teabowl

Today’s bookmarks:

• Measure for Measure - Opinion - New York Times Blog - “The contributors to this blog — all accomplished songwriters — will pull back the curtain on the creative process as they write about their work on a songs in the making.”
• Kale with Garlic and Cranberries Recipe at Epicurious.com - “Garlicky kale, a robust winter green, gains an unexpected twist with dried cranberries’ saucy hits of tartness.”
• homeownership, real estate, mortgage crisis, housing | Salon Life - “How vastly overrated and costly and crazy-making an enterprise home ownership turns out to be.”

What is it about popular music, sung in English, that originates from outside of the English-speaking world? This is a topic that’s occupied me for a few years now. Not in the least because I didn’t grow up speaking English, or in the English-speaking world. My own relationship with popular music has been one of love for the sounds, textures and rhythms before I was ever able to appreciate, or even understand, the lyrics. Words, for me, have always remained secondary. This makes my experience of music very different to that of most people I know. It’s also influenced how I have approached and consumed the music I’ve loved: I can still sing/hum Stevie Wonder’s harmonica solo in the Eurythmics’ “There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart)” note for note, but I could barely tell you what the song is about. Conversely, I struggle to truly appreciate people like Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan.

The world is full of people who don’t speak or understand English. Yet English is still the single most important language for singing popular music. While it’s the lingua franca of pop and widely listened to everywhere from Russia to Argentina, it’s not necessarily understood by those listening. And of course it’s not really necessary to understand the words to appreciate great music. (What’s interesting is how the music may be adopted by another culture but its level of ‘cool factor’ may not be fully understood; witness Queen’s undying popularity in South America, or the somewhat surprising, though nothing short of delightful, Siegeszug of Germany’s Rammstein in North America.)

Pop sung in English is almost completely pervasive. There are strong movements in a variety of geographies in support of rock sung in the native tongue (Rock en Español or Deutschrock come to mind), but the majority of artists from outside the UK-US-Canada nexus that have achieved any kind of international exposure sing in English. And I think their music is often particularly vivid: it has a musical ’sheen,’ a certain glow that often elevates it above their peers’ output from the UK-US-Canada.

I don’t think there are any ‘accepted’ theories about this anywhere, so I’ll posit a few thoughts and suspicions, and we’ll see if they fit. I think that artists from ‘elsewhere’ who sing in English treat pop music like something special, something that doesn’t really belong to them. The associated danger is that they’ll make it into a cliché - and the less accomplished do that quite readily. But there are many instances where pop from elsewhere is more beautiful and reverential, a musical hommage to pop and everything associated with it. Is there something like a ‘beautiful cliché’? Let’s maybe call it an archetype instead.

Singles 1984-2004

a-ha. Warner Strategic Marketing 2004, Audio CD, $6.61

A-ha are an interesting example of a band from elsewhere. The three Norwegians found international exposure and acceptance in the early-to-mid 80s with a string of hits. What most people missed was that they were serious songwriters, with excellent English lyrics, and that Morten Harket’s pronounciation was as highbrow Brit as the news on BBC World. A-ha dropped from view for many years in the 90s but have since returned with several excellent, mature pop albums that are culturally switched-on, beautifully written and produced and a great enhancement to their body of work (Minor Earth Major Sky, Lifelines, Analogue and the wonderful live How Can I Sleep With Your Voice In My Head?). Perhaps Norway’s proximity to the UK had something to do with it. A-ha continue to create archetypal pop music, and - I think - the lyrics are at best an equal part in the overall mix.

How does geography influence artistic merit? Does being from the fringes mean that you’re more driven and focused to create? Or does it mean that you’re able to ‘try on’ certain aspects of musical or ‘youth’ culture without being fully in it, fully committed to it? Does this outsider’s point of view give you the power of not doubting?

Kingwood

Millencolin. Burning Heart 2005, Audio CD, $5.98

Sweden’s Millencolin are a skate-punk band, in a vein similar to the Descendents. They play fantastic, driven, energizing pop-punk that’s melodious and full of hooks. And their English lyrics are, well, questionable :) It all sounds perfectly okay until you listen closely and you realize it’s just slightly off. It’s the subject matter, the song titles, and the turns of phrase. None of it is completely bad… or maybe some of it is, but the undeniable spark of the music more than compensates for it. At least for me - but I’ve already confessed that I don’t care much about lyrics. Favourite song title: “Biftek Supernova.” Awesome.

Is writing pop songs a struggle in the absence of having a complete command of English? I think it is, having tried my hand at it once or twice when I was a teenager. The English-speaking listener expects a certain level of subtlety and wit, and songs whose lyrics sound ‘off’ stand out like sore thumbs. I wonder, though, if their awareness of this encourages artists from elsewhere to ‘try harder’ musically and therefore compensate for the not-quite-right lyrics.

I think there may be other geography-related factors in play too. Europe typically has better music education in schools, so perhaps more European kids emerge from the system being able to play an instrument. And what about the influence of ‘national musics’ on popular music from outside the UK/UK/Canada? I’m not sure I have any further insights about these; they’re just thoughts.

Other examples of great elsewhere-pop that are worthwhile suspending one’s disbelief for are Germany’s The Robocop Kraus (seriously), Sweden’s Shout Out Louds, Germany’s Fury in the Slaughterhouse, and a few others.

In another post, I’ll look at country music from Australia. In the last few years, Singer/songwriters like Kasey Chambers and Keith Urban have consistently created music that’s more ‘American,’ archetypal and expressive than most of the North American country music industry’s commercial output. And their North American nasal ‘twang’ is simply fantastic.

Bookmarks for the last few days:

• We’re not listening until you sing in English | | guardian.co.uk Arts - "And that's why we miss out on some of the world's biggest stars. Sophie Heawood reports."
• Deaf Couple wants Deaf Baby - Interesting piece from CNN.
• August And Everything After - Perceptive original review from Rolling Stone.

