like the moon
my friend alex, sporting a shirt made special for him in Paris’s 11th & inspired by this guy (see e.g.) In yesterday’s re-post of a review, you might have caught the following barb-backed big-up: Ayobaness! continues a line of releases from Outhere portraying African popular music that is, you know, actually popular (not just what […]
Read More →As some readers of both this blog and The Wire might have noticed, I’ve started to contribute now and then to their reviews section. As per my usual practice, I’ll be reprinting the reviews here on the blog, once they’ve enjoyed their print run, usually offering something of a “director’s cut” (more words! glorious words!), […]
Read More →Munchi follows up his moombahton splurge with some flashbacks — i totally forgot to send you some tracks i worked on in late 2009 that were bubbling but influenced by dominican music. like perico ripiao, bachata or dominican dembow. i had these finished but i was working on a whole concept thing there. Munchi – […]
Read More →The students in Elizabeth Stark‘s class at Yale this semester, “Intellectual Property in the Digital Age,” have put together a wonderful 24-minute documentary on “borrowing culture in the remix age,” including some really smart, confident, eloquent, and creative people (though I’d have liked to see some browner faces in the mix). Anyway, do check it […]
Read More →I’ve been trying to get Dave Tompkins to come do a reading in town this spring from his much anticipated and well-worth-waiting-for book, How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop (Stop Smiling 2010). An afternoon at MIT followed by a night of vocoder-animated Beat Research seemed pretty apropos, […]
Read More →Squaring unprecedented opportunities for music distro, sobering visualizations, and tweets for mpfrees asks for tricky math. I’m not sure we yet have the tools or the data. But we get more of each every day. It seems safe to say that the explosion of online tools for distributing music, whether for a fee or free, […]
Read More →Tomorrow I’ll be joining the fine folks from the Music and Sound Studies Colloquium Series at the University of Minnesota to talk about the synaesthetic publics addressing each other via skinny jeans, electronic dance beats, and wonky shuffle steps. I’m pasting the title and abstract below. As you can see, I’m flogging some familiar, but […]
Read More →No, this post is not principally asking about things I should go see at SXSW next week, though I am eager to know about promising parties and awesome acts to catch. Holler if you’re gonna be in town or have a tip. (I can safely predict I’ll be unable to avoid the Tormenta Tropical tractor […]
Read More →Mil gracias a Marisol LeBron, who not only first brought to my attn the wonderful nueva-media phenom of “Watagatapitusberry,” but who has offered some interesting thoughts on its homosocial joi de vivre (check her initial round-up of home videos) and has kept up on the latest developments around the song. Most recently, the launch of […]
Read More →The latest Woofah — a UK-based magazine covering the latest and greatest in bass culture — is finally out, and it’s a big, glossy whopper of an issue. What’s more, yours truly has a thinky-piece in it exploring the fraught relationship between Afrofuturist reggae musicians and the Rastas-in-Space projected by Hollywood films and sci-fi authors […]
Read More →awesome img grab via promo materials for a similarly titled music conf also this week I’m honored to announce that I’ll be keynoting this Saturday’s Columbia Music Scholarship Conference. The conference theme is near and dear to my heart & work: “Music and Money: Examining Value in Music.” The relationship between money and value is […]
Read More →[Here’s another Riddim Method re-post, featuring a couple mashups which I made all by myself (with the help of Kazaa and Ableton). It attempts to embrace a “riddim method” approach to music blogging — to focus more on musical texts that say things about music than wordy texts. I liked the playfulness and directness, as […]
Read More →Next Tuesday (Feb 2) will be the initial meeting of the first class I’m teaching at MIT. I’m excited about the course, a new one, which invites students to read along with me and collectively investigate what I’ve been calling music industry — that is, a broader understanding of musically-propelled cultural practice than something like […]
Read More →I’ve been working on a talk/chapter called “Skinny Jeans and Fruity Loops” and while part of that has involved tracking floggers and tecktonik across Latin America, another part has required that I dig into LA’s similarly day-glo/geeky youthtube dance scene: i.e., jerkin. More on all of this research later. Meantime, I just want to share […]
Read More →Ah, music (departments). Here’s an excerpt from an email I received this week from the academic administrator in my dept here at MIT (which, in case you didn’t know, is Foreign Languages & Literatures, not, as some might assume, Music & Theater Arts): In order to justify [cross-listing your course] to the Music Faculty, they […]
Read More →photo by jake walters, via the wire As the treble/bass culcha conversation continues here and there, we keep coming around to the words & work of Kode9 / Steve Goodman. It became increasingly clear, esp as we wait for his book to come out (yo MIT Press, get at a Fellow!), that I should ask […]
Read More →I’m in the process of working up a short essay on the topic of “treble culture” for a volume on “mobile music.” I’m hoping that some of my awesome readers/interlocutors might lend me a hand (and/or ear). There are two main areas in which I am interested: 1) the rise of “treble culture” and the […]
Read More →Last night at Beat Research the employees of Cambridge-based video game makers Harmonix swarmed the E Room with their friends, their gadgets, and their various musical side projects. They put on quite a show, and to a packed house! Video killed the radio star, but Rock Band might make some rock stars yet. Harmonix is […]
Read More →This spring, after Nettle’s Boston visit, an ol’ fan of /Rupture and the Toneburst Collective told me that she still had a copy of a vintage /Rupture mixtape. On cassette! You know, from back when “mixtapes” were actually tapes. I borrowed it and digitized it and emailed it to Jace. I also asked if I […]
Read More →As many of you may have heard, the trial concluded on Friday with the absurd award of $675k in statutory damages to the RIAA — in other words, Joel Tenenbaum, a 25 year old physics grad student, was found liable, at the whopping cost of $22,500 each, for the willful infringement of the copyrights to […]
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