[NNWM] Pop, Pop, Pop Music
Oct. 14th, 2004 11:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldWednesday, at a branch of the Toronto Public Library I picked up four CDs: Zap Mama's Adventures in Afropea 1, the Rough Guide compilation Paris Café Music, Victoria Rodrigues' 1997 Sol Negro, and Georges Moustaki's Tout reste à dire. Previous acquisitions include Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares' debut CD.
Like many people, I'm rather fond of popular musics, though I think my tastes are marked more by the (better) music of the 1980s than the tastes of many of my contemporaries. For my impending NaNoWriMo, I'm trying to imagine the popular musics of a world where global popular music--the single overarching framework, the related genres of musical performance which ended up setting the standards for popular music worldwide, influenced and being influenced in turn by local variants--has different origins, specifically in national genres similar to French chanson and mid-20th century Brazilian popular music, where American rock'n'roll and r'n'b has barely managed to acquire a niche market outside of the Anglophone world, with European and South American and Asian collectors prize their expensive import albums. A chat with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
talktooloose Monday night helped clarify for me the fact that the overwhelming importance of American musical genres in the post-Second World War world can be traced to the overwhelming strength of the American economy. Take from this importance of French and Brazilian music, and the relative unimportance of American music, what you will.
Alternate history literature, by definition, is a genre that considers things which have no counterparts in our history. It's possible to imagine relatively hard details with some credibility--the rise and fall of states, the impact of new social and religious movements--through analogy with events and trends that we're familiar with. My problem in trying to imagine what another world's popular music would sound like lies in the fact that popular music, like popular culture generally, is a very soft domain, and a vast domain. It's important to me that what I write appears credible, plausible.
We'll see how well I do. In the meantime, I think I'll go home to listen to "Rocket's Tail."
Like many people, I'm rather fond of popular musics, though I think my tastes are marked more by the (better) music of the 1980s than the tastes of many of my contemporaries. For my impending NaNoWriMo, I'm trying to imagine the popular musics of a world where global popular music--the single overarching framework, the related genres of musical performance which ended up setting the standards for popular music worldwide, influenced and being influenced in turn by local variants--has different origins, specifically in national genres similar to French chanson and mid-20th century Brazilian popular music, where American rock'n'roll and r'n'b has barely managed to acquire a niche market outside of the Anglophone world, with European and South American and Asian collectors prize their expensive import albums. A chat with
talktooloose Monday night helped clarify for me the fact that the overwhelming importance of American musical genres in the post-Second World War world can be traced to the overwhelming strength of the American economy. Take from this importance of French and Brazilian music, and the relative unimportance of American music, what you will.Alternate history literature, by definition, is a genre that considers things which have no counterparts in our history. It's possible to imagine relatively hard details with some credibility--the rise and fall of states, the impact of new social and religious movements--through analogy with events and trends that we're familiar with. My problem in trying to imagine what another world's popular music would sound like lies in the fact that popular music, like popular culture generally, is a very soft domain, and a vast domain. It's important to me that what I write appears credible, plausible.
We'll see how well I do. In the meantime, I think I'll go home to listen to "Rocket's Tail."
