the duke, surrounded by “african flowers” — google img search, 1 sept 2010
I was really thrilled with the reception of my “Galangs” mashup last week. To see the video get passed along by the likes of the Village Voice, NY Mag, & NPR, and especially to get this sort of response from SFJ, was really unexpected and delightful. Most of all, that Vijay himself dug it made it feel pretty justified. (Word is out on whether MIA gives a shit. I’m guessing no.)
As it happens, this week a new Vijay Iyer album came out, Solo. And it just so happens that for the recording Vijay decided to take on one of my absolute dearest jazz compositions. (He also plays through “Human Nature” and “Darn That Dream,” two cheeseball songs I find quite endearing; it’s like he’s daring me to make more mashups!) Vijay’s “African Flower” reworks Duke Ellington’s “Fleurette Africaine,” which I know (&love*) from the sublime session with Charles Mingus and Max Roach that yielded Money Jungle.
Considering that Ellington and Mingus are, for realz, my two favorite jazz composers — & that each cultivated unique voices on their instruments (as did Roach) — the album has long held a special place in my life / collection. Mingus’s fluttering bassline, and then his melodic moaning during the B section of the composition, make my heart ache. And I love the idea, as widely reported and fairly audible, that the session had its share of tension, with Mingus playing almost aggressively “out” while Ellington maintains composure, Roach’s tuned-toms knitting it all together.
As a solo take, Vijay doesn’t have to contend with any bandmates playing at cross-purposes, but somehow, one imagines, he needs to sublimate the engaging energies of Money Jungle into his own performance. (Or maybe not. I suppose we’d have to ask him whether the composition itself served as his guide, or whether his experience hearing Duke&co. play the tune has indelibly stamped it.) To my ears, Vijay’s version is at once reverent and distinctive, as the process of lining these up demonstrated to me in great detail — and hopefully as this mashup will suggest to you.
About the process: while the making of “Galangs” was relatively clear cut, the very same procedure in this case presented some serious technical and ethico-aesthetic challenges. MIA’s “Galang” is, of course, rather metronomic, since it moves to a drum-machine / programmed / quantized beat, and since Vijay & his trio-mates attempt to emulate that consistency, it was neither difficult, nor IMO problematic, to warp the two recordings and line them up. With “African Flowers,” however, there was no such steadiness; rather, Duke & co., although pretty odd-swingingly propulsive, are rather elastic in their relation to each other and the pulse, and Vijay, playing the tune solo, takes some rubato liberties to be sure.
So even though both recordings have palpable pulses — and indeed, Mingus and Roach, for all their outtitude, still play rhythm section — it felt a little odd / wrong to snap them onto a grid. But there’s no making a mashup without that level of correspondence, unless one wants cacophony, and that does not a good mashup make. So I made a deal with the Ableton devil and disciplined each to a click-track.
One thing I (re*)learned while warping them is that “African Flower” is not as straightforward as it sounds. Despite its stately sadness and surface simplicity, it contains some surprising twists, including one place where a measure seems to skip a beat. Grappling with this through Vijay’s performance, and then again on Duke’s, I was thrilled to hear, in the end, that they generally lined up.
But while they shared the same underlying form, the process of juxtaposing the two also brought to my attention some remarkable macro and micro differences. In the end, I again struck a compromise with regard to whose performance I would “subordinate” to the other. I decided to favor the brevity of Duke & co.’s rendition, so I chopped off the latter half of Vijay’s performance, essentially a repeat run through the changes, with all the signal differences one expects of a great jazz musician. At the same time, I decided to loop Duke & co. in order to leave in tact Vijay’s creative stretching of the form whereby he repeats the first section (12 bars) of the tune (after a 4-bar intro), as you see in the screenshot below. In the end, just one splice a piece, essentially –
Once I started mucking around with the snap-to-pulse stuff, certain dilemmas arose with regard to what degree of manipulation I would employ. Sometimes the whole point (of jazz, etc.) is that the musicians play a chord or a figure a little before or after the beat. As much as possible, I wanted to maintain the individual approaches of each performance, so as to bring them into greater relief when combined. In the end, I did my best to strike a balance between preserving the original feel of each while letting them line up when not too coercive a procedure. Perhaps only Vijay, or an astute mashup-analyst, will discern the micro-tweaks of tempo and articulation.
