Low blog activity in recent weeks due to being snowed under with work duties at the end of the semester and academic year.
I’ve also been writing the first draft of a 7,000 word academic essay on the dialogic sampling of South Asian music and African American music. Trying to figure out how we can use Missy Elliot, Timbaland & Magoo, Bollywood Freaks, One Self, Panjabi MC and Jay Z, and M.I.A. to think through wider changes in the production, distribution and consumption of music in an economy characterized by the greater speed and volume of mobile digital information. Music is informatic! What are the aesthetics and ethics of these encounters between ostensibly different sound worlds? Who’s rippin’ off who? How are musicians and listeners yearning for a bit and byte of the other? Any thoughts would be gratefully received?
The earthquake this week in my birth country of Pakistan, and one of my adopted ‘homes’ India has been another blow. After a spate of recent ‘natural’ disasters around the globe, it seems like the rich get richer and the poor suffer for the negligent planning and building construction of those with power and money. This is not Armageddon Time, as Pat Robertson and the snake oil salesmen would have us believe. Earthly karma makes a difference though. Some disasters can’t be avoided. But they can be contained with the proper efforts. If states and their national and regional governments don’t act with a view to the future then the detrimental effects of phenomena like tsunamis, hurricanes and earthquakes are worse. But capitalism hasn’t tried to correct its myopia. It’s so short sighted and doesn’t care for the long term. Sustainability is just a buzzword, when most of the corporations and their state partners are more concerned with taking and not giving back to the land, air, water or the people. Fuck globalisation, we need planetarity.
We’re almost done with the governmenting here in New Zealand. The deals have almost been struck and Winston will be the minister for senior citizens. I’ll be relieved if Peter Dunne has to retreat to the wings. He’s not reasonable or commonsensical at all, but a right-wing family values peddling fly fisherman. His hair wave reminds me of the Big Boy icon from the chain of US restaurants.
Check out Onegoodmove for regular bits of reportage and hilarious video clips that expose the US cultural-political landscape. The clips on this site from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show are better than the ones from Bill Maher’s programme. Maher enjoys having a go at religious types, and they deserve it most of the time, but his debate with Salman Rushdie, Andrew Sullivan and Ben Affleck was simplistic in its attack on all religious people. I know the secularists seem to have been relegated in recent years, particularly in an America of intelligent design and end-times rhetoric, but let’s have a principled and ethical secularism. You can still be funny in your criticisms of abusive priests, televangelical hustlers and bigoted mullahs. I say this as a born-again atheist.
Live shows. Saw Roots Manuva on his second Auckland night last month. Good to see a jamming funkified reggae band with turntables, but frankly I was rather disappointed by the show. On record, Rodney Smith is tremendous. I love his flow. His content moves between small everyday details and gnomic messages about some serious stuff. The production is innovative drawing in everything from 80s electro to the dub factor and bashment boogie. But I think Rodney was so mashed that he didn’t bother with his rhymes on more than several occasions. I like his Gentleman Jim or Sir Peregrine English gent persona, which was quite cute when he handed flowers to ‘the ladies’, but the ‘Hello Auckland city’ patter got really tiresome. It was like one of those big acts from the 80s like Boston and Styx who would always say, ‘London, we love you’ whenever they were on tour in the UK. Cue the lighters and candles in the audience. Faintly patronizing really. But then Manuva MC must have had some pretty strong stuff from Northland. I heard the Wednesday show was less all-over-the-place, more on point, less mashed but more mashed up.
Looking forward to Joanna Newsom on Sunday 16th. She’s got a voice that sounds like Kermit the Frog crossed with the great honky tonk singer Kitty Wells, and a harp technique that is percussive and blue. No annoying trills to take you into another soap opera flashback mode. Actually, Newsom’s voice, like MIA’s, is one of those voices that sounds old, and I mean really old, and young at the same time that it’s quite disturbing. Supporting Newsom is Smog. Great voice reminiscent of Lee Hazelwood on opium.
And I’ve got my birthday to look forward to on Saturday though I haven’t figured out how to celebrate that in the tunes I play on The Basement.
But calling all hip hop heads, can you send me the names of any recent interesting tracks that meld South Asian influences in hip hop and R & B and any African diaspora music really. And any links to related information. Much appreciated. Credis and props will be abundant for any aid in my researches.
Thanks for reading and, if you can, listening.
Nabeel