5 ideas
Buy on AmazonA new musical style can be born not in any one homeland but in the movements and meetings of people from many neighbouring places. Migrants from several countries, mixing their celebrations and their conflicts in a new city, can fuse their separate traditions into one shared sound that belongs to none of them alone.
Music that grows out of ordinary city life is at the same time a product, made and shaped by professional musicians, record producers and a business that profits from it. To understand the music you have to follow both the people who live it and the industry that sells it.
A music's character comes from the audience it is made for. When it is made for hard life on the street rather than for elegant dance halls, it carries that roughness and urgency in its sound and its stories.
When a lively style is reshaped into smooth romantic songs to sell more widely, the first thing lost is its musical depth. The commercial gentling of a sound tends to make the music itself flat.
Music as such does not accept nostalgia: a living style keeps changing rather than staying fixed in a past golden age. Its story has to be carried forward to the present instead of frozen at the moment it seemed best.