Hear ye, hear ye! I have started a new musical project, friends, because I am the biggest music nerd you know*!
*okay. debatable. but I am PRETTY nerdy about it
I started wondering how many countries of the world are represented among the full list of "musical artists I like". So I decided to visualize it by filling in a map and coloring every country that is the homeland of a musician I like.
Rules: 1) It doesn't have to be an artist I LOVE, like one of my all-time favorites. 2) It does, however, have to be an artist I genuinely like. As in, I enjoy more than one of their songs and will definitely listen to them in the future again. 3) I am being incredibly strict with myself and not letting myself cheat. At all. This is NOT a list of "countries whose music I have listened to" – that list would be quite a bit more extensive. I'm not letting myself fake it by saying "oh, I kinda like this artist!"; no, I've gotta be completely honest with myself and not pretend to like more music than I actually do, merely in order to have a better-looking map. 4) Bands where one of the band members comes from a certain country don't count. The musical artist as such has to be inherently associated with the country of its origin for it to count.
Admittedly, the project is not finished yet, because I'm still looking up the national origins of a lot of the musicians I like, and also because it's surprisingly harder than you might think to identify the homeland of every single musician you listen to. I hope I got them all right, but I wouldn't be surprised if I'd made a few mistakes while trying to match up artist and country, here and there. I did my best, though.
(e.g. if someone was born in Beirut, then moved to Paris at age one, and then moved to London at age nine and spent the rest of their youth there, are they from Lebanon, France, or the UK? Tbh, I left most folks off the list entirely if they had a biography this confusing)
I also included some Fun Bonus Countries that create a little overlap with the current official countries in existence. Because I felt like it. For instance, there are artists I like that I have categorized as being from East Germany, Southern Rhodesia, Yugoslavia, Hong Kong, Czechoslovakia, England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, Zaire, and the Sahara. So these regions are all listed separately, in addition to the corresponding countries.
Why did I do this? Sometimes because the artist in question was born there when it was still that country. Other times (e.g. in the case of the Sahara) it's because there is a thriving music scene among the nomadic people of the region, who, as far as I know, do not particularly care about colonialist-imposed country borders. Other times it's for yet other reasons. Don't question me on this; I know what I'm doing. I am not only a huge music nerd, but also a huge geography nerd.
I used this site mapchart.net, which seems decent, although as far as I can tell, they forgot to include the Seychelles, San Marino, and Vatican City on their world map. (Can anybody check me on this? Maybe I just missed them... oh well, in any case, I don't know any musicians from any of those three countries, haha.)
Here's my Music Map in its current state (let me repeat that it is not finished yet) – see the alt text for the list of colored-in countries:
Creating it and looking at the result was an interesting experience. On the one hand, I was delighted to see how geographically wide-ranging my music taste is, but on the other, it was a humbling experience to see how many countries I DON'T yet have a favorite artist from. This is exciting, though; it means I have so much left to discover!
I'm eventually also going to post the list of my favorite artists from each country, but I'm still working on that. In the meantime, if you're curious to know what artist or artists I like from any of these countries, or want to give me a rec of somebody to check out from a still-grey country, feel free to pipe up :D
