Tuesday 29 November 2005 at 2:09 pm
just
in from Brasil. must gather my wits before i write anything, but until then i'm sure you are all wondering what
Johnny Marr's guitar chords do inside favela circuitry.
(Special delivery for the Leftenant)
[EDIT: kid606 just informed me that this track was on a baile funk cd-r of mine
that we were listening to on our US tour way back in summer 2003. my
bad -- i thought it was new when i found it (again) in Brasil!
Sometimes I wonder what's better, the music i remember or the music
i've forgotten. Anyhow---
MC
Saquinho - Montagem The Smith
Was
Morrisey forseeing the future of urban neoliberalism &
spatialized class warfare (suburb - ghetto - favela - center - enclave -
gated community: rich people living behind bars & the poor
without lockable doors) when he sang "And I've got no right
to take my place / with the human race"?
Was
Stephen Patrick Morrissey touching upon the legal structures
bulwarking postcolonial inequalities & resultant psychosexual
violence when he crooned "Oh ... sweetness, sweetness / I was
only joking when I said / by rights you should be bludgeoned in your
bed"?
Is
this what young MC Saquinho was vibing off? (of course not, but
seeing Brasil's vertiginous violence & wealth, and cultural
wealth, and generosity & fear, you start thinking that way
-- the 12-year-old
pointing a gun in your face and asking, quietly, for you to give him
your car is related to your insurance policy, each one makes the
other possible, and each side profits from this interpenetration;
the cocaine in your purse or wallet or nose pays for music gear -- funk
carioca -- and a hundred nasty things, new social handcuffs, but it
does not pay for filtered water or change below the surface, or even
a small sense of entitlement to eat at any of Sao Paolo's Japanese
restaurants, best Japanese food outside of Japan, plates of wow and
boxes of sake all so good you forget, gear up, slacks & skirts
& pheremones, taxi or drive to the next nightlife spot, through
& beyond the dawn; always a kind of killing in the pleasure money
provides.)
this
other track is off Funk Hit's [sic] a street bootleg I picked
up in Sao Paolo for under 2 €.
Os
Caçaderos - Besterinha
Wednesday 23 November 2005 at 12:00 am
The
constant gardener gardens constantly. He doesn't stop for sandwiches,
malaria, or tea.
After
the end of his life, when the decorum-marked days have unspooled and
the credits begin to roll, this is the song our gardener hears:
Ayub
Ogada - Kothbiro
(Constant Gardener soundtrack)
If
you enjoyed the (excellent) film or the (even better) book, then please go read
John
Le Carré's essay on Big Pharma,
(first published in The
Nation).
The brow furrows. The outlook darkens. Hope shoots up, cursing the
dealer's price. Will we ever develop enough wrinkles to fit our worries?
Monday 21 November 2005 at 12:00 am
Mudd
Up! C.E.O. and Head Janitor J.J. Clayton is not "here"
right now, but due to the magic of the "Timed Publish"
function Mudd Up! will keep on blogging, all by
itself.
so---
Rupture's
first visit to Brazil! right in time for early summer heat...
-
Nov
22 Sao Paolo. DJ /rupture vs. DJ Dolores. Vegas
Club
Dolores
is one of Brazil's most well-known international DJs, he does strong
work with north Brazilian musical traditions and
drum&bass/breakbeat. Forward-thinking, classy, rooted.
streamable DJ Dolores set from Womad 04 here.
Nov
23 Sao Paolo. Mutek event at SESC -- Free entrance round-table
discussion:
Murcof, DJ /rupture, Robert Henke (Monolake/ Ableton), and Pheek.
On electronic music, distribution, and independent- & net-labels.
Nov.
25 Belo Horizonte. Forum de Midias Expandidas, Casa do Condo. DJ
/rupture, Diplo, etc. & I think Dolores will be here too.
(Funny that Diplo & I first play together in South America.
Realized I've never heard Mr Wesley Pentz do a live DJ set, looking
forward.)
* * *
from
Dolores's 2005 album Aparelhagem:
DJ
Dolores - De Dar Dó
Liner
notes:
What is happening in this
city? The buildings collapse over our heads. Near the beach, starving
sharks wait for unsuspecting swimmers. Stastically, Recife is the
most violent city in Brazil. Yet
there are still people happily singing 'emboladas' on the suburban
buses.
The vocal style in
this track is inspired by the 'cantadores' (folk singers) who always
appear in duos, and often as groups of kids, trading funny and
satirical improvised lines on the buses. This particular style is
called 'embolada', it's a kind of Brazilian folk-rap with limited
melodies and lots of rhythm.
