Beat Diaspora: Beats, Buses, Bricks

Hop the 'Hound

2008-12-17T01:42:00.003-05:00

After Blogger succumbed to possibly counterfeit takedown notifications (I never did quite get to the bottom, but suffice to say it didn't all add up), I have bussed my blog on down the information superhighway -- hopped the 'Hound, as it were -- to Wordpress, with a proper domain name to boot.

So please redirect your newsfeeds, Google readers, and plain old bookmarks to:

The new <<<Beat Diaspora>>>

Unfamiliar Sights

2008-12-01T23:11:00.001-05:00

Holidays afford a routine return to familiar territory that is the perfect opportunity to change perspective. Countless times I have zoomed up I-95 -- the interstate highway, the ultimate American non-place [link via this excellent repository] -- and into Baltimore. I mark my entrance by that smoke stack, this solitary remnant of heavy industry on life support that is as much a cultural symbol of the city, a tourism board's welcome sign, as it the machinery of a factory.

Swooping over the Middle River and either branching off into downtown or continuing under the harbor, this elevated stretch of interchanges and off-ramps dazzles the eye. The water, the shipyard, the Key Bridge, the neighborhoods fanning out from downtown, and the city's modest skyline all compete for attention. It is a microcosm of the northeastern city, serving up a feast for hungry urban eyes.

But with the encroachment of non-places like I-95 that funnel in suburbanites, dumping them at the city's faux-historical economic engine, the Inner Harbor, comes the shadow of the highway trusses looming over forgotten neighborhoods. What haven't I seen in all those years of traveling into Baltimore by car?

I've given up on private car ownership, and when coming from outside the city now feel reluctant to bring a new private automobile into it. Call it moral congestion pricing. So on Friday, I parked at the edge of D.C. and took the Metro, taking advantage of late night weekend service. On Saturday, I took that game plan to Baltimore, hoping to take transit in a state notoriously hostile to it.

My M.O. was the Baltimore light rail, which snakes from BWI Airport and southern inner ring suburbs through downtown, heading north to its terminus at ex-shopping mall/current "town centre" Hunt Valley. I swore allegiance to the MBTA for four years, am doggedly loyal to SEPTA, and even keep subway porn on my coffee table, yet never have I taken Baltimore's tentative steps toward effective public transportation.

As the train crept north, I was particulary interested in seeing the vast hive of concrete and waterways around the Middle River from surface level. The trip did not disappoint, as I discovered two neighborhoods hidden in the shadow of I-95 and I-295. The first, Westport, is in fact cleaved by the latter highway. It is a tiny, down on its heels enclave of rowhouses, now poised for massive redevelopment by the light rail stop. A developer plans a giant high-rise complex with hotel rooms, office space, condos, and retail, which strikes me as a contrast of urban luxury and poverty of Mumbai proportions. While I certainly favor transit-oriented development, as this surely will force heavier usage of the light rail at its doorstep, I'm left with grave concerns about how such a development will interact with the existing neighborhood. Job training? Or the equally likely gated entrances, private security, and surveillance cameras? If there even is a neighborhood left, given the money that starts being put on the table to feed the "insatiable demand for homes on or near the water."

Eerie overtones of the Johns Hopkins hospital in East Baltimore, which looms like a citadel over the struggling neighborhoods at its feet. Town-[hospital] gown tensions run constantly.

Next stop: Cherry Hill. In another overlooked corner by those of us whose itineraries are circumscribed by highway routes, I found the nation's first planned community for African-Americans, designed to house WWII veterans. Sadly, it experienced rapid post-war disinvestment and decay, with the veterans' homes becoming public housing. But just across the water from Westport, the planners have come back as more waterfront property becomes enticing. An active neighborhood group ("A great neighborhood -- getting even better!) catalogues the ongoing development of the Cherry Hill master plan, which remains contentious in the community.

Later that night, I was listening to the Audio Infusion on WEAA. The DJ announced a caller from Cherry Hill and I smiled in recognition. The next morning, on the road in the I-95 morass, I craned my neck to catch a newly familiar sight, the stately Baltimore Rowing Club on the Middle River, with Cherry Hill fanning out behind it. New routes lead to new discoveries.

Turkey Day Takedown

2008-11-29T22:06:00.001-05:00

I am writing this to join the growing chorus of bloggers using Blogger who have received takedown notifications in recent weeks. Blogger has deleted posts with links that allegedly have content in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). In my case, it was a June post, "Rush It Up" (Google cache link) that pointed to an mp3 of Shaggy's theme song for Euro 2008. I was not hosting the file, merely linking to its presence on the Heatwave blog (where you can still find it).

Other bloggers have received notifications -- or even had posts deleted without receiving notifications -- for tracks that they received from record labels specifically so they could promote it via their blogs! It's a shotgun approach that has Blogger (and its overlord, Google) covering their asses while infringing on the ability of bloggers to publish original content (it's not just an offending link that is removed, but the entire text of the post that went with it).

One of the bigger fish to have been struck is Palms Out Sounds, who has suspended its Remix Sunday feature as a result. Digital rights activist Larisa Mann (aka DJ Ripley) offers a helpful overview of the situation.

In the mean time, a friend did some digging on the individual who filed the claim, a one Eric Green. Apparently his main employ is to get illegally shared porn removed from hosting sites. Most of his work is for the adult online industry . . . and yet somehow a handful of music bloggers have fallen into his net. We're like dolphins in the tuna catch here.

If you are so inclined as to ask Mr. Green why my post, or any of the others that Blogger has removed in the last several weeks, here is his contact information:

Eric Green, Owner
Destined Enterprises
391 E. Las Colinas Blvd
Ste 130-609
Irving, TX 75039-6225
(214) 272-8256
www.removeyourcontent.com
webmaster@removeyourcontent.com
removeyourcontent@spamarrest.com

I will be sending him several e-mails and letters, as well as dropping him a line. And looking for a new place to run my blog. This site's days as a forum for free expression are clearly numbered; expect bloggers to run from Blogger in droves.

Tropa de Cultura

2008-11-28T14:00:00.002-05:00

Even if it's old news in Brazil, I'm due to provide a refresher on Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad in English). It was directed by José Padilha as the second film in a trio that began with Bus 174, the documentary of a hostage taking on a Rio bus that was captured by national TV to disastrous results. His cinematic vision is to tackle the city's central pressing issues -- violent crime, the drug trade, police corruption and brutality. In Tropa de Elite, he focuses on the BOPE, Rio's equivalent of a SWAT team, that conducts intense operations in favelas -- usually with callous disregard for human life. Shoot first, ask questions later, as it were. Their ostentatiously violent symbol makes that abundantly clear ("It looks like a biker gang in the third reich.")

I first watched it in Rocinha with some 2Bros folks, where the scene portraying BOPE invasions of the favela were eerily similar to real life. We had a pirated copy that had leaked in August 2007, just a week or two before my departure. It had already spread like wildfire, and by the time of its official release in October, it was seen by a reported 11.5 million Brazilians. Not much the copyright police can do about that.

Most interestingly, it was equally popular among all strata of society, but for opposite reasons. Favelados were on the side of the victimized favelados as well as cavalier gangsters, and a friend of a friend was proud to have been an extra as a bandido. The middle and upper classes were taken by protagonist Capitão Nascimento, whose strongarm, torture tactics elicited applause in movie houses.

In a country whose moneyed interests frequently feel that the drug trade can only be reined in by extra-legal measures, Nascimento's take no prisoners attitude made him, as this magazine cover argues, a new national hero.

Padilha cannily rejects any claims that his film endorses either side of the debate. I saw him speak at the Harvard Film Archive last spring, where he maintained the position that the film was a portrayal designed to spark dialogue, not a polemic. In short, he's let the film be a mirror on its viewers' own prejudices and opinions about the power relations in Rio.

I don't think a strong-willed director tackling such challenging subjects should get off so easily. Surely there was some authorial intent. For one, the group that comes off the most negatively in the film are the wealthy college students who patronize the drug trade -- they provide the funds that keep the whole operation going, much to the detriment of folks who live just a few miles away up in the hills (on a longer scale, Colombia is taking the anti-cocaine message to middle-class Europeans).

Those folks, meanwhile, get their fair due of fun for a brief moment at the beginning of the film, with a stellar baile funk scene that tragically ends in a police-gang shootout. It's chopped up by the opening credits, as you can see in this trailer, but the shots come the closest I've seen on screen to a baile funk, or at least one c. 1997.

I say 1997 because that's the setting of the film, not too long after Rocinha brothers Júnior and Leonardo popularized one of the classics of funk carioca, "Rap das Armas," which they sing live in this opening scene. I documented a recent acapella usage and linktubed to a Yo! MTV Raps-esque version during my Rocinha sojourn. The popularity of "Rap das Armas" as the theme song to the film was a real turn of fortunes for Júnior and Leonardo, who I met around the same time in August 2007 just as they were preparing to tour Europe in advance of the film's release there. After skyrocketing to fame in the early '90s, they became increasingly impoverished until they were reduced to driving a taxi cab on 12-hour shifts each, so the car was constantly in rotation. Now they're back in the driver's seat, so to speak, as funk MCs.

MC Júnior & MC Leonardo - Rap das Armas (Versão Tropa de Elite) by gregzinho

This version is from the official Tropa de Elite soundtrack, which amazingly is on sale stateside, as is the DVD. It cycled around some film festivals in the U.S. this year, but I never saw it make much of a splash in wide release. I was convinced it would become the next City of God, a lush but violent film about Rio, set to further fix foreigners' minds that the city is a violent nightmare. I guess I was wrong. But if you don't want to shell out for the official copy, you can see it for yourself with English subtitles.

With such broad appeal, meanwhile, it was only a matter of time before edits/dubs/remixes trickled out of the Brazilian webosphere. In fact, to permit a cross-linguistic pun -- Tropa became a trope, its catch phrases and music trotted out in all manner of remix culture fashion. Below is a sampling of the samples --

Capitão Nascimento viciously berates his wife as his battles in the field increasingly rattle him. He created a new slang term, "Quem manda nessa porra sou eu" (I'm the one who controls this shit), that caught on rapidly, enough to become remixed as a funk track.

Cabide DJ e Duim DJ - Quem Manda Nessa Porra (Tropa de Elite) by gregzinho

A Fakeipedia page on Capitão Nascimento

Brazilian humor site Kibe Loco has some video remixes cobbling together scenes from the film with tamborzão, crunchy guitar (and in the first, the riff from "Seven Nation Army"), and popular lines from the movie. The stutter-start chopped scenes actually recreate the funk vocal sampling technique with some accuracy.

"What if Capitão Nascimento had read Convergence Culture?" In a little meta-tropa, Xiaochang Li at MIT puts a comparative media debate in the subtitled mouths of BOPE's finest.

Força Kuduro!

2008-11-27T23:43:00.001-05:00

Every time I leave from Rio, the gate next to mine is always the nightly Rio to Luanda flight on TAAG, the Angolan national airline. The idea of these two cities linked by a direct flight across the southern Atlantic when the airline industry is so dominated by hubs running through major financial or political capitals, especially in the Global North, is extremely alluring. A flight to the U.S. at one gate and Africa next to it also neatly sums up the split influences in Brazil, and especially Brazilian music like funk.

Take that six hour flight to Luanda and you'll be in the home of funk's brother from another mother, kuduro. As part of the ongoing effort to keep kuduro from flavor of the month status, Flamin Hotz teamed up with kuduro mediator Frédéric Galliano to produce another stellar 12" EP. I thought the art was stunning on Funkeiros e Progresso, but BustBright took it to the next level here.

Take a listen to DJ Tecas' "Bate o peito (com respeito)" -- beat your chest with respect!

DJ Tecas - Bate no peito (com respeito) by gregzinho

Like it enough to get the whole EP? Compre aqui!

Mnml do Morro

2008-11-23T19:52:00.002-05:00

Brasil still on my mind -- stripped down & sped up.

First, there was some percussive ferocity lingering in my inbox, c/o Daniel D'Errico. He plays in Boston's BatukAxé, a drum group led by Bahian Marcus Santos. Up above, they're playing at the "Welcoming New Bostonians" event, holding it down for the constant stream of Brazucas coming to the Bean. (Daniel is the odd one out in the yellow shirt.)

BatukAxé (Marcus Santos' Bateria) by gregzinho

Then wayne&wax tipped me off to Discobelle's most recent Mixin' It Up by DJ Downtown of Helsinki (what is it with the Finns?! tropical living vicariously through funk carioca?) The opening track is a stripped down version of "Rap das Armas", the ever controversial and ever misinterpreted telling-it-like-it-is funk track. This version sounds like the one re-recorded for Tropa de Elite, which I shamefully never blogged about, although you can read up on all the fuss from last year over at the now defunct BOPE Blog.

