Rebolation

Another dance I have missed! It's the Brazilian extension of the Melbourne shuffle. Originally it seems to have been danced to hardstyle, but in a lot of more recent videos it's electro house instead:



So far, so electro flogger, but the whole thing does take an interesting turn after it was "commodified" (hi marxists!) through a cash-in hit that blew up big time at this year's Salvador carnival:



Ahh, Bahia, always able to make something different through its own imitative copying. There seem to be dozens of cover versions already on Youtube, of course.

Balkan not Beats

I'm not sure how many of you've got Spotify, but if you do it might interest you to hear this playlist I put together of distinctly non-Balkan Beatsy Balkan music, from every interesting country except Albania/Kosovo whose Spotify presence is disturbingly non-existent. Lots of great material is not on Spotify of course, but I think I still managed to bring together a fair deal.

Balkan not Beats (Spotify playlist)

Blogging return planned soon, on a semi-regular basis.

40 feminist tracks

The reason this is my first blog post in nearly a month is that I'm busy campaigning and running for office (I'm #6 on both the Stockholm city council and Stockholm regional council lists) for the Feminist Initiative here in Sweden.

Well, to get all my Swedish readers out voting (come on, vote!) this Sunday, and to keep the steam up ahead of the election campaign, here's 40 well known and less well known tracks I like that have the spirit of feminism in them. Strong, self-confident women all the way, no meek hetero love, no diss tracks towards other females. Order: completely random.

Where Korean pop could have gone

This is pretty fantastic.

I was sent this by Mag, my (hopefully frequent!) new correspondent from France, who's got a wicked taste in music. It's a Korean hip-hop song from 1992, and it's radically different from anything else in the country released since - a kind of weird melding of minimalist deep house à la Blaze to straight-up breakdancing electro and a touch of eurodance, nothing like all other hip-hop at the time. And that background vocalist! Amazing stuff. Mag writes:

I haven't really delved, but I think South Korea is one of the least interesting places on earth at the moment for popular music : it tries sooo hard to imitate western pop music, and the end result is often quite embarrassing. South Korea has failed so far to develop styles of its own : I really don't like what is refferred to as K-pop! Bland, monocultural, devoid of a sense of humour, devoid of happiness.

So far I only found ONE Korean song that I like, it's a hip hop song from 1992, so I'll share it with you. A Korean friend who was trying desperately to introduce me to Korean pop showed it to me among hundreds of shite videos and I instantly fell in love with Seo Taeji and the Boys. But the rest of their musical production doesn't live up to that weird and promising debut single.

Here's the video:

Massive Tekno Halay Mixtape

Found this fantastic 25-minute tekno halay mixtape on this hard-to-navigate Kurdish forum. It's a bit badly mixed and mastered, but it's got that perfect halay/techno balance that I love. Full on with decks, an MC/announcer, a drum machine and those fantastic Korg keyboard faux bagpipe sounds. I would so party to this!

Engin Müzik - Unkown Mixtape 2010 (listed as "bagpipe") (Mediafire)

Techno Halay FTW!

Man, this is some fantastic stuff. I barely know anything about it - it's certainly mistagged a lot - but I'm assuming it's Kurdish. I've certainly heard some music that interestingly touches on electronic dance music in the region before, but this is full on - full on proper techno with touches of trance and tech house, as well as full on proper halay. And it's fantastic!

I'll be researching this more in the next few days, be assured, but before I go to bed here's a video - look at all these cool people dancing to the stuff at the wedding:



And here's a very short MP3:

Sudem Müzik - Yabanci Müzik (Mediafire)

Juke, Jerk and the Rebel Archetype Inside Capitalism

I've been taught that it is a breach of netiquette to reproduce comments from Google Reader. So I'm not going to relate a conversation I read a couple of months ago between two scholars I respect a great deal, though the gist was that Los Angeles jerk music was just too commercial.

Oh, they didn't use that exact term, but I got the drift. They talked about "genre-brands" and "entering into the symbolic circuits of consumer capitalism", and if they didn't use the preposterous, worker-demeaning term "affective labour" it was probably by accident. Jerk (which I don't think either of them dislike, by the way) supposedly was close in the way it presented itself to the commercial end of capitalism, and contained a bunch of aspects that supposedly pegged it as particularly interested in selling itself. This in contrast with Chicago's juke/footwork music, held up as a relative anti-capitalist ideal by comparison.

Well, I beg to differ. Juke is also consistently wonderful music, but it certainly plays much closer to the capitalist rules, and is in many ways much more in line with a capitalist ideal. And I think calling it "consumer capitalist" is making jerk's quiet rebellion a great disservice.

What was the most successful capitalist music product online last year? Obviously, such a product's quality is to be measured in the only language that capitalism understands: sales. Thus the most capitalist product in downloadable media was, by a good distance, neither Lady Gaga nor the Black Eyed Peas but the extremely successful album Only by the Night by Kings of Leon. It's aesthetic is entirely in a supposedly non-capitalistic, "alternative" mode, with a hand-painted album cover, sullen-looking, black-clad album photos, and a sort of supposedly earnest rock music that's miles from Flo Rida.