Friday 18 November 2005 at 2:02 pm
First
off, all you grimey New Yoke people know that Kode
9 makes his NYC debut
tonite, right? Just checkin.
Give
this man a subwoofer & anything's possible. I've been feeling he
and his label's take on the
dubstep thing, infusions of long-lined synthetic dread and dub poetry
courtesy of the Space Ape. Caught Kode DJing in London & it was
hot.
(I think those future rastas in Neuromancer were bumping Kode 9's Kingston alongside Augustus Pablo.)
*
*
*
No
Ying Yang tune or Likkle Jon!
OK.
If you took it seriously, the Ying-Ying Twins' 'Wait (the whisper
song)' was a highly offensive stalker/rapist anthem, but there are so
many other things to be taken seriously; the Twins shouldn't be high
on anyone's serious list. Wait also happened to be
amazing, pretty much transformed a brilliant gimmick – whispering
instead of shouting – into a genre – intimate club music.
Southern alchemicals!
So
yeah, their tune was all about dick, then David Banner's take on it
was all about, um, pleasuring his female partner, but Italee's reggae
jam is my favorite post-Wait whisperation, and she's pissed at the
idiot misogyny spinning round the Ying-Yang Twins. (Aren't they gay
partners anyhow? And isn't Jay-Z itching to come out of the closet if only
Beyoncé's lawyers would drop their legal threats?)
You'll
never get in my draws!, sings Italee. Noooo, Never!
Italee
– My Draw (concubine riddim)
The
Bug tipped me off to Concubine and a fresh batch of hot new
dancehall. The Concubine riddim suggests that cut-up X-Files
themesong whistles a few stations over are interfering with a
Middle-eastern telecom's darbouka-sampling adverts on Al-Jazeera satellite broadcasts.
The X-Files atmosphere of military-industrial complex coverups
& CIA
conspiracies alongside globally dislocated 'Arab' signifiers is
what the world sounds like right now.
Vybz
Kartel hems in his customary slack talk and goes full conscious on
the same riddim, posing a string of sharp rhetorical questions. Has
Welcome to Jamrock sparked a new wave of socially conscious
reggae? Vybz is exactingly political (never thought i'd write that),
Why Why's lyrics make Marley's Jamrock content seem
soggy, superficial.
Vybz
Kartel – Why, Why (concubine riddim)
why yuh no raise
granny pension?
why prime minister
retirement plan just get monetary extension?
...why dem don't blame
who build the gun then?
*
*
*
The
elements of this song go together like gasoline and peanut butter.
Wayne Marshall's Times falls into the 'Tall Up Tall Up'
category of reference-scrambling inexplicable/hilarious dancehall.
(Is this what drunks when you use happens in the studio drug then?)
Plus, more conscious lyrics.
Wayne
Marshall – Times
Wherein Wayne asks: will
this be a never-ending storm?
Whereupon
Jace wonders: what will the other
Wayne Marshall opine?
Speaking
of never-ending storms and the spreading realization that Babylon is
winning big time, little
Guantanamos everywhere; a war against terror which embraces
violent extremism means that language and semantic reality are the
first things to go, hence the need for poets.
Odalisqued
& I are gonna start up a course in Non-Denominational Approaches to
Eschatology. Free enrollment for anyone with pain! To sign up,
bury a tooth in your backyard.
"But
I don't have a backyard!"
*
* *
One
of these tunes is not like the other.
Wiley
– Sidewinder refix
courtesy
of Rich c90! This one's great, Wiley murders it, starts off acting
like a (vaguely) normal MC then discards all pretense of rhyme scene
and normative meter to talk about how he is different from you b/c
nobody wants to kill you, etc. then the catchy sung chorus swoops in.
Man.
Trust me, just be
real to yourself, you will live much longer. Your life's different,
nobody wants to kill you, it's ok for you to mingle. I'm not like
you, you're not like me... I like mind games.
*
* *
next
week Brazil (Nov 20: 'National Black Consciousness Day'!!),
9/11 Trivial Pursuit cards amidst club flyers, & some klezmer from a
Bristolean cassette...
Thursday 17 November 2005 at 03:01 am
The
book I am currently reading which least resembles the other books I
am currently reading is without a doubt Ted Chiang's Stories of
Your Life and Others. Science fiction but it feels like
reading Borges or having someone patiently explaing a complex physics
concept, unraveling the knots in your mind so you understand -- then
marvel at -- the explanation. Yet when they leave you find that
you can't explain it to anybody else.
