like the moon
thx again, lmgm Like I try to do with most fruits of my labors, I’m liberating some recent words of mine here (shhh!), composed last week for a relatively well-consulted (by music grad students?) music “dictionary.” It’s likely that none of you will read them otherwise, not that you’d necessarily want to. (I’ve received requests […]
Read More →Amazing how an Amazon link makes our book finally feel real. (Pre-orders in teh house!) And though they don’t have any imgs yet, I’m happy to report that I do, and — having lobbied HARD for this particular photo by Miguel Luciano to grace our cover — I’m thrilled to share it with y’all: On […]
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I’ve already discussed and DJ-demo’d the degree to which the Dem Bow riddim underpins the lion’s share of reggaeton tracks. But one remarkable part of the story I haven’t given much focus here is how “Dem Bow” the song — in particular, the chorus melody, but also the basic theme of the lyrics — has […]
Read More →You may have heard, somewhere in the background perhaps, that Muzak filed for bankruptcy. Here’s an MOR-perspective podcast about it, bordering on inanity — A better use of your time & in the pdf-blog spirit, here’s a musicological analysis, written 20 yrs ago (!) by me ol’ advisor — >> Radano, Ronald M. 1989. “Interpreting […]
Read More →photo by Brent Hagerman In the first comment on my Zunguzung Meme post, Droid asked the perfectly reasonable question, Is it possible that Zunguzung itself is an adaptation of someone else’s work? It’s something I’d been wondering myself, of course — for about as long as I’d been noting the melody’s long legs, really. In […]
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 →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 →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 →YouTubemusicology c/o Phillip Tagg — who adds — This video is part of the ongoing feature-film length “movie” project “Fernando the Flute – The Film of the Book of the Music”. To find out what the I-vi-ii/IV-V matrix might actually mean you will also need to view “Fernando Museme 3 Part 1” and Fernando Museme […]
Read More →Ubuweb is a deeeep archive of avant art, music, speech, etc. I spent some time today on Marshall McLuhan’s page, delighted to find his classic work (recently reissued) in audio collage form! Side A [audio:http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/mcluhan_marshall/Mcluhan-Marshall_The-Medium-Is-The-Massage_01.mp3] Side B [audio:http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/mcluhan_marshall/Mcluhan-Marshall_The-Medium-Is-The-Massage_02.mp3] a few rndm pull quotes, some sarcastically spoken — We shape our tools and thereafter our tools […]
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 →“Arab Money” may not have musical legs to stand on (remains to be seen — I think it’s still climbing up urban radio playlists), but it sure is the talk of the virtual water cooler. Most of my posts and comments on the song & its fallout have been distillations of email conversations with awesome […]
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 →The Duke U Press catalog for Spring 2009 is already out. Why should you be excited? See pg 1 —
Read More →Mixin’ It Up: Downtown | Discobelle.net thx to boima for pointing me to this — quite a mix — enjoy the minimal steez and that intro track/mix, despite some serious schizophonia, works remarkably well :: ethno techno sez wha? thought so. (tags: minimal techno mix DJ mp3blog funkcarioca) FINAL REPORT | DIGITAL YOUTH RESEARCH "Social […]
Read More →When I wrote about Ne-Yo’s “Miss Independent” last week, I mostly wanted to talk about timbre — the effervesynths that seem to give it so much of its tingly, zeitgeisty affect. But I did find myself discussing things like form and rhythm and harmony too. Actually, I pretty much passed on any real harmonic analysis, […]
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 […]
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