Genre of the Week: Khmer Rap

For once I'm going to pose questions about a genre in one of these. Because even though I usually research stuff fairly thoroughly, on this occasion I think I might have been fooled.

I was convinced after watching a whole lot of Cambodian hip-hop videos from all sorts of sources that something seriously cool was going on there. Could this be the first "real" (well-integrated) Asian hip-hop scene? (Someone shout out if you know of another!)



So after looking at a dozen or so videos I plonked it down as an "integrated style" in my last post. But then I put in an "increasingly" as a caveat, because a quick google definitely rang some alarm bells. First there was this article, which (in hindsight) probably describes the beginning of the scene. What worried me there was the diasporadic status of the main rapper, the small numbers of records sold, and especially the mention of "trendy" young people, "inspirational" music and the fact that it's even mentioned in AsianWeek. Then it was the fact that most of the best videos I'd seen on Youtube were by a producer named Cream who is very articulate and uses the web fully, appearing on MySpace etc.

So, was I fooled? Is this a "cosmopoiltan" music by a small upper-middle-class elite? Well, maybe. But is there even such a thing as an upper-middle-class elite in Cambodia, one of the 40 poorest countries in the world? (Pakistan, which is "poorer", definately has one.) I googled on, and maybe my "increasingly" label is indeed accurate. Blog posts like this, or these, or even a throwaway mention like this does suggest that there's more to it going on than just a few rich dudes playing around. Then I came across this article and I started feeling a whole lot better about the genre...

With a bit of source criticism, a whole lot more listening (mostly trying to avoid more cream391 videos) and a whole bunch of mentions, I can fairly safely say the following, at least:

1. Khmer hip-hop is a very creative genre which differs significantly enough from the original American stuff to be very interesting indeed, with a great range of sample sources (love the old Khmer pop samples from the sixties) and some good-quality songwriting and vocals. New material is released on a constant basis.

2. The rap scene is fairly large in Cambodia, though not as big as the by-now-traditional pop scene. There are numerous bands and it's fairly well-distributed. Different competing artists spur each other on and it's caught on with at least some subsections of the youth, especially in the capital.



But obviously I want to know more, stuff that google can't give me. What's the actual popularity of hip-hop in Cambodia? How big is it in the regions? What social groups are buying it, making it, distributing it? Is there an "oppositional resistance" (thanks Wayne) baked into the music or is it seen as fairly "safe" pop even by the elders? I'd love for someone who knows the scene to give me some info on it, because I really do like this stuff.

Who Put the 'Hip' in Global Hip-Hop?

Sorry if I drift into ethnomusicologist territory, but it's fascinating I think how music is percieved so differently by different individuals, groups, societies. This perception will impact the role of the music in the society and ultimately the sound of the music itself (which of course steers the perception et reductio ad absurdum).

This applies not least to hip-hop, which is global enough to spin off into all sorts of directions. Communities of musicians in different places will each have a different "hip-hop" as theirs. How exactly this divergence happens is very curious and occasionally seems totally arbitrary - the music can have one position in one country and be something else entirely in its neighbour.

Here are four of these possiblities, roughly in order of how well-integrated they are in the local musical culture and coincedentally in vague downwards order of social class. I'm not sure if the two are related.


Firstly, hip-hop can be reduced to a series of purely musical attributes to be strongly integrated into pop music. Japanese hip-hop, for instance, tends to be just as manufactured, fractured and wonderfully strange as the rest of that country's music - "hip-hop" becomes another dialect of the broadest pop music and is not treated as any kind of cultural separate. As a consequence it tends to be a tad superficial, and it's hardly a coincidence that the only area where Japan can fully compete in the urban stakes is street clothing.

A similar attitude can be found in other countries with strong domestic pop traditions like Thailand, but also to a surprising extent in Kenya where it is very much part of a broad pop vocabulary. I guess the vaguely hip-hop oriented local urban styles like kwaito in South Africa could also qualify in this category, but they're not hip-hop per se.

Another fairly superficial approach to hip-hop is to see it as a movement (as cemented circa 1989) with a rigid set of "four elements" and definite ideological rules. In Britain, for instance hip-hop tends to be a strongly middle-class affair where purists weed out any non-believers. Such an approach tends to produce very few hits, and indeed domestic hip-hop never really worked as a genre in the UK (until it was parodied).

