Arguments about the extent to which common elements can be found in the instrumentation, the harmonies, the tonalities or the content of Celtic musics have always fascinated me, but fall far outside my field of competence; I am no musicologist, not even a musician. My concern is more widely cultural, and to a large extent phenomenological; how do musicians and their audiences visualise and frame the culture they are working within, in y Fro Gymraeg and to a lesser extent in Euskal Herria (the Basque Country). To what extent, and in what ways, is the concept of Celtic culture meaningful today to a bongo player in Aberystwyth, a hip-hop rapper from Bala, a record producer in Caernarfon, a festival organiser in Dolgellau or Donostia, or to clubbers in Pontypridd or Bayona?

Marginal to this discussion, also, are those Welsh popular musicians, from Shirley Bassey and Tom Jones to Catatonia and the Super Furries, who have opted to perform mainly in the English language and address an audience that is largely outside Wales. Fine musicians as many of them are, and influential movers, occasionally, on the so-called 'World Stage', the dominant dynamics of money and power mean that they still inevitably find themselves, in Simon Brooks' phrase, 'yn gwasanaethu diwylliant Lloegr, rhagor na diwylliant Cymru' [servicing English culture, rather than the culture of Wales] (1997: 26). There do seem to be imperatives developing at present that may well draw the different linguistic threads in Welsh popular culture closer together again, and I hope to allude to them at the close of this paper, but reasons of space alone demand that for now, the discussion be concentrated on developments in Welsh-language culture.

My decision to include Basque perspectives in an analysis of contemporary Celticities is due to a desire to pose a question about the nature of the articulations and evolutions taking place in the musics of a number of small nations both in western Europe and beyond; if there are - as I believe this analysis will demonstrate - not only close similarities, but a considerable degree of convergence between the popular musics of y Fro Gymraeg and Euskal Herria, then in seeking to understand the processes involved we must look beyond narrow definitions of a 'Celtic' inheritance shared between Wales, Brittany, Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man and their diasporas and offshoots in other parts of Britain and in North America.

Among the cultural characteristics often perceived as uniting the Celtic nations are languages that share a common ancestry, and whose patterns of expression have many marked similarities. There is also felt to be a common distrust of centralisation and rigid organisation, and a delight in the unexpected and unpredictable, beautifully caught in Oscar Wilde's aphorism 'consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative'. From Roman times onward, these aspects of Celtic culture have been exoticised, romanticised and 'othered' by representatives of more politically coherent cultures to the extent that all too often the Celts appear to become no more than the negative images of those who have displaced and marginalised them; the fairies of western Europe. The continuing power of such representations can be seen in the 'joss-stick Celticism' of many today; in a discussion-group conversation on the internet recently, I was advised by an American woman called Ravyn (with a 'y' of course) that I would be able to recognise distinctly Celtic elements of any music if, and presumably only if, I had a 'Celtic soul'.

Another common strand in the cultural consciousness of these nations, though, is their long and continuing experience of imperialism. For centuries, from Galicia to the Hebrides and from Galway to Rennes, the independence of the Celtic communities has been under continual threat from powerful, imperial nation-states seeking not only to absorb them and exploit their resources, but to eliminate all cultural differences between these troublesome minorities and the dominant cultural and economic groups in each state, in the interests of uniformity and coherence. For at least three centuries these empires have been 'the key political system of the modern world, controlling the structures - legal, administrative, financial, military, surveillance and informational - in which we all live' (Giddens, 1985: 17), and it is revealing that in framing the Act of Union between England and Wales in 1536 Henry Tudor announced his intention of rooting out 'the sinister usages' of the Welsh language, which is described as 'a speech nothing like, nor consonant to, the natural mother tongue used within this realm'. Even earlier, the Statute of Kilkenny in 1386 had attempted to make the use of Irish illegal even before English political authority had been successfully imposed there (both quoted in Evans, 1992: 295-6).

