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Sample Track 1:
"J'aurais Bien Voulu" from Babylon Circus
Sample Track 2:
"Dances of Resistance" from Babylon Circus
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Babylon Circus
Layer 2
CD Review

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Marmorek's Mutterings, CD Review >>

It wasn’t better in the past, not really, but it was simpler. When I was a teenager, and just getting into music, there wasn’t that much of a question about what music I would get into. I remember watching the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, and then going to school the next day, and of course all my friends had also watched them. In 1966 I graduated from high school and went to a global university and all the people I met were into the same music I was. There were some regional variations, but not many, for we all heard the same songs on the radio, and those were the songs that mattered that week. In the late sixties music formed a generational bubble, that defined our limits and held us together. Mr Jones may not have known what was happening, but we did, and what was happening was us. The bubble was bright and shiny, and it reflected our lives back to us, which was perhaps all we were capable of seeing.

Now it’s all different. Music is without borders, wide and wild. I go to iTunes radio, and select Iranian pop music and I hear songs I’ve never heard before and will never hear again. World music is what’s in, and websites like calabash.com let me type in “Mongolian” and ZAP! I have five albums of Mongolian music that I can listen to, and purchase. Or I can select the one I like the most and Calabash will let me explore other albums by that band, or other music that is similar to that band, and music is no longer a bubble enclosing my community, it’s a transporter beam opening up other communities to me.

And that’s wonderful and exciting, but at the same time there an edge of loss in it. Nightlosers, a Transylvanian band that plays happily in the minefield between polka and American blues, was a favourite discovery of mine last year. I play it to friends who nod appreciatively and say, “Wow, that sounds a whole lot like nothing I’ve ever heard before”, and the music doesn’t create a sense of community. Perhaps that was never music’s job, perhaps that was a function of my age, and the age itself, but there’s still a sense of loss without it.

It seems like an insurmountable gap. I want music that gives me a sense of communication, that functions as a container holding members of my tribe. I want music that is new and unlike what I’ve heard before, that comes from other cultures, and that connects me to other tribes so that we can ultimately transcend the shallowness of tribalism. How in a post-babel world can we speak across the gaps of culture and language?

That’s why it has been such a joy to discover Babylon Circus. They’re a French band who sing in English (some of the time), a reggae band who bring in rock jazz and swing influences (some of the time), and a joyously rhythmic sound that includes the sounds of everything from circus calliope to two million people in Spain protesting the war in Iraq. They remind me of Kurt Weill, Bob Marley, the Clash, and of no one that’s come to my ears before. Politics is now global, and so political music is as universal to the politically aware today as wanting to hold her hand was to those of us who were teens in the sixties. And Marley was the first third world superstar, the one person whose music I heard from Katmandu to Istanbul, so it’s fitting that Babylon Circus has echoes of his music, woven into a ska dance recorded live in the streets of Damascus.

Babylon Circus has a joyous playfulness to them, and the quickest way to feel that is to explore their three-ring website, where clicking on clowns, lightbulbs, or curtains always makes something happen, whether it’s explosions, music samples, face pies, or photos. But the proof of the pudding is listening to their latest album , “Dances of Resistance”. It has a glorious stretch, a wonderful diversity, like a yin-yang symbol. There’s love and revolution, familiar and foreign, English and French, music and noise (one song is even called ““De la musique et du bruit”). 

The title may well be a nod to Emma Goldman, and her famous, “If I can't dance I don't want to be in your revolution.” This is global music for the dispossessed global villager. I look around and the shiny bubbles that enclosed my arcadian youth have now become the concrete walls of globalization, and through some strange topological transformation we’re now on the outside. But we’re not alone, and Babylon Circus, “electric clowns for riot and fury”, are with us, providing what music always has : a good beat, whether for dancing to, or working together at tearing those walls down. 

-- by Peter Marmorek 04/16/08 >> go there
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