Even though I’ve done some quasi-violent clobbering of an occasional gesture, I’d like to think, as with any of these endeavors, that the mashup I’ve made justifies its existence as more than an exercise in arithmetic, but rather, as living up to the new math of the form.
But that’s a question I’ll leave to y’all.
Here’s the mashup, again in video form to help listeners track the changes and the degree of overlap / departure. One thing I’ve done in this case is to split the audio in the stereofield (Vijay on the left, Duke & co. on the right), to aid with hearing them in tandem. I’ll offer two different audio versions for your listening pleasures, one stereo-split and one centered/combined. It’s nice to hear Vijay playing on a nearby platform, but also to hear two pianos on the same stage. (Because the effect was so helpful, edifying even, I’ve gone ahead and made a stereo-split version of “Galangs” as well.)
vijay iyer + duke ellington, charles mingus, & max roach, “african flowers” (w&w mash)(stereo-split MP3 | centered MP3)
* Incidentally, just in case you doubt my longstanding admiration of the composition, here’s a version of “Fluerette Africain” which I myself put together — programmed note by note, using FruityLoops! — way back in 2001:
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my friend alex, sporting a shirt made special for him in Paris’s 11th & inspired by this guy (see e.g.)
In yesterday’s re-post of a review, you might have caught the following barb-backed big-up:
Ayobaness! continues a line of releases from Outhere portraying African popular music that is, you know, actually popular (not just what might best fit outsiders’ expectations of African difference).
That teensy critique joins an ongoingattempt at course correction for the representation of African music (and by extension, Africa), especially when the enterprise is led by European and American middlemen.
It’s an important discursive battle — whether waged by bloggers or ethnomusicologists, &c. — but efforts like Outhere’s are, I suspect, ultimately more influential in terms of shaping people’s ideas about African difference, and sameness. I could talk at you for days about how not to think about Africa, but you’d just have to take my word for it. Better to hear and see for yourself.
Which is why I’d like to herald another important, awesome, intervening effort in this vein: the upcoming release (Aug 24) via Dutty Artz, curated by DJ Rupture, of a 17-track album by Ivorian crew CIAfrica –
Here’s a brief, semi-snarky run-down from the Dutty Crew:
Ivory Coast vocalists spit soul over futuristic beats that draw on dubstep and electro. This is forward-looking rap/dancehall/r&b for those who get bored listening to all that black-and-happy African music.
It’s true: when lots of folks think about African music, they think: “it’s dancey, it’s happy, nice melodies, very uplifting” or maybe they think about kuduro remixes or “hybridity”. But CIAfrica are abrasive, synthetic, angular, non-dancey lyric-driven music. Urban. Stubborn. Proudly themselves. Religious, sometimes.
It’s provocative, yes, but such a tone remains very necessary. Indeed, let me close with one more projectile utterance via Dutty Artz, which offers a fine riposte to that stupid Brian Eno quote about computers not having enough Africa in them:
As some readers of both this blog and The Wire might have noticed, I’ve started to contribute now and then to their reviews section. As per my usual practice, I’ll be reprinting the reviews here on the blog, once they’ve enjoyed their print run, usually offering something of a “director’s cut” (more words! glorious words!), even though I’m quite grateful for the magic of concision and clarity that editors like Derek can wring out of my prolix prose. My reviews no doubt read sharper in the magazine, but blogs — at least this one — are great places for picking up clippings from the cutting room floor and giving people a little more to read, and comment on.
You can preview tracks from the compilation, and place an order, over at Soul Jazz.
Various Artists Dancehall: The Rise Of Jamaican Dancehall Culture Part 2
Soul Jazz 2xCD
So rooted in local music venues that it became synonymous with them, dancehall captured Jamaican audiences by staying down-to-earth and up-to-the-time. It remains reggae’s prevailing style even as detractors wonder, in an era of autotuned vocals and fruityloopy beats, if it still merits the name. Some stakeholders, including the compilers of the second double CD in Soul Jazz’s Dancehall series, argue that dancehall has met its demise. Their project is one of reverent exhumation, and though that blurs one line while drawing another, dancehall’s seminal sides can speak to skeptics and boosters both.