In Gwynfor Evans' words, 'the way to annihilate a nation is to obliterate its culture. The way to delete its culture is to destroy its language' (1996: 295), and he comments that as media penetration has intensified so has the ability of politically dominant groups to marginalise all others; 'the nation state is now so powerful it can kill a culture by merely ignoring it' (1996: 111). This experience of a centuries-long struggle against deletion, although it is shared by all the Celtic nations and although we recognise and identify with each other's struggles, is not a peculiarly Celtic one; even within Continental Europe the same imperial powers have been resisted by Portuguese, Basques and Catalans, by Savoyards, Corsicans and Flemings, and by immigrant and displaced communities such as Jews, Gypsies and North Africans. Amongst the flotsam of empire, Québécois and Creole, Inuit and Maori have endured similar oppressions and engineered parallel resistances.
 

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Different Currents within Contemporary Popular Culture

Welsh-language popular music took on its present-day, recognisably modern shape in the nineteen-sixties, fuelled by a remarkable burgeoning of cultural assertiveness, particularly among the young, in the traditionally Welsh-speaking, largely rural areas of the West and North. Welsh rock, suggests Ned Thomas, 'has brought a new lightness of touch and gaiety to a national struggle that in earlier generations was characterised more by deprivation and austere commitment' (1991: 101). This was a period of protest and resurgent identity politics world-wide, including the Civil Rights movements in the United States and the Six Counties of northern Ireland, the collapse of Empires, the quickening of national feeling in Québec, in Brittany and Euskal Herria. In y Fro Gymraeg at least, despite a number of disappointments, the succeeding twenty years saw some important gains in the establishment and entrenchment of modern cultural institutions, including Recordiau Sain and Radio Cymru, S4C and independent Welsh-language production companies such as Barcud and Teliesin, a revival in Welsh-language education, and the continued leadership of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg in the support and dissemination of live modern music in the Welsh language.

The major centres of population, though, in South Wales and in the north-east, played little part in these developments, and indeed throughout the seventies there was much talk of a working-class backlash against a Welsh-language culture that was then perceived by some as backward-looking and elitist. The last ten years, though, has seen both a return to the Welsh language by many young people in the industrial south, particularly in the Valleys, and a resurgent sense of Welsh identity there that has been demonstrated in the referendum vote and in the election of Plaid Cymru councillors throughout the area. Attitudes to culture and society, though, in this more urbanised and cosmopolitan society, are inevitably different; Simon Brooks describes the culture of 'Cymru De Newydd - New South Wales' as 'yn frith, yn fratiog, yn gwrs ac yn gymysg' [speckled, fractured, coarse and mixed], having more in common with much contemporary American experience than with rural Welsh traditions, and 'fel Tex-Mex Hispanaidd yr Unol Daleithiau, neu ebonics pobl duon Los Angeles, mae'r cywair yn un rhyfedd, ond miniog.' [like Hispanic Tex-Mex in the US, or ebonics among black people in Los Angeles, it has a strange but acute tone'] (1997: 11).

It is the sometimes explosive, sometimes effervescent, but always fertile convergence between these two streams of Welsh youth culture that makes the late nineties a period of intense excitement and uncertainty; and it is within these whirlpools and eddies that we must search if we are to try to establish to what extent recognisably Celtic influences can still be discerned, and evaluate their contribution within the emerging pattern.
 

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Celtic Influences within the Development of Gwerin Music

Listeners as well as musicians frequently make a rule-of-thumb and flexible distinction between what they perceive as 'pop' music and 'Gwerin'. A friend of mine last week expressed her outrage that for several years now, the Welsh entry for the Celtic Music Festival in Kilkenny has been, in her words, 'nothing but pop. No traditional element at all!' which she perceived as both an insult to the Celtic theme of the festival and an exclusion of elements she values in contemporary Welsh music. To a number of Welsh listeners, Celtic elements are both identified and welcomed in music framed as 'Gwerin', but the situation is more complex in dealing with musics perceived as rock or pop.