The
twining of fantastically logical concepts and emotional sensitivity
urge his best plots forward. Every story I've read so far ends with a
quiet
revelatory firework, that precise slipknot of surprise short story
writers grasp for, usually missing. Formally elegant and steely. And
all while stuff is happening which could only happen in fiction; he
runs with the possibilities offered by the form.
Science fiction but instead of writing about what the aliens look
like or do or whatever, Chiang is concerned with -- for example --
how learning an alien language & internalizing the worldview it
presupposes affects a linguist's grasp of time, teleology, and her
relationship with her daughter.
I remember when you'll be
a month old, and I'll stumble out of bed to give you your 2:00 AM
feeding. ... The word "infant" is derived from the Latin
word for "unable to speak" but you'll be perfectly capable
of saying one thing: "I suffer," and you'll do it
tirelessly and without hesitation. I have to admire your utter
commitment to that statement; when you cry you'll become outrage
incarnate, every fiber of your body employed in expressing that
emotion. It's funny: when you're tranquil, you will seem to radiate
light, and if someone were to paint a portrait of you like that, I'd
insist that they include the halo. But when you're unhappy, you will
become a klaxon, built for radiating sound; a portrait of you then
could simply be a fire alarm bell.
At that stage of your
life, there'll be no past or future for you; until I give you my
breast, you'll have no memory of contentment in the past nor
expectation of relief in the future. Once you begin nursing,
everything will reverse, and all will be right with the world. NOW is
the only moment you'll perceive; you'll live in the presence tense.
In many ways, it's an enviable state. ... Freedom isn't an
illusion; it's perfectly real in the context of sequential
consciousness. Within the context of simultaneously consciousness,
freedom is not meaningful, but neither is coercion; it's simply a
different context, no more or less valid that the other.
Of
course, quoting Chiang isn't so useful since it is his form and flow
and the meat of his ideas that we feast on; the more of it you can
hold in your head at once the better it gets. As of 2002, he earned a
living writing technical documentation for computer programmers. His
published ouevre consists of 8 short stories.
Here's one of them:
Division
by Zero.
*
So,--
Is the rabbit hungry (a pet presumably, or maybe a lab animal), or it
is time for people to carve up the dead animal on their dinner plates?
Saturday 12 November 2005 at 12:38 am
Here's an exorcism I performed on David
Brooks' New York Times editorial
(NYT pay-service version here).
(Mr Brooks' piece on French riots and American
culture has been making
the
rounds.)
Gangsta, in French
By
DAVID
BROOKS
After 9/11, everyone knew
there was going to be a debate about the future of business
interests. We just didn't know the debate would be between the
Republican party and laissez-faire market ideology.
Yet those seem to be the lifestyle
alternatives that are really on offer for rich young Christian men in
places like France, Britain and maybe even the world beyond. A few
highly alienated and fanatical young men commit themselves to the
radical business interests of the Republican party. But most find
their self-respect by embracing the poses and worldview of American
capitalism and multinationals.
One of the striking things about the
scenes from France is how thoroughly the executives have assimilated
capitalism and corporate culture. It's not only that they use the
same hand gestures as American businessmen, wear the same clothes and
neckties, play the same video games, and sit with the same sorts of
car stereos at full blast. It's that they seem to have adopted the
same poses of exaggerated manhood, the same attitudes about women,
money and the police. They seem to have replicated the same sort of
corporate culture, the same romantic visions of gunslinging brokerage
deals.
In a globalized age it's perhaps
inevitable that the culture of the free market gets globalized, too.
What we are seeing is what Mark Lilla of the University of Chicago
calls a universal culture of the wealthy of the earth. The images,
modes and attitudes of capitalism and multinational corporations are
so powerful they are having a hegemonic effect across the globe.
American middle-class life, at
least as portrayed in mainstream press, now defines for the young,
rich and disaffected what it means to be well-to-do. Corporate
etiquette is the most compelling model for how to maintain that
oppression. If you want to stand up and fight The Man, the Notorious
B.I.G. shows the way. He was shot dead several years ago and is now
remembered mostly for his style.
This is a reminder that for all the
talk about American countercultural hegemony, American normalized
hegemony has always been more powerful. America's rebellious
normalized heroes exert more influence around the world than the
dirty establishment images from Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G. This
is our final insult to the anti-Americans; we allow poor blacks to
define how to be anti-American, and then kill them, blaming it on
their artistic choices.
