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Posts tagged ‘Music’

May 12

In Search of Authenticity

Review in Persian of Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s by Ilia Farahani at Rouzgar.com.

Feb 22

The Times They Are A-Changin’ – fifty years on

The Guardian, 22 February, 2014

Fifty years ago this month, the 22 year old Bob Dylan released his third album, The Times They Are A-Changin, the acme and as it turned out the end of his “protest” period. Dylan renounced this genre so quickly, and took his fans on such a giddy journey afterwards, that there’s a tendency to downplay the extraordinary achievement and impact of his work in this brief initial phase of a long career.

As a collection, the album is one of the high watermarks of political song-writing in any musical genre. These are beautifully crafted, tightly-focussed mini-masterpieces. And they have a radical edge, a political toughness, that one rarely finds in the folk music of the period. Abstract paeans to peace and brotherhood were not for Dylan; the songs are uncompromising in their anger and unsparing in their analysis. Read more

Jan 23

My fantasy career (or why there is no such thing as world music)

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 23 January

In another life, I’d like to have been an ethnomusicologist. It would have been a wonderfully open-ended excuse to discover new music, to travel and imbibe foreign cultures at close range.

As an academic discipline ethnomusicology began as a western study of non-western music, but in recent decades it has come to embrace the study of the musics of the peoples of the world, western and non-western, elite and popular, parochial and cosmopolitan. In particular, ethnomusicology studies the musics of the peoples of the world in their social settings. It hears them as part of, and sometimes a key to, a larger culture. Read more

Feb 1

Not pop as we know it: flamenco and the quest for authenticity

CONTENDING FOR THE LIVING
Red Pepper, Feb-March 2010

This article has appeared in a revised form on The Guardian’s Comment is free website.

Flamenco is a name widely known but a music little understood, at least beyond its Andalusian heartland. Forget about Hollywood images of flounces and castanets. Even the bravura solo guitarists and dance troupes are peripheral. The heart of flamenco is the cante, the art of flamenco song. It’s most compelling spectacle is starkly simple: a lone cantaor (singer) and a lone guitarist sitting on straight-backed chairs on a bare stage, plumbing the “cante jondo”, the “deep songs” associated with the gypsies of southern Spain.
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Nov 12

Dissent and rock n roll on the far side of fifty

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 4 November

Two remarkable works of contemporary American art have lightened my load in recent weeks. Both are the products of dissident white men in their fifties, deeply versed in their song-writing craft, steeped in American musical traditions and at the same time driven by opposition to current American policies, foreign and domestic. Read more

Dec 18

A rasika’s tribute

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 17 December

HERE I am in London and the December season is underway in Chennai. To the unconverted, Carnatic music is staid, forbiddingly technical, repetitive, elitist. And some of its devotees do seem determined to live up the stereotype, preoccupied with tradition, treating the music like a zone of purity, forever besieged by the forces (the temptations) of impurity.

I’ve been lucky enough to pass at least a part of the season in Chennai and I think both parties have got it wrong. Read more

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