Did he just say “Making fuck”?
You should listen to KEXP. Their world music program (“Wo Pop,” Tuesdays at 6pm Pacific time) regularly features artists from Belgium, Cambodia, France, Russia, Chile, and others. Heck, just to be inclusive, they recently got some penguin rap from Antarctica. 
Seriously, they play everything. A few months ago I heard a piece by a Serbian artist that sounded like rock-n-roll as interpreted by an Eastern-Bloc military brass ensemble.
KEXP broadcasts over the web. Seriously, check it out.
Remember that “world music” is just a marketing ploy.
As jovan said, lumping everything that isn’t “American” into one glump is stupid excepting that it is just to sell it better to people who want to expand their horizons and do not even know where to begin. People pretty ignorant … like me. Hell, we gotta start somewhere. And they are gonna give us what we are gonna want to buy more of, since these really are sort of sampler packs. Russian folk and Israeli disco just aint gonna get a lot of repeat business from this crowd.
And Africa does a wide variety of exciting extant musical trraditions afterall. And Afropop Worldwide did a two-parter on Arab music just recently. NPR also does The Shamrock and Thistle, has bits on French music of various traditions, and so on. Most of the rest of Europe we’ve heard before. Australia is mostly rehashed British stuff and a few aboriginal bits that wouldn’t sell well to American ears (I have a two CDs of them myself) Most modern Asian pop is very Westernized and the traditional Asian stuff wears thin on most American ears fairly quickly.
Very tacky, the ones I see.
But even today in the news etc, the Arab girls’ hair and make-up is so 1980s. Really plastered on thick. It’s like they saw Melanie Griffith in Working Girl and somehow never moved on…
But those hindi pop videos - arrrghh!! How goddamn awful is that music? I also don’t get why the majority of hindi films still go for the Grease effect.
I do not hesitate to point out that the Gulf has a peculiar mix of Lebs & Gulfies that rather skews one’s sample. Go to North Africa and you see another deal entirely.
As for the Leb girl look, my dear old and oft refered to Leb comrade from Cairo liked to say Bierut girls like to dress like $2 sharmoutas.
Hey, they like it. Different tradition. Why does every third American film go for the Speed effect…
World Music Thread
Well, insofar as Europe is the heartland of the mainstream, I can see why giving what is essentially passé Euro folk music a pass would make sense of a World Music program.
Asia… Well what can one say, I recall having Asian folk music characterized to me by an otherwise connoisseur of South East Asia, fluent Thia, Vietnamese and Loatian speaker as “The sound of cats being banged together.” Which is to say that, and this is correct having heard his collection, the musical styles are a somewhat hard to acquire taste for the average Westerner. Oceana, no doubt the issue is too small a market to jump start. Although check out Ziskakan.
Middle East: which Middle East? North Africa? Ah, there you have some oomph. Rai and its cousins have power. The Machreq? Eh, dominated by what I lovingly call Egypto-Pop. Egypt is the single largest music market in the region and Egyptians have something like the American disease when it comes to their music, if it’s not their dialect and it’s not the sound their comfortable with – the Cairo Syntho Crap Sound – they tend not to listen to it. Unfortunately this freezes out a lot of much better talent in favor of pure shit. E.g. Nubian and Sudanese talent, which really does some cool stuff fusing Latin with Arabo-African beats, either on the traditional Arab scales or on African ones. Lebanese Pop (Leb-Pop in my lexicon) is better quality than Egypto-Pop but frankly not that interesting. Nice enough, but really just Arabic Euro pop in large part. Pity they can do some really dope shit with the flute, drums and similar instruments that really rocks. But the synthesizer has undercut that. Now the really strange thing is the Gulfies have some pretty dope rhythms – one would never suspect such but it’s true, and can sing their little hearts out when they unwind. Can’t give names here since I don’t really follow it closely.
Now those videos you see, I lay 100 to 1 odds they’re the typical Egypto-Pop trash foisted off on the rest of the Arab world by Egyptian ego centrism.
Finally, Brutus, my dear moron, there isn’t that much money in the region. I as I noted in a recent GD thread, Portugal is richer than Saudi Arabia on a per capita basis, and pretty damn close on a gross basis. This stupid stereotype of Arab wealth reflects a short little decade, the 1970s, when one small part of the Arab world had dough rolling in like nobodies business. That’s been over for a long time now.
To be fair, it’s no suckier than any other disco. And Israeli rock, folk-rock and “smart” pop kicks ass, although you have to speak the language - Israeli music is very lyrically-oriented.
Collounsbury: What happened to the welfare states (Qatar, maybe?) that apparently subsidized large portions of their populations with OPEC money? I’m not really sure which states I’m talking about, of course, but one of the smaller ones I recall having been a feature in a National Geographic of recent vintage.
(If I’m jabbering without any hint of a clue be sure to tell me.)
Back onto the topic (and my, what a light and mild Pit thread this is), I think world music would do well to incorporate North American traditional music. I’ve been to powwows in Montana and I’ve enjoyed the traditional songs and rhythms, and I’d be interested in hearing music from different regions of the continent.
As to why African and South American music is so over-represented, I think we could also look to immigration history: The major European and Asian immigrations happened well before anyone was interested in selling `ethnic’ music, and the first major African immigration was due to slavery, leading to the influential, largley ignored genres of blues, spirituals, and jazz. Newer African immigrants and South American/Cuban immigrants are more interested in preserving their own heritage and selling it to others, given our recent move towards cultural pluralism.
