Heather's Adventures in Music from Different Cultures

  Let us set the stage...       Now I’m going to go out on a limb and assume everyone knows about alternative music. I’ll also go ahead and say most of you don’t really know what makes a song alternative. Well I sure didn't and may I just say it was hard to find an exact box to fit the music into. I guess when your goal is the break out of the box you really don't want to be put back in. Music that isn’t considered “mainstream” by most. That’s not saying that these songs can’t make it mainstream. Songs like Smells Like Teen Spirit , which helped push the genre into a mainstream setting, are well known and extremely popular. Anyways I think that is plenty to get us started with so let’s dive into the amazing world of alternative music. What exactly is alternative?      So you may be wondering, how did this start? Alternative music as a whole is created by artists who feel that the mainstream pop music does not fit them. They strive to create something ...

For starters      Before jumping into my interview and the collection of stories and commentary I got from it, I'd like to introduce my mom. She grew up in a small town in Georgia and her favorite time period is the 1980s (this will be evident). She was not happy to be recorded, but I've heard all these stories before because she loves talking about her concert experiences, mainly Rick Springfield. I'll also include a little bit of commentary from my dad, who came in at the end of the interview. He was very jealous he wasn't the one interviewed, but he is a self proclaimed "audiophile." This basically translates to asking him about music= a whole novel. So to backup his comments and additions a little about him is, he spent most of this time growing up in Seattle and went to college at Georgia Tech. Now that that's out of the way let's get into the meat of the blog. The Interview Me: So tell me about music and your childhood.      Mom: *laughing* what ...

 To begin     Another place another blog! Here we go again on an explorative journey to learn more about other cultures. Now this was a tough one for me. And you're probably thinking "literally how you have a whole continent to work with" and you're right. The only thing is I don't know where to start. So of course in my struggle to think after a long, stressful week I just started googling and found some pretty cool stuff that I think you'll enjoy. Mbira      Now I had zero clue this was a thing and the reason I picked it was because I saw the word "xylophone" in the description on a website called Culture Trip while I was looking for some kind of instrument to look into. My reason being I had no clue there were xylophone like instruments. I mean was I just supposed to assume that lots of people strapped metal to wood and decided to hit it? How to heck did we get to the xylophone? But I digress, let's get into just what the mbira is and how it ...