Despite the break that dancehall marks — most notably in the ascension of rapping deejays to primary frontmen — the compilation’s tracks bare their roots. Nearly all feature re-licks of classic riddims, including Studio One perennials Rockfort Rock, Heavenless, and Full Up. Small, tight studio groups reanimate well-worn instrumentals, offering spare interpretations–often two-bar, taut but supple grooves–that leave space for deejays to toast and soundmen to dub. Showcasing dancehall’s domination by microphones and mixing boards, the comp includes several longer cuts comprising a few minutes of deejay recitation followed by the producers and engineers taking their turn, flinging horn snips, vocal clips, and renegade snares across the stereo field. Errol Scorcher’s hilarious “Roach in De Corner,” clocking in close to 9 minutes and featuring classic interjections (“Bim! Kill him! Shhh!”), rides a heavy Ansel Collins version of Real Rock which, over its last five minutes, breaks down in every imaginable way and a few others as well. The compilation focuses on major mic-men — like Lone Ranger, Nicodemus, and Yellowman — who draw heavily on humor and critique, revel in local (and lower-class) slang, and rap more melodically than often acknowledged, but it includes the day’s top singers, many of whom, like Johnny Osbourne or Half Pint, navigate dancehall’s spiky topography with a spry delivery.
While these tracks connect dots between roots and dancehall, the compilation redraws an old line by shying away from the synthesized productions that have dominated since the mid-80s. Notable exceptions are Papa San’s deeply digital “Money a Fe Circle” and the Steely & Clevie produced “When” by Tiger — drum machine driven dancehall at its bouncy best. More often one hears subtle touches of digital tricknology, like the syn-drum percussion pioneered by Sly & Robbie, as on Ini Kamoze’s “Trouble You a Trouble Me,” wielding a synth clap like a machine gun. The compilation finally betrays its bias when nodding to latter day dancehall but offering only modern roots throwbacks. Shabba Ranks’s “Respect,” riding a wicked Hot Milk re-lick by Bobby Digital, is almost overbearing in this regard. In their defense, the series aims to cover The Rise of Jamaican Dancehall Culture (though promotional materials make broader claims), but what feels left out, ironically, is a sense of how dancehall has remained rooted in the spaces which branded it, even three decades later, precisely by staying up to date.
i totally forgot to send you some tracks i worked on in late 2009 that were bubbling but influenced by dominican music. like perico ripiao, bachata or dominican dembow. i had these finished but i was working on a whole concept thing there.
Munchi – Dominican Bubbling Battle 2009
Didnt have a name for it so i called it like that. Sampled and cutted up a perico ripiao song, vocals from dominican dembow and with the oldskool bubbling taste. this kind of oldskool bubbling was my favorite, all over the place and so much going on going from slow to fast. made this right after i saw a bubbling battle video from 1995.
And here’s the video in question. Inspiring indeed!
Seriously, what a style! Dude gets LOOOSE. He’s totally syncing with bubbling’s distinctive double-time/half-time herky-jerk, and, like the genre, seemingly drawing on two kinds of raving at once: of the dancehall reggae sort, and of the hardcore techno sort. I like the nods to robot-style popping-and-locking, the plasticman wobbling, and all the transmuted bits of bubbling — and that’s bubbling in the original Caribbean sense. Butterfly, butterfly, mek we do the…
Munchi also shares a couple of tracks that seem to spring uniquely from his Dominican-Dutch circumstances:
Munchi – Mambo Con Sazon
which he describes as
Bachata guitar with also the bachata percussion and the familiar bubbling slowing down and speeding up. I was plannin to put a female reggeton artist on this track she would fit the track perfectly with the energy she brings.
And here’s one more to round things out. Munchi sez:
I made this in 2007 and its mostly bubbling but it flows into baile funk and reggeton
and it got me a bit of exposure back then lol.
Munchi – Nex Aan Te Doen Prt. 1
If it wasn’t clear in my previous post, I love the way that Munchi’s productions are so situated in the particular musical-cultural networks (actual and virtual) in which he finds himself situated (and actively situates himself, as with such keywords as “baile funk” and with, y’know, enthusiastic emails to bloggers like me and Dave Quam).