Baile Rave

2008-11-22T18:44:00.001-05:00

If it's not one of us, it's another. Following in the fine Finnish tradition of his countryman DJ Rideon, there's another funk carioca blogger (and 2Bros volunteer!) on the loose in Teemuk of Otra Luna, which focuses on "art, design, music and culture from the southern side of the world." His "super classics of funk carioca" series has dug deep this month, with big features on William e Duda and Deize Tigrona.

The latter has apparently gone mundial, collaborating with Lisbon's DJ Manaia for some cross-lusophone batidas.

Dj Manaia ft. Deize Tigrona - Sobrevivente de Rave by gregzinho

"Eu sou sobrevivente de uma rave." (I'm the survivor of a rave.)

A tried-n-true funk MC singing over the raviest of rave synths can only make me laugh as I recall Sany DJ's complaint that his pós-baile funk is derided as "rave" at bailes funk.

What I don't understand about this track is why the vocals are so poorly recorded. They sound worse, in fact, than her smash hit "Injeção" (with a dance routine no less -- happy, Lone Wolf?) The raw sound of funk is constantly praised as one of its most endearing features, although that's really a canard w/r/t funk of the last decade or so, with the big commercial sound systems using top notch recording studios. Did DJ Manaia intentionally rough up the vocal mix to make it sound grittier, more like funk to his Portuguese or wider Euro audience? Either way, it just plain sounds bad against those hyper-polished synths. Maybe Deize is simply hoping her vocals survive this rave.

Baile Crunk

2008-11-19T23:10:00.000-05:00

After the funk overdose of the last couple weeks, I got a São Paulo injection from the lovely Zuzuka Poderosa, sharing some tracks by her friend MC Anão.

There are some pretty direct cops of popular hip-hop beats with a Carib sabor:

MC Anão - Dinheiro by gregzinho

While Anão tackles the ever-popular topic of bling here, I'm more fond of "Sem Floresta." The track's menacing synths, counter-balanced by steel drum hits, reveal not more thug swagger, but the simple declaration, "Eu sei que todo mundo gosta de comer bem" (I know everyone likes to eat well.)

MC Anão - Sem Floresta by gregzinho

I know the Sampa restaurant scene is hopping, but they really go all out on the roll call:
"filé cubana, comida mineira, comida baiana /
comida chinesa, comida mexicana, comida japonesa, comida italiana /
eu como eu como eu como, eu vou comer de novo"

I eat, I eat, I eat, I'm gonna eat again. Gives new meaning to gangsta grillz. Gangsta churrasco?

p.s. Don't sleep on the other Brazilian hip-hop incarnations. Masala and Maga Bo up on some real deal Brazilian dancehall.

Returns

2008-11-17T22:52:00.000-05:00

O Cabidão caught an overnight flight to Rio on Saturday, rather gladly saying farewell to the U.S. and returning to "a minha terra, o meu Brasil!" Too cold, volume too low, clubs too small (and my basement not the nicest place to live either, granted). After three weeks as the ad-hoc tour manager of the first non-Marlboro DJ to play for American audiences, I now have a more realistic perspective on the viability of bridging the divide between global ghettotechnicians and their northern fans, at least in the case of funk carioca, really completing the circle from wide-eyed onlooker to direct intervener.

I don't want to declare the tour a failure. There were plenty of highlights: Global Frequency, MoFo Radio, Invasores do Baixo, Mudd Up!, TTL in-store, Batida do Funk. And the tour really brought out the best of some fine folks like wayne&wax, Lone Wolf, DJ Ghostdad, and DJ Comrade, all of whom put their time/money/effort/talent into collaborating. Kosta of Bananas even used his west coast contacts to score a show in Seattle on three days notice.

Still, a tour remains an economic proposition, and one that fell fairly flat. It seems that playing the Brazuca circuit (Hyannis, Newark, Bridgeport, Boston, etc.) pays for the plane ticket and is a prerequisite to being able to afford other shows for the knowing gringos. Unfortunately, this means Brazuca crowds will also be driving who gets brought up. Most are not carioca, but from other, poorer states in Brazil, and get their funkeiro fandom from the web, where heartthrobs like Mulher Melancia (the Watermelon Lady) are the top draw. Cabide, in fact, was a relative unknown, so he didn't bring out the Brazilians en masse in New England.

While this tour was a half-and-half proposition, in the future I expect funk DJs and MCs to mostly play for the brasileiros and then, if possible, an interested party like myself, the Boston Bouncers, Xão Productions, or Masala (who had expressed interest, but we had some visa issues) will cobble something together.

The "Batida do Funk" party by Xão at S.O.B.'s was, admittedly, my favorite of the tour. To trot out an old cliche, in the melting pot of New York we were able to find the mixture of gringos in the know, global music aficionados, and plain old Brazilians to make the show a real crossover audience. The addition of Brazilian dancers and a baile funk slideshow by Vincent Rosenblatt of Agência Olhares made for an odd refraction.

Dancers juxtaposed with the image of dancers. A baile funk americano (Cabide repeatedly referred to shows as "bailes") juxtaposed with a baile funk carioca. We were both interviewed for the upcoming film Beyond Ipanema, about Brazilian music in the U.S., whose directors were in the audience. I was unable to tell who was Brazilian and who was American. It's difficult math when a club that serves $10 caipirinhas can't pay the DJ as much as a favela in Rio can, but that's the strange inversion for you. Who mediates, who performs, who speaks (Cabide was mute without English and I was left to translate for film, radio, conversation). He opened for Diplo on the penultimate show of the Mad Decent tour, playing the first set even before some indie band from Brooklyn came on. The headliner later worked in a tamborzão, but he was temporally separated as much as possible from the real performer. Worried about being upstaged the next night, cutting the volume, sucking the life out of the music. Metaphor and fact. Who controls and who performs. The tours are over, but the film will linger.

Nova Iorque

2008-11-07T17:36:00.000-05:00

The other direction on I-95 tonight & tomorrow -- Cabide DJ live in-store at Turntable Lab and then a Saturday midnight show at S.O.B.'s.

Bmore Bananas

2008-11-06T15:38:00.000-05:00

Last night on the Jersey Turnpike, coming back from a fast&furious Mudd Up ! appearance (followed by some Brazilian eats in Newark's Ironbound), Casi G and I played Cabide DJ some Philly and Bmore club. "Maneiro, maneiro," ("cool, cool") he kept saying. When we got back to Philly, Casi hooked him up with the T&A Bmore Breaks. He's been playing around with them on his MPC all day in my basement, so we'll see what he's cooked up for tonight in Bawlmer.

[cross-posted to FiftyOneFiftyOne]

Hudson Airwaves

2008-11-05T13:07:00.000-05:00

Yes we did. (Now here's what the rappers have to say about it.) And on that musical note, can't stop won't stop w/r/t Cabide DJ's tour. He was sending international chirps all night to Brazil about Obama, now he'll be crashing the NYC airwaves today for some more MPC-banging beats.

First up: The Big Cover Up with $mall ¢hange on East Village Radio (interwebs only) from 4-5 pm with the lovely Zuzuka Poderosa translating.

Then he'll cross the Hudson for an appearance on Mudd Up, the show hosted by DJ /rupture on venerable freeform station WFMU from 7-8 pm. 91.1 FM on your Nova Iorque radio dial or ao vivo online.

Tic-Tac-TObama

2008-11-04T19:24:00.000-05:00

Polls close in 15 minutes here in battleground-cum-blue Pennsylvania. No snags over at the local fire station serving as my polling place, just some tired neighbors who were running the show all day. I did read about some supposed Black Panther voter intimidation over in North Philly that was debunked. That said, I was walking to the polling station an hour ago as night had already settled in to see if there were lines (and donate my leftover Halloween candy). Some men on their porch asked me if I had voted as I walked by. I told them yes. They asked me for whom. Come to think of it, I should have told them it was none of their business -- the secret ballot is a right -- but of course the "I voted Obama" sticker, "Barack Obama" in Hebrew button, and Phillies/Obama t-shirt gave it away. Still, what if I had said McCain, or even stuck with my tightlipped response? A white guy in a black neighborhood -- where normally I feel safe -- maybe there is an intimidation factor in neighborhoods and towns that tilt extremely to one side or the other? I gave them some Raisinets and everything was cool.

Scattershot --

"The McCain campaign has said they have to win Pennsylvania." -- Anderson Cooper, CNN (T-minus 4 minutes to polls closing)
Twittering your way to Grant Park might prove entertaining. After tonight, Chicago will be the second city no more.
Cabide DJ knows who he would vote for, just check that sleeve.

Non-Alignment Pact

2008-10-29T14:21:00.002-04:00

Buried in the international section of the Inqy I saw a small story on Rwanda and their decision to stop teaching French in favor of English in the nation's schools (syndicated from the WaPo, of course, in this era of shrinking newsrooms). The article is mostly blase, operating on the assumption of French's diminishing role in the world. In particular, it prints a horrendous quote by Theoneste Mutsindashyaka, Rwanda's state minister for education: "When you look at the French-speaking countries - it's really just France, and a small part of Belgium and a small part of Switzerland."

Tell that to the Organisation internationale de la francophonie (Fr only, natch) and its claim of 200 million French speakers on five continents. I guess the minister never took a look at this map. Across the pond, The Guardian dug a little deeper, pulling a better quote from Vincent Karenga, the Trade and Industry Minister: "French is spoken only in France, some parts of west Africa, parts of Canada and Switzerland." Still off-base -- he didn't even mention Belgium, the very reason French is spoken in Rwanda -- but at least he got West Africa, a massive stronghold of French and the very reason French will remain a major language over the coming decades.

Of course, the article appropriately links the decision to lingering anger at the French for their role in the Rwandan genocide and a wider post-colonial push away from European powers, especially former colonizer francophone Belgium. But as an assiduous observer of French as a language of resistance in the Americas, from Louisiana to the Caribbean to Québec, I'm sorry to hear it couldn't occupy a more positive role in Rwanda. Its role in Africa is more as a common thread across countries filled with hundreds of local languages. That, in part, has rendered Dakar such a hub for African hip-hop -- a swirl of languages with French usually running through.

I wonder how politics will trickle down to affect culture vis-à-vis Rwandan hip-hop. The excellent Africanhiphop.com points to an excited local scene with the usual hybrid of languages (Swahili, the local Kinyarwanda, French, and English). Several profiles point to French-language schools that rappers attdended as children. But as that shifts in the coming generation, it's only logical that French will fall by the wayside, and by extension the tour dates to France and Canada will be replaced by the UK and the U.S.

Cabide Tour Update

2008-10-29T00:19:00.000-04:00

Update: The shows in Framingham (Old Station Steakhouse) and Bridgeport, CT are canceled. The rest of the tour is for the non-Brazuca crowd as follows:

10/30 Philadelphia, PA - Medusa w/ DJ Gregzinho, Chip and Becky Soundsystem
11/03 Philadelphia, PA - "Jang House" at The Barbary
11/06 Baltimore, MD - "Bananas" at Bedrock w/ Donkey Bits
11/08 New York, NY - "Batida do Funk" at S.O.B.'s w/ DJ Comrade, MC Zuzuka Poderosa, Supervixen
11/13 Baltimore, MD - Sonar w/Diplo, Boy 8-Bit, Blaqstarr

First show in Philly is coming up fast . . .

And parabéns to Lone Wolf for putting together um ótimo vidéo of Cabide at WMBR.

Blue Monday

2008-10-27T16:38:00.001-04:00

Asian markets tumble to historic lows? The blues still got a stranglehold on the Dow? DJ-cum-financial guru Balagan has the solution: Bear Market Beats.

It's going to be a Red Tuesday tomorrow, however, once the Phils put it away tonight. And for full coverage of Cabide DJ in Philadelphia, check Philly's finest nightlife/music/art/fashion blog, FiftyOne:FiftyOne. What it do, indeed. It begins tomorrow with a 1-3 pm appearance on WKDU's Rhythms N' Time.

Electoral Maps

2008-10-23T19:16:00.002-04:00

It's an off-year election season in Brazil, too, where my man Cabide DJ actually ran for vereador (selectman or alderman) of his town, São Gonçalo, just over the Guanabara Bay from Rio proper. Unfortunately, he didn't make it past the primary, but I don't think we need to worry about him quitting his day (night?) job: being O No. 1 Sampler do Brasil. See him live at the Milky Way in just a couple hours.

