ripley

TURN/RETURN

2012-01-26T09:23:00.000-08:00

So, I just moved back to Brooklyn, and I wanted to throw a party to celebrate. But because I can never just do one thing.. I want to use this moment bring together people involved in all levels of music culture technology politics to start some conversations plots & plans AND get sweaty.

And because NY is awesome, DJ Chief Boima, Kat Fyte, Dj D'hana and I are gonna play, Mista Chatman will get up on the mic, DJ Shakey will demo her amazing audio controller she built, and D'hana will show excerpts from LOOSE: a film xe made about remixing identity, genderqueer life and racial performance.

So it's a chance to cross paths with hackers, ethnomusicologists, djs, MCs, producers, occupiers, curators, activists, journalist, artists, promoters, archivists, and pundits. I've invited a lot of amazing people -- the early side of the night is about meeting & talking as well as demos and screenings. and then awesome dancing and bass beats from round the world and round the way.

Please come & bring friends. it's Feb 3 (a Friday) in the back room at Public Assembly and it's free!
RSVP here: https://www.facebook.com/events/348627205154207/

Recaps galore - part 1

2011-11-11T17:04:00.000-08:00

My online personas have kinda been hijacked by the Occupation movements, which are so interesting, and so diverse, across the US, that it's hard to summarize except to say --as I've been saying to all my European friends all month-- that something really exciting is happening. It may not seem that exciting to Europeans at first, but that's because they still have mass movements and a "Left," they have general strikes and mass squatting/occupations in living memory. It's not, however, that what's happening here is exactly like the strikes & occupations that have happened in Europe - the point is that since they HAVEN'T been happening in the US up until now, it means something different now that they are. But on that, please see this this this (all the same guy I know but he's good) and this, and (super-important) this and for a good take on the European occupation movements please see this.

but I did just go on a European tour. It's true! I met a whole new crew of amazing people, saw some old friends & crews, puttered around some beautiful cities in unseasonably warm weather, and spent a lot of time refreshing #OccupyOakland on Twitter since the media reports almost nothing..

Anyway briefly:

Landed in Berlin in time to have dinner with one of the fantastic producers behind Hey-o-hansen, his charming daughter, and the amazing Dj Marcelle Van Hoof of Another Nice Mess radio (which everyone should check out and be schooled on the deepest crates and the most fearlessly inspired mixing. Marcelle and I had been booked to play at Bei Roy, a Neukolln warehouse space with that classic artists-in-a-warehouse vibe. The nice thing about playing before Marcelle is you know that the audience is up for absolutely everything. So I had a nice slow buildup as the place warmed up and then a nice peak of about 40 minutes happy dancing people before she took charge. A great beginning to the tour. Also the intrepid Dj Zhao came through making time in his busy schedule - good to meet him face to face at last after years kicking around on internet spaces.

The next day, I headed to Hamburg for Wobwob, the premier space for dubstep (hee) at one of my favorite venues, the proper dark and ruff Hafenklang. I don't know if it comes across in German at all, but I really like saying that word -Hafenklang. I'd been lucky enough to play there the summer before last, with a great crowd, and this time did not disappoint. As always, so much good conversation with Vinylizer (who has done Back To The Basics radio for years and years), and then a fantastic show at the Hafenklang. Love that crowd, love that party! People screaming for more, pretty packed club, and Kera, half of incite/ came through and stayed late, and then I got to catch up with both of them the next day. They do crazy cool audio visual art, and play festivals and art events all over the world.

From Hamburg, back to Berlin for a few days (in time to see few people including the always inspiring mind&soul behind play in progress) , then on to Cologne. Courtesy of AgentK, I had been invited to throw down at legendary club Gebäude9 for their party Sub9. Agentk is also involved in a local squatted community center, introduced me to some urban gardeners, and generally was a fantastic host, as was the rest of his household. I was lucky to be interviewed by local breakcore hero Desmond Denker (also of the band Bambam Babylon Bajasch - don't ask me how to pronounce that last word peoples) and play a short set for their Mülgrime radio show(forthcoming!). The night of the gig I also did a short interview for Funkhaus Europa with Cologne's leading global bassologist Daferwa (represent!). Wadada, another great & deep producer, helped create a vibe (as well as cooking up a mean & tasty lentil soup beforehand). Also perhaps inspired by the venue being huge and industrial, and the audience being mainly black-clad and somewhat serious, I played perhaps a more bass-oriented set than some folks expected (although there was stil 3bal, balkan twerk, juke, kuduru and garage in there with the dubstep/dubcore) - but people seemed to like it. A good crowd, committed to getting down on the dancefloor for the whole set.

Then, on to Amsterdam to the legendary Rebel-Up! Soundclash crew at the great venue OCCII where I have played before with Dälek, I think, and maybe one other time too. I also linked with the mighty Process Rebel, who was kind enough (with his lovely partner) to host me. This party was a benefit
for the "Boats 4 People" project which aims to decriminalize migration in the Mediterranean. YOu know me, I'm all about regional solidarity and the destruction of borders. so that was a pretty sweet connection. And the party did not disappoint - super global sounds from all the djs and a live set from Process Rebel, culminating in a fantastic tag-team at the end with all of us, spanning so many genres I can't even name. A true delight.

Next up was Brussels, where I was booked to give a talk and dj as well, at Recyclart, an artspace/cafe/bar/nightclub/TRAINSTATION. Yeah, in the daytime it's a train station, at night they set up a stage. cool, right? not the only train-themed repurposed venue I was to mess with on this tour!

out of steam for now, further recaps to come...

for the students beaten this week

2011-11-11T13:28:00.000-08:00

On Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-10T20:20:00.000-07:00

Having just returned from OccupyBoston on what may prove to be a decisive night, if rumors are correct.. I'm pleased to say that I am still seeing what I thought I was seeing and hearing from people actually at these burgeoning events. It's impressive, and important, and exciting almost beyond belief.

I'm not even going to engage with the "but what do they waaaaaant" crowd, or the "they're so inarticulate" crowd, because so many folks have answered these concerns clearly enough. But I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on why these occupations are important.

I was initally repelled by the analysis especially from leftists, and I have to say especially (though not entirely) from leftist men, which sounded like a lot of armchair quarterbacking about how to "win" the "occupation." This contrasted pretty dramatically with what I found interesting and inspiring about the occupations on wall street and beyond. The occupations, by focusing on creating spaces for living and for having dialogue, highlight how little space we have in our lives for either of those things. The society we live in parcels out living space and space to talk and think, based on money first and foremost. Caregetting/giving, learning, reading, talking, getting/giving food, communicating - all are privatized more and more. People assume they are supposed to happen in our homes, but fewer people can actually afford to do them at home, or can't afford the home itself. We are supposed to hire people or services to provide them, if we can afford it, and ration our participation in all of these most human and humanizing activities based on their cost.

So the most radical thing the occupations have done is made visible a lot of that work, and made it accessible. They show it is possible for people to self-organize things like food, like medical care, child care, a library, media centers, internet, etc.

There has been commentary, especially from, I would say, a more macho side of the left, about how camping isn't real protest. These people are just camping, they are not, so to speak, sticking it to the man. Well, the most effective way the man keeps everyone in line is through our dependence on expensive infrastructure which we don't control and can barely afford.

In the camps, people are providing it for themselves and each other. So rather than saving up money, inheriting it, borrowing it, abandoning one's responsibilities, or simply not having any yet, in order to stick it to the man without fear of losing your health care or child care or whatever...these people in these camps are demonstrating how you can do without the man. And the skills that come from that are indeed transferable.

And as I keep suggesting, these skills are also unglamorous. Often seen as "feminine." The caregiving, organizational, maintaining skills. But they are the skills that make things accessible to more people, especially to people more at the margins. They are also the skills of people who are not dependent on the system, they make it easier to resist selling out or buying in.

And then there are the skills and practices of decision-making and discussion. People are learning what a general assembly can be - they are seeing people who care about whether decision-making is done in a non-hierarchical way - about whether voices are heard. People are not only noticing whether too many similar people have spoken, but are saying "I think someone else from a different gender/ background should speak instead of me, because a lot of people like me have already spoken." Just demonstrating that it's worthwhile to consider these things, that it makes for better decisions. And one of the nicer moments of that was learning that OccupyBoston rather quickly made itself aware that the term "occupation" is rather a loaded and non-liberatory one for many indigenous/native peoples on this land as well as elswheere. Especially as the day approached which celebrates the invasion of native people's lands by Columbus. And although the work of decolonization is undoubtedly still to be done, the fact that this was acknowledged and space left to discuss and move forward on native people's concerns in relation to occupation as well as Wall Street shows, already, a better and more inclusive (in the right way) movement than I have seen. Overall I have been impressed with the gracious and generous participation and analysis of many Native people to these various camps, as well as several important critiques which show the way towards better moves in the future.

So yeah, add in the diversity I saw at Occupy Boston. Yes, in Boston. As I walked around, I heard multiple languages and a good smattering of solid working-class Boston accents. I saw asian, arab, latino, black, white, native, and all kinds of folks, in clusters, twos and larger groups. I saw folks from sixteen to sixty, at least. I saw queer, cis, trans, and straight folk in every style and scene and age, crusty-punk kids in layers of dingy denim and patches, college kids in t-shirts, union members in their union gear, medic in home-made uniforms with goggles and bandannas. While linking with the medic tent, I met an EMT who came to offer her time, and a former military medic checking out the piles of donated supplies (including two huge tubs from the nurses' union). I chatted with the father and mother from Braintree (south shore!) who had brought their four children to see the camp "I work in Boston" he said "I drove by this every day, watching it grow. I think it's just great. It's so great what you're doing here. I wanted to bring my kids so they could see people standing up for something, doing things for themselves."

I also overheard conversations, among groups of people, on subjects ranging from critiquing the gender binary to McChesney's analysis of media propaganda. There were hundreds of people there when I arrived, and more were streaming back after what had sounded like a truly huge students march (Boston is a college town after all). I saw guitars and saxophones and the inevitable drum circle. But overall what I saw was excitement, and hope, and people connecting across their differences - not by erasing them, but because we saw that we are on the same side anyway whether we like it or not, and we've got a lot of work to do.

From the early days now: two good reports and the first decent analysis. Although by now even the New York Times editorial staff has wised up and basically admitted that their first hatchet/hack job by Gina whatever is a pile of crap.

http://thesis.jrbaldwin.com/occupywallstreet#
http://studentactivism.net/2011/09/29/what-i-saw-at-occupywallstreet-last-night/#comment-38880

http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2011/09/30/the-goal-and-message-of-occupy-wall-street/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

And Mike has been doing a great series of posts (yes, each word there is a differnet link), especially strong for me is the way he lays out a lot of background very clearly as he is wont to do.

And of course Zunguzungu is always a treasure, of thought and of further links. Just read everything.

and lest you think this is totally unrelated to other stuff I do - I'll just say that my dissertation is about "exilic spaces" which are spaces in which people's interactions and relationships are not determined by colonial capitalist power. People's identities are not defined only by their oppressors and exploiters, but instead are lived out in relation to a life outside, in resistance to, and predating global capitalism.

I came to this through focusing on creative practices which embody and reinforce exilic spaces of discourse. This term comes from Jamaican scholar Obika Gray, whose work I am eternally indebted to Erin for introducing me to. In this case 'spaces' are a metaphor for'a way of speaking/communicating in which communication -including music- is not commodified. So, riddims, sampling, answer tunes, call-and-response, fan fiction, all aspects of dynamic, social interactions with music, they create around themselves kind of exilic space in which you are not, traditinoally, expected to ask permission in order to participate. And they need exilic spaces - safe spaces where their actions are not controlled or monitored (that don't require you to ask permission), in order to flourish. Copyright freezes communication/music into commodifiable chunks which are attached to particular entities ('owners'), and if spaces of creativity track and enforce this it can kill the essence of living dialogue/musicking. I'm not entirely sure how much the occupations are exilic spaces, but the wilful carving out of a different society in the cracks and fissures in commodified space made by our ability to live fully within it.. well it makes me think anyway.

DC: speaking and Djing

2011-09-24T16:22:00.000-07:00

In January I was lucky enough to be invited to DC for World's Fair Use Day (where I for once got to play the straightgal to the panel discussion on hip-hop and sampling alongside Das Racist). While there I met some fantastic people, including more folks from the Future of Music Coalition, and from the amazing Dj Collective Anthology of Booty.

All that led to much plotting and planning, and the first phase is complete! Which means a triumphant return to DC to speak on another panel, and this time DJ my first DC gig, courtesy of the Anthology of Booty crew! (check out this awesome piece where they discuss how to play raunchy music without destroying the vibe for women - all djs take note - and this hot mix from the whole crew.)

October 1, at the back bar of the 9:30 Club - Diasporas - alongside DJ Bent

rsvp on facebook here

and it's a bit of a reunion, because who is playing upstairs? none other than DAS RACIST so you can rock out upstairs and then check us out below.

and then, Monday and Tuesday, you can sober up (or not) and make it out to the Future of Music Coalition's Policy Summit. Full schedule here.
I'm on a panel called Killer Apps, Conflicting Law: Remixing Compensation in Music Services
alongside one of my favorite scholars, Jessica Litman. It should be a lively one! I'll be bringing in my research based in about 13 months living in Jamaica as well as my experience as a DJ for 16 years across 19 countries.

There may well be a happy hour Tuesday night as well, which I might even dj at for a bit, will confirm as I know more. But I hope to see DC area peoples out in full force on the 1st!

Roundup & last gig for a while in the Boston Area

2011-08-20T20:35:00.000-07:00

It's been an intense summer. (tl:dr? info on the gig here (fb) or here)
Luckily, I've had the chance to meet up with amazing people, through giving some talks
-at the Social Media Research Collective at Microsoft Research Labs
-at dorkbot pittsburgh (review of talk & show here)
and play some AMAZING gigs (see sidebar)

And I managed to get involved in some interesting (as well as damn silly) debates online and off about music, politics, global power, ethics, taste, and law.. all that hot stuff. I decided to take it a step further and invite some of my favorite people whose voices should be heard more, to participate more formally in some of these conversations - so please vote for my proposed panels at SXSW
(featuring Chief Boima (Dutty Artz), Dj rAt (Anthology of Booty), Tina Piper (Center for Intellectual Property Policy) and me!): http://t.co/EY9WDWE & http://t.co/Xl8GImf

and shortly I hope to announce another panel featuring MORE of the most interesting and critical djs/promoters/scholars I know.

But in the meantime, Boston area peoples, come out to Beat Research on Monday the 22nd of August and hear me and DJ Refusenik throw down!

Ripley's taking off

holla

2011-08-05T06:19:00.000-07:00

My internet presence has been lots elsewhere. Some various discussions on the government-monitored, corporate-ownership-of-daily-life site (the older one, not the plussy one). Some great Twitter conversations (one with the one like ProdigalEntertainment especially) and a good three-way convergence via Twitter, email and FB with various members of the Anthology of Booty crew in DC, with whom I hope to work in October, because it looks like I will be coming through DC again at last!

I've been lucky enough to get some great gigs this summer - last week playing with Kingdom, Dev/Null and DJ LeahV in Boston, and this weekend two gigs tomorrow - a free daytime set in the park as part of the Free BASSin' in the park event. The whole thing goes from 1-7, I'm in the latter half, sometime between 4 and 7.

Later in the evening, I'll be throwin down with the Tsunami Bass Experience fundraiser (FUNDBASSIN) down near the Morgan ave side of things in Brooklyn. This one is $10 presale (get tickets here) or more on the door. The lineup for this is equally sick: Joro Boro, Barney Iller, Morphous & Shizaru (Tsunami Bass Experience) and Doppelgenger (Tokyo Bass Culture special guest).

I'm thrilled to finally play with Joro Boro, super excited for bass music stalwart (and killah producer) Barney Iller, curious about Doppelgenger and really honored to join the faculty at TBE.

One thing that draws all these cats together is that they are folks who care about music, make and support it with lots of energy, and also really engage with their minds and souls as well as their turntables and computers and such. They are great examples of how thinking (critically) about music makes music better - not just individual songs being better (although check out some tracks from these cats, whooh!), but by helping create an active, creative thinking community of artists. Super inspiring! And fun as hell to dance to. Hope to see friendly faces out and about, and it looks like I'll be back the following week as well, so watch this space.

A million miles a minute: on sources, communities and audiences

2011-06-14T16:00:00.000-07:00

This week I was honored to be invited to work as part of the Bay Area Video Coalitions' Producers Institute, a 10-day workshop in which five projects for social good which are centered in film or interactive media come together to work on developing their projects into something that can be pitched to funders at a pretty high level. It's a super-fast, intensive experience, where everything seems to go a rocket-speed, and yet thoughtful, nuanced projects come out. The Institute draws on the Bay Area's rich network of technologists, artists, game designers, film makers, app designers, data visualization specialists and futurologists to help people bring their projects into the digital era - transcending the traditional format of documentary film (which most of the projects appear to arise out of), and really make use of the connections and people that contributed to the making of the film, and the connections and people who contribute to its reception.

Coming to it from a non-film background, I have been fascinated by the parallels and the contrasts between my work as a DJ and an anthropologist/ethnomusicologist.

Documentary practices, by which I mean the practices involved in making a documentary, share a lot, it seems to me, with anthropology, in terms of negotiating a relationship with a specific community or issue, in order to make a communicative work. Many issues around access, ethics, representation, technology, and trust seem really connected to my own processes as I spend time in the field. The purposes may even overlap as well: in this case, the projects all have a social goal, whether it is awareness-raising, retelling history, facilitating dialogue, encouraging changes in behavior or shaming authority figures. All of these are often explicit or implicit goals of anthropologists' work.

To be more specific: I'm especially concerned with my relationship to the communities I research, personally (for immediate, self-interested reasons), and for my work and the effect I want it to have. Jamaican musicians, and the specific people and personalities I have been lucky enough to get to know, are not the owners or the controllers of what I do, but they are people who have shared something with me and I have to have integrity about what I do with what I have learned. Even if I end up pissing them off, I need to make that choice seriously and for reasons that hopefully they can understand. I do believe that folks I worked with who might disagree with me would still understand my reasoning for the arguments I make about Jamaican musical practices.

At the Producers Institute, the different projects have some really different goals, which I'm going to totally idiosyncratically summarize below, followed by the project names and descriptions taken from the Center for New media's blog post on the opening day.

1. Straight-up encouraging participants to change their behavior through recasting currently unpopular activities as fun
(Wikilakes: Empowering Kashmiri communities to preserve their environment through game think)
2. Inviting people to view themselves and others differently in a way that overturns stereotyping and fear
(Question Bridge: Transforming preconceptions about black males through video-mediated dialogue)
3. Fostering dialogue between opposing sides and interests while educating the wider world about how we are already involved in this debate without knowing its impact in a particular local setting.
(Equal Footing: Developing tools for Chiapas locals to communicate with government and institutions on sustainable environmental practices)
4. Personalizing a global issue through allowing folks to connect on an intimate level with scientific data about living things
(Rekindling Venus: Bringing awareness and attention to the extraordinary symbiosis of animal and algae in the coral ecosystem and the very real impacts of climate change.)
5. Spreading a forgotten history while making that history a starting place for mobilizing engagement with its aftermath and current incarnation.
(We Were Here: Developing interactive curriculum that honors the memory of victims of the San Francisco HIV/AIDS epidemic.)

Some of these have films associated with them and some do not. But it's been amazing to be a part of the discussion for how one engages with the various communities associated with these projects. There are lots of complexities that arise out of one's relationship to the communities - if one has a particular goal, how to achieve it collaboratively with communities? How is that goal shaped by the people you want to participate, by their attitudes, knowledges, and local situations?

But what about the people with whom you share your work after it is made (to the extent that you see it as a finished work)? Viewers, listeners, critics, students, dancers, experts, colleagues, competitors, fans?

As a scholar, I generally see my work in two ways: as a product (usually written) that seeks a venue, but also as an argument that is intended to convince people or at least share information that I hope people take seriously as they make their own choices about similar issues. So, besides thinking about how that argument/information affects the people and places I study (who are part of the audience), there is a larger audience for my scholarship of scholars, policy makers, technologists and music fans outside Jamaica. Here I am committed to making arguments that will be hard to use to reinforce the kinds of inequalities that are so much in force in Jamaica and globally. I want my work to make people think about what their assumptions are, whether they agree or not. I also know there are institutions in the world that depend on particular understandings of human behavior and meaning, and I hope my work doesn't too easily fit into the dominant ones. This seems to me something at least some documentarians and social-justice-oriented film-makers would be concerned with. But beyond that there are some different traditions in relation to the different media of music vs. film.

Thinking about music and how we enjoy it at my gigs, and how I have studied its enjoyment in different parts of the world has brought out a big difference with film: a different history and trajectory of the different medium. My impression is that film-making, including documentary film-making, has tended to rely on a pretty clear separation between what happens on the screen and what happens in the audience. that is, the audience is not considered much a part of the creative process. Certainly the way I hear film-makers talk is mostly about the message or the story inherent in the film, and how they want it to "reach" or "affect" the audience. The work is constructed in a rather totalizing way, as something that is complete in itself, and the audience comes later. While this isn't so different from a lot of scholarly work, it is completely different from my musical work.

Music starts from a very different place. At least for most people, I think music is a social experience - if there are recordings, the recordings are an element in musical experience, but even live performance in which not everyone has an instrument accords the non-instrumentalists a bit more action than in a movie theater. The conceptual separation between "author" and "consumer" is not quite as strong. The most important and common ways that people experience music is engaged with is more dynamic than sitting down in a dark room (I guess I should separate 'classical' music as it is currently presented, hmmm).

As a DJ, the role of the audience in creating a musical experience is crucial : I help create an audience, partly dependent on who is in the room, but the audience creates itself in interaction with me. I can't ignore or hector them into appreciating what I do. I have to invite them, and their response shapes how I move forward. How I invite people depends on my respecting them where they are, and trying to learn or intuit something about them - I have to figure out what they are likely to respond to. They are as much a part of the musical experience as I am.

One of the terms that is floating around at BAVC (and more broadly) is "transmedia." Music has always been transmedia,* because most music has never been meant to reside in the medium in which it is recorded. Part of what I've found fascinating in the past few days is seeing filmmakers grappling with how to think about audiences as active participants, or breaking down the distinction between audience and producer in different ways. Although people make music with various goals, there is also a tradition, especially in ethnomusicology, of identifying the way music serves social functions without people necessarily being explicit about it. It doesn't have to be "message music" to represent a community, people make music that represents them in a more organic way than that. Although films serve social functions too, I wonder if the history of film-making as a capital-intensive tradition, something expensive and time-consuming to make and distribute and show, made its social function more narrow?

*actually, the concept of transmedia in itself reveals a standpoint that is outside of most people's lives - it sounds like a term used by people who are focused on media first, rather than people. People engage with culture (music, movies, etc) in their lives, by means of media, but for most of them the specifics are not the point (which is not to say that the medium doesn't affect the message, but just that people's use of media is shaped by interests outside of the medium). The idea that there is an experience or a message which exists across different media is how we all experience culture, but also, different cultural forms have grown up around specific kinds of media engagement.

Odetta's laugh

2011-03-10T00:17:00.000-08:00

Ah, check out this lovely piece about Odetta, catch her discussion of “theft” where she schools her interviewer on inappropriate application of property arguments to musicking in the tradition she is a part of.

Seriously. Watch it first, it's a lovely 20 minutes, and then I will take you through her amazing smackdown of her interviewer.

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/arts/20081203_odetta.html

At 13:48, he asks her about Dylan, about how he “took something deep from" her. She pushes back, says he was "influenced" by her, but that he did his own thing with it.

He than says that Dylan listened to the same songs as her, recordings of sharecroppers, workers and slaves, and “stole" from them. She says, immediately, (at 14:15) “no no no no no"

"no no no no no"

" we call it folk music we don’t call it stealing.” And this look, while she says it

"we don't call it stealing"

And then as she is trying to choose the right word ("what do we call it?" she asks herself, clearly), the interviewer offers "Appropriation?"

And Odetta says: “well we could but we don’t” and looks back again at him for emphasis.

"but we don't"

Odetta will have none of this property language, even though her discussion of the music is rooted in a sense of ownership in a way, ownership of her self and her experiences and her perspectives. First, she roots what Dylan did in a social practice, She says we call it “passing on the folk tradition.”

But then, she laughs. I love the long long long laugh she gives after defending Dylan. She connects him to the tradition, but then she gives this drawn-out, deep, rather dark sounding (to me) heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh (24, I counted) at 14:31..
In it, I hear a lot of things going on. But starting with the fact that she begins by looking him in the eye while she laughs:

"passing on the folk tradition"

she’s tossing back at him words used by music-writers, scholars, ethnomusicologists --people who also, for the most part, are implicated in different but maybe equally hierarchical institutions.

But the laugh continues. There's more in there, I think. The most obvious, is the one maybe hinted at in the interviewer’s “theft” language used by : focusing on the different people involved in the tradition. Dylan, a white guy, and black sharecroppers in the south.

And she keeps laughing

She is not only adamant that theft is not really the right word, she earlier describes the folk scene, the “bohemians” as a home for her, and I don’t think that scene was all black sharecroppers. But there's a lot in that long, long laugh. I wonder if there's something broader than the story of Dylan and his relationship to the music personally. Because she talks about tradition, she shows how aware she is of social institutions bigger than individuals. Maybe that laugh has in it the rueful acknowledgment of how Dylan was able to make something of that folk tradition that catapulted him into a kind of fame not reachable by the people with whom he was in creative dialogue, not because of his talent, but because of his position – although an outsider, he’s not as much of an outsider as sharecroppers in the south. Even through genuine participation in the tradition, he ends up with something quite different, because he has access to institutional power by virtue of things that are partly beyond his or anyone’s control.

But, ironically, given the whole piece is about her, the interviewer doesn’t seem to be really listening to Odetta and the points she make. Even when she fixes him with a lazer-like look

"It ain't what you say it's the way you say it"

saying “it’s ain’t what you say it’s the way you say it” (14:37)

how can he miss that look? How much more explicit can she be, that the language you apply to musicking matters, that words like "stealing" do violence to the social realities of music?

