Musical Eclecticism, Cultural Appropriation, and Whiteness in Mission Delirium and HONK!
Andrew Snyder
Like the broader HONK! movement of which it is a part, San Francisco’s Mission Delirium Brass Band has developed a musically eclectic repertoire that draws on a wide range of dance traditions from throughout the world. Also like the HONK! movement, Mission Delirium is predominantly white, and the band has received both criticism and praise from relevant communities for its aesthetic adventurism. Members have debated throughout its existence the moral quandaries of cultural appropriation. This chapter offers no easy answers as to what a relatively privileged, predominantly white band should play. Based on the author’s own experience composing and arranging for the band, it rather shows how the band creates both musical joy and replicates the harm of cultural appropriation all at once. The chapter argues that the band performs an “alternative whiteness” that seeks to distance whiter bodies from the legacies of racial domination into which they are interpellated. While not defending these aesthetic choices, the chapter asks whether it is possible to hear the musical engagements of Mission Delirium as part of the “musical activism” embraced by the HONK movement, an audible portrait of richly multicultural world that might be brought into the world partially through sound.
Andrew Snyder is an ethnomusicologist who received his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in 2018 with a dissertation about an explosive carnival brass band community turned activist musical movement in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is an avid trumpeter and co-founder of San Francisco’s Mission Delirium Brass Band.
Link 6.1 Mission Delirium's 2015 album Live in Rio
Andrew Snyder
Like the broader HONK! movement of which it is a part, San Francisco’s Mission Delirium Brass Band has developed a musically eclectic repertoire that draws on a wide range of dance traditions from throughout the world. Also like the HONK! movement, Mission Delirium is predominantly white, and the band has received both criticism and praise from relevant communities for its aesthetic adventurism. Members have debated throughout its existence the moral quandaries of cultural appropriation. This chapter offers no easy answers as to what a relatively privileged, predominantly white band should play. Based on the author’s own experience composing and arranging for the band, it rather shows how the band creates both musical joy and replicates the harm of cultural appropriation all at once. The chapter argues that the band performs an “alternative whiteness” that seeks to distance whiter bodies from the legacies of racial domination into which they are interpellated. While not defending these aesthetic choices, the chapter asks whether it is possible to hear the musical engagements of Mission Delirium as part of the “musical activism” embraced by the HONK movement, an audible portrait of richly multicultural world that might be brought into the world partially through sound.
Andrew Snyder is an ethnomusicologist who received his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in 2018 with a dissertation about an explosive carnival brass band community turned activist musical movement in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is an avid trumpeter and co-founder of San Francisco’s Mission Delirium Brass Band.
Link 6.1 Mission Delirium's 2015 album Live in Rio
Link 6.2: "Tandy" on Mission Delirium's 2015 album Live in Rio
