& Found! (But Still a Little Lost)

Not long after my last post went public, a savvy searcher quickly proved that what I thought was fairly ungooglable (at least without knowing Arabic) was, in fact, waiting for me on eBay. And beyond simply locating & IDing the music/CD in question, this kind commenter hit Arabkidsmusic paydirt. First, I want to take back […]

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Gam and Sam

One of our guests tonight at Beat Research is Baltimore’s Sam Hopkins, aka Balagan, who promises to bring quite a (digital/digitized) crate with him. He might mix things up like — The great pic above comes from a piece Sam just published in Wax Poetics about searching for vinyl in Casablanca. Allow me to snip […]

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big gyptian (riddim meth0d repost)

[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 […]

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Arab Face, Second As Farce

Thx to the ever-vigilant Ted Swedenburg for bringing to my attn the latest episode in the surreal and surprisingly sustained saga of “Arab Money” (click the non-HD version to stay here) — Video Games | GTA IV: Ballad of Gay Tony | Yusuf Amir Trailer XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii So there […]

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Music Unites Us, Gets Under Our Skins

I couldn’t be more thrilled to announce this — At a time when the arts community at Brandeis is feeling rightly beleaguered, it brings me no little satisfaction to know that we will be putting on a rather art-ful residency later this month, sponsoring the US premiere of such an exciting, provocative, and relevant group […]

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I-talian Money?

“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 […]

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Odes on a Popular Plugin

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, […]

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Iron Chic

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 […]

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A3rab Money Refix?

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 […]

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Delayed Linkdump #2429

Changed my wordpress password over the weekend, which threw off my semi-automatic delicious blogging (aka, linkthink). So here’s a semi-manual collection of yesterday’s links — LRB · Slavoj Žižek: Use Your Illusions looks like zizek caught the hope (kinda); here is a sneeze: “Nothing was decided with Obama’s victory, but it widens our freedom and […]

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Halal Beats

illuminarcy blog devoted to arab hip-hop / challenging stereotypes of arabs&muslims (tags: blog hip-hop arab islam representation babylonia) illuminarcy: "Arab Money" Download & Lyrics a fierce, at times funny, response to busta's ignant "ay-rab money" (h/t rachel) :: lyrics & zshare link here :: someone pllllzzzz make sure that busta hears this (tags: arab representation […]

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Cogito Ergo Cogito Sum

Confessions of an Aca/Fan: MySpace and the Participation Gap "There's a huge gap between what you can do when you've got unlimited access to broadband in your home and what you can do when your only access is through the public library, where there are often time limits on how long you can work, when […]

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Linkthink #0443: New American Menschery

hawgblawg: gothic bellydance per recent discussions, ted swedenburg links to a fascinating “goth bellydance” video, which is set, interestingly, to a custom refix by enduser of some _bollywood breaks_ material (tags: bellydance video arab middleeast US goth breakcore orientalism blogpost dance) YouTube – The Story of Rapper’s Delight by Nile Rodgers chic’s nile rodgers offers […]

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Sticky! Sha3kira Ma3shup & “Arab Face”

Really enjoying the discussion on that sha3bi post — please help keep it going if ur so inclined. This post is mainly a way of bringing that discussion “to the top” but I might as well share a related find… It’s not embeddable, but this video mashup of a sha3bi song and a Shakira/Beyonce vid […]

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8 Mile on the Nile

In my sha3bi searches last night I came across all kinds of odd & awesome stuff. And I don’t say ‘odd’ as an uninformed outsider (though I am one, relatively speaking), but b/c some of the cha3bi vids one finds are truly bizarre mashups of footage ranging from what looks like a Francophone African music […]

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Not Too Sha3bi?

Thx to my man Motaz, an Egyptian/Cairovian musician and activist currently residing in Cambridge, for pointing me to Jennifer Peterson’s excellent article —      Sampling Folklore: The re-popularization of Sufi inshad in Egyptian dance music — which not only, beyond some linkthink, merits a post of its own here (for a few reasons), but inspires some […]

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linkthink #813: Travel Agency

Arab Media & Society | Sampling Folklore: The re-popularization of Sufi inshad in Egyptian dance music | by Jennifer Peterson ‘Drawing on the context of mulid festivals and Sufi inshad, the “mulid” trend samples, imitates and remixes elements of mulid festival music, lyrics, and cultural references into a distinct form of boisterous, youth-oriented dance music.’ […]

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