new school princes of Moroccan beats, Fnaïre, make what they call ‘traditional rap’. until hearing their new album, Yed El Henna, i couldn’t get with Maghrebi hiphop — it always sounded like behind the times French rap or slightly more behind the times American rap. but Fnaïre is on it. The pan-Moroccan samples & structures sit inside the music in a comfortable way; the sound has become its own thing. Masala blogs em. check ‘Sah Raoui feat. Salah Edin.’ for the most successful gnawa-hiphop fusion tune i’ve ever heard (and it’s a genre i’m suspicious of!)
this tune, i can almost ID the sample/riff they are using. I have this music… somewhere.
for old-school Moroccan styles, the Orchestre de Tanger is giving a special NYC concert tomorrow. $35, ouch! thankfully, the virtuoso classical Andalusian music ensemble will give a FREE concert this Saturday, as part of the Mediterranean-themed Central Park Summerstage event. Also appearing at that, Hassan Hakmoun, a gnawa fusionist who’ve work i’ve never warmed up to.
producers from various European stations have been reaching out — as a result, my show, Mudd Up!, will be rebroadcast in Belgium, France, and Croatia! very exciting, the sound spreads, someone is listening amidst all that silence and static, details next week.
we did field recordings all around NYC yesterday, more on that soon
Maga Bo’s new videos are still being vivisected in the cutting room, but until then, here’s a mini-documentary he did between shoots, talking to Xuman of Pee Froiss and Keyti (Dakar All Stars, R.A.P.A.D.I.O.) about polyglot rap, cultural exchange, and more. Filmed on location in Dakar, Senegal, using Bo’s still digital camera!
I keep digging into Colombian music, and today’s find is exceptional – the source track for Timbaland’s ‘Get to Poppin‘ beat! MuddUp reader Tony IDed it awhile back, but nobody had the recording…
I’d forgotten that I was looking for it until I stumbled across this excellent Aspic records compilation, Colombia – La Ceiba.
Everything on the CD is as good as this (incluso mejor…) Booklet includes bilingual liner notes & lyrics, which i’ll share next week. As with the other Totó la Momposina-related song that Timbaland has used (La Curura sampled/rebranded into Indian Flute), the words to this one form deep folky poetry. A disfrutar!
Raquel Rivera’s Reggaetonica has been popping as of late (more bilingual blogs please). This post references recent waves of police violence in Puero Rico, linking to excellent new response songs by Calle 13, Welmo, and Julio Voltio. (I dropped the lyrically stunning Calle 13 one in my radio show last night, approx here.)
[Residente, Calle 13. note Basquiat tattoo!]
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if you harbor any doubts about David Banner’s complicated greatness, I suggest you read his Fader interview.
excerpt:
When people come to David Banner they want some pimpin, a little bit of violence, a little bit of God so they won’t feel bad about the pimpin and a little bit of revolution just because they know that that’s me. Past that motherfuckers don’t want shit else from David Banner. I tried to be creative, I tried to change music. Fuck that. We don’t even get the support from our own structures and the shit that we be around. So it’s like, we gotta do safe music, everybody wonder why people in the south do the type of the music they do, because ain’t nobody behind us. We don’t have that support that Eminem has, we don’t have that label support that Outkast has, and then on they last record Outkast didn’t get supported so how can we do something experimental when our label ain’t gonna push it on America? We can’t do what Eminem is doing, like if I had the support that Eminem had…shit I might mix some salsa music with some reggae music and throw some 808s in there, you never know what the fuck a nigga might do. And that’s what movies have done for me. I don’t wanna be David Banner all the fucking time. That’s depressing. With movies I could be somebody else.
a lot of heads know about this record. It’s been sampled quite a bit in underground circles, most recently by Shackleton. In our post 9-11 world, one can’t imagine a major label issuing a (great) compilation called Palestine: Music of the Intifada.
Yet in 1989 that’s exactly with Virgin Records did.
Liner notes are informative. “Not only does [the compilation] summarise Palestinian aspirations but also it reflects the radical social changes that are being brought about by the daily struggle against occupation.”
They translate the song title & explain: “From The Camp Is Born The Vision is an example of the rapidly changing position of women in society. The name of the group, ‘Sabaya al Intifada’ or ‘Young Women of the Uprising,’ for example, reflects the breakdown of restriction of women from the public life. The singing is itself a challenge, as the traditional Mowwal (or introductory solo vocals) is, for the first time, sung by a woman.”
Changing demands of geopolitical reality echo audibly in music.
“I love New York,” says my Brazilian friend as we drive into a promising and justifiably paranoid Sao Paolo night, “but every time I’m there I feel how money is strong. I come home thinking: I need to make more money.”
