so this omar souleyman guy (RFI, RFD)

. I think it's important to bear in mind that Gergis worked on the first lot of releases over a period of a decade or more from 200 different albums on cassette - surely the actions of a genuine archivist with a passion for the music not someone trying to make a quick buck.

I know for a fact that is the truth.

That is VERY interesting. In the original story, there was a statement about how SF refused to comment, or something similar.

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, October 23, 2013 3:41 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

let me take a wild guess. all the lines accusing SF of various things in the original story were quotes from his new manager, all of which were redacted to the letter once the author actually interviewed Mark.

granted both Milton and I have been friends w/Mark for 10+ years

Don't really know what to make of the management-related controversy, especially given that we'll probably never hear anything from the man himself, but I'm not convinced by the argument that the new album has glossed things up and in doing so lost all the magic. It's still a pretty out-there album by any "world music" measure, not like he's duetting with Peter Gabriel or w/e.

it sounds pretty much the same but with better (depending on your taste) mixing & mastering.

yep. I'm kind of wary when people fetishise lo-fi recording - it can definitely add an edge, but who's to say the artist shouldn't get to try out other opportunities.

You are wary of ppl with different aesthetics than you? You are so right. They can be evil and stupid.

i agree that artists should be given other opportunities. i love king sunny ade's raw and lo fi early recordings and also love the ones where island put him in a slick paris studio and incorporated lots of electronics. personally i find the new omar souleyman album a little disappointing sonically and also with regard to the variation in the music. it was an interesting experiment but it feels like a little of the soul of his music got lost along the way.

Eh. I don't care whether anyone likes the new or the old stuff better. xp

that larb piece is great

There's just an element of "Keep Omar Weird" in some of the discourse (see also Penman's review in the Wire). auto-xp

again, some people have aesthetics that prefer "weirdness" in music

that wasn't penman

ah? I read it a month or so ago, must have got mixed up.

penman wrote the sly stone thing in the same issue

yr right, Clive Bell it was.

it's more complicated than just aesthetics though, right? it's interesting that both sides are concerned with commodification in a way. like this quote from one of the SF dudes:

“It goes from being an underground thing to a cultural-export situation,” he explains, “Once it becomes part of an industry the commoditization of the sound, which is a very normal, almost obligatory part of modern music, the music loses the urgency and the heat that originality made it good. The raw and incendiary message becomes smoothed-over and polished and neatly-packaged for a Western audience.”

versus neatly packaging his music for a Western audience interested in weird, underground, lo-fi records. i'm not taking sides here, but these are the kinds of issues that always come up when marketing/selling non-western culture to a western audience, right? things always start to get weird when real success/money comes into play.

totally. especially when the aesthetic preferences of the "importers" clash with those of the actual artists, which seems to have happened to some degree here. it's interesting.

it's also interesting in terms of how a lot of the music in question is "exotic" interpretations of Western music -- so the cultural exchange is already complicated

"Warni Warni" sounds great!

The arseholes from the record company are only complaining because they are not making as much money out of him as they previously did.

did they tell you this?

That would be crazy though. A higher profile for Souleyman means better back catalogue sales. xp

sarahell do you like the new album?

haven't heard it

oh ok cool

the u.s.-indie-centric notion of an authentic underground sure looks like a form of cloistered Puritan hypocrisy in this kind of exchange. that's why i liked the la review of books piece upthread so much, it gets at the bigger picture which is a mix of different but related truth contexts and how they do or don't work in tandem.

The arseholes from the record company are only complaining because they are not making as much money out of him as they previously did.

Don't buy this - if you're mainly interested in money you don't spend five years trying to break a Syrian wedding singer in the West.

xp - oh i thought you were talking about larb - the food

Yeah right seandalai he is just some modest wedding singer who they have been running at a loss as some kind of favour! Yeah Sure!

xp lol

xp - I don't know about the profits/financials for Sublime Frequencies, but I am familiar with how much money and time Mark, personally, invested in Omar and promoting his work

All I heard was blah blah blah..

look if you want to make assumptions based on superficial cynicism, go ahead, but it's pretty stupid to maintain those assumptions when someone is telling you that they actually know the truth.

