Southeast Asian pop, then and now. Loud sounds from Brazil, and new artists making noise in Paraguay. South African house finds new forms, Nigerian house finds God, and the Punjabi diaspora provide yet another proof point that country music doesn’t belong to any one country in particular.
The Album
Sixto Corbalán and Pedro Martinez, En Vivo en Edimburgo (Paraguay): A harpist and a guitarist walk into a venue and show off some exceptionally impressive string work.
The Report
Paraguay: How up are you on Paraguay’s music scene? According to reporting by WBUR’s Betto Arcos, the landlocked South American nation is undergoing something of a creative renaissance. The country has a legacy of bohemian artistry that contemporary musicians are drawing on to put their own spin on genres like rock and jazz, splicing them with folk traditions like guarania and polca and local languages like guaraní. And also with lots of harps, which happen to be Paraguay’s national instrument. This booming music scene was on full display at the Cranea Music Conference and Festival in Asuncion, which Arcos was reporting from. The festival is in its ninth year; maybe by its tenth, Paraguayan music will be better known on the international stage.
Brazil: Elsewhere in Latin America, Filipe Costa highlights some of the artists pushing the boundaries of metal in Brazil, a country that already has a long history with extreme music dating back to Sarcófago in the ‘80s. The bands working at the scene’s vanguard are mixing that legacy with other elements of Brazil’s musical ecosystem, crafting longform works of avant-metal that are just as likely to feature traditional flute passages as shred-ready guitar solos. It’s a welcome expansion of a musical style that’s too often boiled down to a limited collection of sonic tropes, presenting metal as more of an emotional register than a prescriptive list of instruments.
Southeast Asia: The Guardian weighed in on the rise of Southeast Asian pop this month. Bangkok-based correspondent Natasha May wrote up an overview of the Thai, Filipino, and Indonesia groups that are following the K-pop blueprint to global stardom. May’s article goes into a bit more detail on some of the local genres that SEA-pop artists are incorporating into their music: Molam and Luk Thung in Thailand, dangdut and gamelan in Indonesia. This was somewhat missing from early coverage of K-pop, and whether or not these influences actually predominate within the tight-laced pop formula, it will be interesting to see what happens when countries with well-established homegrown dance genres take up the K-pop model. For example, one of the first first hits by the Indonesian girl band no na opted to blend in dangdut with reggaeton, indicating that SEA-pop may bring a new wave of “body music” along in its wake.
Indonesia and Cambodia: Taking a step back in time, a different piece in History Workshop Magazine looks at the intertwined relationship between music and politics in Southeast Asia during the Cold War. As an example, Indonesian President Sukarno was a big believer in the cultural power of the arts, using the country’s traditional dance and gamelan music as an element of soft power by sending Balinese dance troupes across the world in the early 50s. At the same time, Western pop music gained a strong presence on the archipelago, perhaps most pronounced in the all-girl group Dara Puspita’s rise as a sort of Indonesian answer to the Beatles. Meanwhile, Cambodia’s leader at the time, Norodom Sihanouk, was literally a trained jazz musician. Cambodian popular music during his rule also drew from Western pop as well as Latin styles like the cha-cha, although many of these recordings we destroyed during the Khmer Rouge’s war on any semblances of colonial culture in the ‘70s. The authors (Su Lin Lewis and Ben GJ Thomas) end the piece by teasing a follow-up exploring Asia’s artistic connection with Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean - so be sure to watch this space.
South Africa: It’s been roughly a decade (?) since gqom burst onto the radar of the international dance community, and a lot has changed over that time. The dance music genre that came of age at underground beach parties in Durban has continued to mutate within South Africa’s musical petri dish, and Mike Steyls takes stock of gqom’s current forms in a new piece for Bandcamp Daily. His review includes the more soulful subgenre iSqinsi, the synth-heavy variant sgubhu, and “gospel gqom,” the style that’s taken root in Cape Town and uses the same chord progressions as choral music. The Mzansi Bass compilation I covered here a little while ago makes an appearance, as do a number of other old and new faces showing that South Africa is still as powerfully innovative as ever.
South Africa: OkayAfrica’s Tšeliso Monaheng also takes on South Africa’s encounters with dance music, contributing an account of how kwaito is still influencing music in the country today. From rappers to amapiano producers, artists from across the southern end of Africa are reaching back to the ‘90s house genre for inspiration. Sometime this takes the form of a specific production style, sometimes a lifted lyric, but kwaito’s influence continues to work its way into all manner of contemporary releases. Similar to the U.S., where the '‘90s are often referred to as a “golden era” for hip hop, South Africa in the ‘90s had its own golden era sound in kwaito, which remains a pillar for parts of the country’s music scene today.
Nigeria: Slightly further north, house music in Lago is branching out in entirely different directions. Abioye Damilare, OkayAfrica’s Lagos-based correspondent, covers the growing popularity of “Christian raves.” Structured like a typical EDM concert with more devotional lyrics, these events give Christian youth a chance to come together and party while maintaining a respectful proximity to their religious beliefs. It seems somewhat similar to the “bhajan clubbing” phenomenon in India in which ravers dance to remixed Hindu hymns, but unlike coverage on this Indian parallel, Damilare digs into concerns that several groups have about raves becoming Christian in Nigeria. This includes both traditional rave communities, who see this as an appropriation of a culture developed by queer communities that were often actively marginalized by organized religion, as well as members of the Christian world who see raving’s “controlled chaos” as antithetical to serious worship.
India: In another interesting migration of music outside of its established cultural boundaries, CNN’s Harmeet Kaur wrote an article on “Punjabi country.” While not quite an established genre, Kaur speaks to several musicians from Indian background who have embraced the style and vibe of American country music in their own projects. While many of these artists are now living in Canada or the U.S., they argue that the scenes explored in country music are strongly reminiscent of the agrarian lifestyle they knew in Punjab. And why shouldn’t Punjabi artists take up the country mantel? The strong network of Sikh truck drivers in the U.S. have probably seen more of the American countryside than half of Nashville. Kaur notes that this new pseudo-genre sits uneasily with the conservative country mainstream, which has often embraced (or at least silently accepted) the overtly nationalist posturing of the Trump administration. But at least with country music, it seems these detractors are fighting a losing battle given the genre’s growing popularity not just among Punjabi artists but also African and Latin American communities abroad.
