like the moon
I’ve already fallen behind on my goal of reblogging our ’03 Jamaica Blog in sync with this year’s calendar. But since I don’t plan on re-running every single post (and since you can still see them here), I haven’t built up too huge a queue yet. Speaking of queues, the following re-post is one of […]
Read More →This week at Beat Research — now every TUESDAY at Good Life in downtown Boston — we’re enthused to host none other than NYC-based Dutty bredrin (and local alumnus!), Atropolis. Hailing from / representing Queens, Atropolis co-hosts regular parties (and expeditions) as part of Cumba Mela while pumping out remixes that get to the essence […]
Read More →First, tonight’s (TUESDAY’S) Beat Research is a special session featuring three button-pushing beatsmiths: Hailing from Toronto, Doldrums comes to town during a tour taking him around the US and over to Europe. Omnivorous in his sampling, and known to release VHS-only mixtapes, Doldrums — who often adds video collage and his own voice to the […]
Read More →Despite my relative silence here this summer — about which, more soon — big tings a gwaan, especially as the fall semester rolls around. First up, I’m thrilled to report that I leave today for Rotterdam, my first visit to Holland / the Netherlands! I’m fortunate to have been invited to participate in a conference […]
Read More →Louis Chude-Sokei has just published one of the more textured and sympathetic accounts of Nigerian 419 scammers I’ve read to date. Touching on everything from e-waste to Nollywood, proposing a tongue-in-cheek anti-eco-tourism, and taking into its analysis the way that transnational hustler culture speaks through the (dated) language of hip-hop and dancehall, it’s an incisive […]
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 →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 →When Guillaume was here last week, we discovered in conversation that we both had long been sitting on posts that centered on the question of Africanness and UK funky. I joked that we should both finally get around to finishing these posts and drop them on the same day, causing a ruckus on the ol’ […]
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 →Under the Musical Spell of the Sonidero; Mexican D.J.’s Relay Messages, on Dance Floor and to the Homeland – New York Times on the NYC-mexico sonidero circuit — cumbia shoutouts as greeting cards ! (tags: nyt newyork mexico cumbia soundsystem sonidero transnationalism latinamerica) From VOICES: The Sonideros of Mexican Youth Dances abstract & photos of […]
Read More →Something is poppin’ in the state of Denmark. Troels (of Firehouse Sound) recently hipped me(space) to Lady Smita, a Roxanne Shante song-embedding dancehall diva who makes punaany-power traxx with digital Danish producers like Maffi, uses Boba Fett for her profile pic, and starts her heroes list like so — Which made me think: the MIA […]
Read More →Today the NYT reports that the Federal Trade Commission is not happy about the recent spate of horror films, some of which use torture as a central feature. Elsewhere, Slavoj Zizek argues that most of us can imagine a singular situation in which we might resort to torture — to save a loved one from […]
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