Birdseed's Tunedown

Closing time

2012-01-03T11:51:00.008+01:00

The fact that this blog has stopped functioning as such will come as no surprise to anyone, seeing as to things like, well, the fact that there have been no posts in over a year. I had immense fun writing here for three-and-a-bit years (over 300 posts!) and some of the things I've posted here are still among the finest I've written, I think, from hits like the tikitech post and the succinct A Milli analysis to relatively unknown stuff like the longest post I ever wrote and the internal sex tourism post, or why not that sidchip post that got a great artist comment? And probably tons of stuff I've forgotten, as well as piles of really bad stuff.

Anyway. Reason I'm posting this right now (and not, say, a year ago which would have made sense) is that I've sort of begun working on a new blog. Nothing like as ambitious as this blog, clearly, but a simple tumblog:

http://birdseeding.tumblr.com/

See, the main thing I've really come to miss from blogging here is not long, complex reasoning, it's the little posts. Digging through a hundred Youtube videos to find that bhutanese countryside hipster electro track or whatever. I'm sure there are people doing it better than me out there, but I think there's a definite value in this sort of relocated context wrenching, stretching out relinkings that open up, while always wary of the post-colonial (male) tourist gaze this sort of thing inevitably invited. How that's going to happen exactly in a format of tiny captions is unclear as yet, but perhaps the ways forward inherent in Youtube as a platform (the contactability of artists, not least) will be enough. Do please call me out if I fail, though.

I will assiduously avoid reposting stuff from sources linked to Eurocentric club culture, because there are too many people doing that already.

Come by and say hello if you want!

Rebolation

2010-11-07T15:38:00.003+01:00

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

2010-10-20T12:39:00.003+02:00

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

2010-09-16T21:01:00.004+02:00

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

2010-08-30T00:48:00.003+02:00

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

2010-08-14T17:49:00.005+02:00

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!

2010-08-14T01:15:00.002+02:00

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

2010-08-07T15:49:00.000+02:00

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

2010-07-18T23:25:00.003+02:00

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)

Jejemon, jejcaps, jejebet

2010-07-06T15:26:00.005+02:00

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

2010-07-03T23:16:00.004+02:00

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

2010-07-03T11:09:00.005+02:00

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

2010-06-26T20:12:00.006+02:00

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

2010-06-02T15:02:00.002+02:00

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

2010-05-31T00:32:00.005+02:00

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

2010-05-29T16:57:00.003+02:00

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?

2010-05-25T10:29:00.008+02:00

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

2010-05-13T18:10:00.006+02:00

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

2010-05-11T17:04:00.006+02:00

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

2010-05-06T20:50:00.002+02:00

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

2010-05-06T10:00:00.002+02:00

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!

2010-05-05T15:14:00.004+02:00

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

2010-04-29T15:02:00.004+02:00

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

2010-04-29T02:06:00.003+02:00

"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

2010-04-29T01:06:00.005+02:00

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

2010-04-21T23:29:00.003+02:00

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

2010-04-14T20:01:00.003+02:00

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

2010-04-13T00:20:00.003+02:00

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)

LISBON! (Help me orientate)

2010-03-24T14:02:00.003+01:00

In one week's time I'm heading down to Lisbon for what I hope will be a fun holiday, but my intention is bringing back lots and lots and lots of great pirate/mp3 CDs in the bargain. The various lusophone diasporas offer up a marvellous creol Smörgåsbord of music that, as I understand it, has readily filtered back into the former colonial overlord (and hopefully subverted it). So I'm looking for kuduro, tarraxa, tarraxinha, kizomba, passada, cabolove, funana, Mozambican kwaito, Mozambican hip-hop, plus all kinds of Brazilian music. (Have I missed anything obvious or indeed obscure?)

Thing is, I know very little about where to go in Lisbon for this sort of thing, especially during Easter weekend. So I'd also love tops about the best street markets, shady record stores, banlieu hangouts and so on, to help me get stocking... I promise to return the favour by uploading plenty new content later.

The tikitech and the pelican

2010-03-12T18:10:00.005+01:00

More Europeans, more safari animals a few months after the trend should have petered out. This time, joyously mixed with the other hopefully-dead trend of "primitivistic" parodies of supposedly "third world" visuals.

(EP cover for Copia Doble Systema [sic], Danish cumbia band)

h/t Generation Bass.

Oh, and in case anyone is keeping track of animals on the wrong continent, that's a Great White Pelican right there, endemic to Africa, Europe and Asia.

Niger - Vocoder - Hausa - Lukthung - Bollywood?

2010-03-10T12:03:00.003+01:00

So what do you do when a country that you've not considered much before suddenly appears in the news? Inevitably and rather pathetically, my response is to start looking on YouTube for interesting music from that country. And it looks like Niger has some very interesting music indeed. There's a fairly large and unique hip-hop scene (google Rap du Niger) that has interesting spins on all sorts of material... my favourite track of the moment is this all-excusing cover of one of my least favourite tracks ever, Modjo's "Lady".

But the track that really caught my ears from an interestingness perspective is this:

Fun points obviously include the use of Vocoder in the age of Autotune, but I'm more interested in the melody, because it reminds me immensely of the kind of melodies you regularly hear in Thai lukthung music. Now, it could be just a musical coincidence - drawn out last syllables combined with pentatonic scales running up and down are not mindblowingly unlikely to occur together, and Hausa may recall asia being a chadic language somehow - but I'm still reading a cultural connection, and the only plausible link I can think of is all-eating, all-spitting Bollywood. Anyone got a better suggestion?

Tikitech: a latecomer

2010-03-09T23:22:00.004+01:00

I thought this trend was over - I've not seen a decent Safari animal in months. (Thank goodness.) Then Boima twittered this beauty, via African Hip Hop:

(Record cover for Beat Kondukta in Africa by Madlib)

Yes, as the original tweeter noted: It's a fucking tiger. In, supposedly, "Africa".

Pop World Cup: Africa's Year/Mainstreaming music addendum

2010-03-09T16:07:00.003+01:00

To tie together two previous sets of posts: Although it's possibly scant evidence, here's another indication of the mainstream potential of African music. The poptimist high castle that is Freaky Trigger has completed its first round of the Pop Word Cup (where I, as you may remeber, am Greece), and posted a poll of what peoples' favourite tracks are from that first set of game. The top two so far are african countries, with a futher three in the top twelve.

The top two:

Playing records tonight

2010-03-08T16:03:00.004+01:00

I've been called up at the last minute to do a set at the Int'l Women's Day party of the Feminist Initiative in Stockholm. Definitely in the mix this time around: Timberlee, Shystie, Pink Dollaz...

Funk Melody and the cleansing of the western "feminine"

2010-03-03T15:02:00.007+01:00

I've talked about what kind of selection the global ghettotech community does out of the totality of music in the world before. I didn't want to bring up gender then - it seemed superfluous to the argument - but I'm going to give it a small taster now in very general terms, to see how it goes down. And I'm going to start with our relationship to Brazil.

A couple of months ago I started listening to old compilations of Rio Funk from the late eighties and early nineties. For being a genre with such a poverty-related image, it's certainly fairly well-documented online, and it's fascinating to chart the progression of the music from essentially electro with bass elements to something quite distinct entirely.

But equally fascinating is the way the genre is much less homogeneous than I'd imagined. Up to the mid-nineties, half the tracks on Funk compilations would not be harsh songs about crime and hard partying, but instead stuff like this:

This is funk melody, perhaps most closely related to latin freestyle but diversely influenced by not least contemporary eurodance and older latin styles. It's romantic, values pop lightness and rhythmic complexity, and should fit nicely into a history of today's global landscape with genres like UK funky bringing the brighter values to the front again. And indeed, a bit of Youtube googling reveals a treasure trove of today's equivalents, a lot of which show a lot of promise and connect to what's going on elsewhere while retaining that essential freestyle feel.

So why doesn't any of it come across? None of the blogs cover it, it receives a cursory mention on a few history pages, but in general the music that comes off the funk scene and makes it to our end of the world is hard, unmelodic, and probably deals with drugs and violence. Sure it's a stereotype, a simplification of a complex scene into just one sound, but I also think there's more to it.

I think that this genre is routinely excluded off western DJ sets because it contains supposedly feminine elements. And I think it makes a good starting point for getting that gender discussion going properly.

I'm firmly in the camp that believes gender (and probably even sex) to be a social construction. If we're going to gender analyse a broad spectrum of culture this is a bit of a problem. What constitutes "male" and "female" properties varies greatly across the world, and many cultures have more than two gender categories altogether. Without intimate knowledge of a particular cultural context, it's difficult to find and criticise gender structures and inequalities, especially when they're not readily apparent in text or visual presentation.

Music, especially, is difficult to assess this way. Music as a language, if it can be considered a language at all, is imprecise and wholly fictional. There's nothing that obviously connects any one sound to any one mood or idea, besides cultural convention. Minor key does not equal sadness. Brass instruments do not equal militarism. Or rather, they do, but only to those with a particular background and education. Returning to the issue at hand, some things that appear to break or affirm gender norms in non-Eurocentric-elite music do nothing of the sort - since they need to be read in their own contexts. Bass rumble, to take a very concrete example, is often seen as something particularly male, but in other contexts it's considered "for the ladies"...

But that surely doesn't really matter. Because as much as we like to think otherwise, us music bloggers and global ghettotech DJs are very much touching on that other tradition - the Eurocentric elitist one - the "western" one. In which there are set ideas about what's feminine and masculine in music going back to the 18th century and beyond, and which can't readily be dismissed as outside our experience since most of us have grown up with it or had it partially imposed upon us. From a "western" cultural context, "masculine" means aggressive, large, loud, boastful, technically oriented, hard... And "feminine" means romantic, restrained, quiet, warm, organic.

My contention - and I don't think this is entirely controversial - is that music that embodies the "masculine" qualities as taken from the "western" tradition has fared a lot better in global ghettotech than that which is "feminine" by the same standards. And that this is a significant contributing reason something like prohibidao gets more releases and mixtape inclusions than funk melody. I think this might slowly be changing - genres like zouklove that are "feminine" are no longer entirely ignored - but this still seems to be the overwhelming pattern, and I think we need to take a particularly close look at it if we've got a desire to "convey" something at all and feel good about ourselves as music-filterers.

What do you guys think?

In 1993, "Rap Das Armas" was an anti-gun rio funk track. In 2001, it was a prohibidao track about shooting policemen. In 2010...

2010-02-13T14:25:00.004+01:00

Off the swedish version of Dancing With The Stars:

Cupping the pop

2010-02-11T22:13:00.004+01:00

My blogging is squelching at a disturbing new-girlfriend/masters-thesis/job-application/seminar-organising low at the moment - though I have a couple of posts lined up real soon, and hope to return to proper schedule as a distraction once I'm supposed to be busy writing.

Meanwhile, I've gone and joined a really fun bit of worldwide pop digging that should appeal to readers of this blog: the Pop World Cup on Freaky Trigger. Basically, each player gets assigned a country from the roster of teams qualified for the real 2010 World Cup, and then proceed to face off tracks against each other following the schedule of the real thing.

Who gets what team was semi-randomly to randomly determined. I was hoping for-- I dunno, The Ivory Coast? Serbia? South Africa? But what I got was... Greece.

It's not a bad country in total, and I've found what I think is good material for it, but the group I'm facing is pure murder. Group B opponents South Korea, Nigeria and Argentina are, like, the hardest teams on their respective continents for pure pop and I'm really going to struggle to pull through. So if you've got any Greek pop favourites that you think will improve my chances, go ahead and link them for me!

The first match with one of my tracks in it is already up. I'm facing South Korea, and I'm not going to ask you to vote for me - go for whichever you like better, or if you want my opinion, go for the K-pop!

Mainstreaming Music 2: Whatcha gonna do?

2010-01-14T21:53:00.007+01:00

Say the assertion that pop music of the third world is approaching a convergent style is correct. Well, then, shouldn't we be hearing pop music from all over the world in mixes and eventually the hit lists right about now? Well, it doesn't really work that way, and one place this becomes apparent is in the mixtapes, DJ sets and blog posts of the insiders in the global ghettotech world.

If a lot more of the musical resources in the third world - at least in the forward-looking parts of various cities and countries - are being channelled into producing "mainstream-pop-sounding" music, then this certainly doesn't reflect on the output of western DJs, for perfectly understandable indie reasons. But it presents an interesting question: if the music of the world's urban centres is going out as it changes, what's coming in instead? What new sources of music are western DJs turning to as the normal output goes more mainstream?

As I read it, there are three concurrent trends in types of music that, if you want, can be somewhat attributable to the (possibly) increased lack of non-mainstream popular music from the developing world.

1. The traditional

One type of genre that has always been resistant to trends, by definition, is the traditional, conservative one. These used to be consistently shunned by the always teleological fans of bass-oriented city music - you'd never hear any, say, bachata in mixtapes five years ago - but seemingly not so any more. Two genres in particular that focus on acoustic instrumentation and unbroken traditions going back decades have had a major resurgence in the global ghettotech community: cumbia and funana, both of which have been featured in very straightforward old-fashioned forms alongside newer derivatives.