Earth Bowl is the yummiest, healthiest, most counter-intuitive meal imaginable. Originally published by Caroline Dupont in Enlightened Eating (an excellent, continually surprising source of vegetarian, vegan and raw food recipes and inspiration), Earth Bowl combines apples, celery and nuts into a healthy meal or snack. It could be breakfast because it has apples and nuts. It could be dinner because it has celery. It takes less than 5 minutes to make.

Earth Bowl

1 apple, diced (green or red, but should be crunchy and not mealy)
2 stalks celery, diced
half a cup of pecans, loosely crushed
quarter cup of pumpkin seeds (or maybe slightly less)
half a cup of sugared, pitted dates, chopped into small pieces
juice of one orange

Combine all ingredients in a bowl. Stir. Eat. Serves one person as a meal, two as a side salad. I have no idea what you’d serve it with, though. But it’s really good.

My Revolutions

Hari Kunzru. Dutton Adult 2008, Hardcover, 288 pages, $4.80

A few years ago, I read Kunzru’s Transmission and loved it. I thought it was switched on to what the world was becoming and elegantly highlighted how people from developing countries are traversing the boundaries of distance and economics by plugging into the ‘new’ economy. Then, I tried to read The Impressionist and failed to finish it. It had the long-windedness of a Midnight’s Children without keeping me riveted in the same way. Maybe I’ll go back to it another time; maybe I won’t.

My Revolutions offers a lot - a good yarn, a close look at two trendy topics (late 60s politics and their contemporary ramifications; terrorism), masterfully told by a great writer. The language, the pace, the textures and emotions it conveys - all are well-judged and propel things forward at a good clip. I spent maybe a week reading it, weekday evenings and a weekend.

Chris Carver, from a lower middle class London family, becomes politically sensitized in the mid 1960s, does well in school, goes to the London School of Economics, and gradually becomes more and more radicalized. He falls in with a group of friends who set increasingly higher standards of political consciousness until it becomes inevitable that they no longer rule out violence. Their political actions turn darker, more paranoid and more hegemonic - initially, they fight the police at protest marches, then they squat in some buildings (on the homeless’ and their own behalf), then they rob a grocery store and redistribute the food; and finally, they start to bomb buildings. They’re modeled on Britain’s Angry Brigade, who, it seems, always got less prime time exposure than the Baader Meinhofs, and who were overshadowed in their own country by the Northern Ireland conflict and the increasingly militant IRA.

Woven into this tale of activism (incidentally, Kunzru somehow does an excellent job of representing the political jargon, and, as the text progresses, the jargon becomes denser and less pleasurable to read in a very productive parallel to Chris Carver’s own discomfort about his group’s militant activities) is a love story, between Chris and Anna, who is much more radical and invested in freeing herself and the population from capitalism’s shackles than he is. Anna is a leader.

A second love story is woven into the book’s second time plane, set in the late 1990s. Chris Carver, now called Michael Frame, lives a quiet life somewhere in small town England, having gone underground, spent years traveling, doing drugs and getting clean in Asia, and re-built his life under another identity. Mike lives with Miranda, a cosmetics entrepreneur, and her university-student daughter, neither of whom have any idea of Mike’s real identity.

Things begin to unravel and the plot propels forward when Chris/Mike thinks he sees Anna (who he believes is dead) on vacation in France. Shortly after the vacation, an old acquaintance from his political days reappears in his life, possibly by accident. And so it starts.

I would certainly recommend this novel as a solid, crafty and entertaining read. It deals with none of Kunzru’s ‘typical’ themes and that makes it an interesting departure for him, one that I liked very much.

The Guardian points out, in its review, that there’s another recent novel, by Dana Spiotta, that deals with similar situations and themes. That’s next on my reading list. Other reviews of Kunzru at The Independent and Jabberwock.

There’s an interesting interview with T.K.V. Desikachar, one of the founding fathers of modern yoga practice, in the March 2008 edition of the Indian news magazine Civil Society. It contains a number of interesting points, and I think the humility, simplicity and practicality of many of his and his school’s views are great. Yoga in the West, I think, is often taught either as a type of spiritual practice (by people who, when you see their tv shows, seem like earnest charlatans) or as a ‘performance sport’ with little focus on the individual’s physical and psychological needs.

The piece in Civil Society touches on a number of aspects around this. A key passage for me was about yoga and Hinduism:

[…] teachers were mixing Hinduism and yoga, presenting them as one, implying that if people wanted to follow yoga they had to follow the Hindu religion. Desikachar knew from his studies with his father that none of these practices followed the guidelines of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. For instance, Patanjali saw religious affiliation as a student’s personal choice not the teacher’s. If yoga is tied with Hinduism, then it would have to exclude people who may not be comfortable with its religious content.

What also resonates is Desikachar’s emphasis of individual healing as part of the process of studying yoga. Students come to KYM (Desikachar’s yoga centre) for many reasons, but often because they struggle with specific health issues.

An assessment is made of each person in his or her entirety. The student and teacher then understand each other through an evolving personal relationship. A course is designed for the individual and adapted according to the progress made. The personal factor plays a vital role.[…] Therapy at KYM includes helping those afflicted by psychological and emotional suffering. Here, too, the course is designed for the individual and adapted according to the progress made under the guidance of a supervisor.

This sounds enticingly different from yoga studios and schools in the West. Still, the spirit of this type of yoga was carried into the world by students of Desikachar’s. For instance, Vanda Scaravelli, an Italian disciple, brought some of these more interegrated, gentler, secular principles to Europe and North America. In Toronto, the Esther Myers Yoga Studio carries on aspects of this tradition today.