Submerged by the Future
00:01
Let me ask you a question. Is this folk music?
[Music sample: Italian Brainrot Music]
00:12
If you asked Alexa to play you folk music and got this, you might be a little bit confused. Let me read you the definition of folk music offered by the UNESCO-affiliated International Folk Music Council in 1954. And this is a pretty canonical definition in the history of folk music studies. The definition provides that folk music is, the product of a musical tradition.
00:39
that has been evolved through the process of oral transmission. The factors that shape the tradition are continuity, which links the present with the past, variation, which springs from the creative individual or the group, and selection by the community, which determines the form or forms in which the music survives."
01:00
Let's see how that maps onto the song, which, well, let's hear it again.
[Music sample: Italian Brainrot Music]
01:19
This is an example of Italian brain rot, last year's hottest internet meme. The meme consists of a cast of AI-generated characters with pseudo-Italian names. You've got Trallalero Trallala, that's a shark who wears Nike sneakers on its three legs. Bombini Guccini, a goose fighter jet hybrid, kind of a World War II energy going on there. And Cappuccino Assasino, who's more or less exactly what you're picturing. And from there, individual amateur creators, they put these characters in new situations, new images, new videos, pair them with new songs.
01:49
And as near as I can tell, there's no single canonical Italian brain rot. There's no one instance that makes up the core of the meme. It's just riffs on this central notion and content seems to kind of catch on at random.
02:02
So let's think about that and map it on to the IFMC definition of folk music we were just talking about. Part one of that definition, it evolved through the oral tradition. Look, Italian brain route is not high art. It's not advanced by serious practitioners who studied it. It's vernacular creativity. It's done by people watching one another do it and imitating them. It sounds a whole lot like an oral tradition to me, at least one refracted through modern technology like TikTok and AI and YouTube.
02:30
Part two of that definition, continuity which links the present with the past. That's a little bit of a tougher one here, I think. The meme only began in early 2025 and like most memes, it's already fading from the spotlight here just a year and a half later. But each individual song, of course, is continuous with this sort of self-contained tradition of the meme itself, even if it doesn't have a deep link to the past.
02:52
Part three of the definition of variation, which springs from the creative individual or group. That's an easy yes to me here. The meme really embraces variation. If you can come up with a funny character, give them a preposterously Italian-inflected name, they're in the mix. And from there, you just throw the characters in novel situations. Part four, selection by the community. Definitionally, a given instance of the meme only matters when it catches on. This is clearly a process in which the community selects what defines
03:21
The sound, what defines the meme. So I'm give that all in all, three out of four for the IFMC definition. I think that continuity which links the present with the past, we'll ding it for that. But all in all, that's not too bad for something that seemed ridiculous just a few minutes ago. Let's try another one, this time from 1965.
[Music sample: Paul Simon]
This seems pretty easy, right?
03:51
Like if folk singer was a category on Family Feud, Paul Simon is absolutely on the board. No doubt. But by the canonical definition from the IFMC, this isn't folk music. There's a note to that definition that folk music, quote, does not cover composed popular music that has been taken over ready-made by a community and remains unchanged, end quote. And Simon's music, it's much closer to popular music than to that iterative folk tradition. It's highly professional. It's aimed at consumers. It's aimed at a passive audience.
04:22
Of course, any reading that doesn't capture an iconic folk musician, it might not be terribly useful. Again, think back to Alexa, right? Folk music to many listeners, it's more a slate of stylistic and value-focused signifiers. Instruments, lyrical concerns, an approach to songwriting, maybe a certain sense of authenticity. It's much closer to all that than it is some high-concept sociological context of creation, right? Like when I Google best folk albums, I get a lot of things that sound like Simon. I get Nick Drake, I get Elliot Smith, Joni Mitchell. That's useful.
04:51
It's a whole lot more useful than telling somebody who likes Paul Simon they might also like Italian brain rot due to some definitional hair splitting.
05:00
Let's try one more, again from 1965.
[Music sample: Hamza El Din]
I think this sounds like something you'd find in the same bin assignment at the record store, right? There's a reason so many roots and folk publications sweep certain types of global recordings into their coverage. But what do even know about this music? Is it traditional?
05:29
Or is it for its time modern, technologically advanced, a product of fusion as much as an authentic replication of the past? When this album came out in 1965, those questions weren't just aesthetic. You see, the song's by Hamza El-Din. He's a musician from the southern part of what we today call Egypt. And in 1965, the Egyptian government was in the middle of building one of the largest dams the world had ever seen. A dam that would forever change the physical and social geography of the region.
05:58
And in that context, questions about how much tradition can accommodate modernity and how much modernity needs to maintain tradition, they had incredible stakes, stakes well beyond matters of mere aesthetics and categorization. And over the next hour, we're going to talk about those stakes, the stakes of the dam, the stakes of history, and the stakes of folk music. Together, they outlined what I think is the most significant thing to hear in the music of 1965, that is, the tension between tradition and modernity.
06:29
So don't touch that dial. I'm Matt Collins and you're listening to The Mine.
06:51
[Theme Music]
07:13
Post-colonial Egypt was in a tough spot. If your picture of independence is the United States, it can't be understated just how different conditions were in Egypt. This wasn't a settler colony, European in most every way but geography, sloughing off its obligation to pay fealty to a foreign king. This was a subordinated state, a subordinated people. People beholden to the British who only wanted the colony to ensure easy access to another part of their empire, India, via the Suez Canal.
