Entries associated with the tag "World Music":

I don't mean to harp on any of the points I made in Friday's post, but considered next to the bands I referred to as "second-rate American acts who feebly pillage third-hand notions of world music," a group called Burkina Electric that's making its Chicago debut Wednesday night at the Old Town School is a useful counterexample. Burkina Electric's lineup includes both European and African musicians, and their music is a broad-minded, contemporary-sounding fusion that draws heavily (and knowledgeably) on ethnic traditions.

The group was formed in 2004 after percussionist Lukas Ligeti, son of famed Hungarian composer György Ligeti, traveled through Africa and met some musicians from Burkina Faso in neighboring Ivory Coast. On the group's recent debut, Rêem Tekré (Ata Tak)--the title means "musical exchange" in the Mooré language--dynamic, soulful vocal melodies by Maï Lingani and bubbling electric guitar lines by Wende K. Blass complement a sparkling mixture of acoustic and programmed drums, contrapuntal synthesizer parts, and samples (German electronic-music producer Pyrolator rounds out the lineup, though two dancers from Burkina Faso are also credited).

A second disc includes five remixes of four tunes from the first--including work by DJ Spooky, Mapstation, and Badawi--and they achieve the rare feat of sounding just as interesting as the original tracks. To be honest, the music doesn't grab me the way I'd hope, but at least Burkina Electric aren't taking the easy way out--they've neatly and intelligently integrated the two musical worlds they straddle.

Today's playlist:

Roky Erickson, I Have Always Been Here Before (Shout! Factory)
Lionel Marchetti & Seijiro Murayama, Hatali Atsalei (Intransitive)
Lafayette Gilchrist, 3 (Hyena)
Harry Nilsson, Skidoo and the Point (Camden)
William Parker & Hamid Drake, Summer Snow (Aum Fidelity)

I got pretty steamed last weekend reading a splashy one-page Tribune feature by Joshua Klein called "The Fading Borders of 'World' Music." It's behind the paper's online pay wall now, but I don't recommend spending the money to read it unless you're itching to be appalled yourself--the piece couldn't have been more wrongheaded and provincial.

The story opens by citing the 1981 David Byrne-Brian Eno collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (reissued in 2006 by Nonesuch) as "an album cheekily designed to imitate the exoticism of so-called 'world' music." Where to begin? The term "world music" didn't come into currency until 1983, after a consortium of DJs and label folks met in England to come up with a way to market records that had no clear home in Western music stores--they found it frustrating that African records were routinely shoved in the reggae section, for example. Given that "world music" hadn't yet acquired its present popular meaning in 1981, much less its connotation of shallow exoticism, how could Byrne and Eno have set out specifically to tweak it?

Perhaps more ridiculous is the claim that Byrne and Eno were being cheeky. Those guys have keen senses of humor, for sure, but more than most musicians they harbor a deep, sincere interest in global traditions. Even if Bush of Ghosts had been a "world music" record--and it's not, at least not exclusively, since the varied samples layered atop its thick, funky rhythmic musculature include familiar American music side-by-side with African sounds--there's absolutely no reason to characterize Byrne and Eno's treatment of foreign material as snarky, irreverent, or mocking.

Klein goes on to provide short profiles of six acts that are supposedly "new faces of world music," and it's here that he really goes off the rails. Of course he includes New York's Vampire Weekend (pictured), who play a sold-out show at the Metro on Sunday and whose inexplicable popularity is clearly the engine for this asinine trend piece. I'm not necessarily down on the band--all I can blame them for is being mediocre and dubbing their indie pop "Upper West Side Soweto"--but the alleged African elements in their sound have allowed plenty of rock critics to demonstrate how little they know about music from that part of the world. Robert Christgau wrote a thorough analysis of the situation a couple of months ago, so I won't go into detail here--except to point out that Klein is only slightly less than 100 percent wrong when he claims Vampire Weekend use "Congolese dance rhythms." They do ineptly ape the bubbly, crystalline guitar sound of Congolese rumba on a few songs, and on a few others they bang on a conga. Otherwise there's nothing remotely African about their music.

I have no idea why Klein mentions Panda Bear of the Animal Collective, aka Noah Lennox, except maybe because he lives in Lisbon, which is after all in a foreign country. The same goes for the Ruby Suns, a New Zealand group fronted by a Californian expat, Ryan McPhun--if you sing one tune in Maori on a bland, boilerplate indie-pop record like Sea Lion (Sub Pop), does that make it "world music" now?

