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« on: February 15, 2012, 03:35:23 pm »
Most Persian music is ABOUT the poetry. The beats and the melodic parts of their music are disastisfactorally similar.
I'd posit alot of Indian, Arabic and Afghan music can seem the same.
But the words are the heart of the piece, and that's why you'd see a poetry (see it more like freestyle Rap, if you can) ocmpetition as taking the place of one where people sing and dance. Old folk songs sung by "pop" idols can get a whole audience that 10 years ago might have been fighting in the streets to link arms and cry together, simply because the words to those people are so very beautiful and they identify with them as a culture.
It would be an awesome study, I've thought, as I've been semi-tortured with the Persian/Afghan/Indian genres of music for a couple of decades now, to juxtapose the music the West comes to expect as entertaining, meaningful and emotionally moving to the Eastern traditions of prose-over-notes.
Afghan Idol, by the way, has been on for a while now. One of the girls who won was threatened with death, so she had to have protection and I think had to leave the country for a while. And so it goes...
As to the whole Reagan debate, there's a consortium (read: thinktank, etc.) of right-wingers in the US whose sole occupation is not only to rename bridges, libraries and schools after Reagan, but also to change peoples' memories of that time period and reshape the man's "legacy." Books like the one described in the OP will soon be put on the 451 pile and burned to cinders if they don't continue to get some play.