Many of the user charts on this site are overwhelmingly representing a small selection of countries when there are many more countries making music that operates in a similar context to the music that does get charted. I believe this is not because of an inferiority of the music of those countries, but a result of how the music is presented as existing in a category and context. And so I think that if you have a regional music category and you're putting in all these rock and pop things into it, not only is it contributing to that problem, but it's also giving an easy way out here, because instead of putting the work in to engage with traditional music around the world which doesn't operate in a familiar context, you're engaging with things you already have the tools to engage with.
I voted for African music because I don't think it's a real category but it'd be focused enough to talk about all of the specific sub categories and illustrate the variety contained within. And in an Asian music thread sure I'd expect to see discussion of Cornelius and also the Anthology of Chinese Experimental Music 1992-2008 comp and all sorts of other stuff. But if it's Regional Music, where RYM lists exceptions because "despite being regional in a geographical sense, [they] are not considered regional music because they follow and extend global music trends rather than regional traditions", then I believe it makes sense to focus on the music that does not do that.
I can 100% agree with this. I just don't have enough experience to know when that's true and when it isn't.
EDIT: I actually had both in mind when I created the thread and is likely why it's been confusing. I wanted to please people who wanted to use the RYM instead of Wikipedia's definitions of parent genre's, so I combined the two and said I'm ok with the duality and differences. I think both can exist/be talked about in a single thread, and why the original voting was a combination of both African, Asian, etc. along with Regional Music.
Shibuya-kei seems really clear to me to be a regional thing (being named after a suburb of Tokyo), but it clearly isn't?
Almost all western countries have regional music that is non-classical and non-modern regional music. It would be crazy to not include things like Flamenco and stuff like that. They're as different from modern western music as any music from Asia or Africa etc. As long as it's non-classical or non-modern western music, it seems like a lot these musics fit the definition of regional music.
Yeah, I meant, "not Western pop music," or as you say, non-modern Western music. Oy, discussing category in this thread is a real quagmire.
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RoundTheBendI miss the comfort in being sadProfile Ground Control
lol but ok as offered before I will leave it alone
hehe - fair enough. I still like your arguments. I suppose I'm realizing that this could get derailed quickly and I'm also realizing that it's more frustrating to you than I initially realized, so I just made the suggestion that if you want to talk about this in a different way, feel free to do so. If you want to criticize me for being human, I guess that's cool too.
The full context of my quote shows I was agreeing with you in concepts of giving it a disservice, alluding to it as similar to how feminists struggled, etc. I thought you brought up a really good point that the existence of the genre in general kind of is doing exactly that - putting it on a pedestal and simultaneously saying it "can't compete" with the big hitters - which is bullshit (and exactly what feminists struggle(d) with (as I learned at University - not claiming to be a feminist specialist either).
I don't want to play the "Genre must fit in this box game". That's when I think that's a waste of time because nobody has the right answers. I even alluded to the dual markings of a genre, and how that's really what most people do in situations where it isn't so clear.
Quote:
RE: Shouldn't we just like it cause it's good?
Totally agree. It's the same issue Feminists grappled with. I'm kind of regurgitating what I learned at college (meaning I'm not female, so hard for me to have more than empathy), but it's very similar to the concepts of being put on a pedestal vs being treated like a second class citizen. Women often couldn't feel like "normal" - they were either put on a pedestal (having a thread dedicated to great music not "normally recognized") or treated like a second class citizen (often completely neglected/ignored or worse hated). That was one aspect of Feminism I remember, at least, and I feel like it translated well to what you were saying.
RE: Dual Genre markings
Absolutely. Like I said earlier, Genre is nearly never dogmatic, and nearly always pluralistic. It's not a hard science at all.
RE: Leaving it alone
Absolutely not. I think you bring up fantastic points. As I alluded earlier, a lot of this music is REALLY good, yet how much non-anglo-saxon music makes it to the top 1000 on this site? Yet somehow "the only way" (not really) to recognize it is through threads like this, or "top world lists" or whatever. Something tells me there are less than 25"world" albums in the top 1000 on this site... or any "large publication". Maybe I'm wrong and there's like 50... but all that really matters is there aren't "equal" parts of culture/ethnicity, etc. represented in most music charts.
