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.

Genre of the Week: Logobi

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?