I knew "desert music" scoring was bad and low-effort, but I didn't realize just how clownshoes it sounds to people familiar with Middle Eastern countries' individual styles
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in reply to @the-only-jam's post:
i think two (of many) strong points that the length of the essay lets him touch on is how there's a spectrum of orientalism, and that there's an intentionality that is required to express yourself in another culture's style? like, that ultimately "a soundtrack" is the result of people making lazy and/or ""safe"" choices, and that one can capture these things if one wanted to, but that has to be a conscious, informed and continuous choice.
To an extent yes. I only word it like that ad it gets a lot more complicated as those choices compound in western society as people take the previous choices of composers as the truth, creating echos of that previous stereotyping (as explained and im not trying to talk over you you are right, it's just that element that I've found in life plays a huge role)
yeah no yeah, it's really fascinating! it just touched on us in particular because of how, in that depth of depths you get someone regurgitating uncritically, something so fully removed that it is actual literal as-written-by-baudrillard simulacrum! it has no "true" thing it belongs to anymore, it is of itself!
it's also horrible for everyone except for someone who can make a quick buck by repackaging it and treating the audience and the far-removed source as shmucks.
Oh absolutely! It's a complicated process and history to describe but it's a very important one to talk about/end
in reply to @MelloMakes's post:
I skimmed this like a week ago and it resonated with me on multiple levels-
the way that you can see youtube playlists and hollywood flattening entire cultures.
IIRC there's a version that talks about 'viking music' though tbh you can see this kinda attitude and flattening applied to anything that falls outside the sphere of western classical and white-american pop/rock.
Saw this one a few weeks back, it's fantastic. The part that most affected me was the part near the end where he talks about all the kinds of stories we're missing out on because of orientalism in Hollywood. Absolutely brutal.
yep, and the sense that this is only one of many collections of stories we're missing, too