Get on the Good Foot

The following piece was published in December 2016 in The Wire‘s special issue, Spirits Rejoice: Sacred Songs, Divine Drones, and Ritual Rhythms (#394). I was excited by the call for pitches because I’ve been connecting lots of dots in my music history courses at Berklee between sacred and secular traditions, and I’ve become more and […]

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Still Bubbling After All These Years

I’m headed back to Amsterdam this week to attend the ADE where I’m excited to be a part of the screening of a new documentary on bubbling. Check out your boy the beatboxing talking head! the film will have English subtitles, and hopefully will be widely available before long I can’t say how humbled and […]

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Review: Ayobaness! The Sound of South African House

Continuing my tradition of posting “director’s cut” versions of the reviews I freelance from time to time, here’s the latest: a review of a recent compilation from Germany’s Outhere records, Ayobaness!, which showcases the rich, vibrant South African house scene. This one was an interesting endeavor, as my editor, Derek, pushed me to foreground a […]

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Mix, A Lot — Summertime Edition

Despite that the majority of what I listen to takes the form of DJ mixes, and that I probably download something around 3 per day, and that I probably like a good third-to-half of what I DL, I rarely find the time to write about all this great stuff I’m listening to. So aside from […]

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Moombahton, Munchiton, & Related Reggaetony Ear Candy

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 […]

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Listening Log #425963

A few recent projects of note landed in my inbox last week. And though I don’t have the time to really give them the write-ups they deserve (and don’t get me started on the backlog of projects I need to big-up), they each grabbed my attention — a remarkable feat in this age of info-glut […]

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Is It Funky Enough?

When Guillaume was here last week, we discovered in conversation that we both had long been sitting on posts that centered on the question of Africanness and UK funky. I joked that we should both finally get around to finishing these posts and drop them on the same day, causing a ruckus on the ol’ […]

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linkthink #2303: Remember When Heavy Metal Was Scary

Welcome To ‘The Disco’: Music As Torture – CommonDreams.org “…Haj Ali, the hooded man in the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs, told of being stripped, handcuffed and forced to listen to a looped sample of Babylon, at a volume so high he feared that his head would burst.” (via caro) :: Babylon, eh? you don’t say […]

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linkthink #60989: Calypso Consigliere

Soca Mafia in Trinidad and Tobago – Reality or myth? :: ttgapers.com re: payola in T&T (tags: trinidad soca payola industry) The House the Kids Built: The Gay Black Imprint on American Dance Music, by Anthony Thomas “The following article was originally published in the US magazine Out/Look in 1989, and looks at house music’s […]

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linkthink #7402: Like, Totally Obliterated

Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’ – New York Times “The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.” (tags: US prison stats nyt) Globalization or Zoo-Like Exploitation? Slum Tours on the Rise at Racialicious – the intersection of race and […]

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imeem, i’m sayin

Talk about too much music. Was readying a post on all the pods I cast (or subscribe to, that is), but then I get pointed to a Soca 2k7 playlist on some mysite called imeem — The soca 2k7 are verrrrrry r and b. I thought it would be interesting for your work. The soca […]

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