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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • There are two areas that make me very angry in this debate: music and African art.

    In music there’s this completely ridiculous myth that popular music is based and influenced primarily by the harmonic and melodic language of Western Classical music(*). That it is somehow a popularization and bastardization of this “highest peak” of achievement of that extended Europe.

    This is completely absurd!!!

    First of all, even if you consider only the music traditionally produced in Western Europe and its area of cultural hegemony, what we call Western Classical music is a ridiculously thin and restricted strip even of this whole.

    Western Classical Music is a tradition that encompass the techniques, conceptualizations, rules, styles, etc, etc, that governed how musicians produced the music for the use of the European elites at first and then the elites of the areas were European culture was transplanted to through colonialism. It started as the music for the Church and Nobility, that tradition was adopted for the music of the Bourgeoisie and later was adopted for the music of the bourgeois intellectual and cultural elites.

    This elitist tradition is not representative AT ALL of the whole of the music produced even within Europe!!! Popular and folk music within Europe have their own traditions that are independent of and conversant with the music of the elites. There is a dialogue between the two, but they are not confused traditions. There are things that are valid, good and acceptable for one that is out of character and dislocated in the other in both directions.

    To give a single example, Common Practice music (the Tonal period, lets say, from Monteverdi to Tchaikovsky), counter-melodies moving in parallel intervals, specially in fifths, were considered very bad practice (**). For the specific style of counterpoint they wanted to make it causes lines to blend too much instead of creating the effect of polyphony, of simultaneous and independent voices. But it was tremendously common in European folk music where that specific thing about counterpoint wasn’t a concern!!! See? A cardinal, very important rule in one tradition was regularly broken in a concurrent tradition that was used by other people in the same place!

    Second of all our current contemporary popular music has an overwhelmingly bigger influence from sources that are not European and sources that are not the music of the European elite. Most music that is listened by young people in the USA/Europe/so-called Western sphere of cultural influence has three sources:

    1. The harmony and melody of European popular music. Yes, this have interplayed and dialogued with the so-called classical musical, but it’s not identical with it. And it have, beyond it’s own particular traditions, the influence of surrounding areas, since popular music tend to be less insular about that. See for example how much of Iberian, French and Italian popular musics were influenced by Northern African, West Asian music and Mediterranean sources in general.

    2. The harmony and melody of Blues and the Jazz, and with them a whole host of harmonic and melodic traditions both from African origin and indigenously developed in the Americas by the enslaved Africans and their descendants.

    3. The harmony and melody of the indigenous cultures of America, which is an understudied and incredibly neglected part of the mix, which is there if you know were to look.

    But you noticed there’s one thing I haven’t mentioned so far which is fucking RHYTHM? Which is that one thing that we all know that Europeans simply don’t have? Hahahahah. I’m kidding, of course, but this is super important.

    I’ve been repeatedly using the term “harmony and melody” above because that’s what “Western Classical Music” is all about. It’s very little about rhythm. But our popular music is incredibly rhythmic! Where does it come from? It comes from all over the place, including even Europe, but the most important rhythmic influence in a lot of our popular music is West African drums. Rock, Jazz, Blues, Funk, Hip Hop, Drum & Bass, R&B, Soul, Latin music, etc, etc, I could list a thousand genres.

    Whenever you see a Metal drummer do a cool drumroll, he’s drinking from this source. Whenever you move your body to the “bop bopbop-bop bopbop-bop bopbop-bop” in Shape Of You by freaking Ed Sheeran, you’re listening to something that was brought to our shared culture by enslaved African people.

    Of course it’s not the only source. The boring “one-two-THREE-four boom-BOP-boom-BOP-boom-BOP” you hear below the cool stuff is kind of European. Hahahaha. But the rich rhythmic layer on the music we REALLY spend most of our time listening too definitely didn’t come from freaking Bach or Mozart.

    And it doesn’t stop there. Have you ever listened to popular harmonies? They are completely outside the language of classical music! It owes a lot more to other traditions. Hell, the most basic rock-and-roll harmony template sometimes resolves a dominant chord to another dominant chord!!! Common Practice theoreticians would be absolutely flabbergasted with that.

    That ridiculous myth of Western Classical Music as the pinnacle of music achievement from which all our current music flows from as corruption and degeneration is simply cultural colonialism. It’s bullshit. It’s wrong and pernicious.