Brazil also has a largely middle-class oriented hip-hop subculture, as did South Africa until a few years ago. Significantly, each of those countries had a strong working-class urban style at the same time, blocking a potential trickle-down of hip-hop (jungle/UK garage/grime, kwaito and funk respectively).



Most hip-hop in the world seems to fall into a third, broadly subcultural category like the Hungarian video above. Throughout Europe, for instance, hip-hop tends to be a clear community-formed subculture that tends to go beyond any social categorisation - it's just music. Here in Sweden, our best-selling rappers can unproblematically be from an affluent background or academics or hippies or owning catering companies, it is a freely accessible subculture like any other.

At the deepest level, though, hip-hop takes over near-completely as the predominant working-class (or minority) urban youth expression, where it acquires a dual role as the voice of the poor and as great music. Hip-hop has this "kwaito role" in France, in Tanzania, in Senegal and increasingly in Cambodia. Maybe all this music will eventually settle in new local styles as the Tanzanian and Cambodian examples are clearly in the process of doing, but in some areas it's been going strong since the mid-eighties.

Perhaps the fact is, though, that hip-hop is (even in the US) pretty much all of these things. It is a broad, popular style. It does have a strong history that some groups will strongly defend. It is a subculture that cuts across society. And it is a deep expression of the opressed urban youth. Perhaps it is futile to see hip-hop as any one thing in one country if it is as multifaceted and global as it actually is...

Genre of the Week: First Generation Ska Revival

This one annoys me. I guess many of you will have heard of ska. A supposed "revival" of this sound was done in the late seventies/early eighties, known as second wave ska revival. Then in the nineties there was a pop-punk-influenced third wave of ska revival. Do you spot the fucking gaping hole?

That's right, where on earth in this very common story (retold countless times) is the first wave of ska revival? A lot of people just slate over it and pretend second wave revival is in fact just "second wave ska", but the standard nomenclature suggests otherwise.

It would just be a meaningless quirk of music history if first wave ska revival didn't exist. But it does, however briefly and trivially.



In 1969, by then ailing ska legend Prince Buster released a rocksteady-tinged early reggae track called Big Five, a "slackness" (bawdy) cover of Brook Benton's Rainy Night In Georgia. It was a moderate hit among the skinheads, but Buster was unable to follow it up properly. So a previously unknown london night club bouncer named Alex Hughes stepped in and released a follow-up (Big Six) under the name Judge Dread, and had a substantially bigger hit with his version. Then he spent the rest of his surprisingly long career releasing a number of other novelty reggae tunes, including obvious re-follow-up (and substantially bigger hit) Big Seven and a cover of Je T'aime.

They all sound a lot more early reggae than ska but there was a lot of nomenclature confusion in the early seventies, and Prince Buster was (supposedly) a "ska" artist so Judge Dread got labelled one too. There are also some ska artefacts in his music, like the harmonic progression. And anyway, sounding much more early reggae than ska never hindered later ska revival artists.

Judge Dread is a crucial bridge in the seventies between the ska of the sixties and the "ska" of the eighties. These days he's occasionally lumped together with the (by then dying) skinhead reggae, and sometimes with the later second wave, but he stands all on his own as the bearer of tradition and as the first wave of ska revival.

The Conflation of Modes of Expression: A Continuing Trend for 2007

Time for my New Years' reflection.

This post stems from a conversation I had with a group of friends from my class a couple of months ago, and I've been meaning to blog it ever since. We were discussing the future of music and tried to point out trends that were coming for the future, touching on new forms of distribution and the related changes in music, on a potential for anti-music, on the rise of Japan as a musical center and a bunch of others. But one thing stood out as something we all could agree on from our vastly different backgrounds (punk/kraut, synth/goth, geekcore/metal and my, er, hip-hop/disco/reggae): we saw our genres' hardened limits of expression quickly being eroded.



At a certain point in the evolution and fragmentation of popular music, probably around the mid-seventies, strong instrument taboos appeared even outside folk and trad genres. Giorgio Moroder proudly claimed "only electronic keyboards were used on this recording" in his liner notes while heavy metal adopted a staunch, almost traditionalist anti-synthesizer stance. In commercial products the guitar's atmosphere and the keyboard's punch were mixed together, but the offending instrument was buried deep in the mix so as not to be too obvious.

