Friday 1 July 2011

Nouveauté zouk




Now let’s have a musical interlude with Nouveauté zouk. From Wikipedia:

Zouk is a style of rhythmic music originating from the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique. Zouk means "party" or "festival" in the local Antillean Creole of French, although the word originally referred to, and is still used to refer to, a popular dance, based on the Polish dance, the mazurka, that was introduced to the French Caribbean in the 19th Century. In Africa, it is popular in franco- and lusophone countries. In Europe it is particularly popular in France, and in North America the Canadian province of Quebec.



Maybe Clarissa and Zero have heard about it but I doubt anyone else. ”Ethnomusicologist Jocelyn Guilbault, however, describes zouk as a synthesis of Caribbean popular styles, especially Dominica cadence-lypso, Guadeloupean biguine, and Haitian compas” which is another excerpt from Wikipedia since there is no other information on the web. I came across it in one of my cross cultural perambulations investigating another matter. Nouveauté zouk is a recent metamorphosis of the traditional zouk where modern Rock is stylistically incorporated.

2 comments:

  1. This is big here because of the Francophonie, so one hears it on the radio but I wouldn't have known how to name it. There seem to be another couple of current forms of zouk I didn't know about, either, like ragga-zouk!

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  2. Actually, I never heard of it before. My music tastes are very limited. I only listen to opera and gangsta rap because the emotional charge in both is very powerful. Other than that, I'm useless.

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