Wayne & Wax
type: channel
description: like the moon
date: 2020-09-15T14:55:49Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
generator agent: https://wordpress.org/
items: Everybody’s Doin’ What?
items: Ragtime Country / American Clave, A Mini-Essay and Mega-Mix
items: Sound System Outernational #6: Virtual Edition
items: Interview in Music Journalism Insider
items: Sunday Review: Funky Kingston
items: Dissolve Music, Again
items: Social Dance in the Age of (Anti-)Social Media
items: Writing for Pitchfork
items: Wave Count
items: Why 7 Rings Rings So Many Bells

Everybody’s Doin’ What?
type: item
creator: wayneandwax
date: 2020-09-15T14:55:49Z
subject: everything
subject: af-am
subject: book
subject: dance
subject: ethno
subject: gender
subject: NYC
subject: race
subject: ragtime
subject: sexuality
subject: US
description: As I prepare to teach various classes about ragtime (and its roots), I’ve returned to Dale Cockrell’s recent book, Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music, and Dance in New York, 1840-1917 (Norton, 2019). It’s a revelatory peek at the roots of popular music and dance in the public houses, dives, brothels, and concert saloons of New […]
encoded: As I prepare to teach various classes about ragtime (and its roots), I’ve returned to Dale Cockrell’s recent book, Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music, and Dance in New York, 1840-1917 (Norton, 2019). It’s a revelatory peek at the roots of popular music and dance in the public houses, dives, brothels, and concert saloons of New York city — a demimonde that, demi or not, created a whole world of music, one which we still arguably inhabit. A world, it is important to acknowledge, forged on the backs of sex workers, as Cockrell begins with a sober acknowledgement: Dedicated to the untold thousands of women upon whose anonymous bodies an American music was built. We must never forget. That discomfiting fact is, of course, key to gaining perspective on the contexts for the kind of music making that would pave the way for the ragtime revolution. But as Cockrell notes, the music itself is frustratingly elusive. It’s a steady, implicit, sometimes even remarkable presence in the historical record, on the one hand, and a murky collection of distortions on the other. As Cockrell notes in the preface, the working-class people whose lives he is working to reconstruct “tended to live below … the horizon of record” — To many of these people, the spoken word weighed more than the written, for they were an oral lot. Narratives were vaporous, and of the moment. Then, too, it is in the very nature of documents and artifacts that they tend to be preserved in a ratio commensurate with the social standing of the subject; archives are seldom maintained for those of a low social class. In order to reconstruct the lives of the working-class actors in this book, I have often had to rely on the words of literate middle-class witnesses who, as a group, condescended to those beneath their place. It is likely that their biases are embedded in their accounts. Given that, one should be suspicious, as I have tried to be, of many of my sources’ historical accuracy. As a rule of thumb, disparaging views…

Ragtime Country / American Clave, A Mini-Essay and Mega-Mix
type: item
creator: wayneandwax
date: 2020-09-03T20:47:56Z
subject: everything
subject: academic
subject: af-am
subject: country
subject: race
subject: ragtime
subject: technomusicology
description: It all started when I tried to learn to play Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag on the piano. I never really got past the first couple of bars. Instead, I just found myself banging out this particular rhythm with my right hand. Loving such collections of 3s and 2s, I started counting along: 1-2, 1-2-3, […]
encoded: It all started when I tried to learn to play Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag on the piano. I never really got past the first couple of bars. Instead, I just found myself banging out this particular rhythm with my right hand. Loving such collections of 3s and 2s, I started counting along: 1-2, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2. This particular configuration (2+3+3+3+3+2) had never really leapt out at me, but once it did, I couldn’t stop hearing it. There it was in the horn line of Ray Charles’s “I Got a Woman” and in Scotty Moore’s guitar licks on Elvis Presley’s version of “Mystery Train”; and there again, rearing its head in countless disco songs, in bluegrass jams and “American primitive” guitar riffs, in Louis Armstrong solos, in house and techno, and even in rap cadences by 50 Cent, Kendrick, and Eminem. It seemed like there was a story here. But I wasn’t quite sure what sort of claims I could make. Over the last 5 years, I collected dozens and then hundreds of examples, and I consulted all the musical experts I could: finger-picking guitarists and erudite scholars of American pop, Brazilianists and Cubanists, old time fiddlers and Ghanaian master drummers. In the end, the story seemed to get more legitimately remarkable. I couldn’t find many examples outside of the United States — a rare thing for a rhythm so clearly Afrodiasporic in character — and I couldn’t find any examples that pre-date the ragtime era. Indeed, the earliest example I could find was, for better and for worse, Ernest Hogan’s 1896 bestseller, “All Coons Look Alike to Me” — one of the first ragtime numbers to appear on sheet music and the inaugural “coon song,” an up-to-date extension of blackface minstrelsy that would dominate Tin Pan Alley for the next 15 years. Indeed, it turns out that for some, such as black vaudevillian Tom Fletcher, author of 100 Years of the Negro in Show Business (1954), ragtime itself — and all that flowed from it — was inextricable from this particular rhythm (sometimes…