That said, a friend recently sent me an interesting campaign tool released by Fernando Gabeira, PV (Green Party) candidate for mayor of Rio. He's most famous for having helped kidnap the American ambassador in 1968 to protest the military dictatorship, which resulted in his exile (the event was later made into an Oscar-winning movie, "Four Days in September"). Gabeira has since given up armed revolution for politics, however, although his cultural revolution continued on Rio's beaches. After a distinguished career as a deputy, hopefully his strident leftist voice will now put him in charge of the city.

Like any mayoral candidate, he wants to address the overwhelming issue of the criminal factions that run the drug trade. How anyone is going to stem that tide is beyond me, but if calling a spade a spade is a start, then he's on his way:

Exibir mapa ampliado

This is a map of all the favelas in Rio, color coded by the ruling faction (one of the three gangs, or independent vigilantes called milícias. There are symbols for recent flare ups as well. Laying it out like that is a very stark -- and very powerful -- method of recognizing the scope of the problem. I wish him luck on Sunday.

p.s. On a lighter note, there are several Barack Obamas running in Brazilian local elections this weekend.

Try Try Again

2008-10-22T20:25:00.000-04:00

There's Cabide DJ holding a copy of the Volt Mix along with one of DJ Ghostdad's old school funk records. Ghostdad is in the background prepping for tonight's appearance on MoFo Radio -- tune in on WZBC 90.3 FM from 10 pm to 1 am.

Cabide is going to talk about the transition from Miami bass to funk, with plenty of vinyl examples. He dragged a suitcase full of records onto the plane, so expect a serious history lesson, with the Miami bass originals followed by the Rio tracks that sampled them.

On the sample tip, I noticed something that Cabide has in common with Euro-African collabo The Very Best. Check out this longie-but-goodie from 2006, an extended montage of "Comunidades," basically a roll call of favelas from across Rio.

Cabide DJ - Megamix das Comunidades by gregzinho

Now compare with The Very Best's "Sister Betina," one of the slower jams on this hyped up (but unmixed) mixtape.

The Very Best (Radio Clit + Esau Mwamawaya) - Sister Betina by gregzinho

Both sampled & sped up (although a higher bpm on Cabide's tune) Aaliyah's smash hit "Try Again."

Aaliyah - Try Again by gregzinho

Curious, although I (mostly) doubt direct inspiration. Timbaland's beats are fertile for all.

JP Party Line

2008-10-21T13:09:00.000-04:00

You heard the man. Call now!

And tune in tonight for Cabide DJ on air from 7-8 pm: WMBR 88.1 FM in greater Boston or streaming live on the web

Tomorrow night, MoFo Radio from 10 pm - 1 am: WZBC 90.3 FM in greater Boston or again live sobre o Internet

Cabide DJ Landing Stateside

2008-10-19T17:39:00.003-04:00

Pancadão do Morro was just the first step in establishing better international connections between funkeiros brasileiros and americanos. Now, we've got one of the best DJs from the record on U.S. tour. Funk originator Cabide DJ, who I blogged about way back in '06, touched down the day before yesterday and made it through customs & immigration with no problems (graças a deus).

Cabide is not the first DJ or MC from Rio to come up. In fact, the Brazilian expat organizing the tour had MC Biju (who did "Aviãozinho," which appears on Favela on Blast) and Mulher Melancia (an ex-dancer of MC Créu who launched her own career on the strength of a bestselling Playboy Brazil appearance) playing shows here just last month. The catch is that they only play for the Brazilian immigrant community, covering the east coast Brazuca circuit of Boston, Framingham, Hyannis, Danbury, Bridgeport, and Newark.

Fortunately, I got wind of this tour ahead of time, and I'm proud to announce that the forbidding world of international travel worked out and for the first time -- excluding DJ Marlboro, who has always been in a league of his own anyway -- a funk artist is going to perform for crossover crowds, and ideally beginning to bridge that gap between global ghettotechnicians and their not-so-ghettoized fans in the global norte.

There's the man at work in Rio. Now let's see what he an do to the East Coast, where he already played Club Lido in Revere on Friday night, Made in Brazil in Queens last night, and Tuxedo Junction in Danbury, CT tonight. Check XLR8R for a tour-opening boost as well as an mp3 exclusivo.

He follows with Global Frequencies on WMBR this Tuesday, Mofo Radio on Wednesday at WZBC, and then an Invasores do Baixo massive on Thursday with an excellent cast of local characters.

Full tour schedule below, but I'll be making regular updates with flyers for the shows that I organized.

10/17 Boston, MA - Club Lido
10/18 Queens, NY - Made in Brazil
10/19 Danbury, CT - Tuxedo Junction
10/23 Boston, MA - "Bass Invaders" at Milky Way w/ DJ Ghostdad, Nick Yoder, DJ Gregzinho, Philomena, wayne&wax, DJ Flack
10/25 Hyannis, MA - Pufferbellies
10/26 Boston, MA - Taboo
10/30 Philadelphia, PA - Medusa w/ DJ Gregzinho, Chip and Becky Soundsystem
11/03 Philadelphia, PA - "Jang House" at The Barbary
11/06 Baltimore, MD - "Bananas" at Bedrock w/ Donkey Bits
11/08 New York, NY - "Batida do Funk" at S.O.B.'s w/ DJ Comrade, MC Zuzuka Poderosa, Supervixen
11/13 Baltimore, MD - Sonar w/Diplo, Boy 8-Bit, Blaqstarr

West Philly: Welcome to the Neighborhood

2008-10-19T16:19:00.001-04:00

I always tell myself I'm a creature of the northeast corridor, roaming the rails and I-95 between D.C., Baltimore, Boston, and New York. With considerable satisfaction, I've rounded out the megalopolis by settling down for the time being in Philadelphia. West Philadelphia, to be precise, home to both my employer, the University of Pennsylvania (where I work for the Institute for Urban Research) and a sprawling, teeming, struggling slice of nearly 200,000 people among Philadelphia's 1.5 million. It's a relationship fraught with tension, as to be more precise, I live in the University City District, the district-within-a-section created as a Penn initiative ten years ago to make the area around the university more attractive to live in for students, faculty, staff, and visitors. To what extent they've succeeded, and perhaps left the rest of West Philly behind, is a subject of great debate that I will dive into another time. To be even more precise that the UCD, however, I live in West Powelton, a tiny neighborhood whose name doesn't even register with most Philadelphians. But in this city of neighborhoods, it means something here.

Nothing says welcome to the neighborhood like a block party, and I was treated to two of them in the span of a couple short weeks.

The CDC block party's highlight was clearly the local steppers bringing it in full force. I've gotta say I was partial to the neighborhood squad, but then I've got reason to be biased, they keep their gear in a garage around the corner from my house.

The brassy attitudes of the West Powelton Steppers, from the "PHI - LLY" chants (& their "izz-I" variations) to the "What they gon' do? NOTHING." call outs definitely won the day.

A more traditional block party cropped up just the other weekend as a register to vote b-boy battle.

Local crew Freaks of the Beat, hailing from Penn itself, held it down for most of the evening.

But a collective pass-the-hat effort eventually yielded a decent cash prize for whichever young'un -- all kids about 13 and under -- could bust out the best moves. I wish my camera hadn't run out of batteries by the time it really got underway, but boy could those kids move, 'specially when the DJ put on that club music. Bass travels effortlesly up I-95.

From Nation to the Nationals

2008-10-17T14:33:00.001-04:00

It's not month-long indigestion from too many half-smokes that has rendered me silent on the blogafront. Just a recent move to Philly -- more coming shortly -- from which I haven't shaken the disorder yet. But I'd still like to provide a coda to my stay on the homefront in and around D.C. The last couple months have been a bonanza of momentous baseball, from the curtain call at Yankees Stadium to the Fightin' Phils fall classic hopes to Thursday night's Fenway epic and tonight's do-or-die conclusion.

Lost in October magic, however, is the relative ignominy of the Washington Nationals catastrophic 100+ loss season, coupled with the worst attendance in a new ballpark ever. There are ugly internal disputes with owners the Lerner family, which have spilled over into the worst crime off the field: deadbeat tenants. The Nationals have refused to pay $3.5 million in rent to the D.C. city government, claiming that the taxpayer-funded ballpark was substantially incomplete by opening day and continues to need a lot of work. The Lerners are thumbing their nose and neglecting their role as the anchors of the massive plan to redevelop the Anacostia waterfront, long the neglected waterway of Washington and an afterthought to Potomac symbolism. The ultimate goal is to integrate the Anacostia waterfront, and by extension the largely poor and black neighborhoods that lie along and especially east of it, with the rest of the wealth and vibrancy of D.C. The stadium, meanwhile, was supposed to be a crucial litmus test of whether such development could be done without displacement and disregard for surrounding neighborhoods. Withholding an already cash-strapped city -- whose previous mayor expended the last of his political capital to get the stadium through the city council -- of millions of dollars in rent does not make for a good neighbor. And more to the point, their claims are simply untrue.

I was at opening day on a chilly night at the end of March, attended games throughout the summer, and even had tickets to the rained out final home game of the season. From a fan's perspective -- and the perspective that should matter, because it's ticket revenue with which the organization should be paying that rent -- the stadium is more than complete.

Without getting lost in those minutiae, however, I want to return to opening night and the very fact of that stadium. The mechanisms of urban redevelopment, high-powered private developers, and an economic engine as powerfull as Major League Baseball were a perfect storm. Granted, there was much wrangling for several years over whether the city would approve a stadium with public monies when many of the fans would be coming from neighboring Maryland or Virginia -- states whose jurisdictions were not contributing. But MLB made it clear that no stadium meant no team, which pro-business mayor Anthony Williams could never have let happen, especially when Northern Virginia way vying to host the team out in the suburbs.

Contentious city politics aside, the stadium was assured, the team came to Washington (as the Nationals, not the Senators, their previous incarnation, because D.C. has no senators), the Nats played three seasons at RFK Stadium, and then Nationals Park arrived this year. As a baseball fan whose father can remember attending Senators games at RFK, I was actually rather fond of the old retro spaceship down East Capitol Street. But as a comparison between old and new points out, Nationals Park was likely to follow the generic lead of casino ballparks that suck away your dollars and sprawl over far more land than charming 8-acre postage stamps like Fenway or Wrigley.

For opening night heroics, I admit you can't beat the president throwing out the ceremonial first pitch -- politics aside, a Washington tradition that dates back decades -- and the star of the team winning it in the 9th with a walk-off home run.

But when the dazzle fades and I extract my sentiments from the matter, there is still a hard critique to be made, both architecturally and from an urban planning perspective. The Post's architecture critic definitely took the stadium to task, sounding a dissenting note on the front page of the Style section the next morning while the rest of the paper trumpeted the new ballpark. Philip Kennicott's conclusion is worth quoting at length:

From the top of the stadium, look out at the skyline, toward the Capitol Dome. At first, it seems like a happy accident that it is most visible from the cheapest seats. But now look down into the neighborhoods where public schools have become dilapidated brick bunkers, their windows covered in forbidding metal mesh. It's enough to make you weep. Not about the stadium, which is as generic as it goes. But rather the cynical pragmatism that governs our priorities, socially and architecturally. Washington is a city where people can stare straight at the most powerful symbol of their democratic enfranchisement, and still feel absolutely powerless to change the course of our winner-takes-all society.

And it didn't have to be this way. It's not just a matter of misplaced priorities, which we can all argue about. It's also a matter of inept bargaining and bad planning.

"The city had Major League Baseball over a barrel if they wanted, because baseball had nowhere else to put the team," says Neil DeMause, co-author of "Field of Schemes," a look at the economics and politics of baseball. DeMause argues that Washington got one of the worst deals in recent history when it lured the Nationals here.

If the stadium sparks economic development in the newly revitalized South Capitol neighborhood, perhaps the fact that the city got hosed will be forgotten. But the architecture will remain, and it will remain mediocre. That failure isn't just a matter of bad negotiating on the city's part, or bland aesthetics on the part of HOK Sport, the architecture giant that designed the rush-job Nationals Park.

It is also a colossal symbolic failure with national and international import. At a time when the United States is losing a global argument about freedom and democracy, when China and countries along the Persian Gulf are proving to an attentive developing world that top-down leadership is the best and most efficient route to prosperity, the capital of the so-called free world built a monument to its national pastime that gets a C-plus.

