like the moon
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 →There’s an archived video of the panel I moderated last week during the Together fest. It begins with a six minute opening from me, then I introduce my esteemed co-panelists — Boima, Poirier, Ripley, Max, and Jesse — and we finally REALLY get into the convo about 10 minutes in. From there it’s a solid […]
Read More →Ok, y’all, the week of Together is finally here, and we couldn’t be more amped for Wednesday’s event: Do note that we’ve added another DJ/producer to the line up: Blk.Adonis has been our guest at Beat Research before, but given that he’s a great admirer of Rashad and has been working to work juke & […]
Read More →I’ll be in NYC this weekend participating in the annual EMP pop conference, always a lively gathering of people who not only care about music but care about finding the right words to talk about music. I’m pleased to be involved in two promising panels — a roundtable with the likes of Eddie Stats, DJ […]
Read More →Last month I spoke over Skype with Roifield Brown, a British-Jamaican producer working on a series of podcasts and a short film devoted to the international influence of Jamaica’s distinctive shapes and forms, or in his words: How Jamaica Conquered the World. It’s no doubt one of many many tributes to the likkle but tallawah […]
Read More →Ok, I promise to quit kvetching about SoundCloud soon enough, but the material just keeps piling up. So permit me one more for now, a little ludic repair, if you will, courtesy of Carl Craig, rightly revered innovator of Detroit techno’s so-called “second wave.” (Here’s a recent interview if you’ve got some catching up to […]
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 →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 →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 →Pacey Foster has a great post over at his blog detailing a recent discovery of — and creative engagement with — a 1914 book published by Vernon and Irene Castle, perhaps the premiere dancing couple in the pre-jazz age and crucial players in the formation of the “society” dance scene in NYC during the 1910s. […]
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 →There’s little I can add to all the tributes and reflections gumming up the web these days, but like so many others I feel compelled to say something. Inspired even. I found Andrew Sullivan’s and Jeff Chang’s posts pretty resonant, Jason King’s too, among others, and I’ve been particularly struck by all the MJ music […]
Read More →I couldn’t be more thrilled to announce this — At a time when the arts community at Brandeis is feeling rightly beleaguered, it brings me no little satisfaction to know that we will be putting on a rather art-ful residency later this month, sponsoring the US premiere of such an exciting, provocative, and relevant group […]
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 →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 →Inside Indonesia – Punks, rastas and headbangers: Bali's Generation X a short piece by emma baulch (who recently published a book on the subject) about popular music in contemporary bali, esp alternative, metal, and reggae :: "Although dominated by covers of Bob Marley songs, the Bali reggae scene is much less about the struggle for […]
Read More →The Elephants Child: ring ring ring rachel re: ring tones, txt speak, & refurb'd nokia nat'lism (tags: cellphones video global nation language blogpost) ffm713's blog – FFM presents The Pen & Pixel Madhouse – Skyrock.com 73 pages of pen&pixel rap album covers (via noz) (tags: hip-hop art design album gangsta) Palingenetic ultranationalism – Wikipedia, the […]
Read More →wrt that mike davis piece i&i linkthink’d yesterday, my fren ben, who knows a thing or two about climate science, offers a (slightly) more upbeat, measured take — interesting. i admit that i’m surprised to hear that the London Society is ready to put the golden spike on the anthropocene. seems to me that geological […]
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