07:41
and who weren't meaningfully invested in the long-term success of the Egyptian people as such, just stability and control of the region. So it may not surprise you to hear that the British didn't leave the day-to-day lives of Egyptians in a great place when Egypt finally achieved full independence in 1952. I found a study that year with some pretty rough numbers. In terms of the economy, a worker who worked 15 days a month was lucky to get that much work. And the extreme competition meant that wages were exceptionally low.
08:08
The economy itself was mostly agricultural, and over half the population was rural. That same paper estimated that three-quarters of the rural population suffered from worm diseases, nearly two-thirds dealt with malaria, and 90 percent of the population suffered from eye disease. Many in Egypt at the time had a daily caloric intake below 2,000 calories, and population growth was skyrocketing. A country of 10 million in 1900 is at 19 million in 1947.
08:37
and that figure is on its way to doubling again in another 30 years. Beyond all that, away from home, you've got complicated politics for the newly independent state to navigate. Even with independence, the old colonial powers, they still want the canal. Meanwhile, a new world order is coming together in the wake of World War II, centered around U.S.-Soviet relations. And locally, revolutionary leadership needs to prove itself quickly and decisively to fend off instability.
09:04
which brings us to the Aswan High Dam. Building a mega dam on the Nile sits perfectly between two notions. The first is Egypt's millennia-long dependence on the Nile, and the second is the high modernism of the era. And look, the first, the entirety of Egyptian civilization, it's thanks to the Nile. It exists because ancient Egyptians figured out how to tame the river's seasonal flooding to irrigate crops and practice large-scale agriculture. And the calendar, the ancient Egyptian calendar, it followed the seasonal floods.
09:32
The new year started when flooding began, a moment marked by celebration and offerings that that year's seasonal floods wouldn't be too high or too low. And at this moment in the mid-20th century, everybody's building dams. In the U.S., the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Hoover Dam, the Grand Coulee, all those monuments, they were built in the 30s, 40s, 50s. And post-colonial states, at the same era, they see them as a path towards self-sufficiency and development.
09:55
You've got the Kariba Dam in Zambia and Zimbabwe, the Akosombo Dam in Ghana, dams in India, Pakistan, Venezuela. And I mean, the Soviets, they had an entire great plan for the transformation of nature. This included a slew of dams and other ambitious ideas, like reversing the flow of rivers that they felt uselessly flowed into the Arctic Ocean. They wanted to reroute them and have them go towards where people lived. And all this explains why the new dam was embraced by a lot of thinkers at the time, not just in Egypt. Egypt needs more food to feed its booming population.
10:24
that means increasing agricultural acreage. It needs industry and urbanization, which requires electrical power. And frankly, as a modern state, it needs better flood control. There's a reason we turned the LA River into a concrete trough. It's hard to run a modern community with periodic flooding. And a quote that 1952 study, quote, no single approach seems likely to succeed.
10:47
A comprehensive population plan is required, backed by the maximum goodwill and cooperation of the Arab world and financed from resources far greater than Egypt alone can provide."
11:00
So the state resurrects old plans to place a massive dam in the south of Egypt. They choose this plan over rival plans that would have held water farther upstream in Ethiopia or Sudan, highlands, with less evaporation. But this is where the English had built a dam previously, so there's precedent to put a dam in this location. And Egyptian leadership wants the water and infrastructure in their control. That's very important. But as that 1952 report predicted, funding is a significant problem.
11:27
Budget estimates put the cost of the dam at one to one and a half billion dollars. Egypt's entire GDP at the time, a little over four billion dollars. So to pay for it, the Egyptian government turns to the two new major world powers at the time, the US and the Soviets. After some negotiating, the US eventually backs out on grounds that it won't abide Egypt's strategy of non-alignment. They're essentially demanding that Egypt pick a side and that it better be the US if they want US money.
11:56
But the U.S. money isn't enough, so Egypt tries to nationalize a significant asset in their control to raise revenue, the Suez Canal. At the time, they did still have some holdover British and French owners after independence. This move leads to a pretty significant conflict between Egypt and its former colonizers. It's called the Suez Crisis. And for all intents and purposes, Egypt loses this conflict. But through a stroke of diplomatic fortune, it retains control of the Suez Canal.
12:23
The US and Soviets, they see a much bigger picture of post-colonial politics than continued European control. They tell Britain and France to back off, pretty much putting a headstone on the old colonial order. And importantly for Egypt, it both, one, empowers and legitimates post-colonial Egyptian leadership, who at this point look like successful freedom fighters, right? And two, it positioned the country to get funding for the dam from the Soviets on their own non-aligned terms. And the Soviets do. They loan significant amounts of money at rates that don't hamstring the Egyptian government for eternity.
12:53
and provide logistical support for the dam. In fact, a hydro engineering firm that built many Soviet dams and ran point on that river reversal project, they play a significant role in development and construction of the dam. They began work on the dam in 1960.
13:09
And this project, it's really tremendous. Compared to the previous low dam, which offered some light containment to manage a given water year, that year's seasonal flooding, this new dam is going to allow for management across multiple years. That's key when successive years of drought or overage can wreak havoc on the population. And all that water, it's stored in Lake Nasser that started to fill in 1964 after four years of construction. That's the fifth largest manmade lake on earth by volume when it opened, nearly five times the size of Lake Mead.
