Yeaboo! and My First Rant Posted to the Internet

Inspired by a former co-worker's blog (see the link) - forgive if I get sidetracked or am a bit obvious, but I am a newbie. As I was blogging, inspired by a former co-worker, oh and by the way I am the former, as co-worker is still working at the place where we became co's. Anyway, I was inspired!

So, I am blogging with serveral purposes in mind:

1. Connect to the larger world; my apartment, in spite of my strategically moving the loveseat into three different positions, is sadly still only running about 465 on the square footage - I'm not able to fit much more world in here.
2. Become a conscious humorist.
3. Increase my resource base - more on that latter.
4. Give my friends a break - from my never-ending opinions about life, the universe and everything - by diffusing it.

Hey, Who Are You to Tell Me What Music I Can’t Tango To!
A rant of a very bad Tango Dancer

I tried, with very little effort, to find a partner and take Argentine Tango Dance lessons. From this totally extraneous point in my life I took off on a tangent, but I didn’t know it. I didn’t realize that I gone tangential until a quartet of South American connections, almost a year later, not of Argentinan persuasion, saw fit to correct me when I decided and declared and began to dance Argentine Tango to a Bossa Nova. They TOLD ME NO – YOU CAN’T (1) Dance to a Bossa Nova (They are not danceable) and (2) You cannot dance Argentine Tango to a Bossa Nova (It is not Tango Music). That pissed me off! I decided to explore that feeling of being pissed off about this particular point. This is the result. Oh yeah, those South American connections, they are not of Brazilian persuasion either.