Sound System Outernational #6: Virtual Edition
type: item
creator: wayneandwax
date: 2020-06-02T11:27:14Z
subject: everything
subject: academic
subject: brazil
subject: reggae
subject: soundsystem
description: It’s a strange time to do anything other than shelter in place or get out in the streets, but I’m looking forward to next week’s virtual gathering for Sound System Outernational #6, a conference and set of performances which I will help to kick off with an opening plenary next Tuesday, June 9. I’m grateful […]
encoded: It’s a strange time to do anything other than shelter in place or get out in the streets, but I’m looking forward to next week’s virtual gathering for Sound System Outernational #6, a conference and set of performances which I will help to kick off with an opening plenary next Tuesday, June 9. I’m grateful to Julian Henriques, David Katz, Leonardo Vidigal, and other organizers for inviting me and pushing ahead with the event despite the disruptions of COVID-19. Originally, we were supposed to gather together this April in São Luís do Maranhão, and I’m very sorry that we couldn’t do so after all. As recounted by David Katz in a piece for Afropop Worldwide, São Luís is renowned for its vibrant and distinctive reggae / soundsystem culture, and I was excited to experience it for my own ears. That will have to wait for another moment, but the organizers have put together an interesting program, and I hope that the virtuality of the event means that even more people around the world might be able to join us. My plenary is titled “Sounds of Affiliation: Records from Foreign and Diasporic Belonging,” and I will use the opportunity to discuss the remarkable ways that Jamaica’s soundsystem culture — originally devoted to playing imported sounds from the US — has been replicated elsewhere across the diaspora and localized in wonderful ways. Other presentations in the program will help to flesh out some of these pictures, whether in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Baranquilla, NYC, London, or elsewhere. You can find the full program here, which is also where you can sign up to be a part of the event. Be sure to send your email to soundsystemouternational@gmail.com by June 8 in order to be included in the Zoom invite. Hope to “see” you there — and to gather together in São Luís in person someday.

Interview in Music Journalism Insider
type: item
creator: wayneandwax
date: 2020-05-23T13:18:33Z
subject: everything
subject: academic
subject: dance
subject: ethno
subject: gender
subject: interview
subject: race
subject: sexuality
subject: tech
subject: video
subject: videogames
description: I first worked with Todd Burns back in 2013 when he commissioned me to write a “loop history” of one of my fave loops of all time: dembow. Of course, RBMA is no more, nor are various other outlets for music writers. In the light of this changing and precarious landscape, Todd has been devoting […]
encoded: I first worked with Todd Burns back in 2013 when he commissioned me to write a “loop history” of one of my fave loops of all time: dembow. Of course, RBMA is no more, nor are various other outlets for music writers. In the light of this changing and precarious landscape, Todd has been devoting a lot of attention and space to the craft — and the plight — of music writing today via his newsletter, Music Journalism Insider. He has also been trying to incorporate more academic voices, including those of us who walk the line between music studies and music journalism. In that context, Todd reached out to interview me about my recent article on Fortnite dances, race and gender, and appropriation. The interview is now only available to subscribers, but Todd gave me permission to post it here after its initial public run. Here it is– Wayne Marshall Interview Todd L. Burns I’m Todd L. Burns, and welcome to Music Journalism Insider, a newsletter about music journalism. If you’re not familiar with the newsletter already, click here to find out more. On Wayne Marshall’s website, it says “Wayne Marshall is an ethnomusicologist by training, a technomusicologist by calling, and an erstwhile blogger/DJ.” That seems to do as quick a job as any in describing the many hats that Wayne has worn over the years. For this interview, I wanted to talk to the academic Wayne, specifically the one that penned an article last year entitled “Social Dance in the Age of (Anti-)Social Media: Fortnite, Online Video, and the Jook at a Virtual Crossroads.” Can you please briefly describe yourself and what you do? These days I often just say I teach music history. At times, I might reach for musicologist, but I’m also proud of my training as an ethnomusicologist and my work as a self-proclaimed “technomusicologist” who shares research in the form of musical media like mashups or mixes. For the last five years, I’ve hung my hat at Berklee College of Music, where I teach courses on the histories of Americ…

