Cool Stuff: South America

Time for more Cool Stuff! This time, we'll be traveling to South America. Yes, our focus there has been mainly in the Central Andes, but for purposes of this blog I'm opening it up to all of South America. (Note: for this assignment, we're keeping to South America, rather than Latin America. South America is just the continent, and the northernmost point is southern Panama. You'll have the opportunity to explore the music of Central America, Mexico, or the Caribbean later on in the course, if you wish.)

A few gentle reminders. You Cool Stuff blogs should include:

  • Three separate lines of inquiry--things you want to know more about. These can stem from our class discussions or readings or from other areas of your knowledge.
  • Only one of those lines may be about the culture in general. At least two of the lines of inquiry must have some connection to music.
  • Each line of inquiry must be accompanied by a hefty paragraph of info from you. 
  • You need to indicate where you're getting your information from. You may do this by simply stating it in the body of your prose, i.e. "According to Paul Simon's professional web page," or by including a link list at the end of your post, or even  by linking to sources like this.
As always, blogs are due by Friday night at 11:59 pm; upload the web address to your post to the appropriate portal in Canvas. Comments are due by the beginning of class next Tuesday; upload a copy of comments to Canvas.

Because I don't want to steal anyone's lines of inquiry, I'll just include one item here:

As you'll learn when we get to our study of the music of South Africa, I'm a die-hard, life-long Paul Simon fan. His first foray into the music of other cultures was his seminal album Graceland, for which he traveled (famously and controversially) to South Africa to work with musicians there. The follow up album to Graceland was Rhythm of the Saints, for which he travelled to South America and worked with a variety of musicians there. He mostly worked with musicians from Brazil (this was in 1990). The first song from the album, "Obvious Child," was conceived of by Paul Simon after hearing an Afro-Brazilian drum group, Olodum, that specialized in a heavy drumming style suitable for the samba. Paul Simon wrote the lyrics of the song to match the rhythms of these drummers and then recorded the song and subsequent video with them. Their music is sort of analogous to "Me Gusta la Leche," the Afro-Ecuadorian san juan that we heard in class last week, in that it has obvious rhythmic ties to Africa.



Bibliography:
Scheetz, Cameron. "'The Obvious Child' is 24 years old, but it's all about the present," AV Club, December 9, 2014. https://music.avclub.com/the-obvious-child-is-24-years-old-but-it-s-all-about-1798274750.

Songfacts. "'The Obvious Child' by Paul Simon." Accessed September 14, 2020. https://www.songfacts.com/facts/paul-simon/the-obvious-child.





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