Polyphonic singing, in the Georgian language, is a secular tradition in a country whose language and culture have often been oppressed by invaders. There are three types of polyphony in Georgia: complex polyphony, which is common in Svaneti; polyphonic dialogue over a bass background, prevalent in the Kakheti region in Eastern Georgia; and contrasted polyphony with three partially improvised sung parts, characteristic of western Georgia.
An ensemble called Lalkhori played in London earlier in the year.
They are from the Svaneti region of the North Caucasus mountains of Georgia.
Back in June 2019 my youngest daughter shocked me by informing she’d bought a ticket to see the BTS show at London’s Wembley Stadium, costing a little north of £100. She wasn’t asking for a contribution as her job at Waitrose covered the cost but even so, a hundred quid for a South Korean pop band!
BTS (Korean: 방탄소년단; RR: Bangtan sonyeondan; lit. 'Bulletproof Boy Scouts')
I was left scratching my head.
She went and she loved it.
I should have realised there was something more to this teenage fandom because now she has lived and worked in South Korea for almost two years. She is learning Korean and can negotiate her way through the social mores and culinary challenges of a society that is both familiar but intrinsically different from anything in Europe.
Earlier this year she was unable to get a ticket for BTS’s huge open air shows in front of at least 100,000 people outside Seoul’s Gyeongbokgung Palace in the heart of the megacity’s downtown area. The free tickets disappeared instantly they became available, with most of the rest of the crowd strung out along the linear Gwanghwamun Square connected by huge video screens that projected the highly choreographed hour-long show.
It was clearly the hottest ticket in town, or Asia for that matter, for that weekend probably the World.
When I visited Seoul in 2025 this square was the focal point of political demonstrations connected with the arrest of President Yoon Suk Yeol for insurrection as a result of his illegal attempt to impose martial law in December 2024. Highly amplified chanting was echoing around the high-rise offices that line its sides from both supporters of Yeol and his opponents.
The show’s backdrop was Gwanghwamun Gate built in 1396 in the reign of King Taejo, the first king of the Korean Joseon dynasty, although as is often the case with such culturally significant physical symbols of nationhood that monumental gate has been destroyed and rebuilt several times over the centuries, the last time as recently as 2010.
There is no doubt that BTS are a global phenomenon.
Since their inception in 2010, and first album, Dark & Wild in 2014, the seven clean cut boys of BTS have danced and sung their way across the world to 140 million album sales and billions of streams. BTS’s clean-cut projection is often carefully curated against a more transgressive vibe with song titles such as ‘Hooligan’, and the track Normal with its lyrics.
“Kerosene, dopamine, chemical induced
fantasy and fame, yeah, the things we choose
Show me hate, show me love, make me bulletproof
Yeah we call this shit normal”
In a high trust, and still socially conservative society such as South Korea this is verging on fighting talk and is a long way from the more traditional folk sounds, although I suspect singing mostly in English rather dilutes its impact in a society where English is still not that widely spoken amongst older generations - even after more than half a century of partial occupation by US military forces.
Singing in English does however enable the global reach that has turned BTS into a multi-billion dollar economic phenomenon that can support a 70 date global tour crossing North and South America, Asia, Australia and Europe.
Their latest album Arirang, their first since they had a military-service enforced hiatus, sold just shy of four million copies on the day of its release. Arirang is the name of a Korean folk song that is so ingrained in Korean culture, north and south, that it has obtained UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage status. It is song of departure, longing and regret.
It is a melancholy music, a lyrical style that appears perennially popular across the world whether Portuguese Fado or the blues of America’s deep south.
As the lyrics of Arirang state:
“The trees and the flowers will bloom for aye
But the glories of youth will soon fade away”
In the wake of BTS a host of other K-Pop acts have followed with BlackPink, Stray Kids and Seventeen leading the charge. This is a global dynamic that isn’t going anywhere other than upwards.
Critically you might be drawn towards arguing that K-Pop is derivative and formulaic and if you watched the BBC series “Made in Korea: The K-Pop Experience”you’d probably have such a perception confirmed, although it is worth watching if only for the scary record company bosses who cast their dismissive eyes over the five likely lads from Britain and their attempts to ply their melodies under the name ‘Dear Alice’. It borrows heavily from US hip-hop and rap, and European electro-pop.
Yet what is undoubtedly true is that the enthusiasm of these five British lads to emulate a band likes BTS is confirmation that K-Pop is an integral part of Hallyu, as the ‘Korean cultural wave’ is called, that has found has a sound foot-hold in the UK and elsewhere with food, cosmetics, fashion and film all playing their part. This is a textbook example of the concept of ‘soft-power’.
However, I think my daughter will prefer the authentic South Korea for some time more. She said to me recently “Dad, I love the place, it is so liveable”. I guess another visit out east is on the cards sometime soon.