But he can’t let go of the morally-inflected language, keeps harping on the word "steal." So then she changes tactics and says "we professionals have stolen an awful lot from amateurs!"

Undercutting and complicating his simplistic approach. She said those guys making those songs didn't get paid for them .. "but us professional people got at'em, and learned from'em..."
SO AMAZING. She implicates herself in this system of power - she doesn't claim ownership as a bohemian, a folkie or a black person. Instead she recognizes her specific status, someone who gets paid within a larger system. Not in a guilty way, but not in denial about the realities of music-making, even alongside the potential for communication, mobilization and healing.

Preach it, Odetta!

Cops kicked my class out of the building (rare non-music post)

2011-03-06T10:18:00.000-08:00

The same questions I ask about the claims over "intellectual property" have always been worth asking about physical property. By what right do people claim the right to exclude? What rights do people who labor and create have to define access and share what they have?

Those of you who tried to come on Thursday, I apologize - the police let several of us in and we were inside the building until police came and told us the chancellor was closing the building at which point we had to leave.
A question this course should lead you to ask is: by what right does the chancellor get to close Wheeler Hall? Whose property is it?

Know that this university exists because the land was donated by the state to the university in exchange for it providing free education to the citizens of California. In terms of labor theories of value, if the labor of teachers is part of the educational mission, at what point do teachers get to decide what happens on school property? If you believe, as I do, that students labor is also part of education - helping create what is learned by all in the classroom, what right do students have to make use of the spaces that were given as sites of education? If there is disagreement or diversity of opinion, who or what should arbitrate these rights?

I later got an email from the chancellor saying there was a "health and safety issue" in Wheeler which necessitated closing it. This seems odd to me. I also heard from a friend who was stopping by Wheeler (a volunteer medic) that police had pepper-sprayed and beaten protesters with batons while attempting to remove them from the area. (was that the health and safety issue? if so, I can think of a few ways short of closing the building that could have protected people)

I encourage you to think about the primacy of property rights in what happened at Wheeler Hall. Property rights in objects were supreme over rights over people's own bodies. The rights to bodily integrity of the students were not as important as the rights of the chancellor to control what happens in Wheeler Hall. Its true there may have been a concern about damage to the building - but during the first occupation a police officer smashed the hand (and nearly took off the finger) of a student who was participating in the protests (nonviolently and not causing property damage), and yet police are still allowed on campus. The costs and the harm of batons and pepper spray are not as much concern to the university as the right of the university to control property.
Whose rights are being protected by this? (note that we were carrying on our section without a problem until this happened, it was the police who were limiting access).

Of course there is the question of students right to pursue an education without protest. As above, who should be the arbiter between those different opinions about educational priorities in situations where protesters ARE disrupting classes?

But also, what happens if you include the rights of the students and former students, and also the janitors (speaking of keeping the building in good shape) who are no longer on campus because of the policies like fee hikes and the layoffs dictated by Operational Excellence? Did they have any rights? Milton Friedman (whom we read this week) would say no. But what about the founders of the UC system and its mission?

Also, the rights of nonprotesting students to pursue an education are affected anyway, because even despite the massive fee increases the resulting funds have not gone to education: class sizes are increasing, labs are cut, teaching resources are cut, class sessions are cut ( this course has four fewer classes than usual because of the cuts), libraries are closed, construction disrupts the campus as much as protests..

I hope this is food for thought and future discussion!

a sufi & a killer & a guitarist & drummer & native artists & metadata

2011-02-09T09:03:00.000-08:00

Lowdjo informs me that the Gonjasufi & Gaslamp Killer album gives no credit to the artists whose recordings are re-used. This is really a pity.

It seems like bad faith (I'm pretty sure Turkish psyche-rock great Erkin Koray is still alive and also famous outside the US, and his music is pretty easily findable online). I'm not too sympathetic to G&G in this case, but I do think the way copyright laws links identifiability with the ability to sue ends up strangling some of the great potential that can come from musical hybridity and mixing. The law makes it worse for everyone involved.

Copyright law makes it risky to share information about who made the music and where, because by attaching names, in the current copyright system, someone can use the law to shut you down. Since copyright is overenforced and too broadly defined, and most people can't even afford to go to court, while the people who tend to have lawyers are already rich enough, I'm not a fan of requiring people to license samples no matter what. But in this case, I think it would be better to separate the license question from the information question. It would be great if attribution - or concerns over inequality of participation and representation could be dealt with without getting into a battle over exclusive rights.

Attribution is pretty important, just on its own. Alongside whatever financial advantages come from increasing your reputation, attribution matters for historical, political, and ethical reasons. Recently, a curator at an art museum in Denver made the museum switch to identifying the specific creators of Native American artifacts (rather than just listing them by tribe and region and year). The curator recognized, especially in the face of the literal erasing of past and present people from the public imagination and public discourse, that names matter, and that attaching names and histories can serve living communities.

So too, says Clyde Stubblefield, the funky drummer, who isn't an owner of the tune his drumming made famous. He just wants people to know that it's him playing the drums. And the law works against him too - since he doesn't own the copyright to the track, the bandleader James Brown does (as is quite common). You can see the confusion in the comments to this video of the track - which is titled "James Brown - The Funky Drummer." Although he played the beat which is arguably the basis of hip-hop, people can't quite figure out what that means, and even question whether he played it, since he isn't named on the copyright. Authorship, and especially copyirght ownership is just the end result of a negotiation, but people confuse that with the law being all-knowing about the nature of creativity. So his name is erased, because he wasn't in a position to argue with James Brown. But Stubblefield doesn't say that he is owed money for that erasure, he says he wants is people to know it's him. Although it turns out he could also use money for dialysis, too,* what matters is that we know his name.

Copyright law as it stands now limits one of the great advantages of digital communication and sampling practices: it limits the chance for actual creative communication and learning about actual other cultures and places and histories. Since one of the great delights of sampling is the way it both reinforces and criss-crosses geographies and communities, it's a pity to obscure the names, communities and personalities of the people whose music is sampled. It denies them participation in the musical conversation, only including people, traditions, cultures into the broader musical community as resources, or raw material, for other people who DO get to have names.

Of course you can't always include names, for reasons of time or expense, or because you don't actually know the information. The context matters too - leaving out the names matters differently if you are learning, broke, starting out, or in some ways needing access but can't afford to give much back, and aren't famous enough for your use to bring much attention back to the sources. But all that oughta change once you are signed to a label with money for distro and lawyers (especially a label like Warp, which spends a lot of its lawyers' money on demanding money for any samples of Warp artists).

Its a shame not to pay back at least recognition to the people who lend you their sound. Nameless reuse can erase the reality of difference, turning everything into a consumerist fantasy, where you don't have to deal with the lived realities of different worlds and different lives, and you turn people in to raw material for your profit.

*as I said in DC - let's not pretend that Stubblefield's dialysis costs are an issue that copyright law can solve. They are why we need free national health care and pensions.

paying it forward: (c) sorts it out, badly

2011-02-04T18:53:00.000-08:00

From Generation Bass, one of the places I first came across the great DJ Lowdjo (outta Belgium), comes a great example of how political copyright is, and how it tends to hand over power to those in colonial centers (regardless of intention). It also reveals again how Soundcloud is turning on the communities that gave it its start.

So, two American producers (Gonjasufi and Gaslampkiller) release an album that include lots of songs sampling Turkish psychedelic rock songs. Warp records puts out the album. A Belgian DJ (Lowdjo), independently buys the Turkish albums that G&G did, and makes a mix putting those tracks on it. When uploading the mix to soundcloud, it gets pulled for copyright infringement --of the Americans album A Sufi and a Killer.
It's a mishmash of competing rights, communities, and musical practices, and, not surprisingly, copyright law doesn't help use sort out anything meaningful. Although I would be curious to know how far it reaches - who felt the had to or ought to negotiate with whom. I haven't seen the physical album, I don't know if any of the Turkish artists were credited. Or if they were paid.

Coincidentally, Warp records was the only label, back in 2005, to refuse to allow me to include their track on a mix CD I did for Death$ucker records. They said it would cost a flat 200 pounds and refused to negotiate. That was about what I was paid to make the mix of 41 tracks, of which there were only 500 copies ever sold, at I think 5 pounds each. Anyway, I hope they paid 200 pounds to everyone sampled on that record!

And, where did Gonjasufi and Gaslampkiller got the idea to put a song together made from samples? All kinds of people credit the album for its imaginative use of sampling. The idea of doing that, the creative sensibility that informs that practice, comes from the aesthetic of communities that soundcloud first built itself around, and is now divesting itself of (having profited from our participation).

I found the page where Soundcloud debuted discussion of its change in policy and automatic "enforcement" (expansion) of copyright law.. I encourage discussion there as well as here.

Doings and goings: feb 12 and 24

2011-01-29T18:39:00.000-08:00

Ok folks: two gigs in February before I head to SXSW Interactive in March! (I'm on this cool panel)
I'm still looking for gigs during Interactive, let me know if you have any ideas.

so in February, here's what you have to look forward to:

February 12th - I'm playing Monsters Of Love, a fantastic event in an incredible space in Oakland. This one is more like word-of-mouth underground style, at least for now, so email me or leave contact info in the comments and I'll send you the info. But rest assured, it's big! The space is amazing, and some of my favorite of the breakcore booty bass warehouse crowd will be throwing down.

Feb 24th - I, aka DJ Ripley, get up on the decks at TRANSIT, a new event in Oakland
The lineup for this is EXTREME:
Mark N of Bloody Fist records (Australia) is on the deck playing an exclusive 94-96 jungle set

alongside el juan hubbard aka big sloppy ..(otherworld -highjnx)
octopod .............(electo-shamen)
life1.......(high jinx )

I will also (like Mark N) play a slew of classic ragga jungle, and also some jump-up and ragga breakcore - kind of an oldschool Ripley set for those who remember what I was up to 10 years ago and more..or those who missed me back in the day!

free before 10pm $5 after
RSVP here
9pm-2am
La Estrellita Cafe (kitchen open till 10!)
440 e/12th Street
Oakland, CA

Some of what happened at World's Fair Use Day

2011-01-16T01:26:00.000-08:00

(Hi all you coming over from the wikipedia 10th anniversary party page! check the sidebar for links to mixes of mine or my musical philosophy such as it is. below is a recap of an event I was part of in DC last week)

Thursday was World's Fair Use Day, which I celebrated at a symposium thingy in DC, sponsored by Public Knowledge. And wow, it was a truly inspiring and entertaining time. For someone who is pretty cynical about the use &value of policy, that organization made me feel a ray of positivity --mostly for its insightful choice of people to bring into the room, and the free reign they gave to us to express what's important.

It was opened by the acting Register of Copyrights, who gave a basic rundown of some fair use cases that shape the fair use landscape. She also said some very positive things about fair use principles

Lawyers and policy people often overstate the way legal cases shape the actual landscape, maybe because legal cases are what they do all day... But since fair use now partly depends on how technology is designed, and mass-use technology is more susceptible to regulation by law because it is more visible to law, at least fair use that relies on networked technology is probably shaped more by law than it used to be.

Still, it's funny to hear what legal people call "history" since it's usually a history of DOCTRINE, not a real history - they describe a chain of logical argument based on a series of principles that change or refine over time. Contingency, the material world, power, social groups, political and ideological shifts in the culture, culture in general, people in general, doesn't seem to be present in many of these accounts. This presents a vision of legal change and maybe even social change the suggests change is made by people making arguments in court. Which isn't very convincing to me.

But actually World's Fair Use Day itself shows that everyone in the room, even the Registrar, knows that's not the whole story either - we were all there in that room to tell stories about the material world, about the communities we are part of, about our politics, about culture, and about everyday life and the kinds of power we do or don't have in it. And we heard a lot of stories. (check the schedule here for the full breakdown of participants with links.)

The first panel was on remix and games, and the participants and moderator Josephine Dorado described the gaming landscape (which is much more diverse in terms of purpose and people than you might think), and the various ways they interacted with existing games to play or comment or create art. Almost as valuable as their arguments was the way they so clearly demonstrated the cultures around gaming - they had their own languages, their own jokes, and strong emotional attachments to games as part of their lives. Not in some sad, shut-in kind of way, but in the way that people are attached to fairy tales their parents told them, or a sports team they follow, or any other more broadly-accepted cultural practices.

The amazing Ben Sisto moderated a panel on visual arts which included several artists who engage with the internet in interesting ways. They all talked about their creative processes, which Ben bracketed with some philosophical objections to the premises of copyright law and a casual statement that "western capitalism just doesn't make any sense." (Will there be more on that later in the day? I didn't really wonder.) We got little windows into video game music, into fandom of particular games and overall, how games link together in people's memories and social experiences, which makes people want to literally link the games together with each other or with their own lives.

Aram Sinnreich gave the second keynote, which was partly based on his most recent book, and I was initially suspicious at what seemed like a familiar (history-less and abstract) concept like "mashup culture" or "configurable culture." But he actually engaged with the power issues in a more grounded way than most people who talk about this stuff. It's a pet peeve of mine the way many techies and lawyers appear to have discovered society for the first time now that it appears on the internet, and build grand theories out of behavior they observe online or through people's interaction with technology, without looking to see whether people acted that way before.

The argument often goes: "before the internet, insert-sweeping-generalization about what social practices predominated in the world (!!!) or the country (!!) or even among artists (!) , based in whatever my personal experience is/whatever books I read in high school before I started studying tech/law/whatever.... and NOW, after the internet, IT'S ALL DIFFERENT." Sounds like someone describing their personal life story if they spent the years before 1999 awkward and unconnected from society and who found it easier to socialize online, so the internet revolutionized their personal ability to connect with people. Nice, but all of society has not had the same trajectory. Sigh. So anyway a book titled "the rise of configurable culture" sets off all kinds of alarm bells to me (was culture rigid and unchanging before 1999?).

Since every person is part of multiple historical experiences, traditions and pre-existing institution, that should be accounted for in "before the internet." There are even entire fields of scholarship attending to these things! Like: history, sociology, ethnomusicology, art history, etc etc, from which one could start generating a vision of why and how people do what they do. But I was pleased to see Aram show a lot more depth than most folks I see starting with those kinds of catch-phrases. Actually I was pleased to see an whole Jacques Attali-eesque riff on the relationship between musical culture and the social-economic organization of society! Overall instead of "then vs. now" he kept leaning towards "certain institutions reflect and shape the power structures in society, and when once changes, it suggests the other is changing" which is wayy more my kind of argument, and made me much more likely to read the book.

Next was the panel I was on, featuring Kevin Driscoll moderating, and Das Racist as well. Man, it was fun. Das Racist did what they do best, which is be exactly who they are -not reducible to abstracts- but in a way that cuts through a lot of the bullshit abstractions that mask racial & economic power and that also lead to bland comfortable music. I tried to just cut in with my own experiences and my research from Jamaica in a similar way (although not as funny because next to those guys I don't even). It was hella lively, and Kevin did a great job of pulling out the randomness and reframing it, or pushing us to be more explicit when the crowd mighta been missing something. I think we kinda kicked ass. I even got one of the bigger spontaneous rounds of applause of the day! (I'll do an edited highlights post later)

Dj /Rupture's keynote took all of that to another level -and included a short dj set as well, speaking with music which I hope people took note of in itself: hey folks - music is in itself a kind of conversation, especially DJing where musical recordings are vocabulary not end products. He began by warming my heart: saying nearly word-for-word exactly the reasons why I love Jungle, when describing how an why he got into this music (in the same club I did, the Loft, at the same time, the early 90s). then he described what DJs do in an irreducibly social and creative way. And then on the subject of property he brought it, all the way back to slavery, and what it means to talk about ownership, and highlighting how much of the time we were talking about black culture and creative practices, or about power that is often racialized. (something that Das Racist and I both talked about - me more from a labor perspective and colonialism perspective, but that /rupture just laid out clear as glass and twice as heavy).

The last panel, on humor and fair use, lightened it up a bit, but not as much as you might expect. I was flagging a bit after the end of the day, but they talked a mile a minute about lolcats, 4chan, corporate reuse of images "from the internet" and lots of other entertaining bits and bobs. Kenyatta Cheese, already my favorite from the knowyourmeme crew, was unexpectedly (to me, since I don't know his other work) militant not only on tech issues but around broader and more historical claims about race and power. However, overall I wasn't as clear on the definitions of "community" being used by the different folks on the panel. The lolcat/ cheezburger networks, 4chan, and other internet-based ways of participation were mostly discussed (there were lots of talk about DDOS attacks), but at the end I wondered what exactly makes those things communities and how do they relate to already-existing communities? Still, the stories were provocative and their depth of knowledge about law and tech issues was pretty impressive, and they are all funny, funny guys.

Overall, a great range of creative people, a lot of irreverence and deep thought and serious politics and creativity. And then there was ethiopian food, and good conversation till the wee hours. And then I flew back to SF to dj at the wikipidia 10th anniversary party!

I'm sure more accounts of WFUD will crop up. I am going to do another post on specific highlights from the day later. You might find your own, if you search the backchannel commentary running on Twitter. I wish I knew how to archive it chronologically. Check #wfud on Twitter or @laripley for my tweets, or search @laripley or djripley for others' responses to my tweets from the event.
What's the best way to archive and organize a cluster of tweets including a hashtag?

there's a video archive of the event up, and somehow it's missing ONLY our panel, as far as I can tell? story of my life.. still you can catch lots of goodness there.

Feel free to post further accounts or links to them in the comments!

Kingston Hot, try to bring it to DC and then round it up in SF

2011-01-10T16:42:00.000-08:00

(my set & interview from a few months ago on SanguineSoul show on Pirate Cat radio is up: check it here for rocksteady, dub, glitch, cumbia, d&b, jungle and a bit of bhangra for good measure, plus a chat about sampling and ethics at the end)

Yes, a great week in Kingston (finally getting some beach in there right at the end)... Highlights include speaking to great and talented artists/producers like ZJ Sparks, Dj Krush and Natalie Storm (woy!), but also connecting to the many amazing people whom I got to know when I was here last year.

And too soon I will have to leave. But before I head back to SF to be a graduate student instructor for Property and Liberty (a really fun undergrad legal studies course at UC Berkeley), I stop off in Washington DC for World's Fair Use Day on January 13th

The great people at Public Knowledge have rounded up an amazing lineup of artists and thinkers for what should be a really inspiring set of discussions. People from KnowYourMeme, Negativland, ROFLCon, the US Copyright Office, the Cheezburger network, the fine and Dutty arts and from academia, will all be on a variety of panels throughout the day. When Dj /Rupture is the keynote you know things are getting deep.

I'm definitely looking forward to my panel discussion moderated by Kevin Driscoll (Dj Lone Wolf) that includes me and the inimitable Das Racist. I can only assume hijinks will ensue. At law conferences I'm the clown, but I suspect I'll be the straight man on this bill. Don't miss it!

It's completely free (as is appropriate) but you must RSVP to ensure you get in.

Continuing the theme, looks like I've just been tapped to DJ the Wikimedia Foundation's 10 year anniversary party for Wikipedia, in San Francisco, at the Gray Area Foundation For The Arts on Saturday the 15th of January! More details to follow.

live from Kingston!

2011-01-04T20:08:00.000-08:00

Just after Soundcloud dropped a bomb on the creative communities it had recruited to its site, I dropped a post in response which was re-linked, tweeted, and brilliantly engaged with by a lot of people (check the comments).. and then I headed to Jamaica.

I'm just here for 10 days, extending the research I did in 2009, and re-connecting with a few of the many hundreds of amazing people I met last time (you can have a look through the archive from Jan-July 2009 for some of the stories and pictures from then).

I tried, last night, to hit up a couple dances - but two out of the three were shut down by the police 10 minutes after me and my friends arrived. And I'm not the only one upset.. these "dancehall tourists" from Finland wrote a formal letter of complaint! with less ethnographic detail, but more outrage.. I guess I'm a slow burn kinda gyal.

So, my story: The first party was at an uptown bar/lounge in New Kingston. No dancehall, mostly live alternative and jazzy R&B. Packed crowd, very elegant, running on till the wee hours, with live guitars strumming behind vocalists who all seemed to know most of the crowd. A family vibe, glittering as they emerged from their cars (big SUVs crowd the lot which is guarded by security). I left as it was still hotting up, around 1am, for the next party.

Susie's Bakery hosts Mojito Mondays, in association with local uh "men's energy drink" Magnum. I associate this place with an uptown crowd, the place normally serves decadent pastries and meals that are quite pricey relative to local restaurants. On Qednesdays it has live music, not only reggae, many students from the local music school perform alongside a somewhat international crowd onstage and in the audience (or that's how it was when I was there in the past). The events take place outside and this one is free, with the sound system set up in front of the bakery and the crowd filling up the parking lot to bursting. In terms of crowd and vibe, this night seemed a bit more downtown than the Wednesday night I remember - this night the music was played by a DJ, and was R&B/ Dancehall/Jamaican popular music whatever that hybrid is these days with a sound system I believe by Supahype... and the crowd was indeed super hype... in all their finery... which was at least in part quite a bit louder than at the previous party. The crowd wore brighter colors, more accessories, more over-the-top fashions: the latest trend appears to be wigs that are half-black and half-neon yellow or pink, there was a woman in a magnificent silver lame dress with big shoulders, men still going for heavily embroidered shirts, although I saw fewer chains, and I don't see so many neck scarves as before. Also the crowd was far less dominated by white, lightskinned and asian people than the previous event (and far more people).

Unfortunately, just as we pulled up and started checking out the scene a traffic snarl at the other side of the jampacked parking lot resolved itself into a police car. A bit later the sound cut out and people started milling around. Luckily Hot Mondays is around the corner, so we headed there. the crowd was similar or even more downtown in vibe - it's inside a shopping center, and used to be free but recently started charging. But about 10 minutes after we pulled in, so did the police.. we stood outside and watched the small sedan in blue and white drive through the crowd around the entrance right up to the front of the gate. My companion identified an inspector, not just regular police, so it seemed more serious, and then several people identified another man, in a bulletproof vest and helmet, as a local famous journalist. "that means them (the police) have to do someting" said someone seriously. With the eyes of the press on the police they have to make a show. Sure enough, the music cuts out 5 minutes later.

People start streaming away. There's another party on, out in Bull Bay, but we are worn out chasing the nightlife and head home.

So the crackdowns on popular culture happen all over! And it might depend on your relationship to property, and power whether you get shut down or not. hmm what does that remind me of? and who gets hurt? the fans! who not coincidentally are the people who help make the ting profitable and expands its reach, as our Finnish friends point out, very sensibly.

But wait, on further research, perhaps the second party is Uptown Mondays? because the bossman was called Whitty, according to the people I was with, and that's apparently the name of the founder of uptown mondays, and we were on Constant Spring Road. If so, there's new levels of irony - despite the name didn't have an uptown vibe to me, although Halfway Tree is uptown from a lot of other sound systems. But the real issue is that just last week there was an article in the Gleaner about this historic party. The article describes how this party played an important role in the music scene for breaking out new artists: " selectors, among them Hotta Ball, Foota Hype and Boom Boom, who have got a big break in the music business from playing at Uptown Mondays."

And yet it buss up by the cops the NEXT week after the article come out? what a gwan?

walling off another garden: is Soundcloud turning on its supporters?

2010-12-25T18:49:00.000-08:00

Looks like the walls are going up again...

You may remember the thing memorialized on Twitter and beyond as #musicblogocide which was actually the second wave (and there may be a third?) of what is basically an inevitable clash between the practices and desires of local music scenes, especially dance music scenes, and the way music-making is structured under law and capitalism. I wrote about an earlier wave in 2008 and then this February it started up again, with many folk starting to get into the deeper issues, including this magisterial take by Wayne.

Anyway it looks like it's about to start again with Soundcloud, one of my favorite sites of the past year. Starting a couple days ago, I'm starting to hear from producers that some of their remixes are being taken down from copyright complaints, and from djs that their mixes (or so-called mixtapes) are being pulled as well.

This is a real shame. Every aspect of music that I care about and that I participate in, for the past 15 years Djing across 19 countries on 3 continents, has been based in practices and traditions in which remixing and mixtapes are a fundamental element. In fact, similar practices are fundamental to every living musical tradition (from hiphop & reggae to jazz improvisation to tecnobrega and beyond (and are vital to nonmusical creative traditions too). Whether they involve re-using copied digital recordings or live re-performances or re-incorporating riffs, quotations, basslines, and beats... those specifics are different in different times and places, but their legality is not relevant to the creative practice. Recycling/repetition/reference is a basic element of creativity. Creativity is a living, social practice that arises from people (and peoples) interacting and communicating.

So I am sorry to hear of Soundcloud cracking down on this practice and making it harder. I don't really care what they say their official policy was (it's there if you look), in practice they knew what was happening because they benefited from it. And the law on this is hazy, there's fair use arguments to be made even within the law as it stands, but nobody can afford the lawyers to make it.
Especially not most of us early adopters from dj culture: I heard about Soundcloud through DJs and dance music producers who rely on djs, and I told lots of dj and producer friends about soundcloud and recommended it to them. So many djs, producers, and fans signed up (100,000 in 2009), and many, like me, gave them our money for further functionality, because of its fantastic services for people involved in dj and dance music culture. But it may stop being worth it very soon. I don't think you can kill the music, but I wonder if you can kill the site's usefulness to a lot of the music scenes that gave it its start.

Those of you who care about borders, walls, fences should recognize how this is going to sort out, unless someone wakes up. The propertizers of culture have arrived again, and are drawing lines and raising fences.

If they have their way, the site wouldn't necessarily go away, it would just become the playground of commercialized music vetted and approved by the more powerful players (look like Universal might be the big guns right now). Which would be a shame.

But the greater shame is the way that development hits the early adopters who have contributed so much so far. Soundcloud more obviously than any other platform, came to its strength through the participation and funding by dj culture, and specifically serves and focuses on djs and producers' music, not only the text around music (as in music blogs).