In light of these latest, I’ve been thinking about Munchiton — a genre all Munchi’s own (even though he’s personally embracing the moombahton tag) — with regard to a resonant quotation from DJ Earworm in that “borrowing culture” documentary I shared last week:
…in the future, when people listen to music, everyone’s gonna have their own custom remix … You heard that new song, yeah, check out my version. Oh yeah, check out my version. That’s not gonna be DJ culture that’s just gonna be culture.
In an age of FruityLoopy GarageBands, I think we’re just about already there. Sometimes this is called “remix culture,” sometimes “participatory culture,” sometimes “read-write culture,” sometimes “free culture.” Before too long, though, Earworm’s right: we’re going to stop thinking of remix practice as the exception, instead realizing that the 20th century’s “read-only” broadcast culture was an anomaly in human history and embracing the imperative to mix-and-mash all the stuff around us as what culture’s really about.
Along these lines, I’m enamored of the idea that not only will everyone be enmeshed in collectively, co-creating culture, right down to versioning the latest global (or local) hits, but that these efforts, in any particular instantiation (e.g., Munchi’s work), might yet coalesce into something even more unruly and awesome: genres of our own. New whirled music. Munch, crunch, mulch. Repeat.
The students in Elizabeth Stark’s class at Yale this semester, “Intellectual Property in the Digital Age,” have put together a wonderful 24-minute documentary on “borrowing culture in the remix age,” including some really smart, confident, eloquent, and creative people (though I’d have liked to see some browner faces in the mix). Anyway, do check it out; it’s worth it for the mindblowing Eclectic Method intro alone –
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, but thanks to Dave’s busy touring schedule, that’ll have to wait for the fall when the students are back in town.
For now, I’m enthused to report that Dave will be striking while the book’s hot off the presses — and rounding up several of the knowingest headz in the Greater Northeast to drop robot-vox’d electro jams and other space oddities in support. For reals, with a lineup featuring the likes of Chairman Mao, Hua Hsu, 7L, and Brian Coleman, we’re talking about some serious rapmuzik braintrust in the house. And the Good Life has a pretty accommodating system for big slabs of thunder-croak proto-crunk.
There’ll be a slide show too, and believe me, you want to see these pics blown up. I’ve been working my way through Dave’s book in little sittings for a couple weeks now, and it’s a beautiful thing to behold. Almost every page has some awesome (and awesomely captioned) photo in it. (Props to Stop Smiling for making this sort of package pretty affordable.) The whole thing is just brimming with arcane knowledge jewels. And Dave has long been one of my favorite hip-hop writers, a man with his own muse to be sure. Plenty of times he’s way over my head (and maybe in over his own — though I don’t get that impression). Either way, I want more music writing to be like his: informed, imaginative, idiosyncratic.
To whet, here’s one of my favorite passages so far, drawn somewhat at random since, really, such nuggets are a dime a dozen (all dimes well spent, I might add). Fifty pages into the strange history of the vocoder, we’re told that –
Hollywood would have to wait. All things wondrous, stupendous, complicated and confusing must report to the army first. Though the World’s Fair could make claims on the future, the military officially had dibs on tomorrow. Long before the vocoder played the voice of a missile-happy Cold War supercomputer in 1970’s Colossus: The Forbin Project, it held an underground desk job, scrambling the phone calls of the army’s triple-chinned brass. Patriotic orders to fill, eggs to scramble. Things to come, things to do.
Writing in the New Yorker, Martian-mongerer H.G. Wells precidcted that the World’s Fair would introduce teleconferencing, a snooze button of a prophecy but less dooming than the atomic conflict he foresaw in his 1914 book The World Set Free. Ray Bradbury, the loud blond dreamer, was terrified. No squid lady could distract him from the prospect of the sky above whistling straight to hell.
Those at the Fair who eavesdropped on Bradbury’s free call to Los Angeles probably just admired the clarity, marveling at voices shooting across time zones. Perhaps they mistook his modulated quaver for homesickness, not the fear that he’d never again see his parents. I love you. I miss you. I’m broke.
“We were a few days away from World War Two,” he tells me. “The sense then was that in a few months the world was going to destroy itself. The world then proceeded to kill forty million people. I thought I might be destroyed too. I looked up into the sky, smelled gun powder and saw the war coming.” That night, July 4th, standing in the glow of the fireworks, the world’s blindest stegosaurus fan saw the sky on fire and cried.
