old Mudd!  

GHOSTS IN THE TUNNEL / Grime, Dubstep, Voice

Thursday 28 September 2006 at 6:36 pm

Grime dying? The patient is fevered but that's not sickness. I understand the journalistic impulse to impose a traditional anthropomorphic narrative arc (birth, growth, stability, infirmity, death) on a loose collection of artists, singles, albums, radio broadcasts, messageboard talk, producers, fans, myspace digigraffiti, music videos, etc -- but writing off grime (or giving it the usual flagrant critical silence while championing dubstep, a similar genre whose most immediate difference from grime is the lack of vocalists) ignores the fact the Wiley and a handful of other MCs are producing some of their best work and bursting out with funky, fractured subjectivity as their rhymes get tighter, weirder, more personal.

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Wiley in particular often divulges too much information, giving us an uncomfortable, wonderful amount of detail. On the intro to the Tunnel Vision 2 mixtape he goes "i want to big up all my studio engineers... hold tight all the 10-pound an hour massive, the 20-pound an hour massive, the 30-pound an hour massive for certain guys. Cause, you know, it ranges."

Boy Better Know & co. have begun releasing these mixtapes for free and getting the CD versions in the shops. You can buy Tunnel Vision 1 here, or snag mp3s here. TV 2, wherein Wiley discusses the salary range of his various studio assistants, can be got here with a bit of reply-registration action. OK, back to bizness--

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Examine grime vs. dubstep in terms of how they treat the black voice. Grime has MCs spitting their own lyrics -- often angry, yes, but also often vulnerable, introspective, playful. Dubstep, on the other hand, devoices black subjectivity, swapping the microphone's live uncontrollability for the sample's prerecorded rigor-mortis. If you hear a voice in dubstep, it's usually sampled, a fragment, an emptied signifier of 'blackness' or 'dread' or or ethnic otherness (same goes for the oriental samples). Distanced in time and dislocated. Whereas the voices in grime are so up-to-date you have to live in London or scan the message boards just to decipher what's going on that week. Check Wayne & Woebot's comment conversation for a brief forray into similar territory.

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the Digital Mystikz anthem 'Earth a Run Red' snatches that snippet of Ritchie Spice's roots classic, stripping away the rest of his conscious poetry. The second Dub Police 12" contains a handful of standard dancehall hype samples -- all serving as surface gloss to contextualize it as dub, soundclash, virile macho, whatever fantasy patois boasts alight in the collective imagination of their target audience. I could go on; these are just 2 examples among many. There is no agency, the black voice is used as spice... These structural cliches bore me in breakcore, and they bore in me dubstep. Wiley isn't boring, even when he's examining boredom (ennui, wot u call it?)

Wiley - A Time and a Place (Tunnel Vision 2)

Yeah, the cynic in me says: of course, when futuristic black thugs start saying stuff and self-organizing (Boy Better Know et al), that's precisely the moment when overground critical discussion surrounding the scene loses interest. Looked at another way, it's easier to write on instrumental music than to write about music with words coming from a place you don't necessarily understand or relate to or want to recognize.

An instrumental song contains an abstract consciousness, but a beat with an MC on it works more like a novel -- if you pay attention to the words and the person is spitting something of substance, it's a full-on immersion in someone´s mindset as it stylizes, flows, rhymes instelf into existence. And a ground-up genre like grime offers none of the usual content filters that come with major label rap -- this artistic consciousness $hit enters the ear undiluted. "Grime will not die even if I die" announces a messianic Wiley on Tunnel Vision 2, "hold tight the nonbelievers."

Devlin is young angry and white, and homophobic, and 17, so his lyrical-spiritual bandwidth isn't nearly as wide as grime's elders, but he does the war / street reality thing nimbly, aided here by the pathos of Wiley's synthetic beat.

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remember the 'Hater' song by Various Productions that i posted here? A few months after I upped it the clever lads were signed to XL. Wiley must have liked 'Hater' as much as I did: he jacked the beat for a 100% free Logan Sama mixtape, War Report, downloadable here. or here.

