In a one-question interview with moodmat this week, Theo Parrish offers a heavy, if reductive, look at the music industry color balance. Although some readers will no doubt take issue at the super-simplified picture he paints of American pop (what, no brown people?) his fundamental idea is worth grabbing onto for a moment:

“The curtain that supposedly hides [the underrepresentation of African-Americans in dance music] is the bullshit illusion that dance music has no race, no gender, that it’s about the celebration of some sort of utopian concept.” - Theo Parrish, moodmat, 14 July 2008.

Trainspotting DJ Google for the origin of the phrase “black roots, white fruit”, I found this quote from Derrick May that appears to support the thesis that the genre’s founders were not in pursuit of colorblindness,

“‘[W]hen I play and look out at the [white] kids in the clubs, I hate it,’ May says with pained expression. ‘It’s horrible! There’s a dream we had, a focus we had, a perspective we put on this. We said, ‘Okay, this is a black art form, this is coming from Detroit.’ He grimaces again and adds, ‘To see what it’s become, it’s heartbreaking.’” — Derrick May, Miami New Times, 21 September 2000.

Adjusting for crotchety-ness and general orthodoxy, May is clearly speaking to the Black history of techno - lost to most young people outside of the music. (I blew some minds last year talking to high school students of color when we dug around Wikipedia for the history of techno.)

The consternation that Theo’s interview raised among some readers reminded me of the challenges that Australian techno fans, mnmlssgs made against the Detroit techno origin myth last month. Some of the same arguments seen there reappear from another corner of the techno globe, in this blog post by Ronan from Dublin,

“Race matters everywhere, and there are racial matters everywhere. But I don’t hear many people arguing otherwise. In fact I’m imagining some hippy-dippy 90s strawman when I hear it suggested that white people eulogise about how race doesn’t matter in dance music. I’ve never heard this argument expanded on much.” — Ronan, House is a Feeling, 15 July 2008.

Ronan sees a peace+love straw man and Parrish sees a conveniently colorblind utopianism. Regardless of form, a spectre exists and confounds the techno watchmen. Where is it coming from? And what is giving it life?

The somewhat painful comment section to Ronan’s post lead me to starting thinking about how various local notions of White and Black conflict inside of globalized techno. Both are critical components to the popular techno narrative - an afrofuturist take on Blackness the magical ingredient that brought Detroit techno to life; escaping Whiteness the inspiration for several evolutionary leaps along the ‘ardcore continuum - both quite strongly rooted in the youth culture and history of the US (and, to some extent, England).

Ronan’s discomfort and displeasure at Theo’s comments belie a resentment at the conception of Whites as me-too colonizers in techno. The same resentment surfaces on mnmlssg as various commenters contrast an alleged stylistic stagnation in the Detroit homeland with wild innovation overseas. It’s a double-bind, they assert, White people love and dominate techno yet they are forever relegated to secondary status. Why? Because some old dudes in Detroit stubbornly insist that it is Black music?

Much maligned as the mascot of trance, arguably the whitebread of techno subgenres, Paul van Dyk suffered critically (though not financially) as a result of this hierarchy during his turn of the century reign. Jetlagged back in 2000, he let his frustration loose within earshot of a journalist,

“I am so tired of hearing that my music is only for white people,

“It’s just complete arrogance for Derrick May to say these things. Just because I have nondistorted kick drums and clear elements instead of dirty sounds in my music doesn’t make it ‘white.’ It doesn’t mean it’s not soulful and from the heart.” — Black Roots, White Fruit, Brett Sokol, Miami New Times, 21 September 2000.

I wonder if the history of slavery and racism in the U.S. is sufficiently different from the experiences of people in Europe / Australia that it is causing cultural translation errors among the wide world of techno. Notions of Blackness and - especially relevant to this case - Whiteness are strongly informed by community histories and individual lived experiences. My hunch is that these notions are quite different in the colonized versus the colonizing nations.

