Revisiting an old rant

Above is a Siberian band Otyken performing their song, Storm. I had slotted it for a TGIF music video, but I decided I wanted to talk about it a bit more and so this week we get a TGIF Eve song as well. 

Over a decade ago I did a series of posts on the Music of Mali. I think the series of posts was a bit disconnected and I never clearly got across what I was trying to say. One thread of the series, which was the hook for it all, was summed up in the final post:

I've been languidly writing a series of posts about the music of Mali. Using contemporary Malian musicians as a backdrop, I've noted that West African music was taken to the New World via the slave trade. There, in the isolation of the Age of Sail, it evolved separately in the U.S., the Caribbean, Latin America and Brazil.

In the mid 20th century the music of this diaspora returned to Africa via records, radio and Cuban advisers. African musicians absorbed these influences and integrated them into their music. At the same time African musicians were traveling to Europe where they encountered the Brazilian strain of the diaspora and, more importantly to their pocket books, found a European concert circuit that they could tour.

That thread was the lead up to my reason for doing the series of posts, discussed below:

In 1969 Nonesuch Explorer, a record label that specialized in anthropological recordings of tribal and ethnic music, brought out Goro Yamaguchi's album A Bell Ringing in The Empty Sky.

When it was released, it was difficult to find the album, much less hear it played on the radio. You might hear it late at night on the radio or find it randomly filed someplace in an off-beat record store, but the odds were against either. I found it in a large, and faintly eccentric, record store in downtown Milwaukee. It was the first non-American/European record I ever bought.

All of Nonesuch's records faced that problem, as well as music from Brazil, Ireland, Latin America, Spain, Greece, India (represented by Ravi Shankar, popularized by the Beatles) and a few other oddities -- like the amusingly ridiculous musical "archeologist" Elizabeth Waldo. There was no place for any of these records, and so they fell through the cracks if they were carried at all.

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That problem persisted until 1987. In that year a group of promoters met and decided to bundle it together under a genre they called World Music. They planned festivals, awards, worked the radio stations and, most importantly of all, delivered browser cards to record stores so the music could easily be binned. While still a niche market, the ability to properly bin the records, and for customers to find it, greatly increased the reach of the new genre.

The people who created this new genre were representatives of independent record companies, broadcasters and concert promoters who met in London in 1987 to create it. They were left leaning and had a bias against anything not 'authentic' so that paradoxically large swathes of the World's actual popular music: J-Pop, Bollywood, Filipino and any other band not toeing the 'authentic' line was still invisible in American and European record bins and tours. 

Worse for the excluded bands, the Western money wasn't there for them. It was all a sort of unofficial NGO soft propaganda. In another post I elaborated:

The song I've embedded above is the blind duo Malian of of Amadou and Miriam. They were fairly obscure even in Mali, only selling a few thousand records, until a musician named Manu Chao collaborated with them. The first album they produced with him sold over 600,000 copies.

Manu Chao is actually a French singer of Spanish ancestry (his parents left Spain after his grandfather was executed by the Franco regime). He started out doing rockabilly, drifted into French punk music and reinvented himself by traveling through South and Central America absorbing their style and using his linguistic skills to sing in a pastiche of languages. Oh, and he's a hard core leftist -- his band Radio Bemba Sound System is named after the radio gear Castro and Guevara used during the Cuban revolution.

The name World Music is a misnomer. It was chosen more or less at random, and these days it would be more accurate to call it The Music of Fuzzy-Headed Liberal Lonely Planet Backpackers. OK, I'm exaggerating to make a cheap joke, but regardless it is pretty clearly slanted towards a transnational mind set.

I thought about that series of posts when I first watched the above video by Otyken. It has 3 million plus views, so they are popular, but I still wonder what is the story of their promotion?  

  

Siberian fast food joints

As a Florida boy for me Siberia is so cold it is hard to imagine, unless you're Jussie Smollett, going out in the cold to a fast food restaurant for some convenience food. Of course Siberians are used to their climate and when the urge hits, the urge hits.

Matt and Julia are a young English couple that travel and make YouTubes and guides. Above is their video about Siberian fast food restaurants. While the usual international chains are starting to open stores in the area, there are smaller local chains that have menus offering more local fare. It is these chains that they sample.

  

Walking in Norilsk, Siberia

 Situated above the Arctic Circle and with a population of ~175,000 Norilsk is the northern most city of 100,000 or more. The city exists because of large nickel deposits in the area. The mining of the nickel has led to high levels of pollution in the city and surrounding areas.

This video was filmed in the spring. It is raining a bit, and it looks like there is some slush from the melting snow. The city is rather grim looking. The Soviet style block apartments buildings are intentional, they help cut down on the wind cutting through the city.

 

Hiding in Siberia

The sight that greeted the geologists as they entered the cabin was like something from the middle ages. Jerry-built from whatever materials came to hand, the dwelling was not much more than a burrow—"a low, soot-blackened log kennel that was as cold as a cellar," with a floor consisting of potato peel and pine-nut shells. Looking around in the dim light, the visitors saw that it consisted of a single room. It was cramped, musty and indescribably filthy, propped up by sagging joists—and, astonishingly, home to a family of five:

The silence was suddenly broken by sobs and lamentations. Only then did we see the silhouettes of two women. One was in hysterics, praying: 'This is for our sins, our sins.' The other, keeping behind a post... sank slowly to the floor. The light from the little window fell on her wide, terrified eyes, and we realized we had to get out of there as quickly as possible.

Agafia Lykova (left) with her sister, Natalia.

Led by Pismenskaya, the scientists backed hurriedly out of the hut and retreated to a spot a few yards away, where they took out some provisions and began to eat. After about half an hour, the door of the cabin creaked open, and the old man and his two daughters emerged—no longer hysterical and, though still obviously frightened, "frankly curious." Warily, the three strange figures approached and sat down with their visitors, rejecting everything that they were offered—jam, tea, bread—with a muttered, "We are not allowed that!" When Pismenskaya asked, "Have you ever eaten bread?" the old man answered: "I have. But they have not. They have never seen it." At least he was intelligible. The daughters spoke a language distorted by a lifetime of isolation. "When the sisters talked to each other, it sounded like a slow, blurred cooing." (source: Smithsonian Magazine)

The Smithsonian Magazine has an amazing story about a family of hermits found living in the wilds of Siberia. The father, Karp Lykov, was a member of a fundamentalist Orthodox sect called the Old Believers.

The sect had been persecuted under the Tsars, and things only got worse for them when the communists took over. In 1936, during the purges, Lykov's brother was killed in front of him for his faith and Karp took his family and fled into the Siberian wilderness seeking safety. Over the years they moved several times and faced bouts of near starvation.

They were found in 1978 by a group of geologists surveying the area. The article discusses their introduction to the modern world, and the difficulties they had adjusting. It is a fascinating story of lives spent on the fringe.