The same relationship exists with juke and jerk. Jerk is spreading to poor communities as far away as panama, but juke is definitely the most promising capitalist product - it's got major backing from the hot and hip, and is apparently all over London right now. And yet, it is seen as less commercial! So, bizarrely, is dubstep, perhaps the single most successful new electronic music form of the last decade.

A classic Marxist/rockist explanation of the success of juke and Kings of Leon and dubstep would be the idea of selling out, or in Marxist parlance the "parasitic" nature of capitalism, latching onto non-capitalistic creative scenes. From my point of view, though, a much better biological analogy is that of symbiosis, what a feminist like me would call intersectionality: the fact that capitalism closely associates and connects itself to other systems of power, other dichotomies that divide the world. Clear, unambiguous, oversimplified divisions like "mainstream" vs "alt" allows capitalism to thrive, and it in turn creates and nourishes the power dimension that these divisions rely on.

Take the rebel archetype, the idea of someone who's supposedly standing up to power. As it looks like right now, the rebel is a complete bourgeois, patriarchal, pro-violence invention of the romantic era - inevitably male, inevitably black-clad, inevitably seething with agression. Into this archetype all kinds of people get sucked in - how often have not delinquent street gangs, bikers, warrior groups been recast as "rebels" of some sort? And whether it likes it or not, juke fits right into the ideal: all-male, industrial-set, clad in mainly dour colours, hyper-competitive in a warrior mode, with footwork crews named stuff like "Wolf Pac" and "Terra Squad" (talk about self-branding, by the way). Of course the alt/"rebel" set is going to love it!

Only of course it appeals immensely to capitalism itself as well. Companies have profited majorly of that particular rebel stereotype, which is built immensely on consumption of a particular image. It's not only easy to package and sell, but the way it maintains the oppression of the poor/not cool enough, of women, of transgressive gays suits capitalism perfectly. In some ways, reducing the supposed left to a bunch of middle-class, revolution-dreaming, black-clothes-buying patriarchal rebels is capitalism's greatest achievement, because it totally neutralises any real opposition. Autonomic Marxism and capitalism really go hand in hand.

Jerk, by contrast, is a totally different kind of beast. It takes this particular capitalist dichotomy and totally fucks it over. Women are much more visible, the colours are bright, the competition is toned down (how non-capitalist is that!). And they stay away from traditional capitalist channels to a large extent, existing on hard-to-monetise youtube, releasing 96 kbps MP3s, dancing on streets and rooftops. It remains difficult to categorise and thus difficult to monetise; besides one moderate mid-chart hit, it's really not produced a whole lot of value to capitalism at all. And its ambiguties and lack of a clear archetype have created a lot more stirring in the general sentiment (see the skinny jeans debate) than juke and footwork ever could.

It's far from as clear. But clarity, of course, is a capitalist virtue...

Goldee: Master of the soft vocal polyrhythm

I think I may have found a new favourite contemporary vocalist, just last week. I as listening to the album L'Anné du Zouk 2010 in the background at work when one track just totally leapt out at me and floored me. Let me present you Haw by Goldee:

Goldee - Haw (Mediafire)


So what's the deal, you ask? The production is stale and sounds several years old, and even lacks that bassiness that makes zouklove wonderful. But the vocalist!

She's not got great range or great dynamic expressiveness, I'll grant you. But she does one thing immensely, immensely well - she takes fast-moving, rhythmically precise singing to another level entirely by making it sound perfectly effortless and simple. Soft as a simple voice, yet extremely complex in the perfect precision with which she places her notes. And she does it fucking polyrhythmically!

Take the chorus, for instance. Set against the classic, diatonic rhythm of 3+3+2, with its emphasis on the first, fourth and seventh beats in a eight-divided bar, she sings a melody with subtle but clear emphasis on the second and sixth beats of the bar! Now, not only is this a twice-removed syncopation against the meter, but it also syncopates/interlocks/change-rhythms/whatever against the main, already syncopated rhythm! The result is bloody fantastic, she completely runs counter to the main rhythm and makes it sound effortless as fuck. Magic.

Bonus: Another dude that can sound like Autotune with just his natural voice.

Bakary - Femme de la Nuit (Mediafire)

More Bhutanese music videos

It's been a couple of years since I last really seriously looked into the music scene of Bhutan, whose Sebastien Tellier-meets-Miami Bass drum machine-driven pop still makes it one of my favourite Asian countries. I've done a few half-hearted searches for scraps, but then today through some absurd, self-glitching youtube-mp3-leeching site I found a bunch of new search words that have turned up more excellent material.

So here you go, a bunch more Bhutanese tracks, hopefully whetting your appetites for even bigger amounts.