As late as the 01/02 season this division into guitar-based music and computer-based music was fully intact. The trendy sounds of the moment were detroit garage rock with its distorted sweat-based creed and electroclash, detached and distant. Hip-hop was at a synthetic peak. Metal had brought out the turntables but the synths were still buried deep in the mix.

Today's situation is in complete contrast. Bands from every vaguely vital genre have seemingly abandoned all rules and are using strong, distinct, highly-mixed live instruments and equally distinct computer instruments together. The 06/07 season has seen bastion after bastion of self-contained music fall to the lure of combinatronics, and met little resistance from the fans that a half-decade ago would have spit on them.

To begin with, those good ol' trendy garage/electro sounds have completely crossed-over. A band like CSS fully merges both living guitars and robotic synths, while even a austensibly pure elctro band like Does It Offend You, Yeah can afford to add live rock'n'roll drums and put on a rocking live show. Old bands that fit the new "strong electro, strong garage" idiom, like Polysics, are suddenly becoming huge stars.

At the edges of metal, the music has turned a corner and suddenly bumped into IDM. 65 Days of Static can unproblematically use a whole bunch of glitch percussive sounds and bleeps. Every self-respecting avant-metal band uses at least a loop pedal but more likely all sorts of dirty synth sounds, like the very hip These Arms Are Snakes.

Over at the dance end, bands like The Presets, Cut Copy and Digitalism are going completely indie on us. Or just mixing little bits of guitar music in there. Last year's nu rave hype with bands like The Klaxons is obviously a flirtation the other way.

And then there's hip-hop where live instruments have been crashing in again after many years of being frowned upon. You don't even have to make them "sound like samples" à la Dr Dre, just party like a rock star and interweave guitar riffs to your heart's delight. With producers like The Runners or Montana Traxx, live instruments are turning up all over the mix and blurring indistinguishably from the synthesis.

I guess this development is a kind of fracturing, really, but the splinters are becoming so small it's all turning into a smear along the horizon from the vantage point of this quickly speeding train called music. The social divisions are still there, of course, and subcultures are in no danger of dying out, but it seems no-one is condemning any way of making music anymore. Whether that's a good or bad thing time will only tell, but this trend can only continue and deepen as we dive into 2008.

A Christmas Novelty and a Big Question

I was browisng through the 'tubes to see if I could find good christmas songs in various interesting genres. One of them was manele, at least sort of:



Now, a commenter helpfully informed me that the melody of that track is borrowed from the 1976 Bollywood classic Kabhi Kabhie:



Which is rather fun and makes sense in the Asia-obsessed world of manele. I quite understand why it was chosen, too - it's a very pretty melody, even when detached from its original context like this or when Nelly Futardo sings it.

There's definately something Indian about it too. I'm sure there are many connoiseurs of Indian music who would readily be able to analyse the melody and recognise its quality of "Indianness" even if it weren't for the fact that it's a known filmi track. In general, the melodic construction of indian popular music has, I hope, been well studied and I definately need to read up on the subject since it interests me a lot, a melody detached like this from its cultural context.

There's another side of the same issue though which interests me even more, and that's the Romanians' perception of Indianness. When Denisa and Florin Peste sit down and chose a song with Indian qualities, what is it they're actually hearing? And when they're creating a new track which they want to sound Indian, how do they construct the melody?

The concept of someone else's conception of a musical system fascinates me, and the Indian one is unusually widely spread. What do the Greeks, the Indonesians, the Tanzanians, the Guyanans see as Indian melodic structure? What do second-generation, culturally detached diasporadic immigrants in Britain and the US? What did the hippies in the 60s?

If I ever get around to doing higher-level research in this subject, that's definately a strong contender for something I'd consider studying.

Genre of the Week: Christmas Carols

I'm on christmas vacation in the north of Sweden (therefore the lack of posts this week), so what could be more appropriate than a rather older and more festive genre of popular music? I was originally going to do christmas pop songs, but the history of carols proved fascinating enough to do on their own, so I'm saving that one for next year.

