justnick's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Also, I think the original lyric is 'dead,' not 'sleeping' As ever, I find the internet to be the penultimate source of inspiration. More specifically, youtube comments again. I think I've mentioned before that I'm a sucker for choral music, and more specifically, the African stuff. I was a choir boy, you see. And the thing is, white people make lame music. It's a universal truth. I don't blame it on race, I blame it on puritanical religions. There was too much pertaining to propriety going on. (don't worry, I'm going somewhere with this) In many other cultures, where the biblical religions didn't warp our views of right and wrong, the old music is much more joyous than it's European counterparts. Europeans wrote choral stuff that sounded like it was meant to be sang in a church--because it was--and it was no fun to sing. The African stuff was a storytelling device, and a way to bring people together. It feels like it's supposed to be sang outdoors, around a bunch of people, like you're supposed to be dancing as you sing it. Again, because you are. It was always our secret weapon in competitions. You sing something German and austere, something Latin and epic, and then something African that woke them all up. Every once and a while, I'll get an urge and go on a scavenger hunt for songs like that one, and it was that that lead me to a youtube clip of Miriam Makeba singing Mbube. (see? told you I'd get there) Mbube, in case you don't know, is what got turned into 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' when Pete Seeger misheard the singers and wrote out 'Wimoweh'. Cool, right? And considering that's where Timon and Pumba were from, you'd think they could have managed the original lyrics. Give it a minute, it'll come back to you. Anyway, most of the comments were pretty typical fare; praising her for being talented and African and female, only one of which I think she really had to put any effort into achieving, unless I missed something in sex ed. The one on the very top kept drawing my eye, though. Sometimes--and I hate myself for saying this--its what a sentence leaves unsaid that really gets the imagination going. I know, I know, thank you, Tommy Chong. But you know what I mean. It's why Alfred Hitchcock movies are scarier than Alien, and why the riff from "Satisfaction" holds a crowd better than the stuff Esteban plays. "merghany (2 weeks ago) Is it me, or is that heartbreaking? I imagine some exchange student, hours and miles away from his home and his family, afraid to call anyone at home and let them know how badly he wishes he was there, how cold and lonely American winters are. Afraid because he knows they spent a fuckton of money to get him there, and they're all proud of him, and he doesn't want to disappoint anyone. So he sits in the school library, hunched too close to the monitor so the nosy clerk at the desk can't see what he's looking at, headphones plugged in below the fading "no food or drink" sticker, volume turned just loud enough to hear, watching stuff that makes him think of home and feeling like an idiot for being so emotional. I don't know why, but these little youtube dramas are more interesting to me than TV. Excelsior. 1:37 a.m. - 2008-12-23 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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