The movie and readings this week were a cool little music odyssey. I started by watching Yangon Calling. I enjoyed this documentary a lot because it shows how punk is a transferable cultural phenomenon. Indeed, many of the "punks" in the movie don Ramones and Sex Pistols t-shirts. One musician remarks, correctly, that one doesn't need musical talent to play punk rock. In the documentary, the genre's core values are geared toward a rebellion which has seemingly higher stakes than when punk was born (I think this is fair to say... countering 70's Western mainstream seems less heavy than risking death in a Burmese prison). The fact that punk is being used as a means for survival makes me proud, and while I initially thought of Scum as a deadbeat, I quickly came to sympathize with his chosen lifestyle: how can I judge someone who creates a sense of freedom for themselves against all odds? Thanks to punk's transferability and the role that it has taken in Yangon, the genre has grown as a whole, taking on new, deeper meanings and hues.
Clayton's discussion of Auto-tune also explores transferable music, though this time we're talking about software (which, I won't lie, makes me bubble... musicking for everyone!). What I found most interesting about the reading was Clayton's note about how certain vocal qualities are required to create "successful" Auto-tuning, and traditional vocal talent doesn't necessarily suit this style. In fact, it's better to purposefully hit notes off key. During the reading, I was thinking about the outro to Kanye West's "Runaway." This heavily auto-tuned segment makes sense of Kanye's garbled lamentation. Here we have a technology that celebrates "failure" and "misuse," and perhaps this is what makes Auto-tune so transferable. Listening to Berber pop music, and thinking about the Berbers' resistance to dominant groups, turns Auto-tune into a political matter.
Likewise, A Tribe Called Red cannot dissociate from politics: the quote "As indigenous people, I think we're political from the moment that we're born" really stuck with me. Maybe this is because ATCR reframes self-expression as survival, and it becomes a question of "which tools are we going to use to express ourselves (in order to survive)." These tools, as it turns out, can be borrowed from other cultures and help enrich these source genres (this is true for Burmese punk). How does the need to survive inform musical borrowing? Should all such exchanges stem from shared struggles?
On a different note, this week saw the return of sonidero studies. This time, the reading (by Lippman) focuses on the significance of sonidero performances for the Latin Diaspora. Creating a "home away from home" is central to this phenomenon in the US, and "¡Un Saludo!" allows just that. Relating to the other readings, I find it interesting how cumbia sonidera is both transferable and non-transferable: on one hand, this style of music travels great distances (from Columbia to Mexico City to L.A.) and on the other hand, the genre evolves new characteristics locally, plus the saludos are specific to a certain moment in time and space. It is cool that they're immortalized in certain mixes though. But who will know what they mean in fifteen years? How contingent on presence are Mexican cumbia mixes?
Well yeah, I've run out of logical segues. Last Sunday, Mea and I went to the Parlour, a bar that often features live music. In addition to witnessing Middle Eastern Jazz (which was novel and wonderful in and of itself), we made buddies with three Armenian women. Two of them used to be in a dance group and bravely performed a few steps during one of the livelier songs. The gist of this genre mashup was improv jazz using Middle Eastern instrumentation such as a reverb clarinet, an oud, and a synth. I've rarely felt so enriched by a musical performance, and I hope I get to return to the Parlour for some more quality music.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire