|
hybrid music
If you're interested in what a culture in radical transition might look like, you could do worse than to study Southeast Asia. Over the past few decades Southeast Asia has emerged as a unique crossbreeding of traditional agrarian culture with industrial age technology and American cultural exports. The resultant culture has produced a wealth of genuinely unusual hybrid music. Let me refer you to Trikont's collection Ho! Roady Music From Vietnam, which serves as an excellent documentation of a scene in which Vietnamese funeral bands imitate Western musical forms (bluegrass and hip-hop among them) on traditional Asian instruments...
Things grow even more complicated with the interesting case of the Sun City Girls. They're American, but they've traveled widely in Southeast Asia. The end result is that their music ends up (occasionally) sounding like a Western imitiation of Southeast Asian musicians imitating Western forms... that is when it doesn't end up sounding like freakout jazz or spoken word.
Anyway, they're playing tonight in Chicago; I can't wait. Chicago Reader critic Peter Margasak provides all the necessary preface: "For a San Francisco show in 1992 the band members simply played a tape of chirping crickets, performed skits, and ground marshmallows into the floor with their feet." Labels: culture, music_commentary |
Friday, November 15, 2002
2:46 PM
|
