I just need to do some venting because i have been trying to get more educated lately about various forms of art throughout history and the more i read the more angry i get with the way the entire subject is treated from such a Eurocentric and frankly often outright racist perspective.
And this is not just a problem in the West, throughout the world somehow Europeans have managed to brainwash the entire rest of the world into idolizing their art, their music, their culture and putting it on some kind of pedestal as this sort of gold standard. Why the fuck do parents in Asia for instance so often send their kids to learn to play European classical music instead of the music of their own countries? Why is it that when you read about the "greatest composers of all time" they are all some pasty Euro fuckers, most of them making art primarily for the consumption of wealthy aristocrat patrons?
As if other cultures weren't also making various forms of art for thousands of years - and many of them were no less sophisticated. (And mind you even in Europe the representation exludes the art of the lower classes, who certainly had their own music and culture that was distinct from that of the upper classes.) For once i'd like to see an African, Middle Eastern or Asian painter, writer, or composer of music traditional to their own regions get praised and elevated to the same level of respect, admiration and universal recognition as the European "classics". Why do we constantly have to put up with this big circlejerk about how "great" some toffs in wigs were for writing music that in large part only the rich could afford to have played for them because it required an entire orchestra with an absurd amount of performers?
Of course i know the answer to these rhetorical questions, it's because the dominant culture in any society tends to be the culture of the ruling class. I understand this but it still pisses me off how inescapable European upper class culture is. One of the tasks ahead of us when the revolution comes will have to be the dismantling of the centuries of accumulated cultural hegemony of the Euro bourgeoisie. The Soviets were right to encourage socialist realism as a radical departure with the bourgeois culture of the capitalist system. We need a global cultural revolution.
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:
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.
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.
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 invite you all to challenge your ears with this: https://youtu.be/u1rul1oK6VA?t=540 (specifically this part starting at 9:00 and ending 10:30). See how foreign yet how familiar it sounds.
All music since the 20th century (at least) wouldn't exist without black Americans' labor.
I could believe that since the Europeans only gain the enlightenment to progress from barbarianism after their contact with the Native Americans and the Europeans do not have concept of land ownership until the start their colonization in other continents. The European practice of ownership was ownership of objects, settlements, landmark, and distinctive geographical features of a land before contact with Native Americans. The Native Americans in the North American Great Lakes do owned low quality land and share high quality land which make them equally or more advanced than the European by the modern European standards. The European kingdoms also justify colonialism with the claim that colonized people are necessary for the European Industrial Revolution while many countries of the people of colors need to undergo industrialization without free riding and despite exploitation from European diaspora.
I disagree with the broad statement that Europeans did not have a concept of land ownership before encountering native Americans and colonizing other continents. Elcousure, for example, happened before both.
This is an excellent comment, thank you! I think there is this sort of disconnect between popular music, which is often still to this day derided as "low art" no matter how popular it is, and what is taught even to this day in institutions of higher learning as "proper music", i.e. European classical music and the musical theory that is held up as "the correct way" to understand music, according to the harmonic rules and structures of classical music, and if something does not compare satisfactorily to those standards then it is called "undeveloped", "simplistic" or even "primitive". A really big deal gets made of how intellectually superior European classical music is and there are these endless circlejerks that go on for hours and hours about how complex and how smart and how "perfect" Bach and Mozart are because of this and that mathematical structure hidden in them or some particularly ingenious harmonic resolution or whatever. I mean some of it sounds great, sure, but so does a lot of way "simpler" popular music or music of other cultures. And i come from a STEM background so you'd think i'd appreciate all of this technical bullshit that they always go on about in classical music theory, but i just find it all so pretentious. Not the music itself, i have nothing against the music or the people who wrote it, but the way that it is talked about just gets on my fucking nerves.
For once i'd like to hear the same kind of praise for, say, Indian ragas, or any other non-European music form (except for Jazz which has kind of begrudgingly become accepted over the last century or so as something that the intellectual elites are allowed to fawn over in the way they do classical music - of course while trying to distance it from its African roots).
Fascinating and well-written. Could you point us to some West African drummers/groups with great drums? And if I can be picky, maybe something faster or more aggressive than your youtube link?
Unfortunately, my knowledge of West African music is not really direct, but through its influence in the religious and popular music of Brazil. So I can't really recommend too many natively African artists, but I can pinpoint some very genuinely West African music from Brazil.
A couple of Africans I can recommend are Aziz Faye and Aruna Sidibe. Here's a video of Sidibe playing with another guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sKctPHvwmk
But I'm not really versed on the African conceptualization of their own music to recommend specific things. I only know it through a Brazilian lens.
So for me faster and aggressive rhythms are usually associated with a drum pattern we call Barravento in portuguese (means something like "wind breaker"). It's very associated with songs for the Yoruba storm deity called Oyá / Yansã, although it can be used for other occasions as well. The first song in this collection is an example (note that it's a tradition in this type of song to accelerate as it progresses):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkB4cXf45Ss (notice that they're singing in Portuguese, not Yoruba)
You'd get surprise of how well this sounds over a metal beat! 😆 Actually some metal drumrolls are very reminiscent of this pattern for me. This is HARD to play. More than once I fucked up my hand playing this stuff.
Just a comment on this. Isn't it wonderful? In so called western music one of the most important things is to keep the rhythm steady. And you have here a tradition where the whole point is to rush it as it goes along.
This is something that people need to understand so bad about art that it gets me really riled up.