[HN Gopher] The deadly accordion wars of Lesotho
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The deadly accordion wars of Lesotho
Author : Sujan
Score : 37 points
Date : 2022-05-01 16:59 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| nradov wrote:
| There are ongoing smaller scale cycles of violence and
| retribution in parts of the US driven by rap diss tracks posted
| on social media.
|
| https://www.firstcoastnews.com/article/entertainment/music/y...
|
| https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/criminal-justice/ct-chic...
| AlanYx wrote:
| >"They come to a house looking for you - and you are not there.
| And they kill the wife, they kill the children, eliminate
| everybody in the family. Villages and villages are orphanages,
| because of Famo music," says one of its original promoters,
| Sebonomoea Ramainoane.
|
| There's got to be more to this than what's in the article. Does
| anyone have more information about what's going on? The article
| briefly mentions connections to gold mines and politicians as
| possible aggravating factors, but some of it seems so petty, like
| this:
|
| >"When you are on the radio, you have to make sure that every day
| you play all the groups. If you leave one out, they say: 'You
| don't like us.' Then they shoot you."
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _some of it seems so petty_
|
| It's the harsh logic of resource mobilization. Artists compete
| for a share of (mostly poor) people's leisure budget by
| producing songs, hoping that people will like them so much that
| they'll pay money to hear them from the source. Songs'
| popularity is a function of novelty and longevity. Radio
| station operators can't make songs, but they have transmitters
| that can amplify songs. People listen to the radio to hear
| songs for free. Radio station operators get kickbacks from the
| artists or sell advertising, or some mix off the two.
|
| There are more songs than the market can bear at any one,
| because most people get bored of most songs after a while. The
| time to play all available songs equally exceeds the number of
| hours in the day people can listen to the radio (this is the
| allocation problem streaming solves, at the cost of fragmenting
| the audience). The radio station wants people to listen as much
| as possible, so the operators want to play the most popular
| songs. The listeners decide what is popular, but it takes time
| for those choices to be communicated back to the station
| operators and artists, so the station operators try to predict
| based on the combination of their own musical taste and their
| ability to get audience information (answering phones at the
| radio station, using information gained at promotional events
| etc).
|
| Whereas artists might once have simply trekked from village to
| village playing their songs and being rewarded with food and
| sex, that is no longer a viable way to compete against people
| whose songs are played on the radio. Thus the radio station is
| now able to hold artists livelihood hostage by their decisions
| on what 'the popular taste' is at any given time, a symbiotic
| relationship that can go bad if either party's assessment of
| the music's popularity drifts too far from reality.
|
| In more advanced societies, media corporations or nations
| function as amplifiers for ideological or territorial claims
| which are articulated by social movements appealing to the
| tastes of populations, and which mostly provide strategies or
| tactics for their adherents within those populations to
| maximize their own take from a limited resource pool from which
| said populations compete to draw.
|
| So, the current political spat over a Supreme Court opinion is
| the equivalent of one group of legal scholars releasing a diss
| track of another bunch of legal scholars, delighting or
| enraging their respective fans. All the intellectual depth and
| complexity of legal opinions is partly a function over how long
| the arguments last, in this case ~50 years rather than the few
| minutes of a typical pop song. The war in Ukraine is a
| language/cultural identity conflict that has played out over
| hundreds of years about who gets access to the good
| agricultural land. I would argue that all social conflict is
| just elaborated competition over limited environmental
| resources.
| DFHippie wrote:
| I don't think we humans need better excuses. Believing honor is
| everything and that your honor requires someone else's dishonor
| is all it takes. Here's Shakespeare's holding forth on the
| topic in Othello:
|
| > Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my
| reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what
| remains is bestial.
|
| This is why the Hatfields fought the McCoys. This is largely
| why Putin's troops are raping, murdering, and pillaging in
| Ukraine. It's how you demonstrate who has lost honor and who
| has gained it. It's why "owning" your rhetorical opponent is so
| vicious, why revenge porn exists. People in thrall to this
| version of honor feel they must utterly destroy their enemy to
| restore their honor.
|
| To those of use who haven't recently been slighted this looks
| like the opposite of honor, but it seems less insane after an
| insult.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _in thrall to this version of honor_
|
| One could say honor/status is a proxy for the the amount of
| force you can deploy if attacked. Conflict anthropologists
| note that in highly stratified societies there are strict
| rules on the distribution and use of military technology.
| Japanese samurai could challenge each others' swordsmanship
| and engage in fatal duels, and even chastise any peasants
| that failed to acknowledge his class. But a samurai that went
| about killing peasants for fun would be quickly branded a
| criminal, like a cancer on the social body.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This one buries the lead: _Now, though, the murders are not just
| over accordion music. Rival Famo groups also battle for control
| of the lucrative illegal gold mines in South Africa where many of
| their followers work._
|
| "The deadly gold wars of Lesotho" would probably have been a more
| accurate title. There seems to be politician and police
| involvement as well. So it's fair to guess that this is really a
| struggle over economic power in an area where there's no
| independent judiciary and police and politicians are involved in
| the cash flow generated by the 'illegal' mining activity.
|
| It's also the BBC, the state propaganda organ of the UK,
| comparable to Russia's RT, and so they don't mention the
| interesting and relevant fact that the major foreign outfits
| mining in Lesotho are UK firms, and they're probably pulling most
| of the profits out of an impoverished country, paying kickbacks
| to the politicians, good 'ol colonial extraction style:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_industry_of_Lesotho
|
| But no, says the BBC it's about the music. Come on, now. It's
| more like cartel drug wars on the Mexican border, yes, they have
| narco-music too, but nobody claims that's what they're fighting
| over.
| shellac wrote:
| > "The deadly gold wars of Lesotho" would probably have been a
| more accurate title
|
| Not really. The involvement in illegal mining comes later, and
| violence was part of the Famo before that. There's some
| suggestion that it was tensions over funeral funds, which is
| where these groups came from.
|
| Edit: and I should add that the illegal gold mining happens in
| South Africa, not Lesotho (which afaik has no gold mines). See,
| for example, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-
| africa-34589143.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| I've noticed that BBC's bias is subtle and sparkled sparingly,
| in stark contrast to say ridiculous Russian propaganda machine.
| But for sure if you know certain topics well, you'll notice
| from time to time lack of objectivity, for whatever reasons.
|
| In general I still like them, one view/source on given topic.
| But its best if the topic is not about Britain's darker parts
| of history or present.
| matthewowen wrote:
| > It's also the BBC, the state propaganda organ of the UK,
| comparable to Russia's RT
|
| This is a very silly and misleading comparison. It's true that
| the BBC has biases, but these are more easily explained as
| cultural biases that are simply the product of it being a
| British organization with predominantly British staff, just the
| same as (eg) the New York Time has cultural biases that are the
| product of its own circumstances. To suggest it's meaningfully
| a propaganda arm of the British state is just not really very
| credible.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| It's not as tightly controlled from the top as RT for sure,
| but the BBC is definitely used as propaganda for the state.
| You might agree with it more, but it's presenting the state
| as legitimate: everything related to the crown, to the
| _former_ colonies, to the government, and so on, is presented
| working on the assumption that things are mostly as they
| should be. This is propaganda for the state. To be clear, I'm
| not saying if I think this is good or bad, just that I think
| it's arguably true.
| drcongo wrote:
| Small correction, _buries the lede_. Entirely agree though.
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