Squaring unprecedented opportunities for music distro, sobering visualizations, and tweets for mpfrees asks for tricky math. I’m not sure we yet have the tools or the data. But we get more of each every day.
It seems safe to say that the explosion of online tools for distributing music, whether for a fee or free, has allowed independent artists of all stripes to reach vastly wider audiences than was possible just a few years ago. At a moment of turbulence and transition in the mediascape, independent producers appear to be experimenting with and, in many cases, eagerly embracing a variety of platforms and approaches.
The profusion of “web 2.0” style sites for distributing music — including SoundCloud, Fairtilizer, and BandCamp, but also MySpace and YouTube — offers a number of options for those operating outside the traditional “music industry.” These services generally provide tools for facilitating “discovery” (or, the use of social networking features to help one’s music find listeners, and vice versa), distribution, robust forms of tracking, and in some cases, sales.
It’s clear — simply scanning my inbox — that lots of artists and independent labels/collectives are employing mixed methods for distributing their work and attempting to seek or share compensation with audiences and “peers” of all sorts (including DJs, bloggers, and journalists). It would be quite a feat simply to enumerate the various channels/methods now available for circulating musical recordings (and various related artifacts, from stems to videos); it’s another thing altogether to attempt some sort of analysis.
Given that so many tools are now available, what’s really missing from any such analysis is data. I’ve seen some stats and heard some hearsay, but I’d love to hear from the thoughtful enthusiasts & practitioners who drop in here from time to time, especially independent artists and/or labels. Anyone have strong preferences for one of these emerging methods/sites over another? Success stories? Surprises? I’m not asking you to divulge your brilliant strategery or anything, but I’m keen to hear about what’s working and what’s not, which features appeal and which don’t, etc. Got any anecdotes or pithy quotes? Major or minor figures you’d care to share?
I’m sayin, especially if you’re one of those folks who’ve sent me a link to your distro site, how’s that open-exchangey thing workin’ for ya?
(Incidentally, I’d love to hear from “purely” listeners’ perspectives too, or from bloggers, journos, etc.)
& feel free to hit me offblog: wayne at wayneandwax
Tomorrow I’ll be joining the fine folks from the Music and Sound Studies Colloquium Series at the University of Minnesota to talk about the synaesthetic publics addressing each other via skinny jeans, electronic dance beats, and wonky shuffle steps. I’m pasting the title and abstract below. As you can see, I’m flogging some familiar, but hardly dead, horses: social media practices and aesthetics, public spheres in a networked age, and platform politricks (and, yes, I still have a mega-blogpost in the pipeline that examines the latter in some detail), especially as illuminated by youthful YouTubey dance exchanges. The event is open to the public, so if you’re in the Twin Cities and want to join us, click here for deets –
The Sound of Skinny Jeans: New Media, Networked Publics, and Affective Labor
In recent years, the rise of so-called social media has been propelled rather remarkably by the music-centered affective labor of young people. Using corporate hosted social-networking platforms like MySpace, YouTube, imeem, and Fotolog, teenagers in such far-flung cities as Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Paris, and Melbourne have shared photos, music, text, and video (especially of dance) with their local and networked peers and, inevitably, with the wider world. In the process, these everyday acts of publication and recirculation, enabled by the radical reconfigurability of digital artifacts, have facilitated the emergence of vibrant, youthful counterpublics. The conspicuous presence of day-glo colors and skinny jeans across these disparate if loosely connected scenes offers a synaesthetic way to hear how sound and image intermingle in the brave new worlds of network culture.
No, this post is not principally asking about things I should go see at SXSW next week, though I am eager to know about promising parties and awesome acts to catch. Holler if you’re gonna be in town or have a tip. (I can safely predict I’ll be unable to avoid the Tormenta Tropical tractor beam.)
Mainly, I’m posting to seek a little crowdsourced feedback. I’ve been invited to SXSW to speak on a panel about the history of music recommendation, or to put it another way: music “discovery” in (and before) an age of algorithmic “recommendation systems” and socially-networked music apps. Or: how do people find music today — or how does it find them — and how does that compare to times past?
