like the moon
I made a mix for modyfier! Go on get it, gig wit it, etc. If you’re not familiar with the modyfier series, here’s a primer, written back at the 50th episode milestone (mine’s #124). Rayna has commissioned tons of great mixes, with ruminations on process, from such lovelies & luminaries as Luomo, Philip Sherburne, Ripley, […]
Read More →As things ramp up for carnival, the strains of soca seem increasingly in the air (& my inbox). Believe it or not, there actually is a likkle soca in the air here in Boston. One key source projecting the strains of carnival into the city’s soundscape is BIG CITY FM, my fave “pirate” reggae/soca channel […]
Read More →ok, second post in a row jacking a video from those canny video jackers @ immanentdiscursivity — i love this. don’t you? not only is kid downright adorable, he’s using a youtube vid of a solo piano rendition of the akon song (now a duet!) to accompany himself. that’s some srsly born digital creativity right […]
Read More →Listening to the Federation‘s recent mixx of reggae hottage for Mad Decent, a few things struck me per recent conversations here: [audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/maddecent/mad_decent_radio_44_federation.mp3] 1) the use of the “hey” sample in the intro (0:30-0:40), like an airhorn or any other selector sound effect (speaking of which, check the first sound on that page — you can’t […]
Read More →Speaking of the difference between hip-hop and reggaeton, there’s been a heated discussion over at Raquel’s reggaetonica, redrawing yet again the lines in the sand between the two genres and rehashing lots of tropes about Puerto Rico, blackness, hip-hop, and so on. The debate was initiated by a polemic published last fall by a god […]
Read More →in under 14 seconds, by beatbox, c/o Vico C —
Read More →Rich Boy’s “Drop” — particularly the instrumental — struck me immediately, for a few reasons, as an obvious but original nod to Bangladesh’s juggernaut beat for “A Milli,” which is, as SFJ memorably describes it — both heavy and barely there, built from a sub-bass kick, a thin snare, and synthetic handclaps, none of which […]
Read More →First things first, here’s a biographical essay about Kool Herc* I wrote (almost 3 years ago!). I don’t have a good excuse for posting it so late, but I do have a good reason for being able to post it on my site at all: because I made sure I could. In other words, when […]
Read More →Former wunderkind hip-hop critic and now English prof at Vassar, Hua Hsu asks some great questions in his hot-off-the-press Atlantic cover story, itself a question, “The End of White America?” — What will it mean to be white after “whiteness” no longer defines the mainstream? Will anyone mourn the end of white America? I especially […]
Read More →I know that 2008 is, like, totally over — but that doesn’t mean we can’t already begin revisiting it in ironic/nostalgia mode. And what’s the best vehicle for that? The mashup, of course. DJ Earworm, who put together a similar roundup last year, has not only spliced together — super seamlessly — the Billboard top […]
Read More →There is much that might be said about why urban Africans in the Northern Rhodesia of the late 1930s should have been so interested in ball- room dancing and formal evening wear. But the Rhodes-Livingstone anthro- pologists were right about at least one thing: when urban Africans seized so eagerly on European cultural forms, they […]
Read More →Pace this post (see comments for continued convo), thx to Christina — who also wonders how hip-hop’s use of East Asian imagery fits into all of this (I think it leans more toward the I-talian than the A-rab) — for pointing me to three mashup “valorizations of the gangsta” via the dancehall/Mavado’s imagination (both of […]
Read More →The Best Recordings of 2008: Sasha Frere-Jones: Online Only: The New Yorker i <3 SFJ for sentences like this — "The song is rooted in the jiggling rhythms of James Brown, the motherlode for sampling producers from the eighties, and now entirely irrelevant to any rap being made in New York, Atlanta, Rio, or Miami." […]
Read More →“Arab Money” may not have musical legs to stand on (remains to be seen — I think it’s still climbing up urban radio playlists), but it sure is the talk of the virtual water cooler. Most of my posts and comments on the song & its fallout have been distillations of email conversations with awesome […]
Read More →Wooster Collective: Filippo Minelli's "Contradictions" "what i want to do by writing the names of anything connected with the 2.0 life we are living in the slums of the third world is to point out the gap between the reality we still live in and the ephemeral world of technologies." (tags: art web2.0 critique graffiti […]
Read More →Mediascape | A Curious Circumstance of the iPod Shuffle | by Bill Bahng Boyer cool click-thru piece by ethnoid bill boyer on the ipod & ipod shuffle & capitalism, subjectivity, etc. etc. :: "As a recovering liberal individualist who once unquestioningly subscribed to the epistemological framework posited by a Western, visually constructed notion of subjectivity, […]
Read More →Bidoun Magazine – Art & Culture from the Middle East | Twilight of the Iron Sheik | By Negar Azimi the story of the iron sheik :: 'An Iranian impersonating an Arab dressed as a Turk, he was part pirate, part djinn, all man. The WWF that Vaziri joined was in the midst of reinventing […]
Read More →would you prefer to listen while looking at an img of what may or may not be a swank Dubai livingroom? You may have heard — or at least heard about — the above, a remix of Busta’s infamous “Arab Money,” featuring Lil Wayne, Akon, Diddy, Swizz Beatz, T-Pain, & of course, Ron Browz. There […]
Read More →It was due to serendipity (and size) that my hip-hop books ended up on the bottom shelf. But, boy, was that a good move.
Read More →WireTap Magazine – Free Association: Sound of Silence larisa/ripley's article on the recent rash of dubious takedowns in the mp3blogspotosphere :: written for a youth/general readership, so pretty backgroundy, but a good explanation of the current lay of the land :: bye bye blogspots (tags: mp3blog blogging copyright copywrong digital culture p2p) Beat Diaspora: Beats, […]
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