The Logic Off Topic list

--- In logic-ot@y..., GAmoore@a... wrote:
> Actually England and the US dominate music strangely here in the US 
(as 
> far as I'm concerned - certain to piss of many people) - one reason 
is 
> that we like to listen to music we can understand. 

Oh, it's all about marketabillity, as David already said. Try to 
market french chansons or german schlagger(I hope this is the correct 
spelling, :-)) on the US market. It's much more difficult to sell 
something unknown to people.
AFAIK the music business is much more a business in the US then in the 
rest of the world. The corporations sell music as a product; it could 
have been soap these corporations sell. So, to get hits in the US, you 
have to have a product that fits the selling channels. Your music has 
to be playable on radio, your image should be acceptable.

> Despite their engineering strengths the Germans are not next with 
the 
> hits. I think its the Swedes (Abba, Ace of Bass, etc), then Germans 
> (Scorpions and 99 Luftballoons). Kraftwerk is an underground band. 

I think there is more a tradition of producing music in Germany in a 
different form than via bands. You have guys like Giorgio Moroder and 
producers like that that produce a lot of pop music.
You can see from the countries that you mention above, that the bands 
that got on the US market are bands that don't have such a large 
national market; Sweden has a population not more than 20 million, 
AFAIK. German, french and italian markets are much larger. So you get 
people singing in their native language, operating more on their 
native market.

 
> I wonder how America rap music plays in Europe. I hear rap sounds 
stuff 
> played in Indian movies. I think "god they are copying the worst 
part of 
> American culture."

Hmm, I see you don't like hiphop. That's ok. In fact, hiphop is 
something that you find in a lot of cultures around the world, in 
different forms. The hiphop that is known in the US is partly 
Jamaican; in Jamaica they used to do talking on records, it's called 
"toasting". And in afro/caribean culture you have music where people 
give comments while playing african drums, like djembe, congas, bata 
etc. In India you also have similar music.
Here in Europe, with it's immigrants from former colonies, have 
incorporated their cultural influences into hiphop. You have here in 
Holland people rapping in dutch, in France rapping in french, and in 
Germany rapping in german.
Hiphop is an interesting form of music. It's more like performance to 
me than only music. One of my best friends hates hiphop music, but I 
think people dispise this form of music because of the lack of 
knowledge about this genre. True, hiphop has gotten a bad rap because 
of it's image. Still I find it to be one of the purest forms of music. 
The same way I used to hate blue grass music, until I gave it a 
listen.
Yoonchi.