Sometimes you come across these wonderful YouTube users and you wonder where they get all their brilliant stuff from. One current favourite, totally, is troublemaker1973, who specialises in the pop music of obscure communist dictatorships like Albania and especially North Korea.
I'm fascinated by the official state-sanctioned "pop" music of these places because its uniformly awful in such interesting ways (à la Tolstoy). Doesn't prevent it from throwing up occasional gems, though, like this weirdly haunting thereminbox-driven number by Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble that troublemaker1973 assures us is "about Kim Jong Il":
Marvellous. I've yet to understand completely whether he's posting these videos seriously or ironically, but it's damned interesting either way.
But what really fascinated me was the portrayal of the scene's DJs, especially in the two follow-uparticles. Because they, and by extension the entire craft of DJing, were portrayed as highly suspect and possibly even evil. It's a very peculiar thought to me but it actually makes surprising amounts of sense from some perspectives. I've been brought up on enough positiveaccounts of the DJing profession to have a highly romanticised view of it, and I'm fascinated by how a good DJ works. DJs manipulate their audience in interesting ways, shape narratives of music, cleverly subvert the intentions of the original artists, link together diverse records and create fascinatingly complete new sounds and genres.
But all those skills can just as well be used for, well, bad things. Malevolent manipulation. Insinuating narratives and connections, cruelly warped artistic intentions, preserving old genres by moulding new records into their limited vocabularies. The authors of the article bring up the example of how beach DJs regularly bowdlerise R&B records of all their rapping so as not to offend the audiences with the "degenerate" content they contain.
I think it's a fascinating twist of perspective, and I'm surprised it comes so natural to the writers. Because rejecting DJ craftiness, like David Mancuso famously did in the late seventies, seems so strongly connected with conservatism and 19th-century ideas of "genius" and "the work". I guess that ought to teach me to try to see the opposite perspective as well.
This summer I'm going to be 27 years old. And I'm starting to worry. One of my big interests in life is popular music, and inexorably approaching towards 30 means there's the chance (borne out by oh-so-many precedents) that it'll stop being on top of my agenda. Thirty is the age critics usually start to falter, dismissing new music off-hand as crap and derivative and then slowly creeping towards irrelevance.
This all wouldn't scare me very much (since I hope to bypass it) if it wasn't for the fact that otherwise cool blogs have started to feature new music I don't particularly like. And that it might be the start of a trend I will have a hard time not feeling excluded from.
The first blog-hyped genre I don't get is the entire cumbia nueva thing. I wasn't very fond of cumbia in the first place (it being a rather broad, safe, geographically detached lower-middle-class music) and most of this new stuff has retained all those questionable virtues. It's very much latino (rather than musica negra), it's not properly locally grounded anywhere, it's too reverent to an earlier, fairly dull generation. This all means the obvious analogy is to "rock" in the western world, which is not exactly a glowing endorsement coming from me.
Another aspect is that even the most digital stuff is very samplerrific and shying away from the synthesiser extremes of the past few years. That's something it has very much in common with the other new genre I don't "get", funky. It's kinda softish house-beated, mid-tempo garage with an (almost universal) afro-carribean 3+3+2 latched onto mild house diva or r&b vocals, and it's apparently huge in the london clubs. To me it has all the fairly staind qualities of recent zouk and I just don't see the fun (or the supposed connection to soca).
Still, if indeed we're seeing a trend away from the extreme bassline-oriented electro-styled music of the past few years then I'll have to adjust or be passed off into uselessness, won't I? To me, accepting (and correctly appraising) music I feel totally indifferent to is a huge problem, and a much bigger one than the opposite one that has been discussed a lot recently. How on earth are you meant to critically engage with a subject matter that you don't like or hate but that just bores you?
When critical distance passes off into critical indifference, that's when you really have to start to worry.
Is it just me, or is it more than a coincidence that the two most successful Japanese-language singles of all time here in Sweden both have had food-related titles?
Kyu Sakamoto - Sukiyaki (1963)
Tegomass - Miso Soup (2006)
I guess there's an interesting post here about the relative success of food globalisation compared to all other kinds (or is it really?). And another one about the strange European J-Pop subculture. But those will have to wait for another time.