But to translate the Welsh word Gwerin into the most obvious English alternative, 'folk', is problematical. There are important ways in which the cultural situation of the Gwerin in Wales has been, and continues to be, importantly different from the general working-class experience in many other parts of Britain. In England, for example, folk culture has tended to be defined in contrast to that of the elite; oral rather than written, simple rather than complex, using restricted rather than extended code, dealing with locality and work rather than leisure and abstraction. Arguments about ‘authenticity’ have bedevilled much research into English folk music from the days of Cecil Sharp onwards, and of course the power of definition rested with middle-class collectors and theorists rather than the participants themselves. Such connotations concerning 'folk' music seem to be influential throughout the English speaking word, leading such theoreticians as Richard Middleton and Simon Frith to entirely dismiss the genre as a bourgeois nationalist construct, serving to ‘protect the ruling class from the threat and suffering of the proletariats by first exoticising them and then absorbing their cultures into their own’ (Middleton, 1990: 139), or on the grounds that ‘folk discourse... seems to rest on an essential self-deception’, since ‘that which is commodified is presented as communal’ (Frith, 1996: 40).

The historical experience of the Gwerin in Wales has been different. Between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, the Welsh language was largely abandoned by the gentry, and responsibility for and control over an enormously rich, ancient and sophisticated legacy of cultural forms, in literature and music especially, passed to the ordinary people. The reservoir of traditional forms, both musical and literary, both simple and sophisticated, that are most easily, if not exactly, defined in English as ‘folk’, are omnipresent in Welsh popular music, rather than occupying the more specific generic niche that they seem to inhabit in the English-speaking Atlantic cultures.

It is currently fashionable in academic circles, and in anthropological ones in particular, to decry 'essentialism' in all its forms, and in an era where as Stuart Hall has put it 'when I ask somebody where they come from nowadays I expect to be told a very long story… everybody seems to come from about five different places and in their heads, their sense of themselves, to be juggling a kind of set of world identities' (1991: TV), it is clearly no longer possible - even were it desirable - to deal with cultures as if they exist in watertight, impenetrable compartments. There is a danger here, though, of throwing out the baby with the bathwater; in the words of the Basque sociologist Josu Amezaga, 'although "the people" are immensely diverse in many ways, it cannot be denied that the trends towards diversity are accompanied by processes that tend to bring people together to create broad collectives - especially in times of significant social movements' (1994: 8).

To insist too exclusively on the constructedness and multiplicity of personal and social identities is to close one's eyes to the force and the remarkable longevity of shared social and cultural values, and the powerful loyalties they generate, perhaps particularly in small societies that perceive themselves to be under perpetual threat. Describing the need for small societies to perpetually reinvent themselves amongst the master narratives which always seem to be being written elsewhere, Gwyn Alf Williams comments that 'in that Welsh making and remaking of themselves, a sense of history has always been central' (1985: 304). Although different Welsh women and men will select and combine different elements of their common culture in different proportions at different times in establishing their positions on different issues, many would agree on its cardinal aspects, and on its importance not only in their framing of their individual situations, but in the prosecution of their lives and aims.

Motivated by a desire to celebrate, strengthen, study and publicise elements of Welsh musical culture that could fairly be described as contributing to its essence, its flavour, its intellectual and formal cohesion, a number of musicians from both the rock and the Gwerin ends of the folk-rock continuum have consciously accessed Welsh and Breton traditions in particular. Twm Morys, in particular, has drawn in his music on themes from Brythonic literature and mythology, framed his writing within the demanding patterns of strict-metre forms such as cynghanedd, and integrated Breton songs as well as formal patterns into his work.

