Playero a key player in Puerto Rico’s rambunctious proto-reggaetón scene of the early 90s (think hiphop-jeepbeat-reggae DJ-mixed madness, with rapid-fire singalong vox en español & that low-slung bass reminding you to celebrate your ass’s rhythmic possibilities, which are many). [All 4 MP3s in this post come from Playero’s Greatest Hits vol. 2 mix.] i responded to Wayne’s article, saying, among other things:
Wayne’s piece raises provocative questions on the transformation of ‘música negra’ (black music) to ‘reggaetón latino’, where the “receding presence of hiphop and reggae, this disappearing sonic blackness†gets supplanted by the sounds and stances of pan-Latino cultural nationalism.
Do the soft laws of of authenticity and community anticipate, provoke, or reflect this shift?
3-2-Get Funky – Se Te Hundió El Barco (note the sung melody from this track – riffing on Junior Reid’s infamous ‘One Blood’ vocal line, recently sampled in The Game’s single of the same name. then, 10 seconds later, RZA’s beat for Method Man crashes in…)
Ownership requires strict timekeeping – the original came first, the dude we’re gonna sue for copyright infringement came later. But ‘derivative’ culture (DJ culture, webbed thoughts) is a miasma of signifiers and style, dancing in the omnivorous, sensual now. Listen to the way his mixes pull in black music from all around… Lots of the DJ Playero tapes sound as fresh today as they ever were. Maybe fresher.
The swamp, the sampler, the street. Heat become environment, the air in your lungs.
Heatwave tonite! i’ll warm up the decks for Gabriel w/ a bit of dancehall.
my Aer Lingus flight back from Dublin was delayed 10 HOURS. horrible. still recovering, hence the brevity of his post.
the Irish festival was very specifically crazy. I showed up at 5pm on the day i was performing and the stage manager was already drunk, clutching a half-empty bottle of rum. And the mud…
Below is Mouse on Mars about to cart away their gear in a wheelbarrow. A wheelbarrow! Did i mention the mud? More fotos and festival talk soon.
this sunday I’ll be DJing near Dublin, with Mouse on Mars, Neill Landstrumm, and others, at the Sliabh An Iarainn (SAI ) festival.
Kaboogiewoogie explains: “its situated in a beautiful part of the country on an obliging mentaloid farmers’s land. His name is Pious and is a bit of a legend in the area.” Bog alchemists welcome. DJ Q-Bert & a bunch of cool electronica acts saturday nite.
While i listen to a some old old time music, i hadn’t paid much attention to new (or at least contemporary) old time music, and so when i heard the opening track of the Old Time Banjo Festival CD i thought, ungenerously, this is gonna be one of those comps with the best tune first. But then i listened to rest and its all as good, or better. ((if you like banjos))
I will give my Moroccan banjoist friends a copy of this. Who doesn’t like banjos? Even Clayton Bigsby likes banjos.
Out of all these players, Chris Coole lept out. witness his clawhammer style!!
the main reason I haven’t written about Calle 13 is that (like all rap?) you need to understand what he’s saying to get an idea of what’s going on and why it’s so interesting,… and i don’t have time to translate Residente’s lyrics. In translation you often lose the wordplay as well…
anyhow, Reggaetonica took this time, and the result is a great post (& followup) on La Mala RodrÃguez and Calle 13 – some of the most interesting Spanish-language rappers of the Old and New World, respectively.
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Awesome Tapes From Africa, a blog specializing in awesome tapes from Africa, shares a summer-speed mixtape of Slow Music from Africa. Thursday Born will guest on my radio show at some point this fall. Strictly cassette style.
from the NYT, “Chinese Market Awash in Fake Potter Books”:
The iterations of Potter fraud and imitation here are, in fact, so copious they must be peeled back layer by layer.
There are the books, like the phony seventh novel, that masquerade as works written by Ms. Rowling. There are the copies of the genuine items, in both English and Chinese, scanned, reprinted, bound and sold for a fraction of the authorized texts.