Here’s how the convener of the panel, Michael Papish of Media Unbound*, only slightly cheekily frames the conversation:
Mention “music recommendations” and talk of algorithms, genomes, visualizations and widgets ensues. But, the concept of making music recommendations is far older than the tech industry can imagine. Beginning with traveling minstrels of the middle ages … to legendary freeform DJs of the 60s, we present a history of the music recommendation.
1. How did people ever learn about music without the Internet? Is this even possible?
2. What was the role of music performer in introducing audiences to new music?
3. How can songwriters teach listeners about music?
4. What is the place of the “cover version” in song discovery?
5. Was there a time when terrestrial radio helped people discover music? What different radio formats worked best for music discovery?
6. What is the current state of music discovery via radio (terrestrial, satellite, internet, interactive, etc.)?
7. Can record labels and music publishers create trusted relationships with listeners that allow them to find new and interesting music? Has this worked in the past? Are there groups doing this successfully today?
8. What about movie soundtracks?
9. Do people actually read music criticism?
10. What is the history of listener-to-listener music sharing?
I’m especially interested in the final question Michael poses, wondering about the ongoing history of listener-to-listener sharing (as opposed to artist-(industry/label)-listener models). I know that, for my part, I still tend to find most of the music I come across through directly interpersonal means. These days, that can be both in person (especially at gigs), but also, increasingly, via email or Twitter. And of course, in terms of seeking things out (which I do less and less, so much being pushed at me), I still find music blogs the best place to go to — as opposed to “music journalism,” which I seek out less and less — and reading other people’s blogs also feels like a listener-to-listener model.
I’m definitely curious to hear any anecdotes that readers would like to share. Given the open-eared, active connoisseurship which animates a lot of friends of W&W, I suspect that most of you still have plenty of traditional, interpersonal, offline/nonalgorithmic ways of finding new music. But I’ll be just as eager to hear from you if you happen to think that Pandora is the bees’ knees.
Of course, I’ve been thinking about songs as shared things for a little while now. And I’d love to be able to put that into broader historical context (and that’s largely gonna be my job at SXSW). I think that volumes like My Music as well as Tom Turino’s new Music as Social Life help to offer useful perspectives, and I love when little gems like the following leap out at me from music books otherwise concerned with other matters:
[Moses] Asch arrived at school [in Germany] in 1922 and discovered that the students, who came from all over the world, liked to swap songs from their countries. (86)
This sort of socially-guided music discovery is, essentially, one of the main things that DJs do (whether on the radio or in the club). And there are lots of continuities we could draw between music discovery in pre- and post-Internet time.
But I’m particularly curious to know what has changed, if anything, about our patterns of music discovery, and which recommendation “engines” we find most useful / awesome. Among other changes, musicologist Mark Katz suggests that the advent of unparalleled accessibility of music online has engendered (or at least strengthened) what he calls a “divergent approach to discovering music”:
Instead of seeking out particular pieces (a convergent approach), one initiates an intentionally general search in hope of broad and unfamiliar results. A search until the term “cello” yielded not only the expected (Bach’s cello suites), it introduced me to Nick Drake’s haunting “Cello Song,” the works of Apocalyptica, the Danish cello quartet known for its Metallica covers, as well as to the riches of Annette Funicello. What by all rights should be condemned as a poor search engine served as my trusted guide into the musical unknown. (167)
Adding to the pile of data & interpretation, a recent sociological study by Steven Tepper and Eszter Hargittai uses a sampling of college students (from 2003-05, unfortunately — given how much has changed in the YouTube era) to investigate “pathways to music exploration in an environment that offers numerous choices for discovery.” Considering the roles of cultural capital and social status as well as massive technological change, their findings suggest that,
While students certainly get some recommendations about new music through digital media, traditionally important factors such as recommendations from one’s social circles and mainstream media continue to be the most important means through which students learn about new music. (245)
Allow me to quote them at somewhat greater length, as the authors attempt to place their critical questions into historical context:
Prior to the digital revolution, discovering new music required an array of resources. Two decades ago, the expense and time required to discover new artists, especially for young people, was considerable. Music ‘‘mavens’’ often had to own their own cars and had to travel regularly to inner-city neighborhoods to patronize record stores that were off the beaten path. They invested significant sums buying dozens of albums every year in search of new unfamiliar artists. These ‘‘opinion leaders’’ and discoverers had to rely on broad social networks – family and friends living in other cities and countries, who would regularly send them music that was not available locally. They would have also spent time and money listening to new local bands in music clubs in the city. And, they would have subscribed to high-priced magazines like The Wire, where they searched for reviews of non-mainstream, cutting edge artists. In part because of issues of access and expense, past music mavens and opinion leaders have tended to come from the ranks of the elite.