In doing so, he is not turning his back on American or international influences; indeed, many of his songs could be described as blues or jazz, and saxophone, mouth-organ and drum-kit are key elements in the band's sound, along with harp and voices. He argues that small societies, by their very nature, inevitably find themselves receiving, adapting and refining forms originating from the larger and more diverse societies around them. In the case of Wales, occupying part of a larger island which is itself on the fringes of a continent, this situation is extreme. On the other hand, the small size of its culture is a factor in its extraordinary social and cultural cohesiveness, which in turn stimulates the most rapid and fluent interbreeding of forms. It is the musician's responsibility, he argues, to naturalise new influences into the developing environment of Welsh music, so that eventually, 'like a cuckoo, returning again and again to a Welsh nest, they become… a Welsh bird' (Morys, 1995, interview with writer).

The linguistic closeness between the Welsh and Breton languages (they are to a considerable degree mutually comprehensible) has tended to encourage a particular closeness in cultural matters, and according to Alan Stivell among others (Lahusen, 1993: 263-280) to a large extent the twentieth-century revival in Breton traditional music has been stimulated and encouraged by Welsh influences. Stivell's own influence on Welsh musicians has been profound; Dafydd Iwan has described Stivell's music and his pan-Celtic enthusiasm as central to the development of 'his faith' during the seventies and beyond, and the influence of Twm Morys in the eighties and nineties has led not only to the 'naturalisation' of a range of Breton instruments - particularly the bombard - and Breton forms and harmonies, but to the growth of a number of groups currently prominent in the Welsh scene that include Breton performers. Nolwenn Corbell of Bob Delyn a'r Ebillion, Patrick Berchard of Ysbryd Chouchen and Alice Elin of y Band Arall are all significant participants within the music of their groups.

Irish influences have also been marked in Welsh popular music in the last two decades, not only in instrumentation (of which more later) but in the conditions and situations in which live music is reproduced. A major factor here has been the rapid recent development in the rural West of town festivals, most notably Sesiwn Fawr in Dolgellau but, perhaps at least partly due to its success, a host of others are emerging in places like Tregaron, Newtown, Fishguard and Newquay. This process is leading to the development of a summer 'circus' for musicians and their audiences, with y Gwyl y Cnapan, Sesiwn Fawr and the National Eisteddfod at its core, very like that in West Clare and Killarney, in which town after town takes up the role of host to a rolling caravan of musical pilgrims and free-spending fellow travellers.

Just as in Ireland, these festivals have been enthusiastically backed by the tourist industry and its institutional supports, and following the Irish model such festivals include 'headlined' events, programmed in public places both outdoors and in, and a range of more informal sessions in rugby clubs, taverns and parks. According to Huw Dylan, one of the organisers of Sesiwn Fawr, that festival was 'quite self-consciously' modelled on Irish festivals such as the Puck Fair in Killarney and Willie Clancy's Music Festival in Milltown Mabey. He feels that the growth of such festivals reflects a continuing 'loosening up' within Welsh music and amongst its participants, particularly at the more traditional end of the Gwerin - rock continuum, with a greater emphasis on relaxation and informality rather than the respectful - and competitive - silence of the Eisteddfod or the ideologically-charged unanimity of y Cnapan.

Dafydd Iwan has suggested that this development is changing the relationship between singer and audiences in a way that is often positive; that although performers can still expect some audiences to listen in admiring silence, and others to involve themselves wholly in the unfolding emotion of a concert, at other times they have to compete with the rival focuses of conversation and the bar, and accept greater movement from their audiences. In such situations, he suggests, the performer can no longer direct the progress and atmosphere of the occasion without much closer reference to the feelings of those (s)he is singing to..

That this freer, more informal approach to music-making is part of a revival of interest in Welsh music seems to be uncontested, and the associated attraction of many new participants into performance 'sessions' has resulted in a greater prominence for two distinctly Irish instruments, the penny whistle and the bodhran. These are both relatively accessible instruments to beginners, and it is rare to see a group playing around a pub table in Wales which does not feature one or both. Some professional musicians, such as Sian James, have willingly incorporated both into their repertoire, but there are also those, such as the harpist Robin James Jones, who resent the 'intrusion' of an instrumentation that they feel distorts and even destroys the traditional sound of Welsh music. The ubiquitous, skipping percussion of the bodhran is often singled out for condemnation (perhaps partly because the bodhran is so often badly and insensitively played) while interestingly, non-Celtic instruments such as the mandolin, the accordion and even the guitar are welcomed as more easily integrated.

