As many of you know, my wife and I just returned from a 3 and a half week trip to Tanzania where we successfully climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, went on safari and saw the "Big 5", and chilled out in Zanzibar.
One thing I noticed was the importance of music vis a vis other forms of media. Music consumption in the West is much more of a background phenomenon. We tune into the radio while driving to work, we put tunes on when having people over for dinner, we hear music in bars & restaurants, as part of movie and game soundtracks...the point is that a lot of our music consumption happens while we're doing other things.
In Africa, music seemed to be very much a foreground phenomenon. We'd be approached on the streets of Stonetown, Zanzibar by touts wanting to sell us CDs of African music. In the town of Moshi, there were street vendors selling CDs and cassette tapes (remember those things) of different types of East African and Western music (reggae is very popular there) -- the only place in the US that has something like that is NYC. One of the most surreal experiences was being on Mt. Kilimanjaro and hearing some of our porters singing along to a radio playing soft pop Western Music (Richard Marx "Everything I Do (I Do It For You)", which we heard played disconcertingly frequently). And we'd hear music being played out on the streets, and blared from loudspeakers.
I think it's part cultural and part economic in that we can much better afford to consume other types of media here (movies, games, print publications).
It reminded me of how much I value music. The DVDs we watched on the plane back also reminded me of how much I love movies, but that's for another post.
Great post...I like the observation on the different ways music is consumed there vs. here. I had a similar epiphany while in Japan many years ago, with the obvious popularity of karaoke there...music is much more participatory there as well.
Also, welcome back...look forward to your posts...
m
Posted by: michael parekh | July 25, 2005 at 12:57 PM