Jejemon, jejcaps, jejebet

While browsing for something completely different this afternoon, I came across yet another awesome borderline permutation of the worldwide skinnyjeans style/social position matrix, which I inevitably spotted inevitably through an anti-video. The jejemons of the Phillipines are perhaps not as musically interesting as some of the other groups in the matrix, but their linguistic inventiveness (they've even got their own alphabet, sorry jejebet, and a weird mixed Tagalog-English sociolect) and their fun fashion totally makes up for it. Although the Indonesian Department of Education doesn't seem to think so.

And of course the name, involving a Spanish-Tagalog-English-Japanese linguistic clash, is pretty awesome in itself. These videos show some of the more mainstream, high-end jejemons, all wearing "jejecaps" and a variety of fun, colourful street clothing.





Note the distinct lack of actual Skinny Jeans in the second video. One web store defines jejemon wear as:

Jejecap - the jejecaps are rainbow colored caps. Bright/colorful t-shirt or tops (fit) Belt with much bigger buckle than the usual Metal chain, necklace and bracelet Colorful wristband Skinny Jeans (preferrably shiny/glossy and dark) Rubber shoes (at least 2-colored)

Which I guess is alright, but one fashion style I've really been much more intrigued by (which I can barely find any picture evidence of) is the kind worn by the boy second from the left in the bottom row of this picture:

And all of the guys in this picture, ignore the vile sentiment expressed in the caption:

It's Tupac-meets-football-socks, and the closest I've seen any skinny-jeansers come to actual leggings, which is surely the next step.

Now please bring on the "self-branding means they're all capitalist stooges" critiques.

Yet another Vuvuzela track - and an awesome Facebook group

Everyone and their grandmother has posted tracks featuring Vuvuzelas as part of the sound palette during this world cup, so this is very much a late challenge and barely escapes a yellow through it actually being a South African track, which I believe none of the others are. It's also got a really nice chorus of "Vuvu-zeeeeela, vuvu-zela" which is a bonus, and was apparently an official Bafana Bafana supporter's anthem.

Dj Cleo - Shapa Bafana Shapa (Mediafire)
What's perhaps more interesting, though, is that I got the track through a fantastic facebook group for South African house! This is precisely the sort of thing the all-pervasive nature of Facebook should facilitate, at least in theory, and if anyone has more good MP3-exchanging groups from less-well-known countries give me a shout out.

Tikitech while I was away

The animals never stop coming in faux-African music, do they? Here's a bunch from the last month or so. Bonus (for DJ UMB): none of them are taken directly off Gen Bass.

I could probably fill a whole page with just material that associates the current World Cup with safari animals (instead of, you know, creatures that actually play football) but that veers outside the mission of this series a little bit. Here, though, is a World Cup cash-in compilation released by a Berlin label that fits riiiiight in there:


[Compilation on Faluma Africa. Via Soca Revolution Sound System]

Note that the compo contains one (1) African artist. Who's white. Note also the prominent hummingbird; hummingbirds are endemic to the Americas.

This next one is a bit borderline, 'cause the African-fakeness is not worn on the sleeve. Still, that is one mighty big African animal, and Baobinga is of course certainly in the global ghettotech blogging game.


[Event poster, Luz Control. Via Bass music]

And finally, here's an Austrian tribal-house street album cover featuring monkeys. And a ship, you say? Yeah, that's not a colonialist symbol at all.


[Album cover, Tipanic. Via Ghetto Bazaar]

These things really seem to come to the forefront in Summer. I'm sure July will offer its share of tikitech visual delight.

Return to the Caspian - More Persian Dance-Pop

I normally never walk past the Caspian Food Store here in Kista, since it's in an area that the city planners in their infinite wisdom have decided is to be unreachable by foot (!), but on Midsummer's day it was the only store open in the area. So I walked past only to see that they'd stocked up on piles of Persian pop CDs, each only 40 kr (€4)! I promptly bought a couple.

The titles of the albums are very generic (in the "Persian Collection Vol. 2 Dance" mould), but here are four MP3's harvested off them that can work in a club environment.

I like the chugging starkness of this one, it reminds me of bass-frequency-oriented 80s disco by artists like OFF and Franek Kimono, only funkier.

Barobax feat. Gamno - Soosan Khanoom (Mediafire)

This one I can't decide whether to love or hate - it's inconsistent, and jumps all over the place, and seems to be a novelty humour piece, but the lilting groove is amazing when it works. And it has Vocoder.

Hamed Hakan - Ye Bous (Mediafire)

Now for two poppier numbers. Saman's Bahaar has a classic melody, and this remix adds a lovely synth solo and a wicked drive. Leans over into techno-schlager hell a bit, but it just works I think, especially past the first verse.

Saman - Bahaar (Remix by ?) (Mediafire)

And, finally: a straight pop number, though without the mediterranean/eurovision trimmings these things often have. Disco and the guy's vocal uniqueness saves it. Plus it has breath sounds and rapper that sounds like a prepubescent boy.

