The Cancer of Ethiopan Music

"Who is to blame for the creative collapse of Ethiopian music? The Communist regime and the synthesizer. The Communist government, which carried out a military coup in the mid-seventies, marked American soul music, which more than anything else had fueled the musical blossoming in Addis Ababa, as the music of the enemy, persecuted the musicians who continued to remain loyal to it, and directed the entire preoccupation with music to military-patriotic channels. The synthesizer, which captured the market in the 1990s, turned the wind instruments, the source of the vitality of modern Ethiopian music, into superfluous objects, and enabled untrained musicians, who were often untalented as well, to issue discs at one-tenth the price demanded previously. Abate Barihon calls the synthesizer "the cancer of Ethiopian music," thus expressing the feelings of many. "At a certain point, a few years before I left Addis, the entire city suddenly became filled with the cancers," he says."

Title link takes you to the full article. Via Synthtopia News.