It Takes a Little Sharing

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 […]

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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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Postcolonoscopy Transnotionalism

English Translation of Thoda Resham Lagta Hai Don't take this elegance as anything less than a disaster Oh my adorers, don't take me as made out of hard soil It takes a little silk, it takes a little glass Diamonds and pearls come together, it takes a little gold Such a fair body is then […]

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Dungeons & Dubstep

Dazed Digital | Hank Shocklee hank shocklee is my hero, for real :: here he talks about dubstep (and offers up his own d-step mixx), his west indian heritage, the reggae album he's working on with his bro (!!), film scoring, and the state of hip-hop and music industry (and laziness) :: dude doesn't mince […]

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Linkthink #2111: Make It Take It?

AllHipHop.com Daily News – : The Game, Timbaland, Sued Over ‘Put You On The Game’ a more recent case of saregama v. aftermath (tags: hip-hop sampling bollywood filmi copyright law) China’s All-Seeing Eye : Rolling Stone naomi klein on the rise of CCTV & other forms of surveillance in china — oh yah, and the […]

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Where Do I Begin (To Tell the Story)?

As long as we’re on the topic of “Arab Face” I’ve decided to dust off and finish up this post that’s long been sitting in my drafts folder. (It’s post #100, and I’ve recently published #400, if that’s any indication of how long it’s been on a backburner.) There are countless twisty, tangly stories of […]

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linkthink #1593: orb-eyed nagimandavah

BOMB Magazine: Ned Sublette by Garnette Cadogan garnette interviews ned about his new orleans book :: knowledge gems dropped left&right (but mostly left, knamean) :: dig the stuff on funkiness toward the end (tags: neworleans book interview caribbean US urban culture race history cuba jazz funk) itwofs.com – chronicles of plagiarism in indian film music […]

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The People in Your Neighborhood

Something is poppin’ in the state of Denmark. Troels (of Firehouse Sound) recently hipped me(space) to Lady Smita, a Roxanne Shante song-embedding dancehall diva who makes punaany-power traxx with digital Danish producers like Maffi, uses Boba Fett for her profile pic, and starts her heroes list like so — Which made me think: the MIA […]

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Que Viva

make way: american express meets el angel de la independencia uptown Allow me a little (belated) unpacking, now back from Mexico City, where I swear I will return, clunky espaƱol and all, que pronto es posible. !Que ciudad! My principal reason for going was, as mentioned, to attend the biannual international meeting of the International […]

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Brave You World

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to sound like Time fckn Magazine or appear too technoptimistic. Indeed, allow me to repeat here — for those who aren’t comment readers — /jace‘s well-put and well-taken anxieties w/r/t web2point0h: i think most of web2.0 activities is lil autonomous nodes — blogs, youtube uploaders & viewers, […]

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