Linkthink #4083: AfroCaribEdition

January 25, 2007
3 Comments
  • Solo Plena: a frequently updated Panamanian “plena” blog (that means reggae there, y’know), showing that Panama’s reggae scene, as reinvigorated and reshaped as it may have been by the reggaeton explosion, continues apace.

    &nuff Pma plena pon YouTube too, classic a nuevo

    here’s El General doing his best Don Dada —

    and Aldo Ranks puttin it down undergrown style —

  • !Mas Reggaeton! — Raquel esta blogeando una tormenta recientemente. She’s still cross-posting @ reggaetonica.blogspot, but it seems to me that all the action is over on herspace. (Teaser: I make an appearance in the most recent post, but do check her repost of Bernardo Brigante’s email polemic.)

  • Representar: Humboldt Park’s own Oneeleven, aka the PolacoBombero, aka Anton Kociolek — a deeply knowledgable locolocal who blew my mind last night on some historico-musico-socio-cultural storytelling / ‘pod wheeling / table tapping — also has a blog at thatspace, which he has so far devoted to two extensive pieces on bomba.

  • Back to Jamaica: Delighted to discover this past week “linguist with wanderlust” Ria Bacon’s astute, reflective, and beautiful Jamaica blog (which makes me wish i&i had wordpress way back when) ..

  • Pete Murder Tone with a nice piece on “the other riddim twins”

    (published, you’ll note, in Jahtari Magazine, which — now a regular and tasty blog — adds a nice dimension to what was already a nice lil netlabel, consistently offering up crnchy computachip dubs as well as a series of well-researched but not over-rehearsed mixtapes [fi stream mostly] — check Murder Tone’s steppers genealogy, “Warrior’s Dance”)

  • & speaking of others, or even other others, or even…
    [audio:http://www.wayneandwax.com/music/the-message.mp3]
    You know my name is Wayne Marshall, not to be confused with the other Wayne Marshall, or the other other Wayne Marshall — both of whom, incidentally, have over the years passed and fallen behind and passed me again in the Great Google Race. But you probably don’t know the other other other Wayne Marshall, who is the first other Wayne Marshall I ever encountered — save for my father, of course, also named Wayne Marshall. Which is no little thing; indeed, I was the little thing, referred to fairly frequently growing up as “Little Wayne” (tho never “Lil Wayne,” for the record — even so, he’s still a biter, and a shill for the status quo, so there). Hence, I’ve always sorta been the other Wayne Marshall.

    At any rate, when I first searched my name on the Internet, back in early college (as an assignment, mind you; in CS-50, mind you, which I took as an elective — with Brian “I wrote the book on c” Kernighan, no less), the first return I found was this Luther-Campbell-cum-R.Kelly (f’real, check the track titles) hairychested newjackjiggy pr0nopop soulsinger from the UK. Now that was a trip.

    The other day I (re)found his picture on Google Images (where I’m getting killed, btw, duh) —


    Perhaps the bigger trip, though, is that waynemarshall.com “may be for sale” (not that i want it).

    Perhaps the biggest trip, though, is that I have an English name — or even a “Jamaican name,” as an elderly woman in Kingston once told me — despite that I’m directly named after a guy of Sicilian and Portuguese parentage. (I explained the Machado–>Marshall change last month, you’ll recall.) The funny thing about the first name is that it’s supposedly derived from, you guessed it, John Wayne. (How’s that for post-war 2nd-gen kitsch/assimilation inspiration, pardner?) So I end up with this odd super-Anglo-Am name, though I could have just as easily been Manuel Machado. Sometimes I wonder how that simple change might have changed my life.

    But back to my pr0npop namesake, I’m curious: do any of you UK music folk out there happen remember this chap? (He would seem difficult to forget. I think he even charted.) Does anyone have any of these tracks? Gotta be a bargain bin item at this point, no? Think I can do better than a tenpound pricetag?
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