I was talking to a girl in Wellington who said that Christchurch was musically uninteresting because she and her friends could not find any live hip-hop music there.
And my mind drifted off as usual. I was thinking about music genres and their origins and how many people take a liking to music that is not of their culture. Why not? Hey, I like celtic music and I am not celtic, although I do have Welsh and Scottish ancestors, so I suppose that could be a factor.
And in a flight of fancy I thought about people, forcibly taken from their own country and put to work in a far away land. I thought of the music they brought with them and the way they kept their own cultural origins alive with song and story. And I thought of how in the "host" country, their music became a major influence of that country's musical traditions. And how the music from that host nation finds its way all over the world. It has its own style and is easily recognisable as regards its origin to all who have a reasonable ear.
Of course, I am talking about Australia and the transportation of people having in the main irish or cockney ancestry from their homes into a foreign and hostile land, where they worked hard in captivity until they died or were eventually freed.
And so the irish ballads are not only alive and well in the old songs of Australia but their influence lives on in latter day song-writers and performers. So what problem is there if others can relate to those songs and the culture that gave them birth?
Which brings me to the USA. Did you think earlier that was the country I was going to talk about. Same difference as far as I can see. People taken from their home country, made to work, died or were freed, developed their own songs and stories based on their own culture, that genre being developed and becoming mainstream in the host country, that music listened to all over the world regardless of cultural difference.
Seems the same to me.
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