Tahiti
pp. 56-58 · Read in the full issue
Letter
From James Boyack
JEAN-CHARLES TROALEN walked into one of the dance joints in downtown Papeete last month. It may have been that his shaven head glowed in the black lighted dark like a New York City subway globe, but suddenly the music being played was Tahitian. There would be no foreign music for his ears. No French tunes, no American tunes. L’Affaire SACEM was taking yet another turn, even though a February Superior Court of Appeals decision here seemed to have sounded a death knell for the whole sticky business.
Troalen is the local representative of the French Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers of Music (SACEM). His job is to collect royalties from businesses which play music from the SACEM repertory (most Tahitian music is not included). The composers’ outfit has worked patiently for 10 years to establish its right to such payment. When last month’s decision upheld the October conviction of three nightclub owners accused of refusing to pay, it appeared that SACEM had established its first incontestable foothold in the territory since initial efforts to collect were made in 1962.
The SACEM Affair has consisted of dozens of letters, many complex negotiations, broken promises and French Government efforts to mediate from local to ministerial levels. Most of all it has been characterised by remark ably persistent local outcry against SACEM from every level of society. Those taxed have been no louder in their denunciations than every notable politician and local newspaper.
A history of the Affair, by itself, is not that interest ing. The fact is, however, that Tahiti has taken up arms against a group acting generously well within the bounds of the law. Why has the local citizenry been so con sistently outraged by SACEM? Why is a music tax so anathema here as to allow honest men to flaunt the law with confidence?
In spite of the miasma of charges and counter-charges thickly strewn in the Affair’s wake, two things are ob vious. SACEM demands are legally irreproachable and Tahiti has solid if sometimes mystical reasons for ignor ing them.
The reasons, as 1 see them, are cultural, creating a moral structure independent of international precedent,
and locally historical, emphasising political and economic habits that only could have achieved an operative place in a society, like Tahiti’s, which is insulated from the vulgar dynamics of the rest of the world.
That sounds like bull, and I ain’t no scholar, so bear with me as I try to point out some of the things that make Tahiti different (and delicious).
CULTURAL morality. Music is sacred in Tahiti. It’s everywhere, every day. Life here is a Tahitian waltz.
Music is as automatic as the sun, or blood. Almost every Tahitian owns a guitar or a ukelele. You cannot walk 200 yards on this island at night without hearing people singing. A party at its best is when there are enough guitars and cases of Hinano beer to go around, I finally got to sleep one night at 11 o’clock. Such a party was going on next door. The voices were strong, as if am plified from the middle of the earth. I woke up well after dawn. The voices were weaker, slower, but those people next door were still singing, eight hours later.
After numerous conferences with the Hotel and Night club Association (the organisation fighting SACEM taxation here), the local administration in 1967 produced a document to enlighten the Paris-based composer’s union. One paragraph said, “Music and dance are a kind of natural element in Tahiti and the very idea of a tax on music, for this reason, is a shocking anomaly. . . .
It is the general belief here that there can be no pro perty rights on a song. A musical air is a little bit like plain and simple air, like the wind, like the water in the lagoon which belongs to no one. An author should be flattered that the song he has composed is being sung elsewhere, but that he should desire to make money from his song is just as surprising as the idea that a woman might contemplate commercialising her charms.
There is no place for such European concepts in Tahiti.”
A music tax in Tahiti? Obviously ridiculous.
Then how did SACEM get its foot in the door in the first place? This is where we have to step back a few years. There are several critical dates and a way of political and economic life here over the last 10 years which must be understood.
SACEM was set up in France in 1850 and its struc ture was renovated by a law instituted on March 11, 1957. This law gave it the indisputable right to collect royalties anywhere in the French Republic and therefore in Tahiti.
The first jet plane landed here in late 1961. A few months later the SACEM tax collector made his first appearance. He didn’t know there was a Territorial Assembly election in October, 1963. Nor was he aware that the island’s small size and huge interest in politics made it possible for every event, no matter how insig nificant, to burst into a matter of burning political con cern. When the hotels and nightclubs shouted down his call for royalties in 1962, the then Governor Aime Grimald kindly requested that he come back when the situation had cooled off.
SACEM was held at bay by the governor’s concern for stability until February, 1964, when its representative began negotiations in earnest with local music users.
SACEM efforts coincided with the start of French in stallation here of the Pacific Experiments Centre (CEP).
It can be assumed that SACEM’s requirements were insignificant and potentially annoying to a French administration whose overriding concern was to set up nuclear test sites. Ironically, then, it was the arrival of the CEP and subsequent influx of men and money which prompted the then optimistic local hotelmen’s group to sign its first binding contract with SACEM on December 9, 1964. All the same, it took the governor and a specially flown-in Cultural Affairs Ministry represen tative to mediate the 1964 accords. fTK)DAY, the CEP has begun its gradual pullout from A Tahiti. SACEM’s rake off, if it appeared finally acceptable in 1964, is now an unmentionable burden to local businessmen. Their current logic, which reflects the thinking of the French administration itself, is that tourism must be encouraged as part of the overall pro cess of recycling Tahiti’s economy. This process began formally in June, 1966 with the adoption of the first Investment Code to attract foreign capital. It was to wards the end of 1966 that Hotels Tahiti and Taaone, the largest on the island, demanded a lowering of SACEM rates. Their reasoning then, which is doubly valid today, was that Tahiti’s artificial military economy had already been recognised and acted upon by Paris and territorial authorities; that tourism as a future resource had to be encouraged in every possible way and that SACEM was therefore obliged to lower its requirements here.
