Friend, Party Rocker, Bassaholic DJ Pace (aka Pacey Foster) is a multi-instrumentalist with deep hip-hop roots, he was the turntablist in the Franc Graham Band and the experimental live electronic act Elk which included members of Count Zero/Think Tree. He has performed as a club and party DJ for over 10 years and brings an academic expertise to his wicked DJ blends and musical productions. When he is not working on his growing record archive at the Library of Vinyl Experience. Pace conducts research on local cultural industries as an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His forthcoming article, “Hip-hop in the Hub: How Boston Rap Remained Underground” will be the first published history of Boston’s early hip-hop scene.
Tonight he will present some recently obtained rare electro -boogie -disco -funk records. Do you like vocoders? How about wobbly synth basslines and jawrattling handclaps? Well then my friend, this is the night for you.
I know that 2008 is, like, totally over — but that doesn’t mean we can’t already begin revisiting it in ironic/nostalgia mode. And what’s the best vehicle for that? The mashup, of course.
DJ Earworm, who put together a similar roundup last year, has not only spliced together — super seamlessly — the Billboard top 25 of 2008, he’s mashed the videos too. Using a Coldplay instrumental gives all these autotuned crooners an oddly melancholy / meditative sound. Seems about right –
You all already know that Ghislain P is a mean beatsmith and that I’m an unabashed bass booster. But if you haven’t been paying close attention recently, you might have missed out on a key development: Ghis has been fitting his tracks of late to such striking visual accompaniment as lightbulbs being smashed and, the latest, a face being smacked with cartoonish results (+ interactive version!) –
Speaking of stars, sidereal used to be one of my favorite words. So did eschatology. I think I learned them from the same Tom Robbins book. They somehow occupy a shared space in my head. So do Ghislain and another worldly beatwizard that you all already know, Filastine.
What you may not all already know about Filastine is that he has a (b)log! It’s vivid, full of sounds and images and thoughts about travel and music and relating to people and rocking renegade street parties — not to mention “charming” gigs like the one he played this Christmas in Borneo –
The gig was charming. Sorry I can’t find a better word. They somehow got free use of an outside community center and mounted a dangdut sound system that had the custom-made look similar to funk carioca or jamacian sound systems. Graffitti artists tagged the place up, some local hiphop acts played, then everyone gathered around to intently watch me from a distance of about 10 centimeters. Eventually dancing broke out, even a brief mosh pit. After my set was finished there was a request for Autology, i put on the instrumental and the remains of the crowd yelled along.
This was the first gig I’ve played that had a program intermission for the evening muslim prayer. Also the first audience with girls that somehow hybridized punk style with hijab. But it wasn’t my first gig with electricity hot-pirated from a utility pole, and certainly it won’t be the last.
Read more here (the title of the blog, btw, inspired the eschatology reference).
I’m pretty sure this will be the last January 1st that I get to do this, but I’m thrilled to announce yet again that the coming year will bring us a baby!
In lieu of any ultrasound mashups this time around, I offer instead a few ultrasound flicks –
Kid B, as we’re calling her in fetal form, is due right around March 21. A spring chicken indeed!
So, yes, it’s another girl, in case you’re wondering. Which is absolutely awesome, far as we’re concerned. Sure, a little gender balance might have been nice, but, let’s face it, girls rule. Moreover, as a friend of mine (and newly made dad of a daughter) recently put it: “as a piano teacher, I’ve come to the conclusion that girls are homo sapiens sapiens, and boys are super-villain-chimpanzees.” So, yeah, we win.
And despite wondering how exactly we’re going to find time and space (in our home & heart) for another one of these lovely little creatures — don’t worry, I’m sure we will — we’re really quite excited that, like Becca and I both, Nico will grow up with a sibling so close in age.
We’re preparing for the switch to “man-to-man” defense. Pick and roll, baby!
Should be fun. And get this: only about two weeks til Nico turns one!
Grooming one’s social ecologies is no small task — in the real or the virtual. At least the real is bounded by the unities — you can only see so many people at once — whereas the virtual, with its asynchronous multitudes and embarrassment of data, can easily swamp a surfer.
I became acutely attuned to the importance of different information/interactional ecologies recently while getting used to Twitter.* I don’t know what made me finally decide to enter another one of these little cyberworlds, but I succumbed back in October and I quickly — despite the somewhat odd mix of friends and acquaintances I found there — grew to appreciate the distinctive little conversational channel it was (a function, in part, of the exacting economy of a 140 character limit).
