Alternapop worlds

Dammit, I had a great question and you seem to have pre-empted it! Anyway this is tangentiallty related, so...Fela and Afrika 70 aside, I have NEVER been able to get into so-called "World Music" despite countless fruitless hours and cash spent! First, it seems to have no structure and just goes on and on, second, it's all so relentlessly smiley and upbeat! Why? I don't buy that the art of the oppressed is necessarily 'celebrating-the-struggle'/escapist, because when I want my cheap holiday in o.p.m. there's plenty of great savage/bitter/grim/ugly literature and cinema from Africa, South America and the Caribbean - it's just the MUSIC that sounds like Up With People at an SWP picnic! (If anyone would care to disabuse me of my misconceptions, I welcome it!)

I live in Tooting, a predominently Asian neighbourhood in London. This is a world where pop music *HAS* evolved from a non-Anglo-African-American world. In the shops, listening to Bollywood and Bhangra (and I don't know the other terms cause I can't read the languages) is often a revelation.

Wow, pop music from other countries, even when the words are unintelligible, and the scales unfamiliar. In most cases, it can still be as manufactured, contrived, and saccharine as Western Pop - imagine that. Yet still, there are songs that capture me (I have no idea either the titles of the songs or the artists, I feel stupid and colonial enough when I go into Indian groceries to buy garam masala, I can't imagine going into a music shop and asking for "the one with the girly chorus that goes 'haaa-aiiiii ashtee ashtee, wheeee, ollay ollay'" and the shop assistant calls the cops cause I've just sung "goatcheese, coathanger coathanger, run the bathwater please please" or something) and sound alien, exciting, and sonically interesting, yet still capture some essential human emotion.

I would love to know more about it. Though I worry about starting to get too heavily into Indian influences, cause the worry is always that you'll end up sounding like George Harrison or Transglobal Underground or, godhelpme, Kula Shaker.

I don't consider bhangra to be non-western pop BTW, partly because a lot of it comes from the UK, and partly because I like it.

It may be created in the UK, but it relies so much on non-Western influences - Indian music, whether it be pop, classical or folk simply has different scales, different rhtyhmic (sp?) patterns, and different instrumentation - that it definitely counts. Bhangra, as just one example, may be a synthesis between Eastern and Western dance music, but that does not exempt it from the scope of this topic.

A more interesting question is... why has Indian music in specific made so much more of an inroad into (at least British) pop music and the pop culture, in a way that other "ethnic" and "world" music hasn't?

Using myself as an example, I'm pretty much as whitebread and middle class as they come, (not counting my globe-trotting colonial grandparents) yet I know what Bhangra is, though I could not name you an equivalent Central African or Southeast Asian or South American pop music.

Is it because of the huge and culturally prominent Asian population in the UK? (Then why haven't waves in recent American imigration produced a similar Southeast Asian flavour in the US charts?) Is it the overwhelming and inescapable backage of the Beatles, that George Harrison's obsession has left such a mark? (j/k before anyone jumps on me...) Is it the cultural inheritance of the Victorians and their obession with India?

Or could we count the US charts' recent obsession with "Latin" pop? Sure, that's as American (meaning the continent, not the country) as rock'n'roll. And the influences that aren't natively "American" are Spanish derived - Spain in itself, in both its classical and folk music, owes as much of a debt to Moorish and therefore North African, Arabic and Middle Eastern influences, as to European music.

OK, I have lost the plot, and now I officially feel like a stupid white liberal espousing cultural tokenism, trying to talk about musical styles I only half understand. Shoot me now.

Is it because of the huge and culturally prominent Asian population in the UK?

Well, erm, yes. I think that's pretty difficult to argue with, especially when you take into account the relative coherence of the asian communtiy here.

Asian music is hardly alone in its penetration of the UK anyway. Reggae is much bigger than any form of bhangra and its roots lie outside the mainstream of Western music as much as bhangra does.

Kate writes:

> Is it because of the huge and culturally prominent Asian population > in the UK? (Then why haven't waves in recent American imigration > produced a similar Southeast Asian flavour in the US charts?)

I think it's because the US is so vast, and this immigration tends to be concentrated in certain areas. The thing about chart music in the US is that it tends to be the stuff that you can find anywhere in the US. I live in Chicago, and if you head up to the north side, there is a huge South Asian community. You wouldn't have to work too hard to be familiar with South Asian pop if you lived in the city - plus it's on tv here - but outside of the city, I doubt anyone other than Indians is aware of it. They're a huge ethnic group in Chicago, but you can go other places and not find such a presence. It used to be that there were "local" charts - say, midwestern, or charts that reflected popularity in certain cities. This was in the sixties. I remember pop in the early seventies, and you might hear all sorts of weird things on top-40 radio. Now the formats and playlists are pretty much standard across the US. If that local programming still existed, I'm sure you'd here a lot more Asian and Latino music on so-called "top 40" radio. There are Latin radio stations, Latin top-40 and huge Latin music sections in the stores, but this stuff tends to be segregated. There's so much going on in the city that top-40 seems irrelevant, but it's still stuck to everything like veneer.

BTW, you can get Bollywood cassettes here for two bucks. I went into a store and filled a basket with them. They even carry lots of older stuff from the 60s and 70s, judging from the fashions, makeup and hairstyles on the covers.

Might I take the wheel for just a few miles toward my originally intended route?

Your many excellent observations only serve to remind me that it's nearly impossible for us to think outside the shopworn piano-box of Western musical tradition. An insidious vine that chokes all the other plants in the garden might be a more appropriate metaphor.