13:37
It's length 310 miles long. That's nearly the distance from Washington DC to Boston, Massachusetts. And remember, this thing is in the middle of the desert. And it's going to have massively beneficial effects for the Egyptian people. This is from a 1964 piece of marketing in the dam. It's going to, one, increase the area of crop growing land significantly. Two, prevent seasonal fluctuations, allowing for reliable irrigation and navigation of the Nile. And three, it's going to more than double the amount of electricity available to Egyptians.
14:05
In fact, yeah, at open it was the largest power station in Africa and the sixth largest hydropower station on earth.
14:13
So it may be no surprise to hear this is how Egypt's leader Gamal Nasser talks about the thing. He says, quote, for thousands of years, the great pyramids of Egypt were foremost among the engineering marvels of the world. They ensured life after death to the pharaohs. Tomorrow, the gigantic high dam, more significant and 17 times greater than the pyramids, will provide a higher standard of living for all Egyptians. End quote.
14:38
You see why later historians describe in Nasser a mad ambition to out-farrow the pharaohs, and maybe why the resulting lake is named Nasser. The dam, then, is not just a solution to practical problems, no. It's a modern monument to a new Egyptian state, one intimately connected to its charismatic leader.
15:03
Through all this, a watchful world identifies a significant problem with the dam. Under those 32 cubic miles of there's going to be lot of antiquities, archaeological sites, and ancient monuments. Egyptology is, by this point, exceptionally well-established. One of the most significant things extracted from Egypt during the colonial era, it was its own history. And don't just mean that the Rosetta Stone is in the British Museum along with countless statues and mummies. I mean the entire sense that
15:30
Ancient Egypt belongs to European history by way of Greece and Rome, rather than to the history of the people living in present-day Egypt. Look, a lot more can be said on that, but for present purposes, the punchline is, it should be no surprise that one of UNESCO's earliest projects is the establishment of a center for Egyptology in Cairo shortly after World War II. That center is closely tracking the Aswan High Dam and its impact on antiquities from the moment they hear about it. And it convinces Egyptian leadership and the full UNESCO board
15:59
that the threatened antiquities are worth preserving. This leads to UNESCO's first international rescue campaign, with costs split between Egypt and international contributions to UNESCO. And this quote from the director general of UNESCO is from when they're debating whether to run the campaign and what it might look like. It really stood out to me. He says, quote, uh
16:29
It is not easy to choose between temples and crops." End quote. So in parallel with the dam's construction is another pretty spectacular effort. Archaeologists from around the world are going to save 22 massive temples from the flood and speed run archaeological digs as much as possible. And literally, this is going on at the exact same time in something of a race against the clock. At times, workers had to build many dams around sites to prevent the rising waters from flooding those sites before they were done.
16:58
And it's pretty wild stuff. In one instance, they built a railway to move a 3,000-year-old temple a mile and a half away out of the flood zone. The iconic temple of Abu Simbel, was the one that really got people's attention at the time to run this campaign, is this massive thing carved into a hillside. They cut it into pieces and moved it block by block to a new location where they once again excavated a hillside to present it as close as they could to what it looked like before the move.
17:27
Newly discovered frescoes were removed. Entire temples were carted to museums in Aswan, Cairo, and around the globe. In fact, if you've ever seen the Egyptian temple at the Met in New York City, this is where it came from. A few significant contributors, like the United States, they got to take temples back to their home country. And that squares with how UNESCO leadership talked about this effort at the time. Here's a quote. These monuments do not belong solely to the nations who hold them in trust.
17:55
The whole world has the right to see them endure." End quote.
18:01
Hidden in the footnotes of this story, though, it's the part the world wasn't talking about so much at the time. An anthropologist working in the area would later recall thinking, what are we coming to when millions of dollars are spent to raise a monument of stone and scarcely a fraction of that is spent on the thousands of people who must go the way of the monument? End quote. You see, for as much as the world identified the cost to antiquity, an entire culture, 100,000 people, 50 odd towns,
18:31
they were serving as one last offering to tame the Nile's floods. The Nubian people would be resettled, miles away from their ancestral lands on the banks of the Nile, to make room for Lake Nasser.
18:52
The Nubian people, today divided by the border of Egypt and Sudan, had been on the periphery of Egypt for millennia. Archaeological evidence puts them there on the banks of the Nile going back to 2500 BC. The Nubian kingdom of Kush actually ruled Egypt for a hundred years, but most of time the dynamic was the opposite. And like other peripheral peoples around the globe, they maintained their sense of identity through a combination of assimilation and independence. They were early Christians adopting the faith around the same time as Constantine.
19:22
and they would adopt Islam during Arab invasions about a thousand years later. And they'd have different foreign rulers. In addition to the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and the Ottomans would rule the Nubians prior to colonization. And it's worth thinking about what ruling really meant back then. And look, we're talking about a tremendous span of years and different rulers. There's no one way it worked, of course, but models prior to the contemporary nation-state, they were much more center periphery than we understand governance today.
19:50
Local leadership retained authority and independence to varying degrees, as long as they navigated the politics above them well. Regardless of who was ruling them, Nubians have long been frontier people in the eyes of their rulers. They're darker skinned than Egyptians, racially positioning them somewhere between Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. And culturally, they had a lot to offer. They built charismatic monuments like their neighbors to the north, uniquely steep pyramids, and nearly twice as many as the ancient Egyptians.