Various' disembodied female voice, here truncated, only announces "I'm a sinner" -- doing to the original song what dubstep and breakcore do to reggae voices, cut out the body, leave a trace in hopes that the aura remains. As memes, ghosts dubs traces and duppies are attractive. But do you know anybody who doesn't feel slighted when they discover that you want to avoid their presence? OK, so Various got cool caché from this, etc etc.

but we shouldn't forget the power (relations) of dub. Who mutes? Who pushes the faders around? perhaps Lee Scratch Perry is such a hero and icon because he made and unmade, collaboed on the songs, recorded them, (presumably) paid the musicians, and then eviscerated, ghosted, what his companions had given him. Close to it all. Perry helmed the in-house production of ghosts, intimate dub production-process, a contemporary rarity in the age of a downloaded accappela, the tooth of body alive or dead or dying or like lichen kinda both and neither.

The soundboy is always being buried.

"Never said anything else" she continues, elsewhere, in memory. And we never even caught her name.

FLOATING BRASS & GOLD

Wednesday 20 September 2006 at 6:52 pm

if you want to come to the DJ Rupture - Ghislain Poirier Bounce Le Gros 1 year anniversary in Montreal this Saturday (see below), I suggest you come early... things might get crowded...

Ghislain & I will be guesting at CISM radio from 10pm til midnite Friday, tune in for some talk & music; i'll mix if they got decks.

Filastine shot some video during his stay on the Miss Rockaway Armada, check it. They floated down the Mississippi this summer "on a flotilla of rafts made from junk, propelled by a few VW engines burning biodiesel." (If you don't yet have Filastine's album, fix that problem immediately.)  

Grey informs us that the incredible music  "comes off a poorly labeled Guca compilation (brass band battle in serbian town) cassette, but is Boban Markovic Orkestar.  they are disqualified from competing because they won too much."

 

GANGSTA COOKIES

Monday 18 September 2006 at 4:16 pm

speaking of (gangsta) techno flourishes in reggaeton--

Yomo - Dele ft. Fat Joe

i got a version with no Joe and more gunshots but it's monday morning. from Los Rompe Discotekas.

real gangsta: "I thought how uncomfortable it would be if I wrote to you about money. This is why I am doing it now." 78 cents on cookies. JJ Rut-Pure opines in the comment section.

still listen to gangsta music? You bet. Pitbull & Luda, Banksy & Paris, nonstop murderation.

I think Pitbull could run for the President and win. There's something wonderfully insistent and well-enunciated about his voice, it sounds great as he shouts fascist commands over strange beats. His fundamental absurdity would flesh well with Their absurd fundamentalism. Imagine the TV debates!

MAGHREBI OVERLOOK, COLONEL FORCE, NEW RUPTURE REALTIME

Thursday 14 September 2006 at 6:35 pm

 

as i've mentioned before, The Ex's Andy Moor & I are working on album & playing some duo shows. he's got an excerpt from our last gig downloadable here. ('Lightning w/ DJ Rupture'). Recorded live @ OT301. We do completely improvised sets for guitar & turntables. The main 'beat' of this section is Skream's Lightning -- though there's a whole lot going on beyond that. This is our punk rock? Some moments are quite serene or subtle or whatever. Not this one...

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Anybody got the Lean Back - reggaeton version MP3 that I upped in this reggaeton piece way back in '04? Wayne's on the lookout.

ok: this is the post where i post some songs i'd forgotten to post. (this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a click)

Seven-and-a-half minutes of semi-mystical gnawa bass flowing through sung poetry. Then the beat & banjo hold hands and open the door, to pack you up and take you home. CD says Paco Abderrahmane but it's Nass el Ghiwane. The bootleggers are antilibrarians, losing books and renaming others, bringing disorder to the shelves.

