Sorry for the lack of updates recently, for the one person who probably has been following this blog. Or ever glanced at it. Or laughed at it. But I'll be updating it alongside my blog posts on http://www.lordkat.com/blog . So... to business.
This is the second installment of The Bridge, where I muse about music in general... and I think we can make it a bit more exotic, don't ya think? Spice it up a bit.
One of my favorite metal songs is from a Finnish metal song named Verta ja Lihaa, made by a good group of men that call themselves Turmion Katilot - the Midwives of Doom. ... yea. Anyway, some of the people that know me on the chat (or heck, even elsewhere) know of my love for foreign music. Something about it just clicks with me; cultural influences on the rhythms and subjects, oftentimes how they get away with things that we wouldn't even dare think of due to much more lax censorship laws, and all in all better quality due to less pressure from outside sources to fit the norm in order to sell.
Look at the video for Verta ja Lihaa if you want to see my point. I could write a whole blogpost on that alone. You Finns are weird, but dammit if y'all aren't awesome.
And hell, a ton of this music is in entirely different languages. Perhaps it's some sort of "Exotic Syndrome" or some shenanigans like that, but ever since middle school I've always been a fan of foreign languages. I was born, raised, and still live in Texas - Spanish is everywhere. It's in your menus, your public restrooms, your legal documents, everywhere, so that our brothers and sisters south of the border can have a bit of a leg up here. And I always liked that.
Though this really didn't branch out into my love for music that much until recently, since I never really quite paid attention to the media until about late middle school; this was when my older sister would introduce me to her favorite metal bands (of which were Linkin Park and Disturbed, at least at the time). It was around high school when all of this came together.
One of my teachers in my junior year, Mr. Dean, was quite an eccentric fellow. An excellent teacher, don't get me wrong, but quite an odd man. Anyway, he was apparently showing a previous class-period a trailer for a Russian movie named Nochnoy Dozor (Night Watch); it turned out to be a music video.
I was floored. This guy was rapping in Russian; there was a ton of Arabic-culture influence both in the beat and in the video; and most of all, this guy sounded fucking AWESOME. How they made this guy's voice sound so sinister, how it melded together so well with the sounds and events from the video... I loved it. I asked my teacher later what the video was, and he told me the name of it (in a Russian accent of course. He was weird. Loved him though. Great guy.)
So I had to find out more about this "Seryoga" guy, see what else he did. One of my first finds was the work he did with Grand Theft Auto - Liberty City...
... and I was likin' him more and more. And then I found this in the sidebar.
Russian AND German. IN THE SAME VIDEO. And the beat... I remember watching this video for the first time, mouth agape, as these two rappers (speaking completely different languages) bounced off each other.
And you know, now that I think about it, this and Tamerlana have featured shirtless men. This worries me. But nah, probably nothing.
Anyway, I was completely hooked. From Seryoga, I unfortunately couldn't find much in the way of Russian rappers, but from Azad I found a WEALTH of artists: Kool Savas, Die Fantastischen Vier, Samy Deluxe, Greis, Curse, Kaz Money, Ercandize, Jifusi, Maeckes/Plan B... the list goes on. I've listened to these artists at least once and have found favorites among them, and from so many other countries.
Except for Bushido. Jackass.
As I mentioned before, from all of these artists I found something I was missing from domestic hip-hop - freedom. It was the 80s and 90s again for them, transplanted into the rough-and-tumble world of the 21st century. They rapped about their troubles. Their charisma was devout and concrete. They loved their art. They wanted their voice heard, not just from in their country but around the world. Especially a lot of these German artists were Turkish-born (speaking of which, Ceza is an excellent pick for Turkish hip-hop) and they were - and still are - facing the same struggles that young blacks in the 1970s were in America, and have now found their voice in this bombastic genre.
Believe me, I've found my loves in domestic hip-hop and metal since then, but without this a lot of my love for music probably would not have been born. I attribute a lot of my love to these guys who may only barely speak my language, and of which I can never be able to speak theirs (though my Spanish ain't bad and I'm getting somewhere with Finnish and German). I'd like for y'all to try an artist or two from a country you've always wanted to know more about; ask your international friends for a suggestion or two, and see if you feel the same way about them as I did.
Thanks Mr. Dean.
And thanks to you, dear reader.
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