Some types of traditional music has always had a popularity in local communities, including the two above, so right now this seems more like a positive expansion of the definition than anything problematic. But there's always the chance it might lead in the future to the kind of west-imposed "tradition" that World Music used to peddle, so watch out.

2. The cosmopolitan

The educated middle class has always been extremely adapt at extending the shelf-life of dead working-class genres - boom-bap underground hip-hop is but one in a seemingly endless series that springs to mind. Combined with the middle-class propensity for "fusion" and "neo-folk" cosmopolitanism it's almost a surprise that global ghettotech stayed committed to the urban poor as long as it did. Now, it seems, middle-class producers with good access are as much the order of the day. DJ Umb, in particular, has been pushing completely delocalised, cosmopolitan variants of dubstep and other previously geographically constricted musics, often fused with a local flavour.

Again this is probably a good thing as long as it's actually an extension - I heartily dislike the stereotype of the third world as a mass of anonymous poverty. On the other hand, it risks overshadowing the music of actual marginalised groups and individuals, being easier to access and ethically straightforward. We still need to put in that hard work to find music that doesn't have immediate access to the blogging world, or we risk tilting the stereotype the other way.

3. The fake

And obviously, if you can't have music that sounds appropriate from the third world, you can go ahead and make it conform to the right stereotype yourself... This is another explanation for the ascendancy of tikitech and faux-"African" imagery, that the real Africa is no longer African enough and needs to be augmented.

A milder, not necessarily bad version of making music more "local" while being an outsider exists, of course. As if to prove a point, after reading my last post on the subject (!), Canalh went ahead and cumbified the Kreyol hip-hop track I used as an example of mainstreamness, adding a layer of faux-local onto the international! And you know what? I kinda like it! On a conceptual level not least because, as Jace so eloquently put it, it's the white men wearing the red thongs and body paint and the black guys who wear the jeans. And that, surely, can't be all wrong.

Sex and the Lebanese pop singers

2010-01-07T22:03:00.002+01:00

I used to know this muslim convertite woman who loved middle eastern pop, but complained about the immoral nature of the way the female singers would dress. "But at least," she'd say, "they don't dress up like Britney Spears or Shakira. Look at these album covers - this which is considered a normal top in the west is considered highly sexualised in Egypt!" She showed me a picture of a woman in a fairly modest top, covering the top of the arms.

In retrospect I shouldn't have believed her. Another friend (lebanese-finnish-american) showed me some lebanese pop videos a couple of months ago and I was fairly surprised to see just how sexualised lebanese pop is right now. Certainly more so than a lot of western pop (!) and totally against stereotype for a majority-muslim country. In that respect it's much like Indonesian dangdut seksi.

In this video, the singer plays footsie with a man's inner thigh while chocolate sauce suggestively runs down icecream, catches a flying champagne cork between her teeth, strips off her dress and the man's t-shirt, all while displaying her cleavage:

Name one recent western music video so explicitly about sex! Meanwhile, in the scantily-clad department, there's the first sequence on the boat in this video:

And so on. Plenty more on Melody TV's channel, where there's a lot more female pop in this vein. Honestly don't know what to think about it, but at least the prudish Arab stereotype should be well smashed, if anyone still believes in it.

Avatar from inside a feminist debate

2010-01-05T18:46:00.005+01:00

From the perspective of this blog, James Cameron's film Avatar shares a lot of qualities with traditional "world music". The way imperialism is portrayed not least, primarily as the replacement of (very literally here) roots culture with "light beer and blue jeans" shares a whole deal of qualities with the rights and wrongs according to the world music paradigm. But what really clicked with me while watching the film was how well it paralleled one of the classic central debates within feminism - and that a critique of it from that perspective is valuable for further world music debate as well.

There are a lot of possible readings of Avatar that will portray it as racist in various ways, but on the other hand it portrays the native Na'vi in an extremely positive way. They are made beings of almost saintly qualities, and even just humanising character traits like (legitimate!) jealousy are played down to almost nothing. What more, their positive qualities are greatly accented by making the (dominant, powerful) humans stupid, insensitive and brutish, except for a select few that nevertheless are much less perfect than the lofty na'vi. Humans and na'vi exist as opposites and contrasts to each other, to a very large extent.

Portraying inequalities like this is within feminism the domain of the now-unfashionable difference feminists. According to their thinking, men and women are fundamentally different from each other, biologically, and the qualities of of women are vastly better and are only repressed because the world is run patriarchally. Interestingly, these qualities are in many ways similar to what Cameron portrays as the positive qualities of the na'vi: deeper connection to nature and life, caring, spirituality over cold rationality, collective mutual responsibility over individual competitiveness, equality and consensus over hierarchy and rhetoric. (A difference, in a somewhat bizarre way, is the strangely warlike nature of the na'vi. This, on the other hand, is what several commentators find most problematic...)

A cynic could possibly read a general critique of civilization into difference feminism, when looked at this way. Or maybe the opposite is true, and the na'vi are, as it were, feminised, with their female spiritual leaders and flat gender structure in the hunt? Cameron has expressed feminist sentiments in the past. Whatever the case, it emphasises the fairytale nature of the story: in real life, women continue to be caught in a patriarchal system, and badly-armed locals don't beat high-tech helicopters and guns. Precisely the qualities espoused as positive are the ones that don't succeed in a capitalist-patriarchal society, instead dominated by the "evil" ones. Which, of course, a difference feminist would say is precisely the point.

A worse accusation against difference feminism is its locking of individuals, with various different characteristics, into a strong binary dichotomy. From a queer perspective, the opposition to uncertain gender identities and transsexualism is as bad as any patriarchal dominance, and any individuality is suppressed into essentialist collectivity. And here's my main problem with Avatar as well: the movie has precisely the same problem. Both humans and na'vi are derisive and exclusionary to the other, categorising into a very strong us and them; especially the latter group has a complicated ritually maintained community model designed to exclude any outsider from the inner circle. The avatars, potentially queering and deconstructing the binary, are distrusted by both humans (represented by Colonel Quaritch) and na'vi, the latter considering them positively demonic.

It is notable that the movie's protagonist/transsexual/na'vi trapped in a human body, Jake Sully, is not allowed to stay in his, as it were, pre-op state, but is forced to end up a full-on na'vi in the final scene. For all the cyberqueer possibilities of the avatar characters, any mixture or playful role-switching is discouraged, and only studious and reverent acceptance of all the attributes of one side leads to being included in the desired in-group.

Where this analogy halts a bit, of course, is that Cameron idealises the fairy-tale, dichotomised other from the position of an outsider himself. In this respect he's very much like world music fans, whose own dichotomies lead them to aggregate a lofty other to adore, one that no longer includes individuals but merely the whole world. And like James Cameron they give this collective qualities that will ensure its continued subjugation in the real world, and discourage any single person trying to use their agency to be something different.

Top 50 tracks in 2009

2009-12-31T13:49:00.005+01:00

This was my blogging new year's resolution last year, and I intend to keep it: a top list of my 50 favourite tracks of 2009 (fuck decades!). I've rather sporadically - based on availability of fast internet access - thrown music into a big bin and then whittled it down, so it's really all over the place and skewed towards blogs and the first half of the year and the US. But hey, at least I reveal my biases ahead of time! (Links go to the tubes or whatever where available.)

1. Gracious "Nappa Man" K - Migraine Skank (original pre-release version)

Something about how this is structured with the interlocking rhythms totally blows my mind (I really should have a go at analysing it at some point!), and even though there's (mystifyingly, since I love it) no more Funky on this list, this totally represents that genre's deep genius in bringing rhythm-based music forward. 2009 was Migraine Skank's year.

2. Don Omar - Virtual Diva

Album of the Year: See previous post. Picking just one song off this was super-difficult, but I went for the iconic single in the end.

3. Black Eyed Peas - I Gotta Feeling
4. Untamed feat. Mr Marcellus - Fill It Up
5. The Sounds of Arrows - Into The Clouds

I decided I needed to sprinkle in a few token indie entries in here. Wouldn't want to be politically incorrect, the poor underprivileged white middle class need their share.

6. Barikad Crew - Toup Pou Yo (thx Rachel!)
7. Illie - Liquified Dopeness

I really should listen to more Jerk.

8. Tinchy Stryder feat. Amelle - Never Leave You
9. Leila Chicot - Renaissance
10. Medina feat. Allyawan, Palestine & Aida - Så Dom Gör Det (Fiend Version)
11. Ace Hood feat. The-Dream - Mine
12. Hard Kaur - Follow Me

Songwriter of the year: Pritam. Bollywood really got a re-injection of musical quality this year thanks to the writing and production genius of the jovially bearded Bengali. He may have nicked all his tracks from the koreans (bizarrely) but it's hard to miss what a breath of fresh air one composer has brought to the Mumbai film industry. Runner-up: The-Dream.

13. La Roux - In For The Kill (Skream's Let's Get Ravey Mix)
14. Alicia Keys - Try Sleeping With A Broken Heart
15. James Fauntleroy - Te Amo
16. La Factoria - Apartade de ti
17. Freds225 - Instru Logobi 225
18. Dizzee Rascal - Holiday
19. Ce'cile and Live Wire - You Got Me
20. Kenny Margant - T'Oublier
21. Frenchie - It's Ok (Knel Mix)
22. Amerie - Tell Me You Love Me
23. Nina Sky - On Some Bullshit
24. Circlesquare - Dancers (Russ Chimes vs. Anoraak Remix)
25. T.I. - Hell of a Life

If this was 2006 this might well have been a top ten track for me - this culminates the mega-major-key euphoria that made southern hip-hop so wonderful that year.

26. AC Slater - Hello (Ricorb befriends Kim Jong-il remix)
27. Blak Ryno - Pon Di Earth
28. Ray Rich - Know She Cold
29. Mariah Carey - Standing O
30. Willy Northpole feat. B.O.B. - Hood Dreamer
31. Kartier - Ma Pones Mal
32. Tim Benson - Love At First Sight
33. Swine Flu - Starter
34. Dennis Ferrer - Hey Hey
35. Sean Garrett feat. Young Joc - Smooches (Chief Boima Remix)

Global Ghettotech of the year: as in - purpose-made "exotic" music. This remix is lovely and could make anyone reconsider their attitude towards fusion as a concept.

36. Kaysha - Be With You
37. Newkid - Gör Det För
38. Ali Ashabi - Eteraf
39. Discovery - Osaka Loop Line
40. Unlady Like - Bartender
41. Tavrvs - Vharder
42. Tynisha Keli - Rockstar
43. Al Brown - I Don't Know
44. DJ Hans - Akh Da Nishana
45. Joker - Do It
46. Khriz y Angel - Dime
47. Slicer feat. Tazzz, Renegade - Murk Em
48. Young Dro - Clean With It
49. Busy Signal - Black Belt
50. Trae feat. Krayzie Bone & Twista - I Won't Change

Happy new year, everyone!

Genre of the year: Reggaeton

2009-12-27T14:40:00.003+01:00

There have been many great genres this year. We all enjoyed the fresh appearance of logobi, I've totally got into zouk-love, and at some point I've started to really "get" a lot of the previously mysterious trance/hardcore hybrid genres, like hardstyle.

But there's one considerably older style of music I've consistently returned to, which has really made my 2009: Reggaeton. To some people, this is bizarrely the year the genre died, but from my perspective it's never been more vital or more interesting, and it's forged a path quite different and refreshing compared to everything else going on at the moment. Yes, it's connected to the wider movement towards electro and trance-oriented sounds that might actually have peaked already, but even more so it's tapped straight into the source - Reggaeton 2009 has been channelling the eighties, and everything good about them!

Sometimes, it's been very direct. Compare, for instance, the following track...

ZK Feat. Crac MC - Disculpeme Senorita

..with just about any italo disco, most obviously perhaps this Raggio De Luna classic:

It's a fun leap, one I think not many other genres have made this year. Little flourishes of new wave, italo, video game music, hi-nrg and freestyle are evident in many more Reggaeton tracks this year, but for me that's far from the only interesting idea that's been revived from the eighties. For instance, remember earlier in the year I had a little obsession with collecting tracks about robots and sex? Well, the theme has been brought back in a major way in Reggaeton this year!

Which brings me to what must surely be the album of the year, any genre: "Idon" by Don Omar, which brings together all what's been great about Reggaeton beautifully. A super-ambitious science-fiction concept album (when did pop music last produce one of those?), it perfectly encapsulates the complex platonic soul of great music: instinct mingled with intellect, emotional warmth meets calculating coldness. Just like the best eighties music! The sheer, the square and the dirty feed off each other, in a heady/pelvic mixture of body and mind. And it manages to do so in a musical costume where the Caribbean lives side-by-side with everything from Bon Jovi to Jam and Lewis, with tiny bleeps and massive rumbles, industrial, faux-orientalism, just about anything in breathtaking scope.

