Happy birthday, if that's what we are talking about: I never keep track of these things.
I sent the link about Monika because she has been promoted mostly by a free press weekly that is trying to patronize young/fresh trends and be in all the right places and with the right people. In other words, it has to do with attempts to support a certain scene that would constitute the avantgarde of urban culture...
My problem is that even if the girl is decent in most respects, I don't appreciate in the year 2009, attempts to be chic as part of an international/globalized uniform scene that apes lukewarm sounds emanating from a vaguely american pop/rock tradition. I don't see there but naivete and wishful thinking to fit into the dominant paradigm while believing that you are doing groundbreaking work.
Better said, I would expect the alternative scene of any non english speaking country to establish dialogues with modernity and post modernity and ultra post modernity. These dialogues should be drawing on the real experience instead of posing as something imagined on the basis of MTV commercials.
I think that in English speaking countries, the "avantgarde" of music since the late eighties had been engaging a lot in deformed language exercises. Noise, digital corruption of vocals, whatever... How can the latest thing here be represented by bands that look for ...female singers coming from rich families (and therefore with a good background in foreign languages.... they went to American schools, or grew up abroad and stuff like that... and now, they function as the window of the enterprise, to give the scene a certain polish... like selling a perfume with a french name, because apparently, to smell good you must have a french name... etc)
It seems to me that these sounds and artists I gave you links for, would not be perceived as particularly alternative in any major metropolitan city. They would be part of endless numbers of bands competing for a spot in the limelights of cable TV or whatever.
However, the cultural question and the question of identity, is left completely untouched. What do these totally complacent english lyrics have to do with our experience on the ground? I find the concept pretty insipid.
In my own attempts at songs, I have always moved on the fringe of linguistic identity, an area where different languages and primeval sound emissions are boiling unable to reach any level of articulation. Linguistically, I think there is a serious issue there. As my identity is hybrid, so is my language when I try to express my experience in a musical manner and this is what is missing in these bands. I find them unartistically and characteristically shallow, sentimental, conformist etc
I guess that their point of reference could be Bjorg and her career movement from Iceland to the US. The truth is that Bjorg was mostly an excellent performer. She did not simply sing in english, she basically did things with her mouth and face and body and with her voice.
But, that was a thing for the nineties. Is it interesting right now? I mean, at least, if one was to adopt Chinese... OK, that would have some charm. I should probably do that myself. Make songs in Chinese and sing them in Greece.
You see what I mean?
Do you understand why I'm mortified by greeks aping american stuff in 2009? I was ashamed when they expected me to do that many years ago and still, they are not even aware of the problem, today! I believe that this is sad provincialism worthy of Malta and other well to do provincial shops.
And please... Monika is deemed avantgarde stuff by the niche crowd (you can't get a particularly broad following if you are not a belly dance dog singer in mainstream night clubs, like the ones in the satire by Anna Goula -do you remember the tragic video?- where the girls climb on the tables, the men drink whiskey and they throw flowers to the singing doggish tart), if you dared compare her with Eurovision acts like you do in your message, they would bash your nose over here
I feel a bit alien in this landscape, that's why I prefer to abstain for a while and watch Al Jazeera and chat in their room with the international crowd. At least, English, in there, is truly bastardised and multithreaded and incorrect and patois
Do you have a job these days or are you turning around the sun -in major Tom fashion- in empty space?
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