 

Paco Abderrahmane - track 10 (Nass el Ghiwane) [10.6 MB, 11 minutes]

 

& here's an acoustic Imazighen song, male & female vox, strings, percussion, hitting that rugged and thin-aired mountain gait. Maghni's unnamed sparring partner overloads the microphone when she sings into it:

Maghni Mohammed - track 1 [9.5 MB, 10 minutes]

Timbaland overloads Justin Timberlake's voice too, pushing it from microphone to guitar amp modeling software or distortion box. So maybe they're not only gonna bring Sexy back -- r&b Distortion might come back too. Caught out there?

 

Back to Maghni Mohammed, who may or may not be Mohammed Maghni. He is not the least bit sexy on the poorly-xeroxed bootleg CD cover: his eyes are twin pools of darkness. His moustache a fat caterpillar eating his face. Maghni crouches on the edge of a scrubgrass ridge under a non color-adjusted sky while the woman whose voice I prefer to his is completely out of sight, elsewhere

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Colonel Force was happy injuring something. [via]

Monday 11 September 2006 at 12:01 pm

Autumn Passage

On suffering, which is real.
On the mouth that never closes,
the air that dries the mouth.

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On the miraculous dying body,
its greens and purples.
On the beauty of hair itself.

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On the dazzling toddler:
"Like eggplant," he says,
when you say "Vegetable,"

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"Chrysanthemum" to "Flower."
On his grandmother's suffering, larger
than vanished skyscrapers,

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September zucchini,
other things too big. For her glory
that goes along with it,

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glory of grown children's vigil,
communal fealty, glory
of the body that operates

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even as it falls apart, the body
that can no longer even make fever
but nonetheless burns

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florid and bright and magnificent
as it dims, as it shrinks,
as it turns to something else.

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- Elizabeth Alexander, American Sublime

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CRITICAL SPANGLISH

Saturday 09 September 2006 at 10:02 pm

ZZZZ Zizek

Thursday 07 September 2006 at 05:09 am Slavoj Žižek is a Slovene who makes fast, elastic readings of contemporary culture while a Lacanian air-conditioner rattles on in the background. Sometimes the room gets too cold but it's a handy thing to have. Sometimes Zizek's cultural readings exist to illustrate his psychoanalytical concepts rather than the other way around. I find it difficult to write about him since my laptop has no 'z' key. You can find much of his work online.

 

Maggie chooses the words heterodoxy and provocateur to describe mister Zizek's ouevre. His constant and varied analysis affords a wide-ranging pool of examples, broadly relevant sites (globalization, Hitchcock movies, America's war in Iraq, etc) whose agglomeration is fresh because it sidesteps the usual organizational logic of identity politics (or politics politics or those boring Lacan fans struggling for career recognition). Maybe the approach is flashy, cheap. Maybe profound. Whatever it is, it is working. This bearish yet elegant disposal of the sense of appropriate postmodern scale. An argument's argument is its shape.

 

In the midst of an essay on Katrina you get this:

 

A couple of years ago, an ominous decision of the European Union passed almost unnoticed: a plan to establish an all-European border police force to secure the isolation of the Union territory, so as to prevent the influx of the immigrants. This is the truth of globalization: the construction of new walls safeguarding the prosperous Europe from a flood of immigrants. One is tempted to resuscitate here the old Marxist “humanist” opposition of “relations between things” and “relations between persons”: In the much celebrated free circulation opened up by the global capitalism, it is “things” (commodities) which freely circulate, while the circulation of “persons” is more and more controlled. We are thus not dealing with “globalization as an unfinished project,” but with a true “dialectics of globalization.” The segregation of the people is the reality of economic globalization. This new racism of the developed world is in a way much more brutal than the previous one: Its implicit legitimization is neither naturalist (the “natural” superiority of the developed West) nor culturalist (we in the West also want to preserve our cultural identity). Rather, it ‘s an unabashed economic egotism—the fundamental divide is the one between those included into the sphere of (relative) economic prosperity and those excluded from it.

