that I looked. I
was like, what are her thoughts? That was what I was burning inside
with. What is she thinking rightnow? I can never know? And

(15:00):
I really the dumb brain has tellingme that she's just thinking. Oh,
that's how dumb I am. ThatI think Chinese gibberish that I made up
is in her actually Chinese mind.It's easier to dehumanize people, to minimize

(15:22):
their importance to deny their rights,even to drop bombs on them. When
your richly developed life and mind andlanguage are contrasted to a cartoonishly simple inner
dialogue that's all just me Chinese dandujar that you imagine them having. This
is exactly what these musical tropes aredoing, projecting a one dimensional simplicity onto

(15:43):
another culture. The so called Orientalriff came about out of lazy necessity during
and after that Chinese immigration scare,because China was on our cultural radar.
Playwrights and composers needed a shorthand forChinese. For a while, it was
anything using a pentatonic scale, thefive notes that you get from the black
keys and the piano, usually withthe addition of a gong. Asian traditional

(16:12):
and popular and classical music uses manyother pentatonic scales as the basis of compositions,
like the minor pentatonic and the akabonoscale, the hirioshi scale, the

(16:37):
incense scale, the iwato scale,and the ritsu and rio scales. I
mean, here's a comparison for you. Almost all of the music in the
West comes out of two basic scales, major and minor. Asian music systems
have at least a dozen, allwith different emotional and situational associations. But

(17:03):
you can't let all that nuance getin the way of good stereotype, right,
So in nineteen thirty two, acartoon short called Chinese Jinks included the
first note for note rendering of whatwould become known first as the Chinaman Lick
and later only slightly better as theOriental Riff. And then we're off to

(17:26):
the races. Every cartoon reference toChina or Japan or Siam would include this
trope, from rats with ponytail braidswalking into a Chinese laundry in the nineteen
thirties to a Siamese cat with buckteeth playing the piano with chopsticks and singing

(17:49):
about Chinese food in The Aristocrats nineteenseventy Ring Hi Hong Kong Always Wrong to
nineteen seventy four when the mania ofthe moment was kung Fu and Bruce Lee

(18:11):
to nineteen eighty for Turning. Japanesevideo games would use it whenever you entered
an Asian level or land or restaurantin the game, like the Chai Kingdom
and Super Mario Land for Ye AreKung Fu or playing Team China in Dodgeball,

(18:42):
or introducing a Chinese boxer in Superpunch Out, or min Men's theme
in Nintendo Arms. You get theidea. A funny side note, a
lot of those video games are Japanesein origin, and Japanese culture uses the

(19:07):
oriental rift to mean specifically Chinese.Now funny side side note. About ten
years ago, National Public Radio dida story on the Oriental riff. I
asked Anthony Kune and Pierre's Beijing correspondentto play the tune for people in China.
Mostly people agreed with this. Guy. Hasha Ma Tengo jah June is
a chef from the Hunan province wholistened to the theme Anthony played Hassan.

(19:32):
He says it's not familiar and thatit doesn't sound like it's from China.
Perfect Now, there are other culturalriffs, all reductive in the same way.
In films and television, the widevariety of Native American music is pretty
much always reduced to the same fourto four drum pattern and a very familiar

(19:52):
melody that I think qualifies as ariff that was captured perfectly in a song
called Indian Melody in my very firstpiano book. I'm going to pull up
my actual piano bench to my actualpiano and play this little tune that I
remember from childhood. And one ofthe things to notice about this one is

(20:15):
that it's usually not played as asingle line melody, but as parallel lines
of fourth or fifth apart one,two, three, four, that's a
fourth. Now listen to the Orientalriff and now the Arabian riff. They're

(20:47):
all in parallel forts. Why wouldall of these exotic foreign stereotypes be in
parallel forths or fifths because Western music, virtually all of the music you listen
to pop right classical does not dothat. There's even a five hundred year
old rule against writing music in parallelfourths or fifths. It used to be

(21:08):
the predominant texture in medieval music.Once we moved beyond monophonic music, just
a single melody, harmony was invented, and parallel forths and fifths was the
first attempt. But once the Renaissancegot underway, a whole lot of new

(21:33):
rules came about to handle the morecomplex harmony. Chords were developed and the
third became the unit of harmony.Parallel thirds and sixths became common ways for
vocal or instrumental lines. To movegives you a richer sound in the ability

(21:59):
to hear all the voices. Parallelforths and fifths, by contrast, sound
bare because of overtones. Past episode, one of the voices can get lost
in the other long technical things.No, no, I'm not going to
do a full episode on parallel forts. Pull that whistle back. It's enough
to say that parallel forts and fifthswere forbidden starting in the sixteenth century,

(22:22):
and if you did use them startingin the sixteenth century, it sounded antiquated
or foreign. So when Steve Martinsaid I tried to use the ancient modalities
and melodies then played, he wasn'tkidding. So I don't think it's a
coincidence that when we harmonize these riffs, just like imitating another language, we

(22:47):
subtract our own sounds and what's leftis our impression of the foreign thing.
Wait a day to shoes. I'llopen the same in a horror. Maybe
get to call him off. Thatwas episode sixty five of How Music Does
That. My outro music today ispres and colon ensenan Kuzo. The song

(23:11):
written entirely in pseudo English Gibberish bythe Italian singer Adriano Celantana in nineteen seventy
two. To hear the whole songand see the music video that goes along
with this, just google preas andcolon ensenanme kuzo all one word, just
like it sounds. Thanks for listening. I'm Dale McGowan. You see you
next time, whatever that may befor. How music does that? You

(23:34):
know? Coming up? Chusa byFlotso Obhole, get La Fine
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