Alan Bishop
Alan Bishop
Alan Bishop is an American musician, most famous for being the bassist and vocalist of experimental rock band Sun City Girls. He has also released solo material under the aliases Alvarius B. and Uncle Jim. In the early 1980s Bishop played in the short-lived band Paris 1942 with Maureen Tucker of the Velvet Underground. Bishop is now a member of the Cairo-based band,The Invisible Hands. He is the co-founder, along with Hisham Mayet, of Sublime Frequencies, a Seattle-based record label...
cell-phone thrift unwanted
Old is unwanted. You don't find Thais going to the thrift store. They want new clothes. They want the newest cell phone.
thanks ancient ancient-history
Everyone's a singer now, thanks to karaoke, for better and for much worse. But the live band is now becoming ancient history in Thailand, Cambodia, and Burma.
people music-is
Almost all the bars in Southeast Asia are lady bars. The listener and participants who interact and frequent the clubs are exclusively male who become actively involved with the ladies, not the music. Coming to them to listen only to the music is not what people do.
reality modern
I've had to adjust to karaoke as a modern reality that obscures our hunt for what we're truly after.
thinking people perception
In terms of perceptions of the culture, most people don't think about music. They're not concerned with it. They don't take their musical legacy seriously.
song stupid important
The lyrics are not an important thing to me. In fact, it can be a distraction. If I knew the language enough to know it was a horrible love song with stupid lyrics - like most of the popular songs are today in the English language that I hear - then it would be much more of a turnoff then if it would allow me to interpret it from the expressive capabilities of the vocalizing or of the sound itself, which allows me to create my own meaning for it, which elevates it into a higher piece of work for me.
done language human-nature
I don't speak anything very well. The longer that you travel, you find out that you really don't even need to speak the language to get around and get things done, to live in those places. If you're somewhat resourceful and perceptive, you're pretty much going to know what's going on because human nature is human nature: they understand it, you understand it, and it works.
effort break breakdown
There hasn't been a true breakdown or effort to break Thai music into genres. They're not into dicing and slicing everything up.