It passes, barely. But as sports lovers know, sports is never just sports. And architecture, especially in a world capital, is never just architecture. Nationals Park might be a better experience than RFK, but it fails to say anything larger to the city, or the world.

I find a similarly uninspiring lack of vision in what surrounds the ballpark, what came before it, and what semiotic messages are on display inside of it. While I applaud the city and the team's massive and successful PR campaign to get fans to ride Metro, the carefully managed block from the Navy Yard metro station to the ballpark entrance exudes a shopping mall feel.

Construction cranes loom over the horizon as the redevelopment initiative is in full swing, while street-level banner ads promise a new Half Street, turning a city block into a product to be delivered on a timeline. Half Street SE is not "coming 2009"; it has been there for as long as the grid has been there. But "half street. the whole experience." isn't so much a city block as it is a combined retail/luxury housing/office space theme park. After being shuttled along Half Street from the Metro into the ballpark, you are greeted by some even more perplexing advertisements:

As the rise of this new neighborhood is on display all around you, advertisers are encouraging you to leave the city entirely and go to shopping malls in Maryland and Virginia like White Flint or Dulles Town Center. It begs the question if the neighborhood -- what developers want to call the "Ballpark District" while the city insists on "Capitol Riverfront District" -- has more in common with its suburban counterparts than the nearby neighborhoods in the city itself.

Ultimately, I'm not expressing disdain at the prospect of luxury retail and condos, but at the fabrication of a neighborhood that may never even become a neighborhood. The "district" appelation is already an indicator and the distinction between the two names is telling. The developers are focusing on the cash cow, the structure on which they've economically hedged their bets but also the marketing tool that makes it attractive to their target audience. The city hasn't given up on the idea of a larger Anacostia redevelopment initiative, but that name remains a dirty word. I distinctly recall eavesdropping on a conversation at Nationals Park, where two attendees shuddered at the prospect of going one stop too far on the Green Line past the Navy Yard and ending up in the neighborhood of Anacostia, on the other side of the river, as though they wouldn't even be safe on the subway platform. Growing up, the green line was the "dangerous line." Anacostia's image problem is so bad that even the Metro line that serves it is considered suspect by white suburbanites. Consequently, developers are reluctant to associate their new district, which has far more in common with shopping malls 20-30 miles away, with neighborhoods less than a mile away.

West of the ballpark, across South Capitol Street, one wonders how the hulking behemoth next door has affected both the quality of life and property values/taxes of Southwest D.C., what the Washington City Paper is cheekily calling the Nats Flats while still leveling the straight dope on the history and prospects of the neighborhood, perhaps most notable for its mid-century modern urban renewal architecture. It may be the victim of urban renewal round two, as some housing projects have already been demolished, but I still think that stadium boosters are hoping South Capitol Street will remain a border between rather than a boulevard connecting two vastly different neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, the sides of the ballpark closest to the river recall the area's industrial past. The era of residential urban renewal is, one can hope, largely a thing of the past. No neighborhoods were decimated to make way for Nationals Park. Government Center, it ain't. But what remains -- a sewer pumping station and a cement factory -- occupy prime real estate, much to the stadium boosters' embarrassment.

The WASA pumping station is, I admit, a purely functional part of the city's infrastructure that could probably be moved elsewhere, but after capturing this shot of the cement factory between Nationals Park and the Anacostia River, I became increasingly fond of it. The Potomac may be the river of political power, where the presidential yacht plies the waters, but the Anacostia is a blue-collar river, a river that works. In the meantime, Half Street will continue to funnel fans directly from the Metro and into the ballpark's main entrance facing away from the Anacostia -- although there are still prominent entrances on both the pumping station and riverfront sides of the ballpark.

Most journalists were dismissive of the area prior to the arrival of the stadium. The New York Times takes the consensus view in its opening day story: "But everyone agrees that the change in the neighborhood in the 22 months since work began on the 41,000-seat stadium has been astounding. In what was an urban wasteland of trash-strewn lots, sex clubs, and taxi and auto repair shops, developers have invested in new offices, condominiums, rental apartments, stores and restaurants."

With such a scathing description -- "urban wasteland" -- it would seem hard to argue with redevelopment of any kind. But at the same time, I began receiving e-mails in the summer of 2006 about the imminent closure of Nation Nightclub, a D.C. mainstay of the electronic music scene, and arguably the incubator of house in the nation's capital as host to the Buzz parties. I didn't put two and two together, until I realized that the "urban wasteland" everyone was so excited to raze included Nation.

At that point, the construction of a stadium claimed a real casualty. Baseball may have deeper pockets and a wider fan base than house, but it's worth staking out the loss of such an institution. D.C. has a hard enough time establishing a unique urban identity, and the Buzz parties, while following the same national rave arc of underground to mainstream to oversaturated drug haven, was still the fulcrum of a local scene.

Just as my night out at the Paradox conjured up Baltimore Fever memories, the other half was down the BW Parkway in D.C., with Scott Henry at the helm. Hopefully musical metadata can hold the memories where bulldozers have already claimed the physical space.

A mix is the monument: A dancefloor once stood in the outfield.

50 Years of Half-Smokes

2008-08-27T21:53:00.000-04:00

In a city short on homegrown icons -- because everybody, it seems, is from somewhere else -- D.C. quietly clings to the half-smoke as its only indigenous cuisine. And the city's best, or at least most stalwart, proprietor of half-beef-half-pork-half-Polish-half-smokes is Ben's Chili Bowl. It may sound questionable that a divey greasy spoon serving up the messiest, most ungraceful dish imaginable could anchor a neighborhood, but Ben's survived the 1968 riots that decimated "Black Broadway," the U Street corridor, and has been right in the thick of its since the neighborhood's (largely white) renaissance. In the dark days of the '80s, Ben's was about it for the birthplace of Duke Ellington.

As such, their 50th anniversary was not going to pass without notice. Between an outdoor street party last Friday -- 50 years to the day since they opened -- and a free go-go concert at the 9:30 club, not to mention a book launch, the half-smoke got its due.

I was particularly jazzed about the line-up of go-go heavy hitters: Trouble Funk, E.U., and Mambo Sauce. It's a damn shame I couldn't make it down for the afternoon and I haven't found any reviews posted, but getting all that for free, it's hard to complain. Go-go and half-smokes, that's D.C. in a nutshell.

I did my part to celebrate the anniversary, though. After Brazilian Rhythms, around the corner from 12th and U at 14th and T, I stopped by for a half-smoke smothered in chili. At 2 am, nothing else could have tasted so good.

Brazilian Rhythms: Distrito de Columbia

2008-08-20T19:03:00.001-04:00

Join me and DJ Neville C, proprietor of Som Records, a crate digger's mecca, for a night of, well, Brazilian rhythms. Expect samba & variations, tropicalia, MPB of all stripes, batucada, hip-hop brasileiro, and of course funk carioca.

Cafe Saint-Ex is at 14th and T Streets, D.C. No cover, so vem todo mundo.

[p.s. Post #100!]

Pictures don't need metaphors and neither does Go-Go

2008-08-19T14:29:00.000-04:00

50th Anniversary of The Pick of the Week: A Self Critique


~By Thomas Sayers Ellis

That joaint, especially, the title is kinda 'fusing. I mean confusing.

What you trying to say and why don't you just take pictures and shut the fuck up G.

You worse than Mambo Sauce.

Where's your photo book.

Where's your CD.

You should do like the rappers.

You should do like SharpShot and come by and photograph me and my kids and shut the fuck up.

Pictures ain't News.

Pictures don't need metaphors and neither does Go-Go.

TMOTT was cool as shit till you start dropping visual weekly-reader critiques on the scene.

I'mma steal your camera when I see you.

Still I be lookin' forward to these jammies and want to make a contribution to The Go-Go Pick of the Week fund
so you can start a Photographers Collective to show us how beautiful and how ugly we is all at once.

Where do I send the check? Sike move, fool.

I like this week's Pick. Looks like the kid is floating by on a skateboard.
w h a t the? He is. Damn and he looks like a young Barack too.

I imagine it must take a lot of luck and balls to walk around SE pressing people to take their photo
and bugging peeps for old Go-Go posters that you never get.

My dude don't quit. I seent some of your flicks on a Suttle DVD.

You must have gotten paid for that, cause I, myself purchased four.

Know what? The Pick of the Week is 50 weeks old this week, dayum, a milestone!

Where's the party.

Can I get a few flicks of Model Chick for my dashboard. I know you gots some.

If you had a nickel for every time someone thank you for a Pic, you might have a quarter, might.

That ain't now real job, flashing people while they danicng and shit.

Mr. G ought to kick yo a s s. Get off the stage nucca.

They say you talk to yourself when you shoot.

They say you hear the snare play before it plays.

They say you take pics just to get in free.

That you just using Go-Go to get a job at Jet.

Was that you coming out of the Metro in plaid on plain in Anacostia? You need a break dude.

Happy 50th young...

Go-Go Photo

2008-08-13T20:29:00.000-04:00

If you're looking for go-go, hip-hop, and R&B in the DMV (that's District, Maryland, & Virginia to you), then look no further than Take Me Out To The Go-Go. It's a one-stop shop that's been flooding my inbox lately with multiple daily e-flyers, mixtape announcements, and something that really caught my eye: TSE's pick of the week photo. TSE is Thomas Sayers Ellis, a photographer and poet. He's a co-founder of The Dark Room Collective, which has its roots in my recent stomping grounds up in Cambridge. In fact, I believe their Victorian HQ was around the corner from where I lived this year.

He's now working on a book of photography, The Go-Go Book: People in the Pocket in Washington, D.C. If the TMOTTGG pick of the week is any indication, he's captured a very rich slice of life in our nation's capital. And he writes a mean poem to boot --

The Return of COLORED ONLY

One of these badass,
glorious days,
the signs and negative sounds
that worked against us

will all begin their tenures
of service, their holy and complex repentance.
It has already begun with
"Nigger" and "Bitch"
and for this we have young folks to thank,
their disrespect and fearlessness.

Naturally, this will scare
the civil rights out of some
and, for a mad-moment, empower
a great many wrong-cultured others.

To this "The Return..."
will either code switch or hood ornament,
drama-drumming both––a cult-nats matrimony
of the vernacular re-mix: ain’t studin’ you,
nommo no more nommo,
stop studin’ us.

All yall who tell yall hearts Art,
your Bama Hour is, again, up-struggling
as we (credits and debits alike)
hang and unhang the old slanders ourselves

--not as segregationists
(although that wouldn’t be
that bad, given...) and not as Air Februarians
(.., given…) but as identity repair-people,
faders of trick moves, trope-a-dopes
and okey dokes,

laying our dice down like ( ) we love us.

Olympic Fury

2008-08-11T09:55:00.000-04:00

The 29th Olympiad is underway and all I can do is reflect on an article from two years ago: the destruction of hutong. To Chinese authorities, it was a form of slum clearance, an all too likely prospect during the Olympics. But as the author explains, it was a close-knit, functioning community.

Rail about pollution, corporate collusion, human rights, Tibet, authoritarianism. But don't forget the hutong.

Trinidad Nights

2008-08-07T22:18:00.002-04:00

I've closely followed coverage over the last couple months of the spate of violence in the D.C. neighborhood of Trinidad, which has ultimately resulted in two separate cases of the police setting up checkpoints and only letting in residents or those with documented business. I think of D.C. as a city in and of itself before adding in the federal government (whereas for most Americans its identity is exclusively the government), so I will set aside the obvious absurdity of checkpoints all of two miles from the Capitol, which was enough to ensure it international coverage. It is nonetheless a tragic breakdown of civic life when such a measure is deemed necessary -- and done without community consultation, I should add. Checkpoints are precisely the mechanism of urban segregation, stigma, and ghettoization. "Several years ago, Richardson said, she removed the steel grate from her center's front doors, and she plans on taking the bars off the windows. The checkpoint, she said, was infuriating because it suggested Trinidad has not changed." I can remember from my own experience in Rocinha the startling sensation of entrapment during a police invasion.

The outcry was widespread, and the legal challenges came quickly to reverse the status of "occupied Trinidad." While a Post editorial asks why there was more protest over the checkpoints than the murders, I can point to some compelling community efforts to the contrary, notably a mock burial for snitching led by the venerable D.C. anti-violence group Peaceoholics.

WAMU, the D.C. NPR affiliate, also ran a story on another anti-violence event (audio for RealPlayer & Windows Media), where go-go beats hover in the background as soon as it opens. It featured Anwan Glover, better known to many outside of D.C. as Slim Charles. In D.C., though, he's better known as Big G of go-go legends Backyard Band, credited with bringing more of a hardcore rap style to the go-go scene.