It may be a victim of its own success: so many people are participating now that corporate owners --i.e. copyright protectionists and maximalists-- are starting to notice what's happening. But just caving to their claims on a case-by-case basis is not a good beginning, especially as it's only going to get worse. And it rankles because their success is based on exactly the practices and people it now is shutting down. Although they said their target market is "creators," in dance music that includes djs, producers, remixers and mashers, all of whom flocked to the site, and helped test its functionality, added in their data and metadata and made it a desirable site through providing fascinating content (likely all targetable by the RIAA). Which of us will get locked out?

Rather than sending out letters and taking down tracks one by one, I wish Soundcloud would go public about the pressure they are under. If they are not comfortable doing that, then it's even worse, because they KNOW how much it's a spit in the face of the people who put so much time, energy and money into the site.

So will it be time for us to leave, taking our creative seeds and sparks and connections with us?

It looks like Soundcloud has been more sympathetic to these practices than many: sponsoring CC licensing on the site, which mildly broadens copyright's flexibility through a voluntary choice to recognize participatory cultural practices, and even doing some educational work through featured artists who use CC-licenses on its blog.

Unfortunately such incrementalism will never be enough for the corporations. I'm pretty doubtful that big corporate entities will ever wake up and recognize the prevalence and desirability of self-defined interactive musical culture. I would like to see one of these new, small, supposedly different-from-the-big-bad-guys companies put up a fight along the lines some group like the EFF might lay out, and make an affirmative argument for creative culture that includes remixing. But to do that requires that they be upfront about their allegiances and recognize that you can't please everyone. Sooner or later you will have to decide whether you are going to please the rich & powerful or stand with people on the other side.

Will any company stake its claim on the same side as these scenes and subcultures who provide so much of the basis for their success? Or perhaps we need to find a platform that is not privately funded, because at base a corporation will always put profit before community? Perhaps private institutions simply fail at stewarding popular culture?

Regardless we need ISPs and the server hosts to have a politics - as I said on Jace's show, questions of intellectual property and power still come down to the material control of resources, and any law-based control is at the mercy of the people who have in-house lawyers. Physical control of land and material (including servers and satellites) may be our best option. To start with we have to recognize that this is a question of politics, and not just tweaking the rules. We need to organize ourselves to be in control of our own digital resources (resources for the social aspect of production: distribution, sharing, and interacting), and find allies who believe in our vision of cultural practices and recognize how it directly challenges the copyright extremists.

At the very least, liberal allies like the EFF might be able to shape a more expansive vision of our rights in a creative community. And indeed some people have made arguments for commercial music industries not dependent on current definitions of copyright. But at this point, I'm thinking if the Pirate Parties (Sweden, but Canada offered too, the more the jollier right?) can host Wikileaks, why can't they host dj culture as well? Or how about renting the the basement of a casino? Or is there a tech-savvy crew off the coast of Somalia we can link up with?

further reports coming in here ...

Upcoming thrills: Surya Dub, Jamaica, and DC follies

2010-12-09T17:19:00.000-08:00

Surya Dub returns!!!!!
Friday December 17, with the Slayers Club, we are proud to be hosting the mighty Sub Swara for the album release party, alongside Fresh2Death.

I'll be on the decks, for the last time in 2010 (barring a NY NYE surprise), with lots of sonic goodies stored up to share.

tickets available here:
http://sanfrancisco.going.com/event-843800;Slayers_Club_Surya_Dub_present_SUB_SWARA_LIVE

also, heading to New York for New Year's, then back to Kingston, Jamaica for 10 days, then back to the states in time to celebrate World Fair Use Day with the fine folks at Public Knowledge, on a panel with many luminaries of stage and screen. DC heads, represent!

Lots on my mind about music, but more about education/protests/police brutality on campus and off, and globally networked technology these days, bt on those I will hand you over to Angus, and Aaron.

and

radio show in the Mission

2010-10-24T02:15:00.000-07:00

Sunday, October 24 from 3-5pm Pacific time, I'm djing on the Sanguine Soul radio show, on pirate cat radio. You can tune it at http://piratecatradio.com, or come by the station, because Pirate Cat also have a cafe, and they will open up the DJ booth, so you can see and hear me play. I encourage dancing as well.
I'm going to play a range of styles including a short set of rocksteady at the beginning of the show.

Location: 2781 21st street, at Florida.

Colonialism and collecting

2010-09-21T22:58:00.000-07:00

Well, this great post by the great Chief Boima ups the intellectual ante around the popularization of African musics in the US, and set off a lot of controversy and some great points (alongside some unfortunate personal attacks). I wrote a long response, which came late in the game. But I thought I'd expand it here, because it fits so well with the work I'm doing right now.

I'm working on a paper for a conference this weekend in East Lansing, MI called "Bits Without Borders: Law, Communications & Transnational Culture Flow in the Digital Age" where I will present my paper (horrible working title: Decolonizing networked technology: learning from the dancehall)

(Also I'm preparing to moderate a panel about copyright sampling ethics creativity and law on Thursday, in SF! )

So I have been spending a lot of time thinking about how colonial history and present play out in Jamaica, and in the music scene. Since I was doing ethnographic research, which involves me physically going to Jamaica and spending a lot of time interacting with people, I really had to pay attention to the situation around my interactions with people - that's part of the research. Thinking about how I got to wherever I was, the social, technological, historical, material networks that I moved in and created. I don't mean I was self-conscious (although sometimes of course I was), but that I had to start learning what the implications were of my being somewhere, of my interactions with people. Those implications went far beyond anything that I could control fully or be independent of.

So when I was in recording studios, I couldn't hide the fact that I was a foreigner, and it would have been insulting to try. But since Jamaica is a small place where people know each other (especially in the music scene) and since foreigners are the main sources of money and chances for international publicity for Jamaican musickers, people were extremely conscious of me. My presence at a music studio, or sitting next to a producer, signaled to everyone around that the studio, or the producer was connected to a foreigner, which in itself meant something. Not that I was particularly important, and at a place like Tuff Gong, it would simply have confirmed Tuff Gong's international fame again, but in other places it was probably more significant. This didn't mean that anyone was dishonest, or fake, or that anyone was necessarily trying to hustle me (although the art of the hustle is definitely alive and well in Jamaica), or that they didn't like me or anything. They just knew what was up. My presence there meant something different than if it was another Jamaican, and that meaning was shaped by the recent and distant history of Jamaica, and Jamaica's current relations with global powers like the USA. And to bring it back to the music industry, it was shaped as well by Jamaica's current and recent history of local creativity and massive foreign profit, as well as massive inequality in profit even in Jamaica, and as well the potential for personal gain through connection to international audiences, and lots of other vectors too.

And Jamaicans in those studios were totally right to be aware of that when they looked at me, especially because even though my reason for being there was to do research and not write a magazine article or promote them, the simple fact that I am from outside and connected to outside meant that simple things I did for my own personal reasons had bigger implications. If I found a tune I liked and played it for a friend back home - that's international distribution! The more so if I posted it online or mentioned their name online. So they knew that, and I knew that too. I'm free to do what I like with that knowledge, but I wouldn't be doing myself or anyone around me any favors by pretending it wasn't true. And it's not like my task was then to dismantle colonial power, my task is just to ask myself what the most ethical behavior is, given what I know (and what I learned from people there) about how this whole thing works? And this is basically what Boima raised in his post about collectors of African music.

So he asks is "who is benefiting" when a collector buys African vinyl and spins it back home in the UK or California or wherever. It's not harsh on Boima's part to simply point out the colonial history and express a concern for fairness, given the vast power imbalances and unpleasant histories between Europeans/Americans/Brits and Africans. Several commenters respond quite aggressively, or I would say defensively (defending against the implication that they might be aligned with colonial power).

Some of the commenters seem really upset at this idea, that they might be implicated in colonial power. But this seems odd to me. How could you not be? How could we all not be? Its real, it's embedded in the world we live in, it shapes our ability to travel, use technology, to buy stuff, to communicate. It would be a bit silly to say "because I do this thing personally I have nothing to do with colonialism" or "because I have these feelings I have nothing to with colonialism." The languages people speak, the currency they use, the fact that planes fly to one place or not another, or buses go this way and not that, whether there are phone lines or satellites connecting people, the people who are happy to talk to you and the people who aren't, the presence or absence of recordings in specific parts of Africa or elsewhere.. all of those are shaped by the global economic system which is a product of history and actions that create recreate colonial relations. It doesn't mean people are cogs in some great machine, but it does shape the way we interact. And what Boima's post does is encourage us to think more consciously about it. Interestingly, when people in the comments describe the lengths they go to get money and reputation back to the people whose music they collect, it sounds like they are actually in agreement with Boima's concern about fairness. So the hostility seems a little disproportionate.

The post begins provocatively, sure, but its not like there has been too much of this kind of question -some of the responses in the comments sound like there has been some global obsession with preventing African artists from being exploited. But there hasn't been much of that at all. I'm happy to see the discussion begin, and I hope as things spread out from that initial post we take it even further.

Movie Screening & Panel Discussion (Steinski, Jeff Chang, Amplive, Tim Jones, Tony Berman and ME)

2010-09-03T16:56:00.000-07:00

I'm moderating the panel discussion at this event:

September 23, 2010 :: 9:30PM
Slayers Club and The Hub of the JCCSF Present: Copyright Criminals
Is sampling recorded music to create new works a form of artistic expression or, quite simply, a crime?
Slayers Club and The Hub of the JCCSF present three events in one – a film screening, expert discussion panel and live musical performance – all happening on Thursday, September 23rd at Mighty (119 Utah St).
As seen on PBS’s Independent Lens and at the Toronto International Film Festival, Copyright Criminals (a film by Ben Franzen and Kembrew McLeod) takes a close look at the creative and legal implications of sampling music in the digital age through the eyes of well-known artists, activists and industry insiders. Featuring interviews with Clyde Stubblefield (“The Funky Drummer”), Chuck D of Public Enemy, DJ Shadow and many more.
Steve Stein, aka Steinski, rode the pulse of the New York City underground in the early 80’s and emerged as a cult hip-hop hero. Stein co-produced the series of records known as The Lessons for the Tommy Boy label. These analog tape cut-and-paste collages, still widely bootlegged (and wildly illegal), are generally acknowledged as three of the most influential works in the world of hip-hop and dance music production. Steinski has been cited as a definitive influence by music luminaries including DJ Shadow, Cut Chemist and Fatboy Slim.
The night will also feature live music performances by Amp Live, the Zion I producer who was recently entangled in a legal battle over his bootlegged Radiohead remix work, The Polish Ambassador, who has been called “the West Coast, more sophisticated version of Girl Talk”, will present his new project, Ample Mammal, local favorite Kid Kameleon (XLR8R, Surya Dub), prolific MC/DJ/Producer Joe Mousepad, Rich DDT (LoveTechSF) and the eclectic Slayers Club DJ’s (Daly City Records).
Following the film screening will be an expert speakers panel including Steinski, Amp Live, hip-hop historian, Jeff Chang, Tim Jones of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and entertainment lawyer Tony Berman. The panel will be moderated by legal ethnomusicologist Larisa Mann (aka DJ Ripley).
Fresh from appearances at Nightlife at the Academy of Science and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is a fresh interactive music technology workshop by LoveTech SF (www.lovetechsf.com), including a multi-player, MIDI-controlled sampler system. Think Rock Band on steroids!
On the visual spectrum, attendees will experience live mashups all night by VJ Allofitnow! (Slayers Club) and live graffitti by local artist Nick Fregosi.
Doors at 7pm
Film Screening at 8:30pm
Panel Discussion at 9:30pm
Steinski plays at 10:30pm to be followed by Amp Live, Polish Ambassador and Slayers Club DJ’s
$8 in advance / $10 at the door
Advance Tickets available on September 1st at Brown Paper Tickets
you can RSVP on Facebook (but it'snot the same as buying tix, just lets us know you are coming)

New mix (for those who missed the broadcast) & last day to vote!

2010-08-26T20:23:00.000-07:00

Last day to vote for my panel at SXSW on music & metadata! SXSW music or SXSW interactive

and I've uploaded the "Bass, Wobs & Zaps" mix plus the tracklist, as described below. Listen or download and enjoy!

Bass, Wobs & Zaps by ripley

radio show rebroadcast (& last chance to vote for my panel!)

2010-08-25T18:43:00.000-07:00

(friday the 27th is the last day to vote for my panel for SXSW! please vote!)

Ah, I'm finally on the bill with Filastine.. but only on a recorded broadcast! One day we'll be on an event together..

Anyway, this, following Filastine's set, will be a rebroadcast of the set I did originally for Tasty Cyanide Radio - it will be hitting the airwaves on the fantastic & long-running show Back To The Basics, out of Hamburg, run by one of the masterminds of the Wobwob crew (with whom I played a few short weeks ago)..

The show goes live Thursday, August 26th, 22:00 German time, which is 1pm (13:00) out here in California... Around that time I'll put it up on my Soundcloud page, so all you kids can listen along (or download) ever after...

I will be doing a set specifically for BTTB sometime this winter, but until then, this will represent me and my peoples - lots of good music representing some of the great people I have had the luck to work with (check the tracklist at BTTB or Soundcloud after Thursday!)

Landed again - seeking your help: vote for ripley's panel

2010-08-18T18:20:00.000-07:00

After 1 month in Croatia, a quick stop in Hamburg for a terrific gig courtesy of the WobWob crew, now I'm back in San Francisco.

Lots of things on the horizon, but most urgent now is that I need your help dear readers (few & proud!!). I'm hoping to presenting at South By Southwest in spring 2011 on a panel alongside some other fabulous peoples.. but only if our panel gets enough votes (I think comments are good too!)

I'm lucky enough to be proposing a panel with some awesome folks, one from UC Berkeley I-school and one from the UC Berkeley Law Technology & Public Policy clinic). The panel is called:

"Music and Metadata - Do Songs Remain the Same?"

And the description:
Metadata may be an afterthought when it comes to most people's digital music collections, but when it comes to finding, buying, selling, rating, sharing, or describing music, little matters more. Metadata defines how we interact and talk about music—from discreet bits like titles, styles, artists, genres to its broader context and history. Metadata builds communities and industries, from the local fan base to the online social network. Its value is immense. But who owns it? Some sources are open, peer-produced and free. Others are proprietary and come with a hefty fee. And who determines its accuracy?
From CDDB to MusicBrainz and Music Genome Project to AllMusic, our panel will explore the importance of metadata and information about music from three angles. First, production, where we'll talk about the quality and accuracy of peer-produced sources for metatdata and music information, like MusicBrainz and Wikipedia, versus proprietary sources, like CDDB. Second, we'll look at the social importance of music data, like how we use it to discuss music and how we tag it to enhance music description and discovery. Finally, we'll look at some legal issues, specifically how patent, copyright, and click-through agreements affect portability and ownership of data and how metadata plays into or out of the battles over "walled garden" systems like Facebook and Apple's iEmpire. We'll also play a meta-game with metadata during the panel to demonstrate how it works and why it is important.

So for the panel to be accepted, it needs to be voted on by, well, YOU. So, please vote for the panel!

We have proposed it for both SXSW weeks,
SXSW music http://bit.ly/d6LUe4
or SXSW interactive http://bit.ly/bl1xFt

you can I think vote for it in both, too!

I am also looking for gigs at SXSW so I can play while I'm there in Austin TX. feel free to link me with anyone you know who might be of help.

recaps and a Berlin gig

2010-07-13T01:00:00.000-07:00

FIRST (posting from berlin hello!!): Ripley in Berlin for a few hot days this summer.. a gig is
percolating in the background, but I have enough details I'll give warning, and will finalize infos tomorrow morning (WEDNESDAY) which is the day it should be happening..

So it looks like it's the Knochenbox, upstairs from the theater/chapel, Boxhagener str 99, Friedrichshain Wednesday night, if it all goes down I'll be on at 11:15 or so, but I'll likely be there
from 10 at least to hang out! woo! Show will also be broadcast live on http://www.wirelessfm.net/

big big thanks to DJ Delay, Coost Lardy Cake and more.

And to recap: it's been a crazy few months!

I spent some of April & June in Toronto, which was simply amazing, partly due to the generous efforts of DJ Capro, and his whole crew. I was lucky to link with him and play a few shows at the Thymeless club which was a great hub of Jamaican and bass music in the city. I was there for research, but Capro & co made it a really musically inspiring experience. Also big thanks to the mighty Marcus Visionary for the great music and for sparing so much time for me. Check his funky funky uk funky album Carib for a sample of some of his new directions, I was lucky enough to play a set with him and just basked in the glow of the great music and the great audience.

I really loved Toronto, both for the music scene (with plenty of Jamaican-influenced UK dance music flavor), and the city overall.

And then since then I have been all over the place as usual, while I was back in San Fran we the Surya Dub crew finally started up another big show, with special guest Poirier and all our usual suspects coming through.. I played at Dirty Dishes, courtesy of the Tasty crew... had an amazing series of events in Jackson, Mississippi

I started a facebook page, you can add me there and keep abreast of this and also that.. but it will be quiet for the next month, I'm in Berlin until the 18th July and then I'm in Croatia and off internet until August 13 when I surface for a gig in Hamburg: Wob Wob represent!

Surya Dub 3 Year Anniversary featuring POIRIER!! May 29!!

2010-05-10T13:49:00.000-07:00

Folks in the know.. or those rumbling about in the dread bass blogosphere may have seen hint, hide or hair of a returning dancefloor beast. Well, I've been holding my breath, but now it's time to confirm the rumors

SURYA DUB RETURNS

I couldn't be more pleased, on finally returning to the Bay Area, to be a part of the crew who does the most eclectic, bass-heavy, dancefloor-packing party in town.. with the best dancers, the happiest crew, and the guest artists taking it to another nother level. Seriously, it's been a privilege to work with the Surya Dub djs/producers/vjs, such talented people, and our past guests have been delightful beyond belief pretty much across the board. And we won't let San Francisco down this time, either, because we've got

POIRIER!!!

it's perfect - the Mad Monster of Montreal has a new album out (killin it, killin it on a worldwide scale), we've all been friends since way back when he had two names, and now the times is right to bring it all together for the Surya Dub 3-year Anniversary party!

Date: Saturday, May 29
Location: Club Six, 60 6th street, San Francisco CA

Lineup, alongside the mighty POIRIER
Kush Arora - man dem just dropped a SICK mix, and a new album coming out soon soon
Maneesh the Twister
Ripley
DJ Amar
Kid Kameleon
Jimmy Love
J.Rogers

buy tickets online here, and get a discount (it's $10 advanced, $15 on the door)

We've gone all webby with excitement, too
you can.. uh.. like us (but not necessarily LIKE US like us, unless you wanna) on facebook
We're on twitter
Follow us on soundcloud
or just come to the freakin' party and give us hugs!! that works too..

Toronto, gigs & radio, searching out peoples

2010-05-06T17:03:00.000-07:00

I've been in Toronto two weeks now. What a great city! Big BIG thanks to the dubslingers for all their hospitality, musical and otherwise. I played on their weekly semi-officially last Wednesday, and then even less officially I tagteamed last night, having the honor of following the mighty Marcus Visionary who laid down a beautifully diverse and expertly mixed set ranging from Tropical Bass to his own Ragga Jungle tracks. A tough act to follow!

But luckily for us all, I had managed to stock my laptop with a few choice ragga cuts to carry on the vibe (I was wishing so hard I had all my beautiful ragga jungle vinyl that I just unpacked a month ago.. but it's all in SF). Beginning the set with "Intelligent woman" got everyone happy (that tune has the best drop EVER), and I was over the moon because I saw more than one person who knew the words. It's been YEARs since I've played to a crowd who really knows their ragga jungle. Really, the caribbean flavor in Toronto is hard to miss, plus the UK dance music influence, it makes this town feel really good to me, musically and otherwise.

I'm here doing my research, the last bit of fieldwork on the same project that took me to Kingston, Jamaica last year. So far it's been amazing, I have meet meeting some fantastic Djs and musicians and scholars who have been telling me about Jamaicans making music in Toronto and beyond. Still looking for more, though! feel free to get in touch here if you want to chat about such things in Toronto!

And I've been able to take my story public. Following on the great interview DJ /rupture did with me on WFMU back in March (archived here), I went on the great local radio show The Abstract Index, on CIUT and the host and I talked some about my work, and I played a few tracks. That will be archived soon, I will post that up here as soon as I get a link.

I feel slightly iffier about how I did on this one - there were some technical difficulties (I think they are new to that station, it just moved locations), which meant that initially I wasn't answering the questions very well and was rather rambly, and also we didn't figure out how to hook up my laptop till late in the show. But I got to drop some great dub tracks from the past to the present - it makes me want to play a proper dub set, something I haven't had the chance to do in years. hmmmm...

in other news, I'm hopefully djing a set on the radio on Saturday night, gotta get confirmation on that, but if it goes well you can check airwaves at 10pm toronto time for another slice of DJ Ripley!

Balkans backtrack

2010-04-26T21:01:00.000-07:00

So. A while back, I played in Belgrade. I can't believe I didn't blog about it! But, well, I had a lot on my mind. Anyway, through the magic of the internets, I was able to play a show in Belgrade on Serbian new year. It was at a cool little club called The Wash (some kind of laundromat reference). Hosted by Mythical Didjez and Zeka Yebiggah (whose name means something rather naughty in serbo-croatian).. in the nasty winter weather... and they made a video, or Serbian local television did.

It's a nice section of the set, they chose. It's too bad you can't see the crowd, but I guarantee you there was dancing aplenty, including some fairly inspired freestyle bellydance stuff. Thanks again, and I hope to come back to the Balkans this summer --anyone wanting to book me please get in touch!

NYC(NJ/WFMU), Pittsburgh (YAY), back to NYC for a night. (but what a night!)

2010-03-29T18:01:00.000-07:00

The radio show with /rupture was smashing.The conversation was super fun, when you have someone as smart and challenging and deep as /rupture to talk to it's like the air gets smarter around us. Seriously I wish we could hang out more often because I think I'd finish my PhD sooner.. Anyway big BIG ups to /rupture (and lamin behind the scenes) for making it happen. the whole thing is archived and of course you can subscribe to eth podcast here (mine isn't up there yet but will be soon)

And then I headed to Pittsburgh, despite Jetblue's best efforts to screw up my travel plans.
For the brave folks who came out to the Brillo Box in the rain last Thursday, I brought it as hard as I could.. whomping dubstep with global 8bit flavor, plus bhangra glitch, panama jerk, and a touch of breakcore. The crowd seemed up for it all, and danced like mad. My sincere thanks to everyone who helped make it a great party.

First of course is James Gyre, the genre-confounding musical compatriot, who also took the time to show me more fun things in Pittsburgh in 24 hours than I got out of more famous cities in a week. I met his awesome wife, and his two crazy-adorable kids, and generally left witha good feeling.

My favorite comments for the night were from two women who had been tearing up the dancefloor:
"we danced our f*in pants off!" said one after thanking me on her way out.
"yeah," said the other one "I don't even know who I am anymore!"
Testimony of a good party, eh?

So next time we rock it even harder!

And now it's on to my last easterly gig for a while, courtsey of Thanh.unit.one, Pharoah and other good people, we are doing a FREE gig at Sin Sin in the East Village!

radio, gigs, fun

2010-03-24T20:16:00.000-07:00

As usual, when I travel a lot in quick succession, I forget how many web presences I have to maintain. Unfortunately this time blog has suffered. So I didn't post something that I am really really proud of and was honored to be invited to participate in. On Monday I was on DJ /rupture's Mudd Up Radio, simply one of the best and most interesting radio shows, on a truly great community terrestrial and internet radio station, wfmu.

the show is archived here and there is a podcast, which you can subscribe to (my show will be up there soon)

And before I neglect all the other amazing and creative people and events that I've been invited to be a part of (and that actually hasn't happened yet so people out there can still come)...

Tomorrow, Thursday, I'm playing a great party called Earthly Delights, in Pittsburgh, PA, courtesy of (and alongside) longtime musical kin James Gyre, whose great blog That Veiled Gazelle is full of ideas, amazing mixes, art, and politics. Folks in the neighborhood please come through, I've never played in Pittsburgh before.

The show is Thursday, March 25th 10pm-2am
at Brillobox 4104 Penn
$6 to get in (but there are drink specials)
video projections by Flux Rostrum

and then next week, I'm in New York City for one hot minute, but I'll make it hotter at Sin Sin in the East Village, at a FREE PARTY. I will post again with the flyer over the weekend.

Lyrics music dancing

2010-03-03T11:40:00.000-08:00

A recurring conversation I have had with my friends who like to talk about music (fans, journalists, scholars, djs, producers, instrumentalists, and everyone else)... is about lyrics and dance music. I keep meaning to write about it more, and this recent post by the always-interesting Jay Smooth's on lyrics and music (and capitalism, which he doesn't really get to, but i might later), made me think about it some more.

My first thought on this exchange is that I wonder if the non-lyrical rapping they are both talking about may be more dance music oriented "put your hands in the air!" type rapping. Stuff that hypes up a crowd but leaves them room to sing along and to dance along. Not to say that dance music can't have good/complex/virtuosic lyrics, but that lack of lyrics may signal that it's dance music. I wonder if his definition of hip-hop is ignoring the dance music element and the relation between lyrics and dance music.

I'm struck by the idea that that the rapper Jay is talking about said lyrics don't make money. It seems like he (the rapper not Jay) may be wrong, in the big picture, but I wonder about what his horizons are. Maybe dance music scenes FEEL more successful if you are still a local. Successful in the "room full of high energy folks having a blast" kind of way, rather than people standing and listening and relating to what you're saying, or buying your records from afar. Dancing scenes can build a kind of community, a local scene, that everyone wants to be a part of, and you can be popular in that scene, if it's small enough, in a way that pays off to you every day in small ways. I'm going partly on my experience of Jamaica here, so I'd love to hear others' opinion on it. But I wonder if the "local fame" aspect of that non-lyrical rapping feels more successful than waiting for royalties and the delayed payoff of fame in the larger world. Especially if you aren't getting those later payoffs!