I started to get a sense of my ideal Twitter ecology when certain folks I was following would suddenly clog up my feed with a dozen or so “tweets” in a row. This was especially annoying when done via a third-party client, like blip.fm, which seem to encourage prolific posting. But individuals can easily violate social media etiquette on their own and succumb to what @emynd has aptly dubbed, “twit[ting] the bed.”
Bless his vlogging rapper heart, but @noreaga can occasionally get downright prolix. Even so, I’ve decided, as with @THE_REAL_SHAQ, that there are enough gems in the rough to keep following the guy. Take these two recent tweets by N.O.R.E., for e.g. –
As you can imagine, there are some tough decisions to make sometimes in order to make room for the hit-or-miss musings of N.O.R.E. and Shaquille. So please don’t take it personal if you start following me and I don’t follow you back. I’m minding my twitter ecology, you see. At the moment, I’m finding that following 60 or so people is producing a pretty good feed. You never know what’s gonna throw off the natural balance.
To be honest, I don’t really know why anyone who doesn’t know me, relatively “personally,” would be interested in the fairly banal if occasionally pithy things I might share on Twitter. But that’s the nature of the beast, I s’pose. I don’t mind making my twitterings public. I am, however, resisting integrating them into this blog.
Which brings me to the question of annual resolutions and some ecological changes here at w&w.
Self-explanatory mantras, I know, but to explain the implications for this here blog: I’ve decided to put an end to the “linkthink” posts that have been appearing regularly here for the last year or so. I’m not giving up on linkthink, per se, since I conceive of blogging as having linkthink quite often at its core. But what I mean is that I’m stopping my practice — adopted earlier this year to compensate for blog-time lost with the arrival of Nico — of posting semi-daily linkdumps from my delicious account.
In a recent riff (well worth a read for other reasons), Nick Sylvester notes that “bloggers have two basic options — write original content or become a central link warehouse,” and while that’s something of a false dichotomy — indeed, I think of blogging somewhere in the middle — I definitely want to err on the side of the former (”original content,” whatever that means).
But the truth is, farming out blog posts from my delicious bookmarks has simply become too constraining on my actual tagging practice. I find delicious eminently useful, but if I’m thinking just a little too much about how to frame/excerpt something I stumble upon, the service begins to lose/change its value. Blogging my delicious notes has started to put too much pressure on them, so I’m moving all that activity back to delicious, which you’re perfectly welcome to continue following if you like. You can even subscribe!
The corollary to that change is that I’m resolved to post more frequently here in the year to come. I know that pledging such a thing is a little like signing a blog’s death warrant. Earnest promises to update blogs are like a sad subgenre of blogpost. But I’m for real. You’ll see.
…
* I can’t quite tell you why I’m on something like Twitter but not Facebook. I get a sense that Facebook’s status messages are pretty similar to Twitter, and I do appreciate that — literally — nearly everybody and their mom is on Facebook. But Facebook has long weirded me out, both because of the number of my own students I’d encounter there, blurring social-school lines I don’t always like to blur, and — perhaps more important — because of its radical and sometimes shady reshaping of privacy norms. I know that not being on Facebook makes me, in a certain sense, invisible — and blind. On the other hand, given its ubiquity, at this point it almost feels cool NOT to be on Facebook. I mean, I don’t have any tattoos or piercings either, so there you go. Still, I eventually joined MySpace for the p2p music networking, so it’s probably a matter of time before I cave.
There is much that might be said about why urban Africans in the
Northern Rhodesia of the late 1930s should have been so interested in ball-
room dancing and formal evening wear. But the Rhodes-Livingstone anthro-
pologists were right about at least one thing: when urban Africans seized so
eagerly on European cultural forms, they were neither enacting ancient African
tradition nor engaging in a parody of the whites. Rather — as Wilson recog-
nized — they were asserting rights to the city (cf. Caldeira 2001; Holston 1999)
and pressing, by their conduct. claims to the political and social rights of full
membership in a wider society.
As Wilson noted, the acquisition and display of European clothes and
other goods was the only domain available in colonial society in which Afri-
cans could assert their claims to “a civilized status, comparable to that of the
Europeans.” Urban Africans did not want to be regarded as “decorative bar-
barians” but as “civilized men.” They wanted, that is, to be full and equal citi-
zens of a modern urban society. If they enthusiastically adopted elaborate
forms of European dress and manners, it was to press their claim “to be re-
spected by the Europeans and by one another as civilized, if humble, men, members of the new world society” (Wilson 1941:19-20, emphasis added).