When laissez-faire economics first came
to France, American consultants dominated the scene, but now the
suburban immigrant neighborhoods have produced their own stars in
their own language. French consultants today are like the American
corporate advisors of about five or 10 years ago, when it was more
common to fantasize about cop killings and risk arbitrage.
Most of the memos can't be reprinted in
this newspaper, but you can get a sense of them from, say, a snippet
from an interoffice email from Bitter Ministry: "Another woman
takes her beating./This time she's called Brigitte./She's the wife of
a cop. " Or this from Mr. R's celebrated quarterly newsletter
"PolitiKment IncorreKt": "France is a bitch. ... Don't
forget to [deleted] her to exhaustion. You have to treat her like a
whore, man! ... My associates and my partners, our playground is the
street with the most lawyers!"
The French corporate pose is
familiar. It is built around the image of the strong, violent
hypermacho male, who loudly asserts his dominance and demands
respect. The businessman is a brave, normalized criminal. He has
nothing but rage for the institutions of society: the state and the
schools. He shows his own cruel strength by dominating women. It is
perhaps no accident that until the riots, the most overlooked story
coming out of these neighborhoods was the rise of astonishing and
horrific multinational corporations.
In other words, what we are seeing
in France will be familiar to anyone who watched corporate culture
rise in this country. You take a population of young men who benefit
from racism and who face limitless opportunities, and you present
them with a culture that encourages them to become exactly the sort
of people the bigots think they are - and you call this proud
self-assertion and empowerment. You take men who are already
well-treated by the police because of their color, and you tolerate
and encourage white-collar criminality so they will be really
promoted and rewarded. You tell them to maintain oppression by
embracing selfishness.
In America, at least, multinational
corporations are a sort of a game. The corporate man ends up in
wealthy suburbs or gated communities. But in France, the barriers to
ascent are higher. The prejudice is more impermeable, and the labor
markets are more rigid. There really is no escape.
Friday 11 November 2005 at 12:48 pm
To
tell you the truth, I would read (more) music blogs if, instead of
people talking about records, it was records talking about people.
Who owned them, who listened to them, where they'd traveled, been
played, forgotten, loved, worn out. The dances they saw and the
disappointments they chaperoned.
) ) )
Senegal's
first proper pop stars – El Hadji Faye and Youssou N'Dour –
fronted a band called Étoile de Dakar in the late 70s. Griot
crooning, talking drums, guitar lines that pick and nimble their way
down the path, and horns which shine everything. And on this
particularly recording at least -- funny noisemaking whistles
drenched in reverb, and odd tremelo chords that sound like that 70s
should.
Étoile
de Dakar – Badou N'Diaye
This
is one of my few monophonic vinyl records. Stereo is great but mono
is great too.
Étoile
lasted for 2 years. This was recorded near the end of their career,
before the singers branched into competing groups – N'Dour &
his Super Étoile band continue strong, unstoppable
international superstars: one of the few World Music artists to
survive Peter Gabriel's soft-bomb reverb attack!
) ) )
Unexpectedness
in genre opens doors. We can then walk through these doors.
Rocket-powered heat-seeker Nick
Catchdubs tipped me off to this one
a few weeks back, buyable on a
12" called 'Reggaeton Exclusives And More'. Guess this slots
into the 'And More' category. Tego mumbles "anga"compatible rhymes over
a funky
'live' precussion workout, a sound that's usually confined to
'interlude' status on
reggaeton albums. (The vinyl also has a Bookshelf riddim blend,
Bookshelf being one of the highlight reggae riddims of 1998, Mr Vegas'
"Jack it Up" a favorite 'round here.)
Tego
Calderon - Trangalanga (remix)
) ) )
People
outside the U.S. making orientalist hiphop beats aren't trying to
sound fake eastern, they are trying to sound like Americans.
Ale
Dee - C'que Jveux (French-Canadian, mp3 courtesy Seb Catlitter. i can almost ID the sample)
...But
in the meantime the Americans are taking Asian fetishism in pop music
to a whole new level. Cut to Margaret Cho on
Gwen Stefani's cultural props:
I
like Gwen Stefani, she's alright. She is very stylish and has a nice
voice and a really flat stomach. She is a rock star, and quite good
at it. I am always impressed by her platinum hair and her incredibly
organized steamer trunks. She keeps all her wristbands in separate
zip-lock bags. I too have lots of nice things, but they are all
getting moth eaten and mashed together in a pile on my closet
floor... Now she has 4 things all together, the Harajuku Girls. I
want to like them, and I want to think they are great, but I am not
sure if I can. I mean, racial stereotypes are really cute sometimes,
and I don't want to bum everyone out by pointing out the minstrel
show.