So what's a christmas carol? A "carol" is a type of English secular song that has some sort of seasonal theme, starting in the middle ages but blossomming in the renaissance. They often have religious components but were not performed in church or at religious events. A lot of original carols still exist in print or manuscripts, especially from the late renaissance onwards, but precious few are still sung regularly. (The ones that do have usually moved into the church setting.) The practice died out with the puritan interregnum when festivities were banned.
No, a christmas carol isn't a real carol at all. It's a pastiche. Or a bowdlerised update. (Who would write a carol about slaying children today?) The vast majority are written during the romantic era of the 19th century, when fascination with folk history and early popular music was at its highest and most warped. With little attention to actual history (and a lot of attention to "grand traditions" and "morality"), the Victorians cut up, rewrote, nicked melodies, copied and parodied in order to create acceptable music for the young national spirit.

Take, I dunno, "Deck The Halls". It's hundreds of years old and has absolutely nothing to do with christmas originally (being a new year's song). In 1881 a new lyric was written by a man named J. P. McCaskey and suddenly it became a "traditional" christmas carol. "Ding Dong Merrily On High" is a few notches worse, with its ridiculous faux-mediaeval lyrics (from 1924!) and its melody stolen from a renaissance French dance book. "Good King Wencelas" is (funnily enough) Swedish originally, and a spring song at that, updated in 1850s by an english pastor.

Quite a few others, like "We Three Kings" or "O Holy Night", are original compositions. A few ("Joy To The World", "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing") are resecualrised hymns and probably the most "genuinely traditional" of the bunch. But practically none are actually carols...

So what's so special about the 19th century that has left these songs behind and imprinted them so deeply into tradition? This period is when a lot of today's christmas traditions first appeared, of course, like christmas trees and santa claus, but that just raises the futher question of why all the traditions seemingly originate here.

I think it's because this period of increased modernism and the accompanying industrial revolution was causally accompanied by a move towards secularisation - carols, trees and santas represent the establishment of a rival christmas tradition to that of the church. That might also explain why the new carols were based in spirit on the older secular tradition and not on the bountiful christmas tradition of church music.

Once our secular christmas tradition was established it seemingly became very hard to move. I've not found any frequently performed christmas carols written later than 1941. After that, everything carolesue has been classified as a christmas song, and that, dear children, is a different story entirely.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Music's top 10 most influential countries

Okay, I realise the ideas of "national" music and geographical bounding of music is probably fallacious. And that the concept of influence is extremely vague at best. But nevertheless I've often caught myself wondering: what countries in the world have had the greatest impact on today's popular music? And I mean that on a worldwide, decentralised basis, where Africa is the strict equivalent of Europe.

I think I've listened to a fair bit of the world's contemporary musical expressions, but obviously it's still a sisyphean task. So this will be my own subjective ranking based on guesswork and feel. Feel free to criticize it if you can think of any reasons to change the countries or the order.

1. The United States
For every obvious reason imaginable. The driving force behind every major worldwide genre from Blues and Jazz to Dance music and Hip-hop and the reference point for the very concept of "popular music" in just about the entire world. I'm not sure I need to delve deeper into this one. 2. Jamaica
Now it gets a tad more controversial. But if you count in the dancehall-derived reggaeton and its huge recent infleuce across the Latin world, I think it just edges it. That's obviously on top of being the main influence of most young popular music across Africa, very important in large parts of Asia, and a crucial background influence on both dance and hip-hop via dub and deejay toasting.

3. India
Now this one will take some explaining. Mostly it's this high because of its truly worldwide reach, just as the Indian diaspora is worldwide. Indian-tinged musics appear from the caribbean to indonesia and everywhere in between (across africa, the balkans, the middle east) and everywhere they feed back into the national traditions. Nothing else (except the western tradition) is so widely dispersed.

4. The United Kingdom
Obvious sparring partner for the United States throughout and a big part of worldwide commercial pop sounds, but the only truly british tradition to have a global reach is Heavy Metal.

5. Cuba
Mostly its influence lies in the past but much of what we think of as "latin" music originates from here.

6. Egypt
Main country in the extremely strong middle-eastern musical tradition which is important in african, asia and the balkans.

7. Japan
Okay, another controversial one as the music there is crap. But what would music stand today without the TR-808, the Technics turntable or the DX7?

8. The Democratic Republic of Congo
Soukous has been a huge influence on music throughout africa and the caribbean.

9. Germany
Two artists: Kraftwerk. Giorgio Moroder. Enough said.

10. France
Instrumental in the development of Zouk and a clear reference point for all Francophone countries.

Bubbling under:
Turkey
Brazil
Lebanon