That same vine, parodoxically, nourishes and crossbreeds with a few wild weeds, and the hybirds are interesting--zouk, rai, mbube, Bhangra, salsa, Jamaican dancehall, Malagassy rock, etc.--but still couldn't have been bred outside their post-colonial enclaves. For good examples of many of these exotic blossoms, look to the Globestyle and Real World releases of the last decade and a half-- here you'll find world music that isn't all light-hearted and merely pretty, but much also that is searching, dark, and achingly beautiful in unexpected ways. (Just listen to some Armenian dudek to hear the collective soul of a people who must experience excrutiating sadness even as they make their tea.)

But what this argument comes down to is that just as there are no real "pure" races, there are no pure musics left, if there ever were any. Even the most isolated examples--Melanesian funeral chorals, to name one--couldn't have escaped some amount of cross-breeding from explorers and trading partners over the past millennium. So the pop musics alternatives I propose couldn't and maybe even shouldn't exist.

When the first ethnomusicologists armed with field-recorders headed off for the jungle and the lost Appalachian valley, they immediately faced the problem of somehow getting down on shellac 78s folk sagas, rambling improvised ballads, and week-long death rites. Being limited by the technology, they had to compress and edit such material down to its briefest essence--that being one side of a 78, or about the length of what most pop songs still conform to. Given the chance to hear their performances played back to them, the local artists must have eventually begun imitating the new shorter formats and the more European-style song structures that submit more easily to such limitations. For many fine aural artefacts, witness the "Secret Museum Of Mankind" CD series for a fascinating pre- electric age tour of the world.

So as wise fellow posters have already explicated, the end result is always recognizably pop (i.e. commercial) music, whether in a different language or wearing different shoes. Bollywood can't escape the classic Broadway musical any more than its choreographers could ignore modern dance or upscale fashion houses (though I still see a lot of Michael Jackson-influenced jackets after all these years). Once kids in the Himalayas start downloading mp3s over the Internet, they won't be able to tend to their prayer wheels in the same way they always have. Free Tibet from boy bands, please.

Still, I dream of another world where we English-speakers are the ones being subjugated and overpowered by other cultures' original ideas of what it thinks the masses want to hear. Where the ruling class of music is not a hybrid or a distillation, but the result of an unimaginable (for us, meaning we poor blinkered Westerners) tradition of sounds that would be for the most of us odd and impenetrable, the musical equivalent of African Ga tribal coffins which, instead of trying to look funereal in the Northern European/American sense, take on the shape of giant shocking-pink fish and airplanes and hippos. This would be music which might even make us wonder at first if what we are hearing is, indeed, music. Music that isn't out to impress the likes of smart-ass smartypants like myself, but a multicultural or even monocultural clientele yet to be or never to be born.

I'll hope you'll all keep on talking if you're still interested, for I have much to learn. Unfortunately I count a high number of threads which have come a crashing halt once I imprint my skewed rejoinders upon them!

The problem is that it's impossible to start answering the question musically without answering it economically---which is to ask, isn't Anglo-American/African-American music globally beloved more because of economic and technological dominance than because of anything having to do with the music itself?

So you're asking: what if, say, East Asian civilization had wound up the dominant force in world history, leaving Europe democratically shaky and comparatively underdeveloped, or the U.S. as a nation primarily of East Asian descent with a history of enslaving and subjugating Englishmen. The job we're doing to imagine this is basically one of extrapolation---guessing that, say, world-famous pop music would be way more likely to involve the shakuhachi. The problem is that for any non-Western culture to have achieved musical dominance, we'd have to rearrange world history *so far back* that we wouldn't even be able to do that extrapolation and posit that the opressed Irishmen of the U.S. would have developed gritty, rough- necked strains of Celtic folk. We could try, but . . .

Since the conditions required to make art that is either a) individualistic or b)reflexive are not really possible except under conditions of affluence (y'know, people taking enough time off from foraging to lie around smoking banana leaves and wonder from what angle they're going to use their yurt as a metaphor), and the best way to maintain affluence is to use cheap labour from somewhere, I think only imperialist cultures would make suitable hypothetical hothouses for alterna-pop music. Not necessarily Western either (could be Ghanaian or Khmer) - but an influx of immigrants (breaking the homogeneous surface demographic as well as cheap labour )helps.

Plus, our empire would have to be in its 'decadent' phase. I'm sure there's countless examples of this from every corner. Historians?

Since I'm not non-Western I really can't answer what pop would have been like had pop music evolved out of, say, Ecuadorian, Chinese, Uyghur, or Bantu music.

I can, however, imagine what pop music would sound like had it been influenced by my Western tribe, namely the Poles. Especially since one variant of Mexican pop -- Tejano -- is essentially a mix of Mexican music and Polish/German polka (because of all the German and Polish immigrants to Texas, check it out it's true). And, to my ears, it's unlistenable and unenjoyable, in no small part because I hate polka. That, and the world would have had to put up with ska and its various offshoots a lot sooner and longer than it already has (it's that damn polka fucking everything up again!)

This is a great thread. Someone should comment so it comes back into the recently answered threaads list.

as for the upbeat quality of the particular music, it could do with what the music is generally used for. this might be simplifying too much - I don't have much time, but for one example i wrote on this thread abt traditional bhangra's use in Indian village society - it was music to dance to while celebrating special occasions like marriages and harvests and stuff. So it makes sense to me that the trad bhangra stuff would often be jubilant and upbeat and not usually bitter and grim (UK bhangra is a whole difft scenario entirely obv)

There are some really fascinating topics here, both the concept of "alternapop worlds" and the question of why some non-western music forms manage to find success in western countries and some don't. Anyone have anything to add, based on musical trends of the last 3-4 years?