ProfessorBooty posted:

Been thinkin hard lately about American culture. I'm trying to be more fabulous and poo poo, putting my outfits together and looking like a well groomed happy beardo.

Figure I'm going to start making / modifying my own clothes. Kind of like a bohemian punk. I found this sweet af poncho from ecualama.com . Recommend checking them out.

So that Keffiyeh thread got me thinking about American culture. Like.. What is American culture?

Colonization, sure. Pilgrims and poo poo. Okay, so that's kind of cultural touchstone I remember from my youth, though at the time I was more into toys and cartoons and video games. I think when I was really little I was more into inventions and craft. Lego was my poo poo. I made the things but loved inventing and creating my own things.

Expansion. Pioneering. Settling. "Manifest Destiny". They taught about that in school. So that's like wagon trains, that kind of thing. I'm from west of the west, so in elementary school we focused a lot on Louis and Clark and the wagon trains. Pretty evil poo poo we taught ourselves was good and admirable.

Resource over extraction. The Dust bowl. Destroying the environment itself for just a few more kernels of grain in a crop. The elimination and consolidation of small settler families which at that point may as well have always been there since the new testament.

Hawaii you're a state now, by the way. I digress.

So what is American culture?

We ran out of places to conquer and settle. Rather, we made it more efficient, using spreadsheets and capital control. A more gentle genocide except for when you have a Korea, Vietnam, others that are as important but not things really taught to kids, but all that was probably just on a spreadsheet too.

I grow up and things become cringe. We cycle wildly between cultural movements. Laws used to find new culture and stomp them out, because a good culture has some kind of element of how to organize a society. Can't have that.

So now I guess I can only be a cultural settler. But I try my best to be respectful, trying to find my own self, something that is uniquely me but isn't 'cringe'.

American culture is genocide, to the point where we genocide our own cultural movements so money can be made with new ones.

This is a good Soviet propaganda cartoon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRSsybt9wAo

Ardennes posted:

It doesn't exist beyond a conduit to make money, it isn't that there is actual culture inside America's borders but it is pretty much instantly co-opted and exploited as quickly as possible. It isn't a profound statement, it is just how America works.

The state of New York in 2023 is kind of interesting. It is a city that exists more in the past than the future, it isn't that culture doesn't exist there (usually immigrant culture) but the brutality of neoliberalism is slowly but surely making life impossible. The rent crisis in New York is pretty unreal and it is unclear how culture can exist in a place that squeezes everything out of the humans that live there.

Capitalism isn't new but present-day New York seems to be pushing the edge of what is possible.

Weka posted:

nobody knows what that is dummy

clean ayers act posted:

ahem!

FirstnameLastname posted:

babies naturally sing pentatonic (5-tone) scales around the world
its a series of perfect fifths on the circle of fifths,
perfect fifths are 3:2 intervals, this is also the rhythmic timing interval for one of the simplest syncopated polyrhythms, the hemiola
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCSZ9SyBm_8

tempo almost always falls within about 60-180 bpm which is about the range of human heart generally between 80-120 which is roughly walking pace
the simplest rhythmic interval for a repeating piece of music is 2
the next is 3
3 is awkward to walk to at a steady pace
4 is not

your hands can still do something as you step
You have a voice

people likely didn't invent instruments before inventing music
people probably used their voices in music, since babies sing things

so the earliest music probably involved vocal and percussive elements, in simple (2,4) metric divisions with pentatonic melodic structure, or droning ( or atonal/fixed pitch/chanted etc) vocal portions and then more complex syncopated percussion (i.e. hemiola) delivered by foot stomps. hand claps, vocal noises etc over metric divisions of 2 or 4 pulses while walking, later adding more complicated syncopated subdivisions to dance to, then basing things only on those subdivisions etc.