With that in mind, I have to read Ronan’s identification as “white person” differently. As an “expatriated Irishman”, the implications of his whitepersonhood carry different meanings from what I have learned growing up in the Northeastern US. Theo writes that “[people] in the western world [have] slavery as a backdrop to everything they do” but that backdrop must take different forms around the (cough) West. Thus, despite shared pigment and ethnicity, Ronan ain’t the White I’ve come to know.

Of course, all of this hand-wringing may be for naught as the younger generation couldn’t care less about genreification.

Exibit A:

Wiz Khalifa - “Say Yeah”, 2008

Exhibit B:

Ricky Blaze - “To The Beat”

Haters? Instigators? Cut cut dem off.

Tags

dance, globilization, history, pop, race, techno

Already hyped as “the new Star Wars kid” and “the next Tron Guy” by peeps in the know, Halo Kid mania is on the rise.

Using only cardboard and packing tape, the Halo Kid achieves an astonishing level of detail in his work. To date, he has crafted all of the weapons in Halo 3 and built a custom set of armor. More subtle, yet even more fascinating is the way that he uses his body to perform Master Chief, the player-avatar in Halo 3.

After showing off each weapon to the camera, Halo Kid steps back into the frame to demonstrate the weapon’s proper use. In doing so, he mimics the body language of Master Chief with surprising accuracy. Slowly spinning on the balls of his feet, he aims a laser, reloads his rifle, kneels down repeatedly, and silently mimes a pistol’s recoil. These actions looks strange and unnatural to the non-player because they were designed within the limitations of the gamespace. By removing them from their original context and performing them in his garage, the Halo Kid places the movements of Master Chief in relation to the archetypical human body rather than other computer-generated body-representations.

In-game, we see the best that the dev team could do within an imperfect technical environment. Presumably, Master Chief might move differently were the game able to more finely compute his movement while maintaining a smooth physical simulation. The dance of the Halo Kid, on the other hand, is the result of a sequence of deliberate human choices. By using his relatively more free human body to mimic the constrained motion of an anthropomorphic avatar, the Halo Kid denies compromise in Master Chief’s movement. No matter how awkward they may appear, Master Chief moves deliberately. The Halo Kid’s imitations permit viewers to see Master Chief move without constant reference to a distracting technical context.

When thinking about the visual evolution of games, I generally assume that developers steadily progress the from left to right along the “uncanny valley“. In this case, however, Halo Kid confounds this common understanding by positioning the movement of his own body somewhere closer to the dreaded corpse-pose at the valley’s punto más bajo. While developers struggle to bring human likeness to the avatars in gamespaces, fans like the Halo Kid willingly yield a bit of their free movement to enjoy the mild bondage that characterizes life in a 3-D game engine.

Tags

cms, dance, fanart, fandom, gambit, gaming, halo, literacy, masterchief, meme, mit, movement, teenagers, video

The video of Feist playing on Sesame Street reminded me to dig up the clip of Herbie Hancock demoing the Fairlight synthesizer on the same show twenty years earlier. I am terribly sad to report that it appears to have been taken down by the user! Terribly sad.

If anyone knows where I can find this clip, please get in touch.

One more reason that we need to be vigilant in duplicating and protecting the videos we value. YouTube ain’t forever.

Tags

children, funk, kids, music, sesamestreet, synthesizer, takedowns, tv, youtomb, youtube

Walking around last night, I heard the new Rick Ross track on JAMN and I found the conceit in the Boss’ latest bars even more absurd than usual. Bloggable, even.

