Nomad Codes

psychotronic appropriation of native instruments and non-Western languages distinctly disrespectful. So I asked him what he meant.
    “They are being disrespectful because they are not evolving the situation. They are not rolling the dice. They are copying, just following somebody else’s rules. That’s not what you find in these situations.” Instead, Sun City Girls risk insensitivity, political incorrectness, and crappy music to evolve the situation, and their punk disdain for multicultural pieties paradoxically allows them to extend the creative logic of folk appropriation. That’s why you can’t always tell the difference between the “ethnic” tunes they make up and the “ethnic” tunes they cover, and why Alan babbles in languages he does not understand, and why their version of the insidious “Lambada” meme of the late 1980s is without a doubt the most moving you will ever hear. Call it underground world music, or underworld music, a place of creative misunderstandings and mutual fascination.
    And it is mutual. Before heading to Taungbyon to film the Nat Pwe last summer, Rick and Alan bought two eight-dollar guitars and entertained Burmese folks along the way. They improv’d plenty, but after being hounded for weeks, they finally broke down and learned to perform their most requested tune: “Hotel California.” They knew that when it comes to the desires that inflame human music, you just can’t kill the beast.

    This matter of Orientalist appropriation is further complicated by the fact that the Bishop boys have the Orient within, coded into their DNA and the tenderest layers of their memory banks. Their grandfather was a Druze named Jamil Salman, and he left Lebanon as a kid to tap rubber in the Brazilian Amazon. After saving enough money, he returned to the Levant and brought his family to the States, where the boys’ mother was born. Alan and Rick grew up in Michigan, which has one of the largest concentrations of Arabs in America, and Lebanese friends and family would often gather at Salman’s house on the weekends to party. The boys remember slick small-time businessmen in funny suits hanging out in their grandfather’s tapestry-lined basement, sucking on hookahs, consuming sweetmeats and coffee, and playing music into the night—pop songs and long instrumental jams. Salman was a master oud player, and also took turns on shroud fiddle, dumbek, and various double-reeded horns.
    When Rick started playing guitar, he acted as any red-blooded Midwestern boy should and worshipped Jimmy Page, Richie Blackmore, and the almighty Nuge. But at a certain point he stopped aping and started just fucking around. An early cassette of solo acoustic stuff drips with metal, but there’s no order or obvious structure to the riffs, and weird Middle Eastern melodies keep wafting through. “That’s just from growing up with that stuff,” he says. But even though these sounds bubbled up from his ethnic matrix, Rick still appreciates them as a mode of imaginal transport rather than personal identity.“Middle Eastern music is not caged in by having to have the guitar here, the drums there, the voice over there. Regardless of what notes you’re playing, it’s the overall feel of the music, the atmosphere, that’s important. It puts you in, for lack of a better term, an exotic place.”
    For the Bishop brothers, the exotic is a kind of birthright, a point at once of origin and the obliteration of the ordinary self. Their grandfather’s home dripped with mystery as well as music, an old world atmosphere of creepy wonder that helped spark the brothers’ later fascination with the nether regions of spirit and the sacred forces that surround sex, death, and the utterly deranged. Salman was also a Freemason, and encouraged his grandsons to join a junior Mason’s club called the Order of DeMolay. The elders would bring the boys into the temple, sit them down between pillars on a black-and-white checkerboard floor, and whisper things in their ears. “We didn’t know what was going on,” says Rick. “It wasn’t until later that we found out who Jacques de Molay was, that he was head of the Knights Templar and burned at the stake for heresy. We went: Yah! We have a history again!”
    For Rick, that toy initiation blossomed into a lifelong love affair with the occult. The Orientalist vibe of Masonry led him into Egyptology, and from there he moved into Crowley, sexual ritual, Haitian voodoo, tantra. “I