nb, tl;dr below, may be strawmanning, had a bunch of ideas and a bong and decided to combine the two so plz insert ymmv, imho, idk what i'm saying here as appropriate:-- I don't want to argue that there aren't complexities in recontextualizing a syrian wedding singer for a western popular audience, but why does raising this discussion always seem to skew towards negative interpretations? "exotic" seems to connote a kind of fetishized otherness, as though souleyman were being commodified. the guy of course is already always 'commodifying' himself - he supports his family through playing music professionally, first in weddings and now for hip western record labels. moreover tho it's not like his popularity is this rough, depersonalized exotic figure - i think his coming over has been very centered in the context of his original performances. his audience knows this was originally wedding music, they know his story, and bc of current foreign events they might even know more about syria than they've ever known. also tho, i feel like we don't bat an eyelid when western music is removed from its context and dispersed to non-western countries. we even assume that this expected - either bc of our dominant western aesthetics (lolz, jk) or bc the west is an economic hegemon. but music always has this loose porous relationship between communities; in some aspects souleyman is colonizing a western audience. he's being appreciated as an artist and that is exactly what he is.

agree with that

I distractedly listened to teh NPR stream - sounded good, not very different from his old stuff - but maybe I need to hear this on proper home speakers to appreciate the commercial glossing up.

i feel like we don't bat an eyelid when western music is removed from its context and dispersed to non-western countries

Yeah there's not much of this sort of handwringing around, say, afrobeats (which is largely made up of African pop, dancehall, US hip-hop and London dance music in varying proportions). But maybe that's because we're used to the idea of a constant cultural exchange with the bigger African countries. Physical exchange as well, most people who spend time in a big UK or US city will have encountered someone from Nigeria or Ghana whereas the same might not be true of someone from Syria, many people have had zero exposure to Syrian music, so people get this idea of it being this fragile bird that needs to be protected. As far as I'm aware there isn't anyone saying "Omar Souleyman is the only good Syrian music" or worse still "Omar Souleyman transcends Syrian music".

I do get the sense he's a guy you need to see live to see him at his best, though.

yep. live with a hyped enough crowd, his shows have been some of the most energetic/fun/dancey/manic shows i've ever seen.

that Christgau/Spin review is good, but lol @ this line:

the programmed drums generate rhythms that few American tub-thumpers could map, much less replicate

i like the music but it's not exactly rhythmically complicated.

I didn't see the other article until after the edit -- what was removed?

Hebden seemed a bit upset yesterday: "Some of these pitchfork writers are such fucking amateurs. Facts all over the place."

drama aside this is a great album

Yeah there's not much of this sort of handwringing around, say, afrobeats (which is largely made up of African pop, dancehall, US hip-hop and London dance music in varying proportions).

There's actually a significant difference. I don't know much about Afrobeats, but as I understand it, it's something that grew up within a British immigrant community. Souleyman in the west functions as an individual transplanted into a foreign environment. It's not particularly a Syrian American or Arab American community supporting him (correct me if I'm wrong), and his sound isn't an immigrant hybrid. This seems like the kind of stuff you'd hear at dinner concerts, with tabouleh and shawarma and plentiful bottles of arak, but that's not the circuit he's performing in in the U.S. Or do they make some concessions to those things at these shows?

Not that I feel really strongly about these issues. I like Souleyman. I've heard somewhat similar (and also entirely different) Arab music I like more.

I don't think much of him as a vocalist.

the few other bits of dabke I've heard haven't had as good vocals as his stuff, is there someone w/ similar stoic anguish you wld recommend?

I don't really listen to a lot of debka per se, or when I do it's usually by someone who performs a wide range of genres. So not really.

Would much rather listen to Mohammed Assaf's debka, but that's an entirely different thing. Doesn't have the trippiness of what Souleyman is doing. I have a live recording by Saleh Abdel Gafor which has some of that quality. It's not debka, but feels related. Not sure about the stoic anguish thing though. I wouldn't have thought of that as a description of Souleyman. Honestly I don't go looking for or expect stoic anguish in Arab vocalists. Maybe I'd describe Marcel Khalife that way at times, but if you know him, you know he sounds nothing like Souleyman.

I don't know how to just put a file up somewhere any more. Those sites all ask for too much involvement at this point.

I like some of Syrian debka star Ali Al Deek's music too (especially the album Aloush), but he may be too light for Souleyman fans.