As in some other countries, there are the unauthorized translations of real Harry Potter books, as well as books published under the imprint of major Chinese publishing houses, about which the publishers themselves say they have no knowledge. And there are the novels by budding Chinese writers hoping to piggyback on the success of the series — sometimes only to have their fake Potters copied by underground publishers who, naturally, pay them no royalties. …
Some borrow little more than the names of Ms. Rowling’s characters, lifting plots from other well-known authors, like J. R. R. Tolkien, or placing the famously British protagonist in plots lifted from well-known kung-fu epics and introducing new characters from Chinese literary classics like “Journey to the West.â€
As to be expected, Howard French’s article misconstrues & somewhat overlooks the magic of all this. From the article title on down, French wrongly locates dozens of Harry Potter fan-novels and bootlegs and re-imaginings ‘in service of’ legality and capital-A authorship (not to mention insinuating that fraud and counterfeiting are Chinese national traits):
“Here, the global Harry Potter publishing phenomenon has mutated into something altogether Chinese: a combination of remarkable imagination and startling industriousness, all placed in the service of counterfeiting, literary fraud and copyright violation.”
this statement is so striking because it reverses the actuality, teleologically speaking. People don’t remix stuff because they like copyright violation! All the illegalities of remix culture are nothing more than incidental by-products (nail clippings from the Dead Author).
A more accurate version would be — Harry Potter novel mutation in China: “a combination of counterfeiting, literary fraud and copyright violation, all placed in the service of remarkable imagination and startling industriousness.” but even that doesn’t fully articulate the unhinged, Baudrillian essence of this…
People talk about how Eskimos have a few dozen words for snow, how rappers have a few dozen words for cocaine, how Republicans have a few dozen words for fukallyall. It’s an amazing phenomenon. So too is the opposite – single words possessing multiple meanings.
A troubling example of this – if you, like me, think of pigeons as flying rats – is the Spanish noun La Paloma. It means dove or pigeon. That’s what I call a perverse ambiguity.
The white dove, beloved of poets & lovers since time immemorial.
The nasty pigeon, pecking away at nuggets of vomit & discarded fast food in alleys, staining city roofs with its corrosive droppings. Each one a paloma.
there must exist a language with a word to describe how those flutes relate to the rumbling drums, one specific adjective for the beauty & movement conjured by that relationship and another for what happens when her voice enters into it.
“The music I play has its roots in mixed race,” Totó explains. “The flutes are pre-Columbian, the drums of course are from Africa, and the guitar from the conquisadors.”
Totó La Momposina is a towering figure in (indigenous-) (Afro-) (Latin-) Colombian folk, with good reason. “I don’t think of it as ‘folklore’. To me, folklore means something that is dead, in a museum. Traditional music, music from the old days is alive.”
La somba negra – the black shadow. Listen to the way this song starts as an orderly Latin love song, spare acoustic guitar and voice strolling along… then Afro-Cuban drums creep in, slowly accelerating the rhythm. The guitar shifts from lead instrument to accompaniment. The solo vocalist gets swept up into call & response, not one or two people but many; black Africa eats up the solitude. This becomes a communal tune and its drums are racing.
The Bug on dstep, d&b, and the asphyxiation of influence:
Because for me the beauty of dubstep were the producers that I met in the beginning, the fact that they were influenced by a lot of different music; Kode 9, Mala, influenced by jungle, influenced by dub, influenced by classical music, soundtrack music. That’s brilliant, I could hear that on the tracks but now i think that there are new producers that are coming into dubstep and they only listen to dubstep and for me that’s when jungle became drum n bass, that was the problem then. Drum n bass producers were just listening to drum n bass producers so there weren’t as many interesting influences on the music and I think of course with dubstep now, its amazing the progress in the last year but I don’t see why I should say everything’s positive when its obviously not really.
from a thoughtful two – part interview with Kevin.