It's perhaps hard to capture in a single track (get the album!) but luckily there's the awesome cyborg-inflicted musical-conceptual video for The Chosen/Virtual Diva to whet your appetite. Somewhere here I think the best of 2009 might well be located.

Genre of the Week: Putaria/Funk Putaria

2009-12-11T21:51:00.004+01:00

...and what a week it's been - guests, viral infections, moving and not being able to reply to comments due to a bug (sorry Umb, Dave Quam). One good thing though is that I've come across a rather interesting and vibrant strand of the Brazilian funk scene that I've never heard about before, and which seems to be very much alive and kicking - most of the stuff I've found on the net is less than a year old.

Putaria literally means "harlotry", and seems self-descriptive as much as it is pejorative. (Taking pride in negative descriptions is hardly anything new in the music world.) In a genre that already is fairly crude in its lyrical content and simple in its production, this stuff seems to go another step down the ladder - the production is wonky in a semi-amateurish way, the sound decidedly lo-fi, the feel decidedly closer to, say, cumbia villeira or juke than to something ultra-clean in the trance-electro mould. Interestingly, this has the effect of producing some startlingly messy, complex-sounding productions with unexpected musical touching points:

Treble culture, anyone? This dubby, mixtapy, industrial-tinged piece with its pre-distorted drum sounds would fit perfectly blearing out of a mobile phone, it's hardly been cleaned up to a higher standard. (And is all the more wonderful for it, aesthetically!)

Apparently (this is the only English-language source I've got at the moment) putaria, like prohibidão before it, is a function of the most violent and poor neighbourhoods even within the Favelas. Unlike the macho-posturing prohibidão, though, this material is rather porno-dystopian, and among other things happily accepts female performers:

(Video probably NSFW)

Again, I'm struck by the lo-finess and the high amount of distortion on the usually clean tamborzao, and the weird polyrhythmic productions surrounding it. Good percussive stuff here! And this seems to be new as a sonic style as well, most of the material from two years ago and last year is much cleaner. For this year's putaria, there's a very good amount of available on Youtube, especially served by some excellently-compiled playlists. This one and this one have been especially enjoyable.

Finally, one thing I can't keep away from you, though it's only incidentally connected: this guy, I'm assuming a middle-class intermediary, who's uploaded a few putaria videos. Isn't it great that the täbb/pretty boy style has spread to Brazil as well? Look at his videos for more images!

Break Pong

2009-12-07T23:08:00.002+01:00

There's just so much interesting music in the eighties and early nineties that the laughable, essentialist "World Music" managed to miss. Point in hand is the extremely unusual and post-punkishly awkward combination of breakdance drums and faux-traditional jaipong music, break pong, which awesome Indonesian rarity blog Madrotter just introduced me to. Following the link and downloading reveals some damn weird drum machine+pseudogamelan weirdness, straight outta Karawang.

And as this freshly Youtube video reveals, the idea is still (perhaps surprisingly) alive:

Massive stuff. See also the sample-heavy jaipong craziness of Ega Robot, same source.

Talk on Global Ghettotech

2009-12-06T16:06:00.003+01:00

This will be of marginal interest to the vast majority of my readers, but I'm holding a short talk about global ghettotech, it's development, the differences from world music - and of course its problems, here in Helsinki on Tuesday. The talk will be in Swedish at the request of the organisers, pop culture analysis group Chorus.

Venue: Café Aula Bar, Malminrinne 2, Helsinki
Date: Tuesday 8 December
Time: 1900-2100

Mainstreaming Music 1: How Decreasing Diversity May Be A Good Thing

2009-11-26T18:36:00.004+01:00

One of those supposedly unchallengeable truths about the development of music in the past three decades is the idea of fragmentation.

Music, the thinking goes, has undergone a process whereby previously unified groups of people (say: all the consumers in a country) have split up into ever-smaller fragments, listening to localised, community-based music to an increasing degree. Within each faction, in turn, there are myriads of little facets, each with its own named genre, and there's absolutely nothing any more that even vaguely unifies whole countries, let alone the whole world. This is then explained by a bunch of fancy theories involving post-modernism, long tails and so on.

I think it may be time to challenge this view, which I've definitely held myself. Because it seems to me that with the increased production values in so many parts of the world, and with the unified contemporary aesthetic covering all chart pop, we're hitting a time where, indeed, a lot of music is starting to sound pretty much the same. And for me, right now, that's a good thing.

The videos above are from Nigeria, Kenya and Haiti respectively. Different genres and backgrounds, yet they're all pretty much some sort of international pop, produced up to extremely high technical standards and with quality videos that could, for the most part, pass unnoticed on any MTV channel. For the first time, recording technology has progressed to the level where artist from the "third world" can make music that sounds just as good as any "western" pop, and they're taking the opportunity. In droves. And it's super-popular, racking in fans and awards.

Diaspora and minority populations are certainly following suit. Like bhangra? Well, the subcontinental diaspora increasingly favours RnB-soundalike urban desi instead - and so, seemingly, do the rest of us. And if urban desi is indistinguishable from other pop, it's got nothing on how much mainstream "black" and "white" music has melded completely into one genre. The biggest smash hit this year across almost all charts (including the latin one) defiantly crosses all gaps, racial and geographical, in melding what is very clearly one world pop - a multi-ethnic band with hip-hop roots doing a guitar-driven number produced by a French DJ, hitting number one from Brazil to Japan.

And this development is good, I think, in all sorts of ways. One very obvious consequence is that we're less likely to think in terms of us and them if it's all the same. Both traditional world music and global ghettotech has been extremely good at defining what The Other does as something radically different from "the west", but what happens when the music becomes so indistinguishable? Does it signal a chance to see beyond some of the steotypes, and perhaps embrace the diasporas and the rest of the world on more equal terms? That's gotta be good, right? (Next post I thought I'd have a look at global ghettotech's response.)

But I also think it can be good creatively. By my reckoning what we're seeing in terms of coming together right now is perhaps most comparable to the so-called rock'n'roll era of the 50s, where all over the world people of different ethnicities made similar-sounding music. Was that a bad thing? Not at all! The 50s are considered one of the most explosively creative periods of all time, when "black" and "white" completely came together and kept churning out great material. What's to say we won't see the same now?

Music trends move and waver back and forth. Every time and style has its own greatness and worthy moments. Yesterday may have belonged to local genres, while today even the subcultures are defiantly cosmopolitan. Perhaps, for those stuck in the metaphorical hood, it is time to think about what we can all accomplish together?

What a monster bass line!

2009-11-25T14:19:00.005+01:00

Ever since Boima clued me onto the importance of the low end in zouk love music a couple of months ago, I have been obsessively collecting the stuff. Of course there are low ends...

...and there are low ends.

The breakdown especially, from about 2:10, rivals even the most depth-digging Dubstep.

Tikitech the EP

2009-11-23T19:56:00.005+01:00

Yes, it's bloody Radioclit again. And Douster. Etc. Via Discobelle.

"For this first episode of a series of mini-compilations curated by Mental Groove’s most cherished artists, trend defying duo Radioclit pick their favorite youngster producers and let them paint their own picture of Africa. The Fader-favorite Douster, über-productive Frenchy Lazy Flow and Myd deliver a collection of dancefloor anthem and the perfect balance between African funk and heat-inducing house. Radioclit, still burning hot from producing the monumental The Very Best album, add a bomb ass bonus. C’est l’aventure, it’s Saga Africa!

Already supported by support by Sinden, Mumdance, Riva Starr, Brodinski, Crookers, Duke Dumont and many more."

"Paint their own picture of Africa" indeed. And if that wasn't enough, here's the release party flyer:

"Curse of the Voodoo" is an especially charming epithet when talking about African music, too. Well done guys. (Party, of course, at "Le Zoo".)

And the award for most monkeys in a tikitech video goes to...

2009-11-19T14:22:00.003+01:00

...Funky Monkey by DJ Twist it! (h/t Dubbel Dutch, via twitter.)

Funky Monkey by Twist It. from Narco Media Vision / NARCOTV on Vimeo.

Update: I think I've found another video that might be able to contest the crown, via Generation Bass.

2009 is the best year in the charts, ever

2009-11-18T19:39:00.003+01:00

Apparently, there are more singles sold now in Britain than at any time in history. I bet there are lots of fancy explanations for this from market analysts and academics, but for me there's another totally overwhelming reason: commerical pop music right now is just amazingly good. In fact:

There's never been a year in history where the most commercially successful pop music has been as good as this.

I'm trying to make good on an unfortunate promise from last year and pick the best music of 2009 for a feature on this blog, and as a dutiful anti-rockist reader of Freaky Trigger's Popular one obvious place to start looking is on top of the British charts. Looking at the list of all the UK number ones this year, I count three, I say three tracks that are more or less crap - a charity single, and two retro boy band tracks. But the rest are all good tracks, ranging from the more-than-decent to absolutely brilliant. That has never happened before. Not in the mid-sixties, not in the late seventies, certainly not for the past twenty-five years.

There are some amazing tracks on here, too, some of the finest ever to grace the charts. All the wonderful features of 00s music that makes the last decade the best there's ever been have born fruit at the commercial end. Love that rising, energy-injecting soar of the Ying Yang Twins' finest crunk hour? Or that beautifully chiming 3+3+2 riff in an otherwise dull indie track? Here they are, combined with a massively beautiful house diva vocal and an explosive dancefloor thump! Fantastic!

The finest artists in electro, hip-hop and grime are all up there, there are gay icons and indie darlings. Even the stuff that should be dreadful has generally been completely enjoyable: the talent show contestants have been sharp, intelligent and stylish. The retro artists have struck a perfect balance with modernity. And the once so annoying Black Eyed Peas have been BRILLIANT. There's no pathetic pop-rock, no has-beens (!), no novelty (except said charity single). Nothing cheesy. All the very finest grade of commercial pop, all with edges and production touches that marks out the classic from the merely well-crafted.

Fuck, just listen to this latest track that has made it up there. Those screw-autotune-distorted vocals, the noise, the ridiculously amazing chord sequence in the chorus and the perfectly attuned new wave references. The charts of 2009 are, quite simply, ART.

In front of

2009-11-10T18:54:00.004+01:00

"Malcolm X was bisexual. Get over it" says the Guardian headline, via Boingboing. The article behind the headline impassionedly argues for greater recognition for LGBT people within the African-American and black British community, and accuses Black History Month of "straight-washing" black history. It's not an uninteresting argument.

In fact, there's only one thing wrong with the article - that it's written by Peter Tatchell. Many fans of Jamaican music will know who Tatchell is, as the man who initiated the campaign against "Boom Bye Bye" - an outspoken and highly radical British gay rights activist. The most neutral thing one can say about Peter Tatchell is that he tends to be rather divisive, forming highly impassioned camps for and against his statements. Right now a minor internet brouhaha is under way about Tatchell suing an academic publication in a rather overbearing manner, and he's previously had tussles with other radical activists over Islam, pop music and (perhaps most relevant to this blog) African gay rights activism. I'm absolutely not sure if the allegations in the last link are true, but in any case his response (as featured in the comments) is clumsy and inflammatory in a very unfortunate manner. He's not Mr. Nice Guy.

But I'm not sure all that matters. What's problematic about the article is that Mr. Tatchell is a cultural middle class white man. And you know what? So am I.

DJ Umb is a recent frequent commenter on this blog, and one of his blog comments back when he was slightly more mad at me stuck me as having a lot of truth to it. "Let the colonized peoples speak for themselves," he said. "They don't need white, middle-class, westerners doing it for them. Cause that happened far too often in the past and actually led to colonization in many instances."

Fuck it if he isn't right. Extrapolating, what bothers me about Tatchell's article is that this is a message that ought to have been delivered by a black LGBT activist, not a white one. I'm retreading fairly obvious ground here, but an article that defends the right to be seen of a particular group of people is a touch hypocritical when it's a person from a more privildged group standing in front of them talking. And yet, here I am doing pretty much the same thing, right?

Being an ally is fucking difficult. I don't think anyone will go around saying there should be no male feminists, straight gay rights advocates and so on, people using their relative position of power and their access to an audience to push forward an agenda that benefits someone else... yet it's a super-precarious path to thread since people like me and Peter de facto don't share the relevant experiences, and need to listen to an enormous extent instead of just following instinct. I'm running for the Stockholm city council next fall as a member of a feminist party (announcement! details forthcoming), and not a day goes by when I don't question my own role in the greater power scheme of things. The price of alliance, just as with freedom, is eternal vigilance.

One example. One thing Peter Tatchell does, which I continuously try my best never to engage in, is criticise other marginal groups. In the piece above he attacks the black community in Britain from outside, and his attacks on Jamaican reggae artists, Muslims and those African gay rights groups all have the effect of decreasing the power of an already marginalised grouping. In a classic intersectional scenario, the gain for gay rights is offset by the clambering over other identities to get there. I think that offers a significant clue as to why he's so reviled in large circles on the left.