It is an irony that much of the most popular so-called 'folk' music found in the shelves of high-street stores in England and America is either overtly Celtic, mainly from Ireland and Scotland, or strongly influenced by Celtic modes and models. The musics of Wales and Brittany, though, are represented hardly at all; and listening to a folk programme on BBC Radio 3 recently, I heard the presenter bewail the fact that 'so little folk music ever comes out of Wales'. The language 'barrier' - still so much more powerful a disincentive to English-speaking audiences, it seems, than to those elsewhere in Europe - may help to explain this lack of comprehension, as does the fact that the majority of Welsh-language material is recorded and distributed by small, independent producers with few links, if any, to the multi-national media networks. But another factor is ideological; English-language folk, however 'Celtic' its packaging, has become more and more a nostalgic, essentially reactionary form, all too often scarcely distinguishable from 'Easy Listening', whereas those involved in the musics of the Gwerin in Wales are still, from Dafydd Iwan and Meic Stevens through to Gwerinos and y Moniars, involved in a radical discourse, which as Ned Thomas puts it ‘at its best is satirical and popular song... comparable with the Russian satire of Galich or Vysotsky rather than anything one finds in England’ (1991: 98). For audiences and performers in contemporary Wales, therefore, the reactionary connotations of much mass-produced folk Celticism discourage any identification with this kind of material.
 

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Rock-Framed Perspectives

In Euskal Herria, during the sixties and seventies, the dominant musical genre was Euskal Kanta Berria, or New Basque Folk, a form rooted in Basque musical traditions and in Euskara, the Basque language. Josu Amezaga suggests that this movement became 'a catalyst and a voice for the wishes and dreams of various population groups at a time when people were hoping for major social change' (1994: 2). By the nineteen-eighties, though, the failure of the hopes generated in the south in particular for rapid social change and Basque autonomy, the economic marginalisation of young people as a result of general European recession, Spain's entry into the EEC, and neo-capitalist economic policies, and the willingness of many in the dominant classes to accept integration within a revamped Spanish hegemony, led to an outburst of nihilism and anger that could not be expressed within the culture of Euskal Kanta Berria, and found a conduit instead through punk, which later broadened into Euskal Rock Radikala, or Basque Radical Rock. Interestingly, one of the most powerful agents in this explosion was a tour by the Welsh-language punk band Anrhefn.

In Catalunya, similarly, the development of modern popular music is described by Maria van Liew as originating in a Catalan folk movement of the sixties called La Nova Canco (1993: 248), which derived 'much of its appeal from traditional Catalan culture’ (1993: 250). More gradually than in the Basque model, this form too gave way to rock and punk-based forms in the eighties and nineties. Line Grenier has described the association of Québécois culture and sentiment with traditional forms such as Chansons during the early development of popular music, and their decline in the eighties - a decline once again associated with the failure of hopes for autonomy and national renewal, and with economic recession.

The degree to which punk-based forms and more recently, rap and hip-hop have eclipsed traditional modes or, alternatively, have become engaged in processes of articulation and hybridisation, would therefore appear to reflect the different extents to which the aspirations expressed in the earlier musics were either deleted, or remained alive, during the decades of disappointment and retrenchment

Nick Fenwick, guitarist with Tystion, comments that as he was growing up in West Wales, in the eighties and early nineties, bands such as Anrhefn and Datblygu seemed to offer an escape from forms and aspirations which had, at that time, become suffocating. 'Rhys Mwyn (leader of Anrhefn) and musicians like him broke the stranglehold of folk', he comments. Nick and some others feel also that the relationship between the older generation of musicians and their newly powerful patrons in the Welsh-language media had become too cosy, and was (to some extent, they would argue, still is) preventing the discovery and exposure of new talent and alternative forms. At the same time, the generally cohesive nature of the Welsh-language music scene does seem to reflect a society which has remained to a remarkable degree ideologically and socially united. The capacity of Cymdeithas yr Iaith to continually refresh its membership with new, young and radical elements, and to maintain its central role as the agent of live music in pubs, halls and festivals throughout the country, also testifies to the degree of continuity that has been sustained over the past thirty years.