20:18
They contributed to the religious record, producing medieval Christian frescoes with Africanized takes on Christian figures. And this is a music podcast after all, they performed a cyclical participatory percussion and vocal music tradition. And much like their Egyptian neighbors to the north, the Nile was their lifeline. They settled on the banks of the river and built their livelihoods, customs and culture around it. One tradition I ran into that stuck in my head was the bride and groom bathing in the Nile together on their wedding night.
20:48
Maybe I'm romantic, but something about that just felt tangible. Ritual, human connection in place all tied together in one.
20:56
That's an abbreviated history of the people we're talking about living alongside the Nile in the years before the dam. And sure, they had to move uphill a few times when the old British dam was built and later raised, and they weren't always happy about it. But there they are in the 1950s at the riverside, beholden again to someone new. Now, the new nation state of Egypt. And for all its beauty, Nubia, it's tough country. It's rural Egypt, and you already heard what disease and poverty was like there. And like, they're really rural.
21:24
There's a twice-weekly steamer boat and a monthly boat shipment. That's how anybody trades or travels out of the area. And it's a hard agrarian living, made harder by the inadequacy of arable land bordering the Nile to support the population. According to an academic study of Nubian communities, this hard living, quote, uh
21:49
and the injection of money earned outside of the area into the subsistence economy became dominant themes." End quote. And in fact, males made up just around a third of the adult population in Egyptian Nubian villages because there's no work. They travel north to Cairo and Alexandria to work as cooks, doorkeepers, houseboys, and waiters, and send remittances back. One study found that 23 % of households relied on these remittances as their only source of income.
22:18
Another study found not a single male over the age of 13 lived in four Nubian towns. And here's a particularly tough quote from a source talking about pre-Dam Nubia. Quote, the local population is barely self-sustaining. End quote.
22:35
That's who then Vice President Anwar Sadat was looking at when he paid an official visit to Nubia in advance of resettlement. Here's what he had to say, his pitch to them, as it were, quote, If the Nubian people are leaving their smaller home of Nubia for the prosperity of the Republic and the realization of the great hopes pinned on the High Dam, then the bigger home, their own country, will open its arms to welcome them in one of the new districts in Kom Ombo. There they will find stability, prosperity, and a decent life.
23:05
End quote. Kom Ombo is the area they were building a relocation site as part of the Nubian resettlement plan. The plan included 75 settlements built in an arc of about 50 miles with three major towns and the balanced smaller communities. The new settlements, it was said, they'd be more modern, denser, electrified, and with better roads and continuous pumped irrigation. Nubians would not only receive a home in these settlements, they'd receive compensation or land too, depending on their prior land holdings.
23:35
Contemporary Nubians had no objections to the plan. At least that was the official line. The Egyptian information department kept messaging clear, and it was for all intents and purposes treason to speak against the project. This may explain why there's vanishingly little in the record that looks like opposition, let alone organized protest. I've managed to find one Western author writing before resettlement. He's remarking on how the Nubians seem quote, reluctant to move, end quote, from their, again, quote, most unpleasant.
24:04
and quote, ancestral lands. So that might explain it, government censorship, or it could be due to what I see as optimistic resignation in a pre-resettlement survey. According to that survey, lot of Nubians were hopeful that the new life in Kamambo would come with opportunity. They hoped that men could find work locally rather than migrate north. And in general, they hoped that Nubians could be more integrated with the new national Egyptian community. And look, it doesn't really matter what the Nubians thought or hoped.
24:33
The dam was being built and resettlement was occurring regardless. According to contemporary accounts, Nubian voices were, always heard, but seldom take in account of except in cases where it was possible to accommodate Nubian desires easily within the general framework of the plan, end quote. This general empathy towards the resettled people may explain why resettlement went so poorly. Delays in development of the new towns led to food shortages in the old towns where residents were not prepared to stay longer than scheduled.
25:01
And though the first resettlements were done with significant fanfare, once the spectacle was over, it was a completely different story. Things were broken and shipping. There was no local organization to help people on arrival. And some settlers arrived to incomplete or poorly built houses. Sometimes, none at all. And those acres of arable land promised to resettlers? They weren't yet prepared for farming. That process would take years to complete. Even had the government more effectively executed the logistics of the move, there were more fundamental problems.
25:31
Due to cost cutting, houses were hotter than originally planned. And neither the houses themselves nor the community layout was designed to accommodate Nubian practices and lifestyle. People were settled in houses far from friends, family, and caretakers. The houses lacked the kinds of spaces that Nubians used. And the fundamental geography of the new towns? It was just wrong. To hear Nubian architect Mena Agha tell it in Nubia, quote,
25:57
Every street that runs uninterrupted between the river and the mountain is occupied by djins. That is why we used to build our houses interwoven into one another. But modernist design has deemed its streets linear and open on both ends." This belief stands in for a logistical truth. Nubians embrace nonlinear streets to avoid wind tunnels and shield houses from descending sand. This place, branded New Nubia by the government,
26:26
It wasn't set up for Nubians. They named it El Tahjeer, the displacement.
