The odd ends of music and globalization

One of the things that has most surprised me on this sojourn through the northern end of Europe this year is how much some people in places like Finland and Denmark know about really obscure American music.

Now for me personally, coming from rural Idaho where country music was around all the time (even though I then associated it with very unpleasant would be rodeo cowboys in high school), and passing through California 1969-1973 where merging country and rock was a new, cool idea, just outside and outlaw enough to be hip and fun, it sorta makes sense for me to be a big fan of country rock. To me, it was a unique blend of where I came from, where I was (in California) and where I could see things going (although I did not suspect I would end up in Austin, the headquarters of the current version, sometimes called alt.country.)

But how does a young Finnish guy in his thirties come to like this kind of stuff so much that he plays it both as a DJ and a musician? This is Markus Nordenstreng, who has played South by Southwest in Austin a couple of times. His current band is the Latebirds. His Dad is a long time media scholar friend. When we visited this year, I ended up riding in an old Thunderbird through the Finnish countryside, talking with Markus about Gram Parsons and Lucinda Williams. It is very cool that he likes this stuff and knows so much about it, but how does it happen?

One guy in Finland I could kind of understand. An interesting, very unusual exception. And Finns are kind of known for being interested in exotic music. They have turned the tango into a national obsession. But it turns out there are two guys in my hallway in Media Studies in Århus with very similar interests. We have been having fun, talking and exchanging music.

So how do these guys acquire such specialized knowledge, or cultural capital as Pierre Bourdieu might call it, that they come to understand and enjoy this rather rarefied music. That is an aspect of globalization that I am very interested in understanding better. There is no reason to assume that Americans own this kind of music after all, but the circuits that get it to Denmark have got to be interesting.

I just gave one of the guys in Århus, Jakob, a compilation of a lot of the Flying Burrito Brothers, so for those of you not yet into this rarefied bit of Americana, here is a sample of one of their finest, called Christine's Tune, from an album called The Gilded Palace of Sin, in 1969, my first year in California. The guy with long dark hair is the legendary Gram Parsons, but my real favorite is the guy in blue, Chris Hillman, who plays bass, which I have always wanted to learn and has great hair. He could easily be a Straubhaar, which means curly, standing on end hair in Swiss German, BTW.

So look at this and think, how does a guy in a small city in Denmark come to think this is cool. (Globalization works in mysterious ways, its wonders to perform.)