This feels to me a little bit like Funkadelic re-imagined for the ’80s – many of the tropes of ’70s Funkadelic are here in full, but there are signs that musical technology is slowly changing.
Tag: World Music
The Sensual World (1989) by Kate Bush
Kate Bush, ever the iconoclast, finds a good balance on this record between contemporary art pop – and all of the obsession with technology that entails – and folk music influences. In the vaguest sense this one sort of reminds of Peter Gabriel’s work, only they are incorporating very different forms of folk music and …
Oranges & Lemons (1989) by XTC
I don’t know anything about XTC really, just that one of their early ’80s albums has been on my “to listen” list for a very long time. I sort of assumed they were a post punk band but knew basically nothing else. Not knowing anything was good, as it often is, because I didn’t see …
Into the Labyrinth (1993) by Dead Can Dance
Though I have heard a lot about Dead Can Dance over the years, like so many bands it has taken me forever to hear them. And like so many bands that it has taken me forever to hear, I found myself surprised.
Duck Rock (1983) by Malcolm McLaren
For much of 2017, there was an ongoing public conversation about “cultural appropriation.” It’s a concept and charge that I have a complicated relationship with because, on the one hand, I believe everyone should be freely able to access and to make use of any cultural artifacts but, on the other, I recognize that there …
Geocidal (2014) by tetema
Mike Patton has long been one of my favourite rock musicians. And I think he has also made some objectively great music; at least six albums he has been involved with I would put on my “core” list of important music a neophyte should listen to. (For your reference, those albums are, in chronological order: …
Passion – Sources (1989) by Various Artists, curated by Peter Gabriel
On the one hand, this is a fine collection of “world” music, featuring all sorts of interesting pieces from different cultures. Moreover, it was released in connection to an “event” Hollywood film, meaning that this type of music got unprecedented exposure in North America.
Secret Chiefs 3 Live at the Drake Hotel, May 24, 2013
So I have been a fan of SC3 since sometime in the early 2000s, but I had never seen them live and – due to my music addiction making music money scarce – I had not kept up with their musical output past 2004’s Book of Horizons, where the satellite band “concept” first came to …
RIP Ravi Shankar
There was a time when I really, really wanted to get into Indian music. However, I lived in small town Quebec. So I used the internet (Napster then a few of Napster’s successors) and found very little in what I was really looking for: crazy-long ragas. I found a couple supposedly by Shankar (I have …