by then you would probably get words if you don't already, but they're gonna be before any instruments, probably before rhythmic complexity past 2

people remember rhymed things easier, people chunk information better if it's rhymed, if it fits u must acquit

people didn't invent music after writing
people would've found a lot of utility in storing information orally before developing writing in particular

like there's some wiggle room but all of the core concepts in hiphop, not like recorded hiphop but the concept of rhythmic, rhyming vocals, syncopation, percussion, are all going to be either in one of the first few musical developments or maaaaaybe first like, 4 or 5 no matter where you are all around the world, there's only so many ways for things to rly start, it can go wherever after that but people aren't gonna start off with any kinda harmonization or ultra-complicated tonal or rhythmic stuff or complex or big instrumental things

Pentecoastal Elites posted:

bud I think you are describing "singing"

hop hop originated in late 60s/early 70s new york as an offshoot of the r&b scene that mixed with the spoken word poetry that had been popular there throughout the 60s

WampaLord posted:

NFL Red Zone channel is the peak of American culture

Dr. Jerrold Coe posted:

Peanut President posted:

here's another important part of american culture: telling dweebs with their head up their own rear end to kill themselves

Pentecoastal Elites posted:

bud I think you are describing "singing"

hop hop originated in late 60s/early 70s new york as an offshoot of the r&b scene that mixed with the spoken word poetry that had been popular there throughout the 60s

quote:

Most villages also had their own griot, who told tales of births, deaths, marriages, battles, hunts, affairs, and other life events

FirstnameLastname posted:

im taking about the part of hip-hop that is sharing information and telling stories through rhythmically rhymed patterns which is distinct from singing, by not necessarily being tonal and from poetry by being distinctly musical in nature

people started doing it into a microphone at parties in the '70s and putting drum machines behind it but they didn't invent "rappin" then, that shits old, it comes from largely unwritten traditions brought to the us thru the afrocarribean & originally from west africa, esp. Mali, Senegal, Gambia

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griot

blues, which birthed jazz, rock etc. has a fairly similar origin

Pentecoastal Elites posted:

the only actual culture america has was made by jews and black people until the neoliberal era when the market finally figured out how to eat that too. everything else is just the half-remembered traditions of german drunks and imperial propaganda

ELTON JOHN posted:

cool way of looking at it tbqh

Ohtori Akio posted:

musical recitation is one of the oldest things around but basic structural elements of hip hop like 4/4 bars in power of two blocks are somewhat newer as an aspect of those recitations

quote:

“I am Howard Carroll, guitarist for the Dixie Hummingbirds. I am 93 years old and played guitar professionally for 70 years. My friends call me the Father of Gospel guitar. I don’t know about that, but I was one of the first to bring guitar to gospel music. I am in a nursing home now and can no longer travel, but I want to thank you for taking me to Segou, Mali. I come from a musical family, and we can trace back to the slave holder, Charles Carroll, and his plantation in Maryland. The plantation buried our history alive. Took away our name, took away our language, took away our religion, but they did not take away our spirit or our music. Over a hundred years ago my father played banjo, guitar, mandolin and others. He taught me to play when I was 5 years old. My father had a finger style on the banjo not unlike Mali musicians playing the Mali banjo, the n’goni. I believe our family came from Mali and were musicians. Thank you for taking me home after 300 years away.”


The connection Carroll observed before he passed away was certainly not lost on the late Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure. Toure was a Malian guitarist, born in a village near Timbuktu, Mali in 1939, whose music is best described as blues music before it became blues music. He mostly played traditional Malian music, which is what African-American blues music is rooted in — guitar music from West Africa. His music is like a pre-organized blues or porto-blues but the similarities between his music and African-American blues were obvious to him. He was not influenced by American music when he learned how to play and developed his style. Toure’s music and style are indigenous and rooted in Malian culture, which is where he is from. He first started playing a single-string African guitar but picked up Western guitar in the mid-1950s and adapted it to his style. He told Songlines in 1999, “No one ever taught me to play. I transposed what I knew from our one-string instrument onto a six-string guitar and I tuned it according to my ear. I know all the Western tunings but they are no good to me at all.”