"Keep It Gangsta," if that gives you any idea.

Holding it down in Southeast D.C., very much the heartland for go-go. Audio is kind of rough, but the home movie feel is definitely charming. Now though, Big G is using his clout, the kind that only a go-go star who used to be a banger can bring to young black D.C., to bring home the message for D.C. neighborhoods that violence has got to go. Music is a way out of violence -- it was for Big G and it is for some of the kids interviewed in the story.

The GoTube commentators have it too. As TnUt00bLvr writes: "I'm with you for real, then niggas wonder why they gots to go all the way to Va.& Wheaton to see them play?STOP beefin in the local spots then y'all can party with Back!!You just taking GoGo farther & farther away from HOME because of bullshit!! Quit reppin hoods you rentin' or live with your folks in man!!" Inner-city violence is definitely another factor in the suburban dissemination of go-go.

The WAMU story is particularly penetrating for me, though, because of the comments by John Roman of the Urban Institute. He delves into the economics of the drug trade and then segues to a geographical analysis of how the neighborhood functions in the wider urban network: "At first, it's hard to see how this tiny neighborhood of brick row houses with wooden porches could be home for such violence. Bordered on one end by Gallaudet University and the other end by the National Arboretum, Trinidad physically lives up to its billing as a garden community. But as Roman observes, the layout of the neighborhood and its location have also made it a major hub for illegal drugs."

Parsing it down to one-way streets and proximity to particular avenues is a brilliant way of thinking about Trinidad's problems -- they don't exist in a vacuum, but rather at the core relate to how the neighborhood fits into the broader grid of D.C. On the flip side, the corner view is important too, and stalwart local columnist Courtland Milloy does what needs to be done: he drives into Trinidad in the hours before "killing time" to talk to residents.

On the blog-a-front, I was excited to discover inked, a blogger who lives in Trinidad. She writes at Frozen Tropics (Trinidad in a D.C. winter?), where the July posts are a frantic recap of hourly updates on shootings, checkpoints, and homicides. Digging through her archives, I found a great post on Trinidad houses that shows how picturesque much of the neighborhood really is. She is also a studious chronicler of the revival of the H Street corridor, still reeling forty years after the '68 riots. Her sense of both neighborhood pride and civic engagement is heartening, to say the least, and has already mitigated much of the hysteria that seeped through the media coverage of events in the neighborhood over the last couple months, which makes it all too easy for someone who has never visited the neighborhood to write it off on news coverage alone.

Enjoy your beautiful rowhouse, inked, and be safe.

Voting-a-Go-Go

2008-08-04T22:16:00.002-04:00

Any astute observer on the highways has probably seen D.C.'s provocative license plate, harkening back to Revolutionary-era complaints. It's true -- residents of the District pay federal income taxes, but their lone congressional representative cannot vote on legislation. It's long been a thorny issue, with the most recent best effort shot down just over a year ago.

The latest effort by the main advocacy group for District voting rights, DC Vote, definitely caught my ears. They enlisted a local gospel/R&B singer, Joe L. Da Vessel, to cut a go-go track on the topic.

Joe L. Da Vessel - Demand the Vote

Go-go is, of course, D.C. music to the core, but on a matter like voting rights, the precise boundaries of the city matter. Da Vessel, for example, gives an address on his website of Fort Washington, Maryland -- just across the line in Prince George's County (frequently touted as the most affluent black-majority county in the country). If that's where he lives, then he's got a voice (assuming he votes).

P.G. County is home to plenty of folks with roots in the District, dating back to a black middle-class exodus in the '60s and '70s. Wale, who I profiled from Rock the Bells, grew up in the District and moved out to Largo, MD as a teenager. Go-go's got a stronghold out there too, as an old online list of go-go clubs or the Take Me Out to the Go-Go message board can attest to. Addresses in NE and SE D.C. may still dominate, but there are plenty of Oxon Hill, Capitol Heights, Fort Washington, and Marlow Heights addresses too. The District's city line is definitely permeable, but I suspect go-go is going to move more in the county direction, as inner-ring suburbs become increasingly popular to residents squeezed out of cities by higher prices (or the dreaded 'G' word). The Anacostia River, a psycho-geographical barrier between affluent, cosmopolitan D.C. and everything else (aka black & poor) is even being crossed with some condo development in the historic Anacostia neighborhood. I glanced at some insipid condo newspaper full of marketing doublespeak on the Metro the other day and a real estate agent projected Anacostia is the next big market. This was unthinkable 5 or 10 years ago and, as it goes with the up-valuing of a low-income neighborhood, not something anyone can rightfully decry if they don't live there, but still something to watch -- change takes many forms, not always the ideal ones.

Back to the county, there is another dividing line in the Capital Beltway. As residents chime in on a City-Data thread about P.G. County, the inner-ring is aptly cordonned off the Beltway, the major highway enforcing its own kind of ghettoization. Meanwhile, go-go fans are getting squeezed on both sides as officials see club closures the solution to violence at go-gos in both P.G. County and the District. In an even further afield case, the suburban sprawl that has pushed black residents out of P.G. and into neighboring Charles County has seen police harassment bordering on racial profiling at a go-go night. Just as far from the District both geographically and culturally, I heard that Saturday night's show at Merriweather, where I saw Rock the Bells last weekend and where go-go pioneer and legend Chuck Brown was the undercard, went without incident.

All urban/suburban music, culture, race, and nightlife politics that are far more complicated than the fairly straightforward call for voting rights (it's a shame that Congress can't see how simple it is). On Sunday, the Washington Post reported that DC Vote shot a music video for the song. I'll scout it on VoteTube when it arrives.

"Now I know this is delicate / But I can go to war and all I can get is a shadow delegate?"

Are we in Baltimore? Are we in D.C.? Are we in Columbia?

2008-07-30T18:58:00.003-04:00

Columbia, Maryland is a planned community that appeared out of nowhere in otherwise rural Howard County in 1967. It may have improved on '60s suburban sprawl, but forty years later it's still plagued by suburbia's basic problems: car-dependency, low density, lack of mixed-use development.

I was born and raised here and the temporary return has been rocky, mostly the sticker shock of having to pay for gas while still gainfully unemployed in post-graduation limbo, not to mention the sheer time consumption of driving at least half an hour to access urban culture. Indeed, Columbia is positioned about halfway between Baltimore and D.C., a perk for reaching the two major job markets, or a drag if you just wish you were in one or the other.

I've watched that tension blossom over the years, especially as friends have gone in one direction or the other to settle down: Is it a Baltimore or a D.C. suburb? The answer, of course, is both, but I've made a parlor game out of watching the barometer in either direction -- how many signs for commuter buses to either city, which sports teams are getting repped in bar windows and on baseball caps, what newspaper does a particular house subscribe to, what local news channel do you watch. Despite a Baltimore orientation in high school, I've gradually recognized that I orbit the District -- from the Washington Post at the breakfast table every day to the Nationals game I attended last night. Of course, a particularly snarky commentator could say that even Baltimore is a bedroom community of D.C.

Perhaps Columbia's only saving grace -- certainly culturally -- is Merriweather Post Pavilion. The venue is second to none, an early Frank Gehry (c. 1967) outdoor amphitheater, most definitely an idyllic setting on any summer evening, albeit hot in the daytime under a sticky mid-Atlantic sun. The artists at Sunday's Rock the Bells, a old-school hip-hop spectacular, put on a show at Merriweather from noon till night, but damn if they couldn't figure out where they were. Between Nas, Mos Def, De La Soul, and Rakim on the main stage there were shout outs to Baltimore, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, even Pennsylvania. Music as relentlessly urban and rooted in a particular place as hip-hop just couldn't find a comfortable nesting ground amid the leafy groves of Merriweather, even if it was a convenient meeting point for black/white, young/old, urban/suburban -- although the lack of public transportation may have kept some citybound fans away (I did see one Zipcar, much to my delight).

Another way of staking out location, of course, was through the music itself. Baltimore has club and D.C. has go-go, both of which Afrika Bambaata spun in an animated DJ set on a rainy side stage. He namechecked both -- said he couldn't play a set this close to either city and not drop Bmore breaks or pots and pans music. But in the hype circles of 2008, it's not exactly a fair battle. Go-go can't stand on its own as DJ material the way club can, simply because it's live music. Of course, a little go-go inflected hip-hop might be the perfect repartee. So while DJ Blaqstarr did his best to animate a thinned out side stage the way he did at the Paradox the other week (god-awful hype girl Oxy Cottontail, a Columbia native and ultimate hanger-on, should not have been sharing the stage with the likes of the Zulu Nation any more than I should have), I would he say he was upstaged by DC/MD's own Wale, who performed early on the main stage.

His breakout single "Dig Dug" samples D.C. go-go band Northeast Groovers, chops & screws it just a little but mostly lets it play. "Not from Northeast but I guarantee I groove."

Wale - Dig Dug

On his most recent effort, "Mixtape About Nothing," he tackles the Bmore vs. D.C. controversy head-on, mostly in jest.

Wale - The Bmore Club Slam

Even K-Swift (R.I.P.) gets namedropped. But damn if her beloved 92Q isn't showing PG County's finest any love.

While the Columbia curse means I can't claim any more cred to D.C. go-go than Baltimore club, even if I get the chance to spectate every once in awhile, if I'm in the D.C. area rather than a Baltimore suburb, it's still gratifying to have an up-and-comer to root for (and rock out to). And his DJ, Alizay of WKYS (the D.C. answer to 92.Q), even did a Rock the Bells mixtape.

In the end, though, it was finally Q-Tip who got it right. As he hyped the crowd up for A Tribe Called Quest's full appearance on stage, he yelled out, "Are we in Baltimore? Are we in D.C.? Are we in Columbia?"

The answer, of course, is all three, in different ways. And for a Columbia native, however conflicted it makes me feel, it was the rarest of treats to have music I normally drive at least a half an hour to hear in my hometown, a short walk away.

K-Swift Be Unruly

2008-07-25T11:36:00.001-04:00

What could or should just be ruminations on this Bmore club massive that I attended last Friday is clearly overshadowed by the accidental passing of K-Swift later that weekend. It's chilling to have attended her penultimate gig at Baltimore's legendary nightclub the Paradox, a hulking warehouse in the shadow of Ravens Stadium, where freight trains rumble past throughout the night making for their own industrial air horns. It's an incredible club, exactly the kind of gritty space in a gritty part of town for either club -- Friday nights -- or the wilder side of house -- Saturday nights, especially the legendary Fever party (scroll down to episode 2) that put Baltimore on the map for electronic music.

The Paradox is the kind of place where you watch your back and ask someone to walk you to your car, so it was particularly galling to see a sizeable crowd of skinny jeans, ironic t-shirts, and asymmetrical haircuts. To some extent it epitomized the popularity of club music over the last couple years among a certain hip set. You can hear club tunes cranked out in just about any city across the U.S., Europe, and probably elsewhere, but how is it received nowadays in good ol' Baltimore?

The City Paper certainly noticed the mixed crowd, and it's impossible to get an exact read in the ebbs and flows of a nightclub -- who danced with who, who laughed at who, who earned respect -- it's hard to knock anyone for wanting to come to a line-up that huge. It was tri-state (MD, VA, PA) plus the District, and some NYC to boot. Orioles hats, Phillies hats, even a Nationals cap or too -- maybe it's no longer Baltimore club, but mid-Atlantic club, and in 20 odd years it's only logical that those Baltimore breaks have spread up and down I-95.

My Crew Be Unruly may not have been a Baltimore secret on Friday night, but it was still inner-city Baltimore in tone, and that's what counts. I suspect the out of town, art student, and suburban crowds (myself included on the latter count, at least for the time being) were unlikely to need to avail themselves of the services offered by K-Swift's sponsor (it was plastered all over the K-Swift t-shirts):

Therein lies K-Swift's greatest strength and what made her the rising star that she was: cross-crowd appeal with credibility, from her regular shows on 92Q to sharing a headliner spot with Diplo. Blaqstarr may be the next young DJ (and K-Swift was only 27, too) to look out for . . . he was there on Friday too, and I'll be seeing him on Sunday at the Rock the Bells Tour.
___

In conclussion, it was all the more depressing to receive a flyer for a K-Swift pool party, given it was a pool accident that caused her death.

For the time being, if you're local, there is a viewing today and a funeral tomorrow (see the 92Q link for details). And head to your local Downtown Locker Room to get any remaining Jump Off mixtapes -- they're going to be collector's items soon.

