Musical Encounters of the Fifth Kind?

NASA’s announcement in December about our impending arsenic-based overlords caused quite a stir, followed by a fair amount of disappointment. Despite oddly worded reports suggesting that “NASA has discovered a completely new life form that doesn’t share the biological building blocks of anything currently living on planet Earth” (his emphasis), it turned out that NASA […]

Read More →
Nigerians Are the New Jamaicans

Louis Chude-Sokei has just published one of the more textured and sympathetic accounts of Nigerian 419 scammers I’ve read to date. Touching on everything from e-waste to Nollywood, proposing a tongue-in-cheek anti-eco-tourism, and taking into its analysis the way that transnational hustler culture speaks through the (dated) language of hip-hop and dancehall, it’s an incisive […]

Read More →
Real Wreck a Nice Real

I’ve been trying to get Dave Tompkins to come do a reading in town this spring from his much anticipated and well-worth-waiting-for book, How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop (Stop Smiling 2010). An afternoon at MIT followed by a night of vocoder-animated Beat Research seemed pretty apropos, […]

Read More →
Mi Brain Nuh Need Visa Fi Fly

The latest Woofah — a UK-based magazine covering the latest and greatest in bass culture — is finally out, and it’s a big, glossy whopper of an issue. What’s more, yours truly has a thinky-piece in it exploring the fraught relationship between Afrofuturist reggae musicians and the Rastas-in-Space projected by Hollywood films and sci-fi authors […]

Read More →
Trading in Futures

Working on a little something about the dialectic(s) between dreadlocked aliens, Rastas in space (in reggae and sci-fi), and Jamaicans/Africans as “aliens” among us/US. If you have any other tips/refs in addition to these provocative pics (thx @rizzla_dj & @dizzyjosh for their Star Wars intel), do tell — Bonus points for anyone who can name […]

Read More →
A Farce To Be Reckoned With

todo mundo » Blog Archive » Crank Dat ROFLCon taken down from YouTube! kevin records a message for souljaboy, in souljaboy style (ms.xu = the new ayrab!), after the ROFLCon version of "crank dat" (in which a roomful of MIT folk / internet geeks did the dance) got served with a take-down notice :: ah, […]

Read More →
linkthink #519292: Loosing My Mind [sic]

Shaggy feat Trix & Flix – Feel The Rush | The Heatwave Blog – dancehall reggae and bashment “la cumbia cienaguera” of samim’s “heater” fame (and a hit in its own right in south america for decades) gets yet another odd reanimation via shaggy and the euro 08 football cup :: and round and round […]

Read More →
Adventures in Anachronistic Irony #5593935

Bruce Sterling on Jules Verne’s Invasion of the Sea — Mr. Verne’s latest techno-thriller boldly confronts the menace of Islamic terrorism. He has topnotch chops in technical accuracy, with endearing dashes of broad humor and a keen eye for telling detail. Let me be the first to predict this: someday this French novelist will be […]

Read More →
linkthink #18t3965: Ninjabread Man Edition

Just to make things a little extra personalized in the age of linkthink, ‘low me to add, Sasha-style, a (generally) random photo for your imaginative conneckees — Sucker Free » Dr. Dre Drops A Mixtape vintage mid-80s dr.dre mixtape :: i could listen to these for days (tags: 80s hip-hop mixtape mp3s dre LA) Earplug […]

Read More →
linkthink #5647477

YouTube – RDC Mugen: Homer Simpson Vs. Predator Warrior bizarre mortal kombat-style face-off between homer and predator (tags: videogames predator thesimpsons humor youtube) WikipediaVision (beta) mashup tracking, in real time, anonymous edits to wikipedia via google maps (tags: mashup google web2.0 wikipedia visualization map webapp) Getting to roots of Mexican rock – CULTURE MIX – […]

Read More →
If That’s What You Mean

Mark Dery: Have you ever felt, as one of the few blacks writing SF, the pressure to write science fiction deeply inscribed with the politics of black nationalism? Samuel R. Delany: The answer there depends on what your question means. If you mean: Do I feel that, deep within my work, I’ve situated material that […]

Read More →