dubstep is still so studiously documented and recorded in the annals of bass history that it needs decent artwork to accompany it like monarchs’ portraits in history books, but grime exists mainly on mp3/ phone/ whites and is accordingly easy to delete from memory. most grime producers are more concerned with bringing out new beats than accumulating a ‘respectable’ archive to be remembered by.
this is a good point. i drafted a post on something similar when Andy sent me 2 or 3 clips to dubstep documentaries on YouTube. but we shouldn’t overlook Risky Roadz and all the grime DVDs! These are thrilling, self-produced documents both from and of a scene, completely visible but hardly a ‘respectable’ archive.
the subject of a grime DVD is a whole lot of things – lyrical beef, strutting, DIY cameraboy aesthetics, skyhigh testosterone levels, etc., whereas the subject of a dubstep documentary – any documentary – is ‘dubstep’ itself (the integral objecthood of the docu’s subject); not the content of the scene but only its most obvious, exterior shell, the part of it which has hardened into visibility and no longer moves (maybe the dead part). Once people outside your scene recognize your scene as such, (talking in money terms here) they recognize you as a potential market, something they can invest in or advertise to: you exist.
London dubstep documentary
I’m not criticizing (dubstep) documentaries at all, i simply feel that these are interesting ways to think about the way scenes get remembered or forgotten or overlooked, the durability of its artefacts – cultural visibility – and how well (or poorly) these aspects of a scene can flourish as mainstream media narratives.
and then there’s another thing, about the way ‘quality’ (usually a long-term consideration) and ‘newness’ are very different production goals.
Roll Deep in session
Nearly everybody in the docus (big respect to all involved!) talks about dubstep’s diverse and hard-to-pin down nature, but the nature of a documentary is that by the time that we see it, the subject’s been killed a bit. Things move on. And self-conscious diversity rarely stays diverse for long. In the interview above, Kevin says:
I cant really help but take a look back as well to try and assess what’s sort of going on in the scene because when DMZ had its first anniversary, when it moved upstairs, that night was a turning point for me and not just a positive one. Its great for Mala and its great for Digital Mystikz for all the hard work they’ve put in these past three years but for me, at that night, suddenly the audience seemed more like a drum n bass audience, it seemed more white, it seemed more male, the formula seemed to be almost there then so that was the first night I really noticed there was emerging a really strong formula like in drum n bass, like all the tracks were starting to sound a bit like Coki or Skream. And Skream also that night was rewinding every track which i thought, well the crowd weren’t even generating so much interest for him to do that, so it seemed like a lot of hype and an audience that I thought were maybe a little too closed.
Bristol dubstep documentary trailer
…but it’s true: scenes need anthems, they just shouldn’t become formulas. (I’ve enjoyed watching Team Shadetek’s Brooklyn Anthem become itself, a Brooklyn anthem! – even the crowd up in Denmark knew it when i dropped Ghis’s rmx last Friday).
You can think about Risky Roadz as grime’s Pyrrhic victory in translating itself across media. It is much better at being itself on YouTube then dubstep is (massive physical bass weight doesn’t translate across YouTube clips; instead dstep vids give us people explaining what we’re missing). But grime videos’ success at, well, being grimy means a lot of shouting, a lot of confusion & swears, angry artistic city kids, no voice-over or talking-head explanation since there’s no assumption of curious outsiders looking in who should be catered to or created…
Risky Roadz freestyle clips
but who cares about dialectic when we’ve got this?
Lil Wayne’s producer killed Karma’s Once so it could be reincarnated as Dying. The Fader pointed out the dots. She went from South Africa to Miami to become a star. I dont know what happens in Miami. This happens in Miami.
Karma – Once (lil wayne’s I Feel Like Dying sample source)
cumbias & more on today’s radio, more in a bit… until then, a roundup of my scattered digitals:
Sellbesting’s thoughts on ‘crunkstep’ with a download of the Skream-Crime Mob moment from my latest mix, Secret Google Cheat Codes. (i get asked about that Skream track/Crime Mob blend nearly every time i do it.) the tracklist for SGCC should go live next week. it was effort-intensive, at least compared to a regular type tracklist.