This crucial claim to membership is denied by interpretations …
which suggest that such urban Africans were performing modernity
only to appropriate its magic for use within an indigenous cultural order. But
the most vital political question raised by practices of colonial emulation did
not concern the incorporation of Western symbolic materials into African local
cultural systems. Rather, it concerned the place Africans were to occupy in a
global sociocultural order — their status in a new “world society” — a point that
both Wilson and his informants seem to have understood very well.
do you see why it’s amazing
when someone comes out of such a dire situation
and learns the English language just to share his observation?
probly get a Grammy without a grammar education,
so fuck you school and fuck you immigration,
and all of you who thought i wouldn’t amount to constipation.
and now i’m here without the slightest fear and reservation.
they love me in the slums and the native reservations.
the world is a ghetto administ’ring deprivation.
…
a lot of mainstream niggaz is yappin about yappin
a lot of underground niggaz is rappin about rappin
i just want to tell you what’s really crackalackin
before the tears came down this is what happened…
You may have seen these here before, but I’m reposting b/c — oddly enough — they’re among my favorite YouTubes of the year (and in lieu of year-end lists, which I just don’t do, a little revisiting seems ok). The first one is even appropriately seasonal.
Whattayu think the greatest gift of the holidays izzzzzzz?
And, in case you missed it, this may be the best thing I saw on YouTube this year. Why it still only has around 20k views is beyond me. Here’s me doing my part to spread the virus –
It’s that time of year again, even if the incongruously balmy weather suggests otherwise. So, this past weekend Bec & I made another set of black cakes. This time, in anticipation, we started the fruits soaking in black-strap rum and Manischewitz a couple weeks in advance. And man, did they come out sweet.
To vibe with the Caribbean Christmas recipe, we listened to a whole heap of panang of course (h/t). How can you go wrong with songs about how great it is to eat a food and drink a rum and have a jolly time with friends & fam? Well, I s’pose you could introduce daggering to the whole(some) equation–
In a slightly more (?) traditional vein, some friends around the ol’ ‘osphere have been putting together some xmassy mixes. I highly recommend Gavin’s and Siebe’s seasonal selections. Plus, DJ BC put together another Santastic comp, which includes a bassliney / dubsteppy remix of the Chanukah song by my partner in Beat Research, DJ Flack.
For my own part, I’m sorry to report that for a third straight year I have failed to put together another Christmas mix of my own, but for those of you who haven’t yet heard it, or — as with things like It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Story — are happy to revisit such fare every December, allow me to point you once again to my “Remix-mas” (originally posted here):
My failure to produce is not exactly for want of trying. Over the last few years I’ve put together a couple flailing attempts at Christmashy things, some more successful than others. Most of them quite odd (nature of the beast?). If you’re in the mood, have a listen / read on –
Pace this post (see comments for continued convo), thx to Christina — who also wonders how hip-hop’s use of East Asian imagery fits into all of this (I think it leans more toward the I-talian than the A-rab) — for pointing me to three mashup “valorizations of the gangsta” via the dancehall/Mavado’s imagination (both of which take strong cues from hip-hop and Hollywood). These are easy fits given what Erin MacLeod calls the “melancholy, sweeping, and spooky strains of cinematic dancehall” –
So when is Jollywood (heh) gonna get into the global “film” game? No doubt Kingston could give Lagos and Mumbai a run for their money.
Since last week’s zungu-fest, I’ve had my eyes peeled for similar (semi-)Swahili utterances. And whattaya know, scanning the tracklist for Taliesin’s Apricity mix (which I recommend you listen to — it was a nice soundtrack this past Wednesday, when December actually felt like April), I noticed that the jumpoff track was by a group called NGUZUNGUZU, so of course, I got quite curious.
Given that the track was a remix by the homie, Kingdom, I wrote and asked him about NGUZUNGUZU, so he pointed me to their MySpace page and gave me an email address. Easy as that.
Here’s their reply; I’m afraid it may disappoint some of us Swahili-seeking conspiracy theorists, but it’s an interesting bit of suggestive sonic overlap –
We named ourselves NGUZUNGUZU after a type of wooden canoe prow carving from the Solomon Islands. We liked the name firstly for its phonetics,when repeated rapidly it sounds like a digeridoo. And the idea of this guiding figure on our craft of sonic explorations. Something like a beacon, a navigational tool, a compass that points us in various directions.
Their music sounds nothing like Yellowman or canoes, but I like it — all sorts of sounds and styles streaming into each other.
musicologist, internet annotator, and rapper-ternt-blogger.