Klein also nominates New York's Yeasayer, and I admit, I actually kinda like their recent debut, All Our Cymbals (We Are Free)--but it reminds me more of Genesis than of any kind of world music. Rounding out the list are sampladelic acts El Guincho (from Spain) and Kutiman (from Israel), but only the former builds its music mostly from international sounds. By the end it's clear that Klein is giving "world music" a definition even more debased than the one it already has--he's talking about Western pop that has some exotic spicing, nothing more. He doesn't seem to give a fuck about music that actually has its roots in Africa, Asia, or South America.

To be clear, it's not the bands I'm taking issue with. Music from other countries has always bled into rock--hell, early gems by New Orleans proto-rockers like Dave Bartholomew and Professor Longhair were practically built on the Cuban rhythmic unit known as the clave. I just find it depressing that so many music writers still aren't willing to do some exploring on their own to discover interesting and progressive artists from other lands, even with the Internet making it easier than ever--instead they fall in line to hype second-rate American acts who feebly pillage third-hand notions of world music. Imagine the alternate universe where an article about "new faces" in world music would point you at X Plastaz, Os Ritmistas, or Mahala Rai Banda.

Today's playlist:

Anthony Ortega, Afternoon in Paris (Hatology)
Christine Sehnaoui, Solo (Olof Bright)
Hecker, Electronic Music Soundtrack for "The Disenchanted Forest x 1001" by Angela Bulloch (Editions Mego)
Vierergruppe Gschlößl, I Take Everything (Jazzwerkstatt)
Skyphone, Fabula (Rune Grammofon)

Earlier this year the New York “gypsy punk” band Gogol Bordello landed a BBC Radio 3 Award for World Music in the “Americas” category. The choice set off a furor among people who care about such things, with British magazine Songlines devoting two full pages to the subject in its latest issue (journalist Garth Cartwright excoriates the band and DJ and journalist Max Reinhardt praises them). In the same issue, bandleader Eugene Hutz muses, “I’ve spent a lot of time spitting fire trying to get out from the world music category.” Of course, "world music" is a marketing term, not a genre, and the group’s new album, Super Taranta! (released yesterday by Side One Dummy), is nothing more than a rock record with aggressive violin and accordion riffs.

While I was once taken with Gogol Bordello, their use of Eastern European folk styles has diminished over the years, along with my enthusiasm. Their sound was never particularly “authentic,” but these days the non-rock elements are little more than window dressing, giving the band some level of quirky uniqueness (although the manic presence of Hutz is what people love most). When I listen to the new record, thoughts of Romani music never enter my head; instead I imagine a bunch of punks on Broadway, romping through the score of Fiddler on the Roof. There’s little difference between Hutz’s post-Iggy caterwauling and the overripe performance of, I dunno, Joel Grey, except Hutz has worse elocution and rarely drops below a strained roar. Gogol Bordello has become the musical equivalent of Borat.

The band performs at the Vic on Sunday. I imagine that J. Niimi’s critic’s choice in Friday’s paper will offer a different perspective.

Every year for the last decade the influential BBC DJ Charlie Gillett has compiled assorted favorites from his various radio programs as a sort-of report on the state of world music. While his choices don't generally include hard-core traditional sounds, they strike a good balance between genuine "stars" (by world-music standards), newcomers, and unjustly ignored artisans. Even for someone like me, who seeks out new music for a living, there are usually a handful of revelations.

In late February Rhino Records released the latest installment, World of Music, and while some of the 34 tracks are new to me, none of them are all that impressive. I was thrilled to finally hear something by the excellent Brazilian singer Isaar—a former member of Comadre Fulozinho and a collaborator of DJ Dolores—but otherwise these songs suffer from too much fusion and culture hopping, an aesthetic that says everything is adoptable and adaptable.  I suppose one could argue that someone like Nitin Sawhney, a Brit of Indian descent who mashes up early-Beck-style blues and Bollywood, is doing something innovative, but where's the sense of regional identity? Just because you can competently play a style of music that originated halfway across the globe doesn't mean what you're doing with it is any good. 

There are some terrific tracks by Salif Keita, Amadou & Mariam, Gal Costa, Kekele, Lilijana Buttler, and Camille, but too much of this stuff plays to the cheap seats, whether it’s the usually great Romanian Gypsy brass band Fanfare Ciocarlia playing Duke Ellington or the chameleonic Belgian group Think of One trying on a Brazilian guise as if it were just another wardrobe change. If this really did represent the state of world music, I'd be pretty depressed; luckily, I know there’s no shortage of fantastic stuff out there.