like the moon
I was delighted to get an email last week from a former student, Sophie Weiner, who was working on a piece for the Village Voice about the Brooklyn Folk Festival. She contacted me because she was seeking a quotation about why rap could be considered a form or modern folk music, and she thought, rightly, […]
Read More →What can I say? It’s been a chockfull summer. Mostly with farming and teaching, but also, I’m happy to note, with writing and talking about music as well. And while I’ve found the time to do some “dancing about architecture,” I’m afraid I’ve been a little slack when it comes to linking/re-posting it here. So […]
Read More →Thanks to all for passing around the raggamuffin hip-hop articles & mix. As it happens, the cosmos smiled on our cross-platform publication by arranging for a rather resonant listicle to appear at the bredrin-blog LargeUp just the next day: a Toppa Top 10 devoted to “Raggamuffin Gangster Rap“! West Coast examples of raggamuffin rap only […]
Read More →I’m thrilled to report that tomorrow morning I’m headed back to Jamaica for the first time in a couple years. It’ll also be the first time in a decade for Rebecca, and the very first time for Nico and Charlie. I can’t describe how excited I am to see their faces upon having a cold […]
Read More →A little late to report this here, but two weeks ago FACT Mag ran an interview with Mike Paradinas, aka µ-ziq, perhaps better known these days as the head of Planet Mu Records. FACT describes the label so — Initially serving as an outlet for the IDM scene and its offspring, the label has since […]
Read More →Here is the syllabus for a new course I’m teaching this spring at the Big H. It’s the culmination of a few years of piqued curiosity about “public” as term and concept, noun and adjective. As happy as teaching technomusicology made me, this sort of course — an intense, focused series of readings on a […]
Read More →Not long after my last post went public, a savvy searcher quickly proved that what I thought was fairly ungooglable (at least without knowing Arabic) was, in fact, waiting for me on eBay. And beyond simply locating & IDing the music/CD in question, this kind commenter hit Arabkidsmusic paydirt. First, I want to take back […]
Read More →For this week’s “Back Talk” — the Q&A that runs on the back page of the Phoenix — I had the pleasure to pose a few questions to Nancy Baym, a scholar who’s work (& Twitter feed) I’ve been following for a few, especially as my own research turns more to questions of music “industry” […]
Read More →How many times do we need to be SoundClowned before we get wise? Back in late December, tellingly/suspiciously right in the midst of the holiday vacation lull, SoundCloud started sending out the same sort of automated take-down notices to its users that YouTube has been using for years. Mix-style DJs and remix producers found certain […]
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 →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 →I noted on Twitter the other day that one reason it was taking me so long to finish up the previous post is that “darts are harder to throw than confetti.” It’s important to critique, at least if we want things to be better, but I also always try to remind myself that there are […]
Read More →a once-obscure music that enjoyed a fanatic embrace in the _______ slums of _______ has become a full-fledged global occasion – This could be the mantra of global ghettotech. Could hardly have written it better myself. But I didn’t. Nor was it written, despite what might be its commonplace connotations, about reggae, or funk carioca, […]
Read More →first page of returns for “world music” on google images — first page of returns for “global ghettotech” on google images — The release of Lamin’s EP leads me to think about all sorts of things, stubbornly but slipperily inserting itself into ongoing dialogues in my head and in the worlds of music discourse in […]
Read More →Since my first trip to Mexico City, I’ve been struck by graffiti in DF — the amount, the quality, the style. From everyday tags to stencil ads, grand pieces to snarky jests, locally steeped and globally conversant, the ubiquity and diversity of graffiti in DF is quite stunning, as a few flicks from last week […]
Read More →Next week’s Postopolis! DF happening is shaping up to be super stimulating and utterly exhausting. The schedule has been posted, and it boasts an array of guests that range from art/design-world titans to a dude who’s been diving DF sewers for three decades, and pretty much everything between and beyond. The diversity of participants is […]
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 →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 →Ok, back to reggaeton. So, once again, back to questions of vitality and vocality. Or, how it’s doing and for whom & from whence it speaks. one way of looking at the “reggaeton” “crash” (and recovery?) I was tickled to see Birdseed name reggaeton genre of the year for 2009, fully contra Gavin’s provocative post […]
Read More →If you enjoyed the funkcarioca fingersandwiches I shared a while back, you’ll probably also get a kick out of Joao Brasil‘s latest commercial for Do Bem bebidas, riffing on the plinky-plink shuffle of tecnobrega: h/t kiddid
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