Twigs

Some types of music are never going to be exchanged over the counter in record stores. Some types of music you'll never stumble accross while browsing through Amazon, because they're not there. Some types of music no blog is ever going to link you to.

The obvious one is white power music, universally reviled and touched by no-one in mainstream society. (Well, except maybe YouTube, which has hundreds of clips. I'm not going to link to them for obvious reasons.) With white power music, we're never going to see any feedback into mainstream music - it's the very end of music in that sense. Whatever goes in is never going to come back. If music is a tree, white power music is the very end of a branch, a little twig that's never going to feed back towards the stem.

In a language magazine I read I found another twig - Esperanto pop. As a language without a country which has an ever dwindling population and no commercial presence, the likelihood of any influence seeping onto another genre from here is minimal. And yet it's a vibrant enough scene: there are record companies, dedicated websites with news, even supposedly cult classics.

In a world where everything is seemingly interconnected, these branch endings are becoming increasingly rare. Bhangra in the UK, for instance, used to be one, with separate record distribution channels and mostly desi listeners, but then it seeped across, as anything creative usually is wont to do. I guess it makes for a vastly more interesting world - certainly the Bhangra influence from Tanzania to Bulgaria is fascinating.

But there's something about the twigs that appeals to me. Maybe it's the sense of seeing my own society in a different way. Sure, I can always find some remote local music on an obscure Myspace page, Singaporean shoegazer, whatever, but here's stuff right under my nose that's seemingly equally inaccessible in "the tree". Maybe I should get around to those Kenyan Stockholm groups again...