Back to MEHANATA with a vengeance - dirty and crazy as ever.

In honor of the new place:
Taliban Q-check by Orkestar Kamenci

This post is orginially from November last year, it's republished only for archive purposes

On Saturday a girl came to ask me why I don't play Bulgarian Rap music. My standard answer is that it sounds pretty much the same as American Rap except the lyrics. The unspoken part of the answer is that Rap was the voice of the ghetto when it was interesting and the voice of the Bulgarian ghetto is chalga.

Except that by now Chalga is old news in Bulgaria and seen as something not only in low taste but also over. And in this, just like Rap, Chalga is not alone.

There seems to be a history of these other musics (or maybe this other music) opposite the history of music as we've come to know it. For example, if the accepted model uproots African slaves' chants into a white boys' Rock'N'Roll through the concentric gravity pull of a Mainstream Assimilation Machine (MAM), the eccentric counter-movement throws the copyright-infringing 382nd Greatest Song Of All Time in the Mutilation/Appropriation Machine (M/AM) - also known as a sampler/sequencer - of a Brazilian slum.

Erotic becomes explicit, sterling productions become lo-fi, Punk becomes Dionysian orgy. And we would be none the wiser in dismissing the event as an exception. What about Raï as it appeared in Algerian sleaze bars? What about the Rembetika of Greek opium dens? And of course, what about Reggae and its humble Kingston origins?

This other music is generally frowned upon if one knows its language. It is (morally) dirty, (politically) phobic, (culturally) cheap. Yet it carries such a strong libidinal momentum that it's inevitably and instantaneously appealing to the ears of the foreigner and the hips of the native. The world's lumpenproletariat might have managed to unite only in its music's unanimous rejection and subsequent hypocritical endorsement through MAM.

As an enquiry/tribute (in)to M/AM and this other music, the theme of this week's Radio Nomadi Mundial will be The Global Ghetto.

An often invisible castle quietly vibrating opposite the Luna Park, across that oil-black water stretch.

The castle's doors are open night and day to an endless stream of travellers, refugees, sideshow runaways from the Luna Park.
Its twin towers vibrate in and out of phase and at times and from certain angles they would cancel each other out rendering it invisible. Even more rarely one would be standing across the tiny gulf and would see the castle's water reflection, but not the thing itself - a reverse Fata Morgana, a missing mirage, a negative dream.

They stay there up to three days before continuing on their ways.

At times the first day they would gather around the storyteller, the discreet charm of his voice growing a fragile architecture; then the second day they would make music from the epic story and spread it between them as a thin thin web reverting to a pre-Babylonian memory; and on the third, somebody would have made a recording of that music and would play it for everybody to dance: half orgy / half exorcism of the egos.

Other times they would start by playing a game, follow with a puppet theater and finish with a video recording of both, projected on top of each other onto the castle wall.

An often invisible castle...

Here's to a year of a fast democratization of music (and video) making:



Sayonara Mehanata!