Saturday Music Blogging: Ruy Grudi's 'Amor'

It's always a gamble to visit the countries where the 80% or so of the human race that doesn't have white skin lives. Because of the risk of musical disappointment, that is.

Living in a place like Germany, you're used to the musical exports from these countries: the sophisticated, syncretistic 'world-music' that catches the attention of listeners worldwide. When you actually visit the countries in question, you realize that real people in the country you're visiting almost never listen to this music. The acts from country X that get heard abroad is just the tip of a very large Country-X iceberg whose base reaches far into the chill depths of musical mediocrity.

Yes, there's no sugarcoating it: the sort of music average citizens of country X really listen to is screechy, repetitive, and clumsily produced. Further, it's hopelessly formulaic. According to my careful prosthesis, 90% of the lyrics of all the music produced in the entire world fall into one of these categories:

1. The rugged beauty of Mountainous/Seacoast/Plains Region where the singer comes from.
2. The rugged beauty of girls that come from Mountainous Region.
3. The unusual qualities of Mountainous Region's local liquor.
4. Simple country boys from Mountainous Region who fall in love. 
5. Simple country boys from Mountainous Region who move to the big city and fail to find work, and pine for the simple life in Mountainous Region.
6. Folk festivals celebrated in Mountainous Region, and the singer's plans to dance/get drunk/score with a ruggedly beautiful girl at said festival.
7. Adultery, including hiding from spouse/being caught in the act and killed.
8. The heroism of local independence fighters who fought off the British/French/Spanish colonists.

What's worse, you're usually introduced to this music by hearing it through decaying loudspeakers in passing cars, or in markets where the locals buy the ingredients of their harrowing cuisine. Negotiating the price of a cheap duffel bag is hard enough; doing it while hearing 'Chee Funga Doop Gloy' by the Neerungathan Boychockno All-Stars -- blasting through a visibly blown 1970-vintage AR-5 speaker dangling 5 inches from your head -- is barely survivable. Which is probably exactly why the music is played; Rich Westerner will happily leave an extra $5 on the table just to escape the speaker's fateful sonic penumbra.

Which brings us to today's music video. Brazil is, I would say, one of the only exceptions to the above rule. Pretty much all music Brazilians make is listenable, and much of it is enchanting. Such as this clip from Ruy Grudi, the "Apache of the Northeast," who comes from Pernambuco, in arid Northeast Brazil [H/t JR]. If this don't turn you on, as Wayne Newton was fond of saying, you ain't got no switches: 

In fact, Brazilian music gets progressively worse the more local performers try to ape non-Brazilian genres (stadium rock, soft jazz, etc.). As we see in this video from 'McGill in Brazil', which shows us that Ruy's still at it, and is now (unfortunately) singing in a form of English:

Comments

[Ligia]

Minha Nossa Senhora da Aparecida!... well I "ain't got no switches", and I don´t care!

I´m so happy that I live sooo far away from Rudy Grudi.

[Carsten S]

You do know that that's a Queen song?

[M. Möhling]

To quote Mr Grúdi: "Ai ai morena, como dói meu coração - ui ui morena, assim morro de paixão". His heart aches for, um, brown sugar, and passion will kill him--should fall into th nr 4 slot, roughly.

Else, I couldn't agree more--or less. Yes, Brazilian music hardly ever sucks--no, when amalgamated with jazz it reached its best: bossa nova and tropicália. Ok, some fado and rock and roll went into the latter, too. Its not hard to improve something with jazz, as it infuses musical intelligence into everything it touches. Speaking of which (or rather its absence), and of things screechy, repetitive, clumsy, clumsily produced, and formulaic: only screechy doesn't apply with Mr Grúdi, IMHO.

De gustibus non est disputandum, it seems, or at least only with some difficulty. E.g. working in East Africa in the sixties my father brought home singles of what later would became known as Burundi beat--I enjoyed that quite a bit, and still would do, if I hadn't ditched all my LP equipment. Same goes for most Indonesian gamelan orchestras, or Pakistan's qawwali music. I don't agree with the overall premise of third world music being disappointing, seems to be quite some sweeping assessment, which is surprising, being among us whiteys, as we are.

While there's a point to be made for intricacies of European baroque and classical music, and jazz, that haven't been achieved to the same extent by other traditions, it should seem obvious that both brownies and whiteys suck and excel occasionally. Sucking should win at a 100:1 ratio, as it mostly does--for one Morrissey there's a hundred unsavoury helpings of, say, this, and so it happens when shopping for singles and cassettes in Nairobi's often reeking markets. Same goes for world-music: while Manu Chao isn't Mozart, his music has its charms--neglecting scatterbrained, poisonous ideology, for once.

Vaguely, this issue reminds me of some old fogey's complaint, that old fashioned colonialists at least took the trouble to study their colonial subjects well, while post-colonialists usually just don't know about whom and what they're, um, narrating emphatically.