And on the DC side, check DJ C's tribute, then come see him live tonight in Silver Spring, MD. Gotta put the good word in for my house guest.

DJ Showcase Latinoamericano

2008-07-09T18:09:00.000-04:00

This week is the Latin Alternative Music Confernece in el Manzana Grande. As part of it, global music purveyor S.O.B.'s is hosting a DJ showcase of Latin America's musica digital-bass-club-mashup on Thursday night. I'll be holding it down for the Brazilianists with plenty of funk and hip-hop brasileiro, but the rest are a strictly castellano affair -- Mexico, Chile, and Argentina.

The Zizek boys and their cumbia digital should be a big draw, especially on the heels of their monster write-up in Urb. Toy Selectah also has been mining the urban/rural frontiers for many years now and has hopefully cooked up something special for the evening.

Meanwhile, Refusenik and I keep wondering how a couple of white Jews of Eastern European descent (or birth, in his case) ended up on the bill . . . until I discovered my secret identity c/o TimeOut New York. Apparently I'm now from Sao Paulo! All the reason to rep Rio even harder.

In all seriousness, I understand it's going to be the party of LAMC, so if you're in Nova/Nueva York, stop on by.

DJ Showcase Latinoamericano
S.O.B.'s at 204 Varick St.
$10, 21+
Doors at 8:30 pm, show at 9:30 pm

Neg Fondamental

2008-07-09T16:50:00.002-04:00

The death of Aimé Césaire back in April passed through with minimal fanfare in the U.S., whereas the French broadcast his funeral live on television. As a poet, politician, and philosopher, he stands immensely tall in 20^th century discourse yet hails from a comparatively small place: the island of Martinique. A former French colony and now fully-fledged department (formerly DOM, département d’outre-mer or overseas department, and now a DFA, départment française d’Amérique), Martinique has produced a remarkable number of noteworthy French writers in the last 60 years. Start with Frantz Fanon, then Césaire, then more contemporary authors Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphael Confiant, and Suzanne Dracius. It’s an impressive litany of forceful francophone writers from the colonial and post-colonial eras who have dredged their island’s history and its subordinate status to France to make powerful statements about the legacy of slavery, the effects of colonialism, the cultural bonds of the Caribbean, and the global black experience.

Césaire is, as he called himself, “nègre fondamental” (black at the core). The translation is tricky on both fronts. “Nègre” is a stronger term than “noir,” and has carried a derogatory connotation dating back to plantation slavery. It can still be used as an insult, but it isn’t nearly as ugly as English’s own six-letter word. While the hip-hop world has reclaimed that term to the Nth degree, I couldn’t imagine MLK or Malcolm X getting behind it. “Nègre” is something both rappers and writers use. “Fondamental” can be fundamental or foundational, both of which are applicable here. Rather than pick one and exclude the other, I like the notion of “at the core” as covering both the essence quality of “fundamental” and the building block notion of “foundational.”

In Martinique, where he was mayor of the capital, Fort-de-France, for an astonishing 56 years (1945-2001) and deputy to the French national assembly for another 48 (1945-1993), Césaire was the grand homme of the island. While his early days, especially his break with the French communist party in order to found the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais, made for contentious politics, he simply became more revered the more he aged. Supposedly he held court in a square near city hall up until even a year or two ago. It was my surprise to learn he was still alive when I first discovered him back in high school, by which time he was already in his 80s.

While his voice was assured as early as 1939 with the publication of his epic poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a return to my native land), he lived long enough to be criticized. A younger generation of French Caribbean writers saw Négritude and its emphasis on Africa as undermining the uniqueness of Caribbean heritage, which they lauded as créolité (Creoleness). It was a healthy debate, though, and especially upon his death there was universal reverence. Patrick Chamoiseau, himself a founder of the créolité movement, wrote a stirring memoriam (Fr only). Politically, a half-century can surely get corrupt, and the night clerk at my hotel told me he was accused of letting henchmen run the show as he got increasingly old and incapable of managing all the details of mayoralty by himself.

But the signs -- literal billboards, posters, and public displays across the island -- of appreciation for Césaire were ubiquitous across Martinique, beginning the moment you stepped into the airport, even before passport control. The airport, I should add, is incongruously named after Césaire, something he wasn't exactly in favor of. Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior, pushed it through -- two years after Césaire refused to meet him in Fort-de-France for his support of a bill acknowledging the "positive effects" of colonialism.

My stay in Martinique was short, just long enough to give the island a quick pass, stock up on some Antillean books (including teach yourself Creole!) and CDs (francophone dancehall and zouk galore) although I hope to return one day for a longer research effort. But it was enough to recognize the richness -- cultural, intellectual, literary -- of this particular corner of the francophone Caribbean.

I'm currently reading Chamoiseau's Texaco, which tells the story of a shantytown on the outskirts of Fort-de-France (built on the remnants of a Texaco facility) as it faces demolition at the hands of the city's urban reform efforts. In this neighborhood founded by rural exodus, Creole is at its strongest, yet it is here that I found the "Merci Aimé Césaire" graffiti, the largest I saw on the island, written in French but signed with a Creole name. Here that Chamoiseau eulogizes 200 years of Martinique history as they have resulted in the establishment of Texaco but thanks Serge Letchimy, urbanist and now mayor of Fort-de-France, who led the effort to raze the shantytown. The novel won the Prix Goncourt, France's equivalent of a Pulitzer, catapaulting Chamoiseau, Martinique, and Texaco to fame.

Even après-Césaire, Martinique -- and by extension the French Caribbean (most notably Guadeloupe) -- are poised to remain a hotbed of literary and intellectual activity. If anything, the outpouring from Martinique's younger luminaries simply confirms the multi-generational strain is alive and well.

[My own merci to Mylène Priam for her wonderful teaching on francophone literature in the Caribbean. She spoke about her work here, which garnered a bit of blog press in the Caribbean-academico-sphere.]

Imitation is the Most Illegal Form of Flattery

2008-06-27T23:20:00.002-04:00

Disco isn't dead, thankfully, and I've been a long-time admirer of the DFA camp, especially el jefe James Murphy, for maintaining a disco sensibility that includes a deep reverence for the classics. While LCD Soundsystem is viewed as relentlessly contemporary and trendsetting, Murphy's DJ sets and pure compositional work betray a sense of lineage -- he isn't breaking new ground so much as updating and readapting it in another musical generation.

DFA often straddles the line between excessive commercialism and the underground music scene, however, and I downloaded up 2006's 45:33 with some trepidation. First EMI, now Nike? I'm rather fond of the often dreamlike, spaced-out epic, however, and honestly thought it didn't sound much like running music.

I'm late to the scoop, but it turns out I was right: The whole business about a jogging soundtrack was a sham. As the cover, which I hadn't seen before, makes clear, it's an homage to Manuel Göttsching's E2-E4, one of the finest proto-techno electronic compositions.

Having Nike finance your otherwise not commercially viable 45-minute electronic opus? Brilliant.

The story could end there, but the problem is that the reverence toward Herr Göttsching was not entirely appreciated. I dug up this press statement on the interwebs. After going on about the iconic status of "E2-E4," it paints Murphy as a johnny-come-lately:

This clearly doesn’t qualify his album as a tribute to the great role model.
He's just jumped on someone else's gravy train without buying a ticket.
What Murphy is doing is exploiting the album's reputation for his own purposes illegally
in the context of German Competition Regulations and also according to legislation of other countries, too.

Sadly, it boils down to a bristling about copyright infringement and the branding of the chessboard image. I happen to take Murphy's side in this one -- the world needs more, not less, E2-E4/45:33-esque études. Instead, it's another public case of an electronic auteur uncomfortable with the dance music progeny his work has spawned.

And frankly I'd much rather hear Murphy behind the mixing board than in front of the microphone. DFA has been experiencing a resurgence in the last year or so, as always on the strength of its tireless dedication to the 12" single, releasing dance floor favorites like Holy Ghost!'s smooth plaintive "Hold On", Juan Maclean's blissful "Happy House", and now a full-length from the mythologically-inspired Hercules & Love Affair (whose full-length dropped a few days ago on June 24, my birthday). They've gotten some high-profile press, and I think might represent a sea change for DFA. As Tim Goldsworthy explains in the article, "'It’s really honest,' Mr. Goldsworthy said in a phone interview, pointing out that most artists in the DFA world approach disco from more of a punk or new-wave sensibility. He said that, as a club kid, Mr. Butler 'understands disco and he understands all the little quirks of the music that other people would probably find cheesy.'" After years of mining the points in the late '70s and '80s when rock bands encroached on disco territory, they've finally acquired a flagship act who's loud and proud -- gay, campy disco with no shame, producing glorious diva house without a trace of irony. It might be just the tonic to pull DFA out of the post-ironic/hipster milieu and firm up their dance chops. Play another record, James.

Ela gostou de baile funk

2008-06-17T16:18:00.001-04:00

Casi from Flamin Hotz directed me last night to the Mad Decent blog, where with tremendous surprise and utter shock I learned that Adriana Pittigliani has passed away. I hadn't the faintest idea that she had cancer, as admittedly we haven't spoken much since last August, following a dispute about a DJ gig and disagreements over the Flamin Hotz CD. These arguments seem petty now, and in fact I had recently written her a letter to accompany her copy of the CD, in hopes that it would serve as a springboard to patch things up. She was one of the examples of how the transition from wide-eyed researcher and inquisitor to representative of a record label, however small and independent, unfortunately compromised social relationships. But I still recall with clarity the long discussions in her Flamengo apartment, overlooking Pão de Açúcar, where she chain smoked cigarettes and held something of a funk carioca salon. Adriana was one of the first points of contact for any foreigner coming to Rio with an interest in funk, from Diplo to Daniel Haaksman, British party promoters, Swedish journalists, Québécois radio DJs, or someone with an academic inquiry like myself.

As a middle-class white woman, she seemed a strange fit for a relentlessly young and predominately black scene built from the ground-up in favelas far from the tony high-rises of Flamengo. But I think her attraction began, in part, with her photographer's eye. (Her site no longer works, but if you get the Flamin Hotz CD, you can see her excellent work on the Carioca Funk Clube artist photos.) The movimento funk is a whirlwind of humanity at its most exuberant, and certainly she must have been drawn to photographic compositions rich with sweat and bodies, color and movement. She had a feminist tilt to her experience as a funkeira as well, and she frequently recounted a transformative experience back in 2004 in Vila Mimosa, the red light district of Rio, throwing a baile with a group of prostitutes -- not to drum up clients, just to enjoy. She saw something parallel in attitudes and mores, a thumbing of the nose at decency, in Vila Mimosa and the favelas where bailes are king.

Moving from grande dame of funk, making connections between foreigners and high-profile local DJs and MCs, to the manager of a "house of artists" (Casi's words) in Carioca Funk Clube, chief among them DJ Sany Pitbull, I kept wondering why Adriana dedicated so much time and energy to putting together tours, sending out promo tracks, and scouring the web (her imprint was everywhere -- MySpace, blogs, Wiki) to relentlessly promote CFC -- sometimes, in my opinion, at the expense of the movimento funk as a whole, which I began to think she didn't have a whole lot of respect for. Regardless of my personal gripes, she was decidedly on a mission, and certainly was promoting something new and exciting. It was not for nothing that Hermano Vianna, veritable written authority on funk (cf O Mundo Funk Carioca, c. 1988), called Sany's "Funk Alemão," and by extension the CFC aesthetic, "pós-baile funk."

Adriana's goal, I eventually realized, was to "break" funk the way that her father, Armando Pittigliani, had in part "broken" bossa nova. According to the Cravo Albin Dictionary of Brazilian Popular Music, he "was one of the ones responsible for the first releases by several bossa nova artists." I can't prove it, but I believe the royalties from those early albums, or at least his success as an A&R guy in the Brazilian music industry over the decades, in part allowed Adriana to have such a nice apartment in Flamengo without holding down a steady, full-time job (not that she didn't, I'm sure, earn her own keep from photography). And, in turn, she used the time bought by her father's success to pursue her era's own Brazilian popular music.

I never spoke with her directly about this idea, just inferred it from my own experiences talking with her and with Maga Bo, who introduced me to her and offers his own thoughtful tribute. She was truly a linchpin between Rio and the rest of the world, for me included. She was part of the encouragement that got me to my first baile, and I acknowledged her (as well as cited our interviews) in my thesis.

In a still burgeoning enterprise -- the dissemination of funk carioca abroad -- an essential fulcrum, and the opportunities that came with her, have been lost.

