The deadly accordion wars of Lesotho (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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.

The article explains exactly why it's about music: musicians post diss tracks, musicians react by taking diss tracks a step above. Rinse and repeat and in no time you have people being beaten up and even killed.

You see the same phenomenon in Mexico with corridos ballads, and also on hip-hop.

But somehow it seems you have an axe to grind against the BBC. Comparing the BBC to Russia's RT is a clear tell you are either disingenuous or ignorant.

> 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.

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.