P.S:
The most accessible book on the history of South Korea is ‘Shrimp to Whale' by Ramon Pacheco Pardo who is a Professor of International Relations at Kings College London.
Looks like a book worth reading...
Carl Lee is retired but was a lecturer at The University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, taught A level Geography for 20 years at Sheffield College, is the author of five books about geography and has a PhD in economic geography. He has been nuts about music since buying his first single in 1973: 10cc’s 'Rubber Bullets' if you were wondering.
There was also recent success at the Oscar's for K-Pop Demon Hunters, and the song that features in the film also won an Oscar.
A couple years back I found myself kicking back in the rooftop garden of a Marrakech riad. It was within earshot of Jemaa el-Fnaa.
It was the afternoon and the smoky chaos that unfolds as the sun sets on Marrakech’s main square within the walled old city had not yet begun. On the riad’s sound system - on low volume but gently persistent - a culturally appropriate journey unfolded, a compilation of Arabic house music.
With the snow-capped Atlas Mountains off in the distance and just visible through the forest of palms, telephone masts, minarets and heat-haze, Arabic house music hit an hypnotic spot.
It certainly wouldn’t have been anything like what I was listening to when, in 1980 aged 18, I first visited Marrakech. It wasn’t Crosby, Still’s & Nash’s 1969 hippie anthem ‘Marrakesh Express’ but Bob Marley and the Wailers new album ‘Uprising’ that had been released a month earlier, so more of a ‘Zion Train’.
Not a huge amount has changed in Marrakech’s walled Medina over the years; it is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Inside the monumental city walls the stunningly beautiful Koutoubiya Mosque overlooks the maze of covered allies, sudden sun-lit squares and walled gardens.
Yet nearly half a century on there are far better restaurants, cafes and riads but also the lasting visible damage of the 2023 Al Haouz earthquake; tumbled down houses, minarets supported by scaffolding and cracking stretched across many an ancient wall.
But what was this Arabic house music?
Signs of earthquake damage.
Shazam wasn’t up to telling me, and as the day progressed I forgot to ask at the riad’s reception. The moment passed.
And as the holiday passed snippets of similar sounds floated past me in the background at restaurants, from boom boxes in the street and in the chic cafes of the new city. Arabic house was clearly ‘a thing’ in Marrakech.
I’d started exploring Arabic influenced music decades back; probably first piqued by the Lebanese singer Dunya Yusin’s voice on Eno and Byrne’s 1981 ‘My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts’.
This really resonated with me fresh of the back off a month in North Africa. Then there was Jah Wobble, Natasha Atlas, Omar Faruk Tekbilek (although he was from Istanbul, Turkey) and Page and Plant’s excursions with a full Egyptian orchestra layering an Arabic sway across Led Zeppelin classics, the
album of which, ‘ No Quarter’ (1994), was recorded partly in Marrakech.
I even had a WOMAD inspired Algerian Rai phase and shook my booty to DJ Monkey Pilot and his Whirl-Y-Gig sound system (I’ve still got one of their t-shirts). But that was all more than a couple of decades back and so this smooth Arabic house defined by its use of some traditional Arabic music stylings and instrumentation, and added to a dose of the Balearics that was clearly rooted in the streets of North Africa, became the impetus for me to see what was out there, and what that compilation was.
A key aspect of Arabic music is that it crosses over a huge geographical area stretching from the clubs of Dubai to those of Casablanca and within that are regional differences drawing upon an area’s traditional music. Fortunately musicologists have mapped out the traditional sounds of just about everywhere but not necessarily what is new and bouncing in cafes and on folks’ phones.
Hats off to Rave Club Morocco Collective who are a one-stop shop, vertically integrated operation
dealing with everything from artist management and recording to party organising.
In Morocco a key source of inspiration has been the blend of Sub-Saharan African, Berber and Arabic influences such as Gnawa music, a traditional genre that has been elevated to being of UNESCO intangible cultural heritage importance.
Gnawa is famed for its live performance, which are often trance-like with the invocation of spirits and obviously drawing on traditions beyond Morocco’s predominantly Islamic culture. In Essaouira on the Moroccan Atlantic coast an annual Gnawa festival is held with leading artists such as Asmaa Hamzaoui performing both traditional Gnawa with its focus on the guembri, a camel-skin covered bass lute and qraqab, large metal castanets. Most evenings in Jemaa el-Fnaa several groups are playing Gnawa and that imbues the square with its evocative soundtrack whilst hungry locals eat, snake charmers charm, hustlers hustle and camels and tourists idle past.