Right now in New York City, you hear the ominous snare-crack and tech-steppy dystopian synth melody of 50 Cent’s I Get Money booming out of cars, shops, cranked-up portable radios. “I get money” goes the main sample of Milk Dee, “money I got…” Even its percussion-only elements reference & reinforce the main theme: the beat is sampled from Cassidy’s I’m a Hustla. A few months ago the streets here were bumping with Swizz Beatz’ Money in the Bank and Straight to the Bank from the same 50 album.
[50 Cent – I Get Money video]
It makes sense that the current wave of New York rap hits are often about money, about banks. This is capitalism music. It’s difficult to live well in this city unless you have lots of money in the bank. Billowy folds of the European social state — free health care, reasonable rents, unemployment benefits, quality espresso for 1 dollar! — are starkly absent. These songs come from the speakers and you think: that’s what I’m thinking about too, money, how to get it… The geopolitcal reality of this compressed town-nation of strivers seeps into the music, how could it not?
Brooklyn is all ethnic-enclaves (and/or class-enclaves) but in public and semi-private Manhattan the boundaries collapse: rich people may prefer that poor ones remain invisible (Mexican immigrants hidden away in their restaurants’ kitchens, the TV fantasy of a nation of uppermiddleclass, and on) but wealth, especially in an overcrowded walkerly city like Manhattan, is not only visible but it always seems to be just… almost… within reach.
The 50 song in particular is clattery, edgey. A queasy synth tone makes an atonal slide through the track every 32 bars or so. He’s bragging but the thing feels unsettled. (mo’ money mo’ problems; Connecticut tax laws can be so ornate) On some Hot97 mix shows the DJ will cut up the intro — a minute or two of “I get money money I got” and spare aggressive beat – extended, doubled up, and reconfigured under the DJ’s fader. Its sound and meaning amplified by one of the East Coast’s most power radio transmitters.
50’s popularity isn’t just an East Coast thing, or a US thing either. I’ve seen kids rocking his shirts and sidewalk businessmen hawking his albums in a dozen countries, at least…
do you have a copy of Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady lying around? I’m looking for multiple copies. Send me one & i’ll send you any CD i have that you might want. nettlephonic at yahoo dot com.
the first one comes from a lively new Soundway compilation CD/2LP, Colombia! the Golden Age of Discos Fuentes, the Powerhouse of Colombian Music 1960-76. Martines recommended it, “perhaps the most important Colombian label.” (Lemon-Red revs it )
A few years ago I received an invitation to DJ some shows in Colombia. I was burnt out from travel & said no. I’m still kicking myself for missing that chance.
machinima — filmmaking using video game footage & voiceovers — was new to me until W&W showed me this 2-minute piece a few night’s ago… Godot-infused punchline existentialism in the theater of war. apparently Red vs Blue is a massive phenomenon, but if you haven’t seen it:
Machinima makes inevitable sense. It is economically & creatively liberating. Fantastic cinema/animation on the cheap! Episode 1 of Red vs Blue: the tip of an enormmous potential iceberg (they didn’t need those other 99 episodes, in many ways this one did all that needed to be done)…
between machinima & DIY youtubery & stuff like videojockey translators in Uganda, I’m feeling vaguely optimistic about local art & reverse Ikea & maybe even the elimination of the middleman. (& imagine these hackery concepts taken into the realm of politics, a million kid editors not making flash-in-the-pan entertainment but using their fluency in new tools to break or build things in the name of economic equality?)
Elimination of the middleman: when the story becomes not ‘talented youth get bought up by major label when their viral video sparks local dance craze’ nor ‘talented youth spark local dance craze, bypass label, get rich on micro-income from 1.7 million other kids viewing their viral video’ (although this would be an improvement) but when the story becomes not ‘the story’ (or Slate’s) but your story and the cultural heat generated by it turns into money in your pocket and they don’t even need to hear about it or attempt to explain it.
MP3s and money always travel so much more freely than people.
In a few years, most American children will live inside video games or have microchips for virtual world wireless connections implanted into their navels. Drug dealers, old people, and winos will finally get run of the parks and playgrounds they deserve. Only the poor kids will read books; rich parents won’t dare risk their children’s success in a postliterate society by teaching them to read (Brunner). The adjective ‘virtual’ itself will fall into disuse, describing a quaintly archaic and increasingly irrelevant concept.
Wayne’s delicious points towards the 1st hit when searching for “I’m a african” on youtube. big up Eka.
Blackness has always been virtually real and really virtual, so hearing Dead Prez (a virtually political music group) rap while machinima video-director Eka lip-syncs their lyrics as his Grand Theft Auto videogame edits depict what’s being said makes future-now sense:
[foto by Amanda Marsalis, from Fader 28]
