November 26th, 2008
A Farce To Be Reckoned With
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kevin records a message for souljaboy, in souljaboy style (ms.xu = the new ayrab!), after the ROFLCon version of "crank dat" (in which a roomful of MIT folk / internet geeks did the dance) got served with a take-down notice :: ah, the ironies :: will souljaboy step up and respond? :: now that the 18-year-olds have disappointed us, is there some 12-year-old web2.0 viral dance creator that we can look to instead? :: millennials, stand up!
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kid slizzard offers up a mixtape based on his cassette-digitizations of nola bounce and other low-end delights :: interestingly, he's been inspired to do in part from a recent take-down by blogger (there's been a rash of em) of a post that allegedly contained a link to copyrighted material :: in his own words, "When one post got pulled I realized this blog might have a shorter life than expected and to start over -unlikely, and to back it up – equally, so I thought I'd best shoot my load with a quickness. That way, in the absence of a virtual house of rap on the web-wide world I'd still have dope tapes to pedal in the real one."
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on race, film, and science fiction
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jace lends his ears w/r/t rai (and in partic a couple recent comps) :: i always find jace's prose & ideas interesting, but two terms herein hit some of my ethnomusicological pet peeves, "ethnic percussion" and "musicality" — the first because it is so un-specific (unless he means to note that the drums crucially signify "ethnic-ness" either for performers or listeners, which maybe they do), the second b/c it affirms the specious notion that some music is more musical than others
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nice lil review of /rupture's uproot in teh grey lady :: i like how pareles frames the DJ's role, resonant with the fraught discourse around nu-whirled mediations — "DJ/Rupture knowledgeably traverses a world of ominous meditations, complete with anxiety about his entitlement as a curator."
videyoga ::
musicologist, internet annotator, imagined community organizer.
2 Comments Add your own
1. pale rider | November 26th, 2008 at 11:41 pm
what struck about the dj/rupture review was how the curator’s anxiety interpretation seemed to be based at least in part on a lyric from a tune -
“Early in the album a reggae song by Clouds issues a warning: “You’re too young to play that sound.”
I just bought this song on 12″ and i think the lyric/vocal is from a Cocoa Tea acapella – a generic sound clash version of “Too Young” – the original tune is about a girl that is too young to date, Cocoa reworks the lyric to call the competing soundboy too young to clash. Clouds overdubbed someone whispering their name in the appropriate spots – among soundclash fans this would be called a “splice” – and not considered a true dubplate
I wonder if the reviewer is familiar with soundclashing that spawned that lyric – taken out of context i suppose any interpretation could be expected – sort of like how a dub version of a tune can alter the meaning of the lyrics by dropping them out (and choosing which ones stay in)
btw i love the clouds track and i’m planning to play it sat night, and i haven’t heard the mixtape
2. wayneandwax | November 27th, 2008 at 9:44 am
Interesting! I had no idea about the provenance of those vocals. And I hadn’t really “listened” to them, despite that I’ve listened to Uproot many times now. I have to say that I doubt Jon Pareles was thinking of soundclash when he wrote that. Seems more to me like he’s reading — rockist style — too much into the lexical register. But maybe that’s just me revealing my biases.
To go a little further, I didn’t mention that part of the review b/c I thought it was a little silly. There’s plenty more to be anxious about as an “entitled curator” than “respecting the architects” or some formulation thereof. Just seems a little too rootsy to me. This music is more focused on transformation to my ears, if a little haunted by the past.
If anything, your generous reading of Pareles’s interpretation suggests that it might be better to wonder about the Clouds’ anxieties around & motivations for splicing and dicing the way they do. The debates about neocolonial schizophonia that most recently (?) took place in neo-ragga-jungle — just a few years ago — might need not be retread, however.
But I like what I’ve heard from Clouds. I’ll listen closer now.
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