AfrodiasporaPOP!

In October, I spoke to Rolling Stone (always wanted to say that!) about how, in their words, “reggaeton, dancehall, baile funk, afrobeats and other diasporic styles are mixing faster than ever — without much help from the U.S. music industry.” The topic has been a sustained thesis on this blog and in my work, of […]

Read More →
YouTubology, Spring 2015

As you may know, I think the mini-mega-montage is the method, and I’ve been asking students to make them for a few years. One of my biggest inspirations for assigning students to make YouTube-sourced montages is the fact that musical supercuts are already an ordinary practice, whether we’re talking about the best Nae Nae Vines […]

Read More →
People Watching People Watching YouTube on YouTube

Back to the native genre beat for a moment… I’ve realized that I neglected to mention such obviously indigenous YouTubery as dhol playalongs and keystyling vids (wherein one “freestyles” a few bars in the comments section of a hip-hop instrumental), but these clearly have their precedents in pre-online-video cultures — if far less public and […]

Read More →
Megamontage Is the Method: Mozart to K-Pop

an utterly awesome eight-year-old diva, via YouTube This past week I’ve whipped up another couple YouTube montages in the vein of Gasodoble, Bump con Choque, and my students’ projects in last year’s technomusicology class. Unlike my previous efforts, which not too surprisingly involve reggaeton, these new mega-montages engage repertories that I don’t generally mess with: […]

Read More →
Vacuum Cleaner Relaxation & Other YouTube Natives

Been thinking about “native” YouTube genres, or genres which, in their way, are “native” to the platform, having necessarily emerged on YouTube — new forms and conventions, in other words, essentially made possible by YouTube’s existence and special features (especially, but not limited to, unprecedented access to an endless archive, thanks to massive uptake and […]

Read More →
+plus+

I’ve been following @emancan (aka, Emanuel Vinson, more recently recrowned as +) on Twitter for a few years now. In his early 20s, Emanuel is about as #based as it gets: persistently positive, open and encouraging, and utterly frank, especially when it comes to sources of inspiration or bullshit he needs to speak to from […]

Read More →
Funky Fungi, Homegrown & Delish

We recently enjoyed the fruits — or fruiting bodies, to be precise — of what has to be the yummiest and funkiest Kickstarter I’ve supported to date: loGROcal’s Sustainable Mushroom Farm in Austin, TX. The “Gourmet Oyster Mushroom Kit” I got for my $25 pledge arrived in the mail about a month ago. After following […]

Read More →
Dembow Complex

In case you missed it, I recently published a piece in RBMA mag about the history of the Dembow, a history I’ve been working to tease apart and put together for a looooong time now. If you’re not familiar with RBMA, it stands for Red Bull Music Academy. And I was pretty happy to be […]

Read More →
Panel People, Can Y’all Get Funky?

For anyone who missed our panel last week and would like to check out our conversation, I’m happy to report that it’s been archived here. But here’s an embed for your viewing ease — Video streaming by Ustream Thanks again to my eloquent interlocutors, all of whom had colorful stories & trenchant perspectives to share, […]

Read More →
Love Limited

Remember when I asked — rhetorically and remixically — whether there were limits to your love for Soundcloud? Well, it took a little over two years, but the super smart sample-sniffers over at Audible Magic have apparently finally decided that one of the two mashups I made by way of commentary / limit-testing should be […]

Read More →
Musical Publics

Here is the syllabus for a new course I’m teaching this spring at the Big H. It’s the culmination of a few years of piqued curiosity about “public” as term and concept, noun and adjective. As happy as teaching technomusicology made me, this sort of course — an intense, focused series of readings on a […]

Read More →
The Montage Is the Method

Last week the students in my technomusicology class submitted their video études. The assignment was relatively straightforward: make a montage of YouTube-sourced videos interlinked by some (musical) subject, theme, or tune. One additional challenge, if made far easier by Ableton’s video capacity, was to attempt to bring the various performances into a kind of musical […]

Read More →
Ecological Frictionstep

I’m happy to report, as exhorted about back in December, that Filastine & his collaborators, Nova & Tooliq, have completed the first of the two videos they successfully kickstarted. Before I offer an embed, allow me to cut-n-paste their poignant, soulful framing of the project and its settings & subjects — Colony Collapse is filmed […]

Read More →
Google Glance: “Beauty”

h/t Ferrari Shepherd, aka @stopbeingfamous— When I tried, I saw this — What do you see? (It changes all the time, and then again, it doesn’t.) For more Google Glances, see here.

Read More →
It’s Munchi Time!

Tomorrow / today / whenever it is as you’re reading this — Tuesday Feb 28 marks both the release of Munchi’s Moombahtonista EP and as mentioned last week, his first appearance here in Boston, at none other than Beat Research! According to the opaque metrics at Zuckerborg, as I’m writing this some 56 registered users […]

Read More →
Mega Uh-Oh

I’ve got a piece in this week’s Boston Phoenix discussing the spectacular shuttering of Megaupload and the collateral damage produced by an increasingly aggressive copyright regime in tandem with a remarkable nonchalance about preserving the digital libraries we build. Some will recognize this as but the latest instance of platform politricks, just another rug yanked […]

Read More →
The Internet Today

The first time one of my daughters said “internet,” I was deeply curious about what she might understand it to be. So I asked. Here’s how it went down: “Did you get it on the internet?” “What do you mean?” Slight pause. “I’m just saying ‘internet.’ … Internet.” It was an awesome bit of backpedaling, […]

Read More →
Jivin’ Ladybug Picnic

Today I’ve got a Q&A with Jared Demick at his site The Jivin’ Ladybug, a “Skewered Journal of the Arts” or in slightly plainer terms, “an online arts journal devoted to word-whittlers, picture-pizzazzers, & sound-slingers, all over this here globe!” Though the latter most obviously describes me, and the middle option may seem more dubious, […]

Read More →
Kickstart Kolony Kollapse & Other Worthy Projekts

This was supposed to be a last minute entreaty to recruit a few more backers for Filastine’s attempt to kickstart the making of two rad music videos. But I just looked over at the page again, and it turns out it’s totally funded. Woo-hoo! Go go crowd-sourced critical culture! (That said, it’s still a great […]

Read More →