#regularly schedule broadcast

[voluptuarian]

Weekly World Music: “Kushimoto Bushi” by Eri Chiemi

A traditional Japanese minyo folk song, this modernized, Latin-style cover is by 50's and 60's songstress Eri Chiemi. I've seen it listed to as both "Kushimito Bushi" (Kushimoto Song) and "Wakayama Ken" or "Wakayama Love Song." Kushimoto is a port town located in the Wakayama prefecture, so the title’s location swapping makes sense, but I have yet to find anything that supports it being a love song.

Seriously, if you ever wonder why I post up more music from Europe than from other places, it's because finding information outside of there is like pulling teeth, and I had a terrible time tracking down lyrics for this song. The ones I did find are only in English and Romaji, and seem to be incomplete, as there are several verses in this version that are clearly missing from mine. (Perhaps this is the elusive "love song" content?)

Japanese (Romaji) Lyrics:

Koko wa Kushimoto mukai wa Ooshima Naka wo torimotsu junkou-sen   Ara yoisho, yoisho, yoisho, yoisho, yoisho

Koko wa Kushimoto Mukai wa Ooshima Hashi wo kake-mashou funa-bashi wo Ara yoisho, yoisho, yoisho, yoisho, yoisho

English Lyrics:

We live in Kushimoto. The front island’s Ooshima. We travel between the two by cruising liners. So we have no trouble, no trouble at all.

We live in Kushimoto. The front island’s Ooshima. We dont need any bridge, cause we have good boats. So we have no trouble, no trouble at all.

[voluptuarian]

The worst part of running Weekly World Music is having to search through Youtube comments to get info on songs. You want to know what those lyrics mean? Prepare to sift through not only the horrible spelling and grammar and general brain-dead-ness inherent to Youtube in general, but also a million ranting Europeans and Asians incoherently losing their shit about ethnic groups, "patriotism" (*cough* "did you mean racism?" *cough*), who did what terrible thing to who and when and how that justifies acting like a tool now, how terrible white Northern Europeans are, how terrible everyone who isn't a white North European is, the Soviet Union, "cultural identity", Islam, how x group was living like cavemen while y group was civilized and how that makes y group better, and how "back in pagan times everything was perfect and nothing bad ever happened", all laden with healthy pepperings of cultural stereotyping and broken English and a heavy "I-wrote-this-badly-thought-out-comment-on-my-phone-half-buzzed-at-the-bar-while-my-equally-tipsy-friends-cheered-me-on" vibe. It's like dropping into a tiny 1930's nationalist-centric Europe but less organized and with worse spelling.

[voluptuarian]

All right people, Weekly World Music is back up this Thursday, and I've loaded up the next few weeks's posts as well, so we're are back on track. Sorry about the delay!

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No Weekly World Music the last couple weeks because I've been busy and tired. I hope to get back to it this coming week though.

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I was working on putting together the next couple week's post for Weekly World Music, and I realized it's almost been six months since I started them. It does not feel anywhere near that long! I guess time really does fly when you're having fun.

[voluptuarian]

Weekly World Music: "Amrita (Churning the Sea of Milk" by Vas. Another two-for-one deal; Vas was a now-defunct collaboration between one of my favorite artists, Persian vocalist Azam Ali, and American percussionist Greg Ellis.

I've tried to find lyrics for this and had no luck, but I can shed some light on the song's meaning. It refers to the creation of Amrita, the immortality-giving drink of the gods. From Wikipedia: "Amrita is a Sanskrit word that literally means 'immortality', and is often referred to in texts as nectar... It is related etymologically to the Greek 'ambrosia', and it carries the same meaning. Amrita features in the "ocean-churning" Samudra manthan legend, which describes how the devas, because of a curse from the sage Durvasa, begin to lose their immortality. Assisted by their mortal enemies, the asuras, they churn the ocean and create (among other wonderful things) amrita, the nectar of immortality."