But this is maybe where capitalism comes in. Because capitalising on dance music isn't really about royalties. As far as I know, the live social experience is what the most people make an effort for - whether you charge entrance, or charge for drinks at the event, or sell people objects like t-shirts or other fashion that they can wear to the event or afterwards.. those things have historically (in the US and elsewhere) generated more money than royalties. Because royalties focus on musical recordings, objects, and not on the social experience.

But I want to back up and talk more about lyrics because there's a bigger issue Jay raises when talking about lyrics as being so important to hip-hop. It has to do with how he's assuming what matters about hip-hop - what the key experiences that make up hip-hop are. And a larger issue is that there are other kinds of music which have provided those key experiences, to a similar population as hip-hop fans, but that don't get the same kind of public attention and journalistic/scholarly attention as hip-hop, and I think the lyrics issue has something to do with it.

I think it was Chrissy Murderbot who laid it out the clearest to me in conversation. He said it as someone connected to the Chicago house scene (a dj and a scholar himself), and he spoke up for an analysis rooted in the Midwest USA's experience of music. He said that the public discourse about hip-hop, including academic work on hip-hop, focuses on the coasts but generalizes from "hip-hop" to "black music" in a way that leaves out the midwestern experience. House & Techno functioned, in the midwest of the US, the way that rap did on the coasts. It was black (urban?) music, that reinforced and celebrated black identity.
So house & techno may have been popular among black folk in the midwest the way rap was on the coasts, but the music had a different balance of sonic elements. However those music worked to represent and celebrate communities, I think they didn't do it primarily through lyrics. Lyrics are not the central part of house and techno. Not to say there are never any words, but the focus isn't on lyricism per se. So what does that mean for understanding of music, of race, and of social creativity?

It seems like the focus on hip-hop on the coasts (and I know I'm leaving out the South, which is due mostly to my ignorance of Southern popular culture and I'd love to know more) naturalizes an assumption about the importance of lyrics to music, and maybe to black culture, or popular culture. I have noticed a tendency for people who talk about music with lyrics, to spend the majority of their energy on the meaning and importance of lyrical content, and spend a lot less on the musical meaning and importance, including not really analyzing the way the music interacts with people's bodies (there are some exceptions these days, but it's still a small group, I think).

This suggests a couple of things.

First, many people have a hard time talking about music as dance music being anything but hedonism. Dance music and the action of bodies moving together in space, to music, has been undertheorized and under discussed. Maybe especially in hip-hop, where discussions sometimes include talk about b-boying (and b-girling), but don't usually spend a lot of time on the way hip-hop is music that people dance to.

That matters for how we understand hip-hop in society, because far more people dance to hip-hop than are usually accounted for in the analysis. There's just sort of "audiences" and "parties" and "clubs." And what happens on the stage, or at the center of the dancefloor might get some attention, but everyone else is left out as if they are passive receptacles for music and culture. Those of you who have heard my talk about my experiences and research in Jamaica should guess by now I see so-called "audiences" as active participants in music-making, both in terms of creative input that affects what kinds of recordings and live experiences exist, and also in terms of making music meaningful to society.

So because most people don't talk about dancing audiences as having any musical (as well as political or social implications), one of the broadest human interactions with hip-hop is not really accounted for. If it was included, and if dancing was taken seriously (and not just virtuosic performance, but social dancing), it might alter our understanding of hip-hop's political and cultural significance in several ways.

Second, it seems to me that house and techno are historically black music with a serious role to play in black (American) identity. House & techno are not exclusively black, of course (even from the start).. and over time (in ways that I think have still to be properly studied), the music spread to more communities. But it does a disservice to any understanding of black american culture, or of music and race (however defined) to leave out house and techno.
Some implications of inclusion would be:
since I'm thinking more about technology these days, I also wonder what that does to popular understanding of the relationship between blackness and technology and futurism. Techno, especially, sonically and practically is associated with sounds of technology and machinery, and with technological skill. Also it sometimes evoke visions of the future, of being forward-looking and futuristic. Some folks have talked and written and performed this, but it could use a lot more attention.

Focusing more on house & techno might also suggest more about religious and ritual functions of dance and popular music - some house music ("uplifting house") has a gospel flavor, and incorporates musical and lyrical themes that are explicitly or implicitly religious.
Also, given that there is also more explicit gay presence in house and techno, incorporating house & techno into understanding of blackness and black music might alter how many people talk about the interplay between race and sexuality.
Also since the gender politics of house and techno look, on the surface, to be somewhat similar, in terms of who explicitly is represented and how, we could think more about the implications for understanding who gets to be seen as representatives of culture and subculture, who is recognized for have attributes or skills.
But of course there are endless more implications. One I'm just starting to think about is how dance scenes really require space, physical space - and take up space through amplified audio - which really brings in questions of physical property, peoples rights to use and control and claim physical spaces. NOt that music performance never needs space, but focusing on, say, recordings, lets you stay in studios, radios and the internet, while focusing on dancing crowds keeps attention on how someone got access to warehouse, a club, what zoning laws were or weren't enforced that allowed a street party, etc etc.

The other side of this is thinking about what happens if we incorporate house and techno and other dance musics into our understanding of society and politics. I'm not saying that raves or warehouse parties are necessarily explicitly political, but anything that lots of people are involved in has a political implication - if we just ask why are they putting their energy there and not elsewhere? Hedonism is not enough of an answer.

And maybe sometimes hedonism is more of an answer than we might think. What it means to have fun together, to get sweaty together, to lose ourself in music and the moment and the crowd, or with a partner... not to get all semi-apocyphal-emma-goldman on you, but there is a point. If political activities --or more seriously, political movements-- don't incorporate fun and think seriously and politically about pleasure, I think they are likely to miss out on mass participation.

Music of 2009

2010-02-21T14:58:00.000-08:00

I’m just going to put some lists (NOT IN ORDER) out there, music I've been feelin over the past year.

These are things that are released or that I got my hands on in 2009. I play a lot of tracks that are older, and at some point I should shout ot those stalwarts in the collection, but I'm trying to stick to a theme here.

Folks whose music I love and rocked the dancefloor unstoppably, who I learned about or gained a new love for in 2009:

Schlachthofbronx – Oh man, perfect party music
Taal Mala – out of Canada, making some of my favorite dancefloor movers for the dubstep style
Grievous Angel - some of my favorite takes on UK Funky come from him
Ku Bo - continuing with that witchy minimal tropical shuffle sound
Kush Arora - Surya Dub crew, forging his own sound in several directions at once
Sully (hoorah for the return of the 2step!)
Akira Kiteshi
Bunji Garlin - one of the most fun vocalists out of the caribbean.
Kill Frenzy - I think it's Belgium does Juke?
Soundcloud discoveries: Flore, Gizmode, Ghost Hack, Sa’bat sound, Dmoefunk, blnd!

Tunes at the top of the playlist

Sarantis feat. Honey Brown “Fall in Love”
Murderbot feat Hawatha Hurd, “Roll another one”
Babylon System “Get on up”
Process Rebel vs. Sinead O’Connor “Vampire Booty Stepper”
Robot Koch remixing Doshy
Busy Signal “Up in her Belly” (Magalenha riddim)
L-Vis 1990 remix of Untold’s “Anaconda”
Boy 8-bit remix of South Rakkas Crew’s “Mad Again”
Ale Fillman Skanker remix of Outrun “8 Bit Spliff”
Reso’s Aguardiente remix of Buraka Som Sistema “Kalemba”
Octa Push "Ai Nadia"
Gizmode "Crackstep"

Stuff (Albums & mixes) I played at home and out and about

Roots Uprising album – really solid fun UK Digital roots from the Reggae Roast ceew. Great vocals. Diverse styles. Super nice people throwing great parties in London, what’s not to love?
King Midas Sound - the latest from The Bug/Kevin Martin with incredible mystery and dreamlike vocals
Disrupt - jahtari continues to lay down 8bit roots
Clive Hunt and the Dub Dancers - discovered in JA, published in France. Deep!
Ras G - My favorite of this sort of psychedelic thing
Filastine - nomad bass abounds in his mixes and albums
Unsoundbwoy - australian stormer -check his lizardstyle mix!
Foundation Stepper - Australian roots providers
Dr. Auratheft's "Jamaican Soul Jazz Originals" mix. as on the label, lovely..
Lowdjo - balkanotropical mixes galore!

festivals, scholars, djs, fun!

2010-02-21T14:32:00.001-08:00

The CHAT Festival, Festival on the Hill and colloquium on the Art & Culture of the DJ were all a resounding success, as far as I’m concerned.

Big big ups go to Prof. Mark Katz for organizing the Hill/Symposium part (alongside Prof. Stephen Anderson, who I don't think I met). It was an impressive series of performances and talks!

I didn’t take the time to mention, before I left, what an amazing honor it was for me to be on a lineup alongside the people I think of as truly great scholars of modern music, Oliver Wang, Mark Butler (who wrote this fascinating book) and Rayvon Fouche – all of them seriously impressive scholars, sharp dressers, and great public speakers. I thought I did all right fashion-wise, but O-dub sure is a tough act to follow! I’m getting the hang of it now (after a pretty stiff start a few years ago), but it was a pleasure to watch them all present both because of their different but equally effective styles of research and presentation and because it was all so darn interesting.

I was impressed with the continuity and interplay between all of our talks. Even though they were informed by very different bodies of scholarship – Oliver was sociology and social history, I was law & society, Mark was musicology, and Rayvon was science & technology studies, we all managed to depict fascinating, dynamic moments of musical engagement through our chosen projects. Oliver’s talk, drawn from his forthcoming book, was about the Filipino-American mobile disco scene in the Bay Area (from which the impressive dominance of Filipino-American scratch djs arose). I talked about the participatory, dynamic, interactive practice of music as embodied in Jamaican soundsystems and street dances. Mark talked (from HIS forthcoming book about improvisation, technology and music) about how djs take supposedly fixed objects like musical recordings and render them fluid with improvisatory interactive techniques (illustrated by musical analysis and a close examination of a section from a truly mindblowing DVD of Jeff Mills djing live…who’d a thunk one man and 3 turntables would be so mesmerizing to watch—and I don’t even follow techno!). Rayvon talked about how the words/concepts “digital” and “analog” when applied to recordings and technology are used as stand-ins for a set of positions around authenticity, paying your dues, nostalgia, and race.

And to top it all off –who showed up at dinner but the ill-ustrious Jeff Chang! Rounding out the lineup of great scholars of modern popular/dance music. (Well, for my dream dinner, Wayne shoulda been there, and a few others too..)

Anyway it was an amazing experience, very inspiring. The panel discussion on Wednesday was also great, especially because I got to meet Jennifer Jenkins, a former copyright litigator now of the Center of the Study of the Public Domain at Duke, and even more excitingly the co-author of a fun and useful comic book (yes, comic book) on copyright law and documentary film. Well worth reading even if you are not a film-maker (and they walk the walk - it's available for free online as well as being a delightful physical object for sale). I learned some great news from her after – that they are working on a comic book on music as well. So cool! The rest of the panel was quite interesting as well, and I was gratified to find that even the folks who might be expected to represent more established interests (folks representing publishers and artists with large back catalogs, for example), had their eyes firmly on the future, which didn’t seem to involve a focus on exclusive rights over recordings or a system that requires suing music fans for thousands of dollars. I hope the industry as a whole is as wise!

And then I was lucky enough to be able to DJ alongside two great djs and all-round great folk, One Duran and Yugen.. these stalwarts are responsible for for more good music and dancing in Chapel Hill than anyone, I think. And we had a little throwdown at a bar/restaurant that ended up going well past 2am with people refusing to leave the dancefloor until the last ounce of sound was squeezed out of the system and the owner put his foot down. It was a great crowd of dancing peeps, and big thanks to my hosts for making it happen!

But I still haven’t even gotten to the post I have been planning to make, which is about the music I have been feeling these days. Maybe even my favorite music of 2009. I know it’s almost the end of February, but it’s never too late, right? That's up next..

#musicblogocide 1

2010-02-15T14:07:00.000-08:00

After writing this piece in 2008 about a previous wave of takedowns of music blogs by Blogger(google), things seemed to die down. Many bloggers moved their sites to other hosts, others did not. Music blogs continued being an amazing resource and site of musical engagement for thousands of people, but perhaps some were slightly chastened by the possibility of their work (collecting, juxtaposing, commenting, analyzing, reporting and transmitting), or maybe we should call it their sites for public engagement with music, vanishing, often without warning.

And then it seemed to all start up again last week. I noticed it because one of my favorite sites, Masalacism, vanished as I was reading it.

Masalacism is a perfect example of music-making, in that the blog is part of the conditions for my favorite music, it creates the possibility of audience for/creation of music variously rooted in geographically and socially distant scenes.

I'm talking about music as a social practice, not music as a recording or a particular moment frozen in time or on paper. Masalacism makes music involving actors from all over the world, it draws them together and opens lines of communication between people, places, scenes, who might not get to know of each other in any other way. This is some of the best music-making there is, in my opinion. I love the specific &local, juxtaposed with other specific & local, to make a kind of conversation between localities and experiences, when music does this well, it also does this for the bodies &minds of people involved, bringing them into conversation or dance with each other, physically or mentally or both. Which is part of saving the world, kind of, or at least getting us there.

So anyway, Masalacism went down, alongside many other blogs, many of whom explicitly said they were attempting to follow the mostly-idiotic legal rules. And this in the face of record labels at least contradicting themselves and at most lying outright about whether they were giving with one hand and suing with the other. And now it is back up! With an apology from google, no less.

but even so, this isn't a sign that the system works. The problem here isn't google so much as it is the law, specifically the DMCA, which puts google at risk of huge lawsuits if it doesn't mess with music bloggers, basically, and puts the burden on bloggers to file counternotices when the law might not back them up.

Two things come to mind today:

1) not the ridiculousness of intellectual property, but in fact the importance of physical property. Yes, the law should be changed to allow broader public, artistic and literary engagement with intellectual property (and limiting IP's scope explicitly), but it also would help to have our own servers and ISPs, no? spread out the lines of defense some.

2) what most music bloggers I read favor over threats & counternotices, is real human interaction with artists. Many folk put up "if you have a problem with this song being up here, let me know and I'll take it down." What I like about this is that it puts the burden on copyright owners to engage with the very people they are supposedly trying to reach - the people who engage with the copyrighted stuff. That engagement is necessary for all kinds of reasons, but especially because it reinforces the social nature of music. We're not talking about an object in any meaningful sense, we are talking about recordings which are elements of a total musical experience which involves playing, listening, singing along and dancing, thinking about, remembering, talking about, repeating, etc etc etc. So conversations about what happens with recordings contribute to the meaningfulness of the musical experience.

Of course the problem is that most copyright holders aren't human, they are corporations. The Future of Music Coalition attempts to address this in its discussion of principles for compensation, in which they assume that there is something beyond copyright law that should give artists some rights with respect to some works they contribute to. I'm not sure what that something is, but there is also something out there that should give the public (including artists) some right to engage in an active way with the music they encounter (to say nothing of the music that is shoved down our throats by advertising, commercial radio, etc). Many music bloggers recognize both sides of this. The law should as well. But in the meantime, the law of physical property, or just flat out physical control, of servers might be a good option to look into...

>>edited to add, some other good discussion of this at
http://the1709blog.blogspot.com/2010/02/net-fury-as-google-deletes-music-blogs.html
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100210/1454048115.shtml
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/feb/11/google-deletes-music-blogs
(with great quotes from Masalacism blogger himself!)
http://songbytoad.com/2010/02/owning-information-and-terminating-debate/

peeking! Chapel Hill represent!

2010-02-14T17:26:00.000-08:00

I've been up in the air for so many months, touching down for gigs & links with lovely peoples here and there, but sadly remiss on blogging. A full, "welcome-to-2010" post, with a lot of music in it will come by next weekend, I plan to write it on the road next week. Yes, still on the road.

Next week, Wednesday-Saturday I will be speaking at two events at the Collaborations: Humanities Arts and Technology festival at the University of North Carolina.

Wednesday, I'm on a panel entitled "Music and New Media" where I am alongside an interesting roster of people including the awesome Professor J. Jenkins, co-author of a fantastic comic book explaining (c) law for documentary filmmakers (and it's worth reading for anyone curious about the limits and idiocies of 21st century copyright law enforcement).

Friday, I'm part of a "Festival on the Hill" event on the Art And Culture of the DJ, alongside illustrious folks like O-dub and and the event features a lot of great musical workshops and performances. And to top it all off, I'm djing, courtesy of the fantastic One Duran and Yugen - that night!

BUSTED! Presents a night of tropical bass, dubstep, glitch, UK funky house, and other low-end music.

Friday, Feb 19th
10pm til 2am
@ Fuse, Chapel Hill
http://f-use.com/
No cover!

Meanwhile, big big BIIIIIIG thanks to the Slayers Club for throwing down another amazing party at Club 6... King Cannibal did the slaying, with Nastynasty and the Slayers Club Djs sharpshooting alongside and GhostBeard did the cleanup. I did my bit as best I could for the dancing peoples on the early side. Such a nice vibe in there, Club 6 has many happy memories as the home of Surya Dub for two years (the bouncers remembered me, and bigged up my djing, which coming from the captive audience who hear a LOTTA djs, made me feel pretty good). So good, people, good place, good sounds all around.. Slayers club brings quality, every time!

and on the latenight side, Monsters of Love blew up as always. Extra hollas to the folks providing coconut water at the bar. This should be a staple of all bars. But especially at after-hours latenight warehouse parties. And the music was stormin, just caught some killah sets by one of my favorites: Amandroid, the demonic Venkman, and a live PA by someone called... foxfire? fox something. She was great. I also was lucky enough to play a screaming breakcore-mashup-ragga-dubcore-sissybounce-jungle-dancehall-robocumbia-dubstep-glitch-bailefunk-booty set later in the morning.. thanks to everyone in it for the long haul..

SPECIAL LAST-MINUTE PRE-TXGIVING GIG in JAMAICA PLAIN -Tues Nov. 24th

2009-11-22T18:06:00.000-08:00

well. Mexico has been a revelation. In a good way. Massive massive thanks to master R. Guzman of Static Discos/Nimbo for two blazing shows, in Mexico City & Cholula. More on that soon.

but first - Boston Area Peoples, come out on Tuesday!

================================================================

Tuesday November 24, 2009
"Abundance"
The Milky Way Lounge
The Brewery Complex
284 Amory Street, Jamaica Plain
(new location)
21+

sometimes the best things come together at the last moment. join us for Abundance. three of our favorite DJs come back home for the holidays and we win. Queer Collab comes together to set it off.

DJs:
Kingdom http://kkingdomm.com
Ripley http://djripley.blogspot.com
Dirty Jean http://www.myspace.com/djdirtyjean

Presented by:
Truth Serum http://www.truthserum.org
Chubrub http://chubrubproductions.com
Wasted Youth Sound http://wastedyouthsound.blogspot.com
Queer Collab find us on facebook

Global Bass Sessions mix

2009-11-16T18:18:00.000-08:00

The party was a delight. You can see how freakin happy the crowd was here:

http://theslayersclub.com/2009/11/14/ripley-terenga/

and they were organized enough to record my set, which I put up here for your listening & downloading pleasure:
Ripley courtesy of the Slayers' Club

It's been a good year so far..

2009-11-11T15:53:00.000-08:00

Not yet december, but I've been thinking about the various places I've played this year. Maybe it's because I'm getting ready for my gig this Thursday at Terenga Global Bass Sessions

What a range of people, climates, continents!

Kingston Jamaica, while I was living there - several gigs at Club Fiction's Brand New Machine party, and at Temple Hall Estate.

San Francisco - gigs with Redline, Eclectic Company (big up DJ Tones!), then off to
New York to play Bless UP! radio, and headline Dub War NYC (w/ Mike Slott & FaltyDL woo!) and NY Tropical (alongside the mighty Maga Bo)

Boston, with the almighty Beat Research crew

Back to San Francisco for the Night Kitchen to be the perfect bouncing bridge between the jukemaster DJ Slugo and breakcore madman Baseck.

Australian tour (which I have to finish posting pictures of): Headlining the showcase of the Electrofringe music festival, playing at Scuba Tank in Brisbane, at Roxanne Parlour in Melbourne, and Dirty Shirlows in Sydney.
Back to SF again, played Otherworld's Halloween party (what a scene) and preparing for the Global Bass Sessions.

then I'm off to Mexico City, to play courtesy of the NIMBO crew, and also in Cholula, with the miraculous Wayne&wax. Yes! gigs in Mexico, finally heading a little bit south. Hopefully South America will come next. But before that:

London for the rest of the year.. whew! the ride doesnt end, though I've got more lined up for 2010 so watch this space.

interjection - gig Nov 12

2009-11-04T11:33:00.000-08:00

Bo!

a lot of things happened, very quickly, since I got back from Australia. Still processing, and then new projects in the works, including a 1-month trip to London beginning Nov 30 (holla, uk peoples!)

There's still one chance to see me play in the Bay: Terenga Global Bass Sessions on November 12

Little Baobab 3388 19th St @ Mission

This is a great party at one of the best clubs in the city. People run to the dancefloor and refuse to leave, all the residents are hot-as-hell djs and their guests are selected from the local, national and international crews that bring it without limit. So I'm honored to be a part of it, and I've been saving up some tunes for the occasion. come out & show love. Further updates on my travels to follow but it might be thin around these parts for a few days still.

Melbourne pt. 1, & Babylon (betcha didn't know that was in Australia)

2009-10-15T20:24:00.000-07:00

Only two short sweet days in Melbourne, but I think I pretty much made the most of it. Big thanks to Unsoundbwoy first, and The Sockmonster/Foundation Stepper, plus the one like the BassBin Laden for the links in the first place.

Flew groggy-style Thursday morning out of Brisbane, with the help of one of the Sound Summit (Newcastle) organizers, who is based in Brisbane and was generous enough to get me to the airport at 6am. Whew! After fumbling my way through various buses and trains, was kindly shepherded towards really tasty coffee in the Fitzroy area, which, apologies to the OZ Nationalists among you, looked a lot like the Prenslauer Berg/Friedrichshain area of Berlin. Trams, cafes, boutiques, scruffy hipsters, hippie scruffsters, sleek boys with chin scruffs, etc etc.

My hosts had quite the advertising campaign:

Luckily I didn't have a gig that night, instead it was pretty luxurious: we had a chill(ish) dinner with Foundation Stepper and his amazing partner and their kid at this Moroccan soup restaurant. They kept bringing food out, and I thought we'd never get through it all but it was so damn tasty. Especially this dish with almonds and toasted bread and garlic and yogurt and stuff, so savory and chewy and good. And then we hung out & listened to music, and then watched Babylon, which I had heard about but never seen, about the dub music and Jamaican scene in London in the late 70s. The film was really good.

STarring members of Aswad, plus Jah Shaka and other London-Jamaican luminaries. The picture above is from a super fascinating "making of" piece where they interviewed lots of the folks involved in it, courtesy of BBC channel 4 here. Interesting facts - The screenwriter also wrote Quadrophenia, and the filmmaker worked with one of my favorite Brit filmmakers Ken Loach, and the producer also worked on TIME BANDITS one of the funniest movies ever, wow.

I've since learned there was a bit of a controversy about the dynamic of the soundclash in the context of Jah Shaka in London at that time - the interview suggests that Shaka at least didn't see his system as participating in a contest in the way the film builds it up: One of the two strains of tension in the film is the buildup to a clash between the Lion system affiliated with our (anti)hero, and Shaka's system. My experience in Jamaica more recently was that soundclashes between dancehall crews are at least sometimes that competitive, but maybe it was different with dub? or in London, or just w/r/t Shaka? Also it's entirely possible that outsiders latch on to the competitive narrative more than people at the time? Or that Jamaicans build up the competitive aspect to make it seem more dramatic to outsiders? The interview with Shaka also suggests that he doesn't like the competitive aspect of soundclashes, and so his desire to minimize that aspect of them may be normative rather than descriptive. In the end it sounds a bit like those battles over the definition of hip-hop where you have on one side "hip-hop is the good, positive stuff and the bad stuff isn't hip-hop" and the other side you have "hip-hop is bad and nasty and real music is something else" and then you have the people who say "hip-hop is complicated and hwatever calls itself hip-hop is at least engaging with the hip-hop tradition in some way." Okay so you probably can tell where I stand on this, but hey, I'm an ethnographer that shoulda been your first clue..
Anyone involved in dub in London in the 70s or 80s want to chime in here (oh please let such a person read this blog)? Or anywhere? were dub soundclashes more or less about competition?
(Also, if you are not talking from first-hand experience, whose testimony are you relying on and what do you think their stance would be on whether competition is good or not? my god I am a huge nerd)

Anyway the other controversy is less interesting, basically some folks objected to the violence portrayed in the movie, particularly that the main character ends up being violent himself, which those folks seem to read as the film itself endorsing violence. I think it's pretty clear that the film shows the futility of violence and its tendency to lead to further violence, but it also shows how hard it is to escape violence when you are trapped in a violent and dehumanizing system. Interestingly, the film predates the Brixton riots of 1981.. but it prefigures them pretty explicitly.

There are apparently some licensing disputes over uses of music in the film as well. Big surprise there.

While in Melbourne I also got a bit of a graffitti tour, which was awesome. the prevalence of street art, graff and wheatpaste. This also kept me thinking of Berlin, particularly the alley in Mitte where Haus Schwartzenberg bleibt (right? still?)

Brisbane

2009-10-13T19:11:00.000-07:00

In Brisbane, the Dank Morass crew seemed pretty much musical family. The rows of gorgeous posters on Walrii's wall represented nearly everyone Surya Dub has hosted in the past two years: FlyLo, the Bug & Warrior Queen, more in that vein. The family vibe continued with several large, home-cooked meals and some lively conversation. Lest you think we dj crews are all philistines, I'll share that topics included the relative merits of Tolstoy vs. Dostoevsky, cooking tips, and high-minded issues in global politics.