Other definite principles I hope to follow is to direct attacks to my own in-group, try to help people discover how to find actual artists, and if at all possible link to actual voices and sources. Please - if you find me breaking any of this shit, call me out on it.

Big Budget Tikitech

2009-11-05T23:26:00.003+01:00

Me (on Google Reader): *slaps forehead*

Boima Tucker: Ha!

Rachel: sigh. oh radioclit. explorers pwnt by the natives? vid was wack even before the kalashnikovs, cannibalism.

Wayne: DJ livingstone, i presume?

Me: I think I should just put it up, really. Oh dear.

Triple Threat Tikitech

2009-11-03T18:10:00.004+01:00

It's great sometimes not to have to find anything by yourself, I get new tikitech entries sent to me continuously. DJ Umb, whose reading-posting-commenting workrate is incredibly impressive, sent me some absolute gems for futher inclusion.

Grabbing randomly out of the bag, there's this mixtape, which is both fairly tikitech in itself - mainly European-and-Argentine produced, chanty "tribal" - and boasts the full-on jungle theme in image and title:

[Mixtape artwork from Globalibre]

The idea of "Dschungel-Jazz" is especially charming, as "jungle music" of course was one of the most common racists epithets against Jazz in the first place. When Louis Armstrong first played Sweden in 1933 contemporary reviewers described him as a "clean-shaven hippopotamus" and a "gorilla".

Next up, from the same site, is this party flier:

[Flier for Club LeGrande in Dortmund from Globalibre]

Again this is South America rather than Africa, but the jungle theme is super-clear, and it could almost be from the same clipart series as this Swedish example from last year.

More South American jungle next:

[Mixtape artwork for Efrita from Cooliado]

Which is followed immediately the next post down by this:

[Blog post illustration for El Diario Secreto de MIA mashup on Cooliado]

Now, the sheer mass of bananas could indicate a semiotic critique of colonialism... But even though I don't read Spanish, I'm fairly sure the subsequent text talking about "monkey" and old kitsch-explorer cliché "the interior of the congo" indicates otherwise.

A Small Balkan Pop Primer For The Uninitiated

2009-11-02T16:37:00.004+01:00

What is it with the continual association of the Balkans with brass bands, klezmer and "gypsy" breakbeats? For the past 20 years, the Balkans have been the site of an almost Caribbean-like explosion of different styles in the wake of the fall of communism, and for those of you who're not really into this stuff I thought it'd be worth it to put together a very brief primer, a few sentences per genre and one or two Youtube vids. The social context is super-interesting too but I'll leave that for another time.

Generally, all the genres of Balkan pop exist in a continuum where they're more or less synth-driven, more or less associated with the Roma or other ethnic minorities and more or less take their musical cues from what happens in Istanbul. Other influences felt across the board are Arabic and Indian music, commercial pop, European dance music, hip-hop and, to a surprising extent, reggaeton.

Here's some of the major genres developed in the past 20 years, roughly in a sweep from the south-west to the north-east:

Turbo-Folk
The occasionally controversial pop music of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia used to have less Eastern influence than the rest (and still does in Slovenia to horrendous result) but now it's right there on Istanbul's heels as well, or sometimes up in space. Often, this stuff is touted as what should eventually heal the old enmities of the former Yugoslavia.

The brassiest thing you'll see on here today:

Tallava
Tallava is music from Kosovo, Albania and Macedonia, to varying degrees the music of the Roma, the Albanians themselves and of the Ashkali. It values weird synth equilibrism and has this drone-like quality which lends well to being mixed with dub and psychedelic sounds. At another end it's got a whole hip-hop remix culture set up, and can be some of the more funky music of the Balkans.

Endless, rambling tracks like this one are de rigeur, don't miss the invitation to "dansu reggu" near the end:

Oh, and in case you're missing the Dembow, it's alive and kicking in Macedonia:

Skyládiko
Greece has more continuity to its music scene than the former communist countries, and more connection to the west, so the Balkan pop scene here tends to be a tad ill-kempt (Skyládiko means "doghouse"). On the other hand it's close enough to the very commercial and very successful greek pop scene that it sometimes hard to tell the difference.

I mean, stuff like this is good but more Eurovision than dancefloor:

Chalga
I posted a whole mix-tape's worth of Bulgarian music a year ago, which I could re-upload if anyone wants it. In any case, Chalga, or Popfolk, is probably the most commercially successful and well-balanced music of the lot and very much mainstream music in Bulgaria. At its best it's totally at the level of quality commercial hip-hop, and well worth listening to.

It's also unusually house-club-remix friendly:

Kyuchek
As it's used today in Bulgaria, this is Chalga's low-production-value Turk-Bulgarian cousin. Cheezy synth and/or clarinets set to belly dance rhythms by various funnily-named Orkestars, this can be topical, silly or dancey and is certainly more fun than some of its straight-laced cousins.

I mean, look at the dude ass-dancing in this video:

Manele
Okay, this is my favourite genre in the area and it's going to be the topic of my master's thesis, so you'll hear lots more about this in the winter and spring. Nevertheless, Romania's contribution to the spectrum is the most compelling to me - it's super-diverse, it's got the most wide-reaching influence set, the most heart-felt vocals and just the right mix between rough-hewn and interesting. Some songs are achingly beautiful, some are about butts and feature a reggaeton rapper or something. How can you not love this stuff?

Here's both a dancehall toaster and diva tragedy in one package:

RnBesk
The only reason I'm including this is because it appears on Wikipedia's bare-bones Balkan Pop page. That and the great portmanteau name. It's Balkan in the sense that it's Turkish-influenced European music, but the origin of the genre is Germany, which I admit is a bit of a stretch. Still, it's fairly cool as a decidedly lo-fi example of how interesting diasporadic music can be.

Apparently this guy is a huge star:

Well, there you go. Diversity, depth and more involvement is just around the corner if you do some digging!

Too tikitech to keep up

2009-10-31T12:02:00.007+01:00

Well, the tikitech meme certainly seems to have caught on, considering the amount of submissions readers send me. So I'm bunging together a few in the same thread. First, here's one from Wayne which I think requires no explanation:

[Blog post illustration from Dancing Cheetah about Gazelle's track "Chic Afrique"]

This might have just hit the safari-oriented tikitech motherload: Besides the gif, from the band's myspace, we've got the band name (!) and the blog name (!!). Disappointing lack of jungle sounds in the actual tracks though, only the usual cod-Jamaican toasting.

Next up, Canalh again spots this gem that quite simply switches continents but keeps the animal theme running from the same European vantage point:

[Soundcloud artwork for Max Le Daron's Rave Mundial vol. 1 mixtape]

Finally, DJ Umb submitted the poster of this club night, which I think makes for an interesting border case. There's no immediate association here between the African (as a concept) and the animal/safari/jungle thematic - it's a house night, apparently. Hasn't that kind of cheap, kitschy exotica always existed, outside of any trend and without connection to anything actually from Africa? Maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, and I'll put it up.

Carling Music

2009-10-29T18:10:00.004+01:00

Carling is a dreadfully bad lager beer served in second-rate pubs and rock nightclubs all over England. It has an unpleasant, chemical taste, made with cheap ingredients in as cheap a manner as possible, and sold at a premium.

And yet a lot of people drink Carling. Whatmore, for a lot of people Carling (and similar overpriced "brand" lager) is the only beer they have ever drunk. What always makes me scratch my head, though, is that these are the same people who claim to not really like beer. Now, if I honestly don't like something, and yet would want to learn to like it, I would absolutely not start with what the real fans think is disgusting! I don't much like coffee, never have, but if I'm forced to drink it I obviously try a cup of freshly made cappuccino over some old perculator gunk (just like the experts claim I should) - and yet most coffee drinkers start from the bad end and work themselves up to the cappuccino.

It's an eternal mystery of human pyschology that I think can't adequately be explained away by marketing and gullible consumers, nor by price. The most plausible theory I've heard involves the fact that the drinkers think they're making a compromise. If I don't like beer, they argue, the people who like beer must be wrong; therefore if I pick the stuff they hate, it must be the closest to non-beer - and thus acceptable. It's wrong, of course, but not the most stupid conclusion to make.

And so there grows up an industry of deliberately non-good-beer-like beer, your Budweisers and Heinekens and Carlings. And of course, there's plenty of music that somehow tries to emulate it.

One of my favourite Swedish language music bloggers at the moment is Inanna, who writes the uncomfortably personal and insightful You Care Because I Do. In a retrospective review of M.I.A's "Galang", she notes that music magazines when picking their "best of the year" lists will fall for what she calls "consensus pop", music that appeals both to the indie faction and the hip-hop faction as they vie for power in the magazine newsroom. Her examples are stuff like Gnarls Barkley, NERD, latter-day Outkast, The Avalanches or Hot Chip, and of course M.I.A herself. And yet this sort of middle-ground music is often just not very good - at least when compared to the stuff either faction would actually have liked to put in there.

I think this is certainly a kind of Carling music. The people involved think they're compromising, yet what they end up with is just mostly bad. And, just like Carling drinkers, it's so surprisingly predictable what a person who doesn't really like hip-hop (or whatever) will listen to in a given genre. I had dinner with an record collecting friend in the summer and I could almost have used my Derren Brown-like telepathic powers beforehand to deduce what kind of hip-hop he likes, which came up in our conversation: Dead Prez. The Roots. "Dirty detroit stuff" like Immortal Technique. Him and seemingly literally every other Swede.

Dude is only 21. It's not an age thing. But he's got his musical background in indie, and so he listens for stuff that's present in indie, "live-sounding" breakbeats, "grit" (whatever that is), political sensitivity. And he believes that the hip-hop as present in the working class he doesn't trust is its literal opposite, thus making this particular universally-selected subset of groups acceptable. In short, he's a musical Carling drinker.

I think this would kinda be my answer to Sasha Frere Jones, too. I realise the guy has a background in funk and thus likes hip-hop insofar as it sounds like funk, what he sees ahistorically as "blues-based swing". And then he notices that hip-hop has shot off in this entirely other direction, sounding swish and effervescent and harmonically complex, and he doesn't like it at all. A smart listener, at this point, would go down the cappuccino route: pick the most extreme music of the new generation, the stuff that the young kids make and like, perhaps even the stuff with the most extreme qualities other than what you previously liked. Try to force yourself to listen to it and like it, and notice the sheer quick-moving dynamism of a style hurtling off in a totally unexpected direction.

Instead what we get is Carling music. SFJ somewhat pathetically champions dull boom-bapper Freddie Gibbs, who is totally a cop-out to the "blues-based swing" and steadfastly sitting in that old Tupac-shaped hole and not moving anywhere. It's not counter-edgy or a compromise, it's just bad.

Perhaps if you don't like beer, dude, you should stick to alcopops.

Yet more tikitech - and sexism

2009-10-25T13:57:00.003+01:00

As if it needed proving that tikitech themes and signals go beyond just the visual presentation, Chief Boima sent me a link to this mixtape via Facebook. The intro, especially, is very tiki - the recorded "jungle animal" sounds are textbook exotica, as well as neatly connecting to the Safari theme. Boima writes:

"[T]he Intro is so Tikitech it's not funny. I don't know Croatian, but check "Dobro Jutro is Afrike Intro," with the loop of Wyclef talking in Haitian Kreyol. I'm not sure but assume they are taking a vocal sample unintelligible to them, and putting it in a "tropical", or more specifically African context, to create the nonsensical "tribal" chant thing common to these types of productions. What stood out for me is that the sample they use to me is very recognizable and so in the wrong context. I mean big up these girls for trying something new out in New Zealand, but it's just an example of what you were looking for in my book."

Just as interesting however, which Boima also points out, is the reaction that the mixtape at global ghettotech high castle Mad Decent. It's hardly surprising, but disturbing nonetheless, how much casual sexism the DJs face because they're female - commentary about their appearance, that they are only posted because they're female, and a bunch of negative commentary you rarely see connected with male DJs. I think there's a couple of posts worth of material, at least, to be made around the construction of gender in global ghettotech, and I hope to return to the issue soon.

(Meanwhile, perhaps it's worth considering why a "summer mix" with "cheesy" elements doesn't fit into the supposedly inclusive global ghettotech archetype...)

Meanwhile, back at the tikitech...

2009-10-22T17:50:00.004+02:00

Canalh alerted me to another instance of the pervasive safari-meets-global ghettotech stereotype, which I almost missed because the artists concerned (Crookers) are only marginally part of the scene. Then, of course, I saw the track listing...

(Post illustration from Crookers' own blog for a mixtape.)

More than two tribes

2009-10-22T16:57:00.007+02:00

More observation that's in line with the previous post today, and perhaps with this.

