{"id":601,"date":"2008-10-16T10:48:55","date_gmt":"2008-10-16T15:48:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/?p=601"},"modified":"2015-01-07T14:06:02","modified_gmt":"2015-01-07T18:06:02","slug":"just-may-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/?p=601","title":{"rendered":"Just May Be"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been on a serious YouTube grind over the last couple weeks, working up a couple papers\/talks on black digital youth culture. Check the waxtube<\/a> or my favorites<\/a> to sink into a pixelated dance trance.<\/p>\n

Gave one version of this black-digi-youf chat a couple weeks ago at Harvard, which thx to a little bird<\/s> tweet, led to an exchange with Miles Raymer<\/a> in this week’s Chicago Reader. Check it out!<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

I’m trying to work up a YouTube version of my ideas about YouTube culture for this weekend’s meeting of the American Studies Association. But, man, my iMovie skills are laughable (or maybe it’s just that iMovie is laughable?). At any rate, I’ll share it here if I succeed in making something worth putting up. It’s not like the chicken-noodle-soup kids are sweating the transitions, so why should I?<\/p>\n

To give a clue of where I’m headed, here’s my abstract for ASA, followed by five videos set to the DJ Nate track<\/a> that inspires my title (previously blogged here<\/a>), the illest juke waltz everrrr and a fairly abstract\/avant piece to propel so much funky movement —<\/p>\n

\nMay Be Sum Day: Online Video, Self-Representation, and Peer-to-Peer
\nMusic Industry<\/p>\n

The recent integration of online video and social networking sites has
\ncreated an unprecedented arena for cultural production, exchange, and
\ndebate. Of particular significance is the emergence of do-it-yourself,
\npeer-to-peer video culture, which now animates a substantial degree of
\nthe activity on such popular sites as YouTube, MySpace, and imeem. The
\nadvent of socially-networked sites for sharing video and music among
\npeers seems to have facilitated a veritable efflorescence of
\nAfrican-American regional dance scenes and interregional rivalries and
\nexchanges (asynchronous and online as well as realtime and
\nface-to-face). Chicago juke, Detroit jit, Bay Area hyphy, and Harlem’s
\n“Chicken-Noodle Soup” all represent vibrant sites of practice and
\npride at a grassroots level, while successful figures such as Soulja
\nBoy Tellem (author of the “Crank Dat” craze) embody a new set of
\nopportunities and shared cultural reference points for tech-savvy
\nteenagers.<\/p>\n

The vitality of these scenes seems downright infectious — to borrow a
\nweighted, racy term long associated with the circulation of
\nAfrican-American music culture — and as these homemade dance videos
\nfind themselves embedded not just on the MySpace pages of
\npractitioners’ local and regional “friends” but on hipster blogs from
\nBrooklyn to Paris, we behold well-worn patterns of production and
\nconsumption. Hence, issues around race and representation emerge as
\ncentral in any analysis of the cultural significance of DIY, p2p
\nonline video. These representations are, however, often
\nself-representations, crafted and curated by active agents of their
\nown online avatars. So although the ability for these cultural
\nproducts to circulate outside their spheres of production — a process
\ninherent to the promiscuity of digital files — might raise flags of
\nsorts, it remains significant that the tools of production and
\ndistribution alike are now in the hands of teenagers in Chicago and
\nthe Cayman Islands (to name a couple case studies this paper will
\nconsider), rather than, as in the past, middle-aged executives in Los
\nAngeles and New York. Thus, the phenomenon of widely-distributed (or,
\nin p2p parlance, “shared”) music video represents a crossroads not
\njust for _the_ music industry, but for music _industry_ itself — that
\nis, the cultural work that music does. As online video increasingly
\ndrives popular and grassroots music culture, perhaps once again we
\nmust reappraise music’s place in the social sensorium in the wake of
\nseemingly seismic techno-cultural shifts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Those last two are, in case you didn’t notice, pretty gay — raising yet another (familiar<\/a>) set of questions.<\/p>\n

Oh, and don’t miss these fragments of a footwork feature! (part 1<\/a> | part 2<\/a>)<\/p>\n

More soon —<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been on a serious YouTube grind over the last couple weeks, working up a couple papers\/talks on black digital youth culture. Check the waxtube or my favorites to sink into a pixelated dance trance. Gave one version of this black-digi-youf chat a couple weeks ago at Harvard, which thx to a little bird tweet, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[410,123,406,412,416,57,204,407],"class_list":["post-601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-af-am","tag-chicago","tag-dance","tag-internet","tag-juke","tag-race","tag-sexuality","tag-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=601"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8451,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601\/revisions\/8451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}