Sight seeing we might be in the
Codra port or that new white BM
Home from FAMU with a gorgeous face,
Next semester she transfer to Florida state
Cooking like home-ec for financial aid
I held her down - she has problems with financial aid .
Remember mean time my finance is straight
I even open up the doors to the panantial states
She used to fight with her moms,
Till I sat em both down
Now she’s tight with her moms (what?)
Yeah I put the ice on her arm,
Now she know she getting sliced
Spending nights in Milan (yeah)
We still blow weed together,
Cheated on her but we still gonna be together
With the house on the water hit the beach whenever
She’s from the north and still can’t believe the weather

The premise of the song is typical Ross: a smart, beautiful girl is getting with him because of his drug money. This improbable fantasy is particularly intolerable here as he belittles her education by comparing it to his own crack hustle. Further, he implies that somehow her mother, who opens the video by calling him a “thug”, is similarly swept off her feet by his stacks.

The majority of the video takes place poolside in the blazing Florida sun. Chains swanging, rims glistening, 1s beaming. Aside from a few shots of Nelly draping jewels on a voiceless, nameless woman and some intimate moments between Ross and his girl, the only non-party scene depicts the young woman sans glamour working at a burger joint. Shortly, Ross swoops in on dubs and frees her a través the drive-thru window.

Fairy tale styles but who’s fantasy is this? Does she lean over the counter when business is slow and daydream about a thuglife as a thugwife or is she thinking about where she’ll intern next semester? Tempting the good-girl seems more like the dream of a hustler; to legitimize the game by trumping the conventional path to success.

The durability of this fantasy is remarkable. Pairing overweight hustlers with slim babes is a hip-hop tradition. There is something important in there about body image and something else about the ability to provide and protect but I’m not sure I’m really ready (or able) to dig into all that yet.

For my ears and eyes, however, this track completely undermines Ross’ Miami swagger. When the Boss persona is situated in close proximity to the image of a real super woman - a girl stressing over financial aid, slinging fast food - he doesn’t come off looking like a “super man” at all, just another lame cartoon character.

Tags

body, crack, fantasy, hiphop, hustling, men, musicvideo, rickross, weight

The apogee, the apex, the pinnacle of chill.

Tags

chill, highway, maxing, mobile, motorcycles, relax, sms, texting

Tags

birthday, dj, kingdom, lonewolf, party, todomundo

Don Omar at Fenway Park, 5 July 2008

This week’s installment of Translation Nation is dedicated to el rey (de melodrama), Don Omar. The king put on quite a dynamic performance at Boston’s Latino Family Festival; inadvertently clowning Luny Tunes for their lame no-show from the weekend before. He played for over an hour in a Sox cap on a stage built atop the home dugout and spoke earnestly to the audience (en español, claro), thanking them for their apoyo, stressing the value of living in the moment, and echoing the day’s emphasis on family health and AIDS awareness. Surprisingly came off like a gentleman. (Well… a gentleman who dances perreo!)

Don Omar - Pobre Diabla

En español,

Pobre diabla… se dice que se te ha visto por la calle vagando,
llorando por un hombre que no vale un centavo,
pobre diabla y llora por un pobre diablo.

ELIEL!!!
Pa’ lo bachateros

Pobre diabla, se dice que se te ha visto por la calle vagando,
llorando por un hombre que no vale un centavo,
pobre diabla y llora por un pobre diablo.

Que no te valorizó nunca y que nunca lo hará,
que sólo te hizó llorar,
pero tú lo amas,
que no te valorizó,
cuando con besos te hechizó,
que sólo te utilizó y hasta te embarazó.

Pobre diabla, se dice que se te ha visto por la calle vagando,
llorando por un hombre que no vale un centavo,
pobre diabla y llora por un pobre diablo.
Se te ve llorar, llorar, sólo llorar, llorar,
ya no bailas más, llorar, todo es llorar, llorar.

Pobre diabla, se dice que se te ha visto por la calle vagando,
llorando por un hombre que no vale un centavo,
pobre diabla y llora por un pobre diablo.

ELIEL!

Pa’ lo de la bachata
solo estoy contigo
(???)
solo estoy contigo
solo estoy contigo

Pa lo de monte cristi
pa lo tigres de la
republica.

