like the moon
Dancehall.mobi has the scoop today on a lawsuit instigated by producer Dave Kelly — In Jamaican dancehall culture, “re-licking” a riddim has undoubtedly been a way of life. Almost monthly there seems to be a remake of a dancehall, reggae or rocksteady riddim that originated anywhere from just a few years ago to decades ago, […]
Read More →Speaking of the difference between hip-hop and reggaeton, there’s been a heated discussion over at Raquel’s reggaetonica, redrawing yet again the lines in the sand between the two genres and rehashing lots of tropes about Puerto Rico, blackness, hip-hop, and so on. The debate was initiated by a polemic published last fall by a god […]
Read More →from a blog and forthcoming documentary re: “How rapid immigration from Africa and the Caribbean is transforming the African American narrative” (via) — The Neo African Americans @ Yahoo! Video
Read More →in under 14 seconds, by beatbox, c/o Vico C —
Read More →Since the conversation continues about trad v modern in African music, and since we read something germane about it for class yesterday, and since I’m still tryna maintain that pdf-blog grind, I thought I’d take the opportunity to share another: >> Monson, Ingrid. “Riffs, Repetition, and Theories of Globalization.” Ethnomusicology 43, no. 1 (1999): 31-65. […]
Read More →I agree with Sharon and Boima, searching for authenticity is a good way to miss the forest for the trees. In other words, authenticity is so vague. Or as I’ve put it elsewhere (see note #2), there’s no there there. Back to forests and trees. In the revised version of that globalization theory classic, “Disjuncture […]
Read More →It’s been a long time since I’ve shared a mix with y’all (not incl that brief bit for Blogariddims 50). No good reason for that. I’ve been DJing every Monday night at Beat Research and I’ve got as many ideas for thematic, quasi-pedagogical mixes as ever. Blame time (or lack thereof). The time it takes […]
Read More →“Martin Luther King walked so that Barack Obama could run,” said one boy. “Barack Obama ran,” said another, “so that all children could fly.” — Harper’s Weekly Review, 20 Jan 2007 (quoting Jeezy!) Today, we hold heads high, jump for joy, savor this historic, hopeful moment. Tomorrow, noses to the grind. Support and criticize. We […]
Read More →photo by zoomar Props to Emynd and Bo Bliz for holding it down over at Crossfaded Bacon, where they’ve been posting some great tracks (nh4nr) — with an occasional soft spot for a bunch of R&B too. Yesterday, Bo Bliz posted re: Stevie Wonder’s new song (a track for Obama’s inaugural soundtrack). Perhaps surprisingly, at […]
Read More →Rich Boy’s “Drop” — particularly the instrumental — struck me immediately, for a few reasons, as an obvious but original nod to Bangladesh’s juggernaut beat for “A Milli,” which is, as SFJ memorably describes it — both heavy and barely there, built from a sub-bass kick, a thin snare, and synthetic handclaps, none of which […]
Read More →Since Canyon is bugging me to follow thru on my promises to make pdfs the new mp3s, and b/c Chief Boima put up a provocative post that inspired me to upload a couple of my favorite ethnomusicological articles about African music, I figured I should share them here too. Here’s what I wrote on Boima’s […]
Read More →I still haven’t been able to send him those guitars, but Red Pepper has the Ruff Riddims studio up and running (and blogging!) — and it’s not like there aren’t guitars or guitarists in Botswana. Indeed, the first track I’ve heard out of the studio, “Dumelang” by Skeat (pronounced Skee-tee), is an ebullient bit of […]
Read More →My fellowship at Brandeis runs out at the end of this semester, and right now it’s pretty unclear where I’ll be teaching come fall — or whether I’ll have a job at all. Like many institutions, Brandeis was hit hard by the Wall St credit collapse (suffering an endowment loss in the double digits), and […]
Read More →First things first, here’s a biographical essay about Kool Herc* I wrote (almost 3 years ago!). I don’t have a good excuse for posting it so late, but I do have a good reason for being able to post it on my site at all: because I made sure I could. In other words, when […]
Read More →Former wunderkind hip-hop critic and now English prof at Vassar, Hua Hsu asks some great questions in his hot-off-the-press Atlantic cover story, itself a question, “The End of White America?” — What will it mean to be white after “whiteness” no longer defines the mainstream? Will anyone mourn the end of white America? I especially […]
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