George Lipsitz argues that the revolution in electronic communications and the growth of global capitalism has led, in the last two decades, to disadvantaged communities world-wide becoming far more aware of the links between their own struggles and those of others. Thus the 'new technologies, mass migrations, and the rapid movement of ideas, images and expressions across the globe have created new networks of identification and affiliation… complex new political fusions with profound political implications' (1992: 13). Within such circumstances of rapid global integration and commodification, he suggests, local identities are often intensified as much as they are transformed. The 'poetics of place' referred to in his title permeates popular music, and shapes the conditions of production, distribution and reception globally. Musicians and audiences, in the Celtic nations and elsewhere, increasingly have an international, or post-national, reservoir of forms and genres to draw on; yet they do so, very often, in order to create messages steeped in their own particulars of place, protest and displacement. Then, through the conduits of commercial culture, music produced on one continent and in reaction to a specific pattern of oppressions and opportunities becomes part of everyday life and culture in others. So extensively have popular musicians sampled other musical forms, so widely disseminated have popular idioms become, and so many new musics have contributed to the mix - such as Jamaican reggae, German Technik and Polish Dance - that popular musicians and their audiences now inhabit a world in which every riff and grace-note, every bass-line and drum signature, every nuance of vocal delivery and instrumental mix carries a wealth of potential connotations and articulations (Lipsitz, 1992: 22-47).

Dafydd Iwan has spoken of the gradual process, in the work of the first two generations of popular musicians in the Welsh language, including Meic Stevens, Edward H. Davis and Geraint Jarman, of developing musical and linguistic forms responsive to the parameters of the language, capable of drawing on musical traditions from within Welsh and other cultures and addressing issues relevant to a Welsh audience in a Welsh voice, yet open to influences from America, Europe and elsewhere.

Earlier this year, I had been planning to undertake a tour of Euskal Herria and Brittany with the young acoustic-rock band Ysbryd Chouchen. In the end, the idea had to be postponed, but as some of us were sitting in the pub together working on it, a little overawed by the size of the money-raising task facing us, talk turned to where we might go in the future, if finance was no problem. The first three answers were Cuba! Kurdestan! and Chechnya!. These suggestions came from a band whose music is gentle, lyrical and usually personal in its themes, but demonstrate the sense of identification shared by Welsh speakers with political and cultural minorities world-wide. Similarly, at two recent concerts given by Dafydd Iwan in recent months, a song commemorating the life of a Central American revolutionary was dedicated with tongue in cheek to General Pinochet, and another, attacking 'great-power' interventionism, to the people of Kosovo and Serbia.

Looking beyond the Celtic world and its diaspora, a number of forms have been drawn in particular into Welsh rock from the musics of other peoples seeking political and cultural freedom; the musical conventions both assert and contextualise the lyrical agenda. Caribbean forms such as Calypso and, above all, Ska and Reggae have been hugely influential in Welsh-language music for over twenty years, their echoing patterns of dub and vocal repetition, and their traditions of commentary and seriousness of purpose engaging powerfully in the politically overt work of musicians such as Geraint Jarman, Edward H. Dafis and Anrhefn. Dick Hebdige has related ‘the cut ‘n’ mix aesthetic’ of much modern Caribbean music to these societies’ long-term experiences of fragmentation, dislocation, exploitation and recreation (Hebdige, 1987, pp.26-40). The banjo also plays a widely influential role in a number of Welsh bands, its jaunty assertiveness an appropriate foil for satire and invective. More recent influences, in bands as disparate as Gwerinos and Anweledig, have been Township musics from Southern Africa and Latin forms from Central and South America. The guitar strung and tuned to African patterns not only evokes the guerrilla rock of Zimbabwe’s The Four Brothers and the struggles against apartheid personified by musicians like Fela Kuti and Africa Bambaataa, but contributes an irreverence and optimism to contemporary Welsh resistance music. Blues, too, particularly acoustic, harmonica-led ‘Southern’ blues forms, have been very deeply integrated into the Welsh musical vocabulary. And in Wales as much as in the Basque country, rap and hip-hop, 'the music of the oppressed of the 90s' ('El Tubo', 1991: 13) has been reappropriated by bands such as Tystion in Wales and Kortatu in Euskal Herria as 'a re-appropriation of ethnicity… a message of ethnic and cultural pride… and a call to action and protest' (Amezaga, 1994, 8-9).

