...except when I don't.*
Welcome to the DFH Freaky Friday weekly music series
Because Team DFH operates more or less like a herd of cats, we’re here at roughly 9PM Eastern, every week. So take off your shoes, plop down on that beanbag chair over there, let your hair down, and get some groovy on. |
Songwriters: Brian Eno & David Byrne, 1979
The song's lyrics are an adaptation of
Dadaist Hugo Balls poem "Gadji beri bimba."
This article by Byrne was scribed in 1999, and I agree with just about every word of it.
"I Hate World Music!" ~ David Byrne
There is some terrific music being made all over the world. In fact, there is more music, in sheer quantity, currently defined as world music, than any other kind. Not just kinds of music, but volume of recordings as well. When we talk about world music we find ourselves talking about 99 percent of the music on this planet. It would be strange to imagine, as many multinational corporations seem to, that Western pop holds the copyright on musical creativity.
My cynical tone is primarily referring to "world music" as a genre. Something that is partially credited to Paul Simon with Graceland in 1987, and works of Peter Gabriel and others. A genre... as in a commercial marketing effort to tap in to that market. It worked, eh?
It seems as if the idea that somehow, when western musicians "discover" them, the folk or traditional or, er, just regular music of places, well people actually, outside of North America, are magically all of a sudden legitimate now. Okay, that's me being a tad cynical. I'll try to lighten up.
Here's more from the Byrne piece, he expresses it better:
No, the fact is, Western pop is the fast food of music, and there is more exciting creative music making going on outside the Western pop tradition than inside it. There is so much incredible noise happening that we'll never exhaust it. For example, there are guitar bands in Africa that can be, if you let them, as inspiring and transporting as any kind of rock, pop, soul, funk or disco you grew up with. And what is exciting for me is that they have taken elements of global (Western?) music apart, examined the pieces to see what might be of use and then re-invented and reassembled the parts to their own ends. Thus creating something entirely new. (Femi Kuti gave a great show the other night that was part Coltrane, part James Brown and all African, just like his daddy, Fela Kuti, the great Nigerian musical mastermind.)
To restrict your listening to English-language pop is like deciding to eat the same meal for the rest of your life. The "no-surprise surprise," as the Holiday Inn advertisement claims, is reassuring, I guess, but lacks kick. As ridiculous as they often sound, the conservative critics of rock-and-roll, and more recently of techno and rave, are not far off the mark. For, at it's best, music truly is subversive and dangerous. Thank the gods.
Hearing the right piece of music at the right time of your life can inspire a radical change, destructive personal behavior or even fascist politics. Sometimes all at the same time.
Of course, there's an immense wealth of
quote unquote world music that's well worth listening to, and I do mean immense. Check this out
NatGeo virtual encyclopedia of everything. See the GENRES Box over to the right. Gobs of stuff there for ya.
That said, I do enjoy it when a talented, yes western, okay famous, musician catches a spark of a musical idea from somewhere "exotic" or "obscure", basically non-western, and then re-purposes it in his or her own way, into something distinctly their own.
Good artists copy, great artists steal. ~Pablo Picasso
I've got a few samples here tonight that are some of the more obvious choices from way back when. I hope you'll share your own picks, old or new, in comments.
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Here is one (of many) youtube versions of the, widely known and loved, "folk" song from Peru, El Condor Pasa. I recommend you listen all the way through - or cheat if you must and jump ahead to about 3:00 mark when they speed it up. I love that part.
Peru, traditional
It was picked up and re-cycled, heh, by Paul Simon in 1970. Remember this?
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It's not like he was the first,or only, one to ever do that. The Beatles, of course, are famous for their dabbling into classical Indian music & culture & whatnot. George Harrison especially.
George Harrison first played a sitar on the Rubber Soul song Norwegian Wood, recorded in October 1965.
I went and bought a sitar from a little shop at the top of Oxford Street called Indiacraft - it stocked little carvings, and incense. It was a real crummy-quality one, actually, but I bought it and mucked about with it a bit. Anyway, we were at the point where we'd recorded the Norwegian Wood backing track and it needed something. We would usually start looking through the cupboard to see if we could come up with something, a new sound, and I picked the sitar up - it was just lying around; I hadn't really figured out what to do with it. It was quite spontaneous: I found the notes that played the lick. It fitted and it worked.
George Harrison, Anthology
[...]
George Harrison recorded three songs with The Beatles which were influenced by the Indian classical style. Love You To was recorded for Revolver in 1966. The following year the second side of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band opened with Within You Without You.
source
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There's plenty more, I'm sure you can think of a few!
How 'bout...
and
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or
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* I actually do love a lot of eclectic, fusion, ethnic, and otherwise unexpected musical avenues. :-)
It's Freaky Friday! Bring some tunes, whatever you got! Feel free to comment with just a song-link and your thoughts, or try for the embed, for however long that works for us. Either way, we're just chillin' here, so c'mon and join in.
Here's HOW: To add vids in comments: Click on "share"; then the "embed" button; change the size of the video graphic too, so when it posts, it is smaller. Use 300pixels in the custom parameters (last one on the right) under the embed code. {h/t joanneleon}
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