Que no te valorizó nunca y que nunca lo hará,
que sólo te hizó llorar, pero tú lo amas,
que no te valorizó, cuando con besos te hechizó,
que sólo te utilizó y hasta te embarazó a ti.

Pobre diabla, se dice que se te ha visto por la calle vagando,
llorando por un hombre que no vale un centavo,
pobre diabla llora por mí yo soy tu pobre diablo,
pobre diabla llora por mí, yo soy tu pobre diablo,
pobre diabla llora por mí, soy tu pobre diablo.

Eliel
tu sabe

Pobre diabla,
yo tengo, tengo
pobre diabla,
yo tengo, tengo
pobre diabla
pobre tengo, tengo
pobre tengo, tengo

Don Omar - Pobre Diabla Remix ft. Pitbull

Y en inglés,

Poor little devil,
They say that you’ve been seen wandering the streets
Crying for a man who isn’t worth a cent
Poor little devil (girl) and she cries for a poor little devil (boy)

Eliel!
For the bachata fans!

Poor little devil,
They say that you’ve been seen wandering the street
Crying for a man that isn’t worth a cent
Poor little devil (girl) and she cries for a poor little devil (boy)

He never valued you and never will,
He only made you cry
But you love it
That he didn’t value you at all,
When he enchanted you with kisses,
He only used you and still you embraced him (hold on to him?)

Poor little devil,
they say that you’ve been seen wandering the streets,
Crying for a man that isn’t worth a cent
Poor little devil (girl) and she cries for a poor devil (boy)

They see you crying, crying, only crying, crying,
You don’t dance anymore, crying, always she is crying, crying

Poor little devil,
They say that you’ve been seen wandering the streets,
Crying for a man that doesn’t value you a cent,
Poor little devil (girl) and she cries for a poor devil (boy)

For that bachata
I’m here alone with you
I’m here alone with you
I’m here alone with you

For Monte Cristi
For those tigers of the Republic (the baseball team?)

He never valued you and never will,
He only makes you cry,
But you love it,
He doesn’t value you,
When he enchanted you with kisses,
He only used you and still you held him to you

Poor little devil,
They say that you’ve been seen wandering the streets,
Crying for a man that isn’t worth a cent,
Poor little devil girl, cry for me
I am your poor devil boy
Poor little devil girl, cry for me
I am your poor devil boy
Poor little devil girl, cry for me
I am your poor devil boy

Eliel
You know it

Poor little devil,
I got you,
poor little devil,
I got you,
poor little devil
I got you

This time thanks goes out to Alia Farid for her editorial assistance and gentle suggestion that I try to translate less literally. Claro, two posts deep. I’m still mad n00bish at this.

And for you radio fiends, Andres and I will be playing some of our favorite salsa, reggaeton, and salsa-ton tunes on Global Frequency tonight. Tune in from 7-8pm on 88.1FM (in Boston) or stream live at WMBR.org.

Tags

donomar, letra, lyrics, musicvideo, performance, reggaeton, spanish, translationnation, video

“Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.” — Judge Orders YouTube to Give All User Histories to Viacom, Ryan Singel, Wired, 02 July 2008.

The EFF has already responded. According to their brief article, the ruling my violate the Video Privacy Protection Act.

Here is an anigif you can place on your homepage to express your displeasure:

My apologies in advance to Hon. Louis L. Stanton for the omission. I could not locate a suitable photograph.

Tags

anigif, freeculture, freedom, freespeech, google, lawsuit, liberty, privacy, snitching, stopsnitching, viacom, youtube

Zombie Nation tour setup

Everyone wanted to know, “Will he play it?”

And there you go !

Zombie’s set was cool. Loops dropping in on each other with some particularly ill moments of noisy feedback cut-up on 4-on-da-floor techno.

Did you know that Zombie Nation == ZZT?

Dancing to a roughly the same tempo for two or more hours can be terribly boring but when it’s done well, I get locked into a super heavy zone out / zero in nrg vibe.

