(from Madhav Chari to me)
Interesting, Zimmer is probably correct in tracing the connection
between the two. But energetically the tunes are extremely different: just
listen again.
We tend to look for similarities in structure or motifs, and there could
be conscious similarities. However what makes the piece is the total
emotional energy of the piece ...
Hear the end of the Jackson tune when he say ma ma se etc and hear Dibango
say it in the course of the tune: actually the energy is extremely
different. Jackson's articulation is different: it sounds more aggressive
than Dibango, also regarding the entire piece its almost as if the Jackson
piece is a cleaned up compared to Dibango ... obviously we also hear a US
production job. However to me the Dibango tune is no less musical, no less
interesting and probably connects with a deeper musical spirit the
specific musical articulation is a connect to the spirit of the music form
... musical articulation is similar to accent in everyday language: not
accent as in where the beats go but accent as in Irish, mid western, Long
Island, upper class Indian in Mumbai speaking English
I cannot show you articulation unless I play it for you, or point you to
recorded music ...
-MC
+++
And recently upon my requesting permission to post his thoughts on Goanet.
(MC)
Go ahead but the important thing to note is that one should be able to
hear this articulation and emotive difference ... we can describe all we
want using English but that never gets us very far and this ability to
hear the music cannot be intellectually explained: one listens and listens
and listens till some part of that music sits inside your system / your
body-mind
+++
vjp
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:52:28 -0400
From: Venantius Pinto venantius.pi...@gmail.com
Subject: [Goanet] Michael Jackson's Nonsense Chant
Michael Jackson's Nonsense Chant at:
http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/blogexcerpts/1902/
Yesterday, Ben Zimmer traced
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1542the nonsense-syllable
chant at the end of Michael Jackson's
*Wanna Be Startin Somethin* back to its roots in Manu Dibango's *Soul
Makossa*, a 1973 Cameroonian hit that played a role in the origins of disco
in New York City. The chants in these songs are nice examples of a
phenomenon that I discussed a couple of years ago (Rock syncopation:
stress
shifts or polyrhythms?
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/005154.html,
11/26/2007), where linguistic accents and musical beats start off aligned
at
the beginning of a phrase, and then go out of sync, typically with one or
more of the later textual accents shifted to the left, i.e. ahead in
time,
relative to the apparent musical beat.
Madhav, please take a look at it.
venantius
