Temperature in Dushanbe: 38 Celsius, 100 Fahrenheit
I'm listening to the collection What It Is! Funky Soul And Rare Grooves 1967-1977 as I write this. The collection is a massive, possibly too big to digest properly, slab of rare funk and foul. It is heavy on instrumentals, flute, and corner-turning horns. As usual, I'm getting into it a few years late -- though how that could possibly matter with a collection of 30-to-40-year-old tracks, I don't know.
It's a completely unintelligible collection for the locals here in Dushanbe, except when it begins to sound like hip-hop -- the musical form that, for better or worse, may be the musical Lingua Franca at the moment. Here in Dushanbe, there are dozens of kids starting up hip-hop groups, rapping in Tajiki and English about local pride, or just aping the foul-mouthed mainstream acts that manage to make their way this far -- unfortunately, none of hip-hop's finest in the US. I've seen the best breakdancing here in Central Asia, and they are nearly as fluent in American pop as Americans themselves are, but I don't think they would feel any connection to this particular period of Americana: for those in the more far-flung of the soviet republics, hip-hop and rap emerged via the immaculate conception of satellite-born music channels -- orphan broadcasts from a West without history.
For me, on the other hand, this music carries a charge: my earliest music memories are soul memories, of thrift-store-bought 45s played on the used portable record player. I had The Jackson 5's ABC, Diana Ross, and a few others, with or without their paper sleeves, and for contrast I had Blondie's "The Tide Is High," which I listened to incessantly. When I look back on it, it's a strange world. It was before massive amounts of storage and portability allowed people to own thousands of albums in one convenient location, and before adulthood would allow me access to money and choice. I could not have dreamed of owning 90 45s back then. Or even half that number. But the restrictions put on my record collection (whatever happened to be given to me, found in a junk box, or bought at the thrift store near where we lived in Oakland and then Hayward) has caused those first 45s, played hundreds of times, to be forever burned into my memory.
This collection of Atlantic and Warner sides won a Grammy back in 2006. It seems to have deserved it -- these are truly rare tracks, with hypnotic grooves that illustrate the enormous loss experienced by American rock after the 60's, as it became increasingly separated along color lines. I wonder, though, if the very limitlessness of our consumption opportunities these days dampens the impact of those individual tracks. There are so many of them that it's hard to pay attention to the subtleties of just one -- to make friends with that one little musical moment. Sometimes, I find that I miss the circumscription of that beat-up, tweed-clad portable record player and turning over those scratched little 45s. Sometimes, you really need to listen to the same song a hundred times to understand what music is all about.
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