Like a skeleton running from a rouge UFO.

Tags

boston, dance, dj, milkyway, party, rave, video, zombienation

After decoding the secret message in Beck’s “Loser”, I knew she had to be wrong. (Of course, at that time, I also thought soy meant the salty sauce at Pago Pago.)

Today begins another summer project in which I attempt to translate the lyrics of some of my favorite songs. And, if free software has taught me nothing else, no potentially useful work should go unshared so I’ll blog the results.

Boricua!, PR Festival of Massachusetts, 2008

For our first installment, I tackle a salsa classic by Los Hermanos Lebron, “La Temperatura”.

En español,

Cada vez que yo te veo
ni me importa donde sea
se me quieren salir los ojos
por tu belleza
y hasta pierdo el control
quisiera enamorarte
y decirte que te quiero
pero todavía no lo he logrado, no, no
yo no lo he logrado.

Quisiera yo estar contigo,
pero el mismo miedo no me deja, no
no se que me pasa contigo,
pregúntale al indio, que pierdo hasta el control.

La temperatura sube, sube,
sube la temperatura

Te estoy queriendo en silencio
y eso si
tu no lo sabes

La temperatura sube, sube,
sube la temperatura

Pero ya me cansé, vete para allá,
a apestar como un cedazo

La temperatura sube, sube,
sube la temperatura

Que sube la tempera que sube, sube,
sube la tempera que sube sube
sube, sube la temperatura (2X)

La temperatura sube, sube,
sube la temperatura

Pero ya me cansé, vete para allá,
a apestar como un cedazo

La temperatura sube, sube,
sube la temperatura

And my English,

Everytime that I see you
It doesn’t matter where it is
My eyes want to run off
because of your beauty
that I lose control
I would like to make you fall in love
And to tell you that I want you
But I still haven’t got it no no no
I haven’t got it, no

I want to be with you
But the same fear won’t leave me, no
I don’t know what happens to me with you
Ask the Indian, I lose control

The temperature rises, rises
The temperature rises

I am wanting you in silence
And you have no idea

The temperature rises, rises
The temperature rises

But I already wore myself out,
looking for you there
going fishing with a sieve

The temperature rises, rises
The temperature rises

But I already wore myself out,
looking for you there
going fishing with a sieve

The temperature rises, rises
The temperature rises

Many thanks to my editor and resident slap-of-the-stick sound design expert, Andres Lombana. Fortunately, he doesn’t understand that line about the Indian either. He suggested it might be a nickname for someone in the band. Do you know?

And what would this post be with out Mobb Deep’s terminal classic, Temperature’s Rising:

Mayne. It’s almost not hot enough in Boston to play that track yet. Every sample drips with such dark humidity that I actually feel chilly in contrast.

Tags

español, letra, lyrics, salsa, spanish, translation, translationnation

Screenshot from Mega Man 2 on the NES.

Keiji Inafune, the Capcom character designer responsible for Mega Man, recently remarked about this constraint:

“[The simple fun of a classic Mega Man game] doesn’t fit into the grandiose and expansive world that the consumer gaming industry has become, and so you have to make games that match the current expectations.”

The unnamed force here is the cash factor. Consumers paying top dollar for the latest-gen console expect to be dazzled. Developing a title that could have come from that grey box in the closet is incredibly risky. Fortunately, the growth of digital distribution is sufficiently shifting the financial balance to permit long tail niche development to seep into gaming. (Though Geoffrey makes a good point in complicating notions of “niche” in his earlier entry on the subject.)

The latest issue of Nintendo Power reveals that the next installment in the Mega Man series will be a “new NES game” complete with chiptune soundtrack and faithful 8bit graphics.

Screenshot from Mega Man 9 on the Wii (as printed in Nintendo Power).

According to the article, the popularity of retrographics on t-shirts and other nostalgic bric-a-brac convinced Capcom that it was the “right time” to revive the original Mega Man aesthetic.