Ashkin & Alishmas ft Moshen - Shabash Shabash (Mediafire)

Oh yeah, also I've been away. To Hungary. I planned to Blog during my absence but the weather and company was too nice. :)

Esoteric Research Methods #10: Fanpages that don't exist

Facebook, much hated among a lot of you, has reworked its "pages" feature in a very interesting way. Used to be, people registered a "fan page" of someone or something, and you could then attach yourself to that phenomenon, via system similar to the groups. If no fan page existed, you were out of luck - you had to create and run one of your own if you wanted information about something.

Now, they've done some technical jiggery-pokery, and suddenly the system has been completely overhauled: whatever you've indicated as "likes" in your profile (music, movies, books etc.) automatically gets converted to fan pages, that no-one needs to run any more! Although apparently this will only last a short while until they've found moderators for everything, it means there are suddenly potentially infinite "walls" that people can be fans of stuff on.

While the curated/moderated fan pages were always kinda fun, I get a real kick out of the new, random ones. Lots of interesting postings on any topic you, well, like, seemingly harvested at random from other peoples' postings. (Fuck those privacy controls.) Logobi, for instance, has a discussion-rich fan page which is just starting out. Looking for new phenomena linked out of it, I get a posting asking "......ALANTA VS LOGOBI........which iz da bomb????.......", to which a rich-to-read response reads:

Logobi defo alanta its mstly gurlz dat doez it bt logobi on da oda hand its boys and gurl lol how many boys do u see uploadin dem selfz doin alanta lol but type in logobi and u see tonz of guys and gurlz datz wat makez it interestin lol lol woah lol haha

Inevitably, of course, written by someone female. So what's alanta then? A Nigerian novelty dance from last year, set to a couple of hastily-recorded cash-in records. It's no logobi, of course, but one of the tracks is pretty great:



Hope to see the logobi page grow big over time. Or not, as the trend goes!

The tallava page, by contrast, is a lot more instantly active, with half-a-dozen new videos posted every day. This morning, for instance, someone posted this banger:



Fun! It's a good way to find new music, straight from the fans with no middlemen, harvested by a big corporation for its own evil purposes. Rad.

Best track to mention Blogspot, like, ever

I wish I knew enough Portuguese to be able to decipher the following brilliant, low-end-heavy piece of Mozambican snap, but it's easily the coolest track about Blogging I've ever heard anyway. (Courtesy of Casa de Musica)

UGP feat Ana Paula - Meu Blog (Mediafire)

Bonus: Super-intelligently updated Marrabenta blended with House and Zouk, also from Mozambique.



And a track about the actual phenomenon of remixing stuff. Also a great idea! (Courtesy of mozmusic)

DJ Ardiles - Remix (Mediafire)

Eurovision/When "ringtone pop" becomes literal

I've blogged absolute tons about the Eurovision Song Contest in past years but other commitments have kept from even keeping proper track myself this year. However, I just have to share the original, since remixed version of the Greek entry, which takes the whole concept of "ringtone pop" to another level:



Anyway, To make up for my Eurovision slackness in general, I'm going to be live-tweeting the contest instead, starting in around three hours. Follow me at @Birdseeding on twitter.

What's an influence and how does it work anyway?

Scene: I'm in the studio of manele superstar producer Dan Bursuc. The big man hasn't woken up yet, but his arranger/songwriter/engineer (I would say "producer" but that's clearly Dan) is playing around with creating tracks for Lele, the tiny new star, who's also in the studio.

Suddenly, growing tired of a half-finished track, the arranger brings up a decade-old hit by Florin Salam to play around with while Lele takes a much-needed break. The track has a touch of reggae about its arrangement, and it seems the vocals have caught a tinge of that as well, feeling vaguely sing-jayish in phrasing while remaining manele-melismatic in melody. He samples and loops a section - starting at 1:42 - and dumps the arrangement right out, to try to create a new one for it.

He quickly puts down some General MIDI lines - in the real songs almost always VSTs or electronic instruments, of course - but then he gets stuck on what to do with the more high-pitched of the basslines. Using a cheesy Slap Bass patch, he thinks of doing some sort of funk arrangement, but what he comes out with instead is straightforwardly a clave, dom-dom-dom, dom dom. He doesn't like it much. He plays around with it, and to my astonishment (I'm sitting on the couch behind him) he suddenly plonks down a bassline that sounds extremely much like the Bam Bam riddim, except with the first and second bars in opposite order... After a bit of decoration, he decides the excercise is futile and dumps the whole file.

Time to record the next Lele track.

I relate this mundane bit of studio drudgery because I've been thinking about Boima's discussion on "the channeling of personal influences" here. I can definitely see what he's getting at - there does seem to be a difference between absorbing material slowly through listening to your surroundings (on the one hand) and actively seeking an exotic other to incorporate (on the, well, other). But the way Boima phrases his discussion (which is well worth a read) gives the impression that there's a palette of influences available, a conscious choice of material that the artist can pick and choose from. I think that might be true for the music Boima makes himself, because he spends so much time thinking about how music connects and the specificity of rhythmical components, but where does it leave our studio arranger?