    I say: long live the Africans who didn’t forget how to play their drums and beautiful harmonies even after being kidnapped, enslaved and brutalized, and forcefully transplanted from their home. Long live the indigenous peoples of America, who didn’t forget how to play their flutes and drums even after being murdered, decimated, raped and brutally expropriated. Long live the working class who came from all over the world to the Americas, frequently forced by economic oppression, war and exploitation, and brought with them their horns, guitars and voices. And long live the working people’s of the whole world who everyday contribute their voices to complex tapestry of musical culture who persists despite cultural colonialism. The people who instead of passively consuming the colonial culture, ingest what’s available, digest it, mix with what they know and out spits back something of their own.

    (*) Or “concert music”, “art music”, “erudite music”, “common practice music” or whatever other ridiculous and pompous name we give to that thing. You know what I’m talking about – that shared musical tradition that includes from late medieval European church music up until the New Music movement passing through the Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern, etc, etc. I know people complain when we call it Classical Music, because the classical period is a specific period, but if you force me I will call it “Music of the European Ruling Class”.

    (**) That changed later, but only in the late Romantic and early Modern period.






  • I’m not Muslim but I’m a religious person (I follow a Brazilian-African religious tradition called Umbanda) so I think I can try to respectfully chime in with my perspective.

    For me personally it all boils down to recognizing that different spheres of your experience can be governed by different processes, with different rules.

    When it comes to material interaction with the sensible world, I’m thoroughly and 100% materialistic. I don’t attribute metaphysical explanations to material processes.

    And honestly I think presuming that religion necessarily means attributing metaphysical explanations to stuff is a very stubborn miscomprehension of how religions other than Christianity works. Most religions are really not very interested in building systems of reasoning about the world and doctrinal orthodoxy like European Christianity is.

    They are much more focused on ritual, on human connection, on sociality, and experience of the divine. And those things aren’t at all incompatible with a thoroughly materialistic view of how the sensible world works.

    EDIT:

    Sorry for editing, but I think my answer wasn’t complete enough.

    I think looking at religion as a system of beliefs is a fundamental eurocentric misunderstanding of those things we call religion that aren’t western european Christianity. Specially protestant Christianity, which is a very specific practice, extremely focused on belief, and rationalistic systems of thought.

    Most of the things we call religions: eastern varieties of Christianity, Buddhism, a lot of branches of Islam, Judaism, etc, etc are decidedly not about belief, but about practice, sociality and experience.

    Think like this: what you have to do to be a good protestant christian? You have to have specific beliefs about who Jesus was, what he did, the significance of his actions, what is sin, what is salvation, what is grace, etc, etc, etc. It’s a whole system of thought.

    What do you have to do to be a good Muslim? Practice the tenets of Islam. Practice the pillars. It’s not a person who adheres to a long list of beliefs. As a system of belief it can be summarized in a single phrase: there’s only one God and a specific person is a prophet of this god. That’s it. The rest is about practice, ritual, sociality and experience.

    That is not incompatible with a thoroughly materialistic view of how society organizes, of the processes that create exploitation in capitalism, etc, etc.

    EDIT 2:

    That’s the last edit I promise.

    Just a quick comment that there are those who argue that the word “religion” is a bad category. That lumping together all those different human experiences as instances of the same phenomenon is kind of unhelpful. Precisely because it necessarily draws an eurocentric comparison with Christianity which is prone to cause misunderstanding of those phenomena.




  • there’s a whole issue of is their system secure? Is it noncorrupt? Does it meet all the standards … every other nation in NATO does.

    Uh… HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. This is a joke, right?

    Is Turkey noncorrupt? Is the US noncorrupt? Is the UK noncorrupt?

    Even by capitalist standards of “noncorruption”? Gimme a break…

    Even most right-wingers, even people who believe in capitalism would readily admit those countries are highly corrupt.





  • I’m old so when I was a teenager the Spice Girls were on top of the charts.

    I would blast Spice Girls songs on my stereo and sing along. I don’t know how it was around the world but here it was heavily considered “girl music” in the 90s and if anyone from school saw me doing that they would heavily bully me and call me gay or whatever.

    Luckily for me I lived very far away from school, and also discovered myself as bisexual 20 years later soooo… call me gay as much as you like. :)