Desperately Seeking Dembow: Wayne & Wax Poetics

I don’t know if you dear readers get tired of hearing about dembow, but I sure don’t. That said, if my boom-ch-boom-chick narratives start to seem as monotonous a march as some allege with regard to the dembow beat itself, do let me know. Well-worn paths notwithstanding, I’m happy to share this latest riff on […]

Read More →
Wayne b/w “Actual” Wax

I’m happy to announce that tonight I’ll be playing some records — yes, honest-to-goodness slabs of vinyl — alongside Tim of A Stack of Dusty Records, at an old and fave haunt: River Gods — the spot where I used to host Wicked Wicked Thursdays back in my pre-BR days and, yes, the place where […]

Read More →
Cumbia Worlds from Ol’ to Nu to You

a once-obscure music that enjoyed a fanatic embrace in the _______ slums of _______ has become a full-fledged global occasion – This could be the mantra of global ghettotech. Could hardly have written it better myself. But I didn’t. Nor was it written, despite what might be its commonplace connotations, about reggae, or funk carioca, […]

Read More →
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 […]

Read More →
Musical Travels with Seymour and Bernice, pt. 2: Brazil

This is the second post in a sporadic series here at w&w, an ongoing excavation, digitization, and interpretation of my wife’s grandparents’ record collection — i.e., the historico-musical profile of Seymour & Bernice. See here for the previous entry, and here for a note remembering Seymour. Of the many delights I’ve come across in Seymour […]

Read More →
50s Family Dubplates!

Imagine suddenly discovering that there were fifty-year-old recordings of your newlywed grandparents belting karaoke ballads in the family parlor and joshing (on mic!) about their already rocky relationship. For an ethnomusicolobloggerDJ like myself, it would be an unbelievable find — not just a revelation of family history but a truly wonderful slice of theretofore unknown […]

Read More →
Are You On MyFace?

Library Of Vinyl Experience: Beantown Boogie pacey — friendly neighborhood riddim methodist, lover of vinyl, and boston hip-hop historian — seeks to rightly re-center the bean in the boogie universe, offering up "a collection of (mostly) 1980's Boston electrofunk, boogie and breaks" and ending with a rare, schooly-D style bit of ol-school boston brash c/o […]

Read More →
Linkthink #74943: The Future Is Later

todo mundo » Blog Archive » Is that Lil Twane on the keytar? great post by kevin linking lil wayne to coltrane, miles, george duke and other techno-musical visionaries :: including the great question, "Is not Auto-Tune the wah pedal of today’s Black pop?" :: and, to boot, he inserts his video-supported commentary into recent […]

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 →