The label "tribal", that's been used in electronic music for almost twenty years, is seeping back into daily usage in the blogosphere. Rather than refer to vaguely afro-exotic percussive house or (at the extreme end) dark, meth-fueled "pots and pans", this is apparently the word de jour to use to describe the end of global ghettotech that's arrived from European electronic music. Examples include Douster being described as "tribal electro-house" here, double whammy "tribal and tropical" here, DJs adding "a tropical fruit basket of electronic flourishes that elevate the track into a genuine electro-tribal banger" here and, inevitably, Secousse described as a "tribal riot" here.

I seem to remember having had discussions about the appropriateness of the term a few times in long-lost commentary threads, but again it's not hard to see why someone would vaguely object. The association to exotica, ruralism, "world music", new age cluelessness is very strong.

Which is why it comes as a fun surprise to hear of the genre that's known in Mexico as "tribal", which Soundgoods has put up a mixtape of. Apparently, this hard, slightly cumbia-inflicted music has been paraded around under a series of different banners in the music blogs, but the local casette merchants only knew it as "tribal". And it totally is! It's full of the same kind of chanting-tribesman clichés as tikitech and tribal house. Urban kids with computers latching onto rurality and (fake) tradition, while deeply immersed in their modernity - at some level it has to be slightly culture-awesome.

Suomibhangra - the good brownface?

2009-10-22T14:47:00.005+02:00

In an attempt to further muddy some conceptual waters, I present you this finnish music video:

Shava are probably the only representatives so far of the genre of Suomibhangra, a Finnish take on the South Asian diaspora dance genre, bhangra. One one level there's a lot to be critical of here, perhaps - the wilful exoticism, the fake Indian dancers, the almost-brownface of someone like the "Finnjabi bad boy" in the video.

On the other hand, though, which I think is perhaps more interesting, there's the reaction in the bhangra community. I actually found the track on a bhangra blog, it's been reposted and become popular on a bhangra youtube channel where it's generated positive comments, the band has toured to desi audiences in Canada and it's played on several bhangra radio stations... The bhangra community is not offended at all, they rather like it. (For as they say: Imitation is...)

So who's right? Us radical critics or the people we think we're defending? Perhaps it's worth thinking about.

Hey hey, my my, tikitech will never die

2009-10-18T22:41:00.006+02:00

I'm thinking of making a series out of this, like Ted Swedenburg's kufiyaspotting. Hopefully it won't last as long, but here's more safari kitch in connection with global ghettotech music, again with the caveat that the music totally demands it, especially the artist's name. What they're called, you ask?

Why, Monkey Safari.

This post illustration, this time probably taken from the artists themselves, is on leading Hungarian global ghettotech blog Ghetto Bazaar. Monkey Safari's music is described as "roppant szórakosztató, söt, lökött ghettotech" ("cracking entertaining, even crazy ghettotech" - I'm sure the inhabitants of detroit are forever grateful to you for passing on their genre name, Wayne). A little further down they're described as doing a remix in the "now fashionable tribal tech-house style".

And there's a mixtape. The mixtape contains what seems like a fake zulu choir. This shit really has gone full circle. Bonus: another mixtape.

Genre of the Week: Logobi

2009-10-13T16:54:00.004+02:00

Wow. Something is really brewing, again, on the streets of Paris.

Sometimes you find about new music from strange sources. The video above was posted today, not by one of my usual sources, but by Momus. Consequently I know nothing more about the genre than I can find by googling, which isn't much.

The dance above is called logobi or logobie or logoobie, and it's pretty much entirely new, with no references existing prior to 2007 and exploding in content and popularity this year. It seems to have derived to a certain extent from coupé-decalé, though it's considerably stiffer, jumpier and has almost tektonik-style arm movements. The practitioners seem fairly uniformly to be very young, black french kids, though rarely as young as this:

Socially, these kids all seem to have god-awful, mid-nineties-looking blogs on social networking site skyrock. It's a good place to search for tracks of the associated music, which annoyingly often is anonymous and untitled, appearing under the heading "logobi instru", just "instru" or sometimes "coupé decalé instru". The latter ought to give some indication into the origin of the genre, as homegrown instrumental versions of coupé decalé, and indeed the very earliest material seems to be just that. Dancers then chant stuff over them.

However, more recent instru has evolved in a completely different direction - it's been totally infused by european dance music, and to a certain extent kuduro and hip-hop, while retaining a basic coupé decalé beat. The influence is not, as expected these days, primarily from commercial trance and electro house; instead the genre contains copious amounts of dubstep (like here) and hard trancey techno, like jumpstyle (e.g. here). Some of the best material fucks around with the beat as well, like this track.

It's fairly exciting music all round - there's a huge variety of percussive sounds (including timpani, orchestral hits, cymbals and snaps), it's varied, rich and polyrhythmic in interesting ways. None of it has settled to form yet, and all the artists creating seem to be around 14, which is definitely a plus.

Now please, all those of you with a finger in the francophone-African air, can you compliment this picture with some history and connections?

Where's all this relentless experiencing coming from?

2009-10-12T17:01:00.004+02:00

What's the deeeal with experience? In southern Sweden, one of the regional newspapers has done a brilliantly-conceived survey of all the members of parliament, asking them about their cultural preferences. I love that sort of thing - there's plenty of material to be analysed and indeed articles have done so already. I'm probably going to give it a go at some point myself.

Meanwhile, though, I have a huge gripe about the survey, or rather one of the questions asked. The parliamentarians are asked to provide their favourite movie and book, but when it comes to stage performance, art and (for the purposes of this blog most obviously) music, the question is modified to "what is your greatest experience of...?" But, I mean, who cares? The question tells nothing about the people involved but only of their past selves. Personally, my greatest musical experience is undoubtedly Neil Young at Roskilde in 2001. But I've heard and taken part of much better music since then, just not experienced it so unequivocally and intensely, and my tastes have changed almost entirely.

I don't much like the sort of vulgar phenomenalism that these questions entail either. Music as something to be "experienced" in and of itself smacks of 19th-century darkened concert halls and direct communication, while I've been enjoying music mainly in a functional setting for the past few years of my life, on the dancefloor on both sides of the deck or in a radio studio. Or just listening to it at home or watching videos or whatever. It's always been mixed up with other stuff (great dancing experiences, for instance), and it's not really active, reflective experiencing as such.

What do you think? Do you primarily like music because you experience it? What relationship does your favourite music have to your greatest musical experiences?

Glitchhall

2009-10-05T19:01:00.004+02:00

Jamaican music has long been a contributor to the European avant garde and you'd be hard pressed to find a contemporary highbrow genre in the nebulous art-popular field that doesn't reference or relate to (at least) dub in some way. Glitch, for instance, definitely counts dub among its chief influences, as Jamaicans were among the first to create music on a larger scale by consistently misusing technical equipment to create strange noises.

Well, in autumn 2009 this influence seems to have gone full circle. Listen to these two recent tracks by major Jamaican dancehall artists:

Black Ryno - Pon di Earth (produced by Demented)

Busy Signal - Black Belt (produced by Kirkledove and Jukeboxx)

The riddim (Arrhythmia) of the first track has a second "snare drum" totally done in glitch style with some sort of noisy digital cut thing, whereas the "metronome" in the second track seems to be made up of skip-around clicks. Brilliant! I'm not going to claim it's a conscious connection, but some people in Jamaica are obviously fucking around with their machinery... AGAIN.

While on the UK Funky note...

2009-10-04T17:31:00.004+02:00

I'm totally chuffed at the way mzansi house number Turn Me On by Black Coffee has become a huge hit in garage circles in Britain. Not only is the exchange aspect marvellous, but the tune is great as well, a really sophisticated, slightly trippy number with deep house jazz chords and nicely soft-padding percussion. This is emphatically not the type of music lifted by "global ghettotech", and it's great that it can transverse the continents without a Galliano-style explorer attached.

African Music's Fictional "Africa"?

2009-10-02T18:03:00.007+02:00

Quick question. A lot of people, including me, seem to think Argentinian producer Douster's track "King of Africa", for all it's hipster irony, perpetuates some incredibly old and tired stereotypes of what "Africa" stands for. The video hardly seems to make matters better...

Besides the animals and the crazy-dancin' tribesmen (full respect to the dancers, I'm thinking from the video-makers perspective), there's the whole reduction of Africa, one of the world's most diverse continents, into a single unified exotic whole.

I don't seem to recall a similar outcry, though, when funky used a similarly hackneyed idea of what "Africa" means during its African tribal craze last year. I mean, Donaeo, an "African warrior" with his stick in his hand?

Is it, pardon me for asking, different when black people have a shallow, unitary, hackneyed idea of what "Africa" is? Is "Africa" as Hollywood extravaganza really that different from, say, "Africa" as supreme, wise spiritual homeland? Obviously there's a line somewhere, I draw it too, but what, ultimately, should we think of actual, you know, Africans who have a hackneyed, unified idea of what Africa is?

Or whatever. Are we to take this as a more "genuine" idea of what Africa means, and therefore deny third world musicians the ability and agency to be stuck in precisely the same shitty paradigmatic discourses we have (or construct equally stereotype-laden ones of their own)?

The Middle Section of a Hardstyle Song

2009-09-28T18:56:00.004+02:00

I'm usually a person who happily dismisses music on listening to the first thirty seconds of a song. This means, however, that I've been having huge problems with hardstyle.

I've been downloading a bit of the genre recently in a random, newest-torrent search on some vaguely illegal sites - I'd make that a proper esoteric research method if I thought I could get away with it. And what's surprised me is how intricate and interesting the melodies are, how well-crafted the harmonic progressions, how dynamic and hook-filled the songwriting. It's, quite simply, good pop.

But, interestingly, not all of it. Only a bit in the middle.

Here's a fairly extreme example:

Activator - Activator [Youtube link with download option]

There's absolutely nothing resembling melody at all, only rumbling kickdrum surrounded by percussion and spoken commands, until about 3:19 in.

Then suddenly there's this flowering of hooks, synth instruments vying for attention, dramatic buildups, symphonic stabs, trance-bleeps meeting the highest level of R&B euphoria, a huge hi-nrg winddown, all changing, swirling, supported by well-crafted percussion programming. Then at 6:00 it all stops and returns, absurdly, to just the beat. Wow.

This shit obviously cries out for a re-edit of some sort.

Tiki the Subculture - and Tikitech

2009-09-25T17:43:00.002+02:00

Everyone reasonably immersed in American popular culture knows about tiki. Primarily a theme for bars and restaurants with a supposedly Polynesian flavour, it was born in the thirties, blossomed immensely in the fifties and died, more or less, with the counterculture of the late sixties. Besides a style of interior decoration and a set of drink recipes, a notable aspect was the music, with the theme being closely related to classic 50s-style exotica.

But did you know there is a tiki revival subculture? Starting (according to this great article, which is one of my main sources here) with a tiki-styled camp at the Burning Man festival in the mid-nineties, it soon blossomed out with zines, clubs, festivals, a music scene... and it has reached Scandinavia. My friend Simon down in Malmö showed me the shelf in his local record store where they kept tiki records, and claimed that it had grown fairly big over here in the past few years. Somehow, there's a resonance across the decades and countries, and the style that was prevalent in the United States fifty years ago has found a home in southern Sweden today.

Of course, the fifties are not the noughties. What was considered acceptable then is not necessarily so now. But while there are obviously problematic differences, there are also significant enough similarities across the ages, not just with the revival but with other contemporary music as well, not least with global ghettotech...

There can be a very thin line indeed between subtle irony and utter seriousness, but one of the remarkable features of the tiki revival is that it doesn't see it all as a big joke. Contrast it (and contrast they do) with what would seem a natural neighbour - lounge revival - and the whole distant camp aspect seems completely absent, a playful humour, sure, but no self-conscious sarcasm. Tiki affectionados are as likely to talk about intricate arrangements, design craftsmanship and zones of relaxation as anything kitchy. In fact, a more natural neighbour than lounge seems to be rockabilly revival, with an equal focus on serious dressing up, forming cultural bonds and listening to a certain subset of bands.

In a lot of ways, then, the whole "revival" aspect of tiki seems wilfully perverse, since there was no subculture to begin with. Tiki, once seen as a clear precursor to architectural postmodernism in is playfulness, has been recast as an ultimate primitivistic modernism in the footsteps of Stravinsky and Picasso. It's been imbued with earnestness and nostalgia that was never present the first time around, just like the world modern seems to have shifted firmly from an indicator of the future to a conservationist clinging to the past. The "modern primitive" theme used in some previous events here carries a double meaning: self-chosen "primitivism" both contemporary and harking back to a bygone modern era...

This earnestness, of course, makes it all the more problematic from a historical standpoint.

Accusations of racism are obviously not new to tiki, as the interviewees in the 1996 article indicate. One of the people involved is trying to "be sensitive" to actual Polynesian culture, but for the most part it straightforwardly passes on the mixed-up fantasy of the 50s. Again, there can be a very thin line indeed between detached academic obsessions and underhanded participation. Besides all the more obvious ideas about distortion, social orders and domination one aspects stands out for me: the depopulation. In both the old tiki world and the new, there seems to be no context to the exotic images, and the items are eerily divorced for their creators, like an old colonial fantasy in the Robinson Crusoe tradition where the colonised subjects are faded, like ghosts, into traces.