26:35
It wasn't aesthetic preference or homesickness that brought what followed. No, the early years after resettlement were marked by high mortality because of food shortages and disease. The Egyptian government called on the UN to address hunger, but in so doing only conceded its own failure in establishing for resettled Nubians a way to make a living. And the continued scarcity of arable land led to migration of people to work outside of the area in clerical or domestic jobs.
27:01
Within a few years, resettled Nubians started to make the places their own as much as possible. Benches appeared in front of houses, communal gathering places in Nubia before resettlement. Exterior walls were painted with murals like the houses of Nubia. And ultimately, more men did stay in the new towns than used to stay in Nubia. Later surveys found that many Nubians had modern amenities like televisions, radios, and refrigerators in the new town.
27:27
In a 2007 survey found nearly all respondents believed they had improved education and job opportunities after resettlement.
27:35
But the cultural loss was real. The new villages miles away from the Nile had no room for the many traditions tied to the river. Wedding and funeral celebrations changed, got shorter. Religious observances were reduced in number. And that tradition, that bride and groom bathed in the Nile on their wedding night, it would die out in a matter of decades after resettlement.
27:59
All of which may explain why the same 2007 survey found that all but one respondent would return permanently to the banks of the Nile if given the opportunity.
28:10
But while many Nubian traditions were washed away by resettlement, Nubian people started to gain a stronger sense of awareness of their shared identity. Divisions due to language, geography, or specific traditions slipped away in the melting pot of Kamambo, and a new way of understanding themselves as Nubian emerged. A key component of that identity? Collective remembering of the Nubia they lost. Nubian-American anthropologist Yasmin Moll says,
28:37
Nubia is a land that becomes more idyllic the longer its palm trees, houses, and graves sleep under the water. A land where no one hated, no one hungered, and everyone died as they lived. Peacefully. Old Nubia was, according to everyone who ever saw it, simply fantastic. And I mean that both in the sense of terrific and great, and in the sense of fanciful and improbable.
29:02
You may hear a tinge of skepticism in Moll's telling, but she asks, This question echoes Nubian literature scholar Christine Gilmour's description of memory as a dynamic and performative process of creation rather than a stable process of recollection or reenactment. Memory under that concept is a contemporary project, one that strives to build something new out of remnants of the past.
29:32
which takes us back to Hamza El-Din. In the 1960s, while his homeland was being drowned and museumified, El-Din joined other creatives in Cairo, poets, fine artists, to perform and preserve Nubian culture. You remember him from the top, but let's give him a listen again here.
[Music sample: Hamza El Din]
30:05
El-Din is from the Nubian town of Toshka. You can find it on Google Maps. The pin drops in the middle of the lake, some 15 miles from Abu Simbel. He had this to say about the dam. Quote, I was in New York when the dam was finished. I lost my village. When I went back and saw my village and my people in a different place, I saw in their eyes the loss. I saw my people were lost. They had moved to an almost semi-desert place.
30:34
When I came back, I was lost myself.
30:39
You can hear the pain, to be sure.
30:43
But you can hear something else in the details. El-Din's a little more cosmopolitan than the folky type you imagine some anthropologists capturing in the field now. Joining art movements in Cairo, traveling to New York. To refer back to dams as our metaphor for modernity, he originally went to school to study engineering in hopes of working on the original Aswan Low Dam. He was no rural Luddite, frozen in amber. And when he pivoted to music, he did so at Institutes of Higher Learning in Cairo, in Europe.
31:13
and he would take trips back to Kamambo, riding from village to village on a donkey to learn from Nubian traditions in a self-conscious effort to preserve them against the threat presented by the dam. So even his traditions were significantly learned with the modern lens of metropolitan music training and preservation. And that same push-pull of tradition and modernity, it plays out in his music too. And I think it's really interesting once you have the basics of what he's up to.
31:39
So he's playing the Oud, that's an ancestor to the lute, with an age-old role in Islamic court music. And in this post-colonial moment, it's kind of a symbol for Arab nationalism associated with interest in putting Arab art music on par with Western art music. And this isn't a 1965 cut, but I think it's worth hearing what the Oud tradition sounds like at the time.
[Music sample: Traditional Oud Music]
32:17
And this is really interesting music, right? It's virtuosic, it's angular, it's got a sense of what film music people call vectorization, an idea that the song is going somewhere. But it doesn't sound much like El-Din. And this is where the Nubian tradition comes in. Traditional Nubian music, again, it's percussive, cyclical, call and response, a free flowing music of communal gatherings. And in fact, the oud is not traditionally used in Nubian music. And so we hear in El-Din's approach to the oud, that Nubian infliction.
32:47
with looping melodic lines talking in dialogue with one another. Give it a listen.
[Music sample: Hamza El Din]
And you hear in that snippet the cyclical, the call and response nature, the way the melodies unfold, right? That's Nubian.
33:15
At other times, he introduces hand claps and the tar, a type of hand drum, and that calls to mind the percussive aspects of the tradition. Let's give that a listen.
[Music sample: Hamza El Din]
It's the way El-Din uses those traditions and melds them with the oud that puts us stylistically in a pretty modern place, right?
33:43
Tradition is self-consciously preserved by performance on an instrument that comes from somewhere else. In the entire context of this thing, it's pretty modern too. These are original songs, not performances of an existing repertoire. He's performing them more or less solo, not communally, and more than that, he's recording them, turning them into perfect musical objects. That's an entirely different kind of thing from Nubian folk music as heard in pre-Dam Nubia.