This announcement is an encouraging sign that the unfortunate neglect of past platforms by the mainstream gaming industry is beginning ebb. Free from the need to create playable demos of the latest hardware, studios can nurture a unique language and approach to game design and development.

Innovation along many axes will finally break the brutal linearity characterizing many of the last decade’s popular titles (Doom begat Half-Life begat Halo 3…). The beauty of Flash-based titles like Dino Run is an early indication of the potential in joining a persistent platform to yesterday’s aesthetics.

In its pursuit of “the upper-limits of 8-bit”, I suspect Inafune’s team will be surprised to discover a ceiling of considerable height. Let’s hope they inspire others to similarly explore past aesthetics, constraints, and joys.

Cross-posted to the GAMBIT blog.

Tags

8bit, digital, distribution, flash, gambit, gaming, industry, innovation, megaman, retro, throwback

For more info on pooping, search Youtube for “youtube poop”. It all starts with Mama Luigi. This one is by Krobo:

These videos are bananarama but for real brainmania, try reading Dana Milbank’s account of David Addington under subpoena. Discourse breakcore. “Cheney’s Cheney”.

Tags

campaign, jerks, news, poop, remix, torture, video, youtube

Yoni Gordon at Great Scott, 10 February 2008

My friend Yoni just posted up the tracks from his new 7″ to which I contributed a remix.

In 2003, I saw Yoni Gordon and the Goods hold down a stacked Toad, haunt of the jaded indie rocker, for 3 hours straight on a weeknight. I remember coming home and declaring them the end of rock, the coda, the epilogue. It wouldn’t get better.

The next year, Yoni worked at Planet Records where I routinely cleaned out the month-old hip-hop promos for 2$ each. (Where you think I got all them Lil Jon records?) We drank coffee at Peet’s and talked about grinding, working with kids, and playing parties. Yoni performs and writes songs with a DJ mentality: all of pop history at the ready for sampling, quoting, referencing, ripping, and dropping.

Yoni will be on a tour of the east coast, midwest, and south for all of July. Do yourself a favor and check the Yoni Gordon and the Goods MySpace for dates.

Download: Yoni Gordon - Election Year (Lone Wolf Dub)

And why not throw in the clean “A Milli” medley I made last week: Lil Mama, Jay-Z, Kingdom - “A Milli (Lone Wolf Radio Edit)”

Tags

gordon, lonewolf, mp3, pop, remix, rock, yoni

I. A tale of Warcraft:

II. The war -Spill chapter:

III. The war - Forgotten soul:

Tags

fiction, gaming, machinima, storytelling, teenagers, warcraft

Tags

boston, dance, dj, freetibet, lonewolf, milkyway, party, tash, todomundo

Walking map from Stonybrook to Milky Way.

Tags

boston, directions, milkyway, party, walking

+ TODO MUNDO +

+ SPECIAL + GUESTS +

DJ RIPLEY (new mix!! TO THE PARTY MEMBERS)
KID KAMELEON (hours + hours of mixes on wobsite!)

&& YR HOSTS

LONE WOLF (new mixtape: NIGHTWIND!@)
KINGDOM (did you get the CLUB VORTEX mix??)

as always

+ FREE + NO COVER +
+ THURSDAY + JUNE 12 + 9:30 PM +
+ MILKY WAY + 403 CENTRE ST + JP +

Tags

dance, dj, hiphop, kidkameleon, kingdom, lonewolf, party, ripley, todomundo

Lone Wolf, “Nightwind”
http://lonewolfnightwind.com/

Lone Wolf’s “Nightwind” mixtape is a non-stop blend of slowed trance pop.

Available gratis in digital form and for 7$ on compact disc.

