mudd up!

OiNK is dead. In the past week, I was invited to 2 post-OiNK sites (by an altruistic stranger and the same woman who gave me my first taste of pig). Both sites are quite good. Together they have almost as many members as OiNK did, and they’re only a few months old. You can change the skin/stylesheet of each one to an ‘OiNK’ setting, so it looks almost exactly like our departed friend.

Cut off the head, several grow back.

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I’m playing NYC’s DubWar party tonite, with special guest Jah Dan blessing the mic. Details and ticket giveway over at Dutty Artz.

Matt Shadetek & I sat down and looked at our release schedule for 2008 - it is beastly. It is craziness. We are being topsecret w/ power moves for the moment but soon we’ll turn it on and it won’t stop. the label has a myspace, the iceberg’s tip.

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Alan blogs. And it’s great. sorry, gringos.

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Greg = gringo, but when he writes about funk carioca, he talks about contracts, which is wonderful. His post led me to Flamin Hotz, who talks about contracts, which is wonderful. The Flamin Hotz post is the best online overview i’ve seen of funk economics; before you can even talk about international exploitation/interaction, there’s a ton of Brasil-side madness to contend with:

When the artist in the favela sells the song, the contracts stipulates that he is signing over all of his rights to the music for a one time fee (roughly $1000 reais or approximately $500), the artist will not be allowed to play the song live any more, and that the artist will get no credit for the musical process that was put into the song. In the Baile Funk scene this is just business as usual and has created a huge divide in who actually is getting money from CD sales, radio play, and international licensing. Our goal with our international release is to combat this system where money is only filtering to the top of the food chain.

This touches on what happens in many musical ecosystems across the planet. Most of the classic reggae tunes, for example, are owned and controlled by the studio bosses, so when labels like Soul Jazz license material the studio bosses are the ones they must legally deal with — the ones who get paid. For example, if you want to put Sister Nancy’s classic anthem ‘Bam Bam’ on a compilation, you do not need her permission and she does not receive any money from it, even though she wrote and performed the lyrics.

The music business is a kind of pathetic vivid nightmare, run by greedy people, dilettantes, and people who don’t like music.

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Maga Bo knows incredible amounts about Brazilian music. A comprehensive radio show/podcast he’s done for years is now archived at Spannered.

France’s Recmag just upped a video interview with Andy & I from our show in Feyzin. “Moment unique entre improvisation bruitiste et dancefloor tendance noise avec le guitariste des légendaires The Ex, Andy Moor et le producteur, maître du mix, DJ Rupture.”

We produced another very limited-edition CD, Live in France, to sell on this recent tour. This one contains highlights from several France shows we did last March. A few copies remain.

50 minutes long. Live improvisation for guitar+turntables. For a preview, check this youtube piece. Overall, the sounds are more beat-oriented than our first tour CD.

FYI, Live In France is a mass-produced, labeled CD-r in a slimline case, fruit of one of the many services offered by Chinatown’s graymarket economy.

it’s only available here (via PayPal) & at Ex shows. ‘xclusive!

U.S. people - $7.50 which includes shipping

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rest of the world - $9.50 which includes shipping

Before we get to Fiddy, some crate-digging.

a lot of heads know about this record. It’s been sampled quite a bit in underground circles, most recently by Shackleton. In our post 9-11 world, one can’t imagine a major label issuing a (great) compilation called Palestine: Music of the Intifada.

Yet in 1989 that’s exactly with Virgin Records did.

Liner notes are informative. “Not only does [the compilation] summarise Palestinian aspirations but also it reflects the radical social changes that are being brought about by the daily struggle against occupation.”

Sabaya Al Intifada - Min Al Mukhasyyam Toulad Al Ru’aya

They translate the song title & explain: “From The Camp Is Born The Vision is an example of the rapidly changing position of women in society. The name of the group, ‘Sabaya al Intifada’ or ‘Young Women of the Uprising,’ for example, reflects the breakdown of restriction of women from the public life. The singing is itself a challenge, as the traditional Mowwal (or introductory solo vocals) is, for the first time, sung by a woman.”

Changing demands of geopolitical reality echo audibly in music.

“I love New York,” says my Brazilian friend as we drive into a promising and justifiably paranoid Sao Paolo night, “but every time I’m there I feel how money is strong. I come home thinking: I need to make more money.”

Right now in New York City, you hear the ominous snare-crack and tech-steppy dystopian synth melody of 50 Cent’s I Get Money booming out of cars, shops, cranked-up portable radios. “I get money” goes the main sample of Milk Dee, “money I got…” Even its percussion-only elements reference & reinforce the main theme: the beat is sampled from Cassidy’s I’m a Hustla. A few months ago the streets here were bumping with Swizz Beatz’ Money in the Bank and Straight to the Bank from the same 50 album.

It makes sense that the current wave of New York rap hits are often about money, about banks. This is capitalism music. It’s difficult to live well in this city unless you have lots of money in the bank. Billowy folds of the European social state — free health care, reasonable rents, unemployment benefits, quality espresso for 1 dollar! — are starkly absent. These songs come from the speakers and you think: that’s what I’m thinking about too, money, how to get it… The geopolitcal reality of this compressed town-nation of strivers seeps into the music, how could it not?

Brooklyn is all ethnic-enclaves (and/or class-enclaves) but in public and semi-private Manhattan the boundaries collapse: rich people may prefer that poor ones remain invisible (Mexican immigrants hidden away in their restaurants’ kitchens, the TV fantasy of a nation of uppermiddleclass, and on) but wealth, especially in an overcrowded walkerly city like Manhattan, is not only visible but it always seems to be just… almost… within reach.

The 50 song in particular is clattery, edgey. A queasy synth tone makes an atonal slide through the track every 32 bars or so. He’s bragging but the thing feels unsettled. (mo’ money mo’ problems; Connecticut tax laws can be so ornate) On some Hot97 mix shows the DJ will cut up the intro — a minute or two of “I get money money I got” and spare aggressive beat - extended, doubled up, and reconfigured under the DJ’s fader. Its sound and meaning amplified by one of the East Coast’s most power radio transmitters.

50’s popularity isn’t just an East Coast thing, or a US thing either. I’ve seen kids rocking his shirts and sidewalk businessmen hawking his albums in a dozen countries, at least…

Google ‘I get money’ and you find Fiddy. Incidentally, at the Harvard Free Culture Conference I spoke at a few months ago, they offered free bottles of Glacéau, 50 Cent’s bottled water business which he raps about in the first verse of I Get Money and sold to Coca-Cola for 4.1 billion dollars, netting roughly 100 million from his 10% share. A billion dollars for what!? How!? Curtis elucidates-

I take quarter water sold it in bottles for 2 bucks / Coca-Cola came and bought it for billions, what the f**k?

Real talk. C.R.E.A.M. talk. New York wallet-eaters stand up.