Ples and Popular Music Production: A Typology of Home-based Recording Studios in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea

Abstract

This article explores how indigenous socialities underpin the production of popular music in the Papua New Guinea (PNG) capital Port Moresby, which is a major centre for popular music production in Melanesia. The primary focus concerns home-based studios that were in operation between 2007 and 2011, which produced the distinctive PNG style of popular music known as lokal musik. Their operative structures reflect a Melanesian kinship-based socio-cultural framework—called the wantok system—that connects individuals through networks of obligation, exchange and reciprocity. These affiliations are conceptually grounded in the notion of ples, which is an indigenous concept pertaining to one's identity and ‘place’ of origin. This article outlines how ples underpins the production of lokal music at every stage. It also shows ples to be fundamental in the local categorisations of musical styles, which share characteristics with introduced electronically produced pop, but are interpreted through musical, lyrical and instrumental variants that pertain to specific places. These places are usually linguistically and culturally distinctive, and are almost always rural. From a theoretical standpoint, this paper considers popular music within an indigenous epistemological framework and seeks to provide a new production-focused perspective on the local cultural significance of popular music in PNG.

Keywords:

• Popular Music
• Papua New Guinea
• Port Moresby
• Wantok System
• Home-based Recording Studios
• Recording Industry

Notes

¹ The Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies catalogued popular music released in PNG from 1984 to 1996 (see Niles 1984, 1987a, 1987b, 1988, 1991, 1993; Niles and Clement 1993a, 1993b, 1996).

² Crowdy defines stringbands as ensembles that combine ‘voices, guitars, ukuleles, and sometimes a bass instrument … [and whose] music usually consists of secular songs with local subject matter sung in the vernacular or one of Papua New Guienea's main lingua franca’ (2005: 1).

³ The main exception are Michael Goddard's studies of the social organisation of Port Moresby criminals (Goddard 1992, 2001, 2005).

⁴ This typology therefore also responds to recent research in the Pacific that has advocated for the inclusion of indigenous epistemologies into conventional academic enquiry (see Gegeo and Watson-Gegeo 2001; Hau'ofa 1975, 1993, 2000; Hereniko 2000; Huffer and Qalo 2004; Hviding 2003).

⁵ For recent estimations please refer to The World Factbook (Central Intelligence Agency 2011).

⁶ For a description of urban villages, see Goddard (2000).

⁷ Mike Wild was also responsible for training notable sound engineers Thomas Lulungan, and Dika Dai, both of whom worked at CHM at the time of this research.

⁸ Richard Dellman's website: http://advantagepng.com (accessed 10 April 2014).

⁹ The average Gross National Income per capita is only US$1720: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.CD/countries/PG-4E-XN?display=graph (accessed 26 October 2012). Many musicians, however, are not formally employed. Many who are receive a minimum wage of the equivalent of US$13 per week.

¹⁰ Other lokal styles include Sepik disco, which is an up-beat musical style associated with the Sepik Province; Island or Manus lokal style, which appears to exhibit Caribbean influences; and Bougainville style, which is heavily influenced by hard rock music. Extrapolations of these styles require further research.

¹¹ Some provinces in PNG have a very high language density and all are comprised of multiple distinct cultural and linguistic groups.

¹² The predominance of Aroma studios reflects both their historical significance in terms of the development of the Port Moresby recording industry, as well as my position within the research. My most detailed case study was with an Aroma band called the Paramana Strangers (see Wilson 2011), and I spent time in the Aroma Village of the same name. I was consequently connected to more Aroma studios than studios from any other cultural group.

¹³ Lokal music instrumentation and styles are different from the traditional PNG–contemporary fusion genre as discussed by Crowdy (1998, 1999) and Crowdy and Subam (2003), and also different from the evangelical pop–tribal fusion discussed by Diettrich, Moulin and Webb (2011).

¹⁴ Webb has noted that this stereotype—referred to as Kauboi—dates back to the 1980s (Webb 1993: 175).