This year's first legitimate Christmas music post

Legit because of the well-selected posting time, of course.

This weekend I'm having a house warming party (any readers are welcome to show up, comment for details) and the theme is going to be appropriately seasonal, including the music. Since the new apartment is large enough, there's going to be two separate sound sources, and since CDs are useless and boring, we're going for the computer vs. the vinyl player. The former is easy enough: It's going to be all-parang. As usual, Imeem is the best source for trini music, and I've found this enormous parang playlist:



115 songs, that should last all night. Or until my girlfriend decides to switch to Spotify, which should be about fifteen minutes.

The vinyl, that's trickier. I had about four Christmas albums plus the odd extra track last week, and so I've spent several days hunting down as much as I can, with I must say surprising success. (A convenient record fair helped.) I now have eighteen Christmas albums, plus a single, an album with a Christmas song on it and an unfortunate duplicate, all for about 400 kr. About half are actually reasonably good, too, including some bona fide classics like A Christmas Gift for You, Christmas Jollies and Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas.

But I also have some albums that are less well known. I thought I'd go ahead and highlight three of them quickly.

Ramsey Lewis Trio - More Sounds of Christmas

This is a surprisingly tight package of instrumental jazz (mostly in some sort of vague cool-jazz vein) with some seriously different interpretations of Christmas classics coupled with originals. If I have one complaint it's that some of the originals are a bit too much jazz and a bit too little christmas for their own good. As a sample, here's the radically redone version of "We Three Kings".



The Whispers - Happy Holidays To You

Somewhere (1979 to be exact) on the border between modern soul and eighties R&B, this has a somewhat similar problem to to the last album - the interpretation of standards is great, very soulful, but the originals tend to be a bit clichéd and cheesy. "Funky Christmas" is probably the best of the lot, although it's uncharacteristically disco.



Half Man, Half Biscuit - All I Want For Christmas is a Dukla Prague Away Kit (from Back again in the D.H.S.S.)

Right, this isn't really a Christmas album at all, but this particular song is one of the greats in the genre. It shows painfully, I think, what indie fucked up from punk's legacy: this is in equal parts a story of a pained childhood, a total absurdism and a subtle piece of social critique. It's the last bit most indie bands today tend to forget.

Genre of the Week: Eurobeat

Sometimes a genre just clicks as the missing link in your personal puzzle of music discovery, leaping between continents and time periods and immediately grabbing your attention. For me, eurobeat is definitely one of those genres. It connects, in a way which is really fascinating, the eighties dance genre of italo disco with the latest ringtones and video game sounds. And what's more, its existence raises many more questions than it answers.

Eurobeat is a genre of music produced entirely in one country, Italy, and consumed entirely in another, way on the other side of the earth: Japan. It's been running as a genre more or less constantly for twenty years now, without slowing down much. And it's got its own huge subculture, which involves one of the strangest looks to appear in the part decade, in any country: the blackface Ganguro girls.

As good a place as any to start exploring the genre is the Swedish eurobeat site eurobeat.se. Iocc, the site's owner, claims to have 71 Gb of the stuff, collected from strange and esoteric FTP servers in Chile and Finland starting eight years ago. Apparently, he says, one guy in the US claims to have more music, but he's at least #2 in the world. The obsession in foreign countries with this phenomenon is perhaps natural seeing as to the Japan fascination that's been sweeping Europe in the past few years, but this stuff is truly marketed only to Japan. Iocc keeps returning to this irksome fact during our interview.

What does eurobeat sound like? Well, Iocc's favourite track might give a hint as to what sort of thing is on offer. "Go Go Dance" by the Go Go Girls (a completely fabricated group whose members switch constantly) is fast, carelessly happy, rhythmically quite complex and insanely energetic, constantly switching portions of its content around.