 

or if -- mindful of anniversaries -- you want to get yr 9/11 on, Zizek will keep your hands sticky:

 

The WTC bombings again confront us with the necessity to resist the temptation of a double blackmail. If one simply, only and unconditionally condemns it, one cannot but appear to endorse the blatantly ideological position of the American innocence under attack by the Third World Evil; if one draws attention to the deeper socio-political causes of the Arab extremism, one cannot but appear to blame the victim which ultimately got what it deserved... The only consequent solution is here to reject this very opposition and to adopt both positions simultaneously, which can only be done if one resorts to the dialectical category of totality: there is no choice between these two positions, each one is one-sided and false. Far from offering a case apropos of which one can adopt a clear ethical stance, we encounter here the limit of moral reasoning: from the moral standpoint, the victims are innocent, the act was an abominable crime; however, this very innocence is not innocent - to adopt such an "innocent" position in today's global capitalist universe is in itself a false abstraction. The same goes for the more ideological clash of interpretations: one can claim that the attack on the WTC was an attack on what is worth fighting for in democratic freedoms - the decadent Western way of life condemned by Muslim and other fundamentalists is the universe of women's rights and multiculturalist tolerance; however, one can also claim that it was an attack on the very center and symbol of global financial capitalism. This, of course, in no way entails the compromise notion of shared guilt (terrorists are to blame, but, partially, also Americans are also to blame...) - the point is, rather, that the two sides are not really opposed, that they belong to the same field. The fact that global capitalism is a totality means that it is the dialectical unity of itself and of its other, of the forces which resist it on "fundamentalist" ideological grounds.

 

Consequently, of the two main stories which emerged after September 11, both are worse, as Stalin would have put it. The American patriotic narrative - the innocence under siege, the surge of patriotic pride - is, of course, vain; however, is the Leftist narrative (with its Schadenfreude: the US got what they deserved, what they were for decades doing to others) really any better?. . . And what about the fact that CIA (co)created Taliban and Bin Laden, financing and helping them to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan? Why was this fact quoted as an argument AGAINST attacking them? Would it not be much more logical to claim that it is precisely their duty to get us rid of the monster they created? The moment one thinks in the terms of "yes, the WTC collapse was a tragedy, but one should not fully solidarize with the victims, since this would mean supporting US imperialism," the ethical catastrophe is already here: the only appropriate stance is the unconditional solidarity will ALL victims. The ethical stance proper is here replaced with the moralizing mathematics of guilt and horror which misses the key point: the terrifying death of each individual is absolute and incomparable. In short, let us make a simple mental experiment: if you detect in yourself any restraint to fully empathize with the victims of the WTC collapse, if you feel the urge to qualify your empathy with "yes, but what about the millions who suffer in Africa...", you are not demonstrating your Third World sympathize, but merely the mauvaise foi which bears witness to your implicit patronizing racist attitude towards the Third World victims. (More precisely, the problem with such comparative statements is that they are necessary and inadmissible: one HAS to make them, one HAS to make the point that much worse horrors are taken place around the world on a daily basis - but one has to do it without getting involved in the obscene mathematics of guilt.)

 

 

 

BOUNCE!

Monday 04 September 2006 at 11:03 pm

i haven't played Canada in three years or so. Ghislain Poirier is fixing that problem in fine style. (hold tight toronto, i'll be there b4 long) Come to think of it, this Montreal show is my first north american show in a year-and-a-half...

BOUNCE LE GROS V.11
1er anniversary !!!
Montreal September 23rd

+ DJ /RUPTURE (Soul Jazz, Soot, Tigerbeat6 - USA)
+ GHISLAIN POIRIER (Rebondir Records - Mtl)
+ HATCHMATIK (Peer Pressure - Mtl)
+ Free « Bounce le Gros » CD compilation at the door

Zoobizarre (6388, St-Hubert)
10pm until 3am
10$ at the door – limited capacity