Among many younger people listening to, or playing, popular music in Wales today, references to 'the Celtic inheritance' tend to be disparaging more often than complementary. There seem to me to be two contributing factors: firstly, there is a widely-held belief that Welsh culture is in a process of rapid change, and for the first time in years many are excited by the potential for positive developments. Simon Brooks has defined contemporary Welsh youth culture as 'diwylliant cosmopolitan yma o hyd' [a cosmopolitan culture of the here and now], and one in which music is 'yn rhan o broses o newid diwylliannol' [part of a process of cultural change] (1997: 6). Framings of Welsh culture that privilege ideas such as 'heritage' and 'inheritances' tend often to be perceived as nostalgic and even reactionary.

The second factor is that after centuries in which Welsh and Celtic studies were driven so completely off the school curriculum that many older people in y Fro Gymraeg are still illiterate in Welsh, and painfully ignorant of much Welsh history, Celtic perspectives are now sometimes so heavily emphasised in classroom discourse that school-leavers now dismiss them as brainwashing. Two friends who both grew up in Machynlleth, both busily immersed in the music scene, separately commented that having been taken around the themed 'Celtica' exhibition which is based there, they felt alienated from the heavily ideological slant of the displays. As Nick Fenwick put it, as he emerged, "if that's what being a Celt means, then I'm certainly not one!"
 

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Métissage and Radical Articulations

Celtic influences as seemingly disparate as Hebridean mouth-music and Galician piping are rooted in a long-standing and widely-recognised cultural commonality, and can thus be easily integrated into a contemporary Welsh musical vocabulary that includes many other shared forms. They are iconic of generations of mutual struggle for cultural survival and recognition, and in particular a stubborn sense of identity and self-worth in the face of political and social repression by larger and more powerful neighbours. At the same time, they exist now, within Welsh rock music at least, as parts of a much wider vocabulary drawn from a range of resistance musics, and the affinities felt between Welsh participants in popular music with their colleagues in Ireland, Scotland or Brittany are part of a network of sympathies and affiliations shared between anti-hegemonic cultural forces in all small nations, drawing together as they mobilise against the imperialisms both of the overweening nation-state or of global capitalism.

The small size and, ironically, the economic weakness of these societies is often a strength, avoiding the class and age-group fractures prevalent in larger ones, and the alienations of lifestyle and status between cultural producers and consumers. In Dafydd Iwan's words, 'there are no stars in Wales' (interview with author, 1995). Josu Amezaga comments that in what he defines as 'ethnic' cultures, 'the tendency is to integrate… and this can be seen on various levels, not just in terms of language; the integration of musical styles and rhythms, the use of old, indigenous instruments, the presence of bertsolaris in rock performances.' He comments further that 'Basque rock is building an identity all of its own by integrating elements of Basque culture while, at the same time, moving into areas that were completely alien to it' (1994: 4). In Quebec, too, Line Grenier comments that the nineties revival in French-language rock has been marked by an blurring of genre boundaries between chanson and mainstream pop (1993: 222-3).