Eurobeat has its roots in a familiar story from the history of music: fashions changed in Europe with the arrival of house music in the late eighties. Japan, however, had grown attached to the older music and its crazy lyrics and image, and wanted more. Enterprising producers gave it to them, and the earliest eurobeat from the late eighties sounds distinctly like just more italo. But then, slowly, it began to evolve - new instruments and musical styles emerged, and the tempo accelerated to upwards of 155 BPM circa 1995 before dropping somewhat again. The typical style and image emerged: more or less anonymous rent-a-face artists always singing in (bad) english, tracks who borrowed the names (but not any of the music!) from major hits...

Just how this evolution took place is one of the great mysteries of the genre for me. Practically the entire musical output of the Italian studios who produce eurobeat is distributed and owned by a Japanese company called Avex Trax, and there's no direct feedback from any of the marketing. Also, most of the tracks are sold in compilation form (like the famous Super Eurobeat series) and it must hard from the vantage point of Italy to tell just how well an individual track has done. And yet, the music evolved and changed with the times and is now thriving in its third decade. One music studio I talked to, out of about six or seven still in business, produces around half a dozen tracks every month. How it's worked? The cryptic answer I got was that they sense what their customers want, but that's just mystical ESP bullshit, isn't it?

Well, part of the longevity is probably due to its subcultural moorings. Besides the fantastical (and from a racial point of view eminently analysable) ganguro girls, there's a huge scene centred around the arm-based dancing style para para, including at the now-closed mega club Velfarre where eurobeat was often the main genre of the dance floor. Here's another Go Go Girls track (with more post-colonial goodness to analyse) with some para para dance stylings:

Para Para Paradise - One Night in Arabia
Uploaded by blackpaladin

There's something about eurobeat that's immediately familiar to your ears even though you've never heard it before. Part of it is probably its immediately noticeable influence on other Japanese culture: you can hear eurobeat (or something like it) in video games, in anime, on television. But Iocc also points out that it might well be the other way around: a lot of the familiarity might be from the old disco styles in europe in the eighties it's based on, and not least from older video games. That bright, two-oscillator synth that you hear in a lot of this stuff, for instance, is basically lifted as an idea entirely from one of the typical sounds of the classic SID chip on the C64.

So with over fifteen thousand songs in this breakneck genre's history, where would you get started if you're interested in the genre? Iocc recommends the "Euro Mach" series of compilation albums (should be pretty easy to find online), which were released during the ganguro craze's commercial high point around 1999-2001. Supposedly, they're even happier and more upbeat than the average eurobeat tracks...

How four-on-the-floor can R&B get?

Apparently all of Sweden's R&B bloggers are joining together in a couple of week's time, leaving Sweden without any current R&B blogs and the new blog without any competition. Since I've spent the last couple of weeks mostly listening to R&B (via the brilliant iM1) I thought I'd attempt providing both. At least for one post.


As you all probably know hip-hop has recently taken up a lot of influence from electronic dance music of various kinds to the point of sampling it directly. Well, R&B if anything permits itself to go even more trancey. There's plenty of effervesynths going around, and more and more beat and sound ideas from house, trance and techno are burrowing into the music. Hard to get more chillout room than this new Polow Da Don production, for instance:

Crishan - U


All well and good so far, because the harmonic and song-building qualities of R&B are still perfectly intact. (And it's a great track.) But what's considerably more shocking to me is just how much the beat has gone full-on four-on-the-floor. Sure, even in a song like the above those first beats are emphasised, but compare it to this:

Adonis - Senses


No, it's not the 80s house producer Adonis, but you'd be forgiven for thinking so. The first fifteen seconds has no percussion but four-on-the-floor kick drum, and then adds a hand clap as well until a slightly more rhythmically complex chorus a minute in, but nothing vaguely resembling syncopation. I realise the producer has done similar things before, but this is damn extreme, both in single-mindedness and volume.

This trend has got to have reached the end of the line soon, right? Pity. I kinda like it.

PS. Listen to it making its way into dancehall as well. How four-on-the-floor can dancehall get and still be dancehall?