34:08
And I want to be clear, none of this makes his work less effective, less Nubian, or even less folk. In fact, I see it as the opposite. Much like the Nubians themselves navigated independence and assimilation, these traditions, like all folk traditions, they retain space for modernity. And that exact place right there, that's what music sounds like to me in 1965. It's folk traditions modernizing in the recording studio and...
34:36
in so doing, laying the foundations for the next half century of recorded popular music. And look, this didn't happen all at once in 1965, and it's not all there is to hear in 1965. To that end, you can still hear plenty of recordings that sound more like documents of a performance than constructed studio artifacts, like this calypso tune from Lord Kitchener.
[Music sample: Lord Kitchener]
35:07
You can hear styles that emerge from a more fundamentally performative popular lineage, similarly embracing studio technology, like France Gall's 1965 Eurovision winner, the first pop song to ever win the contest.
[Music sample: France Gall]
35:25
And you can hear things that are a little bit farther through the looking glass of modernity, taking established recorded forms and pushing them in new directions, like Peruvian band Los Saicos' gravelly twist on surf rock.
[Music sample: Los Saicos]
36:01
But if I was gonna pull out the dominant condition for this moment in music, the one that reverberates in the decades to follow, it's this transformation. Common vernacular folk forms grappling with the latest technology and producing something entirely new. Musical artifacts made in the studio, not just captured there, that establish a slate of sounds, songwriting conventions and values that echo forth in the years to come. Let's see what's happening in practice.
36:28
And look, I'm not making some new discovery when I say that rock and R &B have their roots in blues music. That lineage goes back a couple decades before our story here, from blues origins to the schism of race records and rock and roll as those origins diffuse through market segments of early recorded music. But look, blues, it's folk music, right? Like, let's hear what it sounds like in 1965.
[Music sample: Son House]
37:04
That's Sun House. He was rediscovered in the 60s after earlier recordings of his work by folk ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, no less. They found an audience. But by 1965, those folk blues traditions had diffused. They adapted to market conditions and incorporated new ways of making and distributing music. And so by 1965, that folk blues tradition
37:25
starts to sound like this when we call it rock. This is Take a Heart by British rockers, The Sorrows.
37:37
[Music sample: The Sorrows]
37:43
And it starts to sound like this when we call it soul, as in Otis Redding's classic, I've Been Loving You Too Long.
37:59
[Music sample: Otis Redding]
38:03
think what I want to pull out here in both cases is that what's solidifying is a concept of each as studio-made artifacts with certain conventions that make up the genre, and conventions with their roots in a clear folk tradition that evolved in both form and the types of technologies it embraced. And you can hear this elsewhere around the globe too. Samba music comes from the favelas of Rio, where it took hold as the music of community celebrations. And like high folk music, it's a communal music, with a significant oral tradition and repertoire.
38:33
if also a slightly stronger sense of professional composers and performers. And to that end, the performer of one of the earliest samba recordings, Pelo Telefone from 1916, he was accused of plagiarism for having stolen from the folkloric traditions of samba rather than composing something entirely new. Let's give it a listen.
38:58
[Music sample: Pelo Telefone]
39:08
By 1965, this sprightly sing-along music had morphed into its tastefully restrained descendant bossa nova, a style perfectly captured in Astrud Giberto's version of Agua de Beber.
[Music sample: Astrud Gilberto]
39:30
And this intimate studio sound, compared to Pelo Telefone from 1916, it reminds me of the difference between a film and a play. The loud, performative theatrics of samba replaced with something that could only be created with the latest recording technology. And you're even starting to hear this transition in cumbia music. That style went from the music of the rural Colombian coast to urban dancehall music to a modern recorded form by the 60s. Check out this sneaky guitar riff in the call and response mix of Cumbia Loca by Conjunto Minimar.
[Music sample: Conjunto Miramar]
39:59
And look, none of these styles were self-consciously folk music originally. Nothing ever was. They were just music. That's true for even the folk musician you imagine sitting on a porch in Appalachia before electricity. And in that state of nature, let's call it, folk music traditions have always been more pliable than we give them credit for.
40:28
Folk music has accommodated stylistic, social, and technological change across history, and almost definitionally requires change. If it's about a repertoire of songs, instruments, and a way of matching the two performed by regular folks in social settings, it's going to beget a tremendous amount of change. Now think about that key concept of variation in the UNESCO-connected definition of folk music I quoted all the way at the top. Ethnomusicologist Phil Bollman has a lot to say about folk music and its capacity for change.
40:55
But I think this one line from him, it really drives it home. says, In other words, each performer plays the tradition in their own way.
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and simply by virtue of those differences, change occurs. And so styles change and travel through this type of diffusion, the natural evolution of imperfect replication, shifts in taste and social context of creation, and availability of new technologies.
41:41
Let's hear each in practice, starting with the first, Imperfect Replication. And look, don't take this to mean there are flaws in different performances of the folk repertoire. Understand it as something much more basic. Every performance is gonna be different, and that variance is gonna go up as different performers get in the mix. And we can hear that in a track from 1965. Here's British folk singer Davy Graham doing his version of the song, Cocaine.
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[Music sample: Davy Graham]
42:23
That song was brought into the broader folk lexicon by literally blind blues icon Reverend Gary Davis. And he himself learned it in 1905 from literally a traveling carnival musician. And here's Davis performing it sometime in the mid sixties.