But we were all there for the music and after a nice stroll round town on Wednesday I headed to the gig in a nice little venue not really in the center of town - Club 320, in Spring Hill. The Scuba Tank parties are, I think, a collaboration between White Rhino and Dank Morass, and are free wednesday night events in a smallish venue with a solid sound system. The walls are brick, the lighting dim, the bar lines one side and there's a raised wooden dancefloor opposite the DJ table. People were trickling in by 9pm, and by the time I went on there was a nice crowd of people. What I liked was that once again people came in and a good percentage went straight to the dancefloor as if that was their main goal of the evening. Warms my heart! It seemed like a crowd of men and women in their early to mid 20s, unless I'm super-mistaken? Pretty good mix, gender-wise, mostly white folks (as I shouldn't be surprised), pretty unpretentious crew overall, a good, happy weeknight party!

Everyone played nice eclectic warm sets - Arku's skimming the housier side of things, Danck and Walrii bringing that dosed & dreamy breaky sounds in the Brainfeeder sort of style mixed with some dilla-esque hip-hop. Walrii worked the breaks into some turntablism but without losing the musicality. It's all licked with bass and skitters, and people sway and bump in increasing numbers as the dim room fills. I start out chillish but pick it up and take the crowd through a range of dubby and dreamy styles, with a little crunch for contrast. Something about the warmth of the room draws me into dubby 2-step which does bring out some cheers from the crowd, but in generally I feel the love anyway as people dance without stopping till the end of the night.

I'm really sad I forgot to take pictures during the party. I took some pix of Brisbane, which was lovely, but somehow I forgot the gig pics! I'm not good at remembering that, but some will show up for other gig reports.

Earlier that day I had given a talk about my research to students in the music department at Queensland University of Technology. It was a great chance to develop my talks that incorporate more music-playing, and it really felt more like a dj performance. One thing about people under 25 (which I venture most of the TINA talk attenders were not) is that when they start losing interest or getting distracted it's really obvious - you gotta change up the scene quick or you lose them. Luckily I had music lined up to play, and funny bits to talk about, and it was all the more pleasing to explain something, then play the music and watch people laugh in recognition of what I was just talking about. Also, i should maybe play "This is why I'm hot" as the intro to all of my talks, maybe as I walk in, it's a nice intro tune as people file in and I make my entrance...

wow. hooray.

2009-10-05T03:47:00.000-07:00

ATTN Melbourne people who asked me about where I'm playing there: Friday Oct 9 at Roxanne Lounge see info here
(Sydneyites should know that I'm playing Dirty Shirlows in Marrickville Oct 10.)
and of course it's Brisbane this Wednesday the 7th for Scuba Tank at the 320 club.
---

First round of events in Newcastle are over. It went really fast, too fast of course. But it was an unqualified awesome success of a weekend. For which I must thank the organizers of Electrofringe, Sound Summit and This Is Not Art.

The small, somewhat depressed former coal/steel town of Newcastle hosts this art fest every year. It reminded me a lot of PopMontreal plus a lot more electronic music represented. A great DIY spirit, but on a larger scale than I would have thought possible. An art fest, music fest, music conference, zine fest, writers fest, and lots of other stuff all rolled into one, taking up 5 days and with guests from all over Australia and beyond, in the case of a lucky crew (including me). The whole place appeared overrun with various strains of artist folk, from the circus/bodypaint/stilts crew to blackclad beardy diy punx, fabulous vixens in waisted dresses heels and fascinators slugging rum from a brown bag bottle, lean youth in neon colors and missing-piece haircuts tilting down the streets in crews of 2 or 3.. I was glad to catch a pretty wide range of events, and meet some pretty fabulous people. Everyone was very warm, very talented, and really fun to talk to. Pure delight basically!

Both panels I was on went quite well, and I tried something new with my talk by integrating a lot of music-playing into my story. I think this is the way forward, although I definitely need a better way to do slides and music than Powerpoint, whose interface for playing music while talking is simply horrible. But the cool thing was I crammed a lot of information in there, but I didn't seem to lose anyone! People seemed really into it, and asked great questions... some new ideas came out of it for a lot of us I think, which is always a win.

And i had the honor of playing the showcase on Saturday night, after Melbourne heroes Bum Creek, and before breakcore legend Toecutter. It was the perfect setup, because before me it was high-energy but more performance-oriented than danceable, and after me was storming explosive breakcore pop hilarity, so I had a nice sonic and energy trajectory to ride.. and ride we all did. The crowd basically went nuts, people danced like maniacs, there was an ocean of cheers raaaahhhh and Toecutter actually had a bit of a task to get people to settle down and turn towards the stage again.

so thanks go out eternally to the crew for making it all happen. the tech cats were delightful, the woman who initially invited me served me homemade vegan pancakes on the first day, the sound system was boooming, the gabba aerobics team kicked ass, i got to play an after party by teaching myself how to use a new dj software and djing off a USB drive on the fly.. good times.

now, Brisbane! hello!

What's been going on in the Bay in a hot minute

2009-09-28T17:05:00.000-07:00

I've had a fantastic couple of weeks in the Bay Area, especially as the San Fran Summer is in full effect - come October it will be beach time again, at least from 12pm-4pm before the fog rolls in.

One of the highlights was chilling with the Dutty Artz & Que Bajo?! crew, especially Geko Jones and Uproot Andy. Quality gents, both. Deep and broad musical selection, with emphasis on the "musical." That's a risky term, probably linked in my mind with melody (is that ethnocentric?) or something. Maybe I would set their "musical" against my "visceral-conceptual"? I don't know, but anyway I find them pretty inspiring. If they are hitting your town -which is pretty likely given their insane tour schedule- don't sleep. Literally, don't sleep, just dance all night.

I was lucky enough to rock out with them in NY a couple times, and then they hit San Francisco to play Chief Boima's amazing party at Little Baobab. Now that was a truly great event! Seemed like people started dancing the minute they came in the door,* none of that hanging around the edges waiting to get drunk enough to feel okay on the dancefloor, people were right out there and stayed out there.

And then I had more great luck - I got to spin with DJ Dub-U (doing a pretty hilariously fun tag team), opening up for the mighty DJ Slugo. Recap of that to follow shortly. Suffice to say that you Bay Area peoples need to get over yourselves and come out earlier to the Li Po lounge because every aspect of that night was amazing but the first half was too empty and the music was indeed utterly bangin. But by the time Slugo hit the decks the crowd was going nuts. You shoulda seen it. I wouldn't say there was much Jukin (clearly, in the Bay, we need more internet videos to instruct us, although Mr Slugo's awesome lady did her best to show us how to work it out.)

*Actually one aspect of that reminded me of my gig at Eclectic Company. There was a gang of people at the bar who started dancing as soon as the music came on, and more joined them when I started djing, which was gratifying.. but it was clear their priority was to dance, as much as possible. I was playing bouncy hipop and glitch and dancehall remixes and suchlike, and I thought they didn't seem like club music people but it might be worth taking it up to club music tempo --after all who doesn't want to bounce to bmore? But it became clear that they were mystified by the speed and the music. What was adorable was that they didn't leave the dancefloor. They kinda bounced their knees, and looked around, as if asking each other how to dance to this, and sorta waiting in the hopes they would get the hang of it or the music would change. But they didn't leave! That really warmed my heart - they were more interested in dancing than in being experts on the music, or even being familiar with it. In the end I sorta relented, let go of my hope to play stuff at club music tempo and brought it back down to a more hiphop tempo and they immediately started jumpin.

ripley goes to oz!!

2009-09-18T21:58:00.000-07:00

I'm soon to be off again. Farther afield than I've ever been. Yes, it's time for

ripley's first ever Australian Tour!

I am super excited to report that beginning with a lovely email from the Sound Summit & Electrofringe festival/conference (which are somehow related to the This Is Not Art festival), I have been able to line up a small tour and a short series of talks in Australia starting two weeks from now. Please spread the word, and come say hi if you are in Sydney, Newcastle, Brisbane or Melbourne.

Newcastle

Friday Oct 2 - radio show on FBI Radio
Saturday Oct 3- This Is Not Art showcase Cambridge Hotel (789 Hunter St.) $15
DJ Ripley (US), The Vivian Girls (US), ILIOS (GR), Bum Creek (Melb), Free Choice Duo (Melb), Ivan Lisyak Crab Smasher, 10k Freemen (Bris).
I think I play last at this one, so pace yourself!
Sunday Oct 4 -I'm on a panel discussion and then I give a presentation about my research in JA.

Brisbane

Wednesday Oct 7 - A talk at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), subject TBA
Also, djing at Scuba Tank courtsey of the Dank Morass crew

Melbourne

Friday Oct 9 - Omelette and Bass Bin Laden present a kickass show at Roxanne Parlour with Vibesquad, Spoonbill, Unsoundbwoy and Wanklerotaryengine plus Dj Shredder. For more details visit http:// www.omelette.net.au

Sydney

Saturday Oct 10 at Dirty Shirlows, Marrickville, New South Wales
with Svelt, as part of something that sounds oddly hilarious called "sketch the rhyme"

Upgrade issues..

2009-09-06T14:17:00.000-07:00

The UpgradeNY event went really well. Very high quality scene over there - good questions from the audience and I think we neither of us (Karl Fogel nor I ) pontificated too much.

It was livestreamed, but I think it's been recorded in video even, and perhaps that will go up at the website for the gallery space. I will post about that as I learn more. I'd be curious to see it because I gave a 10 minute talk about issues which may both connect and separate the Jamaican music scene's dynamics around copyirght law and the dynamics of the open-source software movement.

Some interesting points that came out:
I suggested that repetition, reference, citation and familiarity are all methods of building and maintaining community & social connection (which is necessary for the scene to function). What they amount to is shared culture - that is, the things that are repeated are or become part of shared culture. So we talked a bit about whether there was shared culture in the open-source software scene, and whether it mattered whether there was or not. Several audience members talked about their experiences with this as well. Short version - Karl said that open source as a movement came from US and Western Europe first and tends to have a libertarian-ish culture and some specific practices, and as the movement included more programmers from elsewhere, there did indeed come to some clashes.

A couple audience members said that the clashes were sometimes dealt with (or rather, avoided) through projects where people who had similar norms worked together.

One interesting example discussed here (which also might be an example of something else), was the practice in open-source scenes where mistakes in one's code can and ought to be publicly criticized. Karl said that people joining the scene from outside the US (he mentioned India) felt threatened by that public criticism --which he sort of framed as a cultural response. But he also mentioned that some of those people felt threatened because they (in India) worried that their bosses might see criticism of their coding and devalue their work. This suggests to me that the larger cultural context matters too - one's employers or others around you have to understand the practice (so, Google probably doesn't punish its employees for having code criticized publicly) - is that culture or corporate culture, or both? Can they change?

But it's also an issue of material positions and what's at stake. Karl also made this point in another contexts, that one's feelings about property rights and ownership probably depend partly on whether you are really on the brink of survival, or instead are living comfortably. I think this is spot-on and not addressed enough.

I suggested that alongside how property ownership can matter psychologically and materially in terms of feeling secure in one's livelihood, it also relates to identity. Especially when you are talking about music and creative works. One's identity may be extremely likely to be tied up in creative work (also given the way identity and culture mutually build each other). This may matter especially when one comes from a place where one's identity is consistently devalued, which Jamaicans may feel in relation to other parts of the world, or poor Jamaicans may feel in relation to the colonial story, and the way systematically exploited & oppressed people feel (and ARE) devalued culturally in relation to dominant cultural narratives and images. Anyway even though I am critical of property rights defined economically, I can see how identity and control of self can be defended, in some ways, by using property language. I just worry about what else is included in that language as it is currently defined.

Today! Brooklyn!

2009-09-03T08:26:00.000-07:00

Start: 09/03/2009 - 7:30pm

End: 09/03/2009 - 11:00pm

Thursday, September 3, 7:30pm

The Change You Want To See Gallery is pleased to host another installment of the Upgrade! NY series on open source as it relates to activism and creative practice. This month we'll explore how changes in technology and social convention affect music, software, and culture in general.

We'll start the evening with a conversation between scholar and DJ Larisa Mann, and developer and open source advocate Karl Fogel. Their discussion will examine how Jamaican music has developed in the absence of an effective copyright regime, how technological and social conditions affect the music and musicians, and how this compares to the open source movement of today.

Afterward stick around for a party and DJ set by Larisa Mann (aka DJ Ripley). Ripley was voted "Best Dance DJ of 2008" by the readers of the SF Bay Guardian.

Not in NY? Tune in to a live stream of the discussion at 7:30pm EST at http://livestream.com/notanalternative

Larisa Mann is a PhD Candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at UC Berkeley Law School, and resident DJ at SuryaDub, San Francisco. She researches the social implications of intellectual property rules, the legal implications of actual creative practices, and explores the implications of networked life (day-to-day reality permeated by networked technology) for our concepts of rights.

http://djripley.blogspot.com

Karl Fogel is an open source software developer and writer who works for Canonical, Ltd, the company behind Ubuntu, helping with the open-source Launchpad collaboration platform, as well as QuestionCopyright.org, a California-based non-profit that promotes public understanding of the history and effects of copyright, and encourages the development of distribution systems suitable for a networked world in which the cost of sharing information has gone to zero.

http://www.red-bean.com/kfogel

Upgrade! NY is co-produced by Eyebeam and Not An Alternative.

THank you, New York & Boston (gig wrap-up post)

2009-08-26T08:31:00.000-07:00

It's been an epic week or so..

I hit New York running, coming straight from the airport (after a plaintive wait for lost luggage) to Halcyon record store to play instore for the Bless Up radio show (big up the host LionDub). We sweltered in there, at the end of a long narrow room, in the NY heat. Kotchy, FaltyDL, Geko Jones and Incyde all rocked the decks in their own inimitable styles and I closed out the evening..I was afraid I'd short out the mixer by dripping sweat on it, but luckily we all survived. Saw some friendly faces, and staggered stickily home to the place I'm apartment-sitting, to drink ice water in my underwear.

The next day was the doublehitter, but first I needed to practice, and after minor and heat-addled (sense a theme?) confusion on the subway I found my way out to Studio Geko for some conversation and some good musical messing about. Later, rolled to Glasslands, where I wimped out and huddled in front of the overworked air conditioner upstairs until it was time for my set.

Lamin and Geko Jones laid down the early set, ranging all over the map, shaking the audience out of their chitchat and getting people bubbling, and I came on with the more global side of my breaky steppy tunes, including this kind of clappy latin-sounding dubstep stuff that makes an odd kind of sense: Emvee's "Nocturnal," Untold's remix of Ramadanman's "Revenue," mixed with ravier crunchier sounds of Shlachthofbronx, 2step like El-B's "Cuba," plus Daniel Haaksman, Ku Bo, and several of DJ Cs new instrumentals which are AMAZING. Unfortunately I had to leave just as Maga Bo was preparing to step up, Rhiannon was drumming and singing onstage while Geko tossed beats to the crowd from the decks.. I packed up my gear and ran through the rain (hello rain!) to a car to get to Manhattan.

Dub War is at Love, which everyone will tell you has a bababoooming sound system. It does. As I came in, slipping down the stairs with the rain, I could hear the dreamy offkilter sounds from the main room. From the DJ booth, there was a sea of smiling faces turned towards us, clearly the Ableton dj set washing over them was to their liking. I just remember the mix of a lovely chunky dreamy tune with the Toasty classic "the knowledge" in a way that spun both tunes into something storming yet delicately balanced. Such inspiring sounds, and my impression was that the crowd was happy, into it, but also ready for things to drop harder, so I got up and gave it to them.

What a totally fun set - I guess I would call it "chipdubcrunkraggajukestep" - there was a Britney Spears remix in there (nice to see the Dub Warriors getting down to things they might not have thought they would get down to), some Chrissy Murderbot burners, Dj C's "Du Ting" riddim (on which NOBODY should sleep), more Schlachthofbronx, Taal Mala, Akira Kiteshi, Cardopusher, my new favorite supercrunch dubstep producer Gizmode, Robot Koch, Badxman, and DJ Remi, DJ Deeon plus Dj Donna Summer as part of an extended rave/juke/dubstep crossover moment with a high point of female voice repping the uh female anatomy (a K-swift sample I believe).

Overall while I didn't avoid the wobble basslines, I cut them with chiptunes-influenced bleeps and crunchy sounds that gave the music more shape, more punch, and more dynamic range. What I like about those sounds is that they are more stark and add more silence & pause on the dancfloor, they add dramatic tension, make the music more percussive. They open out the space by defining the high-end with clean-bleeps and making the low end ragged and glitched out. And then I also dropped some of my favorite vocal dubstep tracks like Sarantis (featuring Honey Brown)'s "Fall in Love" plus some classic and new 2step from El-B, Sully, and Garage Dubs..

Recovering from Dub War (and the small friendly afterparty) took me through the weekend, and on Monday I hopped the Bolt Bus (with Dj Pandaia) to Boston to play Beat Research. Small and friendly is the baseline for getting this fantastic gig. The Enormous Room contradicts itself sizewise, but the quality of people and music there is truly huge. As usual, lots of Toneburst heads came out (my Boston area history runs deep), plus many dear and beloved friends old and new. There was dancing, there was talking & catching up, there were cool visual projections.

Cheers to DJ Pace and DJ Flack who also played great music that caused heads to turn and toes to tap. The venue felt too warm and cozy for me to want to drop the ferocious aggro bass, but it's perfect for classic 2step, baltimore, funk carioca, DJ Flack's own productions, Fauna, dunkelbunt, and more horn-sprinkled, ska-influenced steppers.

And now I'm back in NYC. One more confirmed gig coming up, this one with a slightly different flavor.
September 3, I'm speaking at UpgradeNY as part of a conversation with Karl Fogel on Jamaican music-making and the open source software movement.. and then I'm djing afterwards! That's all happening at The Change You Want to See - 84 Havemeyer Street, Brooklyn, NY, and it's early, starting at 6:30 pm and the whole thing done by 11, I think. The conversation is definitely supposed to include the audience, so come out and make it interesting and then stay and dance!

new gigs added!

2009-08-18T21:28:00.001-07:00

Lots of things in the works. Still seeking Jamaicans in New York to interview.

New gig - Thursday August 20th, I'm playing an in-store at Halcyon with Incyde, from 6-9pm. This brings it all nearly full circle for me since I played a the old Halcyon in its old location years back. But now they are in Dumbo, still holding down the music side (although less cafe-esque than they were). I think they are near enough to some fancydancy chocolate to keep my blood sugar up. Looking forward to a chiller space in which to lay down some wackier wooshier sounds.

And it looks like something will happen in September at Eyebeam NYC, I may give a talk or be part of a cool panel discussion, and then DJ later (although they seem a bit short of actual dj equipment, get in touch if you want to help make the gig happen properly)

August 20, 2009.
In-store at Halcyon, 57 Pearl Street, dumbo, brooklyn
with Incyde
6-9pm

August 21st, 2009.
Midnight-ish - I will open for the ill-ustrious Maga Bo, at NY Tropical 9, Glasslands, Williamsburg. See poster below for details

2:30am - A late set at Dub War, at Love, in the West Village. And the lineup is ILL: Mike Slott, FaltyDL, Kotchy and Incyde. See poster below. RSVP here

August 24th - Ripley at Beat Research, The Enormous Room, Cambridge, MA. Courtesy of DJs Flack, Pace, and Wayne&wax.

then back to NYC

September 3 - Something's likely up at Eyebeam, an Upgrade NY Event? watch this space..

NY TROPICAL POSTER

DUB WAR POSTER

More gigs in NY

2009-08-09T10:23:00.000-07:00

It's all piling up in the best way as I head to the East Coast.

By the way, I'm looking to get in touch with anyone Jamaican involved in music, since my research (on Jamaican musical practice and attitudes about ownership, control, access and quality in music) is the main reason to go to NY, so feel free to link me if you or anyone you know will be in NY August 22-Sept 10 and has time for an interview.

but the big news is I am playing DUB WAR NYC!

Very happy about this.
The fun part is that it's lining up so tightly - I'm playing 2 gigs in one night. Crazy times.

August 21st, 2009.
On the earlier side:
I will open for the ill-ustrious Maga Bo, at NY Tropical, Glasslands, Williamsburg. There doesn't seem to be a ton of promotion for this yet, but I'm sure it's gonna be great, Bo is incredible and will bring global heat for the booty and the feet.

On the later side:
I will do an after-2am set at Dub War, at Love, in the West Village. And the lineup is ILL: Mike Slott, FaltyDL, Kotchy and Incyde.. holy moly this is gonna be outta controlly

so you have two chances to catch me, or we can share a cab from one to the other and party till late early!

Terry Lynn and the Tastemakers

2009-08-05T10:45:00.000-07:00

Although I didn't conduct the main interview, I did get to chat with Terry Lynn, piggybacking on Mad B's fascinating conversation after I was done taking pictures.*

Terry Lynn is in an interesting place, coming from this small, historically rough area that is also so rich in talent both artistic and sporting. She has set her sights on rather a different scene than the local dancehall one. Although that is where she began, hanging around King Jammy's in her neighborhood of Waterhouse

(the studio was closed when we walked by, but this is a shot of the under-construction 0r never-constructed part of it.. on the left outside the frame and underneath the unfinished but there is an actual building in use. This btw is a common scene in Jamaica - half-finished buildings with rebar rusting in the air.)

but going on, before much local commercial success, to link up with international dance music producers like Phred and Diplo and the Mad Decent/bloggy club music scene. She is featured on the Major Lazer album (which I have heard on much heavier rotation in SF parties than in Kingston - no surprise of course), and more dance tunes left and right these days.

She is, I think, pinning her hopes on the tastemakers of the underground and blog-based dance music scene. This is an interesting move, because there isn't a lot of money in the electronic music scene compared to, say, the commercial industry of hip-hop.. but there is maybe a different kind of fan loyalty (although also music-critic on-to-the-next-ness), and also a different kind of artistic credibility. It's interesting especially given the general attitude I found in Jamaica towards 'underground' ness.. Which I may have over-emphasized in my last post on the subject.

The other side of it is that many Jamaican artists are so focused on promotion that they will work with nearly anyone, for free or whatever, if there is hope of exposure, they don't necessarily differentiate between underground and commercial at all.

And true, as much as underground folks like to position themselves (ourselves) as anti-commercial and counterculture, there may be less difference than we suppose, or the difference may not matter in the way we think it does. Nobody could deny that the underground is also a major source of inspiration and creativity for commercial music- judiciously sifted and recast for broader ears. And that may not be all bad - I like Britney Spears' "Toxic (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkIytHD5v9c)" as a dance tune, and appreciate its layers of club-music/bhangra/surf/beats & breaks both for its fun sonic references and for the overall slink and bounce.

Also, in a way, (problematically) substituting 'foreign' for 'underground,' that's what happened with Bob Marley all the way back, his album retracked and re-arranged to please a broader, more rock-oriented audience. Was that wrong or right? And yes, I do mean in terms of Marley getting paid (and kick-starting the major foreign nonjamaican market for reggae), as well as artistic merit. Check Birdseed's thoughts on this dynamic as well - mostly hinted at in the phrase "discursive agenda."

There is a tradition, and perhaps a recent upsurge of vocalists seeking out tastemakers in countercultural or underground scenes (Jahdan, 77klash, Warrior Queen). It makes me happy because I often like the music more - and especially the combination of vocalists like these and production styles from dubstep, garage, jungle: darker, breakier sounds.

Some interesting questions, though. As this interview makes clear, the preoccupations of foreign and local audiences may be different. From a marketing perspective, there are lots of reasons artists make choices about what to sing about and how to sing it. But I'm also interested in how people battle over what is authentic -or to use a less loaded term than the dreadful 'authentic' - I'm interested in the dynamics of collaboration across culture and economics. What do differences audiences (and producers) want to hear from an artist? What do they pay for? Who are producers making music for? And how does that affect choices in music-making?

Less abstractly, but perhaps a crux of the matter - I wonder how long these collaborations can actually support the featured vocalists, especially those coming from such disparate backgrounds to the producers. The pressures on someone coming from so far away to mess with a world that assumes pretty different baselines for survival.. well they seem quite high.

Although it's often asserted to be so, I wonder if people actually do behave more ethically in underground scenes? My experience is that they do. I have the massive luxury of pretty much only working with people I actually like & respect. Then again, if I had to pay my rent from DJing, I don't know if I could continue that. And coming from Jamaica, where money is short and the need is intense, people may not have the space to pick and choose as much as I do. Still, exposure can lead, even indirectly, to getting paid.

Lynn may have picked especially well in terms of the Major Lazer and blog/club music posse. On the cultural side, non-Jamaicans are certainly not concerned with being 'tainted' by the 'low' aspects of Jamaican pop music. I.e. the Jamaican moral panic about oversexualized lyrics nd dancing is absent from foreign clubbers' embrace of Jamaican pop, or celebrated, or fetishized. Check Major Lazer's latest video for an example of that, and I can vouch for every one of those dance moves existing at dances I went to. So whether that is especially authentic or just especially popular, it is not getting dissed by foreign audiences. (Although American racism is just different from Jamaican classism, so there may be an element of choosing between fetishizing black sexuality vs. denigrating it.. but that's a whole other can-o-worms.) Parenthetical skipped lightly over, I can again vouch for Major Lazer's focus on what is actually popular in a lot of Kingston and Jamaica. And clearly they are reworking it for a different audience as well, sonically and visually.

And it does seem possible that here the tastemakers can make some money at the same time. Lynn might benefit from that, although I wonder whether she will as much as the people who she links with who are more embedded in the first-world economy. But maybe it doesn't matter as whether they benefit equally as long as she feels done right by?

Interestingly, Phred and phreemusic are connected to the critical copyright scene. Check their manifesto here. He's got some great future-thinking going on, although everything is a gamble these days, it warms my heart to see someone trying to link critical approaches to copyright with artists in the third world in an ethical way. And there is an exposure issue here too, since many people in the critical copyright/CC world focus on the license rather than the quality of the music, they are building rich networks of (often rich) people, that are sadly thin on good music. Part of my research goal is to learn how to forge links between what working artists really want and the broader range of legal and extralegal and social choices available to them in & outside of copyright law. Phred & Terry are going ahead with this experiment already, so big up!

