like the moon
Late last week I came across an entertaining collection of Mexican pro-w33d songs. Among them was a narcocorrido by El Tigrilla Palma entitled El Rey de la Kush (take that, Dre!). Enjoying the juxtaposition between traditional musical style and utterly contemporary slanguage / thematics, I couldn’t help tweeting that it seemed “so gangsta” in its […]
Read More →How time flies, even as it inches along — January 17, 2008 January 17, 2009 January 17. 2010 January 17, 2011
Read More →Since we’re back to the topic of the wide and contested world of reggaeton, it felt fortuitous to find in my inbox this morning a link to a new interview with Renato, Panamanian pioneer of reggae en español. With the effective prodding of Peter Szok, a history professor from Texas, Renato helps to further flesh […]
Read More →If I were writing my mega-essay on reggaeton today, I’d want to make a lot more space for the Dominican Republic’s local take on the genre. Generally referred to as dembow (rather than reggaeton) — or dembow dominicano, to signal a certain national(istic) distinction — the Dominican artists and producers working in the style essentially […]
Read More →All right, enough already with the sad-sacky bald-faced new year’s greetings; instead, here are some pictorial highlights from the latter part of 2010, in reverse order to prevent early-onset SAD —
Read More →reeeeeeeboooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooot here’s to more joy than oy —
Read More →Notably — at least for this enthusiast of Jamaican culture bubbling through the American mainstream — to help stage Lil Wayne’s big comeback, producer Bangladesh contributed another a-milli-esque banger, in this case opting to deliciously substitute Harry Belafonte’s well-worn Jamaicanisms for Phife Dog’s more obscure ragga filigree — What’s funny — and telling, in a […]
Read More →Well, five years on and I’ve still yet to produce a follow-up to my woozy take on Xmas music. But since this appears to be the year when the world, ironically, finally caught up to screw, here’s ye olde Remix-mas pitched down a few — w&w, remix-mas (screwed) 43 min / 99 mb [audio:http://wayneandwax.com/wp/audio/remix-mas-screwed.mp3] Tis […]
Read More →My Tuesday lunch talk at the Berkman Center is now available for viewing/listening/downloading/etcccc And I’m happy to report that, in fine Berkman tradition, the talk has already been blogged by some very astute observers of digital/internet culture: Jillian York offers an affirming precis here David Weinberger, author of Everything is Miscellaneous, live-blogged the talk in […]
Read More →orthogonal image copied from some website or other I’ve been working on this monstruo post since last January, and hinting at it here and there, making it feel all the more urgent to finish though I haven’t had the time to tie it up. And yet, what has made finally publishing this post so hard […]
Read More →Sorry for the silence here, dear readers. Been a busy month of literal and figurative heavy-lifting. I hope to strike things up again very soon, especially after next Tuesday, my final presentation of the semester, about which I’m very excited. I’ll be appearing in the Berkman Center’s Tuesday lunch series to talk about the “unstable […]
Read More →Tomorrow, bright and early, I’ll be joining a panel of several esteemed colleagues to talk about “new media ecologies of world music” at the annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, which is taking place at the Wilshire Grand hotel in downtown Los Angeles. If you’re in the area and up for getting up so […]
Read More →I’m happy to announce that I recently joined the team of associate editors at JPMS, or the Journal for Popular Music Studies, which is the quarterly publishing venue of IASPM-US, or the United States branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. Now that I’ve got that mouthful out, let me tell […]
Read More →Lamin Fofana, who recently released an excellent EP, has collaborated with Erik Marika-Rich on a video for one of the tracks, “Happy 2010 // Dark Days Are Coming.” It’s a dramatic and harrowing interpretation of Lamin’s suggestive abstractions. Bloops and bleeps offering blank spaces to be filled — Lamin Fofana, “Happy 2010 // Dark Days […]
Read More →As sported/spotted in Global Reggae class last week — Jury’s still out on who that guy with the dreadlocks is. My student assumed it was Bob Marley. Now he knows better.
Read More →Last week a daily newspaper from Abu Dhabi, The National, published a piece I wrote about “nu world” music under the title “Sounds of the wide, wired world” (29 Oct 2010). As usual, while I think my editor — here, the mighty Dave Stelfox — did an utterly admirable job of making my prolix prose […]
Read More →How is it that it took until this past weekend for me to stumble upon* this utterly bizarre, Bill Laswell-produced, hip-hop-infused 1987 version of “Boops” by Sly and Robbie? Be sure to watch at least up to the eskimo kiss and cello duet — *thx to DJ C for a fun-filled afternoon of random riddim […]
Read More →Louis Chude-Sokei has just published one of the more textured and sympathetic accounts of Nigerian 419 scammers I’ve read to date. Touching on everything from e-waste to Nollywood, proposing a tongue-in-cheek anti-eco-tourism, and taking into its analysis the way that transnational hustler culture speaks through the (dated) language of hip-hop and dancehall, it’s an incisive […]
Read More →Yesterday, in a post about music and cellphones, Jace said something striking and funny and perfect — More is my favorite type of music, actually. Then comes 128kbps, one of my favorite musical genres. This reminded me that my favorite co-producer these days is without a doubt AVS Media Demo — (h/t who else but […]
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