I asked him about what he was thinking while building that bassline. He said (or rather hummed and mimed) that he wanted to do funky slap bass, and that was all. I doubt he'd be able to name a "clave" or "Bam Bam" if pressed. So what do I make of the connections? Am I over-reading his influences based on my own prejudices and "personal influences"? Is it rhythmic coincidence? Does the slightly reggae-ish tilt in the previous track result in a "pull" towards a certain expression in other lines as well? Or are these influences hardwired into his cultural background somehow, and just feel right to do?

In any case, there's inevitably a fair bit of negotiation going on in every direction. A utopistic vision of everyone having their own personal genre is one thing, but the influence-interpretation going on is stuck in a space between me as listener, the arranger, Florin Salam, the track's previous producer... On a more concrete level, the negotiation between the arranger and Dan Bursuc (when he eventually gets up) is very tangibly present, a conflict and co-operation between generations and cultural backgrounds. Dan Bursuc, around fifty, grown up in communist seclusion on Raj Kapoor movies and once a forbidden traditional lautari. The arranger, mid-twenties, classically trained, recorded "everything". (And Lele, eleven, grown up on manele alone!) They struggle over a particular vocal line Lele is to sing. Lele improvises something; the arranger writes it out, modified, in a harmonic minor key with glissandos; Dan Bursuc wants to change it and sings something microtonal back. The arranger struggles to find an interpretation in his own tonal language that will satisfy them both. And then Lele sings it differently anyway...

It's fascinating about music how it's always both individual and social at once. Certainly manele is rife with conscious, palette-based borrowings from every part of the globe, and individual creations, but it's also full of "feels" and modes of understanding, flitered through the background of both creator(s) and listener(s). Where to place the idea of the influence, or influence-network, in such a complicated matrix is not immediately straightforward. And I guess that's true of all music, however far the tightly-knit club culture of a poor neighbourhood is from the leisure-class bedroom-studio appropriator that copies it.

Superstar Manele Producer Needs RAPPERS/DEEJAYS/MCs, Now

Okay, let's see if having some access to a network and being privilidged helps any, eh?


Dan Bursuc (top left) is manele's most prolific and successful producer by a long shot. He dominates the market completely, with upwards of 60-70% of the revenue stream according to some sources, and has been the kingmaker behind almost all of manele's huge stars today, from Florin Salam to Nicolae Guta.

I've interviewed him several times during the past week. He's an open, larger-than-life man with a sharp sense of business and marketing, and is extremely proud of his Roma (and ultimately Indian) heritage. As I left, I asked if there's anything I could do for him, and he asked me to see if I could locate a certain type of musician on very short notice.

Dan Bursuc is looking for an English-language rapper (or deejay, or grime mc - the styles flow into each other in Romania). Skillful is good, famous is absolutely not necessary. In his words: "preferably black"*. The rapper has to be willing to learn to perform a verse in Romani. And he's trying to find one by next week, to guest on the supremely talented future-of-manele whizkid Lele's upcoming album.

Bursuc will pay for transport and accomodation. I've got friends in Romania who will happily help translate and interpret.

Anyone got any ideas who would fit into this role, and would like to stay a few days in beautiful sunny Bucharest? I'm a touch ambivalent at manele being sucked into the whole hip global circus, but on the other hand they're really reaching out and the new stuff I heard in the studio is brilliant, connecting beautifully to both tradition and modernity.

---

* As I read it, this is not an expression of racist tokenism as it often would be. The Roma in Romania feel an enormous kinship to African-Americans specifically, with whom they share a similar history of slavery, segregation and racial discrimination.

We interrupt this Manele to bring you Tikitech

Since I seem to have got a few new readers recently, here's a recap of the whole tikitech phenomenon before I bring up a large, oven-fresh batch of examples.

Last year, I noticed an increasing frequency of a particular type of visual aesthetic associated with releases of western-made, supposedly "tropical"/"ghetto" dance music, aka. global ghettotech. Instead of attaching themselves, as they'd previously done frequently, to the visual language associated with dance music genres from the developing world, they instead adopt an approach that borrows heavily from colonialist depictions of colonised places. Africa is represented as a safari, South America as a jungle, both particularly wild an untamed and dominated by animals rather than people. This parallels the tiki revival's obsession with faux-polynesian artifacts and depopulated beaches, hence the name, coined in a Google Reader comment by Wayne.

The music, as the visual imagery, is bereft of actual people from the developing world. It's the ultimate - possibly unconscious - colonialist fantasy of virgin land, free to be filled with whatever exotic content we desire.