Genesis 1962 [from the now defunct Pitti Podcast, but the only hint she gave of nodding to her past]

Heat Waves

2008-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00

The mercury kept climbing and summer doesn't even start until next week. I'm out of Boston for the foreseeable future and have moved to the muggier confines of the mid-Atlantic. On the train heading north last week, I saw hydrants wrenched open in East Baltimore, the classic cooling strategy on scorched city streets. The Johns Hopkins Medical Complex looms over the blocks and blocks of row houses in that part of the city, a citadel of air conditioning towering above the sweltering fields of asphalt.

In D.C., they kept turning on the hydrants till they bled the taps dry. "Quander-Collins said some residents complained that as soon as WASA employees arrived to close a hydrant, neighbors would return and open it again. Deborah Boseman of the 900 block of Barnaby St. SE had been without water for almost six hours. 'This doesn't make any sense,' she said."

The heat makes you do crazy things.

/rupture's got an early mix of the summer candidate, but damned if I don't keep coming back to La Ola de Calor from last year. Summer is all about memories anyway, right?

Textual Healing

2008-06-09T00:11:00.000-04:00

"Reading Place and Space Between Morro and Asfalto: An Itinerary Through the Contemporary Zona Sul of Rio de Janeiro" -- The thesis that, in part, got me across the stage last week
"Techno City: Race, Space, and DEMF" -- More organized thoughts on the 313, following the scattershot first impressions post-DEMF.
"The Anonymous as Exotic in Presenting Proibidão" -- My BRASA paper gets reprised elsewhere on the Interwebs.

Who Says Vinyl is Dead?

2008-06-02T17:57:00.000-04:00

Vinyl sales are up. Cycling is up. Public transit ridership is up. Nothing but good news today.

I've dusted off lots of vintage Chicago house and Detroit techno records for my farewell party tonight. Come by if life is thriving in the good life.

A Farewell to Boston, Beat Research Style

2008-06-01T16:08:00.001-04:00

Just as the fine New England summer is settling in, I'm passing through the crimson gates of the Big H (which some might mistake for the Potterish big H on commencement day) and out into the wild blue yonder.

Looking forward, though, to saying farewell tomorrow night at the place that has most exemplified -- and nurtured -- my socio-musical sensibility: Beat Research at The Enormous Room.

If you're in the Bean, and not too busy chanting "Beat L.A." (although the first Celtics-Lakers showdown since, well, the year I was born isn't till Thursday), come by for the always ear-opening beats of wayne&wax and DJ Flack, alongside Gregzinho as special guest.

Call it a goodbye block party, neighborhood style.

The Enormous Room
569 Mass Ave. in Central Square
Monday, June 2
9 pm - 1 am, no cover

Favela Keeps Getting Chicer

2008-05-31T03:50:00.005-04:00

Paris and London have long had their own corner favela serving up $10 caipirinhas made from $1 bottles of 51 cachaça. Tomorrow, the NYC crowd will be able to get its own first-world favela fix.

Among Brazilian immigrants in the U.S., at least in the plentiful Brazilian Boston (or more accurately Cambridge/Somerville) community, the universal referents for Brazilianness are fairly typical: futebol, Rio, samba. But it seems the CDD phenomenon definitely had an impact: Among the chic, favelas are the real stand-in for Brazil.

I don't doubt they deserve visibility, but consumer consumption at expensive nightspots is hardly a helpful way of getting it. When it comes to favela chic, this is more my style.

Nu Whirl Orgy

2008-05-30T01:13:00.001-04:00

The orgying continues! This is the last one I'm doing this spring after RVNG and Juan Maclean, and perhaps my last ever for WHRB, following such notables from years past as the roots of Chicago house and Detroit techno and Blogariddims.

I'll be sending it off with a theme very apropos to what's been blogged about here for some time. In this case, a spin on the "new world" music that wayne&wax aptly calls the nu whirl. Variations of it have been blogged in translation here, as well as by Wayne, who will be kicking it off with a show&tell of tunes&talk. Also interviews and mixes by /rupture and Bo. Plus a mix by Ghis de Ghis and Refusenik may be dropping by in the wee hours.

Tune in and dive into the brave nu whirl.

Juan Maclean Orgy

2008-05-29T13:15:00.002-04:00

The flyer says it all. If you're fan of avant-robot post-punk or the deft left-wing techno and house stylings of one of DFA's finest, tune in tonight!

I'm So Bad, I Party in Detroit

2008-05-29T01:42:00.000-04:00

For many, a city like Paris or London or Rome seems unreal -- how could the real thing possibly compare to the endless images and leitmotifs in books and movies? For me, that city is Detroit. Does it really exist? Does anyone live there at all? Hasn't the whole thing been abandoned by now?

There doesn't appear to be an online version of Jerry Herron's "I'm So Bad, I Party in Detroit," although there is one of "Everyday Survival." The two together gave me my impression of Detroit: devil's night arsonists burning the city to the ground, itinerant metal scrappers slowly stripping it apart building by building, and RoboCop fantasizing where it will all end up. I quoted both in an article I penned on shrinking cities. Detroit is the American shrinking city par excellence, the only one to exceed the magic 1 million mark and then dip back below it.

As the sun came up on Sunday morning, I gazed out at glistening, isolated casinos (MGM Grand, The Motor City) from the back patio of the TV Bar, an out of the way watering hole off from downtown hosting an after-after-party for the first night of Movement: Detroit's Electronic Music Festival (hereafter DEMF). I chatted up a couple Detroiters who gave me the apocalyptic facts: a city built for 3 million now housing less than 1. 70,000 vacant houses. "Fucking tumbleweeds man," a guy said, shaking his head.

The emptiness is everywhere, permeating downtown and any neighborhood you might pass through. Coming from the crowded northeast, this kind of vacancy is simply unsettling. Neighborhoods didn't seem "dangerous" in the conventional sense so much as eerily empty. Two blocks off from Hart Plaza, the central downtown festival location, you can easily find high-rises of boarded up windows. "For Sale" and "For Lease" seem to be the most popular phrases in the Detroit signage lexicon.

But amidst all that abandonment, there is some extra elbow room, the kind of space that allows an after-party to run until 6 am and an after-after-party to kick up right after at 7 am, outside, on a Monday morning. Who's going to complain? What neighbors? It's the hollowed out core of the inner city that, unexpectedly enough, has incubated culture. Thus techno, thus Inner City / Good Life, thus the collapse of the auto industry and thus Model 500's Night Drive.

The Renaissance Center hovers over the Renaissance City, as Detroit began calling itself in the 1970s. GM's headquarters shine over the horizon looking like cylinders ready to churn in a V8 engine. The ground floor levels house a shopping mall arrayed around GM's latest models.

But the auto industry is still failing, attendance for the Detroit auto show is still falling, and DEMF keeps soaring.

Another take on the Renaissance City motif by Coleman Young, the city's first black mayor: The renaissance of Detroit is the city being reclaimed by its black residents. The proof is in the fist, ostensibly Joe Louis', but more directly the fist of resistance, of black power, of pushing whites over to the other side of 8 Mile.

I'm still seeing the city's wounds freshly. More thoughts to collect & a promised article to Spannered. My own photos once I can get a new USB cable, a casualty of the weekend's debauchery. But DEMF did not disappoint, and the nexus of local/international/Detroit orbital music was top-notch. If anything will be Detroit's renaissance, techno makes for a leading contender.
__

At least they've got some playoff hopes to keep spirits alive. I call Red Wings taking the Cup in 6 / Pistons going under to the Celts. Detroit's white/black divide continues. It's a cold, cold world.

From the Autobahn to I-94 (via the rails)

2008-05-25T11:57:00.001-04:00

Chicago shimmering across the water; heavy industry of Gary receding across the sand. This isn't the Caribbean, just the dunes.

While the beats usually traveled by asphalt, I can't shake my love of the high iron.

White City Black Music

2008-05-24T11:06:00.001-04:00

Somewhere below the vaunted architecture of the Second City, a little sound called house was born.

Frankie Knuckles - Only the Strong Survive (Instrumental) [via the love unlimited sound system]

On a pilgrimage of sorts, more the roots than the branches (watch me juke?). Occasioned by the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, from which I'll have some live reports soon enough.

A Dirge 'Round the Corner

2008-05-24T01:30:00.001-04:00

Another dispatch from the Crescent --

Sylvester Francis, an infamous repository of NOLA lore and proprietor of the Backstreet Cultural Museum, tipped me off on a recent return visit to a jazz funeral for Billy Ding. Not an everyday occurrence, and so not to be missed. And like so many cultural events in this city, it has an only in New Orleans quality to it. A crowd began milling about Jackson Square in the French Quarter, seemingly equal parts those in the know and those who wandered by and stopped, knowing something was about to happen. The bells at St. Louis Cathedral began tolling and out came the coffin. It was led into a hearse, which began the parade. The band struck up its first number.

On a hot May day, the Treme Brass Band was in full regalia to honor one of their own, while the crowd was a strange mixture of eccentric locals, family, friends, and yes, tourists (self included, sadly). It was both a musical event that warranted serious photography and audio recording -- which I saw -- but plenty of snapshots by the simply curious as well. The jazz funeral has assumed a kind of mythic quality that makes it a tourist attraction. And needless to say, a funeral comes off as an awkward event to spectate, perhaps no better than devastation tourism. East Coast funeral rites certainly don't include drinking beer and dancing.

I would imagine those involved knew what they were in for -- this isn't the first jazz funeral (formerly "jazz with music," FYI) to have attracted passers-by who never knew or even knew of the deceased. But in New Orleans, musicians are civic figures, so perhaps it is fitting that their funerals be a public event, as with intellectuals in France (tens of thousands clogging JP Sartre's funeral in Paris). In the end, the crowd hardly diminished the most solemn moments, as when the parade encountered a bend on Chartres St., which indicated the passage from the Quarter to the Faubourg Marigny. Crossing a neighborhood border is not to be taken lightly by bands who self-identify by neighborhood, and so the band leader declared, "We'll do a dirge 'round the corner."

As the road straightened back out, the up tempo numbers returned and the marchers continued on, whetting their whistles and celebrating Billy Ding all the while.

I just finished up Ned Sublette's history of the antebellum and colonial eras of the city. No surprise to learn that the jazz funeral has African roots. It's all part of the rich but chaotic world that made New Orleans.

Blaze Habs Blaze

2008-05-03T11:00:00.002-04:00

A cold spring weekend up north drives away all thoughts of baseball. Instead, my mind turns to Lord Stanley's Cup. Hockey is the sport I grew up with, and I relish it all the more for its current underdog status on the American sporting scene. As a francophile (and more of francophonie than of France), hockey makes me all the more fond of Québec, and Montréal in particular. The Habs (short for Habitants, we were here first) -- né Canadiens -- are easily the most storied professional team in North America. And when their fans belt out the bilingual "O Canada" at home on a nationally televised game, there's an audible flash of French broadcast across North America, a rare enough occurrence.

But it's do or die for les Glorieux tonight against the reincarnation of the Broad Street Bullies. The Habs barely made it past the Boston Bruins in game 7 -- the two teams having duked it out more than any other pair in North American sports.

They've got some encouragement on the beat front of course. I've slept a little on mon pôte Ghislain Poirier's No Ground Under, especially the video for it's lead single, "Blazin." Chunky bass meets ice hockey and transnational migration, what more could I ask for?! Does kreyol have a word for puck yet?

Maybe the B's got the last laugh, though:
Ghislain Poirier - Blazin (DJ C Remix).

And don't miss the Québécois rework of Flo-Rida's "Low" en français!

Here's hoping that they'll still be chanting "Go Habs Go" after tonight and the Montréalais will crank out a few more re-edits for the great white dirty north.

RVNG Orgy

2008-05-02T12:14:00.002-04:00

Orgy season kicked off yesterday at WHRB, featuring hours upon hours of steamy college . . . radio.

I have three lined up for May: RVNG, Juan Maclean, and Nu Whirl Music. RVNG -- that's Revenge without the E's -- is coming up tonight. If you're local to Beantown, tune your dial to 95.3 FM, or listen in via the e-radiowaves.

Celebrating this NYC label whose mixes and 12"s explore the blurry lines where old school and avant-garde techno, Italo/twisted/not so twisted disco, krautrock, 80s new wave/industrial, ambient, and mash-ups slide together in the capable hands of expert DJs

Fair Trade Funk

2008-04-30T00:35:00.002-04:00

Amidst the brouhaha over anonymity, I need to finally announce a project that I've been working on for nearly two years. I've been hush hush here, not sure exactly how it would turn out, but now it has arrived! Pancadão do Morro: O Funk do Flamin Hotz, Já É? (Big Hits From the Hill: Flamin Hotz Funk, You Down?)

