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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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



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

Niger - Vocoder - Hausa - Lukthung - Bollywood?

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?

How does news events influence your listening habits?

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.

Esoteric Research Methods #7: Twitter searches

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...

Esoteric Research Methods #5-#6: The Freedom Map and Youtube Playlists

Very straightforward this one, really, but it's proven productive so far.

I've been using this map of relatively free countries to search around the world, based on the reasoning that if there are lots of good countries that produce great music because they've got good civil liberties, other countries with good civil liberties must have decent music scenes too. Not entirely true, of course, but the very act of going around the map is a great ERM, just sitting with an atlas, Youtube and Wikipedia and randomly punching in countries, cities and regions can yield surprisingly decent resluts.

Just a couple of weeks ago this was a much more tedious task than it has to be, but thank goodness that Youtube has brought back playlists from the dead. These used to be incredibly annoying, stopping whenever they encountered a broken video or seemingly if you just coughed gently, but now they're smooth, plentiful and (with some working around) embeddable. A great way to access a local's selection of the music, as a sort of answer to the dilemma posed in the last post.

Just to take a couple of products of the combined approach of the two above:

Picking Liberia as a relatively free country, looking up Music of Liberia on Wikipedia, searching for "hipco" on Youtube, and getting this playlist:



Cool. Next: picking Namibia, repeating the procedure with "namibia kwaito" and producing this:



And that's pretty much it. I'm off to listen to more stuff...

Esoteric Research Methods #4: Youtube most viewed

You guys know I'm not overly fond of Youtube and its astoundingly annoying policy of blocking videos by country, but it is by far the biggest video site out there and a brilliant source for all sorts of video material. I think I've discovered more new stuff via the "what's related" link list on YouTube than any other method in the past year, and the site just keeps growing with new material.

Another interesting way to spot new YouTube videos (and consequently new music) is by looking at the various lists of most viewed videos available on the site. Obvious and not esoteric, you might say, but it's surprising how often you can come across music you've never heard before, seemingly randomly ascending to the heights of the day list or week list, pushed by a crowd you bear no regular relation to.


Here's just a few of the videos I've come across today (as a random sampling moment) from the recesses of the Rap & Hip Hop - Most Viewed list. The focus is definitely on stuff I would not usually access through other channels, ie. nothing American generally.

German hip-hop always features heavily on the list and I'm not overly fond of it - there's something a bit dour and formulaic about the beats and too strong a boom-bap emphasis to appeal to me immediately. One track that stood out a little bit though was Ghettobass by Azad (page 1, this month), which at least has some interesting drum machine programming now and then. French hip-hop is usually a bit more fresh and indeed something like Suis-Je Le Guardien De Mon Frere by Sefyu (page 3, this month) is considerably more exciting to me with a very engaging bass riff and atmospheric synth line.

And while we're eating off Europe's biggest countries, how about Spain? Emsis by Tr3s Monos (page 5, this month) is sample-based (which usually a no-no for me) but I like the way it's built up and the floating synth line. Italy is plenty represented on the list too, with 'U Tagghiamu 'Stu Palluni...?! by Combomastas (page 2, this week) a clear highlight - how much more gangsta does it get than Sicilian rap, especially stuff that feels this Sicilian?

The best of the big European countries is totally Poland though. With its minimalist synth-oriented sound something like W Aucie by Sokol feat. Pono & Franek Kimono (page 1, today) totally rocks my world. Sokols record company, Prosto, is well-represented on Youtube and practically all the material is killer, with a recognisable signature sound that's one of the most unique and interesting on the continent. Polish hip-hop outside this one company is not as strong but Warto Rozmawiac by CeHa (page 1, today) is also a pretty good track, I like the pitch-bent keyboard.

Of course, there are limitations to this sort of approach. All the countries I've picked out are European with a population of 40 million or more, and that's hardly a coincidence - there's bare representation on the lists somewhere from Libya, Hungary, Brazil, Holland, Denmark and Australia, but all with considerably weaker material. The genre limit means it's almost entirely straight hip-hop and that other genres don't get a look in. But even so, in just a few minutes I've picked out a whole set of songs that by all accounts are interesting and lead on to other equally fascinating threads of research. Tell me what other random sampling approach could possibly accomplish that?

Esoteric Research Methods #3: Google Trends

#1 #2

I love Google trends, Google's shoddy beta pop-statistical tool. It's unreliable, worthless for actually measuring anything, fails to pick up small things... and absolutely marvellous.