Sunday Review: Funky Kingston
type: item
creator: wayneandwax
date: 2020-05-23T12:55:17Z
subject: everything
subject: jamaica
subject: race
subject: reggae
subject: review
description: Pitchfork’s Sunday Review is a weekly forum where writers revisit a “significant album from the past” that has not been reviewed at Pitchfork before. As someone who really enjoys reading these deep dives, it was a thrill to be invited to contribute one of my own — and one that focused on a classic reggae […]
encoded: Pitchfork’s Sunday Review is a weekly forum where writers revisit a “significant album from the past” that has not been reviewed at Pitchfork before. As someone who really enjoys reading these deep dives, it was a thrill to be invited to contribute one of my own — and one that focused on a classic reggae album. While reggae has generally been — and remains — a singles-driven genre, there are plenty of great albums to consider, whether from roots reggae’s heyday, decades of mesmerizing dub sets, or (soundboy) killer efforts from throughout the dancehall era. My editor suggested Toots and the Maytals’ Funky Kingston, one of reggae’s first albums to hit as a worldwide sensation, and a wonderful vehicle for exploring what it meant to make reggae — and to make reggae for an international audience — at the moment the genre was beginning to crest in popularity. I’ll leave you with the opening below, but go ahead and read the whole thing over here. /// After a shuffling drum intro, a steady groove invites us to let down our guards and open our ears. With another drum roll, the band pivots to the “one-drop,” Jamaica’s reigning rhythm since the ska days. The kick drum and rimshot anchor the backbeat, often emphasized by an organ stab, while the bass moves a simple, sinuous pattern and the rhythm guitar chops chords between each beat. To heighten our appreciation of this interlocking ensemble texture, the instruments are panned across the stereo field, the lead guitar plucking a lightly bluesy, bubbling counterpoint across the room from the steady offbeat skank. Centered in the mix, Frederick “Toots” Hibbert begins to preach in terms downhome and direct, in a Jamaican country brogue plain enough for all to understand. Sleep won’t come. The rent is too high. Your brother can’t find a dollar, and neither can I. Time tough. In a sly inversion of hip slang, everything is out of sight, but not in a good way—life is so hard even the basics seem out of reach. Today is judgment day, s…

Dissolve Music, Again
type: item
creator: wayneandwax
date: 2020-02-15T20:39:50Z
subject: everything
subject: gigs
subject: jazz
subject: mashup
subject: tech
description: Next week I’ll help kick off a 3-day “spatial sound” festival at MIT’s Black Box theater as one of about 20 acts diffusing sound/music through a 360-degree soundsystem powered by d&b audio. (My own set will probably be from ~9-9:30pm on Wednesday, Feb 19.) No doubt the performances will run the gamut as far as […]
encoded: Next week I’ll help kick off a 3-day “spatial sound” festival at MIT’s Black Box theater as one of about 20 acts diffusing sound/music through a 360-degree soundsystem powered by d&b audio. (My own set will probably be from ~9-9:30pm on Wednesday, Feb 19.) No doubt the performances will run the gamut as far as shapes and styles, and part of the aim is to explore as many ways of using spatial sound as we can. For my part, I’m eager to investigate the affordances for listening to simultaneous versions and renditions. In other words, I’ll be playing some spatialized (s)mashups of alternate takes, cover songs, and riddim jugglings, hoping that by spreading them out we can better attend to their similarities and differences. Imagine listening to Ella in one corner, Billie in another, and Satchmo in a third as they all sing their way through the same song. Or hearing Charlie Parker duet with himself over the same changes, three years apart and across the room. What about 6 different voicings on the same dancehall riddim at the same time? If I play my Louis Dembow Gottschalk mix with the piano on one side of the room and the dembow on the other, will different listeners find their sweet spot? Can I expand a Venn diagram of taste … with space? We shall see! (& hear!)