[Music sample: Rev. Gary Davis]
42:54
Davis is obviously delivering this in a traditional talking blues style against Graham's more melodic delivery. And accordingly, Graham plays the whole thing as much more of an arrangement than Davis's independent blues guitar and vocals. And that play in the joints you hear here across different performers, that leaves a lot of room across the span of time and place for sounds and styles to evolve.
43:15
Another big influence on how those styles evolve is the context of the creation and reception of folk music. For me at least, I tend to associate folk with something of a politically activist tradition. Phil Ochs' Here's to the State of Mississippi might be one of my favorite songs in the canon. It's from 1965. Let's give it a listen.
[Music sample: Phil Ochs]
43:48
but even that explicitly political activist type of folk music, it's a relatively new invention. It has its roots in the pre-McCarthy era. Back then, performers like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, they connected folk music's roots as working people's music with that ascendant politics of the working class. So the play and the joints that we're talking about here, it's not just a matter of a particular performer's styling, skills, preferences. It's a matter of the performer and the audience's social setting and how music fits within that.
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and how it influences which songs are ultimately selected to call back to that IFMC definition, how they're ultimately selected to continue the tradition.
44:26
And the third key driver of folk music evolution is changes in technology. Instruments, they're technology, and technology that travels. There's no guitar in your image of the folk musician without a complex history of necked string instruments moving from ancient Mesopotamia to the Middle East, to Europe, and eventually America. And at each stop, someone embraced this instrument for the first time and incorporated it into their tradition. To bring it in scope of 1965, that's canonically the year that Dylan went electric.
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a moment that triggered conversations around tradition and modernity. The lore goes that Pete Seeger threatened to cut the electrical cables with an axe when Dylan performed at the Newport Folk Festival that year. That sounds a little goofy, but if you think of folk as a stripped-down acoustic performance like Graham or Oakes just now, even this relatively analog full-band performance is dangerously inauthentic. Give it a listen.
[Music sample: Bob Dylan]
45:32
To me, in 2026, it's hard to hear anything but folk here. The tradition, it turned out, had room for this new technology.
45:42
And of course, technology isn't present just in how folk songs are made. Now, it's also present in how they're shared, how the oral tradition is passed from person to person. And even in that imagined state of nature, there's mediation. Going back to the Renaissance, the printing press standardized at least lyrics, even if musical notation was the province of art music. And fast forward a few hundred years, folk as we understand it today is almost fundamentally a product of mediation. The whole concept of folk was born in the 1800s alongside the notion of the nation state as a way to build a coherent national identity.
46:11
Traditional music was captured in its ostensibly pure form by musicologists and songwriters looking for inspiration. And there's this really interesting take from American folklorist Kenneth Goldstein here. He argues that technological advancement presages folk revivals. Technology isn't the enemy of folk in this take. It's instead a handmaid. And here's a quote from Goldstein. He says, quote, recording the folk song does not freeze its form and content such that it ceases to be a folk song. It speeds up circulation through space and time.
46:41
He continues, recordings have supplemented rather than replaced, reinforced rather than displaced, fed rather than swallowed the oral tradition, end quote. Which in a way, it makes sense. If folks in oral tradition, new methods of speaking and listening allow for folk to work in new ways. American philosopher Walter Ong calls this secondary orality, a type of oral transmission mediated by the printed or recorded word.
47:09
And that whole story is down the middle of folk music in 1965, right? Recording technology is better than ever. Decades of folk music preservation efforts have generated a library of recordings and an audience for certain vernacular music traditions. And modern musicians are now self-consciously reproducing, drawing inspiration from, and advancing those traditions using the latest technologies at hand. And now think about the consequences of that going forward.
47:34
The next later performances, they're now in dialogue with these contemporary recorded iterations of folk traditions. That's secondary orality. And from there, sounds and styles naturally diffuse as each artist and their context give the tradition a new spin, developing entire new genres along the way. And we can hear this already in 1965 in the Byrds' take on All I Really Wanna Do, a warbly acoustic Dylan original now turned into harmonious folk rock fusion.
48:03
[Music sample: The Byrds]
48:13
In this process, it has a lot in common with folk in that imagined state of nature, perhaps more so than the self-aware preservation inherent in what we think of as folk. Let's call back now to that song, Cocaine, a century old passed down from carnival performer to blind blues legend to the revival core songbook. Here's what it sounds like after another 50 years of diffusion of the tradition, this time from 2013 by SoCal punk band FIDLAR.
[Music sample: FIDLAR]
48:56
That's a pretty far cry from where we started. But without recording technology to compare these all side by side, would we remember this as deeply different? Before widespread printed music, the vagaries of oral or handwritten traditions left a lot of room for play between performers. Musical notation, again, that was the province of art music. And before recording, even written music left a lot of room for interpretation. Now, we can hear the primary document and hold it up as authentic and pure.
49:24
any digression deviant to the tradition. So our ability to demand fidelity with the past of folk traditions, ironically, it's a product of new technologies brought to bear on those past traditions. And given that any recorded document is inherently out of step with the context of its creation, is a precise replication true to it? That is to say, is it authentic? Or would the tradition have authentically evolved?