Here are today's examples:

Diamond Bass

This Portugese dude recently added me on Facebook and has been sending me a (banana) boatload of classically formulated tikitech since. All of these are taken off his soundcloud page:





In classic tiki music fashion, there are also frequent use of "actual" ie. Hollywood jungle sounds in the tracks themselves. Also note the tiger in "Africa".

Pachazónica

Berlin-based tikitech artist. Via gen bass.


Økapi

One more borderline example. final one for today. It doesn't present itself as particularly tropical put it doesappear on gen bass, and there are both sampled and synthesised "jungle" sounds throughout the tracks.

Manele Tidbit #2: Loudness Wars

This is a series of uncorroborated rumours and ideas thrown at me from various people I've talked to about manele. Until I finish my research none of it is to be regarded as empirically sound, well-collected evidence, and I'm not providing any source for any of it. Yet! Please correct me if I'm wrong about anything.

No, not those loudness wars.

During the communist era the Roma were an almost completely silenced group in Romania. Not fitting into the idea of national unity, they were silenced, their culture considered crudely derivative of the Ottoman one and unsuitable in the new Romania. They were forbidden from playing their music, excluded from official records, barred from holding many jobs, and generally treated as second-hand citizens. After 1989 there should have been a change to all that but as we all know "free" capitalism and a racist social order doesn't work that way, and they were still consistently pushed to the lowest rungs of the social ladder, discriminated against at all levels, including officially.

But free speech did bring one big change: the Roma could now be heard.

Manele was the catalyst. Out of cars blared the music loudly. Off balconies. Huge speaker systems were set up. Suddenly the previously forbidden tones were everywhere, an immanent political statement reading: here we are.

For an elite that was continually used to nationalism it was extremely offensive. Not to mention the extreme racist right, and to music snobs and emos. Together participants from these groups formed an unholy alliance of "anti-manelisti" on the web, quite well organised, which ran events and planned activities to silence the Roma again. Their most famous action - which should earn them both grudging admiration and scorn from an IT-concious crowd - was a malware virus specifically designed to delete manele MP3s, but in this context, another of their more creative ideas is perhaps more interesting: they planned a counter-attack in loudness. Not long ago, the call went out to put up speakers that blared Mozart (!). Can you imagine a more fantastic image of a culture war, crude gypsy music and eurocentric elite music battling over the soundscape of the city?

Of course, the whole silly dichotomy is queered up by the roma, who are always the most cunning ones after centuries of marginalisation. Because the thing is, Mozart is also manele. Anything can be manele. And here is the video to prove it, if you ignore the gaming noises in the first 30 seconds: a great manele cover of Mozart's 40th Symphony.

Manele Tidbit #1: The Manele Economy

This is a series of uncorroborated rumours and ideas thrown at me from various people I've talked to about manele. Until I finish my research none of it is to be regarded as empirically sound, well-collected evidence, and I'm not providing any source for any of it. Yet! Please correct me if I'm wrong about anything.

Everyone and their dog wants music industry reform these days. Looser copyright, alternative business models, customer interaction, donation systems. well manele has all these things, and has for a long time. The future may be on the internet, but it's also among the discriminated roma in Romania...

The sales of CDs are an incredibly small source of revenue here. Official 150-track MP3 CDs, selling for around 15 lei (€3), barely recoup manufacture and distribution costs, and have thus totally undercut the market for any piracy. There appears to be no copyright enforcement at all - people happily copy each others songs, in cover versions or even note-by-note, and of course manele is built to an incredibly large extent on "plagiarised"/transcultured musical elements from surrounding countries and across the world. Copying and being copied happens all the time.

And yet the performers and production companies are doing extremely well. How? By live appearances catered to functional needs, by customised music à la dubplates, by direct donation from listeners. All appearing in this video, sorry about the sound:



Here we see Florin Salam ("Florin Sausage", I love these artist names!), performing at a wedding. Wedding receptions (and christenings) flaunt their wealth by booking the biggest stars, of which Florin definitely is one, and of course buzz gets generated from wedding to wedding and the value of the performer is incredibly high, upwards of €10 000 a night for a man of Salam's calibre.

This revenue stream is the complimented by the curious practice - as seen in the video - of throwing lei bills at the performer and his band. In exchange, the singer incorporates the name of the donor into his performance, freestyle. Thus the singer gets money and the donor gets to support and interact with the star, plus get prestige in the eyes of the fellow party guests.

Does any of this sound crass to you? Well, think about it - how is it any different from various proposals of how to generate a living for musicians in the digital age?

I'm in Bucha-fucking-rest! Awesome!

I know, I know, these things are supposed to be announced on the blog before hand, but now I'm here and loving it.

As you may know, I'm doing my master's thesis on Romanian manele music, one of my favourite genres of contemporary Balkan music, and I'm super-excited to finally be down doing field research in the awesome metropolis of Bucharest, the megalomaniac new Rome imagined and executed by this guy. So far it's been going great - in fact one of my contacts just texted me saying I might be getting an interview with the biggest producer in the business, which would be awesome. Other than that I've talked a bit to fans and to fellow ethno-/musicologists, including the awesome Marin Marian-Balasa, whose own research and outlook perfectly complements a lot of the stuff I was hoping to get out of the trip.

