like the moon
In October, I spoke to Rolling Stone (always wanted to say that!) about how, in their words, “reggaeton, dancehall, baile funk, afrobeats and other diasporic styles are mixing faster than ever — without much help from the U.S. music industry.” The topic has been a sustained thesis on this blog and in my work, of […]
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 →Next week I begin teaching my second course at MIT. It’s a new syllabus, though it draws on certain materials I’ve used before. In contrast to previous offerings, however, this will be the first time I teach a class with a primary focus on reggae outside of Jamaica — on what I’m calling here “global […]
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 →Since I’m in a syllabus sharing mood, I figured I should finally get around to posting the one I put together in Spring 2008 for a course on “Global Hip-hop.” A series of case studies examining how hip-hop travels outside the US, what it carries with it, and how people adapt its forms to their […]
Read More →Afropop Worldwide has a new program, airing currently on terrestrial radio in the US (and soon to appear online as streamable audio), which focuses on a subject near&dear to the heart of this blog: world music 2.0, aka nu-whirled music, aka global ghettotech. Or as they put it — Afropop Worldwide takes us into the […]
Read More →pa que tu lo sepa / pero lo sabía If you haven’t heard it yet, I want to recommend that you check out Afropop’s recent show re: reggaeton, Reggaeton Roundup: New Moves in Latin Youth Music. Here’s their blurb — When Daddy Yankee released his hit single “Gasolina” in 2005, nobody suspected what was about […]
Read More →A couple weeks ago, a bunch of Boston’s “baile funk” enthusiasts were assembled by the um-and-only Gregzinho — who, incidentally, is our guest tonight at Beat Research! — to watch a couple DVDs showing different sides of the carioca scene: DJ Cabide’s self-produced “national” and “international” DVDs (which were both great & grainy), and the […]
Read More →if Cabide DJ were your lunch lady… do bem™ – Suco de Laranja 100% fruta (MPC de torradas) from do bem on Vimeo.
Read More →I promised to post about “raveyton” a long time ago, and twice. A recent ghettobassquake post serves as a fine reminder. Noting that reggaeton synths have been “sliding into more Trancedelic wave forms,” Sñr Vamanos acknowledges that “[d]ramatic synths have been there for a while.” Sin duda! Working in an utterly omnivorous genre, reggaeton producers […]
Read More →The Best Recordings of 2008: Sasha Frere-Jones: Online Only: The New Yorker i <3 SFJ for sentences like this — "The song is rooted in the jiggling rhythms of James Brown, the motherlode for sampling producers from the eighties, and now entirely irrelevant to any rap being made in New York, Atlanta, Rio, or Miami." […]
Read More →EBONYJET | Whose Tube: Doing For Self or The Cyberground Railroad: Part 2 "We are taking this cyberground railroad to new celebrity, much like our cousins worldwide. Youtube has become a place to 'get a rep,' for some to use as a stepping-stone to other things. But for some, and maybe most of us, it […]
Read More →Cabide DJ has landed. He’s here in Massachusetts. Met the man last night, who blessed me with a couple of those lovely shrink-wrapped CD-Rs so common in Rio. Don’t know bout you, but i CAN”T WAIT FOR SOME LIVE MPC COM NARIZ ACTION!!!11!!1 As Gregzinho details, you can catch Cabide at all sorts of venues […]
Read More →MySpace.com – Lyndon Livingstone aka STONEZ – Port-of-Spain – Electronica / House / Club – www.myspace.com/lyndonlivingstone housey-trancey T&T producer — check the trance mix of collie buds's "come around" !! (thx, brian) (tags: trinidad myspace trance techno house soca reggae remix) montag: Musique pour bébés this page links to some raymond scott audio i posted […]
Read More →Great bailes of fire! Watch Cabide DJ rock the sampler de fogo — Can you imagine how that machine would go over in Jamaica? If all works out in the forbidding world of international travel, Cabide will be touring the US this fall, including stops at such Boston-area bastions of Brazil as Club Lido and […]
Read More →Banned in the U.S.A. (Almost) – washingtonpost.com “What is so unspeakably wrong with saying that justice, secularism, tolerance and equality of citizens — rather than privileges granted on the basis of religion — should be among the values of a state?” (tags: book op-ed middleeast religion government politricks israel palestine censorship) THE VICE GUIDE TO […]
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. […]
Read More →A Backlash? – New York Times race-based feelings about the dem candidates, post-race-card BS :: this chart speaks volumes (tags: race election08 chart obama clinton nyt) El Nuevo Día – Todo sobre la leche felix jimenez on lipstick, leche, and the war in iraq (tags: spanish op-ed cultcrit war iraq puertorico) YouTube – An Interview […]
Read More →Soca Mafia in Trinidad and Tobago – Reality or myth? :: ttgapers.com re: payola in T&T (tags: trinidad soca payola industry) The House the Kids Built: The Gay Black Imprint on American Dance Music, by Anthony Thomas “The following article was originally published in the US magazine Out/Look in 1989, and looks at house music’s […]
Read More →Beat Diaspora: Beats, Buses, Bricks: Unlabeled: The Anonymous as Exotic in Presenting Proibidão greg scruggs examines the exotic-as-anonymous approach wrt “baile funk” c/o diplo & sublime frequencies (tags: funkcarioca rio brazil sublimefrequencies diplo representation rule#4080 critique academic blogpost) The Tecnobrega Business Model arising from Belém do Pará .: banco de cultura :. from ronaldo lemos […]
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