One Nation Under Many Grooves

Started reading the November issue of Songlines on the train last night. A great resource for new music from around the world. Again, I think it’s so funny that the genre is called world music, as in, anything that’s non-American. Well, the U.S. has the World Series, I guess it’s all along the same lines. People with grandiose ideas about themselves.

In that light, I also was excited (and amused) to read the following. It was a “special report” entitled One Nation Under Many Grooves written by Nigel Williamson about world music coming from the United States.

Here’s his lede:

“In recent issues of Songlines, we’ve increasingly found ourselves writing about world music coming out of the US. It’s a relatively recent phenomenon—but suddenly it seem that American world music acts are everywhere.”

Williamson goes on to say, “In a way, this burst of multicultural, pluralist creativity should hardly come as a surprise, for the US is a nation of people who originally came from somewhere else. Yet, paradoxically, it has long behaved like the most parochial country in the world, where only a tiny percentage of the population even has a passport. At best it has appeared indifferent and isolationist and at worst openly hostile to cultures other than its own. This has been particularly evident in music, where American audiences have proved strongly resistant toward sound emanating from beyond the English-speaking world. Forty years ago Marshall McCluhan defined the modern world as a ‘global village,’ a concept [that] it’s not hard to conclude that the US interpreted as an opportunity to impose its own narrowly defined cultural hegemony on the rest of the planet, rather than an opportunity to embrace other cultures.

“The pressures upon immigrants to conform to a homogeneous notion of what constitutes being ‘all-American’ are powerful and intense. For generations it has seemed that new arrivals are institutionally encouraged to forget the “primitive” culture they left behind and proven themselves as “true Americans” by embracing the values of the land of Coca-Cola without question.”

Wow. That’s really good U.S.-bashing. I particularly liked the line about ..”the land of Coca-Cola.” That is kind of funny.

And, sadly so much of it is true. To a point.

Like so many opinions like this one, you have to take it with a grain of salt. After all, I’m American and I found Songlines because I was interested and excited about growing as a musician, artist, and just generally finding new music to enjoy and to enrich my life, and the lives of those close to me. Just this morning I sent Sue off to work, putting a Songlines’ CD in her hand to check out on her commute.

Nor do I support the current administration, and I deplore what it has done not just in Iraq but throughout the world and to the U.S.’s position in the world. There are others like me in the United States. Not a lot, I hate to say. While there is little support for the war, there is a tendency for Americans not to understand how the rest of the world feels about them and their country. I, most times, feel like a stranger in a strange land here, but that has more to do with me. I’d probably feel different and on the fringe even at a “World Music” event. It’s just the quirky nature of my life and my personality.

I didn’t know that only a tiny percentage of the population has a passport, nor do I know if it’s even true. If it is true that’s an interesting fact. Yes, I’ve heard Americans say, why go to Paris and see the Eiffel Tower if you can see it in Disney World. Yes, statements like that make me cringe, too. But, both my kids have had passports since they were little. My oldest had one when she was six months old. But just to be fair, your typical American hasn’t really had the need for a passport like a person would in Europe, where countries are as small and close together as our states. Until 9/11, you didn’t need one to go to a lot of the nearby places Americans traveled, from Canada to the Caribbean islands.

A lot of Americans do tend to embrace the shallow pop culture, and not just in music. Their tastes run the gamut of low-brow movies, television shows, and books, But percentage-wise, how many intelligent, intellectual people are there in any country? The thing so many non-American don’t get is just how big this country really is. England is roughly the same size as the state of Louisiana, the U.S’s 31st largest state. Everything about the U.S. is big, and sadly, the negatives get enlarged as much as the positives.

And please show me the country that readily assimilates any outside culture. Good Lord, exactly how many civil wars are going on right at this moment? Personally, I love to learn about new cultures—everything from their food to their music. But I think the tendency not to embrace new cultures is more human than American.

A long, long time ago, I was one of those American backpackers who descended on the European continent, only then I hated being American at the time. I was embarrassed. If you think this was during George Bush’s father’s regime, guess again. Ford was in the White House, and the U.S. had just been floored by Vietnam and Watergate.

Since then I’ve grown to be proud of being an American. As of late, I’ve discovered and dove into American country music, not the corporate product out of Nashville, but the stuff coming out of East Texas and Louisiana. That’s how I came to have Songlines in my lap on the train ride home last night. You know, World Music ain’t nothing more than country music, without the twang, that is. As I blogged yesterday, it’s just music that celebrates what happens between the time we are born and the time we die.

Songlines

Hillary cries. Obama surges. Huckabee strums, or rather, plucks. Hillary surges. Obama pledges to continue. Oh, and Britney shows her private bits again. Surf your favorite news site and it’s all the same. Year after year after year. The names may change, but humans got a way of just doing the same old same old. Politicians crash and burn. Voters defy all logic and common sense and elect a complete moron. Pop stars continue to disprove Darwinian law, living their weak-kneed lives long after some stronger species should have put them—and us—out of their misery. You can thank liberals and lawyers for that.

I’ve long given up on the traditional heroes. Professional athletes, politicians, movie stars are nothing but groveling toadies jonesing for power and attention, worse than any decrepit needle addict. When I get like this I beat the bushes, I zig when everyone else is zagging, I head out on the fringe, away from the maddening crowd.

I started casting around for new music. Music is such a wonderful diversion for me. It takes me away from wherever I am, and it’s not that I don’t like where I am, I simply love to travel, whether it’s physically or in my mind. And I love my music collection, but I do get bored listening to the same stuff.

It’s probably not news to a lot of the visitors to this site, but I’ve been meaning to pick up a copy of Songlines of a while now. Actually have skimmed one once or twice but tossed it back on the shelf. This time I bought one and found a gold mine of new music, at least for me. A nice distraction from the world of politics and current events.

It’s called world music, but I think that’s a funny name for it. Kind of like people calling anything not from the U.S. “foreign.” Well, it’s only foreign to you, dude. I keep saying country music, good country music, not that sugary crap manufactured in Nashville with all its empty calories, is all about what happens between birth and sleeping in the dirt. And that’s what a lot of this music is about. Hey, when you get down to it, isn’t that really what all good artistic endeavors are about—life between birth and a dirt nap?

The November issue that I bought (well, it is printed in the UK; don’t expect the most up-to-date issues here on “foreign” ground) came with two compilation CDs. I love hearing all kinds of music from all countries sung in all different languages. But obviously I’m a product of my own environment, and right off the bat I was drawn to Linda Thompson and Kate Rusby, both British folk singers.

Thompson sings Katy Cruel, a traditional song dating back to colonial times (American colonial times, that is) in a lilting voice accompanied by a guitar and the beat of the hand on a drum, backed by female vocalists reminding you that Celtic ghosts are what make those lace curtains sway:

When I first came to town,
They called me the roving jewel;
Now they've changed their tune,
They call me Katy Cruel,
Oh, diddle, lully day,
Oh, de little lioday.

High on the Hill, which is on Kate Rusby’s newest album, Awkward Annie, is a beautiful English song in the folk tradition that opens with a plucked banjo (or is it a mandolin?) and Rusby’s sweet voice accompanying. The song picks up with more instrumentation, lilting lyrics (that’s really the only way to describe Irish/British folk music, isn’t it?) and Rusby harmonizes with Chris Thile from Nickel Creek.

oh, darling, let’s go over now, the devil’s here….

I can’t find the album in stores. It’s an import, so Amazon.com ships it in one to three months.

There’s a ton more. More that will keep me preoccupied from the rest of the madness.

Oh, darling, let’s go over now, the devil’s here…