dot organizing

it's great to feel this site begin to coalesce, to bubble a bit with activity. the feedback loop begins to spin. i have big goals for wayneandwax.org. most of all, i hope that it becomes an inviting and interesting creative portal, linking all kinds of people through collaboration and conversation. i am excited that recent developments show growth.

first, i want to point you all to the .org page of thaddeus miles, director of public safety for masshousing and intrepid community-computer-lab creator. early last summer thaddeus invited me to conduct digital music workshops in his centers, beating me to the punch only barely and making my summer. over the course of july and august i was able to shape a teaching method for digital music while dozens of kids had fun making beats. more than making my summer, though, thaddeus's initiative planted a seed that i'm now trying to transplant in jamaica. i stay in touch with T (gotta break my rule and use a big t for thaddeus) to keep tabs on the program's progress in roxbury. he reads the blog page and sends me updates. recently he informed me that his latest project, massimpact, is close to launching. massimpact is a consortium of community-based computer labs in massachusetts. its focus is quite in line with ideas behind digital music: to draw people into computer fluency through digital technologies that facilitate creative expression, and to expand the range of representations of self and community by promoting local media. the digital stories project encapsulates these goals quite directly. using software to combine visual images, text, recorded voices, and music, people create sophisticated mini-movies. thaddeus has posted a few examples on his .org page. they are early examples, but they demonstrate the range and the potential of the project quite well i think. i am excited about combining digital music creation and digital storytelling in the near future.

next, i want to annouce some initial activity on the remix page. rhombus, an electronic music producer in madison, wisconsin, has been maintaning his own site at wayneandwax.org, has been reading our blogs (and giving us verbal feedback), and recently began providing musical feedback. first, he remixed becca's first riddim (as you may have noticed a couple becca-blogs ago), and now he has posted a remix of my own remix of jamaica's sunday morning airwaves. check out the slanted-square treatment on the remix page. if you dig ron's approach, you will definitely enjoy the other stuff he makes, which is quite varied. i really appreciate ron's use of the stereo-field, his attention to texture, his predilection for deep, clean, and reverby timbres, and the constant flux and steady build of his forms. check out slantedsquare.com for more examples. in a show of good faith, i return some of his own sounds back to him. in response to the track he sent me called "yams" (i will let rhombus decide whether to make this available to the public), i offer "nyams" (nyam is jamaican vernacular for eat). i've taken his beat, chopped it up a bit, looped some, and added drums and percussion. just a gesture.

i also recently heard from byron logan, my counterpart holding things down at the camfield neighborhood technology center in roxbury. byron has been active on his .org page, posting plenty of his own digital creations (byron is new to fruityloops, but as you can hear, he is a quick study). looks like b-lo just put a new post on the remix page, too, so check back there soon to see if anyone takes up his offer to collaborate. he also informs me that things are going well at the center and that the program is growing in numbers. just last week byron conducted a two-day workshop for students from washington heights. from the fruits of the sessions, they seemed to go quite well. check the roxbury page to hear some new music coming out of boston.

yesterday i visited the american international school of kingston, a rather privileged institution attended by sons and daughters of diplomats from all over, but especially the united states, and a handful of elite jamaicans. i ended up there because of marvin hall, one of the enthusiastic teachers i met at the harvard-jamaica dinner. marvin previously worked at an inner-city school downtown called camper down, and he would like to connect us there as well. i have to admit i was a bit hesitant to spend my time showing well-off kids how to take advantage of their considerable resources. my hesitation springs from the same concern that makes me wonder whether i will be fulfilled teaching at the college level: these kids are doing all right for themselves; my energy is better spent elsewhere, with people less likely to find a way to fulfill their potential, cultivate their talents. being a harvard grad and thus fairly privy to elite life, i realize that, frequently, privileged people experience less fulfillment than those who live with much less in the way of material means. i understand that happiness is no less elusive a thing to the rich and that it is just as important to challenge ignorance and closed-mindedness in such circles. nevertheless, i am not drawn to devote my efforts there. nor am i drawn to bratty kids. fortunately, most of the kids at the american school were not brats. the young are, of course, less likely to have crystallized into obnoxiously oblivious creatures, as some people often appear to be--more often, to my observation, in cambridge than in kingston. (i pray they are not putting on such airs.)