Social Dance in the Age of (Anti-)Social Media
type: item
creator: wayneandwax
date: 2020-02-15T20:09:11Z
subject: everything
subject: dance
subject: ethno
subject: gender
subject: race
subject: tech
subject: video
description: A few years ago I started teaching a class at Berklee called “DJ Cultures and American Social Dance.” We survey the history of social dance across the Americas, with particular attention to the era of DJing, but we try to place that cultural turn within the long-view of how dance has functioned in different societies, […]
encoded: A few years ago I started teaching a class at Berklee called “DJ Cultures and American Social Dance.” We survey the history of social dance across the Americas, with particular attention to the era of DJing, but we try to place that cultural turn within the long-view of how dance has functioned in different societies, from the US to Cuba, Jamaica, Mexico, and Brazil. Teaching the course has helped me to cultivate a perspective on social dance history (and race and gender and class), which has spilled into my other classes and lectures, and I’m especially excited that it has also begun to inform my research. Last spring when the Journal of Popular Music Studies put out a call for someone to write about dance in the age of Fortnite, I jumped at the chance. It’s a topic we had been discussing in class and presented set of questions I found myself increasingly drawn into, especially vis-a-vis the longer history of dance, race and gender, transgression and appropriation. It seemed to me that the Fortnite dance phenomenon was, in some ways, a lot like previous dance crazes abetted by emergent media (whether instructional pamphlets, short film reels, network television, MTV, YouTube, Vine, etc.). As I discovered writing the article, however, there are other ways in which it seems fairly different in character. In December, I published the essay in the JPMS, which you can find here (as well as here): Wayne Marshall, “Social Dance in the Age of (Anti-)Social Media: Fortnite, Online Video, and the Jook at a Virtual Crossroads.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 31, no. 4 (2019): 3-15. [PDF] While Fortnite seems less a part of the conversation these days, in just the short time since it was published, the predicament of (black) social dance on (anti-)social media has become a hot button topic — on social media (see e.g. or e.g.) and more traditional media. I spoke with journalist Tatiana Walk-Morris, who found me via the JPMS article (!), for an article on the subject published…

Writing for Pitchfork
type: item
creator: wayneandwax
date: 2020-02-15T16:26:23Z
subject: everything
subject: reggae
subject: review
description: I started contributing to Pitchfork last year, and I just want to flag the reviews here. (You’ll also find them collected at the Journalism & Criticism page.) I meant to do so sooner, but my WordPress had gotten pretty gnarly over the last couple years. Anyway, back in business! So far, I’ve only reviewed reggae […]
encoded: I started contributing to Pitchfork last year, and I just want to flag the reviews here. (You’ll also find them collected at the Journalism & Criticism page.) I meant to do so sooner, but my WordPress had gotten pretty gnarly over the last couple years. Anyway, back in business! So far, I’ve only reviewed reggae releases. I guess that’s my lane, though I hope to expand my remit this year. All three of these are definitely worth your time (the releases, if not the reviews); the VP set is a treasury — https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/equiknoxx-eternal-children/ https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/i-jahbar-and-friends-inna-duppy-skrs-soundclash/ https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-down-in-jamaica-40-years-of-vp-records/ This was a fave tune of 2019 for sure, great vid too–

