Mongolian Hip Hop!

I decided to write my research paper on autism and absolute pitch. One of the books I found that had extensive writing on absolute pitch was in a book called The Psychology of Music. Something I read reminded me of my earlier post about absolute pitch. The author of the chapter on absolute pitch talks about the phenomenon that I mentioned where a person can recall a pitch at will but does not have absolute pitch. It’s called quasi-absolute pitch. It is not a very glamorous name, and I don’t particularly like it. It is also not a very descriptive term. I would prefer something like selective pitch recall or selective absolute pitch.

The reading from Soundtracks certainly jumped right into a controversial topic right away, that of what is and isn’t popular music. It is a thoughtful discussion of an issues that engages musicians and music lovers across genres. Foa very long time I was very dismissive of what I thought of as ‘popular’ music. Now, I understand it as something to be enjoyed. Sometimes I take it seriously, sometimes I don’t. I no longer beat myself up for having ‘bad taste’ for liking the latest overproduced top 40 hit single. I think that this type of discussion was what I was hoping for from The Future of Music. Even if I didn’t get it there, I’m getting in this book.

The second chapter I read was the chapter on lyrics. The discussion of hip hop outside of the US reminded me of this story from NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112514136. It’s interesting in Soundtracks they mention how French hip hop objects to nationalism, but Mongolian hip hop is all about the nationalism.

The discussion about punk was interesting, and made me wonder is punk really a middle class vehicle? I think punk has more of a working class background than the authors give credit to. I would be more likely to say that hippies were decidedly middle- to upper class kids disenchanted. I have seen punk scenes that encompass a little more of lower socio-economic classes. Sure, I have seen enough trust-fund gutter punks, but I don’t know if I would characterize 30 to 40 years of punk movements on that basis. Patti Smith is a bit of an enigma in that way – both obviously well exposed to literature but working in factories right before Horses. Of course, all these issues of authenticity have been hashed and re-hashed in punk scenes since the 1970s.

I would have liked the authors to draw a clearer line between country and punk. Joe Ely toured with the Clash in the 1970s, I’ve heard a rumor that Dwight Yoakam had some sort of relationship with the Sex Pistols, but I’ve never been able to substantiate that. Also, what about Hank Williams III? I am at least glad they mention the connection and debt owed by country music to African American musics. I grew up in the American South (Kentucky, to be specific) and have always lived with a long cultural history of segregation and racism. However, as I’ve gotten older and learned more about the many complicated ways people interact, I think that it often overlooked the interplay between white and black cultures in the South over the years. White culture and black culture, though segregated by law still had a lot of give and take over the years.