« Reply #2 on: August 07, 2009, 12:33:18 PM »
The Sami and Mari Boine
(from The Rough Guide to World Music, 1994)
The Sami, or Lapps, live in northern Norway, Sweden and Finland, preserving their own language and a culture related to other arctic peoples. As the indigenous people of artic Scandinavia, their relations with the colonizers have often been problematic, although, following a political struggle in the early 1980s, originally focused on plans to combat a planned dam, their rights and way of life are now enshrined in the Norwegian constitution.
Central to Sami music is the joik, an improvised and highly personal style of singing in a sort of epigrammatic form. Often describing nature or animals, joik illustrates the close relationship that the Sami people have with the world around them. When Sami people sing joiks for each other they don´t applaud but simply sing a joik in return.
Contemporary Sami music has seen some dramatic developments over the past few years, with several artists forging an international reputation. Nils-Aslak Valkiapää from Finland performed the opening song at the 1994 Winter Olympic Games in Lillehammer, Norway. His recording break new ground in Sami music-making, incorporating diverse elements such as symphony orchestra, synthesizer and jazz/folk fusion with the help of the Finnish group Karelia. Angelin Tytöt from the village of Angeli in Finland are a trio (sometimes a duo) of young girls, joiking and singing with guitar and percussion.
It is Norway's Mari Boine (aka Mari Boine Persen), however, who has made the biggest impact outside Sami land with her modern electric band. This singer has been an articulate spokesperson for Sami culture, both in her music and in interviews. As she explained: "I used to think men oppressing women or governments oppressing people realized what they were doing and were just cynical. But then I realized that often they are unaware and are filled with fear. I fell I have to find my way to their hearts to let them know what they are doing. It's the only way to change things. That's why I feel my music is important."
"Our first relationship is to nature. You are part of nature, not the master of nature. This also gives us a strong sense of solidarity - you are about other people. Money is not important and power is not important. It's more your personality, the human being that is important."
Mari Boine's music is dominated by her strong and urgent voice, plus a few carefully selected instruments from people all over the world, notably the native South Americans, chosen in part due to their history of even harsher colonization. Most distinctive is her drum. She uses an African drum, but the combination of drum and voice goes back to ancient Sami culture and pre-Christian shamanism.
"The colonizers brought Christianity and told the Sami they had to forget their primitive religion - and music was part of that religion. A lot of people of my parent's generation don't accept the music, they say it's devil's music and what you sing when you're drunk - the colonizers also brought alcohol. When I started to use a drum some people got worried and said, 'Is she a Shaman?' So I decided I couldn't use a Sami drum."
"I think your voice is a mirror of your soul and how you feel inside. When I began I was singing pop songs and ballads and didn't sing from the heart. Over the last ten years I've been fighting this feeling of being inferior to Norwegian or western people and my voice got stronger as I decided I wouldn't let anyone oppress me and that I have a value as Sami. Western culture makes a distance between you and your body or heart. In Sami culture you think of everything as a whole."
Gula Gula (Hear the Voices of the Foremothers)
Hear the voices of the foremothers
Hear
They ask you why you let the earth become polluted
Poisoned
Exhausted
They remind you where you come from
Do you hear?
Again they want to remind you
That the earth is our mother
If we take her life
We die with her.
http://www.heikopurnhagen.net/attic/music/mariboine.html#rough
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