NOVALIMA - AFRO
As the global tentacles of the music industry thrash around trying to find ways of flogging the old dressed up as new, the genre of world music has emerged, with subsequent micro industries of record labels, magazines, DVD`s, festivals and all the goddam awful paraphenalia marketed around niche markets, we must somehow stay focussed, calm and not lose our critical edge.
Who often controls and markets the sub sub-niches of this white middle class genre construction ?
Who is deciding what is valid, good, authentic, denoting classic album status and all the other cliches that glue a marketing campaign together ?
Yeah, of course its been going on since blues and country drunkenly fucked each other in a dark alley. The blues got pregnant and they called the baby Rock n` Roll. This we know, so, regardless of the BAD old music industry cliche ridden grinding and gnashing of gums, pick something else to have a moan about, I think we should look a bit more closely at this particular construct, the cheesily and, quite blandy named, World Music.
Ok, I aint doing the thinking for you, but suffice to say, beware, watch out, be alert...............theft of music, culture, poetry and souls. Again. And they are making the dollars, not the indigenous people, not the creators and guardians of their own ancestory, the tellers of history and herstory, they have got the vulture cultures picking their bones clean. I can hear you stifle a yawn, scratch yourself and ask; Whats new then ? Well its still going on. Right under yours and my noses. You could even be buying it, for Allah or Buddha`s sake.......Think on............
Novalima are one group who have stood up for their ancestors culture. They come from Peru. They have released an album called Afro, available on the small but beautifully formed Mr Bongo Recordings. Novalima actively wanted to keep cultural-ownership of their music, in the names of their forefathers and mothers who originally began to make it. The ones who lived it. Their music goes back several hundred years to slavery times, when Africans were shipped to European colonies in the Americas. The pain that those slaves endured has been documented across generations through story, poem, music and song. Same all around the world, for the dispossessed to put their stories into folklore, to attempt to seal their ways of coping and overcoming their pain for their childrens childrens children.. Novalima have taken up the baton from the inspirational black Poet and musician Nicomedes Santa Cruz. Cruz felt compelled to chronicle his meticulous exploration and study of Afro-Peruvian culture in his work Cumanana - Antologia Peruana, containing poetry and music, in 1964. A second edition was published in 1965. What compelled him ? He could not sit and watch the fears and sufferings that his people had poured into songs, poems and music simply die. They were played at parties, social gatherings and other important events. Hidden and huddled within sexual rites and practices, flamboyant and showy games and the exaggurated gesture of rythmic dance, the tales lived on. Cruz feared that these aesthetics would be lost forever, subsumed by what he named the `hollywoodification` of Afro-Peruvian culture.
Novalima have continued the tradition; Peruvians who have chronicled the narratives of previous black Peruvians, Afro-Peruvians, Afro generations, sealing them in a tribute album that ensures their continued relevance, for all to hear. The album is cooking. Afro is hot, funky, rythmic, exhilirating, original, cultural, powerful, tinged with sorrow, melancholy and pain. It contains songs, samples and lyrics from their forefathers. One of the Novalima musician`s, Manque vasquez, is the grandson of Porfirio Vasquez, thought of as the founding father of Afro-Peruvian, Afro music.
Novalima. They hold the cards. I`ve marked yours. Go buy it.
allcontents©hesterglock/paulhawkins2007
"tactical guerilla facilitation within the (+/-)pop culture Dow Seng"