Jah Cure and Wayne Marshall - So High

Freedom and Music Quality

In the last couple of days I've posted a couple of blog posts that have given the illusion that good music can be produced in countries with extremely oppressive regimes. This summer I posted about decent music in a communist dictatorship.

Well, the thing is, if indeed these claims are true they're very much exceptions. Actually, it's fairly amazing how clearly freedom correlates with good music worldwide, generally. Today I came accross (via) the web site of Reporters Without Borders, and this year's edition of their famous Press Freedom Index. And I think the map and table of the freest countries is pretty startling.

(large size in PDF file)

Some of the freest countries in every region read like a who's who of recognised music producers and blog favourites.

In the Caribbean: Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago.

In Africa: South Africa, Tanzania, Ghana, Mali (Ivory Coast & Angola are okay).

In Asia, though the general level is lower: Turkey, India, Cambodia, Thailand, Japan, Lebanon.

The correlation is far from perfect either way, especially in Europe and the Americas, but it's still a bit too much to be a coincidence, I think.

Hip-hop crackdown in Burma

I'll freely admit to never having heard of Zayar Thaw before reading about him in the news and on the net today. You know I love Asian hip-hop and try to find it in the strangest places, but I honestly have never thought of looking at Burma as a possible country it could be big in. But apparently it is. Or was. Zayar Thaw, one of the biggest stars, was sentenced to six years in prison yesterday for his part in the 2007 uprising. Another big star, Yan Yan Chan, is still awaiting sentencing, and last year they came and took G-Tone, after he took off his shirt to show a tattoo in support of the monks. He was released, but banned from ever performing again.

The scene wasn't bad. There was plenty of stuff I could well have blogged about. Here are a couple of videos, a little old-fashioned perhaps but vital nonetheless.

Yan Yan Chan - Lite Kye


G-Tone and others freestyling


Acid (Zayar's and Yan Yan's group)- Ma Ya Kyout


Burmese C-Walk


Do you think we from the international hip-hop/globetech/whatever community have a special responsibility towards these people? We gladly accept their wares, play their records, encourage their independence. All this material would certainly have ended up on my old radio show. On one level I guess it's horrible when a dictatorial regime cracks down on anyone, or on any artist. But just like the PEN club defends writers specifically, I think this is precisely the sort of thing we need to engage in if we're not just going to be irresponsible surface skimmers.

What do you think?

Jesus fucking horrendous Christ

I thought there was no cultural activity going on in Kista compared to it's more vibrant neighbours. I was wrong.

AAAAAAaaaargh!

The enemy is here! Dammit!

Something is brewing in Zimbabwe

Wow, Zimbabwe's blandly-named-but-sometimes-brilliant local genre urban grooves is really picking up pace! Less than a year ago I was googling it and finding nothing, but now there's tons of material, much of it newly produced. It's great to see music springing up in a country that hasn't had a happy last few years, and for it to be fresh and unsettled the way good new genres are supposed to be. (Though a lot of it seems to be made by expats.) There are influences there from the two regional power houses, Tanzania and South Africa, and you can kinda hear some sort of warped kwaito-meets-bongo-flava thing going on in there. Like on this track, by the unfortunately named Street Niggaz out of Bulawayo, which clocks in at a very discoey 116 BPM and samples the bassline of Madonna's Holiday.

Street Niggaz - C'Zobalimaza


I love the houseyness of a lot of this stuff. There's stuff that almost borders on straightforward gospel house! In general, there are loads of warm deep-housey synth mats, which I'm usually ambivalent about but it works great here. But it's far from universal: there's plenty of material here, still, that copies the usual American and Jamaican suspects, and it's still developing. (A lot of stuff is actually labelled "Zim Dancehall", they've even got their own riddims.) Then there is material that ties into older Zimbabwian music as well: plenty of Kalimbas and Kwassa kwassa guitars going on here.

There's plenty more tracks in the genre to be found on the youtube page of zimvibes.