MUSIC IS UNIVERSAL

Hey, this is Frances here :D
Howdy patnas?
I am only kidding, slightly.
Bare with me, I tend to have really long sentences. It gets pretty crazy. I just have too many thoughts happening at once!

This weekend I went on an awesome trip to Memphis called "Rockin' The Boat in Memphis," where I was able to visit Graceland as well as Sun Studio, Stax Records, and Rock N Soul Museum. It was really amazing to learn where many of the prominent artists got their influences from. The amount of information I learned was overwhelming! I can't even begin to try to recite to you all the awesome facts I learned. What I loved the most was being able to stand where history was made. I could just feel the energy in the room that was present at another point in time.

This experience made me think of just how much music is globalized. There were people from foreign countries who were also familiar with the American artists such as Elvis Presley and Ray Charles. I found that to be so cool, that music is universal, and has the same effect on all different kinds of people.  For example, personally, my favorite type of music is Canadian music, mostly. It is just something in the way their artists sing that brings joy to my ears. However, I could tell when listening to the songs that some of the songs have American influence. Deutschland, known as Germany for those who Spricht Deutsch Nichts!, has songs that have singers who sing Deutsch+ English, which I believe is due to the globalization of music. Even if you look at the top 40 charts of different countries, you could see that there are American pop songs on there. This concerns me a bit because sometimes it makes me think that globalizing music takes away from different cultures.

I am a person who is really interested in learning about and appreciating diverse cultures, so for something like music, which does not impede the progressing of a culture, I almost feel as if a part of me is against allowing global influence to affect culturally specific music. I do not mean  that people from other countries should not even  enjoy music from other countries because that would be hypocritical. Instead, I mean it as in people should preserve their culture's specific styles at least a little bit.  To be honest, I am one of those kids who lost knowledge and stopped living in accordance with my native culture because I assimilated too much to my adopted country.  So now, I feel like I can never really have a strong sense of identity of where I fit in the world, since I do not really feel completely Kenyan or American.  But through the music that my parents played around the house when I was growing up, I think I was able to preserve at least some knowledge of the culture. Music is just powerful like that :)

I hope I make sense, if I don't sorry! Sleep-deprived college kid here.

Toodles :D

Here's a cool video where someone explains their view of the globalization of music through history. This is such a cool topic! I am surprised I did not think of incorporating it to our project.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=497ZptG_k8M

On an extremely unrelated note, I just want to share this song. It just randomly popped in my head, but it is on the topic of music :D And, if you read the comments on this video, some of them are not in English! Music really travels. For instance, one commenter wrote that he or she is from Brazil and  plans to get a tattoo of the symbol of this band because that is how much he or she loves them!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuFI5KSPAt4&ob=av2e