like the moon
Next week’s Postopolis! DF happening is shaping up to be super stimulating and utterly exhausting. The schedule has been posted, and it boasts an array of guests that range from art/design-world titans to a dude who’s been diving DF sewers for three decades, and pretty much everything between and beyond. The diversity of participants is […]
Read More →Munchi follows up his moombahton splurge with some flashbacks — i totally forgot to send you some tracks i worked on in late 2009 that were bubbling but influenced by dominican music. like perico ripiao, bachata or dominican dembow. i had these finished but i was working on a whole concept thing there. Munchi – […]
Read More →Tonight’s Beat Research appearance by Canyon Cody and his Gnawledgable cohorts gives me a nice opportunity to lavish some overdue praise. I first met Canyon not via internets but thru my brother, a classmate and friend of Canyon’s at Boston College. My bro suspected we’d have a lot to talk about, and he was right. […]
Read More →Readers of this blog should know my love for Mexico City by now, so it’s with great pleasure that I announce my participation in Postopolis DF! A 5-day conference-conversation on urbanism in one of the world’s most amazing cities… In other words, if you were thinking of coming to DF this summer, now’s a great […]
Read More →I’ve been trying to get Dave Tompkins to come do a reading in town this spring from his much anticipated and well-worth-waiting-for book, How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop (Stop Smiling 2010). An afternoon at MIT followed by a night of vocoder-animated Beat Research seemed pretty apropos, […]
Read More →a moomba, apparently — no relation to afrojack, i don’t think Reggaeton doesn’t die, it just continues to fragment and reconstitute in a thousand different ways. (Sorry about the passive language there — I don’t think reggaeton has viral/memetic agency, but I still find myself using that sort of shorthand/emphasis even when what I want […]
Read More →[Ok, here’s another oldie-but-goodie from the Riddim Meth0d vaults. Plenty of readers are no doubt familiar with this post/mashup, especially since I’ve revisited the issue. In the time since I wrote it (almost 5 years ago!), I’ve also had the strange fortune of submitting a brief report — about the significance of “Big Pimpin” to […]
Read More →Sometimes it really does feel like I’m in Oz, some Wizard behind a curtain producing lifelike YouTubes of my swirling musical obsessions — or like that cartoon kid Simon for whom the things he drew came true ¡ via via via con dios !
Read More →This Monday, the French section of Foreign Languages & Literatures (my home at MIT) is presenting Hamé, a rapper and filmmaker from France. Some of you might know him from his work with La Rumeur. Here’s what is in store for Monday evening — In addition to a sample performance of his rap artistry and […]
Read More →In my recent post on “Watagatapitusberry” I wondered aloud, in so many words, where “the text” in question might reside, given that most people have been exposed to an intermediary “fan”/peer-produced text (a video) more popular than the original “text” (a recording), tho perhaps soon eclipsed by a new “official” video with potentially greater reach […]
Read More →Mil gracias a Marisol LeBron, who not only first brought to my attn the wonderful nueva-media phenom of “Watagatapitusberry,” but who has offered some interesting thoughts on its homosocial joi de vivre (check her initial round-up of home videos) and has kept up on the latest developments around the song. Most recently, the launch of […]
Read More →I was excited to find in my inbox today a link to a brand new LP by one of my favorite artists from whom I hadn’t heard much in a while: the mighty Mutamassik! It’s called That Which Death Cannot Destroy and the liner notes very plainly state that it “cannot be bought or sold.” […]
Read More →Since I’m in a syllabus sharing mood, I figured I should finally get around to posting the one I put together in Spring 2008 for a course on “Global Hip-hop.” A series of case studies examining how hip-hop travels outside the US, what it carries with it, and how people adapt its forms to their […]
Read More →What Happens in Riddim Method Stays in Riddim Method
I’ve written a lot here about the “riddim method,” a cheeky term suggested by my co-author Peter Manuel to describe a well-worn practice (and in the case of our article, a distinctly Jamaican version of it). We jest, but we’re serious. In short, what we try to explain is an approach to musical materials as […]
Read More →Boima’s post about a Panamanian/Nigerian jerk-off made me wonder about this Suku Castro character calling out “TODO MUNDO JERKEANDO!” So I did a quick googlywuzzit on his name and landed on this page, which not only hosts yet another interesting example of jerk practice in Panama (a mix containing no Spanish verses but cut’n’pasting several […]
Read More →When Boima was in Boston recently, back from a trip that brought him to Dubai and Dar es Salaam (aka Bongo) Nairobi, he mentioned that he noticed CDs on sale on the street, like the one pictured below, which compiled current hip-hop (and r&b) instrumentals, presumably for local rappers and singers to use for their […]
Read More →tis the season for donning hats & maybe getting clobbered by a classmate Last Wednesday night I was the guest of Emily Corwin, host of The Neighborhood, a weekly radio show broadcast from Cambridge/MIT on WMBR. As she billed it — With trusty laptop in tow, Wayne wears all his hats at once –– musician, […]
Read More →Tonight at Beat Research we’ve got a special session in store: our main man, Pacey Foster, will be teaming up with heavyweight hip-hop scribe Brian Coleman to celebrate Boston hip-hop. Yeah, you read that right. And what? We rep da bean, knamean ;) The occasion is the publication of an essay by Pace on the […]
Read More →Afropop Worldwide has a new program, airing currently on terrestrial radio in the US (and soon to appear online as streamable audio), which focuses on a subject near&dear to the heart of this blog: world music 2.0, aka nu-whirled music, aka global ghettotech. Or as they put it — Afropop Worldwide takes us into the […]
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