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sinesalvatorem:

brin-bellway:

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@sinesalvatorem

The previous thread was getting a bit long and topic-drifty, so I’m putting this here.

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The band “Shame and Scandal” borrowed some instruments from. (Wikipedia says this is not technically prog rock, but more the stuff that prog rock evolved out of. *shrug* Prog rock’s not my area. I liked Genesis a lot better after they sold out.)

(Naming genres in general is not really my area. I’m used to the kind of mishmash of pop, rock, and maybe occasional dips into electronica like you hear played in the background in grocery stores*, in which the primary thing that distinguishes one type of music from another is age rather than genre. That’s why I included decades in my categorisations.)

(That’s also why it’s possible for a song from the 1980′s to sound late 50′s/early 60′s, or a song from the 2010′s to sound late 70′s/early 80′s. Both of those songs were deliberately trying to sound earlier than they were, and it works.)

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God, I know I’ve heard songs so much like “Obeah Wedding”, but I’m having a hard time thinking of any. I don’t specifically seek them out, and they aren’t distinctive the way “Light My Fire” is.

Hmm. They mostly phased out 50′s stuff from the radio rotations in the late 00′s**, and since I don’t seek it out, I haven’t heard it much in quite a while.

I’m going to play the opening instrumental of “Obeah Wedding” to my mother and ask her what songs it reminds her of. That might help.

[…]

…well, she said her first associations were cruises and Mexico and Florida, so in other words she’s too close to the mark to be helpful. She did suggest big-band stuff from the 40′s, though, and–once I told her what the song was–pointed out that I would be familiar with this calypso song. That one sounds very different to me, though (and not fitting into any established category in my head, I think).

While I can’t seem to find anything suitable, I can tell you that I think a lot of what my brain is going off of here is “slower-paced song with lots of horns”. Although I suspect there’s some more subtle stuff going on too.

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“Rally Round the West Indies”: again, I swear I’ve heard similar stuff, but I’m not sure what. Some part of me is insisting “The Same Moon”, but when I put them side-by-side it doesn’t seem right. (They have kind of similar minor background instruments, I think, and that’s probably what that part of me is latching on to.) Another part says “Dance into the Light”***, which is kind of similar in the horns but not quite right overall (and might be cheating, because I suspect he might be trying to sound vaguely tropical in that one).

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Overall, this was a lot harder than I thought it would be. Recognition-vs-recall issues, maybe. I’ll try to keep an ear out when listening to radio, see if I can spot something suitable.

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*Well, probably not your grocery stores. But I know you’ve been in Canadian grocery stores, and probably American ones too. That stuff.

**Which is a suspicious timing. It may actually be that America just plays more 50′s stuff than Canada does, and it only seems like late 00′s because that’s when I moved.

*** /sees some of the music video while getting a Youtube version to link/ …god, Phil Collins is such a dork. I love him, but he’s a dork.

These are cool! However, with the exception of Shake Senora (which is actual Calypso), they all read to me as “Old American music of unspecified genre”, and I wouldn’t associate them mentally with any of the Calypso songs I linked. Huh.

Maybe you associate Calypso with rock but don’t have this association with its descendant genre (Soca)? This would be weird to me, because I feel like Calypso is more distinctly itself, while Soca borrows a lot. But IDK how your algorithm works. What do you think of these songs:

“Geelay”: 2010’s (possibly also late 00’s) music-to-dance-to, whatever the proper term for that would be. I have never been in a nightclub, but from what I’ve heard of them I would expect to hear stuff with this sort of sound. I do know from experience that it’s commonly played on radio stations aimed at adolescents; may be heard in grocery stores at times of day/week when students tend to shop, as well as at coffeeshops and fast-food restaurants at any time of day.

Ignoring the lyrics (with their geographical references), I would not have guessed it was from the Caribbean, but I probably would have guessed that black people made it.

Like the 50’s stuff, I vaguely enjoy but don’t seek out this kind of music. They kind of all blend together in my head (doesn’t help that they tend towards mostly-unintelligible lyrics), and I can’t pick out any specific examples of the category. (Except “On the Floor”, which is helped memorability-wise by having so many of its lines end with “on the floor”, but I suspect outside of the radio-playlist context that song doesn’t sound like another piece of the same puzzle.)

Well, the nice thing about still being on the radio a lot is that I can just turn on a radio for a bit and have a decent shot at getting something suitable.

[a few minutes later]

Okay, so I skipped around a couple youth-oriented radio stations, found a song just starting whose beginning sounded promising, I looked it up on Wikipedia, and guess what?

It’s a fucking dancehall song.

…well. I don’t really know what to say, at this point.

(…I’m beginning to wonder how much of the tendency towards unintelligible lyrics is because they’re actually singing in creole.)

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“Far From Finished”: Same. Maybe a tad more electronic, but still definitely in the category of “things I would hear at Tim Hortons”.

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“Lip Service”: Verging from the above category into rap, but I’m sure my definition of “rap” is overly broad from growing up in a subculture with a very tense relationship with black-dominated music genres. The definition of “rap” I absorbed was a metonym for the kinds of music you were supposed to dislike in a Definitely Not Racist, I Just Don’t Like Newfangled Stuff, You Can’t Prove Anything way. (I definitely don’t have a grasp of the distinction between rap and hip-hop, for one.)

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“Find Yuh Way”: for some reason, this specifically evokes “bowling alley” to me rather than “coffeeshop” or “grocery store with lots of younger customers”. I don’t think I’ve been in a bowling alley since this song came out, though, so it’s probably not me subconsciously remembering having heard this song in a bowling alley.

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“Jammin Sake”: Same as the first two. I’m getting a few “vaguely tropical” vibes, but I suspect that might be priming/[thinking to look for it], and if I heard this song at Tim Hortons it would not seem out of place.

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Tell you what, here’s an Internet stream of the station I got that dancehall from. You might want to try it and see what you get.

(Folk-influenced rock is also very popular these days, though, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you get some of that.)

I could totally see you having accidentally listened to Soca without noticing due to inability to parse the lyrics. Probably way more true of Dancehall, though. Dancehall and Soca have similar relationships to their parent genres (Reggae and Calypso, respectively) in being a dancier, clubbier, pop-infused version. After all, Dancehall is meant to be listened to at the dancehall (ie: dance club).

However, afaik, Calypso songs have only ever been popular in the US/Canada when they were explicitly being enjoyed as ~exotic~, while Reggae was actually somewhat popular there for a while. So I’d expect Reggae’s clubby descendant to also be popular. In fact, it’s infected Japan.

So, if you’ve already been exposed to Caribbean musical styles in typical North American environments, this may be why you don’t think of them as distinctly Caribbean. Or something. IDK.

(I may also be biased on how “obviously Caribbean” these songs sound because I can actually understand what the singers are saying, and they sound home-y to me.)

Anyway, I was unable to play the radio station you linked me to, and I’m not sure why. Maybe they don’t broadcast outside of Canada? But, like, when I pressed play, it showed me an advertisement (about health, using kids on a hockey rink for the backdrop, because so Canada) before cutting off.

It could be geo-locked, but I do find when testing it that I have to press the play button two or three times before it actually starts streaming. (I didn’t get an ad, though.)

I scrolled down, and towards the bottom of the page, to the right of their street address and phone numbers, is a link to a list of recently played songs (which you could probably then hear on Youtube). Does that one work for you?

(I’m not sure if that URL is a permalink or not, so if it doesn’t work, clicking the “Recently Played” link on the main page might be worth a shot.)

Tags:

#music #reply via reblog #long post #racism cw? #(for earlier post in reblog chain)