More MIA

[zhao]

So you're saying that the roots of house music come ultimately from Scottish Presbyterians?

http://www.willieruff.com/linesinging.html

sure. there is a strong connection there. and english folk influenced american folk a lot too.

the roots are complex, yes. and stretch back through millennia and many cultures. but that does not warrant a completely relativist stance: oh everything came from everywhere so there is no point in mapping lineage.

 

[zhao]

i wish Alan Lomax was still alive and can chip in on this conversation.

 

[Lichen]

Jazz is a bit trickier to ascribe an experience to though.

Slow, appreciative nods accompanied by a slight narrowing of the eyes. Try it!

 

[mms]

Slow, appreciative nods accompanied by a slight narrowing of the eyes. Try it!

or lindy hopping

 

[zhao]

 

[Woebot]

(much as it would be tempting to move on and not get bogged down in minutiae - final word on the subject)

blues is folk.
(the criteria is amplification/electrification)

reggae is rock.
(stemming from new orleans rock'n'roll. the confusion stems from the fact that in the first instance it was jazz musicians like ernest ranglin playing rock)

zhao's argument (which i haven't heard till now) seems relativistic and nonsensical. scottish line-dancing is folk music. obviously.

re: chic. a particularly bad choice for an example. i don't think nile rodgers would have the slightest problem at all being classed as a rock musician.

 

[zhao]

zhao's argument (which i haven't heard till now) seems relativistic and nonsensical. scottish line-dancing is folk music. obviously.

you seem to misunderstand what my "argument" is.

my "argument" is against relativism.

my "argument" is tracing the primary roots of house music backwards, to disco, to funk, to motown, to R'n'B, to Gospel, to the Blues.

and before that, the roots of the Blues are complex, including the work songs of the slaves, various folk traditions like those of Scottish immigrants. (good article by the way Droid)

is it more clear now, Woebot?

if something about this still seems "nonsensical", please demonstrate how it is so.

 

[massrock]

What's 'ambient' or Ambient music then? Is it classical? I'm tempted to say it's rock actually, not usually harmonically complex enough to be jazz.

Or is it a meta-category like what people were saying 'wonky' was / is?

 

[zhao]

What's 'ambient' or Ambient music then? Is it classical? I'm tempted to say it's rock actually, not usually harmonically complex enough to be jazz.

Or is it a meta-category like what people were saying 'wonky' was / is?

i haven't read all the pages of this thread but this boiling everything down to a few "fundamental" categories thing seems really stupid to me.

and how in hell is Rock one of these foundational, basic musical architypes? surely the tunnel visioned bias of aging dads who grew up during the 70s.

and wonky is confused triphop. it ain't no "meta-category" no how.

 

[massrock]

Well I'm just asking the question in the context of Woebot's map and as a bit of fun. Wondering if Ambient throws a bit of a spanner or where it would fit. And pointing out that it was a cross-genre category before people started talking about *wonky* in those terms. After all, you can have Ambient anything.

I am down with the idea that more things 'are rock' than are sometimes recognised to be though. And that's not a bad thing, rock is great! I mean it doesn't matter (just a bit of fun really) but I like to think of rock and roll as this very broad category - it's inclusive and acknowledges commonalities and common roots among those things which rock.

 

[woops]

I think this categorisation is a bit of a fool's errand. Are we trying to somehow get past postmodernism here? Or are you re-organising your record collection Woebot?
Seems to me new genres emerge from cross-pollination rather than as direct lineages.

Classical music was incorporating folk themes from well before even modernism, then onto incorporating jazz and that's just an early example, I'm sure there are earlier and for sure there are many many more.

I think zhao's "argument" (you seem to like the quotation marks zhao) is dodgy, not because there's nothing to it, but rather because it establishes the idea of an unbroken lineage, which to my mind suggests that there are two kinds of music - the 'right' kind from the historical tradition and the 'wrong' kind, leading to a questionable, not to mention rather dull, purist approach. Of course the real dichotomy is between 'good' and 'bad' music which is up to the listener. Also yesterday I dropped a cigarette in the cat bowl and banged my head going up the stairs, both by accident, so it's not true that there are no accidents either.

On top of ambient as throwing a spanner, what about harsh noise? It seems to fit into the category of classical music except it's from the other end of the social scale (almost said 'wrong' end lol) and it's made for other purposes. Is that jazz too then? Or rock in its aesthetic? Or it could be considered folk, except it's pretty electrified. Seems only a minute ago everything the Wire touched was ambient, now it's all jazz.