Two ostensibly similar Eurovision entries. Uptempo, slight ethnic overtones grafted onto conventional pop material, similar rhythm. Yet one is at the very top of the betting firms' odds, and the other is at rock bottom. In this post I'll have a shot at explaining why, and why those small differences in rhythm are more significant than one might think.
These are two of the most modern songs in the competition from one way of looking at it. But what does "more modern" mean in a pure pop context? It's not being the music that's the most boundary-pushing, that's for sure. (It's questionable whether that's even a possible definition of modern in the first place. Chart pop ten years ago was arguably more boundary pushing than today, depending on which boundaries you count.)
Nor is the music that's seemingly ahead of its time, which is incredibly hard to predict of course (are we heading towards funky or dark dubstep?). And it's probably not even relevant in this context. To pull an analogy with, I dunno, the late sixties, "Cold Sweat" and "Here Comes The Fleas" were definitely symbols of the future. But if we look back at that time and think "what sounds the most 1966?" or whatever, we're gonna nevertheless be stuck with something like "Scarborough Fair". This "modernity as sounding like your time" is probably best represented so far this year by Usher's latest hit.
I think this kind of modernity is what Macedonia are aiming for.
Tamara feat. Adrian and Vrcak - Vo Ime Na Ljubovta
Listen to the rhythm here. For most of the song it's a semi-regular, Eastern European three-grafted-onto-two beat (with hits on the first, fourth, fifth and seventh quaver). But in the scene-setting first verse that beat is reduced to just a 3+3+2, a change that together with the singing rappers signal some sort of assymetrical dancehall or reggaeton. I know that trend is not exactly new but it's still signalling being ahead to the conservative Eurovision audience.
But there's one more conception of modernity that's probably even more relevant to that audience. And that's the idea of not sounding outdated. Something like Iceland's entry this year is never going to work because it sounds like something that went out of fashion long ago, but Armenia has really gone to lengths to sound universal in a current way. And yes, the result sounds a bit like some sort of Shakira song.
Sirusho - Qele Qele
Now, listen to the rhythm on this one. This one also has that slight ethnic assymetry in the rhythm, but it only appears every other bar and the four-on-the-floor is much more heavily emphasised. It's saying - "I'm current, but I'm also a normal pop song with the safe symmetric beat."
And that's why it's an odds-on favourite and Macedonia is tipped to fail. Or it could be that it's much more memorable and that the Macedonian rappers are distressingly out of tune. But whatever.
I'm fairly adamant generally that world music is bad, but if there's one thing I can usually accept that gets lumped into that category it's the pre-existing music. Something someone has heard (rather than made) and decided to pass on to the west. Heck, I'm guilty of enough of that myself to defend it, at least when it's knowledgeably and respectfully done and the selection is fair and based on the received wisdom of the scene itself.
But even as I'm involved in this sort of thing myself, I've recently started to realise the magnitude of its problems. The biggest one by far, I think, is our discourse of genre selection, and I find myself asking: what types of music are we really selecting, and what is our real reason for selecting them?
And I'm afraid, I'm very afraid, that the reason is stereotyping.
I generally consider myself some sort of hip-hop/disco fan and most of the music I've chosen to pass along has been young, electronic, "hard", bass-driven and working class. That type of music certainly gets some attention, and over the years seemingly disparate material like (to take three examples) Cambodian garage rock, crazy eclectic Bollywood music and South African semi-modernised dance music has ended up in some hazy media spotlight. Why this material exactly?
Chance, I guess. Quality to a certain extent. Accordance with the usual prejudices of "world music" in many cases, like that they're a bit exotic, fairly unthreatening, fairly old. (80s Bollywood, clearly superior to the 60s material previously touted, has only recently been accepted in world music circles.) But I think that even if we chose to factor out all these things there is a clear prejudice to the genre selection that I see in myself and that I'm very uncomfortable with.
I think a lot of the music is picked because we have expectations that certain people are going to conform to certain stereotypes. The Indian film music composers are allowed to be genre-crossing music thieves, but you'd never see crazy eclectic Latin music. Or South African garage rock - Africans are meant to copy African-American music, right, and make blues and funk and hip hop-based modernisations? Everything else is sorted away.
