As many of you know, my wife and I just returned from a wonderful trip to Tanzania where we successfully climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, went on safari and saw the "Big 5", and chilled out in Zanzibar.

One thing I noticed was the importance of music vis a vis other forms of media. Music consumption in the West is much more of a background phenomenon. We tune into the radio while driving to work, we put tunes on when having people over for dinner, we hear music in bars & restaurants, as part of movie and game soundtracks...the point is that a lot of our music consumption happens while we're doing other things.

In Africa, music seemed to be very much a foreground phenomenon. We'd be approached on the streets of Stonetown, Zanzibar by touts wanting to sell us CDs of African music. In the town of Moshi, there were street vendors selling CDs and cassette tapes (remember those things) of different types of East African and Western music (reggae is very popular there) -- the only place in the US that has something like that is NYC. One of the most surreal experiences was being on Mt. Kilimanjaro and hearing some of our porters singing along to a radio playing country and soft pop Western Music (Richard Marx "Everything I Do (I Do It For You)", which we heard played disconcertingly frequently). And we'd hear music being played out on the streets, and blared from loudspeakers.

I think it's part cultural and part economic in that we can much better afford to consume other types of media here (movies, games, print publications).

It reminded me of how much I value music.

PS - No offense to Richard Marx, but it kind of baffled us as to how often they played that kind of stuff on that radio station...Kinda like how David Haselhoff is (was?) so popular in Germany. And we shuddered at the thought that they might consider it representative of Western music.