Wave Count
type: item
creator: wayneandwax
date: 2019-06-13T17:44:13Z
subject: everything
subject: audio
subject: classical
subject: mixx
subject: techno
subject: technomusicology
description: MIT’s Stefan Helmreich and I have collaborated on a mega-mix of music that evokes or otherwise represents ocean waves. Building on Stefan’s anthropological work with ocean scientists and my ideas about telling musical stories musically, this mix carefully stitches together 70 pieces in a 3 movement, 44 minute montage. The pieces were composed between 1830-2018 […]
encoded: MIT’s Stefan Helmreich and I have collaborated on a mega-mix of music that evokes or otherwise represents ocean waves. Building on Stefan’s anthropological work with ocean scientists and my ideas about telling musical stories musically, this mix carefully stitches together 70 pieces in a 3 movement, 44 minute montage. The pieces were composed between 1830-2018 and range across a wide number of genres and approaches — classical, romantic, modernist, minimalist, electronic and experimental, not to mention surf rock, reggae, bossa nova, jazz, and techno. We’re pleased to have the mix published via The Wire as a Wire Mix, and I’m grateful to Stefan for putting together a video — see below — which tracks and traces the appearances and layering of each piece in the mix (including full credits) as well as for taking the lead on the brief, evocative essay that accompanies the video (reprinted below, with tracklist). It’s been a wonderful collaboration, over a year in the making — and, no doubt, the most intricate mega-mix I’ve ever worked on — and we’re thrilled to share it with the world and to see what sort of waves the mix itself makes. Thanks, always, for listening along. Here’s an MP3 (100mb, 44min) if you’d prefer to listen “offline,” whatever that means these days. WAVE COUNT is a montage, in serial and parallel, of mostly instrumental musical pieces meant by their composers to evoke or represent the sense and sound of ocean waves. Selections range from the years 1830 to 2018 and include classical, modernist, electronic, and experimental compositions, with pieces drawn primarily, though not exclusively, from traditions in European art music, American avant-garde composition, Afrodiasporic musics, and Japanese experimental work. The sequence rolls out common and uncommon wave-inspired phrases, turns, and arrangements — cataloging and connecting recurring formal musical motifs (or “topics”) as well as the more acoustic, sonic, timbral, and onomatopoetic qualities that …

Why 7 Rings Rings So Many Bells
type: item
creator: wayneandwax
date: 2019-04-08T20:44:45Z
subject: everything
subject: copywrong
subject: ethno
subject: hip-hop
subject: pop
subject: race
subject: video
description: This month’s New York magazine features a set of articles about popular music today and why questions of plagiarism seem to dog so many hit songs. I was happy to contribute an article teasing out the controversies around Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings” by taking a musicological deep-dive into the disputed musical figure in question, a […]
encoded: This month’s New York magazine features a set of articles about popular music today and why questions of plagiarism seem to dog so many hit songs. I was happy to contribute an article teasing out the controversies around Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings” by taking a musicological deep-dive into the disputed musical figure in question, a resurgently popular rhythm that some would call a Scotch Snap. You can find an online version, complete with technomusicological examples — a few mashups and a mini-mega-mix! — over at Vulture. They’ve gone and slicked up the Ableton screengrabs I made, which is nice, but I also like the charm and simplicity (especially the ability to track audio, notation, and video) of the originals. Here, for instance, is the Scotch Snap megamix I worked up — just follow the bouncing cowbell! I first started noticing the Scotch Snap a while back, and I flagged it on the blog here in March 2014, proposing that the “remarkable spread” of the “stuttered, splattered, staccato syllables” popularized by Chicago rappers Lil Reese and Chief Keef made it second only to the Migos flow. I noted that it was already a trope among such pop singers as Rihanna and Beyonce, and I suggested that “perhaps I need to make a supercut to make my point.” Well, it only took me 5 years, but here we are. How funny to look back, especially in the wake of this Ariana Grande piece, and see myself writing that “far as I can tell, that Chicago drill flow has less of a history than 8th note triplets.” Now I can tell farther. Far farther. As I explore in the article, while it’s important to recognize how rappers have crucially contributed to the vogue for this rhythm, the Scotch Snap has a long history, spanning all manner of music in the United States and pointing back to Scotland (as well as West Africa). In the words of musicologist Philip Tagg, The Scotch snap is used by Henry Purcell, Béla Bartók, Mahalia Jackson, Woody Guthrie, Stevie Wonder, Ry Cooder, James Brown, Buck Owens etc.,…