Another Hungary Holiday - Hip-Hop?

I still don't understand why Hungarian music is so shit. In an attempt to rectify this fact I'll spend some time during my annual holiday in Budapest trying desperately to find anything that appeals to me, with very little hope in my heart. I want to belong to a people that actually make good music, but I think I'm resigned to supporting the Swedes.

This year, I thought I'd at least try to find some appealing local hip-hop. Now, if this were Poland I could happily find all sorts of material to my liking, and most other neighbouring countries are fine. But just like with locally flavoured pop, Hungarian hip-hop is particularly, almost studiously awful. The actual rapping, for the most part, is actually fairly good, but the production is intetionally ghastly - ridiculous sub-underground boom-bap, badly sampling shit soul tracks in a throwback to Europe ten years ago or (very, very charitably) the US twenty years ago.

Take this event, which I might attend 'cause it's cheap (click image for info):


These are some of the top local artists, it seems. All of them have recorded music videos. And all of them are bloody, bloody, awful. Presenting, with their most popular videos off YouTube: Hősök, NKS, Bankos, Norba, Punnany Massif, Akkezdet Phiai (best of a bad lot, though more because it's quirky than with a good beat) and Funktasztikus. Punnany Massif (whose name is both the worst and the most promising on here) even have a track which manages to actually make 3+3+2 sound insipid and over-serious! Apparently this kind of "jungle rap" (which bears seemingly only a fleeting resemblence to actual jungle) has some sort of presence in Hungary, though I'm not particularly hopeful because the manic energy which makes actual jungle interesting is totally absent.

I'm going to have to go beyond the surface to find anything decent, it seems. I've been hunting around for anything to my tastes on Youtube, and this guy comes closest to qualifying so far:



Not only is the name of the artist excellent, he seems to have actually got essential things like bass and rhythm down. And he does electro house remixes. Always a good sign.

As usual I'll have plenty more to say on the subject end of next week when I'm back.

The Greatness of Misrepresentation?

Bloggers have power. Hell, anyone who is read anywhere has power, especially if read by the bourgeois public. It'd be foolish not to consider the ethical implications of this power, and I hope I've done so quite often in this blog. About my own power, and that of other media.

A woman in my ethnology class last week really lashed out at the magazine Gringo. Gringo is run by people from a fairly diverse selection of ethnic groups and can be described as basically an immigrant equivalent of a gay pride magazine, brashly and colourfully presenting "suburban culture" with quite a lot of pow and tongue firmly in cheek. My classmate's objection was that they turned a blind eye to reality in the suburbs, which is often hard and poverty-stricken. A more balanced coverage where both the negative and positive side was represented would have been better, she thought, in order to give a fair picture of how things really were.

But I'm wondering how fair this is. Is it desirable when describing culture to be as accurate as possible, or should we default to just showing off the good sides?


I blog a lot about music. Within any particular genre, I usually go ahead and pick out the music that appeals to me the most, that I deem has a good quality. I probably do this less than most posters, because I end up posting stuff like this and because I have no taste, but nevertheless I strive towards posting music that's enjoyable. Is this wrong?

The answer is probably "partly".

If I was a classical music blogger, the question wouldn't even be raised. No-one would go around demanding I give an "accurate" picture of mediocre composers and amateur ensembles, they'd want me to go for the very best all the time. Actually, this comparison is not strictly accurate because there are some interesting music historians (in the field of "style history") who definitely are more interested in average works than greats, but if I was presenting the material outward, selling it as it were, no-one would expect me to bring up the mediocre or the awful.

However, there are a couple of differences here that are worth considering. To begin with, there's the whole imperialist taste-imposition angle. Taste is determined within the context of its production, the whole idea of "the scene" being one in which a group of people act as mutual referees as to which of their music is good. So who are we outsiders to go around selecting music according to our taste? Bloggers have the power of access to the public, so perhaps we should let our taste take a back seat lest we destroy the creativity of the scenes by asking them to conform to our needs? Perhaps. But I guess even going by someone else's idea of quality we're still basically stuck with a reformation of the same problem.

Secondly, ignoring what you feel is mediocre might in fact be oversimplification and the denial of diversity and interesting complexity. My classmate who talked about Gringo came up with an example of a little girl in one suburb who was an excellent violinist, one of the best at her age in the country, but who the magazine refused to cover. There's a danger that thinking about quality along one axis (a "ghetto culture" one, in Gringo's case) causes a creeping essentialism, where one ethnic group (or a whole social category like immigrants) is always associated with one style of cultural expression.

