Wednesday, February 05, 2003
michael, I - we? - stand corrected. excerpted from the aforementioned consumer guide, christgau on ali hussan kuban's the rough guide to ali hussan kuban [emphases mine]:
"Situated in that strangely familiar territory between kinda boring and utterly weird, Kuban was modernity's musical ambassador from Nubia, which some—mostly boring Afrocentric weirdos, but that doesn't make them wrong—regard as a prime source of the Mediterranean culture all Americans share. And though it says something about developmental feedback and lineaments of greatness that this wedding singer from an ancient land was known to tip his kufi to James Brown, his funk has always sounded indigenous to me. For one thing, it's melodic in an ancient, pentatonic way—that's the Nubian part."
"Situated in that strangely familiar territory between kinda boring and utterly weird, Kuban was modernity's musical ambassador from Nubia, which some—mostly boring Afrocentric weirdos, but that doesn't make them wrong—regard as a prime source of the Mediterranean culture all Americans share. And though it says something about developmental feedback and lineaments of greatness that this wedding singer from an ancient land was known to tip his kufi to James Brown, his funk has always sounded indigenous to me. For one thing, it's melodic in an ancient, pentatonic way—that's the Nubian part."
# posted by Thomas : 2:52 PM