1. Mariah Carey - Don’t Forget About Us (Tony Moran and Waren Rigg)
2. Usher - U Don’t Have To Call (Lake Night Ext. Vox)
3. LMC v. U2 - Take Me To The Clouds / The Feeling (Extended)
4. J. Costa - How am I Suppose[d] to Live Without You (Mr Mig/ DJ Holland Club Mix)
5. Kelly Clarkson - Because Of You (Jason Nevins Dub)
6. Alice Deejay - Better Off Alone (Vocal Club Mix)
7. DJ Sammy - Why (Club Mix)
8. Real McCoy - Run Away (Single Version)

http://lonewolfnightwind.com/
http://myspace.com/lonewolflonewolflonewolf
http://todomundosound.com/

Tags

dj, hiphop, lonewolf, mixtape, music, nightwind, release, trance

As you can see, I’ve added a novel header and footer and removed most of the borders, backgrounds, and other structural elements from the page.

Presented here for your use, reuse, abuse, and chartreuse. I suppose I prefer you not copy my layout exactly but, if you must, please link back to: http://lonewolfnightwind.com/

Lone Wolf MySpace Layout: lonewolf_myspace.txt

Edit that file locally and then copy-paste the code into the “About Me” section of your profile (or “Band Bio” for MySpace music pages.)

Does anyone know of any legible resources on the web about making MySpace layouts? I did some googling but got frustrated rather quickly with the number of auto-layout offerings and simple copy-pasta. Someone must have done a comprehensive breakdown and blogged it. Come on, webs!

Tags

code, css, hacking, myspace, todomundo

For the last week, I’ve been flipping around in We Rock So You Don’t Have To, a collection of essays and embarrassing interviews with 90s grunge navel-gazers that carefully details modern rock’s last gasp. Read it in tandem with the 80s underground equivalent, Our Band Could Be Your Life but find-replace “embarrassing” with “inspirational”. I can’t quite identify the shark, but these books go a long way to describing the jump.

In the My Bloody Valentine article by Mark Kemp, Kevin Shields makes some particularly insightful comments regarding the waning relevance of rock in postmodernity.

“It’s funny,” Shields says, “the world has gone into this weird, like, time warp. You watch TV and hear people condemn bands for their ’60s-isms, but it’s honest because we still hear that music all the time. It’s not like we’re trying real hard to search it out and be retrogressive, it’s just that it’s always there in front of everybody’s faces. […]

“I realize that hip-hop is very modern music in a way that ours isn’t,” he says. “If people in the ’60s were to hear us they’d go, ‘Wow, that band’s kind of weird.’ It might seem alien to them because of the technological precision-ism in what we do. But we are in a machine age, so we kind of naturally imitate those machines. So that side of us would seem alien when put beside the Velvet Underground, who were all loose and flowing.

“But if you played hip-hop or house music to a ’60s audience, people would go ‘Wow! That’s weird, avant-garde wildness!’ And that’s kind of strange, because in the ’90s it’s totally commercial music. So, in that sense, hip-hop and house music is more modern than what we’re doing; not that what we’re doing is less relevant. It’s realness that matters, and in England, it’s trendy to be modern - to be hip-hop or house or ethereal, or this or that - whereas in America, it’s pointless to be trendy.”

He loses me with the bit about “realness” and the pointlessness of trends but his image of the timetravelling record is revealing. For Shields, it is meaningful and possible to be modern (perhaps “contemporary” is a better choice of words?) yet the benchmark he uses to determine modern-ness is the opinion of an earlier generation. Pretty much everything identifiable as rock has been time-traveler music since My Bloody Valentine so who thinks in these terms today?

Has hip-hop inherited Shield’s burdensome relationship to history? With anticipation of Tha Carter III at a fever pitch (and quite a few leaks spinning on our harddisks), the hip-hop digerati squabble to identify the core character of a “classic album”. Without fail, heads trot out the canonical examples - the Illmatics, the Reasonable Doubts, the Ready to Dies, etc. - always the history lesson.