The Gulf states all run, to varying degrees, welfare states based off of oil revenues (nota bene, not all the Gulf are OPEC members). That does not mean they are rich. Qatar is, something like $20k per capita income – see the GD, seach on me and Qatar to pull up my summary of the data. Qatar is somewhat unique insofar as it has invested in huge natural gas projects that will shortly become more important than their petrol production.
Again, one has to track the progression of real income. Also see my thread on Iraq Reconstruction. Yes, there are fairly important capital flows to the region, but when one puts them in context (not just going for the BIG NUMBERS syndrom) one sees that even weaner economies in Europe are stronger than the Gulf economies. The stereotype of vast wealth is wrong. However, of course, massive mal-distribution does mean there is a small elite with disgusting amounts of money, but that really is true of even the poorest shit holes.
Now, now.
I don’t believe that African immigrants play any role in the interest in African music, in substantial terms. Rather, the historical influence of Latin and African music on the global music scenes and the degree to which they both fed into Rock etc. make them more accessible to the average listener than other “exotica” - ex. of course Euro Folk, but that is likely too close to the plain vanilla, that is not really exotic enough.
Somewhat unique? Surely it’s unique or it isn’t?
Oh bother.
[nitpick]
**DSeid, ** it’s the “Thistle and Shamrock,” not the other way around.
That said, there sure is an insane degree of emphasis on African and Latin music on NPR (not that I personally mind most of the time, and prepare for more of it, because I just saw Celia Cruz’s obit in the paper yesterday. **bayonet1976, ** what’s the reaction been in your neck of the woods?)
Why? Well, I think a lot of it is more accesible to American ears, what with the African influence on blues and on rock through blues and on gospel, not to mention the African influence on Latin music. I think if I won the lottery, I’d becme an amateur ethnomusicologist and do LOTS of fieldwork. Afropop Worldwide des a good job of showcasing the ties among African-influenced music styles.
But I do wish NPR would branch out a bit. There’s good music to be found in Europe that comes from all sorts of folk traditions which we never hear on NPR; not all of European music is what American ears might consider “mainstream,” although occasionally a folk style will pop out of obscurity for a moment. Some of my favorites are Georgian polyphony (check out the Rustavi Choir), Bulgarian/South European choral folk stuff, (a la Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares, whom you may have heard of), and some interesting folk-influenced stuff coming out of Scandinavia. And the Russians are positively invisible on NPR music shows.
I’m sure there are parallels in other parts of the world in terms of musical genres that I know absolutely nothing about. To hear new things, I like to listen to a local college radio station (in Chicago, Loyola University’s 88.7, plus they have a GREAT Latin show on Sundays 2-6 pm, which plays stuff besides the pop trash and Mexican regional styles, which I can’t stand and which get the lion’s share of airplay on Spanish-language stations in Mexican-dominated Chicago. Yay Jesuits!)
I rarely hear “Latin” music included as “World” music. I usually hear “World” as a synonym for African (including Noth African Rai) with the occassional Roma or Subcontinental (Indian/Pakistani) thrown in.
I think African music has come a long way since the 1980’s. Maybe its not as big commercially as it could be, but it could be a viable genre of its own, especially in Europe. Maybe the “World” scene could focus more on Asia or the decidedly non “plain vanilla” music of Europe or even North America.
Well, if one city can beat out an entire Gulf state, I’d say you’re right.
(weaner == Wiener == Viennese == Of or relating to Vienna, a single city in Europe. I’m awful.)
(At least I didn’t make reference to a sausage economy.)
Wien…
You need to be beaten to death with a sausage.
General mourning, wall to wall coverage in the media of course, but even in the shops it seems to be all anyone is talking about. This of course, contrasts starkly with the reaction in Cuba, where Cruz’s death merited only a two paragraph obit in page six. Which mostly said:
Sad. For my own part, I cried like a baby when I heard, and every time I thought about it. Feeling better now.
I am so sick of salsa. I mean, I like it just as much as anyone, but for some reason it’s all anyone wants to hear in Toronto. I go out dancing (to a non-salsa place) and I wait for something that’s not salsa to come along. And sometimes I sit the entire night.
No, mixing it with something else doesn’t help. Yes, that funk-salsa mix was cool. But it’s still fucking Salsa. There are other kinds of music, y’know - even other kinds of Latin music, if that’s what you want to play.
just a pet peeve of mine.
Depends on where you live. IMHO, there is some really great music in Europe that simply doesn’t get enough airplay here in the States.
It’s not that I don’t sympathize, I do. I really enjoy dancing, but for the longest time no clubs, and I mean not one clubs would play any latin music. So I’d go out, have a great time and work up a good sweat, but the only time I’d get a chance to dance to latin music would be at the occasional wedding or private party. Then a few years ago clubs started playing some latin songs, and that was really cool. Then, they played more and more, and now, like you, my only complain is that they only play one type of latin music, usually generic puertorrican style salsa, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but some variety would be nice.
Still, I’ll take the current state of affairs over the way things used to be.
Just be thankful that the popularity of the polka-mexicano-country fusion known as Tejano Music has remained limited to a small part of this world.
Except that’s what they play in some (Mexican/Latin-American) game shows, and that’s what’s some people identify first as Latin music.
shudders