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Just Call Me Mr. Meme Maker

November 6, 2007
15 Comments

when i say that ghislain poirier is one of my favorite global ghettotechies®, i think i mean that unsardonically, but i’m not sure where that leaves us

ghislain’s music, however, usually leaves me grinning

if not spinning

keep it blazin, g —

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Tags: academic, blogging, ethno, ghettotech, media, reggae, soundscape, traxx

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15 thoughts on “Just Call Me Mr. Meme Maker”

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  4. chewy says:
    October 10, 2008 at 8:56 am

    Guys, it’s Po-Co HouseĀ® these days, keep up with the trendsters.
    http://climaxxxblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/where-we-going-where-we-at-pt-2.html

  5. wayneandwax says:
    October 10, 2008 at 9:50 am

    Hmmm — at least Woebot’s “shanty house” and yrs trly’s “global ghettotech” make the slumming angle more expliciit. Plus, where are your references to Spivak and Bhabha?

  6. chewy says:
    October 15, 2008 at 8:24 am

    I could have gone with ‘DER-O Po-Co’ house but that might be offensive to some. Although many are proud of their ghetto roots, we should bear in mind that some, like Flava Flav deplore its use as instant street cred. There was nothing fun about his ghetto upbringing he told the girls on Flava of Love 3.
    If anyone else out there would like to come up with some interesting new genre names I suggest you make your own
    Genre Generator
    and see what you come up with.

  7. w&w says:
    October 15, 2008 at 5:38 pm

    Ah, yes, Flavor Flav, that paragon of critical theory. And Flav’s never been one to exploit class or race, right?

  8. Birdseed says:
    October 16, 2008 at 1:36 pm

    What’s with the “tropical” moniker that’s been floating around in Britain apparently? On clubs like this.

  9. chewy says:
    October 20, 2008 at 6:23 pm

    how could you doubt the wisdom of anyone who chooses a reality TV show to find love?
    Jodie Marsh did it…

  10. wayneandwax says:
    October 21, 2008 at 1:43 pm

    Birdseed, far as I can tell, “tropical” is a pretty free-floating signifier in the UK today. Generally, I think it’s referring to a certain Caribbean-tinged dance music. Part of the popularity, I think, stems from “tropical” being one of MySpace’s pull-down options for ID’ing one’s sound. Perhaps what began as a cheeky thing will someday define an actual sound/genre. At any rate, it’s definitely confusing against more longstanding — if specious — uses of “tropical,” which remains the industry’s umbrella term for Spanish Caribbean music.

  11. Birdseed says:
    October 22, 2008 at 3:06 pm

    I’ve only seen it before in connection with this club, which represents a total switch in the presentation of global ghettotech (or whatever) in the Stockholm nightlife: from very tough-looking posters with bold 3d fonts and red/green/yellow text to genteel, sophisticated and using (possibly ironic) old orientalist/exotica images. This very publicised mixtape is also veering a bit towards that visual direction.

  12. wayneandwax says:
    October 22, 2008 at 3:11 pm

    As with “ghettotech” — another term whose loosing from its moorings I blame in part on MySpace drop-downs — I think you’d find some interesting, perhaps pattern-like, results if you search to see which bands/artists are billing themselves as “tropical” on MySpace. It’d be nice if a bot of some sort could crawl&collect MySpace “tropical” music and create a montage to give a sense of how people interpret the term. Who’s working on those research bots anyhow?

  13. Birdseed says:
    October 22, 2008 at 4:06 pm

    I went to myspace to have a tentative look and I have to say that your hypothesis is slightly hampered by the fact that tropical is not, in fact, one of the genres you can chose on myspace.

    Good try though!

  14. wayneandwax says:
    October 22, 2008 at 4:53 pm

    I don’t know where you were looking, but a quick search on MySpace just now turns up plenty of bands identifying with the term “Tropical” so it must be an option.

    See, e.g.,

    http://www.myspace.com/richiejape
    “Regional Mexican / Japanese Classic Music / Tropical”

    http://www.myspace.com/abevigoda
    “Alternative / Tropical / Punk”

    http://www.myspace.com/djdexteroz
    “Hip Hop / Tropical / Grime”

    etc

    Clearly a free-floating signifier. Indeed, I suspect the majority of uses on MySpace, as with “Ghettotech,” are tongue-in-cheek.

  15. Birdseed says:
    October 22, 2008 at 5:07 pm

    That’s interesting. I was trying to use Myspace’s internal search engine, maybe it’s set up differently for different countries?

Comments are closed.

Wayne Marshall is an ethno/musicologist by training, a technomusicologist by calling, and an erstwhile blogger/DJ.

Here you’ll find lots of thoughts about music, writing about music, even music about music.

Holler at a scholar:
wayne at wayneandwax dot com

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