like the moon
On the 243rd anniversary of the Boston Massacre (bigup Crispus Attucks!), I’m reposting the merely titular-pun-related mix of Boston-associated songs I cooked up for the Somerville Art Council back in 2005. This is also (barely) germane to the day given the currently flaring debate over Massachusetts’ official rock song. (As they say around here, I […]
Read More →Here’s another ten-years-gone re-post from the initial instantiation of my blog, back in 2003 when Rebecca and I moved to Jamaica for six months of doctoral research — and, as a side gig (if one deeply intertwined with my research), a series of digital music workshops in schools and prisons. What I’m going to do […]
Read More →yung wayne wonder on the mic Almost incredibly, it was ten years ago today that I put my first blogpost online, less than a week into a six month stay in Kingston for doctoral research, accompanied by my better half — my partner on Hope Road, as I ultimately dedicated the dissertation — who blogged […]
Read More →In honor of the late, great Aaron Swartz, pictured above, I’m making an overdue effort to get some of my own works out from behind walls of various sorts and into the open. (This is always my practice, but sometimes there’s more of a lag than I’d like.) I can’t say that I ever met […]
Read More →I’m headed back to Rotterdam a week from today — to continue the bubbling research, of course, but also, expressly, to take part in a hip-hop festival called Street Science. Among the various performances & screenings & discussions & battles, I’ll be speaking as part of a panel on Sunday the 15th concerned with “Diversity […]
Read More →Summer vibes really on lock all a sudden, eh? Boston tropical and ting! (In fact, the main reason I’m finally getting around to writing this post — best intentions notwithstanding — is on account of IT IS TOO HOT TO SLEEP.) The dog daze arrived just in time, tho, for I’m delighted to report that […]
Read More →Ok, rounding things out, here’s the 3rd review/polemic in the 3-part series I’ve been running here (see parts 1 and 2). This one’s the most recently published, hardly a year old! (That’s not bad for lag, as these things go.) On the surface, it’s a review of 2010’s Anthology of Rap (Yale); but again, while […]
Read More →This Thursday at MIT, Dave Tompkins will be giving a talk based around his book, How To Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder From World War II To Hip-Hop. I’ve not given the book a full treatment on the blog, but I’ve been recommending it to anyone I talk to about music or technology or […]
Read More →Funny as it may be, I’m pretty sure Run DMC’s “Roots, Rap, Reggae” (featuring Yellowman) is the first “reggae” song I ever knew. As an occasionally awkward and awfully chintzy attempt at reggae via New York, it’s an odd introduction in nuff ways. On the other hand, there are a couple moments in the song, […]
Read More →Bigups to my man Marvin Hall, aka @hallsoflearning, aka the guy we’ll be thanking someday for the Jamaican turn in robotics — or something equally astounding — for uploading an old reel from RETV (Reggae Television) dating back to 2003. That’s the year I was living in Kingston with my better-half, doing dissertation research alongside […]
Read More →Africa Is a Country, a wry but passionate blog devoted to “Africa” — the idea, not (simply) the song — in contemporary media (but “not about famine, Bono, or Barack Obama”) has been threatening to make a weekly series out of the genuinely remarkable resonance of Toto’s 1982 soft-rock anthem. It’s a begrudging tribute of […]
Read More →I’ve got a piece in this week’s Boston Phoenix discussing the spectacular shuttering of Megaupload and the collateral damage produced by an increasingly aggressive copyright regime in tandem with a remarkable nonchalance about preserving the digital libraries we build. Some will recognize this as but the latest instance of platform politricks, just another rug yanked […]
Read More →As if there weren’t already enough to tease out about Konono N°1 and Congotronics, a recent article in the Guardian points to a song and video called “Karibu Ya Bintou” by Baloji, a Congo-born rapper who cut his teeth on the Belgian hip-hop scene but who has worked over the last few years to return […]
Read More →I’ve got a brief contribution to LargeUp’s Throwback Thursdays series today. Returning to one of my favorite videos from the underground-era, The Noise 6 — a video you’ve likely seen if you’ve ever caught one of my reggaeton lectures — I provide a quick bit of exegesis and some points of entry. Head over there […]
Read More →Mungo’s Sound (which will not, alas, be in attendance this Monday) Permit me to dub the description of my partner Beat Research, the estimable Mr.Flackett — Yes the heavy heavy sounds of Mungo’s Hi Fi will be coming through BR for a special last minute stop while on tour from Scotland. The world-renowned producer is […]
Read More →So stoked to be hosting such a boombumpity bash at Beat Research 2nite — Celebrating 7 years of outernational hiphop & global bass, DJ Canyon Cody will be joined by Gnotes, Afro DZ ak, Mandeep Sethi and Brooklyn Shanti for a tropical g-funk bday celebration. Founded in the Boston summer of 2004, the Gnawledge crew […]
Read More →Joining the illustrious ranks of “Pan con Queso,” here’s another hilario cross-lingual take on a contemporary club banger (apropos of this, via @carolyneweldon) —
Read More →And these videos give me hope that the future will be groovy, at the least — (h/t @Chrysaora on both of these, I think)
Read More →Tonight at Enormous Room, Beat Research is delighted to welcome Zuzana Husárová, a Slovakian scholar currently in residence at MIT. In her own words, Zuzana is into: electronic literature, inter/transmedial narrative, digital art, interdisciplinary literary theory, theory of fictional worlds, multilinear writing, techno-aesthetics, performativity of digital sign, playful aspects of culture, etc. She also takes […]
Read More →Thanks to DJ Effresh for putting me on to yet another interesting instantiation of the “Lambada.” Here’s Vakero, one of the DR’s fiercest MCs, jumping on a dembow-influenced reworking of a truly perennial tune, as hashed out here, way back when — Discussing this over at my/our Buzz, Birdseed pointed out that there’s a recent […]
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