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Mike called our attention to this article: Study: Why Americans Have Bad Rhythm http://www.livescience.com/othernews/050207_music_beat.html .............which took a study of balkan immigrants and compared their experiences with a group of native north americans and concluded that north americans are bad at grokking syncopation. I'm sorry but I have to say that this study reflects western science's compulsion to categorize at the expense of accurately understanding reality at it's worst................there are so many factors that relate to how a people percieve different kinds of rhythms that you would have to have a much better designed experiment to make the case that is made here. also, they talked about North Americans......................well North Americans come from Africa, Europe, Aisia and all over the world. Which Northern Americans are they talking about? I suspect they mean Caucasion people with primarily British/European heritage who were Canadian (as it turns out). There are lots of different kinds of complexity in rhythm from around the world: I"ve met a lot of Balkan drummers and MiddleEastern drummers who are great with odd time signatures and what I would call 'linear complex rhythms' who are really bad at playing the funk rhythms of the African Diaspora, innovated in the United States. Odd time signature dance rhythms, spread mostly by the Ottoman turks and the Moors to many of the countries in the Middle and Near East and in Eastern Europe are, for the most part, very minimalistically played and fairly conservative in syncopative application. There are great tradtional African drummers who are completely incapable of holding down a simple techno groove or disco groove. The Indians are famous for having some of the most sophisticated rhythmic expressions and tradtions on the planet but those traditions are mostly linear. There is just as much sophistication in the polyrhythmic rhythm interplay in a large West African pop band as there is in a ripping tabla player's performance..............it is just sophistication of a different kind and order. Can you make a case in each of these instances that either of these cultures are rhythmically challenged? Hell no. They just reflect the cultural sensibilities of each region they came from. Let us not forget that the whole concept of Funk was innovated in the United States, ableit in the expatriated African Amercican communities of the great Diaspora. It didn't originate in Africa and if you study it carefully, it has West African (and Middleastern) roots rhythmically speaking but it is a different phenomena that the traditional musics of those regions. Funk is, like many things specifically American, a fusion of styles: Without the marriage to the repressived non-syncopated traditions of the dominant paradigm (which all come, originally, from the Shamanic pagan tradtions of the tribes of Northern Europe) there would be no Funk, per se. Mercifully, we now live in a world where it is very easy to find out information about other cultures so the styles of all of these great tradtions are merging into the most sophisticated pop music traditions in the history of the planet. If you study just the mathematics of the proliferation of popular rhythmic expression from Western culture there has been an almost geometric increase in the sophistication of rhythms found on commercial radio. Sure there's still a plethora of four on the floor rhythms on the radios of the world but just sit down and analyze the rhythmic complexity of a Timbaland production of a Missy Elliot song and compare it to commercial Western music of, say the early 1960's. The information age and the jet airplane has resulted in people from all over the planet increasing their rhythmic sophistication and their access to sophisticated world musical instruments. You can buy Irish bodhrans that kick butt, made in Pakistan...........................Indian Kanjira's made excellently and innovatively on the East Coast of the U.S. I remember 25 years ago when I first saw a real Djembe for the first time. I was amazed and in awe. Yet I had been playing West African djembe rhtyhms for a few years thanks to the proliferation of radio and cassette technology. This is all a long winded way of saying that the study of world rhythm and how it's performed and felt: how and in which ways it is sophisticated is just too complex a phenomena to put down to a study of 75 balkan immigrants and presumably white Canadians and it's irresponsible to publish tripe like this. Sorry but that article really got under my skin and pissed me off. lol.................with indignant rhythmic righteousness, Rick Walker (a Northern European drummer who should be retarded rhythmically speaking since he spent so much of his youth in the suburbs of San Jose)