Similar patterns can be identified in contemporary Welsh youth culture. Catatonia have just released an album featuring the traditional harper Elinor Bennett. First and second language Welsh speakers seem to be moving closer together to develop the sort of fluid culture that George Lipsitz has described as 'bifocal' (1986: 38). Like Native American and Quebecois activists, too, who have similarly been using popular music as part of their strategies for 'securing, shaping or stunting the power of the state' (Lipsitz, 1994: 146-151), Welsh popular musicians can helpfully be seen as 'deploying music as an important weapon in battles to create a cultural basis for new nations, to transform alliances and identities… and to unmask the power imbalances that give regions, languages, and ethnic groups very different relationships to the state they supposedly all share' (151).

In sharing their concerns with cultural survival, and issues of language and autonomy, with Basque, Québécois and Cuban musicians, Welsh language artists are developing links that are not as obviously shared with 'Celtic' colleagues in Ireland or the Isle of Man. The ease of access - double-edged weapon though it might seem to be - enjoyed by such musicians to the so-called 'World' audience and global distributors through the English language is not accessible to the Bretons, Welsh or Kurds. Moreover, the willing acceptance that primarily English-language musics and musicians, operating under the label of 'Celticness' have received into the mainstream of transatlantic anglophone culture (to the extent that performers like Enya, Clannad, Capercaillie and The Coors are as likely now to be found in the 'Easy Listening' sections of high-street music stores from Sheerness to Seattle as they are in the almost equally amorphous section of 'Folk') is a positive disincentive for radical and oppositional groups to identify themselves within the same frame.

The concept of Métissage, developed by the Martiniquan poet and sociologist Andre Bernabé (1989), was originally applied to the re-creation of coherent Creole histories and world-pictures after the experience of diaspora and oppression, but offers important opportunities and resonances to students of other resistance cultures. Métissage is the conscious social relocation of disparate experiences into solidarity against the forces of hegemony, allowing the previously disfranchised to share visions, empowers new alliances between groups themselves aware of difference and diversity. As an analytical tool, métissage enables us to differentiate between the playfully post-cultural and the determinedly political, or, to use Zygmunt Bauman's imagery, the tourist and the pilgrim, the shopper and the builder.

To the student of popular culture, similarly, it throws into clear contrast cultural forms developing within what Mark Slobin refers to as the 'over-arching' hegemonies of the super-culture, 'including its alliances with techno-, media-, and finanscapes, consummated through the ceremony of advertising, justifying the ways of the superculture to man, woman and child' (1993: 27-9), and resistance musics dedicated above all to celebrating and defending the rights of ethnic cultures to function as modern, flexible and relevant elements of everyday life. In the lyrics of the song 'Esan ozenki!' ('Shout it out!') by Negu Gorriak, a leading contemporary Basque rap group, we hear: "Gure ordua heldu da, txo: Euskalduna naiz eta harro nago! Aski da txo, esan ozenki: Euskalduna naiz eta harro nago!" (Hey, man, our time has come: I'm Basque and I'm proud! Yeah, that's right, shout it out: I'm Basque and I'm proud!) (quoted in Amezaga, 1999: 10).

Cultures can diverge as much as they can converge. To the extent - and it is still considerable - that Celtic influences, however we define them, have become part of the vocabulary and the emerging métissage that are empowering the anti-hegemonic struggle central to popular culture in y Fro Gymraeg today (and what is culture if it is not a site of contestation and struggle?) we can feel justified in talking about a continuing 'Celtic' presence, and one that is not entirely residual. To suggest that ideas of 'Celticness' are to the forefront in the cultural identities currently being negotiated and rehearsed in the modern Welsh-language music scene seems, through the eyes of the participants I have been involved with, to be not only romantic and nostalgic, but misleading.
 

This Paper was Originally an Address to Celtic Cultures: An Interdiscipinary Conference, University of Leeds, 1 May 1999

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Copyright © Meic Llewellyn, 1999
This edition copyright © Celtic Cultural Studies, 1999
ISSN 1468-6074