49:51
And where that leads me, then, is that any sense of authenticity or of tradition, it's not a project of the past. It's a project of the present. It's like how that Nubian literary scholar Christine Gilmore talked about memory, an active process that occurs in the present that understands the past in ways that serve today's purposes. Or to quote, again, folk ethnomusicologist Phil Bollman when talking about authenticity, says, quote, authenticity widens the gap between the past and the present.
50:19
idealizing the validity of folk music's origins, but purposefully failing to define them."
50:27
That failure to define leaves a lot of room for manipulation now, and this goes back a ways. In the 1930s, song collectors in the rural South often recorded authentic versions of songs that were fact learned from the radio just a few weeks before. But even from there, disputes over authenticity are more cover for what we want to exist today by making an appeal to the past than they are about the past itself, which is never in reach. And then the real question we're left with, it's not one of how true is this to the past?
50:56
It's what present and future are we creating when we leverage the past in these ways? British rock critic Simon Frith talks about how, both the folk revival and rock music, which drew on folk sense of the authentic, there was a sense that the music begat community on its own. There was no need for a community to make it for it to be folk. Through the conditions of its creation and what it says, the music created community and community described the musical experience, end quote.
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And think Frith really hits at what's happening to folk in the broad sense at this moment in music history.
51:33
Folk music, or at least some folk musical styles, are shedding aspects of themselves and becoming recorded studio objects with a high level of professionalism, a new set of conventions, and an embrace of an industrial distribution model. It's leaving behind a certain sense of the communal inherent in folk music to be sure that imagined oral tradition of music that just sort of exists in the air around social gatherings. But at the same time, it's engendering a new type of diffusion via secondary orality. A diffusion that, like folk in the state of nature,
52:03
continue to shape shift as each performer put their own spin on it.
52:08
And that last question, what present are we creating? It again has real stakes. The weaponization of the past in service of the present is of course key to significant political projects of many stripes. And our collective sense of the past bleeds into less explicitly political agendas operating simply as a way of knowing or a way of being.
52:27
Martinican psychologist and post-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon warns, that obsessing over tradition can be a trap. He says, quote, a national culture is not a folklore. It is not made up of the inner dregs of actions which are less and less attached to the ever-present reality of the people. A national culture is a whole body of efforts made by a people in this sphere of thought to describe, justify, and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence, end quote.
52:56
I read him to be a little concerned about self-concept here, about limiting yourself because only great stories happened in the past. He recommends, the formula this all happened long ago be replaced with that of what we are going to speak of happened somewhere else, but it might well have happened here today and it might happen tomorrow, end quote.
53:17
But I think he's also touching on how, at the level of cross-cultural relations, fixation on an authentic past of the colonized locks them into the periphery, a place where present-day conflict isn't even in the realm of possibility, because the colonized is not a relevant player today. To quote another thinker, this time Canadian literary scholar Diana Brydon, this dynamic, denies the necessity of cultural and political struggle, suggesting that tourism is probably the best model for cross-cultural interaction, end quote.
53:49
That in turn makes me think of the star line from Jamal Majrub's Nubian Indigo, a fictional tale of the dam, displacement, and Nubian resistance to it, and maybe one of the closest things we'll get to the truth of the story. That line goes, quote, a museum is just a fancy word for a tomb, end quote.
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So let me ask you again, is this folk music?
[Music sample: Nubi]
54:25
That's Nubi. He's from the Nubian diaspora and now working out of city of Aswan, 10 miles from the high dam. He got a start in the world of rap battles, a communal vernacular culture going back over 40 years now and blends Nubian stylings with trap, Afro pop and shabi, another Egyptian vernacular style.
54:47
The world preserved the monuments his people lived among while the lake drowned their customs, traditions, culture. Is his music only folk if he dug up the artifacts of the past, a past modernity made foreign to him? Or can he make folk music that speaks to his present concerns and traditions and those of his people? Does something only become folk once it's far enough removed from the present day to be in a museum? The Nubians as well as anyone.
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know the price of answering that question too strongly in the affirmative.
55:23
An American anthropologist who closely studied the Nubian people before and after displacement had this to say, For unlike these great monuments, the people of Nubia have not endured through centuries of splendid isolation, but on the contrary, have time and again met social and natural threats to their continued existence
55:51
with remarkable vitality and flexibility. In fact, though it seems paradoxical, the survival of this ethnic group seems in large part due to its partial assimilation."
56:04
In the context of folk music, musicologist Phil Bollman echoes these thoughts. He says, quote, the expansiveness of community tradition is itself an assurance of stability because of its ability to encompass widespread and ongoing change within his various repertoires, end quote.
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Me, personally, I'm more of a primary source guy, so think Nubi puts it best.
[Music sample: Nubi]
In relevant part that translates to, we got lost in the maze of streets, but we still bear the likeness of where we're from.
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Personally, I'm picturing those streets in El Tahjeer, full of jinns, now dotted with Nubian murals.
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I'm Matt Collins. Thanks so much for listening to the first episode of The Mine. This is part one of our first series telling a global history of popular music. There's an accompanying playlist featuring the songs you heard on here and more from 1965. You can find it on the official Mind Spotify page and on our webpage at ListenToTheMind.com. My thanks to Leigh Finnegan, Mason Shefa, Flawn Williams, and our visual artist for this season, Julie Guillem. She makes really beautiful work.
57:32
We'll be back with episode two, picking up the story in the 1970s in a few months. Thanks again.
[This transcription courtesy of Riverside]