First, why is Bossa Nova not danceable?
Wikipedia had this to say about Bossa Nova (music) when I checked it: “Bossa nova is at its core a rhythm based on samba. Samba combines rhythmic patterns and feel originating in former African slave communities with elements of European march music.” And this about Bossa Nova (dance), “Bossa nova was a fad dance that corresponded to the bossa nova music. It was introduced in 1960 and faded out in the mid-sixties. … The style of basic dance steps suited the music, though. It was danced on soft knees that allowed for sideways sways with hip mitions. It could be danced both solo and in pairs. …Embellishments included placing one arm onto one own's belly and waving another arm at waist level in the direction of the sway, possibly with finger click.”
My strongest South American connection can play, live, on guitar, several Bossa Nova songs (many of which are familiar to me), and I could always find a Tango-esk beat to attempt one or all of the three basic Argentine Tango steps to. And I wanted to find out why:
Wikipedia noted, when I looked this up, that Tango (music): “…origins… are as complicated as tango itself. The French colonists in the Dominican Republic around the 18th century made their slaves play for them while they danced "la contre dance", a French type of music where the tango's "counterpoint rhythm" originated. These slaves played also for their own pleasure, travelled around and received important influences from Cuban music and the Spanish zarzuela, that has similar musical aspects.” A bit about Zarzuela, of course from Wikipedia, “…is a Spanish lyric-dramatic genre that alternates between spoken and sung scenes, the latter incorporating dances. It is believed that the name derives from a hunting lodge, the Palacio de la Zarzuela, near Madrid where, in the 17th century, this type of performance first occurred before the Spanish royal court.”
Now doesn’t that mean a fancy form of Hip-Hop Rap? I think so.
Wikipedia has, “Hip hop music (also referred to as rap or rap music) is a style of popular music. It is made up of two main components: rapping (MCing) and DJing (audio mixing and scratching). Along with breakdancing and graffiti (tagging), these compose the four elements of hip hop, a cultural movement that was initiated by inner-city youth, mostly African Americans[1] in New York City, in the early 1970s.” I, by the way, happen to be mostly African American. Furthermore, Wikipedia adds a note about the rhythm, “Beats (though not necessarily raps) in hip hop are almost always in 4/4 time. At its rhythmic core, hip hop swings: instead of a straight 4/4 count (pop music; rock 'n' roll; etc.), hip hop is based on an anticipated feel somewhat similar to the "swing" emphasis found in jazz percussion. Like the triplet emphasis in swing, hip hop's rhythm is subtle, rarely written as it sounds (4/4 basic; the drummer adds the hip hop interpretation) and is often played in an almost "late" or laid back way.”
Bossa Nova ‘swings’ and Tango has hesitations, making some of the movements ‘almost “late”’. Hey this tangent was getting really interesting to me. Okay, so I know that “The Argentine tango is a walking dance with a standard meter of 2/4.” fromhttp://www.tangonoticias.com/articles/a2004/mar/theory.htm
reading, “…The relationship between tango music and dance goes beyond meter and rhythm into the higher level of phrase structure. I have heard tango dancers talk about "dancing the melody" when in fact they mean dancing the phrases. Sensitive dancers intuitively combine the basic steps and figures into gestures that initiate, fill out, and conclude the phrase, thus translating its musical departure, middle, and conclusion into motion. In between these points of initiation and conclusion, the phrase is marked by improvised gestures, including forward steps, side steps, occasionally back steps, ochos (swivel steps forward or backward that trace a figure eight), and turns.”
Well, that is what I see when I watch Hip Hop, “sensitive dancers intuitively” “dancing the phrases.” From Hip Hop I go back to Bossa Nova and ask ‘Why can’t you Argentine Tango Dance to Bossa Nova?’
Then in answer I found at http://www.gainesvilletango.org/24-argentine-tango-dance-music.htm
An Interview With Korey Ireland About Argentine Tango Dance Music, Reprinted with permission of www.close-embrace.com and Nochero Soy tango-zine. Interview by Robin Thomas.
Nochero Soy: What is tango? How do you know if a piece of music is tango or not?
Korey Ireland: This is really subjective. What someone in Finland calls Tango, would differ from what someone in Argentina calls tango and further from what someone in San Francisco might call tango. …Well we could describe the musical skeleton: the rhythmic framework and relation of phrases, the form, and arrangement techniques that characterize the music we're familiar with as tango dancers, we could get really precise with this, but…it would still require some technical expertise to differentiate Di Sarli's musical skeleton, from, say Cole Porter's.” Expertise which I most assuredly do not have
…Syncopa refers to an asymmetrical division of time. This is easier to hear then to see in text, but we could demonstrate in a couple ways. Because syncopas split the strong pulse in an uneven way we need to divide the beat further. Instead of have 4 slices of tango pie, we'll have 8, but the pie is the same size, just smaller slices. For text, we'll say that in between each numbered slice (1.2.3.4) is a slice called "and" or "+". So we could count all the slices: "1.+.2.+.3.+.4.+."
…We get the sound of the syncopa by leaving out beats (numbered slices of time) and emphasizing the subdivision between beats (the "+" slices). A very common syncopa would be "1.+...3, with some orchestras we hear "1.+..+.3." The even or symmetrical division between the strong beat 1, and the next strong beat 3, would be 2. But the syncopa evades this beat to give more excitement. It feels a bit bouncy, or even perhaps jazzy.
Let me interrupt the edited flow of this to show you scientific proof from a paper called DANCE MUSIC CLASSIFICATION USING INNER METRIC ANALYSIS, A Computational Approach and Case Study Using 101 Latin American Dances and National Anthems, I found at http://imsc.usc.edu/avolk/ICS2005revised.pdf:
“…The second most frequent error was the misclassification of tangos as bossa novas… Consider the accent profile of the T1 and the B1 rhythms in Figure 3: they both show strong accents on the first and third beats, a high degree of correspondence with the outer meter, which may explain the algorithm’s confusion between the T1 and B1 classification.”
If an algorithm can get it wrong, then I am hearing and feeling it right. I think the end of the interview (interrupted from above) is the correctly applied, improvised ending for this whole rant. Which is to say – live as you see fit and can honorably justify, and remember to dance as you want to!
NS: Is it important to try to dance to difficult music or non-tango music?
KI: Important? I suppose that depends on your goals. I think it can be very enjoyable, and it can improve your dancing, if these things are important then I suppose the answer is yes.