*Full set of photos from the interview up here, courtesy of Mad B's (also check out her amazing shots from Colombia where she is now working. Note her vastly superior photography skills as well).

sound around town

2009-08-04T08:04:00.000-07:00

One of the most obvious and dramatic aspects of living in Kingston is the prevalence of music. You hear it everywhere in the city, all hours of the day and night. It's present in in your ears because nearly every business, car, and bus station has the radio on, guys selling stuff on the sidewalk have a boombox or stereo, the church next door is having a service or the revivalists are circling under a tree and singing..

But its presence is felt visually and in your bones and belly, because huge towers of speakers loom over many landscapes. They line Hellshire beach, kicking off with 70s soul and R&B and occasional rocksteady around 11am on Sunday, and hotting up to dancehall and newer R&B by the afternoon and evening. And, even more dramatically, they stand tall in the poorest neighborhoods, like Waterhouse, home of the incredible Terry Lynn, as well as the recent Olympic champion Shelly-Ann Fraser, King Jammy's studio, and of course hundreds more people, living in cement brick houses, zinc-paneled shacks, and everything in between. (Check this great sports illustrated article, cached here, about Fraser and Waterhouse.) You're walking down the street, and up ahead you see this:

waiting for the sun to set, the soundman to set up the CD players, the local shops to roll up their windows to sell drinks and snacks and the drum chicken guys, peanut and candy vendors with huge boat-shaped stacks of treats balanced on their heads

and other freelance folks to roll up and start selling. By midnight the scene will buzz with dancing, flossing, flirting, drinking, eating and smoking, as folks come out of their houses. The more famous dances like Boasy Tuesday are famous outside their neighborhoods, but if you drive around any night of the week by 11pm or midnight, you're liable to come across a street dance within half a mile or so of anyplace you start in central or downtown Kingston.

So this day in January, right after I first arrived in Kingston from Oakland, I was walking through Waterhouse taking pictures of my friend Maddy's interview (for The World) with Terry Lynn, when I got some great shots of the speaker towers:

It's striking, when you are walking or driving through the city, and these tarp-wrapped vast & trunkless legs of speakers straddle roads and gullies, promising earthshaking bass weekly, free of charge. Nobody troubles the speakers, seemingly, except the threat of rain and dust which is, I guess, why the tarps wrap them in the day. They do cause the mighty some concern, if not despair - as street dances are constantly under challenge from noise complaints (the police now actually enforcing noise complaints, a change in recent years), and also the source of moral panic since the dirtiest lyrics and dancing are generated by and aimed at these venues.

Street dances are not spontaneous or uncontrolled, of course. Neighborhoods have powers-that-be, whether it is legal or extralegal, who must be supporting or even profiting from the dances. If it isn't Members of Parliament (which class allegiance/horror of poor people music can work against) then who steps up? My favorite euphemism is "area leader" or "community leader" which refers to the local don or head gangster --- but which does often genuinely mean community leader as well since the local gang may be the most organized institution in the neighborhood and one that doesn't shy away from associating with the music and practices that upper classes often bemoan as morally degenerate. I'm not sure who pays for the speakers though, that's one question I need to ask -who owns them, and what does ownership mean, in this context? I don't think the towers are always standing around all week - but these were up at noon when we walked by, so who puts them up, when, and if they are taken down, where do they go?

*Full set of photos from that interview up here, courtsey of Mad B (also check out her amazing shots from Colombia where she is now working. Note her vastly superior photography skills as well).

upcoming gigs and hops

2009-07-28T16:18:00.000-07:00

Re-connecting to the Bay Area has been pretty much pretty fun. Had a quick hop to Los Angeles as well. But now I'm looking at another few weeks here before I go on the road again, partly for research purposes, touching down here and there in North America and beyond..

So, I'm now looking to connect with Jamaicans involved with music in New York (I'll be there August 21-Sept 10), in Toronto (I'll be there late October-early november), and in London (I'll be there in December).

In between, I am also hopping a surprising number of places. I have some gigs lined up already, and some surprises to come. To begin with:

August 7th --> Festival - a huuuuuge party at The Bordello in Oakland. I'm playing early (10-11pm) which means I get to run around and enjoy the rest of the party afterwards. This one's $20 bucks but you get an amazing location and a really impressive lineup. Dj Eva Lee and the Redline crew have really pulled out all the stops and pulled an amazing crew together, big up!!

August 21st --> Ny Tropical. Glasslands, Brooklyn. I'm super-honored and excited to get up at this party, which has been going great guns for the Dutty Artz crew. Expect bass. Fertile sounds. and heat. Also cheap! $5 before 11, $8 after. Not sure of the full lineup yet but you can't complain with folks like Geko Jones, Lamin, Uproot Andy, Taliesin, Matt Shadetek, and DJ /Rupture on call..

August 24th --> Beat Research. Enormous Room, Cambridge MA. Love these guys. coming home to my peeps and beats. Big shoutout to new papa (x2!!) Dj Flack, and continuing papa (x2) Wayne&wax, as well as Dj pace, and other good people in attendance and on deck. Free!

first pass at dancing isht in JA

2009-07-10T16:12:00.000-07:00

I hadn't gotten around to posting videos from Boasy Tuesday. But now I will. I have a lot of thoughts kicking around about the importance of dancers in the scene.. here's a first pass to get started with.

If you've been checking out especially the men's fashion at the street dances, there are a lot of interesting choices: things like plucked eyebrows,

makeup, skin bleaching, extremely tight pants, lots of accessories including bows

cravats scarves and enormous chains, and elaborate hairdos involving braids and bright un"natural" colors.

Until recently, I don't think these choices were common for men in Jamaica. They were more associated with women. Especially since overall I haven't heard people recognize any difference between messing with gender and messing with sexuality (or between being transgender vs. being gay), many folks here say the fashion "looks gay."

NOTE, for any newcomers: It is IMPOSSIBLE to know what anyone's actual sexual practices are from looking at their clothing. People choose what to wear based on what it means to them, but there is no way to tell what it means to them without reading their minds, or asking them, and also understanding exactly where they come from. Fashion moves so fast that styles from one year have a completely different meaning a few years later - for many people, denim jeans were workwear that showed you were poor or low-class, but now denim jeans can be a symbol of wealth (if they are the right kind), or dreadlocks had a very different meaning in Jamaica 20 years ago compared to now. So braids and hair dye's meaning is hard to parse. And now, because styles move back and forth overseas, due to internet access, cable TV, and video, the meaning of people's fashion choices are even more complicated - are they dressed to connect themselves to an image they saw on TV (which might have come from the UK or the Republic of Congo or Japan), or to evoke an image from up the street?

So what I am talking about hear is NOT about the dancers' personal lives, what they are doing at home or what they are thinking or who they have sex with. It is about how people are talking about dancers, and what the dancers' choices seem to mean in the larger context of Jamaican society.

So another fact about many of the popular dances (the ones with names), as you will see below, is that except for daggering, they are mostly men dancing in groups with each other. So, both the fashion and the dancing appears to bring up anxiety in Jamaica and elsewhere, especially about the dancers' sexuality.

Once again, I'm talking about anxiety by OTHER people, I'm not talking about how the dancers see themselves or what they are actually like. I'm talking about public discussions about dancers. These discussions are very interesting.

I've heard it on the radio, read newspaper articles, and heard many people in upper and lower-class scenes talk about it. And the anxiety and criticism is performed publicly at the dances themselves. While Boasy Tuesday is one of the hottest dances in Kingston, and its hotness is due to the dancers there, the DJ at Boasy regularly goes on extended rants, often without music, about how "man nuh dance with man" (men [should] not dance with another man), and there are a slew of songs out right now about that, with lots of lyrics about how the proper way to dance is in a man-woman pair.

Elephant Man, who is a major promoter of these fashions (although it's hard to say whether he is a leader or follower of the dancers' fashions),

(note the keffiyehs worn several creative ways in the video!)

Elephant Man is as usual a total genius at coming up with a new song and associated dance every week, mostly of the non-partner variety, but also simultaneously coming out with songs about partner dancing, including a ska song. Interestingly, many DJs and radio announcers and older Jamaicans hearken back to Ska as a music and dancing scene were people were properly paired off in couples.

Also interesting: I have heard many people in Jamaica hearken back to Ska as an era when things were not as lewd. This may seem so nowadays, but memory maybe glosses over a lot of the era. As Dennis Howard points out, "slack" (sexual) lyrics have always been around, and certainly if you look at the commentary on Ska at the time, the powers that be didn't think of it as sweet and peaceful music but as disturbing, sexual and lowclass. And it's not like times have changed so much, Prince Buster's "wreck a pum pum" sounds kinda dirty anytime, once you know what pum pum is..

but enough chat for now, later I will push more on these issues (including the possible decline of DJs and dubplates and the rise of dancers as a creative force in JA -- ideas here developed in more detail as part of a fascinating presentation at the Caribbean Studies Association annual meeting by Josh Chamberlain of UWI's Cultural Studies graduate program/Soul Of The Lion, as well as other people I spoke with-- and also my thoughts on the political & social implications of Jamaica having homegrown performers who are gender-bending and sexuality-challenging, who are also "cool" and have "street cred.")

anyway enjoy!!

Back in SF. Two gigs this week!

2009-07-05T16:42:00.000-07:00

I'm freezing in San Francisco's clammy, windy summer, having become a delicate tropical flower over the past 6 months.

But I can't complain, I'm in the Mission district, full of some proper cal-mex food. Don't think my posts on Jamaica (or pictures --and I do have video too--) are over.

Also on the subject of future posts: Friday night, my first full night back in SF, I went to a party which kicked off further thoughts on the whole Major Lazer thing. I saw a dubstep/lazerbass/future blap party with my awesome homies Lazer Sword, Annasia, Sam Supa, Bogle & Dials (and No New York), at which someone played a Major Lazer tune.. While dancing, sweating, and saying hi to old friends, I was also inspired to think a bit more about who was there, where it was, and how people responded to the music, as compared to where I spent the last few months. So that is forthcoming.

But in real world, physical-experience-type news, I must announce I have two gigs this week! Gig #1 in Oakland, #2 in San Francisco!

In Oakland, at Descendants United the creation of Chief Boima and Aebl Dee, on Thursday, July 9. RSVP here or on facebook

And on Friday, July 10th:

Final Boasy

2009-07-01T11:14:00.000-07:00

Of course I'm too busy running around (and checking my email apparently) to write an introspective wrap-up post now. Preparing for my farewell party on Wickie-Wackie beach, packing etc..

But I did take the time to go to Boasy Tuesday one last time. It was totally worth the lack of sleep. They've moved, due to noise complaints, and are no longer in the street. Now it happens in a shopping plaza parking lot. At first I was suspicious of the new venue. It's still free, though, and by 3am it was so utterly hopping (with no signs of stopping) that I gotta say it's still the best party in Kingston.

Here are some highlights, and you can check out my flickr set as well

disconcerting tattoo, kinda?

VIDEO COMING SOON AS I GET A FASTER CONNECTION!

music = eat a food

2009-06-24T16:01:00.000-07:00

It's cosmic. Or rather, it's timing - lots of people are apparently coming across Bruno Natal's lovely documentary Dub Echoes. (I think the first half is as close to perfect as I could imagine). And Rupture (from Word the Cat) reminded me today of a clip I had forgotten.

This is very similar to what many musicians I have spoken to here in Jamaica have said. Including the mention of church, often (though not always).

It may seem far-fetched to some, but when we are talking about places of extreme poverty.. when music's power to heal and feed is ONLY understood in terms of royalties, or even in terms of its money-generating ability more broadly.. we lose something important about its power, its meaning, and its value for the people who make it. If music is medicine or food, then what rights do we have to access it? This conversation can be depressing in the privatized US, but in places where rights to access medicine and food have been more supported by governments, maybe we can take this discussion a bit further?

Also, placing music in the church context makes me think about musical connections to larger concerns of the soul, and visions of music as not the product of individuals alone. Old territory for some (concerned with the political implications of "scenius" vs. "genius") - it's true that focusing on group creativity can serve to disempower individuals in the system. But I don't want to concede all to a system that focuses on individuals alone, this in itself destroys something valuable (if risky) about communities, movements, scenes, subcultures.. Especially when the people involved in music-making, members of these scenes, use this language I don't want to kick it aside.

Are we down with the underground? Major Lazer in context

2009-06-23T13:24:00.000-07:00

As much as Jamaican music is beloved by underground party people around the world, I don’t see Jamaican dancehall fans seeing themselves as underground party people or counterculture in the way those terms signify in the US. I have seen the term “underground” used here, but I’m not sure what it is used to mean, but it usually doesn’t seem to mean “not striving for top-40 success, material accumulation and wealth.”

Not to say that dancehall doesn’t overlap with ghetto-based, poor-people-based authenticity –uptown is definitely considered ‘less dancehall’ even by uptown people. Uptown meaning wealthy (there really is almost no middle income here, you are either poor or quite rich, although in a place where at least outside the city food falls off trees, poor doesn’t mean exactly what I’m used to it meaning).

Anyway, my experience has been that most folks in music here see mainstream success as the goal, and many respect pop stars and pop music on the basis of its commercial success. Not that they don’t talk about musical quality – but something being “commercial” is a compliment in itself.*

This means that everything that is not dancehall, reggae, and R&B, is super niche audience, and most people don’t much dance or respond to it (this includes dub, sadly). But niche doesn’t mean underground like I’m used to the term being used in the US and Europe. Most folks I know outside Jamaica use underground in the sense of resisting mainstream culture, and often with an anti-capitalist or anti-commercial attitude. There’s something going on here that relates to Birdseed’s mention of counterpublic vs. counterculture, maybe? But in a weird way… Niche non-dancehall tends to correlate with uptown, and with “cosmopolitan (but well-off).”

I don’t know for sure how the Major Lazer scene is framing themselves, but it seems like there is a sort of counter-culture vibe going. Maybe I’m wrong, and “we want to be top-40 mall music” is part of the plan? It doesn’t seem like it exactly. I get the sense that they want at least enough ties to resistance or underground scenes to stay “cool” in the eyes of tastemakers.. which again in the US is quite a different thing than in Jamaica. There’s definitely a ghetto-authenticity-“street-cred”-seeking vibe too, which I’ll address more below.

Anyway, as my own djing crosses more over into Major Lazer/Diplo style these days (although from the even less commercial side, from breakcore, jungle, dubstep, glitch, and dub). From the first time I played in JA I thought that big crowds, or especially street dances and audiences in JA would not be likely to get it – or if audiences did get into what I was doing, it would be in a different way than it was intended.

This has been true for me = I have dj’d here in Kingston, but for audiences and crowds quite different than those I play for in San Francisco, in the US generally or in Europe. Anything not reggae, or not seen as Jamaican, and not pop, is understood as “alternative” and becomes at least partlyt a marker of uptown, cosmopolitan people. A simple visual – the parking lot outside the club I play here are dominated by shiny Range Rovers, Prados, and even Escalades (and in Jamaica, a third-world country, there’s a 100% tax on cars.. so they are twice what they cost in the US which sets the owners even farther away from the poor majority and any concept of ‘middle class”). Compared to where I play elsewhere where it’s bikes, old Japanese imports, a veggie bus or two, 2 and 4-door sedans, and the occasional Scion.

So a few months ago I heard from a friend that Diplo wanted to play in Jamaica and wanted to get onto the decks at a real street dance. I wouldn’t have advised that. Necessarily. Unless they are super thick-skinned and don’t mind pissing off a crowd. Perhaps if they could bring their own dancers and hype crew and MCs, people who will raise the energy level (and be part of the audience), that could attract interest.

But I think the crowds here are mostly not interested in pushing boundaries musically – at least not without serious attention to the local conventions of dancehall djing – people want specific tunes, in a specific order – for example, a big R&B/hiphop tune from the US, followed by the Jamaican versions over the same riddim, peaking with the biggest Jamaican version. This was one of the things that got a wheel-up at the Major Lazer show. But it’s not anything you don’t get from any decent dancehall soundsystem any night of the week.

Still, it’s a nice moment in any Jamaican dancehall party I’ve been to. I think it’s a rush of local pride –taking the riddim/instrumental of a big tune from foreign and doing Jamaican vocals on it. I think people are excited to hear their language –patois- and their issues/experiences associated with a globally famous instrumental. The instrumental definitely matters – as far as I can tell it has to be one that’s already big on the pop charts – but it’s not just vocalists riding on the coat-tails of Americans. For one thing, many of those Americans are doing the same thing but more covertly, or without expecting American audiences to recognize their sources. For another, I do think there’s an element of “answering” or taking over the pop tune and making it Jamaican. Something people get a rush out of.

However, as a DJ concern, again, it’s not new music per se that makes an audience here happy –dancehall audiences appear to happily listen to, and demand, the same songs every week, even the same song several times in a night. The songs change, but pretty slowly by my estimation – Mr. Vegas’ “I am Blessed” has been big here since I came in January, as has Mavado’s “So Special” and of course the almighty “Ramping Shop” and a slew of other daggering tunes (RDX’s “Bend Over” etc), and lots of Elephant Man’s dancing tunes, especially “Sweep.”

The point being, if you don’t include that stuff, people don’t get into it much at most mainstream events. Even at the uptown “alternative” events, most people don’t really dance except to dancehall. They dance a lot less than at downtown events anyway. But overall, even when I’ve gotten nods and smiles and compliments on my djing, it never translates into dancing except for a very few people (some of whom are gay --but also uptown and cosmopolitan-- speaking of subcultures or counterpublics). So I’m not surprised at the reception of the show last week. And I’m not now, given what I have learned, surprised that the place that has been most welcoming to me musically has been the artsy, uptown, alternative crowd.

For whom, by the way, I am djing, as well as everyone else who can afford the cover, tomorrow night at club FICTION, in Marketplace, Kingston Jamaica. And Thursday I will accompany an art opening at Olympia Arts Center, in front of U-Tech on Hope Road…

* People do criticize lyrical content, and commercialism gets mixed up in that sometimes. People imply or say outright that bad content is done for the money, where real art is done for the message. But this is all mixed up with commercialism of distribution – Payola is apparently a huge problem, so radio djs and other promoters of the music get paid to play music. So this means people talk more about how if only we could get the bad content out of the way (that is being put forward by people for some bad reason like being paid for it), then the good stuff would have commercial success ‘naturally’ because it is better.

more street fashion (at the mall too)

2009-06-22T09:46:00.001-07:00

Ran into this couple as I came through the mall at Sovereign Center for iced coffee and internet.

I asked if he was a dancer. He said he was a dancer and a singer too. And then...

and some time earlier I interviewed this artist/DJ: Iyara, part of the Alliance crew, at Payday music

Nobility, bloodlines, identity in Jamaica

2009-06-18T12:36:00.000-07:00

I just read the most amazing piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has been doing a mind-blowing series of pieces on the Civil War. they are all amazing, but this one is simply the best thing I have read in years.

one particular passage, however, hit me hard for another reason - it sparked a set of thoughts I have been kicking around while trying to understand what it means to be in a country where race relations are shaped by colonialism rather than by slavery (setting aside the colonization that destroyed so much of Native American culture, which was a different kind that I'm even LESS equipped to think about, unfortunately). Anyway I had been thinking about how racism, colorism, and class work here -it's so, so, so, so different than I see it in the US, many of my missteps with people have arisen from my misreading of these things. But I also had a growing discomfort with the way many black Jamaicans frame their resistance to it.

Here's the exceprt from Coates (which I take off from.. the rest of it is focused somewhat elsewhere, and is, again, amazing, as are the comments):

When I was young I believed, like a lot of us at that time, that my people had been kidnapped out of Africa by malicious racist whites. Said whites then turned and subjugated and colonized the cradle of all men. It was a comforting thought which placed me and mine at the center of a grand heroic odyssey. We were deposed kings and queens robbed of our rightful throne by acquisitive merchants of human flesh. By that measures we were not victims, but deposed nobles--in fact and in spirit.

I don't propose that blacks are alone in our myth-making, or in our desire to ennoble ourselves. But given the power dynamics of this society, we're the ones who can afford the comforts of myth the least. This is doubly true for those of us who are curious about the broader world. By the time I came to Howard University, I was beginning the painful process of breaking away from the "oppression as nobility" formula. But the clincher was sitting in my Black Diaspora I class and learning that the theory of white kidnappers was not merely myth--but, on the whole, impossible because disease (Tse-Tse fly maybe?) kept most whites from penetrating beyond the coasts until the 19th century.

A few years later I read (like many of you, no doubt) Guns, Germs and Steel and was, again, heartbroken. Here was a book with no use for nobility, but concerned with two categories--winners and losers. And I was the progeny of the losing team. I was not cheated of anything. I had simply lost.

This was heart-breaking, in the existential sense. What was I, if not noble? What was the cosmic justice at work that put me here, that made me second? Slowly, by that line of questioning, I came to understand that there really was no cosmic justice, that I should just be happy to be alive. Moreover the truth--Harriet Tubman and Ida Wells--was sustenance enough.

I'm especially thinking about Coates' discussion of the need to, and problem with, focusing on being descended from "Kings, Queens, and Nobles" as one reclaims a certain kind of black identity.

I'm pretty much anti-hereditary nobility and monarchy and against that kind of social hierarchy, and have spent much of my life studying people who have never had access to (through marriage, birth, or membership) that kind of power. I am also the granddaughter of farmers or peasants, on both sides (immigrant jews on one side, poor Texan dairy farmers for a coupla hundred years and Europe before that), as well as having been raised by working-class radical academics.

Wherever my worldview comes from, I have often been a bit weirded out by the royalist language many use in Jamaica, including but not limited to Rastafarians. I spoke with a descendant of the Maroons, who (as did others I spoke with) emphasized his connections with royal families in Ghana and elsewhere. Rastas call each other King and Queen, and Empress and My Lord. In one way it's impressive, it's grand, it feels dignified and powerful. I understand that people who were systematically denied dignity, and still are, in terms of social power in Jamaica today, want to claim markers of dignity.

But seriously, the focus on royalty and nobility makes me cranky. What's so bad about being descended from a farmer? It seems like rather than taking the King=dignity, not-king=worthless framework as a given, and just reversing who is the king, is missing the point.

does this have any connection to music and music-making? Well, in some ways..
I see a lot of Rastas, for example, who are perfectly happy with the government ban on dirty dancehall music on the radio, while they had in the past decried government bans on reggae. They are happy to support the power of the government to dictate acceptable music, so long as acceptability fits their definition. There is an authoritarian strain here that I can't fully get on board with. Some people I have talked to say this is a newer development in Rasta politics, and I'd like to know more..

I'm not sure but it's possible that the dancehall culture is not as caught up in this.. I don't find it mapping so well onto this quest for royalty/nobility. It seems more a scramble for capitalist-style success, in which the concept of dignity is a bit hard for me to spot. Not sure what to make of that either..

Major Lazer in Kingston

2009-06-16T19:53:00.000-07:00

On Friday, I was sitting outside on campus where I can get some free wireless, and I checked my Facebook page, which is how I keep up with my friends at home. But this time I saw something happening here in Kingston, that I hadn’t heard about. One of my Facebook friends (check how these connections work) the wife of a guy I had been introduced to (via email) by an entertainment lawyer friend of mine in SF –she runs a website about events in Jamaica, and she posted the following information:
Major Lazer was launching their tour right here at Quad, the biggest club in Kingston, tonight!

I called the guy, hoping he and his wife and some other people were going, and he said yes.. and offered to pick me up on the way to the club. Woo! He came by at midnight or so and off we went.

We got there around 12:45 or so. I was on the guest list, which eases my passage past the security guards who gave me shit about wearing sneakers last time. Heading through the entryway, a jazz club called “Christopher’s” is on the ground floor, to our left. The crowd here is older and/or wealthier/more conservative looking than elsewhere in the club. The main stairway leads up past the jazz bar to the main floor. This floor takes up the entire building, but is broken up by the shaft of the central staircase (which is enclosed, and the kind of staircase where the stairs go around a central square opening that is open all the way down). This means that althogh the space has a big capacity, it's impossible to see more than about 1/3 of the room at any one time and thats when you stand in a corner, the space is broken up by the central staircase. There are bars around the outside walls, the DJ booth is at on end on the outside wall, and there’s a dancefloor in front. The ceiling is oddly low, every area is irregular-shaped, with islands breaking up the dancefloor into a smaller space, and a serious air-conditioner blasted chill air onto us from above. The sound system is pretty huge, and pretty clean. I’d looooove to play on it sometime. I’ve been through here a few times before. I’ve always been impressed with their weekend DJs, although the crowd is nowhere near as lively as Boassi, the guests have never blown my mind. And these guests?

The Major Lazer crew I recognized as they trickled in. Diplo and Switch and Terry Lynn showed up in the DJ booth, I saw them through the glass, her big sunglasses reflecting back the light. A bit later a couple of other people I assumer were MCs collected back there as well and I hoped they would all get on the mic at some point. Diplo came on the decks maybe an hour or more later.

The order of his sets gets a bit mixed up in my mind. But I think he started by playing a mix of familiar (from the Jamaican scene) stuff, i.e. dancehall and hip-hop/R&B. It wasn’t too adventurous, but certainly no worse than what I’ve heard elsewhere.

Then there was a moment where he had an MC come up. This was where the crowd livened up the most. The MC was dressed in “african” style clothes, colorful Batik-patterned long tunic and trousers and a tall cap, and wraparound shades. His rapping had a distinct accented-english style. It was Prince Zimboo, whose way of rapping the Gleaner helpfully calls a "deep African accent" (!), and he made some funny dirty jokes and the crowd responded well, with cheers and gunhands and such. He is already known in Jamaica especially for his presence on the famous Black Chiney mixtapes (hah more racialized performance - they're out of Miami but they are Jamaicans of partly chinese descent popular in Jamaica). His second big cheer came from a phrase off of one of those mixtapes - he calls himself the "Punanny Macguyver." (hee)

The fact that he is not actually African but is a sort of “African-face” performer weirds me out and is worth a post in itself – anyone else want to take a crack at that? Looks like the backstory is even less cool, but not so unusual. Lots of people really get into stereotypes here (of everyone including Jamaicans – the most popular comedienne right now wears blackface and plays a ‘low-class’ Jamaican who mispronounces words and is loud and dresses inappropriately –this SLAYS’EM in the aisles). And Jamaicans are perfectly capable of saying horrifically racist things about Africans. But I digress.

