poetry in music

Can music express the words of the poet ?? I have been intrigued by Madina Gulgun an iranian/azeri poet. Her most famous work which was sung by everyone was sen gelmez ouldun. Unless you understand the language you might not be able to identify the depth in her lyrics. Not to mention even if you do find some decent translation.. there are somethings which just gets lost in translation (so true for Urdu poetry). I remember long time ago reading a small poem by John Keats.It tells of the poet's astonishment at reading the works of the ancient Greek poet Homer as freely translated by the Elizabethan playwright George Chapman. Well this new age music inspired by Madina Gulgun's poetry composed by Alihan Samedov made me go look up at her work. I really feel the composer translated Gulgun's poetry into this music. After changing my laptop few time I lost this music... imagine my surprise when i accidentally find it today and yeah i did not know about the composer until today

Nostalgia

Last few days have been listening to Linkin park esp this one

Kanye west

I first across this singer from Colbert Nation. I think before the MTV awards south park had a nice episode on Kanye west and this is a song from the show (remember it is south park so don't expect the language to be nice).. I just found the song and the episode really funny

inspired!!!!

well last weekend I spend some time listening to some music and I found out that there is a new (hey I dont follow it as much I should) music director in hindi movies... Pritam. Well first of all I did hear the song Ya ali from gangster and I had heard the original arabic version too. I thought may be just one out of quite of few of his hits. well it seems that most of his hits song are actually copies all around the world. Apart from the usual middle eastern, Tarkan he did not even spare Korean, Indonesian and far east music.

Here

is a site which lists his hit songs and the original version of the same

The issue here is can we just say it is just inspired from another artist or just plagiarism. Karan Thapar had a segment on this issue and he picked two music directors- Anu Mallik and Pritam (two poster boys for music plagiarism). It is a must watch... Pritam seems to think that getting the tune is just 15% of the job and the difficult part is trying to re-do so to speak. Well if the bollywood movie industry is so much against video piracy.. hmmm should I go further.

Well just in case Pritam does accidentally bump into this blog.. I do agree that sometime people get inspired but there is definitely a clear difference between inspired and copying. Not making sense here is an example.. this is an slightly old song of Ofra Haza (a wonderful Israeli singer)


And this is a Deva's Tamil song which has similar begining



I think although it has a similar beginning the rest of the song is different. May be again may be this is called inspired. (For the record Deva is also known to steal songs completely in many occasions)

Now what about "the not so inspired but rather copied" here is a song from the Korean soap opera




And this is Pritam's Peheli Nazar from the movie Race .. and yeah if you look at the time line when the songs came you can figure who copied whom :)




It is so interesting some years ago there was a similar claim in particle physics. A group from Kumaon University did a direct copy of Renata Kallosh paper word by word and got is published in some journal. Well after people figured it out the axe fell on the graduate student not on his advisor. More info

here

Flamenco

It has been up in my list of do things to learn to play some instrument (knock the smile off). In my second year at grad school I got myself a yamaha guitar and two years down I sold it :). So much for progress. My latest dream is flamenco guitar. It is much more lively, and not to mention the dance accompanying it. Here is a video which has some good music



The interesting thing is I always knew someone who was good in music... during grad school it was couple of friends, when I moved to NY my land lord was big in it and most importantly my current adviser plays blues guitar (which apparently he learned it by himself).

Turkish music

I guess I have been introduced to Turkish music for quite some time. I once had a housemate who played Sezen Aksu almost 24/7. Maybe I would appreciate the songs better if I understood it. I just found it depressing. I think my all time favorite turkish song is Isyankar by Mustafa Sandal featuring Gentleman. I think the video is nice too. My first visit to Istanbul earlier this summer was quite like the taxi drive in this video



I guess his earlier song araba was also very popular. But the version of Faudel's La main dans la main is much better. I am not sure who copied home. Faudel's version sounds more pop rai.