i enjoyed the time i spent at the american school. the kids were enthusiastic as ever, girls as well as boys, geeks as well as cool kids. the ability of digital music making to shift one's sense of self, to ignite the imagination, to make one feel like an artist or like someone with music in them, is as profound a lesson here as anywhere (though the students may be more likely to be involved already in arts programs). i am also excited by the prospect of connecting these uptown kids with their downtown peers through some collaborative, creative activity. there is, indeed, potential here too.

moreover, i had the opportunity, as usual, to get a sense of the students' musical worlds, which, as one might expect, are even more international than the average kingstonian's. one student--a young man of indian descent who hails from australia (with an accent to prove it)--began a conversation about "underground rap," which he says is impossible to find in kingston but which has a fair following in australia. he was familiar with fruityloops. they use it there, too. he said he prefers hip-hop from the new york and philadephia underground scenes (he named jedi mind tricks, aesop rock, and swollen members as examples). it was interesting to run into such a chap in kingston, especially an indian-australian. i had been wondering about an underground rap scene here for a while. i had not observed one. on the contrary, the kind of rap that people love in jamaica tends toward the mainstream--party music, tales of guns and bitches, bling-bling conspicuous consumption, the politics of the gangsta/thug/pimp/player "revolutionary" (perhaps, an endorsement of the same system that screws folks over everyday, indeed describing a 360-degree spin?). strangely enough, if one looks at hip-hop in, say, germany, the underground has a much stronger presence, from sonic style to politics, and the mainstream-style of rap seems vilified--at least in the dominant hip-hop discourse there, from journalists' to artists' representations. by and large, germans (white and middle-class, but also "black"--which might refer to turkish or italians as well as africans--the guestworkers, or gastarbeiterin, who never left) prefer the underground politics that were transmitted worldwide in the early days of hip-hop by performers like afrikaa bambaataa and the zulu nation: a more inclusive vision of community, grounded in the struggle for justice and against racism, and focusing on the power of musical and other artistic expression (graffiti, breakdancing, turntablism, etc.) to change people and change society. in some sense, it seems like a less individualistic philosophy, one more inclined to argue for the group than the self. of course, in practice, this underground ideology often degenerates into solipsistic, masturbatory exercises in abstract, though sensuous, language of self-promotion. it is ear candy, but often no more than lip-service. and the whining of the "backpack" set makes its righteous posturing no more compelling. the student i was speaking to was frustrated with both extremes of the rap world and sought in his own efforts to make mainstream music with substance--a goal i can identify with, but something too easily (and too often) said and not done.

one more note: on another computer, two girls--both more or less london-based, having spent considerable time there (one jamaican, one ghanaian-american, i believe)--sat constructing a techno track. at first the one of jamaican descent wanted to build a dancehall rhythm. upon hearing a techno-ish soundclip ("that's so acid," by which she referred to a kind of hardcore dance music), she said, "that's so london. i wanted to make something different. i want to make dancehall." i liked that she considered dancehall different, though she may have been jamaican by parentage and now lives in kingston. it illustrates the ease with which we naturalize, and equate, music and place. the flows of culture, and people, between jamaica and england are rapid and recombinant (try jungle, drum and bass, trip-hop, two-step garage--never mind two-tone, second-wave ska, punk). and such transnational experience is by no means limited to the elite (or to jamaicans, for that matter). there's a whole lotta movement-of-the-people going on--not all of it so easily described by the traditional narratives of diaspora, colonialism, or globalization. it's great to see such flows embodied in particular people. the textures of such lives make abstract ideas like culture real and testify to the wonderful complexity of the world. what kind of narrative about human life and society, about music and culture, about power and beauty emerges from these intertwined lives in kingston in 2003? trying to map out the routes, while keeping roots in mind, staggers the imagination a bit, but i like the feeling. perhaps we need to stagger our imaginations more, unsettle and expand our understandings of the world, and then act with the humility and respect such understanding fosters.