Once again the local administration was called in to Tcfrcw 1967. Local hotelmen began a partial boycott of SACEM to show their determination. After complex renegotiations, both the French authors’ group and the vS?; m S hts P°t federation accepted amendments to the i 9- Thls was in December, 1968, and the SACEM Affair appeared shelved. No such luck.
When in April, 1969, SACEM refused to write off unpaid dues between March and December, 1968, many members of the hotel federation refused to sign new contracts based on the amended agreement. Charles Poroi, federation president, then demanded further modi fications of the 1964 accords. This request was cate gorically denied by SACEM in July, 1969 * par , ked a total federation boycott of SACEM. The hotelmen reasoned that SACEM alone refused to take into full account the evident peculiarities of French Polynesia. In which case, to hell with SACEM.
And here is the first sign of honest men habituated to a certain type of political and economic give and take
I>ACK into history. There is a sensational precedent "for local businessmen keeping unwanted fingers out of their cash registers. There is no income tax in Tahiti.
Twice the Territorial Assembly has passed income tax laws and twice local merchants have pressured the administration into smothering them.
The tactics were the same in each case. Find a thousand bored people, hand rocks to some of them and then march them past the governor’s office to the assembly building. There, the gendarmes will hold back the “angry” mob which settles for breaking a few assembly windows. An “emergency” is declared and the reason for it, the tax law, is suppressed to maintain public order. This ritual drama occurred in 1958 and 1968, if my memory serves me, and speaks encyclo paedias about local politics.
The federation’s refusal to pay another franc to SACEM started an all-out war. The final battle took place in court last month, to the federation’s dismay.
Prior skirmishes occurred primarily in the local press.
Drafted into service on the side of local opinion were, among others, French National Assembly Deputy Francis Sanford and French Senator Alfred Poroi, two men who rarely share a common political view. Both men pub lished letters in the newspapers calling for the end of SACEM’s role in Tahiti. SACEM’s eloquent rebuttal, also published, had little effect on public opinion. These polemical exchanges took place in the final months of 1969.
The general attitude in Tahiti, then as now, was, ‘Who are these Frenchmen who think they can make us pay for music?’ The subtleties of artistic and intellectual property completely eluded the Tahitian in the street.
While there was not a single dissenting public local voice, the hotelmen were gradually awakening to the fact they were fighting someone who was not a member of the Tahitian “family”, and who therefore did not understand the traditional rules of the game. The federation maintained its tough public stance while privately wondering how much, and when, they would have to pay. SACEM was not to be bullied or run around anymore.
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which for one of the few times in their experience, would not give one inch more. “A stalemate,” they declared, “we won’t budge either.”
SACEM had already decided to go to court when the hotel federation, in February, 1970, asked Governor Pierre Angeli to intervene on its behalf while m Paris.
It noted that Tahiti was competing with other Pacific destinations for tourist dollars. It requested that the governor use his good offices to obtain for Tahiti the ASCAP tariff of between 0.25 and 0.50 per cent, prac tised in Hawaii.
SACEM had faced a total boycott since the beginning of 1969. Some royalties from ’67 and ’6B had not been paid It therefore obtained affidavits in August, 1969 and February, 1970 to prove that SACEM material was being exploited illegally in many nightspots.
When the threat of court action did not budge the federation, legal proceedings were initiated in April of last year. A June court date was postponed until Sep tember 21.
Enter a last ditch effort by one branch of the family to save its relatives and to preserve the traditional way of conducting business here. The Territorial Assembly on September 14 abrogated the local application of the French law which allowed SACEM to operate.
The court decided last October that SACEM was perfectly justified in collecting royalties in Tahiti. It ruled that the assembly had overstepped its prerogatives by outlawing SACEM. Three nightclubs were fined and ordered to pay all back dues for the years ’69 and ’7O.
The court deemed acceptable a 2.5 per cent. SACEM levy and accordingly set damages ranging from 139,000 CFP to 267,000 CFP for those singled out in this precedent-setting example of SACEM’s power.
CLAUDE GIRARD, the dynamic, young Papeete lawyer for the defence, was able to establish several technical errors in the original judgment during the appeals session in January. His arguments, as he privately admitted, were not aimed at the legal, indis putable principles of SACEM action here. Rather he set out to minimise payments imposed, and he suc ceeded. The cabaret destined to pay 267,000 CFP, after the appeal, only had to cough up 30,000, and so it was for the other defendants. Girard established that a single constat did not prove that the same crime had been committed before or after the fact.
The assembly, meanwhile, had bowed to the court opinion that it could not rescind SACEM’s prerogatives here. Instead, invoking its right to regulate interior com merce, the assembly set 0.001 per cent, (one m 1,000) as a ceiling for SACEM taxation. This was at the end of December. The governor has yet to sign the decision into law. He has 90 days from assembly passage to do so.
Which brings us almost to the conclusion of “L’Affaire SACEM”. Will SACEM enforcer Jean-Charles Troalen only hear exempt Tahitian music when he goes out on the town? Will the governor inhibit SACEM action so as to make it unprofitable for the group to remain here? Is the SACEM Affair really over? I dare say not.