Still, I can't help thinking that we need both. Both stories about the bad and about the good, both pep-pieces and complete analyses. Or perhaps, rather, all possible angles from a diversity of sources. One blogger or one magazine can't possibly cover every story, so why not let them just focus on one thing as long as there is diversity in coverage overall? The general news media's reporting from the suburbs is relentlessly negativistic and bleak, confirming (as the media is wont to do) a negative stereotype. Gringo was partly founded on the idea of providing a positive counter-picture.

In general, the idea that one newspaper or one blog needs to cover all sides and aspects seems a bit old-fashioned in a world where my blog aggregator has something like 309 feeds, all with their own perspective. It does become more of an issue, though, when everyone or almost everyone veers the same way, creating a general monolithic discourse. Maybe someone needs to start a blog of fair-to-middling album tracks and flop singles they don't really like?

Is great art automatically less racist?

Just a quick reflection.

Read in the newspaper the other day about the CinemAfrica festival here in Stockholm, where a spokesperson claimed they only showed films by African film-makers to get a "proper inside perspective". Then I watched a film that was clearly done from an outsider's perspective: Colors, Dennis Hopper's film about gang violence in Los Angeles. It wasn't very good. The characters were a bit simplistic (helped a bit by Sean Penn and Robert Duvall in leading roles as two partner cops), the plot thin and disjointed, and the portrayal of street gangs as far as I can tell inaccurate and simplified. I quit watching 2/3 through the film.

Jeff Chang claims most gang films, like The Warriors, Assault on Precinct 13 and Fort Apache, The Bronx, are fundamentally racist. I'm fairly sure he'd attack Colors as well - it's got a similar set up of one-dimensional gangsters, most black and Latino, attacking the protagonists, who are somewhat more fleshed out.

But I was thinking, what about The Wire? Everyone likes The Wire, which is (at least in part) a "gang tv series", and no-one claims it's racist. Sure, you say, in that all the gang members are complex, living and totally not dehumanised. And that's probably the difference. But isn't that quite simply a sign of good art? Could it be that high-quality art is, by virtue of its aesthetic qualities, somehow less racist?


I'm not really up on my classical aesthetics, but there's plenty of angles on The Wire that you can claim makes it a great piece of art. It's complex. It's subtle and refined. It brings out universal themes. It's got a deep humanist heart. Etc. etc. By contrast Colors is not very good art at all. Since by its form it's totally simplistic and one-dimensional, it's no surprise that the black characters are depicted as one-dimensional and defined by their ethnicity, making the film racist. Bad art is way easier to make racist than good art.

I'm sure there's plenty of examples of this kind of think in music, too, stuff that's actually just bad and insensitive and that becomes racist through just not being good art. But the only one I can think of straight off the bat is "Fattig Man Söker Efter Mat" by wonderful kooky eccentric Hans Edler, whose depiction of third-world life is fucking ridiculous, fucking simplistic, bad art, and quite a bit racist no matter how well-intentioned. Unfortunately I've not been able to track down a copy to post a link, but it's in Swedish anyway.

Anyone got any other ones? Or tracks rescued by being very good art indeed?

Shamesongs

Anyone who knows me well will tell you that one of my biggest personal weaknesses is my tendency to be ashamed too often. I can march out in a rut if I'm embarrassed over the slightest thing. It's, er, embarrassing really.

Nevertheless I'd say this makes me a bit of an expert on embarrassment. By my standards the type of material that's ended up in this meme-feature (which I've nicked from, who caught it via, who took it from the source; since Dial M didn't "tag it along" I'm stealing it unbidden) is pathetic. Ridiculous. Practically none of it is shameful, properly shameful.

Let me guide you into the world of real shame. And present my list of guilty listening pleasures.

Every single one of us, except I guess psychopaths and some low-level autists, follow codes. More or less conscious systems of how we understand the world, act and present ourselves to others – moral codes, political ideologies, manners, aesthetic systems of taste. Most of us, I hope, try to keep these codes as logically consistent as we can, and consider it a bit hypocritical if we go about breaking them. We deride the social democratic politician who drives fancy cars. We deride the hell-fire preacher who sleeps with church aides.

That hypocrisy is the sole centre of shame. Because as long as what you do is defensible by your own standards, you've got nothing to be ashamed about. It's only once you start "sinning" (I put it in quotation marks, but to a Christian it really is sinning) against them that you're really doing something embarrassing. So I get embarrassed when, say, I have to be pushy. Or if I get caught breaking a rule. Or something like that.

Songs to be ashamed of are thus indefensible songs. Songs that you like despite the fact that they run against all your principles of what's good and bad music. They're not songs you used to like, but don't any more – as evangelical Christians will tell you, a dirty past is merely a good thing. They're not songs you downloaded for "study purposes" or some friend sent you. They're not songs everyone else thinks are embarrassing but that you justifiability like.