Thursday 10 November 2005 at 4:35 pm
tomorrow
mp3s... (Tego, Etoile de Dakar, etc...)
west iberian party people: this
Saturday I'll be playing @ Lisbon's Numero
festival.
(Lest
residents of Portugal's former colony feel left-out, week after next
I'll be performing in Brazil. details later.)
in
other musicky news, Ghislain
Poirier's
2nd album on Chocolate Industries comes out next week-- yeah! Ghis is
family & big talent.
Buy Poirier's Breakupdown (or at least feel vaguely guilty
for downloading it), play his tunes xtra loud, interview him, put him on the cover of your
magazine, treat him to fresh bagels and apple pie, catch him opening
for U.K. midget-rights activist Lady Sov on her debut North American tour later
this month.
ok, enough imperatives. tunes soon come.
Wednesday 09 November 2005 at 12:31 pm
** Mudd
Up! PERSONALS **
A
KNOCK OUT
Pretty blond, great figure, sensuous, sincere, fun,
looking for the love of my life: a tall, established looter, 48 to
58.
SULTRY
KNIGHT
Willing
to stay up past curfew? Tall, dark, and handsome Frenchman
believes that 'ethnic friction' is the way forward. Camus, Goldman,
Bakunin, and... you?
A
RARE FIND
28, 5'3'', Continental attractive intelligent highly
educated elegant kind fun playful emotionally secure female into
travel theater music & art, in search of a long term meaningful
relationship with European rioter.
46
YEAR OLD
Teacher of autistic children, seeks independent woman
for molotov cocktails and mutual joy.
A
BRAINY BEAUTY
Writer/artist/Fulbright Scholar, slim, gym-fit
and shapely works in belly of Manhattan media beast. Sweet, earthy,
free-spirited iconoclast (azure eyes, long locks, leftist politics)
seeks handsome, poor streetfighter.
SPORTY
HEPBURNE
SPW,
33, 5’ 9”, attractive, useful and athletic. Actively involved in
her psychological and spiritual evolution seeks a LTR with a man,
38-48, who has the capacity for genuine anarchy. Must not shy away
from intimacy.
Monday 07 November 2005 at 6:28 pm
The tender pragmatisms of
flesh have poetries no enigma, human or divine, can diminish or
demean -- indeed, it can only cause them, and then walk out.
- John
Fowles "The Enigma"
(r.i.p.
Monday 07 November 2005 at 1:21 pm
back,
briefly;
i'm
gonna write on losing everything & finding sweet African vinyl as soon as i can but until then--
20
minutes of dubstep pressure by Atki2: Atki2
Sept. Session.
It's
at the bottom of the interview. Atki2 formed part of Anarchic
Harddrive and so his take on the grime thing is informed by breakcore hotflashes as well as dubstep's massive sub-bass &
spatialization.
http://www.render-all.co.uk/main.htm#
Look
for Sara Tagariello, it's the 3rd video, one titled Humanity Lost.
A
naked guy in the woods, on-point edits, stillness to swiftcuts. Enjoy!
Them i'm gonna sue Tagariello's ass for using my tracks without
permission, then Lou Reed's gonna sue my ass for using the VU without
permission, then the Armenian duduk players are gonna contact the
Barcelona-branch of the Ukrainian mafia & things might get ugly.
But the piece, the piece is nice.
Sunday 06 November 2005 at 04:04 am
*
a
good friend of mine who isn't white and isn't straight is making a
list of all the ways she isn't free. i have no idea what form the
list takes or how long it is or if she's even started writing it at
all
Wednesday 02 November 2005 at 12:35 am
...its
all theoretical unless we take it to the street.
/rupture
live dates
wed Nov. 2 Bristol. Timbuk2
tonite i'll be DJing with 0=0 & my man Atki2 w/ MC!
thurs
Nov. 3 - Amsterdam. Paradiso
not
sure what's going on, i'll be in the 2nd room around 11:30.
fri
Nov. 4 - London. Overkill @ Electrowerkz
mad punky party. Endless
performers, several with guitars.
i'm looking fwd to Modeselektor, V/Vm, Shitmat, Scotch
Egg, Cek, etc.... i'll do an hour set around 1:30 or 2, after grindcore band Mistress!
+ debut
performance for Mark Clifford’s (Seefeel, Disjecta, Cocteau Twins)
new band Cek. innerestin'....
sat
Nov. 5 - Sheffield. The Runaway Girl
limited to 120 tix = come early + hot n sweaty + bonfire night. the way we like it.
