Yu No Kick Part 12: Musical Interludes

When I came to Vanuatu, I tried to come prepared. I knew from time spent backpacking and doing other wilderness activities the importance of music for maintaining one's sanity. It's not so much that listening to music is a pleasant way to pass the time (which it is), but rather that, in the absence of an external source of music, my mind has this tendency to provide it's own soundtrack for my life. This can be pleasant if, say, you've got a good selection of Beatles constantly rolling around in the back of your head, but it can be maddening if you're stuck with the Meow Mix song. Thus, it's important to have music of your own to counter with in order to flush out the old internal soundtrack every once in a while. When I left the US, I carefully put together a music collection on my laptop consisting of a few thousand songs that I thought might come in handy. I tried to be as broad as possible, throwing in as many different genres and artists as I could because it's hard to predict what kind of situations are going to arise, and so it's best to be prepared. And we really do have a staggering amount of music to choose from in the States, and all of it so different. It's kind of mind boggling. In Vanuatu things are a lot simpler. Going along with it's lackluster cuisine, Vanuatu also decided that it would be best if they skipped the whole music phase of their cultural development. As far as I know, there are only a couple instruments that are native to Vanuatu. The first is the tam-tam, a wooden still drum, so basically a log that's been hollowed out and is beaten with a stick to produce sound only slightly more pleasing to the ear than banging two sticks together (and there are a couple custom dances I've seen that incorporate the banging-sticks-together instrument). Well, that might be a little harsh. Tam-tams do make a nice, dense, natural, wood-like sound, which is kind of cool, but just not particularly interesting. I mean, I can't envision a lot of online lists of people's top ten all time favorite tam-tam solos. Actually, for the most part, tam-tams are used as like bells to get people's attention for meetings and such, a much more pleasant alternative to banging on an empty metal acetylene canister.

The second all-Vanuatu instrument is the heart of what's called a string band, which is the closest thing Vanuatu has to its own style of music. I'm not even sure what the instrument is called, or if it even has a name, but it's a large wooden box with a hinged stick protruding from one of the top corner. A cord connects the end of the stick with the center of the box. The musician uses the stick to adjust the tension in the cord and plucks it to make music. In a string band, the box player is accompanied by a couple guitars, maybe some keyboard synth, a few guys with rattles, and a singer belting it in Bislama. Traditionally, all the band members are supposed to dress up in matching, overly colorful Hawaiian shirts. The thing about string band is that there's only so many different notes you can make with a string tied to a box, so all the songs tend to sound the same. I mean, like, really the same, not like how old people say rock music all sounds the same. Literally, the tune of every string band song is almost identical. The only real difference is in the lyrics. When I first got to Vanuatu, I spent a day with my training group in a pool at a resort in Vila. The entire day we kept hearing the same song repeated over and over again, and most of us just assumed the resort had a single CD on infinite repeat. It was only later that we discovered that it was actually a live band playing, and that they were actually playing different songs, it's just that all their songs sounded alike. There are also string band music videos, most of which were very obviously made by some guy who'd only just downloaded Final Cut Pro off the internet a few days prior and usually feature the lead singer superimposed a slide show of various pictures from around Vanuatu.

Another common musical genre in Vanuatu is church songs, which one tends to get exposed to at least three or four times a day, independent of whether or not you happen to be at church. My school, and, I think, most schools, are big on the church songs and most classes get kicked off with a chorus, as they're called. Some of these choruses are in English and this, combined with the fact that a lot of the people singing them are horrendous singers and have only a very limited command of the English language, means that they mostly sound like total gibberish with the word “Jesus” occasionally mixed in. Other choruses are in Bislama or, even better, a mix of English and Bislama, which renders them slightly more comprehensible because the people singing at least understand what the words to the song mean. A personal favorite of mine, and probably every Peace Corps volunteer in Vanuatu, is a chorus called “Jesus is the Winner-man,” winner-man being an English-Bislama-ism meaning someone who always wins at everything, or is just generally awesome. The thing is that no one ever gets the pronunciation quite right, so it always, always ends up sounding like wiener-man. So it's really amusing to be sitting in church listening to the entire congregation sing “Jesus is the wiener-man, the wiener-man, the wiener-man. Jesus is the wiener-man, the wiener man all the time.”