I've got masses of great stuff already spinning around my head, and I'll start dropping the cooler angles and anecdotes on this blog as I go along. Meanwhile, to demonstrate that manele really does take inspiration from EVERYWHERE - it' standout feature to me and the focus of my research - here's a manele track that copies... Fitness craze Zumba!?

Okay, a comment then: Ethnic re-thonging

There was plenty of things wrong in spirit with yesterday's commentless blurb text, but the one that really has stuck with me today is one that for the most part is a factual error.

The text calls the use of percussion from a number of genres "tribalist", including, absurdly, kwaito. Kwaito, whose percussion is derived straight from Chicago house with some hip-hop additions. (Here's a kwaito man practising his "tribalist" drumming.) I would just laugh at it, normally, as a clueless ignoramus using bigoted language to sell mediocre music, but there's a process at play here that scares me.

Because, it seems, even in 2010 we can't imagine South African music as something not "tribalist". And it seems we do our darnedest to make sure it stays that way.

Last year Jace, aka DJ Rupture, wrote a great article channelling a lot of peoples' discomfort about the ethnification of third-world musicians. Along with many others, Jace has used his music and writing to do precisely what he suggests in the article - put a thong on the westerner, showing how all music is equally mixed, equally "ethnic", part of the same global rhizomic conversation. On the other end, it's been demonstrated again and again that supposedly "western" traits like electronics and modernity are extremely adaptable and easy to integrate by those so-called "tribal" people, who seem to have no problem at all ignoring "their" tradition once technology is available to them.

And yet, the same dichotomy seems to persist.

The Eurocentric elite world: neutral, modern, cosmopolitan, free

Everyone else: ethnified, ancient, bound by tradition

You'd think with stuff like kuduro and kwaito finally penetrating to our latitudes we'd have lost this divide by now. But its power is strong, and it seems like we're not done putting the thongs on the natives, not by a long shot. My very first textbook about reggae kept harping on about oil drums and bamboo poles, however irrelevant they were to the contemporary music; the writer from 14 tracks above has to make sure that it's the non-"western" genres that are declared tribalist. Factual truth - like the fact that South African DJs have been doing house fusions much longer than any of the musicians on his compilation - doesn't really matter, as the important thing is to make sure the dichotomy stays intact.

Then yesterday I came across this. A dude in Berlin taking club music and making it "ethnic", that traditional worldbeat exercise circa 1990. One portion mainstream, "western" club music, one portion of someone else's tradition, and bang, you've got the neutral-ethnic dichotomy enforced in a single track.

What's fascinating, though, is that every one of the supposedly neutral genres evolved, the ones that are eventually "ethnified", originally come from marginal communities in some way. Dubstep and grime are from the Black Atlantic diaspora and the urban poor in England. Jamaican dancehall - which only recently seems to have turned cosmopolitan and neutral, witness the amount of western-produced tracks called something-riddim recently - is of course from Kingston's poorer neighbourhoods to a large extent. This is another tactic in the maintenance of the dichotomy: appropriation, not in the accepting-and-receiving-influence sense, but taking a cultural expression from somewhere and wholly taking over the interpretative space around it. In this case, carefully whitewashing any trace of supposed "ethnicity" from dubstep, grime, dancehall, and making them fit neatly into the "western" slot of the worldbeat dichotomy.

And yet, we're all ethnic. And we're all modern and rootless. Jace and others have done a lot to make this apparent, but it seems that there's still plenty of people around who want to slip music into one category or the other, for possible later fusion. Either music has to be "tribal" or it must be appropriated and neutralised by the west. And that makes for a very boring world indeed.

Left without comment

"14 tracks: Global Ghetto House

From Dalston to Durban a prominent Afro-Latin accent is dominating dancefloors. In the kinky riddims of new producers like Julio Bashmore, Greena and Douster, tribalist percussion is gleaned from Kwaito, Soca and Cumbia and raved up with explicit House references to Masters At Work and a plethora of underground dance styles absorbed via youtube. Depending on their own generic roots, a load of international producers, new and old, are mixing these memes with their own riddmic DNA to create fresh and fascinating forms. We love tracking these developments and this weeks 14 tracks is devoted to those heads who're creating a new mongrel sound, using tracky NY & Chi-town templates with elements of European party tracks to nice up your area..."

(h/t Dubbel Dutch)

Lisbon trip music #3: Funaná, Batuko and a smidgen more Kuduro

This is what you get when you don't post your new record finds immediately: high-profile sites like Ghetto Bassquake and Discobelle get there first. Oh well, at least it'll teach me not to dawdle, and I do have a second CD to show off with.


