I just need to do some venting because i have been trying to get more educated lately about various forms of art throughout history and the more i read the more angry i get with the way the entire subject is treated from such a Eurocentric and frankly often outright racist perspective.
And this is not just a problem in the West, throughout the world somehow Europeans have managed to brainwash the entire rest of the world into idolizing their art, their music, their culture and putting it on some kind of pedestal as this sort of gold standard. Why the fuck do parents in Asia for instance so often send their kids to learn to play European classical music instead of the music of their own countries? Why is it that when you read about the “greatest composers of all time” they are all some pasty Euro fuckers, most of them making art primarily for the consumption of wealthy aristocrat patrons?
As if other cultures weren’t also making various forms of art for thousands of years - and many of them were no less sophisticated. (And mind you even in Europe the representation exludes the art of the lower classes, who certainly had their own music and culture that was distinct from that of the upper classes.) For once i’d like to see an African, Middle Eastern or Asian painter, writer, or composer of music traditional to their own regions get praised and elevated to the same level of respect, admiration and universal recognition as the European “classics”. Why do we constantly have to put up with this big circlejerk about how “great” some toffs in wigs were for writing music that in large part only the rich could afford to have played for them because it required an entire orchestra with an absurd amount of performers?
Of course i know the answer to these rhetorical questions, it’s because the dominant culture in any society tends to be the culture of the ruling class. I understand this but it still pisses me off how inescapable European upper class culture is. One of the tasks ahead of us when the revolution comes will have to be the dismantling of the centuries of accumulated cultural hegemony of the Euro bourgeoisie. The Soviets were right to encourage socialist realism as a radical departure with the bourgeois culture of the capitalist system. We need a global cultural revolution.
Unfortunately, my knowledge of West African music is not really direct, but through its influence in the religious and popular music of Brazil. So I can’t really recommend too many natively African artists, but I can pinpoint some very genuinely West African music from Brazil.
A couple of Africans I can recommend are Aziz Faye and Aruna Sidibe. Here’s a video of Sidibe playing with another guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sKctPHvwmk
But I’m not really versed on the African conceptualization of their own music to recommend specific things. I only know it through a Brazilian lens.
So for me faster and aggressive rhythms are usually associated with a drum pattern we call Barravento in portuguese (means something like “wind breaker”). It’s very associated with songs for the Yoruba storm deity called Oyá / Yansã, although it can be used for other occasions as well. The first song in this collection is an example (note that it’s a tradition in this type of song to accelerate as it progresses):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkB4cXf45Ss (notice that they’re singing in Portuguese, not Yoruba)
You’d get surprise of how well this sounds over a metal beat! 😆 Actually some metal drumrolls are very reminiscent of this pattern for me. This is HARD to play. More than once I fucked up my hand playing this stuff.
Just a comment on this. Isn’t it wonderful? In so called western music one of the most important things is to keep the rhythm steady. And you have here a tradition where the whole point is to rush it as it goes along.
This is something that people need to understand so bad about art that it gets me really riled up.