I'm doing a course on musical hermeneutics for school. Musical hermeneutics is "a study of interpretation", more specifically of the universal essence of a piece of music (old view) or the meaning in a cultural context of a piece of music, but not the ethnological meaning, oh no (new view). Basically it involves finding explanations for music from outside the music itself, understanding a piece of music as a struggle or an allegory or a metaphor or something.
Since my mission in my studies right now is to blast popular music into all areas of stale sonata-wanking, I've been racking my head for something from there to do a hermeneutic analysis of. What I've realised is: the ultimate popular music form to do a hermeneutic analysis of is the DJ set. Like instrumental classical pieces, it doesn't tell a literal story in words. But also like instrumental classical pieces, there's often an interesting underlying story told through the track order, mixing, etc.Sadly, it's also not really my topic usually. So what I want is tips of great DJ sets available as recordings or podcasts, preferably with strong narrative qualities that are not expressed through liner notes or comments. Preferably in a genre I'm a bit familiar with, i.e. disco, hip-hop or related.
I'd be really grateful for any tips. Don't be scared of mentioning classics, I'm really not familiar with a lot of the mixed material.
6 comments:
If you haven't taken a look/listen to the blogariddims collective, they've put out some really interesting podcast sets in the past. Based on a recent post over on Wayne and Wax
http://wayneandwax.com/?p=556
it looks like they may not be creating them anymore and not sure if it is what you are looking for, but it's worth a shot to listen to some of the previous sets.
You can grab the feed here http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogariddims
You can read detailed info about some of the sets that have been contributed from Wayne and Wax on his blog as well.
I read this and found an old post that i had forgot to publish, about my favourite DJ-set in a genre that is pretty crowded today: slow, spacey disco. here: http://www.emilarvidson.com/blog/2008/10/28/disco.html
Thanks, I'm definitely checking it out. I'm familiar with most of the music on there and that's always helpful...
The Coldcut Journey by Dj's is kinda foundational. Prancehall's Anger is a gift was my fav last year.
MC Beezy's have a lot of narrative..,
Aaron Spectre's early mixtpes got me excited at thetime
Thanks, will check the lot of them out.
I ended up using a fairly musically boring but narratively strong in the end:
http://www.ubu.com/sound/dj_food.html
Good amount of music running against words and stuff going on in it.
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