In theory, the digital revolution and the arrival of new technologies should democratize the discovery of new music and the capacity for individuals to become opinion leaders in culture. More people have access to a greater variety of culture than ever before. The digital divide creates new inequalities, but as this divide closes, as some commentators contend that it will, more citizens will be able to discover new music through a variety of online services. If discovery and opinion leadership are sources of status, then new technology might serve to flatten hierarchies and cultural advantage. It is beyond the scope of this paper to sort out the relationship among technology, discovery, opinion leadership and status. But, we can answer the following more descriptive and more limited questions: First, does new technology facilitate discovery of new music for college students? Second, is everybody using new technology to discover new music or just some students? If there are variations in this activity, are there identifiable status differences between users and non-users? Additionally, are users more likely to be opinion leaders? If so, what are the distinguishing characteristics of opinion leaders in the realm of music exploration? Are such opinion leaders more omnivorous in their tastes? Are they pre-disposed toward experimentation? (230-1)
While I find Tepper’s & Hargittai’s narrative framework above to correspond to my own intuitive sense of how — if you will — things done changed, I also find it somewhat wanting in grain of detail. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy to go back and survey “music mavens” and “opinion leaders” in the 80s or 90s. And this is where you come in.
In other words, I ask you, dear reader, to please help us out. Leave a comment indicating what, if anything, has changed in your own processes/practices of musical discovery/recommendation over the last several years. If you have a particularly illuminating bit of historical context to offer, as always, I’m all ears!
…
* Full disclosure: I worked as a lowly data-processor for Media Unbound, a modest but awesome music meta-data company (which was very recently acquired by a larger one), between 2003-4, grooming info fields for reggaeton artists and British boybands alike. It was a trip, and it helped pay the bills while I was writing my dissertation.
Mil gracias a Marisol LeBron, who not only first brought to my attn the wonderful nueva-media phenom of “Watagatapitusberry,” but who has offered some interesting thoughts on its homosocial joi de vivre (check her initial round-up of home videos) and has kept up on the latest developments around the song. Most recently, the launch of a slick new video/remix featuring Pitbull and Lil Jon –
What i find most fascinating about the Watagatapitusberry phenomenon — though I still need to tease a lot of this out, and I wish YouTube would make it easier to do so — is that the most popular instantiation is neither the “original” video by Del Patio & Blackpoint (a static image w/ audio, uploaded in early summer 09 — plz correct me if I’m wrong), which has, nonetheless, had over 1M views, nor (at least not yet) the new remix w/ Pitbull & Lil Jon, but the loopy, casual, creative theatrics of a handful of young DominicanYorks which has racked up over 3.5M views since it was posted in early August. If you haven’t seen it yet, you’re missing out; get cultured–
I love that the dudes who made the video above had the cojones to label it the “Official Video.” It may as well be, for it has arguably done more to popularize the song — to make it what it is — than anything else.
I confess, though, that I have been able to glean relatively little about how all these productions are related. Does anyone know if there’s any (formal) connection between these Wash Heights kids and Sensato del Patio & Blackpoint? Whether or not, it sure offers a fine example of how legions of YouTubers can add value to something by making it their own.
Let’s hope that the new, Big Music-funded version doesn’t produce the kind of collateral damage on the YouTubosphere that, say, the signing of the New Boyz seemingly caused to many of the videos that helped make “You’re a Jerk” the career-breaking single that it became — the majority of which either suddenly disappeared once the song’s audio became Major Label property, became unfortunately muted, or even more oddly, took the option of “swapping” the song for something “legal.” Of the latter camp, this is my favorite, surreal example (click thru for some sad/hilarious comments about the “African” music now soundtracking the Action Figures’ moves):
Sounds more like Avatar than Africa to me, but whatevs…
musicologist, internet annotator, and rapper-ternt-blogger.