We all love it when someone in South East Asia creates a dynamic hybrid genre with hip-hop or something. But what if they decide to use heavy metal instead, like in morlam sing?
You could argue that metal is a "bad" genre and hip-hop is a "good" genre, but I think there's also an underlying assumption that metal is a "white" genre that "ethnic" people can't take their lead from, so this kind of hybrid is never properly explored. I certainly would have ignored it a few years ago.
Plus there's a whole bunch of conventionally "good" genres that people in the developing world aren't allowed to take their lead from. There's a really good shoegazer scene in Singapore, for instance, that we will never hear about because it's not "their music" - people "down there" are meant to make funky working-class music with ethnic undertones.
When I consider this sort of built-in prejudices I'm truly thankful for a blog like the wonderful with comb & razor, easily my favourite MP3 blog at the moment. From his vantage point on the scene in Nigeria, the author scours for quality local vinyl of every type and genre. Recent highlights have included Nashville-style country (which, of course, was also wildly popular on Jamaica), a coloratura soprano singing faux folk songs and the overture of a Nigerian opera. None of it is bad either (okay, the opera kind of is), but you'd never hear of any of it in the sea of Afro-funk and ethnic sounds that is our stereotype of Nigerian music.
I went to a dubstep club and I discovered something very interesting going on in drum & bass. All Out Dubstep is Stockholm's number one dubstep night (or rather, only dubstep night) and they had a brilliant event on at the Students Union. The genre is such a brilliant example of why music styles work best in the first few years of their existence, before the format is completely settled. I was especially impressed by a Rinse FM DJ called Chef whose sampling eclecticism ranged from Bounty Killer to Balkan jazz via Busta Rhymes, Niche, epic house, horror movies, spoken word, all brilliantly dubstepped up. I really liked his focus on Jamaican material as well with sublime touches like a few seconds' worth of "I Chase the Devil". The rhythm constantly weaved from nu-breaks to one-drop and everything in between.
All evening I also kept checking the adjacent drum & bass room and was turned off every time. I just don't particularly like the genre - it's too dense, too sample-centric, too old-and-stale, too pretentiously intelligent for my tastes. But then Chef was brought in to do a drum & bass set in that room and to my great surprise it was absolutely brilliant. Fresh, exciting, modern-sounding material. There's definitely something interesting creeping about in the jungle. I couldn't find any tracklists or the like on the net so I sent off an e-mail to the organisers and they sent me a bunch of tracks and artists to check out (thank you Martin at Club Traffic). Now that I've done that I'm even more excited if anything.
Just listen to these tracks from the set and tell me if they aren't brilliant. They've got a sense of fun, speeded delirium that's rare in music (Ca Plane Pour Moi and Surfing Bird excepted) with short interjections, fun samples and happy danceable basslines, connecting across the pond to bmore and ghettotech. On top of that they're exquisitely modern, if not 2008 in sound then at least 2006-ish - great wobble basses, spacious production, garage and grime influences. TC - Game Over (Youtube "video") Clipz and Die - Number 1 (Youtube "video")
Martin claimed the music was part of a sub-genre called jump up, and listening to some classicsof the genre I can certainly see the connection. But it's all been updated to sound so new that it's almost like another genre entirely. Apparently (judging by Wikipedia edits and Youtube comments) this type of music is considered declassé "chav" material by "true drum & bass fans" which is certainly a recommendation in my book, and indeed it seems to lie closer in spirit to the best of garage than to something like liquid funk.
Looking through the myspace pages of the artist list, the ones that appealed especially were Clipz, DJ Hazard and TC and what's interesting about them is that they all come from the same city, Bristol, and what more they're all residents at the same club night. This kind of local scene-building gets me all hot under the collar, it's exactly the kind of stuff I go for. I also think the trend towards vocals and proper track structures is very promising.
I'm telling you, keep a look out for "Bristol runstep" or whatever this scene will end up being called. In my book at least, this stuff should be blowing up to high heavens.
