Cool Stuff Friday!

As I was searching youtube for some "cool stuff" to post for today, I ran across something that I had no idea existed - The Native American Music Awards. Apparently, the Native American "Nammy" is equivalent to winning a Grammy, or at least an MTV VMA. Anyway, I thought this video was a great example of syncretism that we talked about in class. Though the music is very obviously influenced by Pop music, it contains several Native American elements, such as a Native American flute, a brief Powwow in the background, and the singer uses vocables in the song.




This video is of what is apparently called an "array mbira". Which I guess just means a really big mbira. Since it is cool stuff Friday, this one is really just for fun. Here is someone taking a traditional African instrument that we learned about in class and playing an arrangement of "Under the Sea" with it. Enjoy!



Hopefully most of you watched the opening ceremonies for the Vancouver Olympics, but just in case you didn't, here's a little part of it. It shows the Native people of Canada all dancing and singing together. I think my favorite part of the video is the giant drum like the ones used in the powwow videos that we watched in class, only much, much bigger. It's also interesting that the announcer points out that the dancers are mostly comprised of young people, showing that their culture is still very much alive in the younger generations. Unfortunately, embedding was disabled for the video that I wanted to post, but you can still see the dancing and drumming in this one.





And finally, I just couldn't resist putting a kora video on here. So here is a griot playing the kora.