Aside from the locally produced music, it's always funny what kinds of foreign music manage to catch on over here. Of course, Reggae is really huge, as it is almost everywhere except the US, from my understanding, which probably accounts for the enormous number of people one sees every day wearing shirts with giant pictures of Bob Marley on them and why every village has at least seven people in it named Bob Marley. There's also a slow trickle of pop music that makes it here from the Solomon Islands and the Philippines, because, I guess, they're the closest musically inclined countries. Solomon and Philippine music is usually very heavy on the synth and often have beats and tunes ripped off from popular American groups and overlayed with different music. So, I'll often hear a beat I recognize and get all excited because it's a song a like from the States only to be sorely let down a few seconds later with I realize that the lyrics are in the Philippine Spanish-English pidgin and thus were probably not written by Snoop Dogg. I'm not really sure why, but songs from abroad tend to arrive one at a time. So one week everyone will be rocking the latest new song over, and over, and over again without interruption and then the next week they'll have moved on to the next one. Thus, when someone asks you “have you heard that one good song?” or “do you have the music video for the song?” it's not that hard to figure out what they're talking about, as there's usually only one or two songs to choose from. Duncan finds it difficult to get his head around that fact that, where I come from, you could listen to music for months on end without repeating a single song, which leads to some confusion as he once came over and asked me “can you make me a CD of that song?”
To which I responded “Umm, which song?”
“You know, the one you were playing when I came over the other day that I liked.”
“Uhh, you're going to have to give me more to go on than that.”
“No, you know, the good one.”
“I have no idea what you're talking about.”
“Oh, well just play all your songs and I'll stop you when we get to the right one.”
“Umm, Duncan, I have thousands of songs.”
“Just start playing through them.”
I actually did, a few hours later, figure out what song he was talking about. It was Sweet Home Alabama. I made him a CD and threw on some other, similar, music I thought he might like and now our nakamal is the only one on the island that occasionally busts out the Skynyrd and Creedence. Shania Twain is also a big name around Vanuatu, which leads to a lot of humorous situations involving large groups of burly, well-muscled men saying things like “Kas, Shania Twain i tuf tumas!” (literally, “Shania Twain is really tough.” In Vanuatu “tough” is slang that's probably best translated as “bad-ass”).

Somewhere along the line Ni-Vans in Vila and other more westernized areas decided to crank things up a bit and try and make some home grown pop music. Much like that from the Solomon Islands and Philippines, Vanuatu pop is also heavy on the synth and borrows extensively from western artists. For example one rising star in Vanuatu is a singer who exclusively sings Selena covers, and makes it painfully obvious that she has absolutely zero grasp of the Spanish language, which all Selena songs are written in. Perhaps it's best that they stick to covers, however, because just a few months ago a real Vanuatu original was born, a pop song that tells the story (which is supposed to be based on a true story) of a Vanuatu mother whose newborn baby died due to negligence and who tried to secretly bury the corpse in her yard so her husband wouldn't find out (and yes, I agree, that it seems like the husband would probably, at some point, notice the lack of a living baby in the household, even without necessarily having to find the body, but I guess that's why I'm not a musician). The song is sung from the perspective of the husband and is supposed to be a tribute to the baby. It starts off (translated from Bislama) something like this: “I'm singing this song to say I'm sorry that we ruined you, that the cold killed you and then the dogs dug up your body,” and goes downhill from there. And I know what you're thinking and, yes, there is a music video, featuring footage of an actual dead baby. Also, although I've never had the pleasure myself, people tell me that the song is way better live. Far be it from me to critique the work of an aspiring artist, but I think I'll stick to my laptop.