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So, this genre is kind of bullshit. Don't get me wrong, I'm excited to see what comes up in this thread. And yes, it is important to keep sight of the context that traditional music sits in. But at what point does something step out of tradition and become something else? I'll talk about some stuff that neatly fits in to this thread, but first I want to talk about some stuff that ends up in this type of category that causes some problems.
Glen Velez is a Mexican-American man who did tremendous work in promoting techniques for frame drums. Don't take my word for it though, why not read what the Percussive Arts Society has to say in his entry in their hall of fame http://www.pas.org/about/hall-of-fame/glen-velez
So for this album, RYM just straight up doesn't even try to put it into a genre, and discogs has it in the Folk, World & Country one. But this isn't music that belongs to any specific region, really. He's taking frame drum instruments from different cultures which use the instruments in combination with other non-drum instruments, and isolating them in a way that brings them all together outside of their original contexts and into something that develops an approach to hand drumming that carries over to all of the instruments.
I love this album, but I'm really not sure if it belongs here, and if it ending up in this sort of category makes it a sort of "toxic cosmopolitanism" to borrow a term from Kassel Jaeger. I think this is a totally valid musical pursuit, but the problem is that the categories do not accommodate it and it ends up somewhere like here.
Yeah - I see what you mean. Just gave this a spin. It technically is just frame drum work that could really belong to any "region" - yet Google Play (through which I listened to it from) states the genre is that nebulous "World".
I'd honestly categorize it as experimental (whatever that means, and no I'm not starting another conversation about whether it belongs here 🤣 ). It seemed the "purpose" was to push frame drums to places they "normally" aren't pushed, or if they are, that's not the focus. It was equally curious why a single "track" basically was multiple efforts. Perhaps I missed something, but I often saw no connection to the experiments, even if there were some cool transitions. Maybe they were simply at the same recording session? Dunno.
Small association I had was with Moondog, even if a far off one.
I thought it especially cool when he'd get harmonics from the drum in Pyramid and Bodhran - way rad. He really pushed every aspect possible it seemed. Impressive. With Rain you could hear a drum echo the "spoon" sound. Simple yet incredibly creative. I liked it.
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RoundTheBendI miss the comfort in being sadProfile Ground Control
I like this and I feel like it fits here more than anywhere else, even if it technically is more on that "world" music side of things, and near new age, but what the hell, enjoy it regardless.
I'm no linguist, so I don't know for sure, but I think half is in urdu or farsi or something and the rest in English.
And I've never heard this before, but it totally screws with that colonialism vs post-colonialism crap where it's like let's appreciate other cultures, but from "our" lens, instead of something truely authentic, but the visuals are stunning regardless (even if I'm 90% sure at 3 minutes is corkscrew canyon here in Utah...)
These are albums that I saw on the lists that some of you guys posted above.
I listened to these two because the couple of Brazilian albums I know I really like. And when I saw it says Sergio Mendes Presents, I thought it would be something I like cuz I love Sergio Mendes and Brasil 66. I was never sure just what kind of music it's called, maybe Bossa Nova or Samba or one of those other ones, I would describe it as the kind of cocktail Brazilian music which was popular in the US in the 1960s. I think mostly older people liked it, younger people being into acid Rock at the time. Ha ha. They were the type of albums that your parents had. But it's really good. The Edu Lobo album is kind of similar except it has more guitar than the stuff I was used to. Lots of guitars and flutes and not as many horns as Sergio Mendes. I love the cover songs they used to do by people like Simon and Garfunkel or the Beatles, and the only cover song I recognized on this album is Hey Jude. Which I find single words single words very interesting. He doesn't sing the words to Hey Jude , he just does that kind of "bop bop boop, da dee da" type of singing. Not really scat singing but something along those lines. And on some songs he sings in English or Portuguese. Some of these other songs might be cover songs but I didn't recognize them. I really like this album. I'm going to listen to more by him.
And the Jorge Ben one doesn't remind me of anything I've ever heard before. It's not at all like the other Brazilian albums I've heard. But the farther that I listened into the album, the more I kind of got the idea of what it's all about and I really started to enjoy it then. I saw that he has a real long career with shitload of albums, so I'd like to see what his later stuff sounded like.
I guess it's too late to put this on my list, but if I would have remembered it I definitely would have. This is the dub techno guy Gaudi with the famous singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. This is actually the only place I ever heard him sing, but you always hear how he was one of the greatest voices ever recorded and all kinds of stuff. This is like Pakistani singing with ambient type dub techno. It's really cool.
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