My five embarrassing tunes would go something like this:

The Beatles – Helter Skelter: I've repeatedly and strongly stated my dislike of the White Album and of all music that acts as an ironic pastiche of something else. Here the fab four (on what's actually the oldest MP3 on my hard drive, from 2000) take the mickey out of the harder rock that starts appearing around then, and they do it in a strung-out hippie manner that I find abhorrent. Yet the track is actually really good to my ears, that seem not to care about content as much as my stomach usually does.

Am Adolf Hitler Platz: Sent to me by some idiot once, but it doesn't matter. I defend abhorrent lyrics in songs I like by appealing to the right of expression of oppressed groups, or to veracity in reporting about far-off places, or to allowing people the right to develop without our interference. None of these apply here. This is just total nasty Nazi shit. Catchy though!

Talvin Singh – Butterfly: What's not wrong with this one? First, it's worldbeat, fu-u-u-using fucking annoying Quawwali, okinawan music, sitars and intelligent drum and bass, which is another pet hate of mine. It's got new age synth pads! Indie people love it! It also happens to be particularly energetic and imaginative, but I simply can't defend loving this one.

Blur – Song 2: Okay, now I'll descend into vitriol for a while. I hate cackling YBAish devil-may-care hipster band Blur. I hate smug obfuscationist Damon Albarn and his Malian cohorts. I hate simply everything about the album Parklife. I also bear a slight dislike of overplayed songs that everyone can sing along to. This is good though, and as someone on the comments thread says: Reminds me of Fifa 98. Which I guess is an embarassing reason for liking a song, too.

Cold Blood – Kissing My Love: Hippies. Tasteful jazz-funk. Screaming white women pretending to be black. I'm totally, utterly, wordlessly embarassed by this one, all the more so for the fact that I just don't like this track, I love it endlessly and sing and dance along as I'm typing this. Dang-EEH-EEH-dang dang!

I tried to find entries I liked from Radiohead, Frank Zappa, Massive Attack, 3 Feet High and Rising-era De La Soul and Sly and the Family Stone, but gave up coz all of their music is S-H-I-T-E. I've also really tried disliking Beans from Antipop Conspiracy, The Grateful Dead and Eric B & Rakim, but it turns out I'm not actually embarassed by them at all.

I now "tag this along" to everyone in the world ever, 'cause I don't like clubs.

Those Mysterious Magyars + Blog Break

I'm mystified by one of my own peoples, the Hungarians. Why does their music suck so bad?

I mean, the country is surrounded by more-or-less interesting local pop genres. The Romanians of course have the awesome manele. The Serbians and Croatians have turbofolk, which is also interesting. The Bulgarians have chalga. The Poles at least used to have disco polo, though it's dying down a bit now, and currently have one of the most distinctive hip-hop scenes in Europe. Even German schlagerfox is okay.

But Hungary? What's up with my beloved Hungary?

Hungarian music is just generally god-awfully produced and god knows why. I'll spare you the straight-out-of-the-textbook pop and the frankly embarrassing hip-hop and go straight for the more working-class genres.

A typical Hungarian "folklore" pop song creation seems to be something like this: Take a popular song from before the rock era, tack on a really predictable house beat out of the demo bank of your keyboard, record a comedy video, and presto, a hit! Fekete Pákós hit from my previous post is fairly typical too; it's all like something straight out of The Manual. I don't mind this kind of simple superimposition of one type of music onto another, it is usually an important step in the development of coherent styles, but a little bit of imaginativeness wouldn't hurt. Or at least trying something a bit contemporary, like Alexander Marcus is doing in Germany.

You'd think the roma, Hungary's biggest minority group would be able to add something interesting with their massive musical heritage. Except it's possibly even more keyboardy and ill-produced. This video actually got a bit of blog attention recently (god knows how he got hold of it) and it's fairly typical of the Hungarian gypsy style - it all sounds like it's coming out of a cover band at a third-rate restaurant. The faster material is okay, I guess, but still doesn't hold a candle to its balkanic counterpart.

It's all a bit perverse because Hungary had one of the strongest pop scenes in Eastern Europe before the fall of the Iron Curtain. Especially in the eighties they had some damned brilliant material, from some totally modern-sounding eurodancepop to characteristic synth tracks. Depeche Mode used to be the biggest foreign act in Hungary for ages. You'd never guess that today.


I'm off to Hungary myself for a two-week holiday with no internet access starting on Tuesday, so any posts will be sporadic from internet cafés if at all. During my stay I honestly intend to delve deeper into Hungarian music to see if I can find anything recent of value, and barring that a pile of good-quality eighties vinyl. I'm hopeful for both and will post the results on my return.