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Wow. I'd love to know on average how many languages foro members speak. Just on this thread we've gone from English to Chinese to French!
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"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
Yeah there is a longstanding tradition in France to focus not so much on the music but on the lyrics. The so-called "paroliers". Though it's a tradition that seems to be losing ground fairly rapidly. Even French humor used to be based a lot on the language itself (as opposed to, say, situational comedy), with some of the greats of French stand-up such as Pierre Desproges or Raymond Devos. But that too seems to be changing.
Back to Afghanistan: I browsed a bit through freemuse.org as well and had found this report There is also a BBC documentary called that covers the history of Afghan musicians from the Soviet era, through the Mujahideen rule and subsequent Taliban rule. (The story of Amruddin, around min. 25, really got to me...)
There are quite a few names of Afghan artists both in the report and in the documentary and that's basically what I've been looking up.
My starting point was this:
Though this is Qawwali sung by a Pakistani and not Afghan music, I guess there must have been some interplay between the two since Ali Khan collaborated with some Afghan artists. Or perhaps the purists were calling Qawwali fusion?
As for Afghan music per se, I've been listening to some of this:
As far as singers are concerned, she's the most interesting thing I've found so far. Everyone seems to think that Ahmad Zahir was a great singer, but I'm just not feeling it...
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"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
I'm gunna guess 2 on average. There's likely a lot of Americans that only speak one that would bring our average down to two. I kinda wanna know too....maybe a I make a poll.
It was actually through Paco Ibanez that I first got acquainted with the main poets of Andalucia. He has a way of putting their poems into song without deforming the essence of the texts. A rare gift.
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"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
Good idea! The results won't be all that reliable since it's very subjective (I don't think I'm the only out there who at times had the impression of speaking fluently when the people I was speaking to could probably barely make out what I was saying ) Should be fun to see what people say though.
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"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."