Which brings me back into global ghettotech.

[Album cover by The Very Best]

[Post illustration from Generation Bass about Edo Rinaldi and his track "Safari"]

[Club poster for Secousse, previously discussed here]

[Post illustration from Radio Canalh about Douster's track "King of Africa"]

Once, what seems to be an awful many years ago now, the scene was about "exploring" the self-made music of ex-colonial subjects and bringing it up to western attention, in contrast with the exoticising old world music. Then the DJ's involved starting making their own music which imitated or referenced the music they'd previously transmitted, sometimes in "collaboration" with third-world artists. At the lowest end of this there are offensive caricatures, like the ones Rachel so eloquently criticise in this post, but even then the people involved try to put themselves on the same level as the people involved - they're (sarcastically, perhaps, I guess) trying to be colonised subjects.

But now, it seems, the path is open for the colonised subjects to disappear completely, like they have in tiki revival. (The word "tikitech" is from a Reader comment by Wayne.) Rather than reference some cultural manifestation from the third world, they reference a kitchy european or american fantasy of third world culture, or often not even that, merely an empty paradise, exotica for exotica's sake. Tiki revival has its ancient, mystical statues, and global ghettotech has its safari imagery - the Lion King, Madagascar, lion costumes. Animals abound but there are absolutely no people. This, of course, happily mirrors the simultaneous decrease of third world musicians in the actual music. The issue lies deeper than just some pictures.

For me, as I stated in my comment to Rachel's post, the self-consciously colonial imagery is a lot worse than the clumsy caricatures. As the tiki example shows, seriousness is but a small step away, and though it may be (in Rachel's words) "snarky / cheeky / hitorical / self-referencial" now it's still being used, and somehow appreciated by the creators and listeners. To take up a recurring theme in this post again: there's a very thin line indeed between being privileged and self-referentially pretending to have a colonial mindset, and actually having one in the midst of that privilege.

Turkmen-tón

2009-09-19T13:53:00.002+02:00

In lieu of proper posting, here's some Turkmen novelty reggaeton.

I'm in teh Finland

2009-09-05T15:46:00.005+02:00

Listening to ur tango

There are many reason's for August's frankly shameful post tally, but the most interesting one by far is that I've moved to Helsinki. Here I'll do an exchange term in a faculty of musicology which specialises in the semiotics of music (awesome?) while immersing myself thoroughly in Finnish culture and (potentially) frozen lakes.

For the purposes of this blog, though, I'll be hunting for Finnish music as well. I've not really got into anything at a deeper level so far except the marvellous Finnish tango, old and new, which I'll be following up on with a big post in the near future.

Any readers from here want to meet up or anyone with general Finland/Helsinki tips, feel free to contact me.

Screamo covers of hip-hop

2009-08-26T18:01:00.003+02:00

And here I was thinking Brokencyde was a unicum. Apparently, they're just plowing a rich furrow where hip-hop vocals are straightforwardly replaced by people screaming. Not full-on commercial metal covers, but decidedly lo-fi affairs over the original instrumental. Youtube has a whole scene of this kind of stuff:

Possibly the original, I Set My Friend On Fire's take on Crank That (Soulja Boy):

Subscene's version of Lollipop:

Anonymous (as far as I can tell "Calvary Boys" is not a real name) version of Laffy Taffy:

Slightly studioed-up:
This Rigid Empire covers Whatever You Like:

So Long Secrets does Right Round:

And so on. I'm honestly not sure how to interpret this, but it seems genuine and loving enough, I'm not catching the parody vibe here. It all seems to be from small, american towns and made by very young kids, some of which have label deals. Anyone have better insights?

The Disco of the Priviliged

2009-08-20T16:34:00.006+02:00

What does the injection of social privilige into music really mean? If the current trend of global ghettotech-as-written-by-europe continues, what will the music sound like? I got a fascinating insight into what how music, culture and maginalisation works during this latest blogging hiatus, which I spent down in Malmö. And bizarrely, it all centers around that most multi-marginal of music styles, disco.

Malmö is a really fun city teetering just on the right side of the soca vs. new age divide. During my visit I stayed with my friend Simon, aka. Sergio Rizzolo, who runs a blog called Diskoakademin which is definitely worth visiting. Like the name suggests it's part of a "disco" scene which Simon tells me exists throughout Sweden... but the disco that he puts out and that his friends play at their parties is entirely different from the disco I know - it is a complete reimagning of disco minus precisely the elements that make it unique.

And I'm completely perplexed by it.

Simon's "disco" supposedly originated with a guy called PJ DJ Harvey, who is some sort of sub-Mancusoic bearded mystic who spends his time surfing on the US west coast. Rediscovering seventies bands with some sort of vague dance beat, your Rare Earths and Barabasses and Dennis Wilsons, "disco" is a kind of proto-balearic reimagining of seventies dance music as being part of straightforward mainstream rock.

As such, the music played by the "disco" scene is almost entirely white, male and straight. It also values genuine songwriting, the "band" metaphor for music creation, and (most strange of all) acoustic/electric instrumentation with only occasional, analogue, synths. It's got a very strong sense of authenticity. In other words, it's completely opposed to everything immanently political about the old disco, which for generations has stood for queerness, blackness injected into a white mainstream, the emancipation of women to a certain degree, fakeness and the breakdown of traditional rock heirarchies. The new "disco" enforces them instead. In its world, Disco Sucks somehow, subliminally, won.

Simon's defence for this is that, in fact, the people involved in the scene are also male, white and straight. They're only latching onto music that they, themselves, can relate naturally to. Simon Reynolds has talked about how dance music gets turned into "rock" – acquires auteurs, "intelligence" and so on – when rock journalists and fans apply their discursive models to it, and I guess it's pretty much the same thing going on here. Another possibility is that the political fight against rockism isn't really relevant anymore, and that championing synthy fakeness and getting off on pictures like this is no longer an issue for today's generation, who've all synthesized it (har har) and are ready to move onto new dialectics. Perhaps, as Rachel suggest of my critique of backpacker rap here, the fight has already been won and everyone has left the battlefield.

A third idea, also planted by Simon (not Reynolds), is that in the act of labelling these rock musicians disco we are, in fact, queering them. Reinterpreting the musical mainstream with queer-theoretical or feminist eyes, we're somehow warping the social constructions society rests on. As such, any reinterpretation and reimagining might be a good idea.

But I'm still a bit worried because "disco" is moving music out of the hands of marginalised creators and mixed audiences, into the pure hands of the priviledged. AGAIN. And not just because it's a political problem, but aesthetically – disco has always thrived on tension, juxtaposition, mixture, which seems entirely lost here. Thankfully, there's other music in this world I can happily think of as carrying on the disco legacy as I know it, but that's not exactly getting great reviews...

Finally, to tie it all together with the main subject of this blog these past few months, I think global ghettotech needs to be wary of not succumbing to these tendencies as well. There are definitely signs – tracks hitting it big only when they're published by western record companies, increasing collaborations, the "tropical" sound in mainstream white rock, imitation albums – that the music is moving towards being created and consumed by the privilidged rather than the marginalised (with us listening in). Is that really the way we want things to go?

Yes, as a matter of fact you should adapt your music for Europe

2009-07-31T21:18:00.005+02:00

Long time no blog post. Were we talking authenticity...?

I've done another stint at the Gagnef festival, which still is an immensely interesting place to be. For once, though, I was really made to think by an artist instead of the audience.

DJ Edgar is an old Rio funk DJ, doing stints with the legendary Furacão 2000 way before the funk we know even existed. For the past several years he's been touring Europe instead, doing well-crafted sets with good-quality MPC work. The thing is, though, he's pretty much stopped playing straight-ahead funk entirely, a fact which he readily acknowledges by calling his music "pós-funk" or "funk na Europa" – funk remade for Europe. Essentially, he plays some sort of tamborzão bmore, chopped up remixes of tracks well-known to his audience. This would include stuff his specific fans would be familiar with – Calabria, of course, and the emerging global ghettotech canon with tracks like Township Funk and Wegue Wegue (h/t Vamanos via Boima for the idents). He also plays the season's inevitable jacko tracks, as well as a whole bunch of classic european hits from Das Boot to The Power.

However, except for prohibidão classic Rap das Armas (which totally doesn't count, since it's bizarrely #1 on the Swedish singles chart at the moment) he didn't play any Brazilian tracks at all. And I'm going to go ahead and say that it's a good thing.

It's really facile to want to see artists from the third world as some sort of ethnographic artefacts, living field recordings of untainted culture. Perhaps this sort of attitude is more associated with the traditional view of "world music" (although god knows they went in and tainted it whenever they got the opportunity), but I think it's fairly prevalent in the hip-hop/global ghettotech generation, too. The (tourist) desire to experience and describe precisely the real thing, whatever that is, is still a feature of most Eurocentric relations with marginal culture.

Of course, you're never going to experience music the "right" way anyway. You're always going to be the outsider, no matter how much you familiarise yourselves with the codes. In music as relational as funk (or just about any DJ music, for that matter) it's always going to be central how the audience feels for the material being played, and each and every dancer's instinctive feelings towards the tracks they hear, deeply imprinted in their cultural backbones. The DJ, too, works completely in relation to the audience, gauging their reactions and moulding her set accordingly. Straightfowardly transposing a DJ set which works for an audience intensely familiar with twenty years of Brazilian radio and television and charts is never going to work in that context.

Perhaps its a matter of staying true to the DJ as an artist and a craftsman, too. A "living stereo system" playing a field-recorded mixtape is far from the full extent of what a DJ can and should do. I would definitely acknowledge some adaptation can be fairly appaling (I'm particularly allergic to warping music to be more "conscious" or "wise") but at some point its worth seeing it from the artist's viewpoint, and consider the motivations as much as the results. DJ Edgar, I think, seems fairly far from losing himself.

Obviously its not all clear-cut and it's always worth it to consider how he ended up in Europe in the first place, at whose behest, and if his being here is part of a discursive agenda. I'm not going to blame him for coming here, any more than I can blame any other diaspora, but there's plenty of examples (since Leadbelly and beyond) of artists being misrepresented for social or monetary gain. I don't get that sense at all here, but I'd definitely like to find out more.

Lie To Me, MC

2009-07-23T15:05:00.006+02:00

One aspect of analysing global ghettotech writing I didn't really go into in my article a little while ago was the fairly central idea of authenticity, which still seems to loom large over the way we think about music from outside or own environment. Happily, Rachel came along a little bit later with a piece of critique which uses precisely one form of authenticity concept to counteract another, illustrating both the usefulness and the perils of thinking about some music as more "real" than other.

In a well-constructed blog post against an article on Haitian music, Rachel criticises a group of New York music critics for not grasping the actual nature of Haiti's music history. To the article writers, music is properly Haitian in so far as it's got spiritual and political ("revolutionary") depth, alternatively if its traditional and connected to some sort of imagined history. The superficial and the ahistorical is constructed as exceedingly suspicious. Rachel on her part is happy to accept these qualities because the music that embodies them is "popular", while another strand of music is okay because "Haitians" "use" it. Two notions of authenticity are presented and contrasted (if not in so many words), one based on tradition/depth and another on usage in contemporary local culture.

But at no point is the idea that music can be real at all questioned. There's an underlying idea of "the real Haitian music" that's very hard to shake off – I frequently think like this myself.

Still, there's something about the idea of any music being realer than another in this way that makes me wary. The leap doesn't seem to be that long to an essentialist idea of national character, in either discourse. Compas is the music Haitians listen to can easily turn into real Haitians listen to compas, subtly shifting the power from the dynamic users (or their tradition) to the cultural constant. And at least from my European cultural horizon, people who claim to be "real Swedes" or preserve "real Hungarian values" are extremely scary people indeed.

In contrast, there are the fakes. In the recent US presidential elections, the idea of an "unreal American" gained a lot of leverage among feminists, left-wing minorities and others who felt left out by the patriotic definitions. Here in Sweden the leader of the (tiny) Christian Democratic Party made a speech in which he argued for "reality's people" (verklighetens folk) over the supposed left-wing cultural elite, whereupon a facebook group by the name of "unreality's people" (Overklighetens folk) immediately drew a lot of members. I certainly joined. Somehow, it feels slightly paradoxical that we "fakeys" are basically the same cultured middle-class that fights to have our version of Haitian music (or whatever) declared the most real.

This, I think, hits at one of the biggest problems with a lot of our attitude towards the subalterns (to talk poco for a while). A lot of energy is spent busting (as fake) the discourses about the Other of our compatriots. Instead, we offer up a reality based on what we are told by the othered people, never reflecting on the equally "fake"/discursive nature of their world view. In effect, the Haitians are made to be "realer" than us, their music "truer", merely by virtue of their relative global marginalisation. Again, this is true no matter what authenticity criterion is used.

