like the moon
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 →There is much that might be said about why urban Africans in the Northern Rhodesia of the late 1930s should have been so interested in ball- room dancing and formal evening wear. But the Rhodes-Livingstone anthro- pologists were right about at least one thing: when urban Africans seized so eagerly on European cultural forms, they […]
Read More →Wooster Collective: Filippo Minelli's "Contradictions" "what i want to do by writing the names of anything connected with the 2.0 life we are living in the slums of the third world is to point out the gap between the reality we still live in and the ephemeral world of technologies." (tags: art web2.0 critique graffiti […]
Read More →I first stumbled upon Aaron Bady’s blog, zunguzungu, when searching some keywords along the nationalism / imperialism axis. And though lots of his posts have provoked my imagination, from incisive readings of The Wire and The Office to shock’n’awe as modern-day lynching, it was his blog’s title — for obv reasons, if you’re familiar with […]
Read More →The Adventures Of Soul Clap Podcast Episode 42: Eddie Neal Brings It Back To 88 | The Soul Clap Blog – House. Techno. Dance. Music. Boston. a little local DJ history (and a mix!) c/o the Soul Clap dudes & Eddie Neal :: pull quote — 'Back then [late 70s / early 80s] the Boston […]
Read More →Changed my wordpress password over the weekend, which threw off my semi-automatic delicious blogging (aka, linkthink). So here’s a semi-manual collection of yesterday’s links — LRB · Slavoj Žižek: Use Your Illusions looks like zizek caught the hope (kinda); here is a sneeze: “Nothing was decided with Obama’s victory, but it widens our freedom and […]
Read More →Mute magazine – Culture and politics after the net | I Like Listening to Awesome Tapes from Africa nice conversation about african music, "world music," and new circulations thereof, featuring andy moor, other members of the ex, and /rupture (h/t wordthecat) :: my favorite sentence — "It's not fusion, it's collaboration." (tags: internet worldmusic africa […]
Read More →1) In Obama’s speech last night, he reached out to those who voted against him and did so in an utterly eloquent, firm, and — to my ears — somewhat sly manner: To those Americans whose support I have yet to earn — I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, […]
Read More →Confessions of an Aca/Fan: How We Help Spread Political Messages… 'Four years ago, the activists were using the term, "viral media," and I suppose they still are. If I had my way, the term and "memes" along with it would be retired from our vocabulary of talking about how media circulates. There's something sick and […]
Read More →Beat happening – The National Newspaper jace offers less a review than an extended essay on the sounds, significations, & marketing of a west african / "islamic" hip-hop comp: "Populist, ecumenical, Muslim, fun: Many Lessons is good, right? Yes. … None of this diminishes the fact that the label releasing Many Lessons (Piranha) is using […]
Read More →The Elephants Child: ghetto/slum/shanty/bario/hood/favela great post by rachel (as usual) wrt the use of 'ghetto' wrt africa and the depiction thereof in recent film(s) :: "Ok so I'm super amused by a dutch (ngo?) called ghettoradio which posts videos and radio from the 'ghettos' of Africa. Theres something really problematic about what they are doing, […]
Read More →The Elephants Child: SeneRap, Rap Galsene : Hip Hop SeneGal rachel makes an interesting point about parallel discussions happening in other places on the network — "It's really fun when I find discussions in the comments on various African music sites engaging similar questions as the folks at wayneandwax.com and dutty artz." :: this needn't […]
Read More →Gambit Weekly : Sissy Strut : August 12, 2008 nice piece on "sissy bounce" in new orleans (tags: neworleans bounce hip-hop queer homophobia sexuality journalism) Generational Myth – ChronicleReview.com siva takes on the myth of all "kids these days" being "digital natives" fluent in info/communication technologies (as well as the general problem of generalizing and […]
Read More →This "Paper Planes" Thing is Way Out Of Control | RapidShare | Blogs | Vibe.com all of a sudden, it seems, "paper planes" has gone downright viral :: whattaya know? (tags: remix hip-hop MIA audio blogpost) The Jamaica Star :: Entertainment :: Overseas party link :: March 19, 2008 "While the major summer events are […]
Read More →Welcome To ‘The Disco’: Music As Torture – CommonDreams.org “…Haj Ali, the hooded man in the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs, told of being stripped, handcuffed and forced to listen to a looped sample of Babylon, at a volume so high he feared that his head would burst.” (via caro) :: Babylon, eh? you don’t say […]
Read More →In my sha3bi searches last night I came across all kinds of odd & awesome stuff. And I don’t say ‘odd’ as an uninformed outsider (though I am one, relatively speaking), but b/c some of the cha3bi vids one finds are truly bizarre mashups of footage ranging from what looks like a Francophone African music […]
Read More →For really tho, how impossible can it be to send a guitar to Botswana? Post Office says it’s too big for them to ship; UPS wants to charge me more than the thing is worth; and my most recent attempts to send it as cargo via airline (as recommended by my fren there) have been […]
Read More →Musical Tourism, Ethical Consumption and other blog resonances pinging through my mind « UNFASHIONABLY LATE “We try to shuck our inherited identity as tourists or consumers or Orientalists or neocolonialists, and build new identities in their places … that will assure us that our musical choices match up with our liberal politics” (tags: worldmusic global […]
Read More →Although my research/interests often turn to (trans)nationalism, lately I’ve been thinking less about nationhood and more about neighborhood — not in terms of an actual space or place (though that’s part of it), but something more akin to neighborliness, to being a good neighbor, to finding an ethics of neighborhood in an intensively globalized/mediated era. […]
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