Just like with the last two ERMs, its mainly useful for discovering new scenes. How you do that, though, tends to be a tad different.


Being a geek I'm a bit mesmerised by graphs and tables. Maybe that's why I like this service so much - I get stuck for hours putting in words to see what sticks. See The White Stripes' popularity slowly decline, intermittedly punctured by ever-diminishing album releases. Watch Bing Crosby, reduced to nothing more than his seasonal material. See the popular comebacks, the very brief trends, where international artists are most popular (Austria?).

Closer to the topic of this blog, it's brilliant to see exactly when trends and genres first explode. Take, I dunno, novelty dances. Or little regional genres. See the January spike in interest in Baile Funk? Or the seasonal nature of Manele interest? Investigate! I suspect they're both false alarms, but it's this kind of thing that can provide a good road towards a story or idea.

But the area I like most is the country table below the main chart. It's great at picking up regional scenes where you don't expect them. Do a search for hardstyle, for instance, and you can go on to search for the Estonian scene or the Malaysian one (see next post). And I must say I'm quite intrigued by the interest in electro house from Morocco. Wow.

This is exactly the kind of thing to get you kick-started. In fact, I just found this genre I simply just need to look up...

Esoteric research methods #2: Wikipedia vandals

This one is a little bit related to the last ERM. It's also about people trying to push through a message, a self-promotion, in the entirely wrong place. The difference is that here, they're earnestly to make it appear to be pure fact.

Wikipedia's 2 million plus articles and completely free editing aren't the easiest thing to police in the world. There's plenty of examples of people putting up a page about their own obscure little band, or just linking to their myspace page from the article of a bigger band or genre. However, these usually dissapear fairly quickly, as they tend to be fairly straightforward to spot.

For longer-lasting self-promotion, a clever Wikipedia vandal will tap into wikipedia's vast web of genres and post their own genre. Being less obviously based on notoriety, genres are much more difficult to disprove and tend to stay up much longer. And maybe, just maybe, one of them is hiding the next big thing...

The gold standard example of a successful genre placement is the "local scandinavian" (in reality, one group of friends) genre of skweee. Not only has the genre page been up for a year, but they've managed to keep a reference on the page of much more notable genre electro for almost as long! I'm sure I'm not the only one who's discovered Skweee (what a fucking stupid name, btw) this way. It's not bad stuff, and might well stay on Wikipedia as it seems to stand a decent chance to breach noteriety. Ironic - Wikipedia writing music history instead of describing it!

There are a few others that probably stand a smaller chance. Genres with tiny stub pages and few links to them like thizz, birdcore or Brick City club (and that's just from the genres of hip hop page) will probably be edited out eventually unless someone rewrites them better. But they still last longer than those pure band pages!

Finally, another sly way of self-promotion on Wikipedia: this map is prominently located on the hip hop of the United States page and includes at least one genre too obscure to have a Wikipedia article that has stayed up! The "Bamabounce" music that's created by seemingly just one person (the annoyingly named DJ (7)+->) and possibly one of his friends is way obscure (plus it's just bmore, really) but nevertheless it's managed to place itself in a considerably more illustrious circle...

Update: This page of "music genre stubs" (short articles describing music genres, often automatically labelled) is a great source for finding tentatively launched genre labels, trying to get into the mainstream discourse. A few of them will make it (heck, a few of them don't belong there at all, they should have proper length pieces) but many of these labels will inevitably dissapear. Catch them before they're gone!

Esoteric research methods #1: Hackers and scriptkiddies

Under this heading I'll look at ways to find new music beyond the normal suggestions and links. This week I'm just gonna repost an anecdote I've told before to give you a taste of the type of thing I'll feature.

Back in April 2005 I was reading popular British tech news site The Register when I came across this story. Basically, a virus author had created a virus that wiped out all files of Manele music, an eastern-influenced pop genre from Romania, and the tech site thought it was interesting as an example of how virus writers can use the technology to bring personal vendettas. Me, I decided to look the genre of Manele up... and today it's one of my favourite types of music. :)

Practically any genre is worth looking up, but I say look out for the ones people hate. They're inevitably the ones that are the most interesting finds, because they tend to be more rebellious and more upsetting to middle-class bourgeois sensibilities.

(The Register does a great line on news that mention Balkan music as an aside apparently. Here's a story which just caught my eye a minute ago which lead me to look up Azis - totally quality Chalga! Note that he, too, is presented as controversial...)