This is especially important, I think, when it comes to music, because music is (at least to my mind) conclusively fake. If, like the musicological discipline of musical hermeneutics claims, music is a language that can be completely interpreted, the "writings" of music can't possibly be considered anything other than fiction, and its emotions, ideas and thoughts are inevitably make-believe. Musicians have always revelled in made-up worlds and baseless boasts, and periodically in conscious "syntheticity", making any consideration of realness in musical expression extremely questionable. Especially, I think, when quality gets so explicitly connected to the real. If the only good music is real music, then there's probably no good music at all.

Of course, the music world itself has happily gone along and produced its own authenticity discourses anyway. From the rockist "selling out" to 80s metal's "poser" accusations, to hip-hop's "keeping it real". Like any self-inconsistent dichotomies, though, these tend to pop/deconstruct themselves as time goes along. I don't think I'm wrong in saying the "tight pants" electro fad in hip-hop has gone a ways to destroy the dour "reality" stuff, together with the obviously exaggerated claims of southern rappers (eh, officer Ross?). And I love it. I don't mind being lied to, and no your women obviously don't actually behave that way.

In any case there are signs that the constant borrowing across genres is somehow destroying the "authentic genre" in any cultural-homogenous sense, too...

How does news events influence your listening habits?

2009-07-17T15:49:00.004+02:00

Quick question, awaiting a better-working blogging computer next week or so.

How much do current events shape the way music is used and heard by its listeners? I don't just mean facile stuff like Michael Jackson resurfacing as a commercially viable artist in the wake of his death and the umpteen related tributes, but subtler shifts in the allowed terrain.

Take Iran. When I posted about Iranian music in March I couldn't claim to be part of any trend (although as usual Rachel was ahead of the curve), but after the election and the resistance I've seen posts of Iranian music everywhere, from Jace's Mudd Up! to Mad Decent. But also, in addition, I think there might be a generalised shift towards interest in the whole middle east, an area that's usually underrepresented in blog music. It may just be a coincidence, but the current global ghettotech blogging hotspot Generation Bass has posted an awful lot of arabic and persian vibes recently...

Cound resistance in Iran shift the centre of the music-blogging world eastward? It's hardly unprecedented, but it's interesting that the music thus discovered isn't just directly political or revolutionary. Definitely a product of our times – the news as an Esoteric Research Method, coincidence providing an opportunity to focus in on a spot in the endless information flow; politics as being seen on the internet no matter the message.

Grimeton

2009-07-11T19:48:00.001+02:00

Grimeton

Global Ghettotech as a Genre of Literature

2009-07-07T15:12:00.007+02:00

"[R]eggaeton (if you can call it that)" - Gavin, Updates from Chicago's Puerto Rican Festival

"Can We Talk About The Reggaeton Crash" by one of my favourite bloggers, Gavin, is clearly an important contribution to global ghettotech. You can tell by the number of comments, and the amount of links. Plus even Wayne has responded to it. That must count for something.

This sort of article tends to pop up from time to time. Not necessarily exactly with this particular content, but with a language, a set of assumptions and a way of looking at music that is deeply shared. I've increasingly come to think of global ghettotech as not really a genre of music at all, or even a broader categorisation of music, but a way to approach an understanding of music, even a literary genre. Within these countless blog posts, long and short, the meat of the style is formed.

So I'm going to have a go at a brief analysis of Gavin's article. It's a very good article, one I wish I could have written myself. But it's still useful to take on a reflexive outsider's eye, to examine others and thus examine yourself. That, too, of course, is actively part of the genre.

Global ghettotech, the literary genre, takes the form of a self-critical appraisal of the way we listen to music, that claims to challenge certain values while at the same time actively affirming them. Gavin's article fits neatly into this formula. His aim is to discuss how we abandon genres after they've stopped being trendy, yet he himself talks about how he's stopped liking Reggaeton. As I'm sure is perfectly possible to do with this article as well, teasing out the threads of criticism only affirms their relevance to the article's values themselves.

One simple example is that of novelty (not, in this case, novelty). Gavin is clearly (self-)critical of the "jump[ing] on the bandwagon early and promot[ing] a new exciting musical genre" approach to music writing – global ghettotech is all about finding new (untainted?) music and angles, not unlike the more ethnographic groupings it challenges. Yet at the same time he's happy to claim that his own approach is "largely ignored" by everyone else, in effect claiming novelty for his own angle. (BTW, I'm fairly sure I've read lots of "reggaeton decline analysis" material.)

More subtle is the interplay between the voices of the genre itself and the outsider voices of the global ghettotech community. Gavin dislikes the "boom and bust" structure of the interest of "nu-whirled DJ-bloggers", but also clearly places himself in the same category – he's disinterested in reggaeton as it stands now, how ever much he claims the opposite elsewhere ("I still enjoy all [nu-whirled genres]"). Reggaeton, "if you can call it that", now embodies values that place it outside the global ghettotech field of interest. In order to defend that field, reggaeton must be defined away as something that's no longer part of it.

There's a mirror effect here, where the sins of new reggaeton perfectly expose the restrictive field of global ghettotech. First, there's traditionalism, Gavin's claim that reggaeton contains "bachatas, some mambo tracks". The relentless modernist surge of global ghettotech actively discourages any connection with the past, or at least other generations. Then there's the staunch (folk-like) attachment to the small locality and community, the scene, and its local values – mirrored in the critique of cosmopolitanism, reggaeton being problematic when it's "r&b" or "digital-dancehall" i.e. non-Puerto Rican.

Finally, there's the great sin of sophistication. Gavin deeply questions reggaeton's "polished commercial sheen", which indeed has appeared in reggaeton as it has in a lot of other music. (I guess you could put a gender spin on this, a Reynoldsian "feminine pressure" vs. the gruff testosterone-praising world of global ghettotech. But I'm not sure the "sophisticated -> female" formula applies to the Caribbean, especially not when it's about male sex fantasies with robots.) Today's third-world producers use the same techniques, largely, as commercial ones in the Eurocentric world, and (as Rachel deftly has pointed out) "something about seeing global pop present itself outside of grainy video changes perspective a bit". Global ghettotech actively clings to primitivity, and like Gavin's post it refuses to accept this particular perspective change.

Increased sophistication on the part of global pop producers places them, increasingly, on equal footing with us. Maintain the socially constructed illusion of primitives making simple-but-hard music, and you gain the advantage of being able to form the discourse around the music. Gavin (like many of us) artificially inflates the importance of our club nights and blogs, but what would happen if we no longer could be the explorers and curators, but were sidelined in the transmission of music from the third world to the eurocentric one? When global pop is indistinguishable, both technically and in terms of social position, from American pop?

Global ghettotech, as a genre of literature, would surely cease to exist. And perhaps that is part of why it defends, yet also critisises itself so schizophrenically. Post-colonial theory has some very interesting perspectives on this – Bhabha talks about how the colonial discourse is ambivalent between wanting to bring about equality and mainitaining Orientalist distance, and Spivak discusses how the voices of the subalterns are destroyed in our discourse about them. I think it's definitely worth it to continue analysing global ghettotech writing, and I'll try to weave in more of the serious theory in subsequent posts. That reflexiveness makes me, and this article, fairly typical of global ghettotech too.

What's the best new music in the past two months?

2009-07-05T12:58:00.003+02:00

I'm resetting my RSS feed reader. And I need your help.

I've spent two months doing just about everything possible except blog, from holidays to political campaigning. I'm now ready to resume full-speed blogging, but there's just too much tuff to listen up – I've got thousands and thousands of RSS posts lined up, the vast majority containing audio I ought to at least glance at. Especially after making that promise to make a list of "best songs" for the end of the year.

Well, bugger that. I'm going to ask for you guys help, and giving up on May and June. What are the best songs to come out in the past few months? Suggestions on a post card, in the comments field or @birdseeding via twitter.

Naturally, the music I got out of the Hungary visit was Vietnamese Pop

2009-06-26T21:38:00.004+02:00

Via a poster at the extremely rainy Jozsefvarosi Piac, aka the Four Tigers, aka the Vietnamese market...

I found this site, with its major, arena-sized diaspora tour of Vietnmaese artists. Of course, though most of it is shit, some of it is inevitably to my tastes:

Bugger all good Hungarian stuff though. Oh well, I'm off to Finland over the weekend. Serious posting resumes in July.

Another Hungary Holiday - Hip-Hop?

2009-06-15T22:21:00.003+02:00

I still don't understand why Hungarian music is so shit. In an attempt to rectify this fact I'll spend some time during my annual holiday in Budapest trying desperately to find anything that appeals to me, with very little hope in my heart. I want to belong to a people that actually make good music, but I think I'm resigned to supporting the Swedes.

This year, I thought I'd at least try to find some appealing local hip-hop. Now, if this were Poland I could happily find all sorts of material to my liking, and most other neighbouring countries are fine. But just like with locally flavoured pop, Hungarian hip-hop is particularly, almost studiously awful. The actual rapping, for the most part, is actually fairly good, but the production is intetionally ghastly - ridiculous sub-underground boom-bap, badly sampling shit soul tracks in a throwback to Europe ten years ago or (very, very charitably) the US twenty years ago.

Take this event, which I might attend 'cause it's cheap (click image for info):

These are some of the top local artists, it seems. All of them have recorded music videos. And all of them are bloody, bloody, awful. Presenting, with their most popular videos off YouTube: Hősök, NKS, Bankos, Norba, Punnany Massif, Akkezdet Phiai (best of a bad lot, though more because it's quirky than with a good beat) and Funktasztikus. Punnany Massif (whose name is both the worst and the most promising on here) even have a track which manages to actually make 3+3+2 sound insipid and over-serious! Apparently this kind of "jungle rap" (which bears seemingly only a fleeting resemblence to actual jungle) has some sort of presence in Hungary, though I'm not particularly hopeful because the manic energy which makes actual jungle interesting is totally absent.

I'm going to have to go beyond the surface to find anything decent, it seems. I've been hunting around for anything to my tastes on Youtube, and this guy comes closest to qualifying so far:

Not only is the name of the artist excellent, he seems to have actually got essential things like bass and rhythm down. And he does electro house remixes. Always a good sign.

As usual I'll have plenty more to say on the subject end of next week when I'm back.

Car Audio Bass as a Precursor to Dubstep

2009-06-14T16:25:00.005+02:00

No one, honestly no-one except the mad Russian/Ukrainian guys at collector's blog Drop Da Bass, seems to like car audio bass. A genre of slowish, instrumental Miami Bass from the mid-nineties specifically geared towards car tuners and audiophiles, it's not dirty enough for the hipster crowd, not pretentious enough for progressives, too aloof for the inner city and too foreign for ravers. Even respected bass historian Pappa Wheelie, who loves the most ridiculous extremes of bass music, claism that "even the artists and fans of Car Audio Bass feel their branch of Bass sounds sterile".

But maybe the time for the genre has come? Because as I've been finding out after downloading too much content off the aforementioned blog, there's a strange resemblence between some of the tracks and that most current of electronic genres, dubstep. The common heritage in electro, breakbeat hip-hop and dub/techno really shows, and bar the drum sounds there's quite a bit that could almost pass at Forward.

Here's three tracks with an obvious bent towards the same sort of thing dubstep is trying to go for. And then I've even left out the track which actually has surprisingly authentic-sounding wobble bass in its dubsteppy middle-eight.

Def Bass Crew - Bass Bender

Drum Machine Overdrive - Thumpin' Bass Beat

Bass Boy - Blinded by Bass (Slowed Down by DJ Deep and Techmaster PEB)

Esoteric Research Methods #7: Twitter searches

2009-06-12T10:26:00.005+02:00

I've been using Twitter, a bit infrequently, for something like a month now, and I think I might be getting into it soon. The crowdsourcing has so far not been a great success, but there has been an unexpected side benefit, which I had no idea the platform could be used for: term searches. I realise the idea is old hat to most of you, but it certainly has helped me find new music, and not least gauge the attitudes of the general tweeting public on musical subjects. Coupled with a decent machine translation software and some of the results are interesting indeed...

I'm currently using twitter software tweetdeck, which can be set up to include panes of search results. For instance, one of my most active searches is the one for manele, which tends to produce something like 30-50 new tweets a day. Some of these are about some shit resort on Hawaii, but a great majority are actual Romanians who write their thoughts about the music I'm interested in. With the translation software included some of them are gold. This one I'm even considering including in my eventual Master's thesis, because it shows off attitudes I've also picked up through other research:

"Gypsies manele not play for them but for the Romans [read: Gypsies don't play manele for themselves but for Romanians]" Madalin Voicu

Madalin Voicu is a well-known Roma musician and politician, and his attitudes towards manele is precisely reflective of both the general disdain from the Roma towards the music, but may also be getting at an actual ethnological point. In any case, both the quote and that someone decided to tweet it is interesting - what's the tweeter trying to say?

