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¿Sueños de Jerkbow?

March 25, 2010
15 Comments

Sometimes it really does feel like I’m in Oz, some Wizard behind a curtain producing lifelike YouTubes of my swirling musical obsessions — or like that cartoon kid Simon for whom the things he drew came true

¡ via via via con dios !

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Tags: dance, DR, hip-hop, internet, jerkin, nation, race, reggaeton, remix, video, youth

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15 thoughts on “¿Sueños de Jerkbow?”

  1. Birdseed says:
    March 25, 2010 at 11:02 am

    Ace! Do my ears decieve me, or is one bit of this on a (very) pared down version of the Bam Bam riddim?

  2. wayneandwax says:
    March 25, 2010 at 11:06 am

    Yeah, you’re hearing Bam Bam in there, as filtered through 15 years of Playero-esque tinkering with it in PR and the DR. Those Bam Bam bits alternating with the jerk/NewBoyz samples (which are themselves subject to reggaeton’s sample-version logic) are the current sound of Dominican dembow. See, e.g., “Pepe” or any of the mixes by DJ Scuff.

  3. Birdseed says:
    March 25, 2010 at 11:26 am

    And the Jerk samples are themselves some sort of clave, via “Wait (The Whisper Song)” and crunk? Whoa, this stuff is historical-conceptual-incestuous on so many levels.

  4. wayneandwax says:
    March 25, 2010 at 11:36 am

    another crunk genealogy

  5. Bendude says:
    March 25, 2010 at 8:36 pm

    I’ve told you ;)

  6. Deepak says:
    March 30, 2010 at 10:52 am

    Are they saying “soy un mama clítoris”? and ” es que los condones no me quedan cocolos”? That’s…a bit on the wilder side of things compared to Pepe and some of the others. The production reminded me of the old underground videos, except the storyline is, well what storyline?

    It made me look for one of those from an earlier era.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4rYeN9pTIs&feature=related

  7. wayneandwax says:
    March 30, 2010 at 11:16 am

    Your ears, Deepak, are sin duda much better than mine for picking out these lyrical, um, intricacies. What you observe is consistent with Raquel’s take (via email):

    The jerkbow song is as outrageous as any of the dirtiest during the censorship debate heydays! And then little boys perreando with the older girls (women!?) amidst all the references to hard dicks and sucking ass… wow! I’m just waiting for the next moral panic.

    We’ll see whether/when that panic ever arrives. Curious in a way, to see this sort of thing surface again. Then again, with global publishing available to teenagers at the click of a button, is it any surprise that such sophomoric content would make its way to such accessible channels? Will we all adjust our norms in turn? Have we already?

    As for the musical similarities, I too really love the way the alternation between the jerkin samples and the classic dancehall/reggaeton bits harken back to the “underground” days myself! In some sense, visible/audible as “Jerkbow” is, it’s still pretty undeniably “underground” in its ways.

  8. Deepak says:
    March 31, 2010 at 8:11 pm

    Wayne, I’m not sure if this would qualify as an inverted facsimile of the jerkbow samples you provided (assuming that boricua underground has an influence in jerkbow’s visual and musical style) but I thought you would be interested in seeing it: bachateo paródico boricua. From Ponce—the land of Héctor Lavoe— with love.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x_TSsc26z4

  9. wayneandwax says:
    April 1, 2010 at 8:44 am

    Wow! I don’t really know quite what to make of that or how to compare it to jerkbow. For all its humor, it definitely comes across as a heartfelt, faithful, and spot-on interpretation of bachata. I may be missing lots of cues, but I don’t quite hear how this interweaves PR and “non-PR” musical sources in quite the same way as the jerkbow stuff. But thx for bringing to my attn!

  10. Birdseed says:
    April 7, 2010 at 12:08 pm

    So how big is Jerk in Panama anyway? Also eg. this:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRwaHkvcZEg

  11. wayneandwax says:
    April 7, 2010 at 12:19 pm

    Thanks for that, Birdseed, which led me to this one too —

    It’s pretty fascinating to see how the “You’re a Jerk” song & video have both become (re)fashionable texts for expressing a certain cosmo cool in places like Panama and Dominican Republic (from which the initial videos I posted above issue).

    As far as the popularity of jerk in Panama, it’s a good question. I have no idea. I don’t even know to what extent it’s integrated into hip-hop practice generally vs. something seen as its own phenomenon, embraced by kids from outside, say, the established hip-hop communities in Panama. (Same questions go for DR, incidentally.)

  12. carmen says:
    April 22, 2010 at 2:22 pm

    hmm,, http://www.mediafire.com/?ukuzmeyzjin

  13. wayneandwax says:
    April 23, 2010 at 1:52 pm

    Nice one, Carmen! Thanks for sharing. Funny, I was just checking some Jamaican jerk (the terminological confusion cracks me up) yesterday c/o —
    http://brukmagazine.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/the-grass-is-always-greener/

    It’s not too surprising to hear JA artists jump on jerkin given that dancehall kids are always up on the latest hip-hop hype. I’m hoping to hear a little more in the jerkbow vein from Jamaica, however — something that seeks to merge jerkin and dancehall more than just rap inna patois on some (“tiefed”) jerky beats. Do let me know if you run across anything like that!

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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.

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wayne at wayneandwax dot com

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