Freedom is the Road Seldom Travelled by the Multitude

A Fever Dream Playlist for the Non-Western World

Y’all are going to have to excuse me today; the holiday, combined with some extra family obligations, have me a bit drained and so I haven’t been able to center on music nearly as much as usual, at least in the sense to dig down like I’d like to with these Sunday editions.

However

Your support isn’t being taken for granted, because I made this playlist for you. It’s called The Colour of Pomegranates named for the hypnotic and beautiful 1969 film by director Sergei Paradjanov. The film is an artistic biography of Armenian poet troubador Sayat Nova and was banned in the Soviet Union due to its anti-realist construction, and had to be shown underground in order to be seen. I am thinking about the great works of film and literature that proliferated this way in the former Soviet Union, such as the literature of samizdat, which involved the covert distribution of state banned writing via copying and then destroying material.

Listening to the music in this playlist, one should keep in mind the political context of their creation. While I wasn’t thinking directly on the authoritarian effect on the artists included, it has to be noted that in many of the cases, the melding of traditional music with the sensibilities of western sensibilities could carry a hefty significance as opposition to the polished image of states that were actually failed / failing. The Turkish music I’ve added may not have been met with the type of state-fist that artists like Selda Bagcan faced (she was imprisoned three times, although her work was not overtly political), yet still exists within that framework. Derdiyoklar, for example, represent the diaspora that took place as an effect of that failing statehood: Turks in Hamburg, playing for the growing Turkish community in Germany. I don’t know if they even had distribution in their former country, honestly.

Or as with the case of Boutaibi Saidi, the musical tradition of Räi came as a street level expression born of mixing traditional Moroccan styles with the Western influence of the colonial French, and has its own history of censorship by religious authorities.

So with that in mind, please enjoy this hour and a half collection of strange and beautiful songs.