Category: Culture

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Culture

Cultural blinkers

I’ve got quite a lot of African music these days.* I bought the first CD (The Rough Guide To The Music of Kenya and Tanzania) some years ago because I had fond memories of the music I remembered them playing on buses in East Africa, a style of music I now know is called soukous.

It was only really when I started getting music from the internet that my selection of African music moved from one or two CDs to hundreds of songs, much of it downloaded from mp3 blogs but also quite a lot I paid for – Calabash particularly made it easier. Now that I have enough that it comes up on iTunes quite often, the initial touristy, exotic quality has worn off a bit and I just find it hard to believe that this stuff is so far below the cultural radar in the UK. It’s not difficult music for the Western ear in the way that music from North Africa or Asia can be; I mean, it has a distinctly African quality to it, and that’s part of the charm, just as a sense of place is part of the charm of reggae, or country music. But most of it is to some degree or another derived from familiar genres – jazz, Latin, funk, or whatever. And indeed reggae and hip hop, for the more recent stuff. And the best of it is just very good music.

I wouldn’t expect an African band to have a string of hit singles in the UK, but there’s a complete absence from the fringes of the fringes of the mainstream of even one act that a man in the street might be able to name. It just seems ridiculous. Indeed, the whole of African music hardly even gets its own genre – instead it’s bundled into the ghetto of ‘world music’ along with French chansons, dub remixes of Finnish folk songs and the Spanish klezmer.

My point isn’t really about African music. If I have a point. It’s that unwillingness to reach out beyond the culture you happen to have been born into. It’s the same complaint people have about the lack of translated novels for sale. I don’t think it’s anything as decisive as the rejection of other cultures, just a complete absence of interest.

Oh well. If the English can learn to enjoy garlic and spicy food, who knows where we’ll end. Maybe in a few years the hottest new tunes from the dancefloors of Kinshasa will go straight to the jukebox of the Dog and Duck.

*mainly via Calabash, Benn loxo du taccu, Aduna, Matsuli Music, Awesome Tapes From Africa and the Rough Guide compilations.

Categories
Culture Me

A super-glamorous new look for Heraclitean Fire

Which isn’t actually going to happen. I was working on a new look for the blog a while ago, but came to the conclusion it was going to be just too memory-intensive. It’s heavy on the graphics, and because it uses lots of sharp-edged high-contrast shapes, you can’t compress the images very much without getting lots of glitching.

Anyway, I thought I’d produce a mock up to show you. If I’d worked it up into a full WordPress theme, I daresay I would have tweaked various things, not least the text styling. But it’ll give you the idea. I’ve done it as a PDF, although I don’t know why really.

Categories
Culture

Dada, modernism and suchlike

I seem to have gone a bit link-happy over the past 24 hours, producing a daily links post which is far too long. So I’ll single out one of them in case you miss it: Charles Simic on Dada.

I always think of continental Europe as being the natural home of modernism. The Great War, the Russian Revolution and the growth of fascism provided the context for art of real ferocity. There always seems to be a disconnect between that and the work of British and American modernists like Eliot and Woolf. That’s a terrible simplification, of course, but still, you get an odd perspective on modernism if you learn about it through the lens of English-language literature.

Anyway. Read the Simic.

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Culture Other

9rules Writing Community

9rules strikes me as potentially a great idea. It’s basically a conglomeration of blogs, each of which has been approved as reaching a certain standard of quality.

The 9rules Network is a community of the best weblogs in the world on a variety of topics. We started 9rules to give passionate writers more exposure and to help readers find great blogs on their favorite subjects. It’s difficult to find sites worth returning to, so 9rules brings together the very best of the independent web all under one roof.

They have periodic application periods when they winnow out the sheep from the goats and accept the sheep. The approved blogs are then sorted by subject.

Since blogs are many and multiplying, any way of finding the good stuff has to be a good thing. But I decided to look at the blogs which have been accepted into the 9rules Writing Community. It hasn’t given me great faith in their quality control. One of the various principles they claim for themselves is that

A nicely-designed site might draw readers in, but it’s the content that keeps them coming back.

But given that at least two of the ten in their ‘writing community’ are blogs which are nicely designed but whose content is seriously poor (1, 2), I find myself unpersuaded. The most likely scenario is that the people who selected the blogs just weren’t very literary by inclination; my point really is that they aren’t doing their credibility any good.

In the interests of balance I’ll point out one more 9rules literary blog, PoetryReviews.Ca, where they review Canadian poetry books and seem to do a good job of it.

But generally the 1rule which is most important seems to be ‘style over content’. Perhaps that’s unfair. Perhaps the many good blogs that can be found among my long poetry blogroll just haven’t applied, so 9rules don’t know what they’re missing.

Categories
Culture Other

FSotW: Red Brick Wall

Today’s Flickr set of the week is Red Brick Wall. Admirably single-minded, I thought.



originally uploaded by Special.


originally uploaded by Special.
Categories
Culture

Africa in the news

Or rather, Africa not in the news. I have to admit, I haven’t been in news-junkie mode recently, but how did I miss this?

This week we bring you music from the Democratic Republic of Congo to recognize the incredible moment in history we are witnessing. In the largest UN overseen election in history, 58 million Congolese citizens will choose their elected leaders for the first time in 46 years! With over 33 candidates for president and 9,500 people running for 500 legislative seats the ballots are sure to be long, just finding your candidate will be a challenge.

The reason it’s a big deal is not just that a previously undemocratic country is going to try to become a democracy. It’s that between 1996 and 2003, the DRC was the scene of a brutal and long-running war, triggered by the Rwandan genocide, in which about 4 million people are estimated to have died. Nine nations were directly involved.

I’ve read a few people recently try to make some kind of rhetorical point by comparing the amount of media attention that the Middle East gets with the coverage of Darfur. But the truth is that if anything, before the West got bored with it, Darfur got an unusually large amount of attention for an African conflict. After all, Sudan has been in a state of civil war for most of the time since independence in 1956, but that hasn’t spent much time in the papers.

I’m not claiming any personal virtue here – if you’d asked me, I probably would have said that Congo was still at war, even though the war formally ended in 2003. I only learned differently via the quote above, which is from Calabash. And I had to get all my information about the war from Wikipedia. Anyway. Fingers crossed that Central Africa is on an upward path.

And a plug for Calabash. They describe themselves as ‘The World’s First Fair Trade Music Company’, and they’re a great source for world music. Calabash offers regular free singles for download.

To mark the election we give you ‘Ba Kristo’, from Kekele’s hot new album “Kinavana”. By paying homage to the Cuban composer Guillermo Portabales, the album brings the two countries together across the black atlantic in the most joyous and musical of ways. ‘Ba Kristo’ is based on the music of Portabales’ song “El Carretero”, but instead of telling a wagoner’s tale it denounces the efforts of evangelical churches in Africa to ban all music that is not Christian.

I’ve got some great music from them, and I can definitely recommend the latest free single. I think I’ll buy the album. Songs are 99¢ each, but note that you can save money by buying 20 song credits for $14.99 – i.e. 75¢ each.