Projecto Funaná & Batuko 2010 was one of the first records I bought, and it's a banger. Every blog I've read seems to have gone with the high-profile male performer and the lead-in track on this one (I have to pinch myself not to start making modernity and gender analyses), but some of the other music on here is just as interesting. This one is lighter and subtler yet has these magical show-off synth vs. accordion passages:

Isa - Bu Podi Vivre (Mediafire)

And then there's the Batuko. Never really got into the genre before - a capella chanting doesn't appeal to me much - but plonk in synth drones and you've got créol-deconstructed, counterpublic Deep Forest, except with humour. You've gotta love it, right?

Voz D'Africa - Mudjer Soltera (Mediafire)

(Incidentally, I also like the self-proclaimed status as the Voice of Africa, in relation to this.)



Funaná e Batuko 5 was my other purchase, and this one included some really good stuff too. This piece of pure stereo mayhem - headphones are a must - is quickly emerging as my favourite Funaná track ever:

Zé de Titina - Passa Sabe (Mediafire)

Some crazy distorted vocals and super-spread, super-diverse instrumentation, it all gets a ridiculously intense towards the end.

Next, since I have a soft spot for small children recording pop-- here's the Cape Verdean entry in the youngness league, Telmo. He sounds, and looks, to be about four.

Telmo - Amor (Mediafire)

And finally, for some reason, maybe cross-promotion, there's a ridiculously hard-hitting Kuduro track on the CD as well, totally intense stuff on the border towards gabba, if you can imagine African gabba.

Puto Cossa - Ja Ta De Mas (Mediafire)

But wait, there's more! Next up, whenever that may be, is kizomba and zouk...

Lisbon trip music #2: Nacobeta & Puto Português

This Kuduro album was easily the most pushed all over Portugal when I was there, and listening to it I can see exactly why. There's a lot of straightforward hit bangers, of course, but also a couple of those vaguely polyrhythmic-sounding weird tracks that Kuduro seems to be thriving on. Here are my two favourites:

Nacobeta & Puto Português feat. Vui Vui - Manda potência (Mediafire)

Nacobeta & Puto Português - Baba Bum (Mediafire)

Lisbon trip music #1: a couple of Costuleta vids

There's probably more interesting stuff forthcoming, but at least I got a couple of videos up in YouTube that no one has posted there before. Both are from Costuleta's 2009 DVD Bomba Kuduro, which SoundGoods already posted some tracks off.

Tchiriri, his big hit, has a dozen videos it seems but this one is a bit different, since it focuses on Costuleta dancing. As you may know dude only has one leg, so it's fairly unusual stuff.



This was the most experimental video of the bunch, and one of the best tracks, I think:



Plenty more to come of course.

Lisbon pics, thinks, and a track

Many more pics in the Flickr photostream.

Portugal is an interesting and complex country and I didn't get anywhere near penetrating it, I felt, so no real travel report forthcoming this time. I'll share some stray impressions and pics though.

Street Sounds

Car audio blaring: Reggaeton. Kizomba. Free jazz. Car audio demonstration at the Praca de Espanha market: Hip-hop. Street vendor's music: Funana, reigning supreme. Bollywood a distant second. A guy in the appartment opposite my hostel: Minimal techno.

"Street" Art

I've travelled Europe from Dublin to Moscow and Lofoten to Naples, and I've never seen a country with as much grafitti as Portugal. Huge legal walls eveywhere, "street art galleries", exclusive hipster-minimal stores selling spray cans... and shitloads of illegal tags, paintings, defaced advertising, what have you. The more central and prestigious, the more grafitti, very sporadically cleaned off - as opposed to the pristinely kept street surfaces, cleaned off daily by huge crews. The picture above, incidentally, is from a seaside resort, but could just as well have been both the suburbs and the heart of Lisbon.

Actual, You Know, Streets

In Damaia, an African-dominated suburb next to Buraca of Son Systema fame (I resisted going there just for the photo op), I shopped for records at the HQ of label Sons D'Africa and the comparison with the hip and prestigious Bairro Alto was telling. Large swathes of Damaia are - like touristy Alfama in the city centre a thousand years earlier - permanentized slum, former shacks with added pavement, electricity, mortar and postboxes, retaining a labyrintine layout and touches of organic colony-building. Precisely the same values that makes Alfama and Bairro Alto attractive are here the hallmark of slum... Shaded courtyards, narrow picturesque alleys, tight neighbourhoods.

Honestly, which is the shabbier-looking of these two alleyways?





Favela Chik

If you felt I was being to uncritical of life in squatter settlements in the last comment, at least I didn't have a drink at this place:



And a teaser track...

I've got shitloads of music, including videos once I figure out how to upload them, and that deserves posts of its own. As a teaser, though, here's some music from a country I've never considered before: Guinnea Bissau. It's a strangely beautiful track that seems to bring together African and Portugese sensibilities in a fascinating Créol way, but don't worry, there'll be plenty more modern Kizomba, Kuduro and Funana coming up shortly.

Dupla di Forombal - Badjuda di Caió (MediaFire)