Music

Apparently there’s a musical movement in Peru called Qpop

It emulates the aesthetics and musical styles of K-pop, but it’s done by indigenous Quechua speakers

In an added twist the biggest band’s lead singer is named *Lenin* Tamayo

pic.twitter.com/OZpe7vrswe

— Andrés Pertierra (@ASPertierra) August 24, 2023

Global global music! Yes, it’s real, per the AP — “Q-Pop: Peru’s social media phenomenon Lenin Tamayo fuses Quechua and K-pop”:

What happens when you take Quechua, the most widely spoken Indigenous language in the Americas, and fuse it with K-pop, the global musical sensation with roots in South Korea?

Ask Lenin Tamayo, who has become a social media phenomenon with “Q-pop” and released his first digital album this week.

Tamayo grew up listening to his mother, a Peruvian folk artist who sings in Spanish and Quechua, a language shared by 10 million speakers in countries including Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina and Chile. As a teenager, K-pop became his passion and helped him find a group of like-minded female classmates who helped fight the bullying he says he faced at school for his Indigenous looks.

Now himself a musician, the 23-year-old Tamayo has fused those chapters, mixing Spanish and Quechua lyrics with K-pop beats to create Q-pop (in which the “Q” stands for “Quechua”). He’s amassed more than 4.4 million likes on his TikTok account and released five digital singles online…

However, Wikipedia claims the moniker for Kazahkstan — per Youtube, going back to 2015!
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Also political protest music:

"HERE HE AM!" ??@RandyRainbow is a wicked wit, an unparalleled musical master of parody & a national treasure, full stop. Every time I think he can't top himself, he does it AGAIN.#TherapeuticHilarity ?????? https://t.co/3FM6u5wQR7

— Mark Hamill (@MarkHamill) August 22, 2023

(Randy Rainbow, on tour this fall.)

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Another twist in the latest musical ‘Culture War’ kerfuffle…

Rich men North of Richmond singer says “it’s aggravating seeing people on conservative news try to identify with me like I’m one of them.”

He says it’s funny they used it in the GOP debate because “I wrote that song about them.” pic.twitter.com/jlzoEDSs4p

— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) August 25, 2023

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Sunday Morning Open Thread: Musical Interlude(s)Post + Comments (139)

The Indigo Girls are having a moment because their most famous song is featured at a key scene in the Barbie movie. Here are Indigo Girls Amy Ray and Emily Saliers performing their then-new hit on the Letterman show in 1989:

NYT columnist Lydia Polgreen talks about what it means to witness the renewed relevance of a song that was a staple of one’s “angsty adolescence” — and why the Indigo Girls remain on her playlist well into middle age (gift link):

They are, as the kids would say, cringe.

Cringe: the ultimate insult of our era. It implies a kind of pathetic attachment to hope, to sincerity, to possibility. Cringe is not exclusively female; the musical “Hamilton,” written by a man, Lin-Manuel Miranda, is definitely cringe. But in these hardened times, it implies a kind of naïveté that so often gets coded as feminine, a silly belief that human beings, through sincere effort, might actually improve themselves and the world. That things might, somehow, get better. Feminism? Definitely cringe. And if feminism is cringe, then lesbians are double cringe. And the Indigo Girls? We’re talking cringe squared…

We live in dangerous, frightening times. We’ve been through a pandemic and stared down a global recession. Rights that seemed secure — to control our bodies, to marry whom we love, to vote — are under attack. We’re once again reminded of the ever-present threat of nuclear war and confrontation with China. It’s likely the hottest summer in recorded history. You can respond to these circumstances with fatalistic cynicism. Or you can meet them with a sense of possibility, grounded in reality, loosely tethered to something like hope.

To me, this is what the Indigo Girls are all about. Sincerity coupled with wisdom, which is a recipe for something durable: solidarity. A sense that we are in this together. The Indigo Girls are great. Cringe but true. That’s because the kernel of who we are is cringe. That is what it means to be open to the world. To be open to the possibility of a future different from who you are now. When we are young, we feel that way because we don’t know any better. Eventually you get to a place where you know all the ways it can go wrong and feel open anyway.

We could all use something like hope these days, and it’s there if you look for it. I saw it last night in Ohio. I’m even seeing it in Florida!

Open thread!

‘Something Like Hope’ (Open Thread)Post + Comments (224)