I recall a set of clubbier remix tunes, Baltimore club and house music, mixed in with Kid Cudi’s “day n night” (which is pop/r&b’s sonic excursion into club sounds)—this is something I might have done, trying to get the crowd into the clubby vibe and getting them to realize it’s not so different from music they already like. Except I kinda hate that song so it would have been hard for me to play it even for such a sensible purpose.

Next he played a set of dubplates by big names in dancehall. This seems like going for something familiar to dancehall fans, after the unfamiliar music played before. However, my companion, a longtime Jamaican music industry guy said they weren’t even the hottest dubplates, either not the biggest artists or not the biggest songs. I can’t say I know enough to judge that, I only remember one by Konshens, who is pretty big, but no Vybez Kartel I think. But the crowd didn’t really seem that into it. I thought it might be that dubplates in themselves aren't that big for this kind of crowd. My impression is that dubplates (special versions of a tune re-sung by the artist who is known for singing it ---or by someone who SOUNDS like that artist—but dropping the name of the DJ in the song) are more important in soundclash competitions between rival djs/sound systems, or in the street dances where artists really get street cred. Then again, several scholars of dubplates I know suggest that dubplates are losing importance more generally in JA. Whatever the cause, nobody seemed that impressed here.

Quad is considered a more uptown scene, it has an entrance fee of 800/1000 Jamaican (around 10-12 bucks), which is pretty high for Kingston and the inside is white and shiny and gleaming, at least the counters. The crowd is definitely more conservative or boringly dressed than at street dances, in a way that I have come to associate with an uptown crowd. People look pretty healthy – good skin, good teeth, physically pretty fit. Guys in polo shirts or t-shirts and short or shaved hair, girls in tight dresses with not a lot of jewelry and not-too-complicated hairstyles, or somewhat conservative jeans and tight tops. High heels popular (the club’s “no sneakers on women” rule is apparently followed, by most), but there are plenty of women in flip-flops too. Maybe I would call it at least partly a college crowd. More hard shoes on the men than a college crowd in Boston where I grew up, but Boston is a buncha schlubs basically.. “upscale and college” maybe?

People didn’t dance much to the housier/clubbier stuff (except for me and one guy in a white button-down shirt and a shaved head). When that stuff came up people calmed down into standing around and bouncing a bit and chatting. Except for my fellow dancer, who was black, the only people I actually saw cheering any of the clubbier tunes were white or very lightskinned (I was in front of the dj booth while these tracks were played, and I was dancing but most people just watched me or the other guy).

Overall, the crowd was not particularly enthused, at peak moments more folks busting out and dancing (maybe up to 50% of the crowd I could see, more of that on the central dancefloor), or ladies here and there bending over and rubbing their butts back against the groins of their male partners (this move is sort of catlike and questing in a way –sending the butt backwards against a guy and then making kind of a scrubbing motion- and it’s kind of funny because sometimes the men just stand there at get scrubbed). I saw a few guys who looked more like dancers but they never busted out any moves where I could see it. Things heated up a bit during the regular-dancehall set. Their biggest response of cheers and gun-hands-in-the-air, other than to Prince Zimboo, were when Diplo played the big tunes –tunes currently big in every club and dance in Jamaica – in the expected sequence: Big R&B track, then Big Jamaican vocal on the same riddim, for example.

They people actually started thinning out by 3 (which is by no means when things stop at Quad). The place had gotten pretty packed but after that initial peak nobody seemed to be really into it, although they didn’t seem exactly hostile.

My take on it? Well, I was surprised to hear about the gig in the first place. Definitely impressed that Quad took on an adventurous booking, and unimpressed by the lack of initiative, energy and responsiveness from Major Lazer/Diplo. The dancehall stuff I could have heard anywhere in Kingston, the dubplates were probably expensive but not really impressing the crowd, and the club stuff did not connect for most people there although they didn't run completely away. It was ok, but not earthshaking. I’ll fess up, we left before the end, but the crowd had left the dancefloor already and I couldn’t see anything dramatic on the horizon that would have changed the scene.

If I had been part of Major Lazer – here’s what I would have done: Since the crowd really responded to the MCs, whatever my initial plan had been, I would have asked the slew of interesting MCs behind me (like Terry Lynn!) to work with me to make a live show, freestyle, more high energy, even winging it a bit just to throw some energy back at the crowd. People would have at least respected and enjoyed them putting on a show and committing a lot of energy to it. I’ve noticed that over and over again at Jamaican shows – when someone really gives it 100%, even if the audience doesn’t really like the music, they usually respect someone for trying. But this performance was lackadaisical to watch, and not that thrilling to listen to on a number of fronts, so it felt pretty flat.

This is getting long, so I’ll save my big-picture comments for the next post.

June has come, pleas and shouts go out

2009-06-06T20:27:00.000-07:00

It's already been 5 months? wait, what?

Only one month to go here in Jamaica and (like every other researcher I know in their last leg of fieldwork) I feel like I have only done 1/3 of what I wanted to do.. At least it's been really interesting. Dealing with all my notes is gonna be the hard part. Scratch that, transcribing a ton of interviews that are mostly in patois is gonna be the hard part. But so interesting!

Not much else to report except I'm (mostly) looking forward to returning to the Bay Area. I hope to line up some gigs.. I really have missed djing, especially djing for crowds who know & love what I do.. On that note, I plan to play in New York, and London, and possibly Europe over the next few months -any interested bookers please shout me. Also, anyone in Toronto who wants to book me, get in touch...I only played there once and it was a long long time ago. I hope to come through before the winter since I've seriously lost my edge after 6 months in the tropics.

I've tried to stay on top of new music while being here.. Hard for several reasons, but I still find myself stumbling across new tunes and producers, or new stuff from producers I already love.. I think it's a good time for music right now, in a scattered, let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom kind of way. Feel free to send me stuff, anyone!

took a breath

2009-05-18T07:18:00.000-07:00

I've been doing a lot of interviews lately, which are fascinating but haven't led to as much description lately.. But currently I'm sitting atop one of the hills ringing Kingston with an insane panorama of the city spread out before me, my breakfast remains and a pot of Blue Mountain coffee cooling next to me.. a moment of breath, some down time, perhaps a bit of perspective.

On Friday I gave a talk to the Cultural Studies grad students at UWI on one aspect of preliminary findings from my research. I did it from notes I organized on Powerpoint (nobody saw the powerpoint but me, I've found if I do it this way I don't read, I use the powerpoint outline to riff off of). Anyway it went well.. people were interested and seemed to get what I was going for.

One of the main questions I am kicking around these days is: What is the difference between funding music and making music? Or really, what comes out of the relationship between the people who pay for music and the people who create it (and those groups sometimes overlap)?

I'll write more about this next time, once I have pulled out more from my presentation.

I also took some pictures of Jamaican candies (that come from somewhere spanish-speaking). In doing so, I discovered my new Dj name.. maybe..

SUPER HIPER ACIDO MANGO BITCH

Fresh Friday Fashion

2009-05-02T02:35:00.000-07:00

Oh heavens what a scene. Mystic Plaza, Hagley Park road. check the styles!

part of my favorite crew of the night, I think. The Timeless dancers

Just love it. Dancing with a drink in hand..

hair/head styles up high

check the bow tie

again so happy! check the scarf on the guy behind him. I saw several like it.

more on my flickr page here

more pix from expo

2009-05-01T09:23:00.000-07:00

Just a couple more people from the IP expo last week

A designer and dub poet I met.

The sky over Emancipation park

IP expo part two

2009-04-30T08:56:00.000-07:00

the MC for the stage show was really funny. Mostly intentionally, and some unintentionally. Some of the humor was that kind that I don't really understand. Probably because I (as well as other audience members) was the butt of it. Making people uncomfortable can be funny - not that I was uncomfortable but I pretty much had no opinion on that aspect of the performance. It involved him going through the initially sparse audience and asking people's names, and then making fun of them. When he got to me, he asked my name, and on finding out my last name is Mann, he spent a minute or so pointing out that I was not a man, asking if my name was really Man, and asking if people said "hey, Man" to me. I said they did. that was that.

But to return to my topic - IP week concert highlights involving the MC were many. He definitely was committed to talking about IP and educating people on the need to register and claim their IP. His theme was --once you register, what happens? and he tried to start a catchphrase: "Ch-Ching!" (this refers to the sound of cash registers). Or later, he extended it, and said once you copyright it you become... Ch-Chingable. Now, the extension of this phrase and concept is interesting, because it involved the mental leap that IP proponents rely on which is assuming that creative works WILL be bought and WILL generate money for someone. This assumption is based in other assumptions:

1) that this is because creative works SHOULD generate money through their sale/license
a. because doing creative work is inherently valuable
-which ignores that some creative work may be crappy,
-let alone the idea --which many Jamaicans are comfortable with-- that some creative work is actively harmful to society
b. and maybe relies on the idea that good works WILL be in demand
-which assumes that a market will value works appropriately

So yeah, many, many artists I have spoken with make a critique of bad music which is popular these days, and they appear to mean bad in terms of content and the effect on public morals. In some other conversations, "bad"'s meaning has extended into poor music-making through being unoriginal or even sampling, but for the most part case people were talking about dirty, sexual, or occasionally violent lyrics. However, these are undeniably popular. Even though many people aren't paying for those dirty lyrics - at least not in terms of buying recordings (or they are buying bootleg DJ mixes of the hottest tunes), but they are definitely attending concerts, soundclashes and dances in order to enjoy them. So what is the market saying? In fact many musicians say that the market, or radios, or people, love this bad music..

Another interesting moment came from the MC commenting on a fashion show of clothing made out of garbage bags - where he said be sure to register your work, designers!

I don't think even in Jamaica fashion designs can be copyrighted, certainly in the US they are not.

He also told models that if they develop their own particular walk they should register that too. This - owning a walk- is also not possible, as far as I know.

But also, the re-appropriation of garbage bags as fashion was interesting. what exactly could be ownable there? Can we imagine an example where the garbage bag manufacturer might sue? If not, that's interesting too..

2009-04-27T20:29:00.000-07:00

I'll post more from Boasy when things are quieter. But here is some of the fashion from the JIPO IP Day event. The first is dub poet Akin, also member of The Uprising Band.

trying to get the magnificence of his hat. The outfit was made by Mama G.

I don't know what to say about this woman except I wish I had tried harder to talk to her. Note the large arm tattoo peeking out!

This is Delroy

he is fabulous

down to his shoes

Happy Intellectual Property Week.. part 1

2009-04-26T08:38:00.001-07:00

Last week was IP Week here in Jamaica. the Jamaica Intellectual Property Office sponsored a series of events in order to promote and educate people regarding intellectual property.

There were some interesting moments from the concert celebrating creativity.

The first moment was that the concert was kicked off by a performance of maroons, drumming and singing and dancing. Maroons are an important cultural group in Jamaica, who claim connection to African traditions, and who are present at many events where Jamaica presents itself to outsiders, but also appear (from Jamaicans, including Maroons, that I talk to) to represent something about Jamaican-ness to Jamaicans... although again relying heavily on a relationship to "Africa" or sometimes more specific regions and ethnic groups.

What interested me about the performance was that I wasn't sure what the "property" was, and there seemed to be different and interesting implications for the basis of ownership. In this celebration of creativity in the service of promoting IP, I could see Maroons as claiming a collective ownership in their drumming patterns, but that ownership was also complicated by claiming a relationship to Africa that means that Africans could also claim ownership. I know some Africans who are unhappy with members of the Diaspora claiming african-ness and feel that there is some appropriation going on.. although the appropriation can also be a sign of connection, I wondered whether it ever leads to disputes or criticism over the rights of people descended from africans to claim ownership (and what kind of ownership) over the concept african, or particular practices that africans currently engage in.

I watched an interaction between a Rasta man who gave his name as a name I know from Nigeria. A Nigerian guy next to me said "that's our name. that's a name form my country." His tone of voice was ambiguous. He didn't sound angry, he sounded interested, but also like he was educating either the rasta man or other listeners. the conversation didn't continue, but it made me think about disputes over naming. People name themselves, their bands, their art in order to reference or tribute others, but sometimes the others don't take it that way. (I remember a conversation with the director of the Alpha Boys School where he was angry about a German ska band who had "taken their name." The school is a historic engine of ska musicianship with scads of amazing artists coming from it. It's possible the ska band was linking itself to that tradition, paying tribute to the school, and trying to demonstrate and educate musical history - but the director saw it as unfairly trading on the school's reputation)

to go back to the drumming and singing and dancing. I'm not sure whether the law could have protected anything about the performance. Of course, a recording would have been protected in terms of sampling.. but in terms of ownership of the drum patterns, or even the songs (which consisted of short, repetitive call & response phrases, some of which I have heard before in other performances).. the ownership implied here is not really I think what copyright is well suited to protect. There is a really interesting branch of international law based more in human rights arguments aout "cultural survival" - but also in negotiations over folklore and "cultural heritage" - but the kinds of arguments and justifications used to justify access or exclusion seem rather different. Certainly the US-style argument about copyright "incentivizing creativity" seems ludicrous in the face of people arguing for a centuries-old tradition.

Boasy!

2009-04-23T19:56:00.000-07:00

So I finally got it together to properly take pictures at Boasy Tuesday. Boasy (or Boassi, or probably another spelling) comes from "boast." It has to do with showing off, flamboyance, fabulousness. Such is the order of this street dance, which occurs once a week, starting after midnight, in a certain street in Kingston, bracketed by speaker towers, pan chicken sellers, and a guy selling (be still my heart) sprats & festival!

I took a ton of pictures, here is round one:

The guy with the big hair is a dancer called CH-CHING-CHING

more styley style

2009-04-15T08:03:00.000-07:00

Million dollar smile! Short trousers..

cool embroidery on the shirt, the other side had a flower growing up the arm..

street fashion

2009-04-13T09:47:00.000-07:00

In the downtime of the Easter holiday, I thought I'd upload some pictures of street fashion. People, especially men, dress incredibly here. I haven't taken any of street dances yet because it's too dark and crowded, but it' s people at their most flamboyant.

That hasn't stopped me from taking a few more in public places though.

I'll start with someone I met at a studio outside Kingston. (I did ask permission for all these photos btw)

Small string bag

Big Cuffs!

I think the center of the star ring has a lion head engraved in it but I can't remember. I was so dazzled.

irritating to be so far away..

2009-04-04T10:05:00.000-07:00

I'm continually missing Nettle.* As in, I feel the absence of this group, sometimes, when my mind wanders. recordings don't provide enough for me to really feel them, somehow. Even though I've never seen them live. I'm glad to know they do what they do and track their ripples in the music world with interest, but sad that I haven't been in the right state to see them yet. Recently, Wayne made it happen at Brandeis.. and the review in Bostonist sparked some thoughts in me.

"Near the end of the performance, one song touched Bostonist in particular and proved to be a definitive moment for the band. Although the song isn't originally by Nettle, Moroccan group Nass el Ghiwane's "Mamhamouni" proved to be quite haunting in its beautiful execution."

I wish there was more attention to this point, rather rather than disclaiming it ("although..") --it's entirely meaningful that the song that touched the reviewer was not an "original" to the band. Especially considering the emphasis on collaboration across space and time, and embodiment of distance as well as communication and simultaneity in performance. But more broadly in terms of why or how things affect us emotionally, in the spaces beyond analysis, as well as in the pleasures of analysis of an experience. I would like to hear a lot more on how or why the song that was "not original" was at the same time the most memorable and affecting.

*I love nettles, by the way (spot the odd invocation of the South Bronx in that otherwise informative article!). They were very important to the street medics I worked with in NY who were also involved with herbal medicine and decentralizing medical knowledge. It's really true, if you grasp nettles firmly and with intent, they don't sting you. Then again, the stings, while painful, increase circulation, bring heat to your joints, increase flexibility. While discussions of the band's name focus on the irritant nature of nettles, this is one aspect of their character. Nettles are incredible good for you, high in tons of minerals, good for kidneys and bladder..lots of good stuff. Apparently it is like hemp (without the countercultural tee-heeing) in that it can be made into fiber, fabric, paper.. Once we medics drove miles out of the city to a river, picked nettles and watercress and made the most amazing pesto - I lived on it for a week.

mucking about in music - sampling, fluidity, copyright

2009-03-05T09:15:00.000-08:00

Simon has a nice piece in the guardian about sampling. I think he's partly talking about the way sampling plays people's memories and associations (which is sometimes how I think of DJing), of how it reveals and accentuates shared history, fantasy, and emotion. The importance of it for me right now is that he lays out many of the issues that get overlooked, glossed over, or ignored in discussions of "originality" and music making.

"Original" is a word I have become hyper-sensitive to in my research. It is so commonly used about music or musicians, and when people use it they activate a lot of legal, moral and aesthetic judgments --in some contexts literally activating law because being able to argue originality affects your ability to claim ownership of a copyright. However, "original" doesn't have a very meaningful definition, unless you define it in terms of your own assumptions and ignore everyone else's.

What I mean by that: any definition of "original" that could be considered objective, or at least really useful, applicable across culture, across subculture, across time, is mostly meaningless. So I could call a song "original" and you could point out all the ways that it is inspired by, refers to, draws on and engages with other songs, genres, styles, traditions. We would have to agree on some point at which all those dynamics don't matter any more. How little influence is little enough to call it original? How isolated is it from all other creative works? how isolated was the artist involved from all other artists or other people?

but at that point, what's the point of basing a definition in something which seems profoundly anti-social, in the sense that it denies the human connections which make up culture of which music is a part? If something is totally original, under that definition, it is basically irrelevant to human life.

So with Simon's sampling article, and in the comments, people differentiate sampling from other kinds of reference because sampling makes use of the actual sounds created - or as one person helpfully puts it, sampling re-uses the actual performance. Some argue this makes sampling less original. One way to read the article is that he is saying sampling is more original. Depending on what you look at, either or both are true. But how does this matter? If we agree that sampling is definitely different than re-using a score, or quoting the words, or replaying a melody, what does that difference matter? What does that difference mean?

US law and some international law places one kind of re-use in a different category than another. So in the US covering a song without permission is legal but sampling without permission is not. But many musicians (and I think even more non-musicians) who in other cases are perfectly willing to assume that laws are imperfect, and reflect power imbalances in society, here argue that that legal definition is meaningful morally, or even aesthetically. That one kind of re-use is more creative than another. That permission matters more in one case than another.

One focus of my work now, brought into sharp relief by the poverty and struggle faced by many Jamaicans, musicians or not, and the power relations between musicians, producers, engineers, labels, locals and foreigners... is trying to figure out when permission matters and for what purpose. (I'm not focusing so much issues of aesthetic value - althoug plenty of Jamaicans go there). The thing is, if people don't examine the premises and the purposes for which they are arguing for originality than the debate will go nowhere. Hence the circling around whether sampling is unique or not. In one way, as everything is unique to its historical moment, it is. In another way, of course it is not. but again, what does it matter?

I get a shout-out in the article (thanks!) - although I would like any academic quibble over his evaluation of the term "fluid" which he calls a euphemism. I would say I'm trying to avoid passing a judgment on how people deal with copyright law - because otherwise you get into some pretty tired tropes either about lawless artists and the serious-minded lawyers and business people who must wrangle them into ruliness, or even worse, in the Jamaican context, you get stuck with people tutting over those backward Jamaicans who don't understand the proper administration of creative product. Of course, all human negotiation with law (and any other social institution) is fluid, in the sense that it is dynamic, changing, flexible, and sometimes unpredictable. What I'm studying is how it is fluid in this context, and ..again..why it matters.

news making my point for me.

2009-02-09T10:32:00.000-08:00

So in the past couples of days entertainment news has kicked up two burning examples of one of the points I’m trying to make from my research.

Dave Kelly, producer of a riddim called the “Showtime” Riddim (also owner of madhouse records), is currently suing the (Jamaican) producer of the “Unfinished Business” riddim, which is a re-lick of the Showtime riddim.

and

Vybz Kartel yesterday received an e-mail from EMI Music Publishing stating that the song “Rampin Shop” infringes on the copyright license of Ne-Yo’s Miss Independent. The current version of Vybz Kartel and Spice’s Rampin Shop has been ordered to be destroyed and pulled from all radio stations, television stations and the Internet by EMI Music Publishing.

destroying music in order to save it, indeed. Let me assert, also that Rampin Shop is one of the biggest tunes in Jamaica. I also happen to think it is an amazing tune. Wherever it comes from, it’s one of my favorites as well.

*a quick break for definitions:

Riddim - the instrumental of a track:i.e. everything but the vocals. in Jamaica (as well as other places including sometimes US hip-hop) many people will “voice” i.e. put vocals over the same riddim.
Re-lick - I’m never entirely sure the difference between a re-lick, a refix, a remix, and a remake, but it means taking some aspects of a popular riddim and adding some other parts to it, often called “updating” it - a term which also has interesting implications about the value of music as it relates to its relevance or currency (rather than its status as a treasured object, holy relic or dare i say fetishized commodity)
Producer - a person who claims credit for, and sometimes owns copyright of, the instrumental version of a track, sometimes by synthesizing or using samples, sometimes by ‘causing the recording to happen’ including wrangling musicians or recordings of them into his vision (occasionally her?) vision.

Anyway, as dancehall-related news website Dancehall.mobi points out, “In Jamaican dancehall culture, “re-licking” a riddim has undoubtedly been a way of life. Almost monthly there seems to be a remake of a dancehall, reggae or rocksteady riddim that originated anywhere from just a few years ago to decades ago, often with no thought, care or compensation being made to its original composer or creator.”

Probably ending up in my dissertation, that one. Re-licking is a common practice and that it deserves to be taken seriously as a creative practices, and not tutted over as an example of lawless Jamaican savages (which is nearly the way that some higher-level gov’t and NGO people discuss the dancehall scene). As I was saying earlier in this blog, when people don’t obey a law that you know about that doesn’t mean they have no rules at all. And whatever the law is, it came from somewhere, just like the rules people ARE following came from somewhere.

Setting aside the question of whether “respect for law” is good in itself (which can be questioned on so many fronts - starting with a certain letter and moving on from there (more links to follow when my internet speeds up), why not examine where those different sets of rules come from? As it happens, copyright law is not universal, is not ahistorical, and is not without culture. Historians and cultural studies scholars and anthropologists (and indeed many others) would not be so silly as to assume that, but international legal and trade organizations seem to have problems with this concept. Since copyright laws have cultures embedded in them, it would be wise to examine what this means when they are enforced or ported onto different places (cultures, institutional settings, industries, practices etc) than those they came from.

Wayne sums up many of the problems and inconsistencies here. For not only is copyright law culturally bounded, even the people using copryight law on their behalf in this instance have broken it when it suited them. One thing is clear - when there is no money to be made (i.e. when the song is not a hit), people don’t sue. Obvious, maybe, but also a sign that the law is not understood by these players to be about rights per se, but about money. Or at least that people insist on some rights in one context, and on other rights in another..

Wayne’s discussion of these inconsistencies is illuminating, but don’t neglect the comments, where many thoughtful people weigh in. The only point I would add, as I did there, is that copyright law appears to work very well as a tool of the powerful against the weak. Property law, and indeed all law, has this characteristic. So calling for more law, even on the side you want to protect, can backfire. One of the things I am exploring is how to shift the actual power dynamic - can law actually help with this or must that shift be started elsewhere?

still here

2009-02-02T07:08:00.000-08:00

hello all

blog migration requires more bandwidth than I've got right now, figuratively and literally. Soon come.

Those of you in the Bay Area, especially all of you who always meant to come to Surya Dub, now is your last chance, at least for a while.. we're switching to a one-off format for the next little while. But we're going out with a bang: Dutch dubstepper (with a deep techno flavor) 2562 and the utterly way-out Gaslamp Killer! get your tickets in advance at www.going.com/suryadubfeb7

And me? I've landed in some interesting scenes here in Kingston so far. People have been very welcoming overall (barring a few folks who are in the "i'll get back to you" camp).. I've had some gigs, most courtesy of Mystic Urchin, and ran into musical fam in the form of Dj Livinspirits (someone fund his film quick quick!), and DJ Sawandi (props for playing Deadbeat as I walked in the door).. The Institute for Caribbean Studies is full of interesting, smart people, so my University experience is pretty much all good.

further updates as events warrant.

those of you here looking for my mixes, check the right sidebar - the closest to downtempo is probably the Perennial Philosophy radio show I did. Haven't made a dub mix in so long.... maybe one day!

Also, I made a mix for all my friends who have kids... for their kids.. but also for anyone who wants some jolly, bouncy hip-hop-reggae-breaky fun with lots of storytelling and some international flavors.. download the kids mix (re-upped! hosted! thanks C!)

In Kingston, settling in OK

2009-01-17T08:27:00.000-08:00

Hello y'all just a quick note to say I am in Kingston and doing great, and some preliminary musings..

I'm staying on UWI campus in my own little apartment which is great except for the lack of hot water. But I just boil up some in a kettle and use a bowl to take a sort of rinse-off shower, not too bad. I'm considering mosquito netting though.. every day I wake up with more bites. does mosquito netting really work?

This morning I walked up the road to the Papine market (open-air fruit & vegetables) to get some fresh stuff, so I'm liking the convenience. I have connected with some amazing faculty members and grad students so I'm also liking the intellectual atmosphere.

Planning to migrate and update the blog, but the free internet access (walkable from my apartment) is a bit spotty so I can't do any major stuff until I get a campus password.

Have already been out and about a bit. Music is everywhere. Every cab plays music, at night street parties pop up in all the neighborhoods. Even in the poorest parts of town I have been to, walking in the daytime with a friend, these huge towers of speakers loom on the sidewalk, waiting for their night-time activation.

