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Jamie Ward's avatar

Had a Lebanese friend indefinitely loan me some Umm Kulthum and Fairuz records back in the early 2000s and that opened up a whole amazing world to my ears. I can think of worse ways to spend an evening, listening to either of them, glass of wine in hand, cooking a nice meal...

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Charles in San Francisco's avatar

"Popular tunes were less ditties than epics, untethered by those tedious limits that whittle most other popular music to just a few minutes like 7’’ single space or radio placement.....audiences still saw the value of long performances that dug into a story with the same slowly unfolding grace of parallel musical forms like operas and ragas." Love this. I am not familiar with Umm Kulthum, but I grew up around both Indian and Western classical music and as a kid I thought all music except nursery rhymes was long and epic. Today, a 6 minute prog-rock or metal song is too long for most people. Attention spans have been falling steadily for a long time, and now tiktok has led to a whole songwriting culture built around songs less than a minute long. Thanks for this column.

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