geography and The urban experience


stephanie (nnine@yahoo.com)
Fri, 3 Dec 1999 09:04:37 -0800 (PST)



so glad someone else tagged onto this new thread...

to summarize this message for the delete-happy: some
music is tied to a place, some to a groundless state
of mind. why is that? examples?

yeah, for me the classic examples of genres being
really linked to a physical place are hiphop, j/dnb,
and a lot of brazillian styles, let's say batucada for
argument's sake.

yeah, I can go apeshit for any of this, but when I
hear great big london style breaks being played by one
of the super stars over there in england, versus some
schmuck over here in the states, there is definitely a
difference, can't put my finger on it, like hearing
someone speak with an accent. I think that even if
you're not from a place you can take the art that's
created there and build your own experience around it,
respond with your own emotions and experiences, and in
fact you SHOULD, because attempting to recreate a
foreign atmosphere that you don't intimately,
intrinsically understand, is probably totally futile.

(breathe)

therefore on a subconscious level (oh jeez i'm
babbling) the way I experience jungle and batucada is
!overwhelming! but intrinsically different from that
of a native. Nothing wrong with that! It's still the
shit!!!

However, other musics don't seem to be tied to a
physical place so much as a state of mind. A lot of
quirky, skittery, bleepy, breaky dnb I've been into
lately is the domain of quirky skittery people and
their wacked out psyches, not the town they grew up
in. (think plug, phume, icarus, funky porcini, etc).
When I play this stuff I feel like a native speaker.
When I play Da Lata and Gilberto Gil, I am giving a
nod to cultures I love and respect. When I play Celia
Vaz, I'm doing both.

so, uh, anyone else have similar experience or
examples of music which for them has no basis in
physical reality? Oh my, and I haven't even been
reading any william gibson lately...

--- Beside <beside@makeme.com> wrote:
> ----------
> >From: Jason Mariyappan <jason.mariyappan@ic.ac.uk>
> >Just to stir things up a little - the place and
> environment has a lot to do
> >with the music people come up with. Good hip hop
> from the U.S. cannot be
> >made in the same way in Europe unless, which of
> course, happens, is just
> >very weakly copied. The urban experience for those
> into hip hop is real
> >different to that in the U.S., e.g. listen to the
> French hip hop.
>
> Well, hiphop isnt just about "the urban experience"
> tho. Some of the topics
> various mcs go on about is truly universal and will
> seem just as familiar to
> someone in Korea as someone in the Bronx.
> Listen to The Grouch's "success is destiny" (the
> whole album, not just the
> titletrack)... he's from Oakland and im from a small
> city in Northern Norway
> (just about as far from Oakland as you can possibly
> get), still i can relate
> to 90% of what he talks about (that album even made
> me quit my old job!
> thats how much i can relate to it). Alot of Public
> Enemys, X-Clans and Brand
> Nubians songs will make just as much sense to a kid
> in South Africa or
> France as to someone in Brooklyn. Aceyalone is from
> LA, but even a pigfarmer
> from Spain might be able to relate to "Faces"...
>
> Its not all guns and blunts you know, and they
> really arent kidding when
> they say that hiphop is universal.
>
> p's
> Beside
>

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