In a recent thread at DatPiff, NewMexicosFinest even writes:

Classic albums don’t have this auto tone gah-bage on it B-)

Do Jay-z Shit Gotta Vocoder On His Shit??
Did Biggie Have That Shit On His Classics????

Lil Wayne Is A Good Lyricist….but A Classic Album Maker???

Shield’s interview in “We Rock…” was recorded just before the release of his own classic album, “Loveless”. Were there fanzine op-eds at the time decrying his use of drum machines and digital delay because the Beatles got by with Ringo and tape loops?

Roke ruin begets hip-hop hypocrisy. The cyclical nature of pop?

Tags

books, grunge, hiphop, history, music, rock, roke, shoegaze

Saturday Night May 31 st 2008, 8:30 PM Doors, 18+, $10
At The Paradise Rock Club , Boston Massachusetts
Presented by Cloud City

DJs : Lone Wolf* (Gold Chain) with Bone Zone (live), Etan (Basstown), Claude Money (Soul Touch), Dan Shea ( Bodies of Water Arts & Crafts), Matt Sisto (Lemmingtrail), Joseph Colbourne** (Color), Baltimoroder^ (Hearthrob), Dafna & Stella (Gross Anatomy+), Mark Pearson (Neptune), Brenden Wesley (Akult)

VJs: Morgan Harary (Bloodsugar), Josh Randall (Robotkid), Michael Savant , Matt Boch (Harmonix)

On 9/2/06, over 400 people came out to support the first ever Love During Wartime . A dance party founded by local DIY promoter Ben Sisto (Honeypump, Punk Rock Flea Market, Dynasty, Etc); LDWT was setup with the goal of raising $500.00 to be used as grant money for a local artist. DJs and VJs of all genres shared the stage; the night ended up raising $1,000.00 for the grant, and was voted one of the top 10 parties of 2006 by the Boston Phoenix.  Lissa Rivera , a talented young local photographer who just finished putting herself though college walked away with the grant ($1,000). It has allowed her to afford materials to continue her work in Boston and New York. This time we hope to raise even more!

In a cyclone, BZ sounds and looks like this:

But def check Perching on the Beam to hear a little of the Bone Zone / Lone Wolf collabo sounds.

Tags

benefit, bonezone, dance, dj, hardcore, lonewolf, party, performance, todomundo

BAILE ROYALE

ft.

REFUSENIK (ftw)
LONE WOLF (todo mundo)

Dancehall, funk carioca, rap, bass music, b-more, cumbia, reggaeton, electro

Sunday May 25
9pm - 1am
NO COVER

Enormous Room
569 Mass Ave
Cambridge

Tags

boston, cambridge, dance, dj, hiphop, lonewolf, party, refusenik, todomundo

[Verse 1]
Got somebody she’s a beauty
Very special really and truly
Take good care of me like it’s her duty
Want you right by my side night and day

[Chorus]
No letting go / No holding back
Because you are my lady
When I’m with you it’s all a that
Girl I am so glad we’ve made it
No letting go / No holding back
No holding back, no
When I’m with you it’s all a that
All a that

[Verse 2]
They say good things must come to an end
But I’m optimistic about being your friend
Though I made you cry by my doings
With Keisha and Anisha but that
Was back then

[Chorus]
No letting go / No holding back
Because you are my lady
When I’m with you it’s all a that
Girl I am so glad we’ve made it
No letting go / No holding back
No holding back, no
When I’m with you it’s all a that
All a that

[Bridge]
Really appreciate you loving me
After all that we’ve been through
Really appreciate you loving me
All times, time

[Repeat Verse 1]
Got somebody she’s a beauty
Very special really and truly
Take good care of me like it’s her duty
Want you right by my side night and day

[Repeat Chorus Till Fade]
No letting go / No holding back
Because you are my lady
When I’m with you it’s all a that
Girl I am so glad we’ve made it
No letting go / No holding back
No holding back, no
When I’m with you it’s all a that
All a that..

Tags

todomundo