Buy J’ai ete Au Bal (I Went to the Dance), Vol. 1
This is the soundtrack to a documentary about Cajun music & Zydeco music. I’ve never seen the movie, but I wanted to explore Cajun music a bit, and I heard this soundtrack was a good overview. My experience, and I think the experience of most, when it comes to this genre is Hank William’s Jambalaya & Paul Simon’s That Was Your Mother. This certainly seems like a wide ranging look. It isn’t arranged in any kind of chronological order, but it has the very oldest Cajun recording, a song from 1925 and some live recordings from the early nineties by modern Cajun bands and a lot in between. Unfortunately, I just didn’t take to this at all. A good portion of this CD, which is well over an hour, seems like music created on a dare, where, let’s say, an accordion and a fiddle play different songs in different keys while some raspy voiced guy hollers tunelessly in French over the top of it. I like to think I have wide ranging and eclectic tastes, but I found most of this album to be completely unlistenable. When it was listenable, it was never better than just kind of mediocre. I’m going to give volume 2 a try since I have it here (they came from the library together), but based on this, my hope is not exactly high. Oh and there are these solo vocal tracks; apparently a big deal back in the old days was female singers singing unaccompanied. God, those are like the worst ******* things I’ve ever ******* heard. Absolutely forbidden. 0 stars.
tl;dr – compilation of Cajun music gives a broad historic overview, but the music itself is sloppy, weird and cacophonous in ways that add up to totally unlistenable. 0 stars.