These categorisations are fun but only productive when they start to break down, and any is as good and bad as any other. Like massrock said we're just having fun with the categories and ideas. Very postmodern I know but I can't see a way round it.

 

[woops]

The real question posed by this thread, though, is -

Can blue men sing the whites?

 

[zhao]

I think zhao's "argument" (you seem to like the quotation marks zhao) is dodgy, not because there's nothing to it, but rather because it establishes the idea of an unbroken lineage,

why of COURSE it is an unbroken lineage. there are thousands of unbroken lineages around. it is the idea of fixed categories and abrupt jumps, that one day we woke up, and the Blues had become Rock, which is Bull Shit.

there are loads and loads of transitional period music, which straddles the cusp of what is almost always posthumously labeled this or that. i am in fact very much interested in these periods of in-between-genres music: for instance early 70s "Post-Funk" "Proto-Disco", which also had elements of Psych Rock, Jazz, etc. that shit was not only great, but firmly uncategorizible.

some may seem more abrupt: such as the transition between Disco and Hiphop. but it is only the emergence of the MC which makes it seem so, while early hiphop was based on the disco-funk blueprint for many years before slowing down to the boom-bap that we know.

the image of the evolution of music is surely one of a tree with a million branches, each with an unbroken lineage, sharing common roots --- and NOT a million little cubicles, separated by partitions.

and i positively don't know how the hell you got from my "argument" to the following:

which to my mind suggests that there are two kinds of music - the 'right' kind from the historical tradition and the 'wrong' kind, leading to a questionable, not to mention rather dull, purist approach.

wachu talkin about, woops?

 

[woops]

I think I've explained what I'm trying to say as well as I can in the post above really.
I think Woebot's systematising approach and Zhao's historical-tradition one are both useful only up to a point and reductive, and more interesting and useful when they don't work than when they do.

the image of the evolution of music is surely one of a tree with a million branches, each with an unbroken lineage, sharing common roots --- and NOT a million little cubicles, separated by partitions.

I'm also of the opinion that music making should come before theorising, that music should not be based on a theory but whatever the musician feels like doing that day. Since that's the case I should probably stay out of this thread but I can't help myself.

 

[woops]

the image of the evolution of music is surely one of a tree with a million branches, each with an unbroken lineage, sharing common roots --- and NOT a million little cubicles, separated by partitions.

Woebot's not talking about a million little cubicles. Where you have one tree he has four, and the very fact I'm typing about tree metaphors is enough to make me question the wisdom of posting in this thread.
If anyone's talking about a million little cubicles, it's me - but they have a really good communication system where any cubicle can talk to any other at any point. Ooh, music as a really well networked office. That's much better.
Just a bit of master-narrative questioning is all I'm doing.

 

[woops]

double post

 

[zhao]

music should not be based on a theory but whatever the musician feels like doing that day.

yet "what s/he feels like doing that day" is, of course, influenced by -- the mp3 his friend sent him the day before / what he saw on MTV and hated the week before / what his dad used to put on the stereo when he was a child / etc.

you get the picture. there are no isolates. products of our time and the traditions we were raised in: all of us.

 

[dd528]

Sorry to interject at this point in an interesting segue away from the thread topic...

I'm generally a fan of MIA's work, but I've always thought of her pretty much as an album artist. Her LPs have a dynamic to them, and some of the songs that I think are her best (XR2, Galang) don't really work for me outside of the context of the ebb and flow of the albums on which they feature.

So when I heard Born Free (some time before I saw the video for it), I was kind of sceptical, but I think for me it'll be worth withholding judgement until the whole album has dropped. As a stand-alone, I think it's lyrically pretty weak, but musically it's decent. It's not breaking any moulds that weren't already shattered years (if not decades) ago but, like I say, context is everything.

I'd never normally listen to that kind of hardcore/big beat sound, but if it's wedged between some kind of downtempo reworking of Bavarian folk and a heartfelt 19-minute composition for Kora (I may have unrealistic expectations of the level of experimentation she'll be bringing on the new record...) who am I to say it won't all make perfect sense before I've heard it?

The video has one trick, but I'd say it still beats most music videos that get put out.

 

[mms]

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[Tentative Andy]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/magazine/30mia-t.html?pagewanted=all

Been a lot of debate about this on Twitter today. I've never been ultra-interested in MIA but fwiw I thought this was a really well-written article.