A Modest Proposal

Calvin Wong wrote on his blog:

aspiring singers need to expose themselves to various music cultures and infuse their own creativity and created something unique but accessible by `normal' people. Pushing the boundary step by step. If you are not comfortable with Cantonese then sing in Mandarin? It doesn't need to be a ballad. It can be a rap, rock, jazz, soul, funk, nu-metal as long as it's good and you like it and most comfortable with. Good news is that there is a superstar in every genre of music there is.

And this

Media needs to start educating the consumer that there is a whole wide world of music out there. Be adventurous with the playlist but don't send them to the orbit with your knowledge. They have lost all Western music sense and consumer needs time to get back into it. Instead of programming Sigur Ros, try Coldplay or Keane. Instead of Method Man, Music Soulchild or Kayshia Cole, try introducing them to Chris Brown, Usher and Rihanna. Internet and You Tube has been a revolution as well for us not relying on been force feed by media and allow an ordinary person to experience new music themselves.  

I have been posting a lot of my favorite music on AnD in the past month or so.  This is music that has meant so much to me that I just want to share it with as many people as I can, hoping that others can see that there is a whole world of music out there that is pretty accessible, yet different from what we hear coming from our own Top 40 radio stations, MTV and the other “usual suspects” that bring popular music into our lives.  I have been sharing artists and cuts that I think a lot of people would find accessible without too much explanation on my part.  These are artists who, when I first heard them, I stopped in my tracks and wanted to know immediately “who is that”?  Of course, there are some things I’m not sure the world at large is necessarily ready for—opera (although the Chinese composer Tan Dun and the Argentine Osvaldo Golijov are producing some amazing and untraditional contemporary works), most classical music (it breaks my heart to say this), non-Western classical music, and a lot of the more cerebral types of jazz, etc.  As amazing as I find Sharam Nazari’s  traditional classical Iranian singing of lyrics by the Persian Sufi masters like Rumi with traditional Iranian ensemble, it is probably an acquired taste that most will never acquire. :-)

I invite other AnD members to share with us one or two of your favorite pieces of music.  You Tube and other Internet compendiums have literally millions of examples of music videos and audio tracks easily downloaded and added to your blog.  This is how we learn about music from other parts of the world and outside the mainstream in our own world. 

My adventures in this type of music can all be blamed on David Byrne (Talking Heads) and his very first Brazilian music compilation in 1989.  When I heard the music that was coming out of Brazil, I was humbled, exhilarated and excited beyond belief.  Those were the bad old days—no Internet, so no You Tube and no web commerce.  Just finding the music was a major scavenger hunt.  There were two ways you found music from half a world away—you went there yourself and stuffed your suitcase with as much of the local music as you could, or you found some mail order source that would sell you what little they were importing.  It was definitely hit or miss.  Whole parts of the world were totally unknown (I never heard of Cantopop, for example—I simply had no idea what was being produced in Hong Kong in its glory days).  How different it is today.  If I want to experience the music of the Spanish alt-pop diva, Bebe, I can go to You Tube and watch literally dozens of videos: from professionally produced music videos, to live concert performances, fan vids, fan karaoke to their favorite songs, you name it, it is there.  If I want to watch videos of Anthony Wong Yiu Ming, Hong Kong alt-pop music master, there they are in all of their glory.  I was looking up a video by the Spanish flamenco/bolero/classical singer Mayte Martin, her Vidalita, and it linked on You Tube to some indigenous group from South American playing the folk version of the vidalita, perhaps the same one that was turned into flamenco by an enterprising young woman visiting Argentina with her bullfighter father in the 1870s, and then transformed into flamenco music that took the nightclub scene by storm in 1880s Seville.

Music, what would we do without it?  Share the wealth, share the love, make someone’s day, change the course of someone’s life.  It has certainly changed mine.