Tweets can also help expose structural racism in Romania. Both from tweeters, and from stuff tweeters get upset about:

At Hosting-blog.ro not allowed to manele - http://bit.ly/JiF7P - any files or text. :)) Broken!

Here is a blog hosting service in Romania which, in its terms of use, specifically forbids manele lyrics over any other genre (!).

Of course, a more conventional research object would be finding new music, and here twitter searches oblige as well:

Decent stuff on the border of manele and hip-hop, though a bit commercial. I'm not gonna post the pirate links I keep getting as well, though.

I've got similar searches set up on a variety of musical subjects, occasionally scanning though them. Tallava basrely ever produces anything worthwhile, while kwaito is occasionally fascinating...

Hipster Blogging vs Party Politics: Two Tribes?

2009-06-09T14:15:00.009+02:00

I've spent the past two weeks campaigning at a smartly-designed home-made campaign chest (literally a chest of drawers! ha ha) adorned with rainbow flags and crooked, home-cut graphics I made myself. We had little rugs. We had a banner with little hearts cut out. So why aren't the hip kids taking my flyers?

The people who pick up party information are, frankly, squares; the people I love in this blog, the radically self-expressing kids and working-class outsiders, couldn't give a toss. Past me walked sneering emos, bored hip-hoppers, disinterested otakus, indie kids, no-one giving a damn about our political message at all. But why not? The suggestion from my party colleagues when I brought up the issue was that these people aren't really radical, only posers - or maybe it's us that are mainstream-establishment and, in reality, politically conservative.

But in actual fact I'm convinced that both (left-wing and feminist) political activists and self-expressive extremes are incredibly radical, politically. So why is it that we can't meet up? Why does it seem that we're doomed to be two separate tribes?

An interesting (though slightly depressing) perspective on this comes from political philosopher Hannah Arendt, whose thought I was recently reintroduced to by pirate thinktanker Rasmus Fleischer (in Swedish). According to her, the two groups are engaged in completely different political projects that are largely incompatible with each other.

The political activists are engaging in poiesis, work, the building of something. Anything they say or do is aimed towards creating something, namely a political movement or a successful party or an ideal society. But in this work, Arendt argues, they lose themselves. The ultimate aim may be political, but the individual expressions are empty and in some sense lies - they're merely means to an end and tell nothing about the person who makes them, more than what they are: feminists, or whatever.

By contrast, the self-expression of the kids is really, inherently, deeply political. It's praxis, action, the expression of the self of a free individual. It reveals who they are to the world, thus in that moment they are free and have agency. As Arendt sees it, if poiesis gets to overtake praxis then totalitarianism looms.

I'm not sure I completely agree with her, but I do see how the two ways of thinking are really hard to combine. I've really been wrestling with the question of whether I should blog about my political activity because that's what engages my mind at the moment, or whether I should avoid it, because it just feels untrue. Both to me and to the blog readers, it feels as if I'm not really being honest and expressing what I really think when I'm trying to convince people to act in a certain way. At best, it's just so completely square.

Like, pretty much, all overtly ideological pop music. I've always disliked progg, backpacker rap and roots reggae, because the music tends to be incredibly banal and boring and the lyrics hackneyed doggerel, and by Arendt's account this would be because they're not really self-expressive at all. Only by revealing the underlying who can you get that complexity and that rush of freedom that god pop music has. Pop music (like my blogging, I guess) has consistently been ruined whenever ideologies have entered the picture, and made pop music subservient.

What I fervently hope, though, is that feminism as a rather exceptional (and experimental, h/t Rasmus) ideology has the potential to turn things on their head and make ideology subservient to pop music, or at least to praxis. If we make self-expression and agency central concerns (as indeed they should be in feminism) then we're half-way towards solving the problem, and if we co-operate with the cool kids on their terms we're much more likely to successfully integrate. Look forward to at least one event this fall where we're trying to bring in some of the best queer clubs in Stockholm...

Another (perhaps contrary) consequence, which might please my regular readership, is that I'm bringing my feminist blogging elsewhere and focusing on the music here. I'm not quite ready to reveal the project yet, but it'll be a group blog in Swedish. More news coming up!

Vote, dammit, vote

2009-06-06T11:29:00.002+02:00

I'm preparing a post about my ambivalence to the idea of party politics, but right now I'm too far gone into this campaign to be able to say anything other than this. Would you please go ahead and vote for the Feminist Initiative in the European Parliament elections? It's the clearest and most decisive statement against the growing tides of far-right ideology sweeping over Europe. If you can't find our ballots at your particular polling place, you can take an empty ballot and write "Feministiskt initiativ" on it. Nothing else, no names, or the vote won't count!

But, you're thinking, what is the soundtrack going to be like? You obviously pick a political stance according to your taste in music, and I don't blame you. Well, in a bizarre turn of events we've suddenly gone completely poptimist, after Benny from ABBA donated a million crowns (additional link link link link in Swedish) for a last-minute ad campaign. Now everyone is going around humming ABBA tunes in Sweden's most radical mainstream party - a beautifully ironic juxtaposition against the self-righteous prole-hate of the 70s progg movement, who denounced ABBA as reactionary.

You can be safe in the musical context as well. Please go right ahead: lay or your love on Fi.

Pop-Political Tracks #2

2009-06-02T21:05:00.001+02:00

Under this heading I thought I'd occasionally take up deeply political tracks that are at the same time decidedly commercial and mainstream within their contexts. I've been inspired, in part, by Vybz Kartel whose letter to The Star defending his seemingly puerile music shows a deep appreciation of a whole set of political issues and problems. Politics goes way beyond the folksy protest song and permeates all sorts of musical discursive practice, from subtle suggestion to mere existence. Very post-structuralist.

Cherelle - Affair

I especially like this one because it has one overt message (of sass) and a subtler one.

Too Many Cooks Make Interesting Sangria, or: An Experiment In Crowdsourcing

2009-05-30T20:23:00.004+02:00

A couple of weeks ago I started making a little Spotify playlist where I put on somewhat summery songs, mainstays like this or this, stuff to have in the background when sitting on the porch. After adding about ten songs, most with the word "summer" or "sun" in the title, I realised I didn't have time to do it properly so I temporarily gave up.

Then I had the idea to ask some forum friends of mine to add more songs in the same style, so I didn't have to do it all myself. So I opened up the playlist cooperatively, and made a thread asking for people to add more songs to it with a summery feel, matter-of-factly saying anything goes.

Well, I wasn't counting on the Anal Cunt.

The playlist has spiralled into a huge and very interesting monster, because not only do the music styles vary but the level of seriousness - some people are doing a pure pisstake of the pleasant summery concept and dropping in metalcore, christmas tracks or stupid novelties. (And I love it!) Others are earnestly adding sophisticated jazz-rock and electro. I'm fairly sure some people have done both. Someone has spent some time randomly rearranging the list. And so on.

So I thought to continue bringing it to another level I'd post a link here and see what else could turn up. Add or delete anything you like - I want to see what happens with this once the real anonymous crowdsourcing gets started.

http://open.spotify.com/user/belavh/playlist/6n8V7WKQHxBwighW470Tmi

Another DJ Night

2009-05-30T00:02:00.003+02:00

I've just been called up to do some more DJing at a last minute notice, so I'll be playing a medium-size set at another Feminist Initiative event, so if you want to see me semi-competently stringing together eighties dance music about sex robots, come along to this:

Mother's day bash/fundraiser for Gudrun Schyman's European Parliament election campaign -

(Actress) Kim Andersson, (Writer) Unni Drougge, DJ Pamela, DJ Birdseed, etc. etc. at Restaurant Momma, Stockholm from 7 PM, Sunday 31st of May.

Europe's remaining conflicts, as revealed by the Eurovision voting last night

2009-05-17T10:40:00.004+02:00

The past decades have seen some fairly severe conflicts in Europe. The wars in the Balkans, from the Croatian independence war to the Kosovo conflict. Wars in various ex-soviet states, from Moldova to Georgia. Old, brewing conflicts like the Northern Ireland troubles. And that's before we start considering that both Lebanon and Israel are EBU members...

In as diverse a competition as Eurovision, these conflicts sometimes threaten to spill over into the contest arena. Sometimes, it happens very openly, with countries withdrawing in a huff. You'd think in the block-voting bonanza that is Eurovision, it would also be made apparent by how countries allocate their points, with former enemies reluctant to vote for each other, but in a lot of places this hasn't been the case at all. Ireland and the UK vote for each other, as do Greece and Turkey. More famously, all the former Yugoslav countries happily exchange votes, as does previously fraught ex-soviet republics and Moscow. Eurovision, by commentators, is often seen as a real harbinger of peace, a first aesthetic step towards solving deeper issues.

That perspective is true, I guess, for the most part, although sometimes minorities and diasporas can mess with the perception of the result. But if you look closely at the voting results from a political perspective, compared to the kind of music the block structure suggests should be the right taste for a region, some of the conflicts seem still seem to be brewing - something I've not seen mentioned in any Eurovision coverage. Here are the three I've noticed:

The Cypriot-Turkish conflict seems totally to have spilled over to the contest. Turkey, which generally finishes top ten, last got any points at all from Cyprus when they won in 2003. This year, when the generally taste-analogous Greece gave Turkey 3 points and the entry finished fourth overall, Cyprus yet again didn't vote for Turkey at all.

The extended Kosovo conflict also rears its ugly head. This year four out of the six former Yugoslav republics gave Albania high scores, but Serbia gave them nothing - there's apparently a continued antipathy towards ethnic Albanians in the Serbian public sphere.

And finally, the Nagorno-Karabakh war seems to be still going on in the minds of the Armenians and Azeris. Last year both countries finished top ten, with neighbours giving them both high points, yet they gave each other nothing. This year again both finished top ten, and Armenia squeezed in a measly 1 for third-place finisher Azerbaijan which wasn't reciprocated.

It's interesting that this sort of nationalist chauvinism isn't talked about nearly as much as the kind where culturally close neighbours vote for each other. Perhaps division isn't nearly as upsetting as unity for formerly successful teams like Ireland and Sweden...

Birdseed's Tunedown

Closing time

Rebolation

Balkan not Beats

40 feminist tracks

Where Korean pop could have gone

Massive Tekno Halay Mixtape

Techno Halay FTW!

Juke, Jerk and the Rebel Archetype Inside Capitalism

Goldee: Master of the soft vocal polyrhythm

More Bhutanese music videos

Jejemon, jejcaps, jejebet

Yet another Vuvuzela track - and an awesome Facebook group

Tikitech while I was away

Return to the Caspian - More Persian Dance-Pop

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

Best track to mention Blogspot, like, ever

Eurovision/When "ringtone pop" becomes literal

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

Superstar Manele Producer Needs RAPPERS/DEEJAYS/MCs, Now

We interrupt this Manele to bring you Tikitech

Manele Tidbit #2: Loudness Wars

Manele Tidbit #1: The Manele Economy

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

Okay, a comment then: Ethnic re-thonging

Left without comment

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

Lisbon trip music #2: Nacobeta & Puto Português

Lisbon trip music #1: a couple of Costuleta vids

Lisbon pics, thinks, and a track

LISBON! (Help me orientate)

The tikitech and the pelican

Niger - Vocoder - Hausa - Lukthung - Bollywood?

Tikitech: a latecomer

Pop World Cup: Africa's Year/Mainstreaming music addendum

Playing records tonight

Funk Melody and the cleansing of the western "feminine"

In 1993, "Rap Das Armas" was an anti-gun rio funk track. In 2001, it was a prohibidao track about shooting policemen. In 2010...

Cupping the pop

Mainstreaming Music 2: Whatcha gonna do?

Sex and the Lebanese pop singers

Avatar from inside a feminist debate

Top 50 tracks in 2009

Genre of the year: Reggaeton

Genre of the Week: Putaria/Funk Putaria

Break Pong

Talk on Global Ghettotech

Mainstreaming Music 1: How Decreasing Diversity May Be A Good Thing

What a monster bass line!

Tikitech the EP

And the award for most monkeys in a tikitech video goes to...

2009 is the best year in the charts, ever

In front of

Big Budget Tikitech

Triple Threat Tikitech

A Small Balkan Pop Primer For The Uninitiated

Too tikitech to keep up

Carling Music

Yet more tikitech - and sexism

Meanwhile, back at the tikitech...

More than two tribes

Suomibhangra - the good brownface?

Hey hey, my my, tikitech will never die

Genre of the Week: Logobi

Where's all this relentless experiencing coming from?

Glitchhall

While on the UK Funky note...

African Music's Fictional "Africa"?

The Middle Section of a Hardstyle Song

Tiki the Subculture - and Tikitech

Turkmen-tón

I'm in teh Finland

Screamo covers of hip-hop

The Disco of the Priviliged

Yes, as a matter of fact you should adapt your music for Europe

Lie To Me, MC

How does news events influence your listening habits?

Grimeton

Global Ghettotech as a Genre of Literature

What's the best new music in the past two months?