“Listen to your tribal voice”: Embodying Locality in German-Australian Music Encounters The Case of Peter Maffay and Yothu Yindi (original) (raw)

In 1998, German rock musician Peter Maffay founded a music project called 'Begegnungen' (encounters) in collaboration with artists from around the globe, including the singers Noa from Israel, Natacha Atlas from Egypt, Lokua Kanza from Congo, American blues musician Sonny Landreth, the rap group Cartel in Turkey, and, what will be the focus of this essay, the Yolngu band Yothu Yindi in Australia. Each of these collaborative 'encounters' consisted of a visit of Peter Maffay and his band to the designated country and the subsequent performance and recording of one song together. These recordings, then promoted under the umbrella 'World music', culminated in several releases in 1998-1999: the release of the album 'Begegnungen', a concert tour around Germany, the release of a film documentation, and the publication of an illustrated travel book. While each of these encounters focus on tolerance, international solidarity, and transnational exchange (of stories, genre, lyrics, political agendas), it is mainly Peter Maffay, I argue, who engages in a transcultural performance, presenting himself as global body and symbolic contact zone. Especially in the case of the collaboration between Maffay and Yothu Yindi, in their joint tour around Germany and release of the protest song "Tribal Voice", Maffay engages with Aboriginality as a form of ethnic drag and uses the intercultural encounter as a forum for esoteric and exoticized images. While Yothu Yindi's traditions and lifestyle are presented as necessarily tied to a specific locality, Peter Maffay's engagement with ethnicity foregrounds a freely accessible cultural experience ready to be appropriated for a global market. Both protagonists of the collaboration, Peter Maffay and Yothu Yindi, are known in their home countries for their political activism. In the 50 years of his active career as a musician Peter Maffay has frequently acted as peace activist and agent for numerous aid projects and charity foundations. Maffay considers himself political and also inserts his own political stances into his music. 1 Born in Braşov (then: Kronstadt) in 1949, Romania, as the son of a Transylvanian Saxon mother and Hungarian father, who immigrated to a Bavarian village when he was 14 years old, the fight against discrimination and xenophobia is of personal importance to him: "I commit myself to people who are in need, for minorities, for people who are discriminated against, because I find it atrocious". 2 His work as a peace activist has brought him to perform a concert for German troops in