Toure was introduced to John Lee Hooker’s music, the influential African-American blues guitarist, and was struck by the similarities between Hooker’s blues music and his own. In an interview with the London Daily Telegraph, he said, “I thought he was Malian because of what I heard. It was 100 per cent our music. The roots are in Africa. There is something there; the trunk of the tree, but there are lots of branches and, on the branches, are the leaves, and certain fruits, and it’s dispersed. Musically, it’s African, but the words are in American.” In another interview, Toure said, “The first time I heard John Lee Hooker, I heard his music but I said, ‘I don’t understand this, where did they come up with this culture? This is something that belongs to us.’” In that same interview, Toure answered his own question, “I will tell you this, there are no Black Americans. There are Blacks in America. No, Black Americans don’t exist. The Blacks left with their culture. And they kept it. But the biography, the ethnicity, the legends they did lose. Still, their music is African.”

quote:

The Arabic vocal influence in blues stems from the spread of Islam in West Africa. When Islam spread in West Africa, indigenous Africans did not give up their traditional spiritual traditions. In fact, Africans adapted Islam and Islamic culture to their existing traditions because that was the best way to accept Islam as a religion without fundamentally changing African culture and society or, worse, causing friction among different Africans. This is why, throughout West Africa, Sufi orders of Islam spread. Sufism allowed for Islam to spread while adapting itself to indigenous African society, while not completely giving up traditional African spiritual systems; this is very similar to how Sufism spread throughout India and made room for respecting Hinduism without sacrificing Islam altogether. But, at the same time, compared to mainstream Sunni Islam, African Sufism may seem unorthodox.

Music professor and prominent scholar of African music J. H. Kwabena Nketia, in his book The Music of Africa, points out that Arab-Islamic influence in Africa was “uneven”; while North Africa and northern Sudan, where Bedouin Arabs interacted with Amazigh people, adopted many Arabic musical traits, south of the Sahara Desert in Africa was different. He explains, “In some parts of west Africa for example, it appears that African converts to Islam did not have to abandon their traditional music completely, even where they learned Islamic cantillation or became familiar with Arabic music. On the contrary, they continued to practice it, making such modifications in resources or refinements in style as contact with the new musical culture suggested” [pg. 10]. Nketia adds,

“…it was generally only the more superficial aspects of Arabic musical style that seemed to have attracted those societies in contact with Islam who did not give up their traditional music. These traits include features of vocal technique identified with Islamic cantillation — such as voice projection and its accompanying mannerism of cupping the ear with the palm of the hand, or a slight degree of ornamentation — and facilitated by the traditional emphasis in Islamized areas of Africa on monodic singing. The more important aspect of Arabic style, the system of melodic and rhythmic modes, does not seem to have been generally adopted, for this would have entirely changed the character of the music of those societies” [pgs. 11-12; bold added].

Therefore, Nketia says, “it is not surprising…to find extensions of traditional customs or the use of indigenous resources in the musical practice of Islamic-African communities” [pgs. 12-13]. There is a desert concert in the Sahel region, southern Algeria, where African folk music is played regularly.

There is traditional African music, which, if you listen closely, is essentially a predecessor to modern blues and rock music. That’s why the music is often called African desert rock music. In addition, because of the unique cultural make-up of the region, there is also Arab-influenced music, as well, played alongside traditional African music. That shows the unique fabric of the African Sahel and the interplay between traditional African music and Arab influences layered on top of a pre-existing African tradition. So while blues utilizes Arabic melisma in the vocals, the pentatonic scale system is African.

That African scale system is the fundamental root of blues music.

Ohtori Akio posted:

to be clear i mean that power of two blocks are ~centuries old instead of ~millennia old.

i also think it's easy to overstate the influence of blues specifically on hip hop; the 12 bar form for example is essentially not present in hiphop. rather as youve said the influence is through midcentury american popular music, which almost entirely discarded the 12 bar form

the rhythmic extracts you pulled are very clearly 4/4 with barline crossing syncopated rhythm. the existence of tracks which violate a basic structural principle for kicks dont make it any less a basic structural principle of the genre