Another side of Marrakech is to be found outside the walls of the medina; modern Marrakech with its wide boulevards, chic 5 star hotels and night clubs where the beautiful people party and leading the party today is Amine K, Marrakech resident, international DJ and perhaps the highest profile Arabic
House DJ around.
He has quite a distinct vibe, clearly ticking all the house music boxes but layered across it is a distinct Moroccan feeling created by dipping into the countries traditional Gnawa, Chaabi and Berber sounds.
After a fair bit of musical exploring I have come to the conclusion that the elusive house mix that my riad was playing, or something incredibly similar to it, is probably one of Café De Anatolia’s Arabic house mixes. There are plenty of these mixes on YouTube to choose from and they often come accompanied with some rather dramatic drone footage of Arabic landscapes from deserts to bustling
towns. Even if it isn’t one of these mixes they do take me right back to the frenetic bustle of Jemaa el Fnaa, the narrow lanes of Marrakech’s medina, the chic cafés of the new city, piercing sunlight and the lofty peaks of the high Atlas Mountain in the distance.
Carl Lee is retired but was a lecturer at The University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, taught A level Geography for 20 years at Sheffield College, is the author of five books about geography and has a PhD in economic geography. He has been nuts about music since buying his first single in 1973: 10cc’s 'Rubber Bullets' if you were wondering.
Here's the second guest blog post by Carl Lee, following his earlier post on the Sheffield clank.
Fado – a traditional music with a modern future.
Like so many cultural expressions across and within nations and people, origin stories are often contested, and Fado, the mournful ballad music so intrinsically associated with traditional Portuguese culture, is no exception.
What is clear is that this was a music that grew out of working class communities around the docks of Lisbon, in the early 19th century. It was music of loss and regret, of homesickness on travels to the new world and nostalgia for better times. Up beat and optimistic it is not, with Fado drawn from the Latin word fatum widely translated as meaning fate.
Some suggest Fado’s roots are longer than the early 19th century with it coming to Portugal from its colonies, or from Andalucía’s Arabic tradition. Whatever its cloudy origin story Fado is now a central part of Portuguese culture, so much so that it has been awarded UNESCO intangible cultural heritage status - see January 15th post - and tourists to Portugal soak up its repackaged authenticity in bars and clubs across Portugal, not simply in Lisbon.
Unsurprisingly for a music that grew up in a working class culture, instrumentation in Fado is not extensive with the Portuguese 12 string pear-shaped guitar being prominent. This made Fado a music that required little in the way of resources to deliver and its popularity moved out of the bars of Alfama, the port district with its narrows streets clustered around Lisbon cathedral up the hill to the more bourgeois neighbourhood of Barrio Alto and its more bohemian sensibilities.
Throughout the 20th century Fado was becoming music not just of the working class but also of the growing middle classes and even aristocracy. It then broke out of Portugal in the 1940s with the international recognition of Amália Rodrigues, sometimes know as ‘the queen of Fado’.
Rodrigues grew up living in poverty in the docks area of Lisbon but through her voice, honed in the Fado bars of her city, she became a worldwide star, with acting credits, performances across the world and with Portugal’s leading poets vying to write lyrics for her to sing. Rodrigues' most famous song was internationally know as ‘April in Portugal’ which referenced the central Portuguese university town of Coimbra where a separate tradition of Fado was developed by students, more formal with less poignant longing but a retained sense of nostalgia for past better times.
'April in Portugal'
When Amália Rodrigues died aged 79 in 1999 3 days of national mourning was declared in Portugal.
Although so much Fado today is performed in tourist venues, with a side helping of traditional Portuguese cuisine, it remains central to Portuguese national identity and younger artists such as Carminho have become stars of the genre albeit a genre that now draws in other influences such as pop and jazz.
What may take Fado to a new global audience is the Spanish singer Rosalia whose critically acclaimed 2025 album ‘Lux’ includes a Carminho fado song ‘Memoria’ which Rosalia sings in Portuguese. The lush production and classical music framework of Lux has been much admired with lavish praise coming even from the Vatican whose spokesperson acknowledged the album’s themes of religion, enlightenment and spirituality.
Rosalia - 'Memoria'
Memoria is the penultimate track on an album that is sung in 13 different languages from Japanese to Arabic. It is a Fado that dwells on how much we change over time and whether we remain ‘true’ to whom we were, or are.
“Siempre que me acuerdo de aigo.
Siempre lo recuerdo un poco diferente”
When I remember the past it always changes a bit.
Sources
History of Fado
Carl Lee is retired but was a lecturer at The University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, taught A level Geography for 20 years at Sheffield College, is the author of five books about geography and has a PhD in economic geography. He has been nuts about music since buying his first single in 1973: 10cc’s 'Rubber Bullets' if you were wondering.
More to come on Rosalia's Lux album in a future blog post.