Most memorable scene so far: BOASI TUESDAYS a street party in Ken Cot. I will post my write-up about it soon. oh wow. what a scene.
I also went to a very uptown club which was quite a scene as well in a totally different way.

Today I am going to Rebel Salute, a big roots reggae festival a few hours outside of Kingston. I'm rolling with a crew of people who are all part of and connected to the roots and old-time music scene and are really nice. The festival radio ads all say "No meat, No alcohol" so I think it will be pretty mellow and I look forward to some Ital food. There seems to be quite a revival scene here, and many of these fairly elderly performers tour like crazy.

Given that not everyone probably enjoys touring (something I plan to ask lots of older artists) I see why people might want copyright as their pension plan. This phrase has come up a lot in Jamaica.. However, I think royalties are a terrible pension plan. I need to get more statistics on this, but the main problem with the idea is that it seems like you need to already be famous and have a lot of recordings in order to rely on royalties as you get old.

If you are not already popular, how can you get your music out there? How can you get recorded, and how can you get distribution? Costs of recording may be lower now, but there's still expertise and time and equipment involved that someone has to pay for. You can either bargain with a label & distributor (who won't take the risk on unfamous you unless you give up a lot.. including probably your copyright) or you record it cheaply and/or give it away.

But people still want to rely on copyright to provide them with income in their old age. They feel they hav ea right to, despite whatever bargains they made when they were younger. This suggests to me something interesting about how people think about rights over music they create. Even though you can sell or bargain away your copyrights, people feel a lasting connection to their creative works, so that they feel wronged if those works become popular and they don't get a direct cut. Maybe that's true of anything - if you sell it to someone and that person sells it for more, are you wronged? Sometimes people think so..

Of course some people were ripped off, flimflammed, scammed & taken advantage of, too. No doubt about that. So some people want theirs back because they made a bad deal. I'm not sure how the law can help with that, because bad deals are still legal deals in most cases.. the law is not good at recognizing the power imbalances behind dealmaking (differences in information or social power that allow people to bargain effectively).

But even so, while it's true that the bargains you make starting out aren't the ones you would make later in life, it;s not necessarily true that it means you were ripped off when you made those bargains early on when the situation was different.

Given the amount of uncertainty around new artists and whether they will become more popular, I don't know how people make deals that will provide for them IF they become famous, but that will also allow them to get famous (through getting distribution). hm hm hm.

holidays and all

2008-12-26T07:26:00.000-08:00

It's been a hectic month - moving, preparing to leave the country, family stuff, Surya Dub, and other gigs.

But a quick update and cheers:

-big up BEAT RESEARCH for throwing a fantastic party. Hooray for DJ Flack and Wayne&wax who hosted a warm, lively crowd well into the wee hours. DJ Rizzla killed it on the early side, and then I played to the end to a super bouncy jolly crowd who were dancing from the first to the last record, and hollered for more when I stopped, so that the nice people at the club said "you can play another 10 minutes." A swell farewell to my US dj career for a while as I head overseas!

-big up Kid Kameleon, who is as always the greatest friend & partner anyone could have, deviser of awesome gifts, and who is starting a cool new project at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is full of awesome people (including the Sock Puppet Soundsystem's Jimmy Tones, one of my favorite people in the Bay)

-big up all the cool people & places who have hosted me this year - from Montreal to Jamaica Plain! The festivals and conferences like Mutek, PopMontreal, and the organizations who booked me like 826boston, and The Milky Way.

-big up the Bay Area, for being such a welcoming place for the past 5 years! shout outs to Club 6, the Surya Dub crew, 5lowershop, Havocsound, the readers of the SF Bay Guardian who voted me "best dance dj of 2008," big up the EFF, the Samuelson Law Technology & Public Policy Clinic, the Hip-Hop Scholars Working Group, the Berkeley Center for New Media, the Berkeley Art Museum (especially its awesome curator of digital art), Berkeley Students for Free Culture, and all the amazing people I have met --plus all the great places to eat: Papalote, Burma Superstar, Finfine, Tacubaya, Mission Pie, Bake Sale Betty, the Lakeshore Farmers' Market, Gioia Pizzeria, Guerilla Cafe and sigh.. Blue Bottle Coffee.

have a happy new year - I will be blogging from Jamaica so I'll be in touch one way or another.

year in technology and rights wrap-up (bye bye blogger)

2008-12-01T11:31:00.000-08:00

(CC party info here)

It's been a great year as a columnist for WireTap. I feel like the many things I am involved in as a scholar, a DJ, and a journalist have all come together and helped me be a better advocate for some of the more incremental changes I think are possible, but also carve out more space for broader & deeper changes. But the change I'm going to start with is a very narrow specific change, what with the personal being political.

I'm going to try to migrate this blog off of Blogger by the end of the year. The reasons why actually tie together a great many of my posts from the past year at WireTap.

Here's why I am likely leaving Blogger.
I think they have handled the recent wave - the one directed at blogger - of RIAA crackdowns against music bloggers terribly. Blogger and Google (Blogger's parent company) have not respected the work of the people who make use of their service, and have gone beyond compliance to leaving their users stranded without recourse, plagued by bad-faith, automatized copyright complaints that are sweeping through the music blog world.

In many cases Blogger has taken down content that was up legally, as well as content that potentially or actually violates copyright law. So even bloggers trying to comply with the law at its narrowest are caught up in this. Those who engage with a broader vision of fair use and public discourse have been affected, alongside all kinds of other people who post music online.
In most cases they have not given sufficient information for bloggers to file a counterclaim. Not only have some posts disappeared without warning, but the content accompanying the links in question have disappeared. The Terms of Service say that Blogger will make a "good faith effort" to let you know, but that's clearly not a strong commitment to your work, since recently "good faith" has sometimes meant no notification at all. So take that as a sign of whose good faith they need the most. This is shady behavior, and it disrespects all the labor bloggers bring to Blogger, and all the value they create.

Blogger is a free service, so bloggers don't contribute directly financially. However as we participate in blogging, Google/Blogger mines our data like mad, getting information from the millions of eyes, click-patterns, and other information-generating practices of people who engage with Blogger products. In addition Blogger benefits from the prestige and cultural cache of the people who use it and read it. the more people participate, the more important it is, and the more valuable.

As Fred pointed out, Google has in the past taken on the legal defense of what he calls "silicon valley" - i.e. the tech companies that profit from enhancing or enabling our social practices. Many people have seen this as proof that Google (or technology) inherently supports our social practices - which also have rights attached. Freedom of speech and association, criticism, commentary, education, protest.. all of these rights are implicated by the practices tracked and presented by blogs, and people exercising these rights make use of technology like google's products. But Google and other companies have gotten a bit too much credit for the practices of the people who use them. These companies are not inherently engines for rights and freedoms. Because of how they are designed, they are as much likely to be engines of control or at least of surveillance. How do you think they gather the information that they profit from while providing so much free stuff?

I'm not pointing out a conspiracy as much as a mismatch of goals and functions. Even when they market themselves as a kind of a public service, and even as they come to function as one, they are private companies with private interests, mostly governed by private law. We saw this develop in the Net Neutrality debate - when the FCC classified what is transmitted on the internet as "information" instead of "communication. This defined actions on the internet as private/commercial, and not matters of public concern.

As a private company, Google also always has had the option to bargain over what they allow. They bargain directly with the other large corporations with in-house legal teams, and "bargain" with us over our uses of their services. Bargaining with the public, is what you see in Terms of Service agreements. How fair a bargain it is depends on how free you think people are to switch to a new service. In some cases, like ISPs or airwaves we don't have many chocies because there literally aren't that many. But even when there are techincally choices, the reality limits our choices in a few ways.

Paradoxically, the more useful, fun, and popular a service is, the less ability you have to bargain with them since they start monopolizing everything of value (ease of use, connection to others, fun). I have written about how unfair this bargain can be with respect to our privacy. It's also true that it can be hard to understand what you are bargaining over while the services understand extremely well the value of what you are giving them.

But that private bargaining goes against the effect and significance of these services' success: if blogs are a major way that we make ourselves present in the world, then they are an aspect of public life, and not just a private bargain like you have with a storage company who holds your extra furniture.

If you recognize the public functions of blogs - then Blogger's Terms of Service agreement have us grant away a lot that we might feel are similar to free speech rights. For example, bloggers have no legal recourse over their own content that Blogger deletes when it takes down a post.

So we contract out of our rights to engage with culture online, to converse & communicate online, to create, manipulate and use content online. Even though in the end we may not have so many choices, and though we may think it's worth it in this context or that, ultimately the scope of our rights are reduced.

But is the choice that we are offered is in bad faith? Sometimes - especially when they don't take our rights seriously as a baseline, as Blogger has demonstrated. That said, Blogger is under pressure from other companies or organizations like the RIAA and the AP was probably underpressure from having its business model collapse. My point is that the choice over these issues is not ultimately, a private one.

Until now, our expanded activities (sometimes misunderstood as expanded rights) have been the byproduct of Google's corporate interest, but only the most naive would argue that our rights are the same as Google's private business interests. And now we are seeing the fallout - it's been worth it to Google to settle with publishing houses over Google book search (with the result that we have no precedent about the public's right to read books and essentially the creation of a "license to read"). It seems unlikely that they will stand up to content owners on the more creative legal challenges to the takedowns - but the least they could do is actually give bloggers the information to challenge, and it would be best if they figured out a way to preserve everything but the offending link (block the site from public view but notify the blogger about the specific link so they can deal with it)?

Anyway, even though I don't post much in the way of mp3s, I'm pretty disgusted by the whole thing and will likely be migrating this blog away as soon as I can, hoping that the market solution will work in the short term. But these issues aren't going to go away, and ultimately we need to rewrite copyright law (shrink or alter the derivative works rights, expand fair use for starters) to prevent it from being used this way, and also alter internet law so that our human and constitutional rights are seen as present on the network rather than contracted away to all the private companies we use to get access to the network.

One ray of light: Google also has made grandiose claims about its value to society and its moral commitments, which lets us in on another kind of bargaining that the public may have some power over - the bargaining over public perception of the company. Google should be embarassed about how badly they have dealt with bloggers. Perhaps if there is more public criticism they will come up with fairer practices in the short term that treat us with more respect.

2008-11-27T11:42:00.000-08:00

Tapping away before heading to a potluck meal with friends and burning-man-campmates. Now I really feel like a californian, since burning man is definitely one axis along which I organize friends. not the main axis, but still..

Surya Dub last week was fantastic. I love the Bersa Discos sound and their audience too - very compatible mix of people and a great vibe. Hopefully we can link up again in the future - the global dread bass sounds are pretty unstoppable! Some good pictures up here

two more gigs for me before the end of the year

I'm playing the Creative Commons holiday party, at 111 Minna, on December 18th. I assume they will announce it soon and I'll have more info. Kid Kameleon will also represent.

And after I go back East to see my fam, I will be lucky enough to drop in to Beat Research and throw down alongside Rizzla. Should be dance party madness in Central Square..

car recovered, music missing from the internets

2008-11-12T09:29:00.000-08:00

Police found our car dumped at the end of a very sad street in SF (lots of boarded-up public housing and a pretty bleak-looking orphanage). It wasn't damaged much except for the broken window and everything movable gone. So it's been in the shop to get tidied up and re-keyed, hopefully we get it by the end of the week. woo!

In other news - I've been hearing a lot about the crackdown on music blogs that post music or links to music. Palms Out - one of the giants in the new club music scene ("blog house") has had their remix Sundays targeted and taken down by Blogger. This sucks, for lots of reasons. I will be writing about it in my next column for wiretap.

If anyone has had this happen to them (links or blog posts taken down, with or without warning --ESPECIALLY if there is no notification and things just disappear), post your contact info in the comments or get in touch with me please.

My weekend

2008-11-06T22:57:00.001-08:00

after djing a party in a hay maze on Friday night... I'm speaking at this conference at the Berkeley Art Museum (which happens both Friday day and Saturday) :

and then, I'm going to the Brainfeeder showcase: Kode9, Gaslamp Killer, Flying Lotus, Daedalus, Ras G, Martyn, Samiyam and more..

the bay area is a fun place.

GO OUT AND VOTE

2008-11-02T12:30:00.000-08:00

going forward

2008-10-31T09:51:00.000-07:00

Researching living options in Kingston, JA (for next year) continues apace.. looks like UWI will be at least the first stop (cross your fingers). Starting to link up with some very interesting and thoughtful people in Jamaica whom I hope will be good starting points for my research.

Looking back: Surya Dub was a lovely crowd, as always. Umoja really brought it - amazing selection and classic tunes all over the place. Unfortunately, Kid K and I left to find our car was stolen. hassle beyond hassle. Luckily our computers weren't in it. 1 week later and it still hasn't turned up -we even drove around some of the more industrial parts of San Fran to see if it was dumped there.. no luck.

o well. onward and, eventually, upward!

who needs to say more? THIS SATURDAY

2008-10-23T21:26:00.000-07:00

Oh wow. just check this out - this, my peoples, is who we have coming to Surya Dub.

you know it's gonna blow up with an MC like that!

$5 adv tix at www.going.com/SuryaDubOct25

Special Guests:
UMOJA HiFi Soundsystem (SF/LA/TX)

The Umoja Hi-Fi unites to celebrate their 15th year as a DJ crew. Umoja Hi-Fi was co-founded by DJ Daz (Darren Blackburn) and DJ Tomas (Tomas Palermo) in 1993, and was soon joined by DJ Culture D (Damon Arnone), DJ Jun (Jun Antazo) and Cokni O' Dire (O Williams). The crew's last member, Washington DC's Stevie G (Steve Gamboa), joined in 2000. At breakout LA club nights like Umoja Jazz & Ragga Lounge, B-Side and Chocolate Bar, the Umoja DJs established an eclectic blueprint for the LA club sound, one that included diverse but connected sounds from dancehall and hip-hop, to electronic beats, rare groove and house that typified the name Umoja, a Swahili word for unity.

The various members remain active in San Francisco (Tomas) and Dallas (Cokni O' Dire) and LA (Daz, Culture D and Jun) and continue to rock key parties such as Speaker Boxx at Carbon, Uprock 77, Sunset Junction, Coachella, The Standard, Firecracker and Do-Over. Umoja DJs have also opened for and shared stages with Shabba Ranks, Supercat, David Bowie, Tricky, Jamiriquoi, The Pharcyde, Lennie Kravitz, Freestyle Fellowship and Blood & Fire Soundsystem.
The Umoja 15-Year Anniversary gig in San Francisco will be a groundbreaking gathering. It's only the second appearance in San Francisco in 10 years for the entire DJ crew, and the first to feature founding members Daz and Culture D. Additionally, MC/DJ Cokni O' Dire – a radio and club DJ with Brooklyn, Jamaican and London roots – will emcee in two separate rooms throughout the night and spin a vintage reggae set. DJ Jun and Tomas will perform a two-hour tag-team dubstep and global bass set in Surya Dub's basement chamber. Expect a big night, boom tunes and DJs who live for their art. Pure vibes!

Sub Hz Den
Dubstep, Dread Bass Breaks & D'n'B, Ragga
Residents:
Maneesh the Twister (Surya Dub, Dhamaal, Dub Mission - Best Club DJ SF Guardian) & Ripley (havoc sound, Surya Dub), Kid Kameleon (xlr8r, Surya Dub), Kush Arora (live Dubwize set - KAP, Surya Dub),
J. Rogers (Blipswitch, Surya Dub), Visuals by CONTACT (Surya Dub)

Inna Yard
Reggae, Dancehall, Bhangra, Global Beats
Residents
Jimmy Love (Non Stop Bhangra, Surya Dub), DJ Amar Electric vardo, Surya Dub)

Club Six - 60 6th street
Saturday, October 25th, 2008

More high points from Music Tech

2008-10-21T09:55:00.000-07:00

the highest of high points - I won a TERABYTE Hard Drive in the raffle! Woohoo! thanks Seagate! It looks awesome and will actually not fill up immediately (which is what happened the last time I bought an external hard-drive and then got ambitious with media). I actually didn't know that was one of the prizes, I was going for the Les Paul Gibson beauty that was also being auctioned off. But I can sure use the storage.. it will also be great to backup my field recordings when I go to Jamaica.

I met a ton of fascinating people, and had a lot of good conversations. Including a lot of introductions - "oh you should meet x, who I was just talking to, she does just what you are interested in." I also got to make the case, repeatedly, for the importance of ethnographers in the tech world, an idea to which people were surprisingly receptive. There was even another lurking ethnographer, whom I had known before only as an internet connection from my online web journal days (back before they called it a blog): big up tiara.org! 1995 internet peoples represent!

I was also well pleased to see Rickey Vincent there, moderating the Bay Area Funk panel. This man literally wrote the book on Funk. I know him from the UC Berkeley Hip-Hop Studies working group, which I haven't been involved with as much this semester, but I still have love for, and they are picking up and doing great things under revitalized leadership this year! I had to scale back because at the end of last year I suddenly found myself the sole remaining member of boalt.org and since I do think it is a valuable student group I thought I should devote myself to getting it back to being self-sustaining. This we are doing - lots of great people involved already, and some cool guest speakers and conferences coming up - more on that soon.

Another interesting theme of the conference was Obama support - a variety of T-shirts from simple to cute ("Barack you like a hurricane"), the extreme point made by Robert Kaye from Musicbrainz who had his head shaved except for a circle at the back on which was dyed the Obama symbol. I guess despite FISA, techies still like Obama. Not that I disagree - at this point I'm just happy that there is someone who believes that sciences, research and experts have a place in government.

There was a very legal-technical panel called "Ethics and Music Law" which I was hoping was going to be a discussion of some of the big conundrums around music and law, but then I saw that it was for Continuing Legal Education credit, which usually means that it's a series of specific questions about how to stay consistent with the Bar Associations ethical guidelines. And it was. Still kind of interesting in that it opened up for me some of the specifics about how musicians and lawyers work together, but not as interesting to me as a deeper discussion of the issues might be: like if the panel was about taking more seriously how different musicians' goals & practices can be from legalistic approaches to goals and practices - not just framed as a problem for lawyers to educate musicians to think & act right, but as a possible clash between law-mindedness and other ways of being.

more updates soon - short promo: Surya Dub Oct 25th! and I'm playing a party in a hay maze south of Half Moon Bay on Nov 7th!

(oh and I learned the truth about acorn)

Music Tech etctechera

2008-10-20T13:47:00.000-07:00

At the Music Technology Summit in SF. Some lively discussions - lots of interesting people here. Major Props to Rickey Vincent for stepping up to moderate the Bay Area Funk panel - good to see the UC Berkeley Hip-Hop Studies Working Group peoples representing.. and to see actual local music being featured at a technology conference.

Local-ness being something special that can't be digitally distributed - and also supporting connections to the local community outside of Silicon Valley.

I also got a thrill because Paris just walked by.. I remember listening to his stuff back in 1991.

more to report later, I'm sure.

out in the field.. in the studio..

2008-10-11T08:13:00.000-07:00

Last week I did my first four hours of studio observation for my pilot project. I'm researching musicians' practices in the process of music-making to see how they implicate copyright law. (I use the word "implicate" because I'm having a hard time finding a word that could suggest law affecting practices but also practices having implications for law, but it's that 2-way relationship that I'm most expecting to find and that I don't want to obscure or ignore.) Those of you who have followed along, especially last summer's 2 months in Jamaica, might remember what this is building up to - an ethnography of Jamaican musicians in the context of Jamaican and international copyright law.

The pilot project is on musicians in the Bay Area, to map out some of the ways copyright law comes up in the recording and rehearsing process. By trying to sketch out some of the different ways the law is visible among musicians in the process of creating, I hope to get a sort of vocabulary of things to look out for in the Jamaican music-making process. Ultimately it will all become part of a schema for a comparative study about copyright law and music-making. By focusing on the music-making aspect - the beginning of th creative process, I am going to focus on something that hasn't been so much studied in terms of copyright law's effects. It's easier to track how the law manages the products of music-making (music-recordings), and this has been done in various ways. But what actually happens with decisions in the music-making process? This is what I can't demonstrate in my panel today at the Free Culture Conference. I will be playing music recordings (the product) and talking about what they suggest about the process of making it. But I will be reallye excited to come back from my research with some discussions about music-making (and recording) that rely on evidence from observing the making itself.

Just like article writing, it's easy to see an end product as a series of triumphs and a logical progression of decisions: I thought this, I researched it, and I got a conclusion. Wa-hey! But the process is usually much messier and relies more on chance, setting, social connections and interactions, mistakes, battles, and compromises. I imagine that may be true for music-making as well. In both cases accounts of processes can tell us something important about the conditions of creation - which could help us improve those conditions if we thought it was important.

By the way, if anyone in the Bay Area is in a band, and wouldn't mind letting me observe a rehearsal or two or some studio recording sessions, leave me a note in the comments. I will keep identities confidential (if you want that can include no blogging at all about my experience, otherwise I might write but would keep the identity of the band/people anonymous).

Also if anyone has ideas for more funding for this work, I've gotten some, but living in Kingston is not cheap at all, so I am still working on more. Any sources, public and private, beyond the usual (SSRC, Fulbright, Wenner Gren Foundation, Soroptimist, NSF) much appreciated.

brief recap from Montreal

2008-10-08T09:36:00.000-07:00

Spent the past 6 days in Montreal at the Popmontreal festival/symposium. What a brilliant experience.

Highs:

the high attendance at all the panels I attended and was on
the mainly very good questions from the audience
the fact that the audience was mostly musicians & artists themselves (I've been to many panel discussions about music that is full of academics, or journalists & industry people, but this was really dominated by artists who wanted to talk about the big picture or their own experience or both - really great)
the incredibly high number of good-looking, stylish people everywhere, who were also really nice and engaged and not at all stuck-up
The Persuasions busting out some a capella on St. Laurent while waiting for their ride back to the hotel
the fact that the last day was all workshops - how to build a contact mic, how to circuit bend
the food & coffee
Rustie's set at the Rustie/Hudson Mohawke/Megasoid show. Big, bassy, eclectic - getting new hip-hop kids into dubstep, rather than seasoning dubstep with hip-hop
Hanging out with Geko Jones and Jah Dan - quality people (and thanks for the Dutty Artz shirt!)
an enormous awesome greek meal with Geko, JD, Kid K, and some cool peops from Ninja Tune.
an enormous awesome Indian takeaway with Off the International Radar and some good friends including my brilliant & talented host
the Baltimore Round Robin - an amazing concept well-executed and totally entertaining. A big warehouse room in which the BRR crew had set up around 5 small sound systems in a horseshoe shape around the edge, some with lights or projection screens, and each system had someone perform one song, and then boom the show would switch to another system. The audience would run across the space to be in front of the next performer. There were bands, spoken word, video art, performance art, electronic fun. I think Dan Deacon was the mastermind, or one of them. It was fantastic and hilarious.

Lows:

my brokeness preventing me from buying a lot of presents and things at the art/craft fair (which was adorable).
my brokeness preventing me from eating out quite as much as I liked
the fact that there were so many shows every night that I couldn't get to all of them
missing Sister Nancy because she began so much later than advertised that I had to run to the next show I wanted to catch

overall a fantastic time and I can't wait for next year! (will post more specific recaps soon)

Free Culture conference & party in Berkeley!

2008-10-07T13:49:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to say that UC Berkeley students have started their own chapter of Students for Free Culture, as of the end of last semester. And this semester --this week, in fact-- they have organized a Free Culture conference. It's on Berkeley campus, Saturday & Sunday Oct 11th and 12th, and it's pay-what-you-can.

Saturday, the first day has some great speakers from across the free culture spectrum. Including a panel on remix culture that I will be speaking on. and that night we are doing a Free Culture dance party at Blake's on Telegraph, with one of my favorite bloggers/thinkers/dance-craze-instigators Dj Lone Wolf! plus recently relocated DJ Refusenik, myself, and DJ Kid Kameleon. It starts early --8pm-- and is 18+ before 10pm so come on out and warm up your saturday night in style.

Sunday will be more workshop-oriented - come and get your wiki on, it will be created by the participants.

Na, wie Geht's - I mean SA VAH?

2008-10-01T19:00:00.000-07:00

***edited to add: the symposium sessions are all being filmed, and will be up on the website. nice one!***

In Montreal, having just arrived. Preparing for Popmontreal.

I'm doing a listening session, a panel, and a DJ gig, plus getting to hang out in Mile End and meet cool people all over the place.

If you are in or near Montreal, come out for some or all events!

Kid Kameleon is also in town, on two panels and moderating one, and djing as well, so there's really no excuse.

plus, The Bug & Warrior Queen play here tomorrow night!

I'm impressed with many of the panels here - the way the descriptions spell out some of the relevant issues, it seems really in touch with questions a lot of music-makers and music-lovers have. What I like best, reading it now, is all the ways the presentation of the issues separates out issues of power, issues of culture, issues of representation, issues of pleasure and issues of law - although they are all intertwined, solving a problem in terms of representation doesn't necessarily solve it in terms of any of the other things. It's nice to see that represented.

Coming from the legal world, where solving things for law (in terms of "making people's actions legal") is often the goal, even if that doesn't make everything fun, fair or good art.

Get ready!!

2008-09-25T10:28:00.001-07:00

Been lucky enough to spend some time with Warrior Queen & The Bug this week, after they landed in San Francisco for the first time. Quality peoples, with quality musical knowledge - and a proper appreciation for the best ice cream in town.

They head down to Los Angeles to blow up the Pure Filth party on Friday, and then back up here for Surya Dub - the super-low-price advance tickets are gone, but you can still get reduced price at the door before 11pm. this one is gonna be a scorcher! Maga Bo representing from Rio across the world, and Daneekah from the Coo-Yah reggae parties here too!

the new video for skeng just came out, and it's as raw as the Poison Dart one was slick (apologies for my blog's poor layout, you can also check it at this site:

get hyped up for some proper dread bass! Don't say we never do anything for you, after this show we are practically a public service for bay area dub needs.