Hey, I never said that. I merely said that African music can be rhytmically complex – and it often is. “Rebel Rebel” isn’t exactly African. It’s an instance of European music that has been ruined by various influences, among them, I’d say, African-American music. That song is literally just a single riff repeated tirelessly with Bowie singing over it in an annoying way. The chorus barely distinguishes itself from the rest of the song.
African music is no doubt more interesting than that – at least some of it. This is pretty fun in comparison:
The singing can be a bit distracting at times – it depends on the particular piece, I guess – but the drums are where all the fun lies. What I find interesting the most is that I find absolutely nothing weird about this kind of music. It sounds perfectly natural – unlike say Middle Eastern music that sounds quite creepy.
Let’s Dance is less melodic, less European, more African and . . . more interesting.
“It would have been much more fortunate had the Persians become masters of the Greeks, rather than have the Romans of all people assume that role” -Nietzsche
Southeastern European music is divided into several camps, the two major camps being Western and Eastern camp. What I’ve been posting here falls into the Eastern camp, and even then, I’ve been posting only what I like or is otherwise interesting to me. That said, it’s not representative of the whole.
If you want cheerful music from the Eastern camp, here is some.
Very ‘temple music’… Babylonian sounding… reminiscent of something out of a Conan film.
“…the compositional method revolves around the use of the Ancient Greek Dorian mode (equivalent to today’s Phrygian mode) with an abundance of skips within the mode, which produces a pentatonic-like effect commonly attested in surviving Ancient Greek music. As was the case with most Ancient Greek music, it is primarily monophonic with only slight hints of heterophony provided by the strings of the base note of the mode providing a rhythmic drone, which some reconstructions attest was used in Ancient Greek music of the Hellenistic and Roman eras.”
It feels like the piano spelled the death of the harp in Europe, but there are still places where variations of them survive, and are used to produce sounds which the popular imagination would not suspect.
Most of the music in the Eastern camp is either very-to-extremely cheerful or it’s on the sad side (but never extremely.) Very few of it lies somewhere in between.
Perhaps we should look into the Western camp. The Western camp consists of music that is closer to Western music as well as whatever is popular in the West at that time.
Tara is trying to imitate Rihanna, so her music might be more pleasant to you.
Can you post some Italian ballads that you find enjoyable? I don’t have a high opinion of post 20th century Italian music but that might be because I’m blind to the good stuff.
The Western camp of South Slavic music has a lot of Italian inspired music in it presumably because it spread from Venetian ruled Dalmatia. Croatians might be proud of their Western sounding folk music but all I feel is pity.
If it weren’t for that powerful chorus, this piece would be completely uninteresting to me. It’s pity because it’s gentle to the ears – there’s no harsh instrumentation, for example.
Here’s another one. This one might be more representative of the genre. It looks and sounds very cultured but it ultimately fails with respect to my taste.
I’m afraid it’s just snippets of memory, you will have to assume it is a lie. But the video I reposted was instantly familiar to me the first time you posted it. I tried at that time to find what it reminded me so much of, but it was never music I myself sought out so I didn’t know any names or specific references and couldn’t find it.
Maybe just to say that the Italian ballads you have posted belong in a lady’s chamber, the ones I remember belong in a tavern.
It may not even have been Italian, but South American and inspired and composed by or by sons of Italian immigrants.