It's a compilation CD of 22 tracks that give a cross-section of funk over the last couple years. More importantly, you can stamp it as "fair trade funk." Every artist has a contract in Portuguese, was paid a sum upfront, and will receive royalties. I can vouch for this personally, as I'm the one who has been orchestrating it all for my friends over at Flamin Hotz Records. Moreover, the CD itself is a gorgeous six panel deal, c/o BustBright, with cover art by funk legend Tony Minister, spot gloss lettering, and two booklets -- featuring lyrics in Portuguese and English, artist bios, and photos. There is no anonymity here.

So put some names and beats with faces, add some well-mastered tamborzão to your collection, and support the hardworking MCs and DJs down in Rio: proceeds are going their way. Trust me, I'll be sending the remittances myself.

Buy it here, here, here, here, here, here, or here. Prices, currencies, and locations may vary!

The promo 12", Funkeiros e Progresso EP, is still available at TTL but going fast for the vinyl fiends, I'm sure.
___

By way of some explanation, I got in touch with Flamin Hotz back in the spring of 2006 after purchasing a copy of the Sou Funk EP and subsequently asking them how such a project came about. The response was stark and simple: the whole thing was a bootleg job. The artists didn't get paid, probably didn't even know the record existed. It had already stirred things up on the Hollerboard by the time I got ahold of Casi, the label head (of a two-man operation) and he was feeling pretty low about it.

He proposed the idea of a new release done properly, which coincided perfectly with my desire to, in some fashion, repay the folks in Rio who had been kind enough to take me around, answer my questions, and introduce me to other people in the movimento funk.

Unfortunately, nothing happens in Rio that doesn't happen face to face, thus two years is really just a few months' effort of when I could actually be there to move it along.

But the EP is out, the CD is out, and hopefully it will be the beginning of much more funk moving its way up north through ethical channels.

As for making amends, I did try to reach the artists from Sou Funk and pay them retroactively on FHZ's behalf. In the case of MCs Júnior and Leonardo, residents of Rocinha whose house abuts the Two Brothers building (in a city of 13 million, in a community of 250,000, what are the odds . . . ?), I pulled it off:

MoFo Radio / Invasores do Baixo

2008-04-24T00:29:00.000-04:00

Just got back from plying the airwaves over at WZBC, a venerable local college station, for DJ Ghostdad's MoFo Radio. I realize that doesn't do you much good to listen in, since it's now over, but he will be posting the audio in due time.

We talked a lot about funk and of course listened to many tunes from the Volt Mix, tamborzão, and pós-baile funk eras. All of it was promo, to some extent, for a chance to hear the bass heavy beats live!

Bass Invaders is going brasileiro this week. If you'll be in the area, come down to the Milky Way for beats, booze, and bowling (candlepin, of course).

Bass Invaders/Invasores do Baixo
DJs Ghostdad, Nick Yoder, and Gregzinho
Milky Way Lounge & Lanes in Jamaica Plain
Thursday, April 24, 9 pm - 1 am, 21+

Unlabeled: The Anonymous as Exotic in Presenting Proibidão

2008-04-23T22:47:00.001-04:00

[Update: The folks at norient.com liked this paper enough to publish it. It's missing the hyperlinks from the blogaversion, but still nice to see it circulated it further afield.]

[The reason I went on down to New Orleans after all was for the BRASA conference, where I appeared on the panel: "Raps do Parapapá: Representations of Violence in Brazilian Funk Carioca," organized by Paul Sneed, of 2Bros fame. Below is the paper I presented, modified for the blogging public with some links &c]

The existence of this CD, Proibidão CV, the subject of my talk, is due in no small part to the efforts of American DJ Wesley Pentz, aka Diplo, who first brought funk to a certain kind of American audience: young, musically au courant, tapped into wider hip-hop and dance music scenes that include music from across the United States, Jamaica, other parts of the Caribbean, the UK, Latin America, and increasingly Africa. Beginning in 2003, he released two funk mixes, “Favela On Blast” and “Favela Strikes Back”, and included several funk tracks on his mixtape “Piracy Funds Terrorism,” which was a promotional tool for the Sri Lankan by way of London artist M.I.A., who in turn borrowed some aspects of funk to make a bricolage of global urban beats that catapulted her to pop stardom.

However, whether out of a desire to monopolize access to funk or simply out of carelessness or even ignorance, Diplo’s inaugural funk efforts were notoriously devoid of any contextual information. In particular, artist and track names are simply nonexistent. The two exclusively funk mixes do not come with track listings even though some tracks are by extremely well known artists like Bonde do Vinho. The mixtape, meanwhile, is more egregious. It features a mixture of commercial hip-hop, recordings of M.I.A., and funk. The latter, however, is listed only as “Baile Funk 1,” “Baile Funk 2,” “Baile Funk 3.” [I should add that “baile funk” has become the name for funk among non-Brazilians.]

Diplo was criticized somewhat for this disservice, although ultimately let off the hook. Music critic Nick Sylvester, reviewing Favela Strikes Back for Pitchfork Media in June 2005, argues “But 10 wrongs do make five rights, and if Diplo’s shtick is bringing this shanty to the world in a way they might respond to and ultimately might take vested interest in (read: $$$), then let’s drop the charges for now and indulge the music as wide-eyed as he does.” While I don’t share Sylvester’s laissez-faire attitude, I’ll nevertheless point out that Diplo has at least made recent efforts to act less like a “culture vulture,” including plans to open a branch of HeapsDecent, an NGO that offers music production workshops, in the favela of Cantagalo in the Zona Sul of Rio de Janeiro. He is also working on a movie, Favela On Blast, that purports to put names, faces, and stories to what he had previously presented as anonymous.

Anonymity, however, is the order of the day in this recent release by the label Sublime Frequencies, Proibidão C.V.: Forbidden Gang Funk from Rio de Janeiro. Its liner notes, after providing a brief, simplified, and somewhat inaccurate explanation of proibidão, read: “Recorded and assembled by Carlos Casas. Courtesy of some anonymous MCs and DJs in different bailes along the favelas of Zona Sul, Rio de Janeiro during March-April 2003.” On the opposing page, it prominently states: “All artists are Anonymous. All tracks are Untitled.” It then lists the tracks as “Untitled Proibidao CV” numbers 1-17. [Italics are my own.] For the listener who doesn’t know any Portuguese that, unfortunately, is the end of it. However, a closer listen reveals a more complex CD than the providers are willing to admit, or perhaps are even aware of, in their liner notes.

To begin with, there is little indication that all of the tracks take place in the Zona Sul, as track 3 sings of “tranqulidade na Mangueira,” track 10 speaks of a “Festa da Jacaré” in addition to mentioning Vidigal, both 7 and 11 indicate that they are from “Borel”, and #2 perform the well-known trope of poetically listing a series of favelas from across the city. Conversely, Rocinha, the stated source of the photographs in the CD package, is not mentioned once. Instead, the photos, which do not document any act of criminal behavior to my eye, implicitly link favelas with the drug trade. It’s an unfair generalization — a CD of proibidão, therefore it needs photos of favelas no matter what they show.

The liner notes also mention “the explicit lyrics of apology to drug gangs and the violent content.” I will not dispute that this is present, as tracks 4 & 5 – which appear to be a continuation of the same live recording and not separate tracks – declare, “Hoje vai ter churrasco pra geral / só ninguém vai comer” when speaking of burnt bodies in a prison riot at Bangú 1. On the other hand, there is a more thoughtful view in track #15.

It opens with a protest against stereotypes in a clever call and response: “Dizem que nós somos violentos / Mas desse jeito eu não aguento / Dizem que lá falta educação / Não é desse jeito não / Dizem que não temos competência / Mas isso sim que é violência / Que só sabemos fazer refrão.” (They say we're violent / But this shit I don't buy / They say we lack education / That's not it at all / They say we're not competent / But that right there is violence / That we only know how to cut refrains") Later, the MC sings affirmatively: “Nós temos escola / nós temos respeito” (We have schools / we have respect) and “cidadão brasileiro e tenho meu valor" (Brazilian citizen and I have my value). Such sentiments are hardly the one-dimensional view that the CD Proibidão CV presents. The prominent spelling of “Cidade de Deus” also makes it clear that this is another track not from the Zona Sul.

Likewise, something beyond apology for the drug trade is taking place in track #12. While the reference to the Comando Vermelho motto “Paz, Justiz, e Liberdade” would affirm its status as proibidão, the earlier lines are of considerable interest. “Eu sei que um dia a gente saí daqui / Não sei o dia e nem sei a hora. / Mas sei que um dia a gente vai embora.” There is an escapist, and I believe even utopian, impulse in these lines. Will “a gente” leave by escaping the cycle of violence, by leaving their community, by dying in a blaze of glory in a gun battle? This open-ended vision credits more toward the insightful analysis of Paul Sneed, who I’m sharing this table with, in his dissertation on proibidão: “Machine Gun Voices: Bandits, Favelas and Utopia in Brazilian Funk.”

Indeed, it is precisely a perspective like Paul’s this is lacking in Sublime Frequencies’ presentation of proibidão. They conclude in the liner notes, “This CD is in no way an apology for these groups, but a document to portray a moment in time in Rio de Janeiro musical and social history.” On their website, meanwhile, they declare the label’s mission: “SUBLIME FREQUENCIES is a collective of explorers dedicated to acquiring and exposing obscure sights and sounds from modern and traditional urban and rural frontiers via film and video, field recordings, radio and short wave transmissions, international folk and pop music, sound anomalies, and other forms of human and natural expression not documented sufficiently through all channels of academic research, the modern recording industry, media, or corporate foundations.”

Such rhetoric is a dodge. If indeed they are “explorers” on the “urban frontier” of Rio de Janeiro seeking to “portray” a particular “moment,” then they are uninformed explorers who make no effort to explain the parameters of that moment – where, when, why. Instead, they let the listener concoct his or her own vision of Rio’s favelas based on abrasive beats, gruff voices, and the sampled sound of gunshots.

Such a proposition – suggesting the violence of Rio’s favelas without fleshing that concept in with details – is reminiscent of the attitude that Alex Bellos takes in an article on proibidão for online music publication Blender. He opens the article, “Coke. Guns. Booty. Beats.” with the declaration that funk is “the most dangerous – and most exciting – underground club scene in the world.” The implicit link, however, is that it is the most exciting because it is the most dangerous. The same principle is at work in Proibidão C.V. – one doesn’t need to actually know what the songs are saying; rather, the music should be exciting simply because of its violent, dangerous context. In both cases, exciting is also a substitute for exotic, for the exotic is exciting as well because it intimates danger. I should add that Sublime Frequencies traffics principally in “exotic” locales like “Java, Bali, Sumatra, Burma, Morocco, Thailand, India, Mali, Syria, Laos, Cambodia, and Nepal.”

Anonymity, then, is indeed the rub. I am certain that a lack of knowledge of Portuguese, both among foreigners like Diplo and among their audience, plays a role. However, I think there is a more sinister impulse at work as well. For anonymity ultimately implies unknowability. Radical urbanist Mike Davis provides a chilling account of the consequences of unknowability in Planet of Slums. He concludes the book by arguing that the Pentagon is the only global institution to take seriously the implications of rapid slum growth in large urban areas. He cites U.S. military tactics, which “assert that the ‘feral, failed cities’ of the Third World – especially their slum outskirts – will be the distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century” and continues by quoting an Air Force theorist writing in the Aerospace Power Journal: “Rapid urbanization in developing countries results in a battlespace environment that is decreasingly knowable since it is increasingly unplanned.” But the attitude that slums are going to be the next global battleground, perhaps because of their unknowability, is not limited to the U.S. military. One only need look as far as a recent edition of O Globo to find the polícia civil or, in more extreme cases, the BOPE in blockbuster hit Tropa de elite, engaging in such tactics, trying to bring Rio’s favelas back under the city’s control. Unplanned favelas are unknowable spaces to the uninitiated. They are, moreover, soundtracked by proibidão. But when proibidão is presented as anonymous and unknowable, as in the case here, then it does nothing to increase knowledge – and knowability – about both the music and its environment. Instead, it only encourages the exoticization of both, a process whose consequences may be extremely dire.

Devastation Tourism

2008-04-22T22:51:00.001-04:00

Much ink has been spelled about the unevenness of recovery in New Orleans from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Just yesterday, Bush wrapped up a NAFTA summit in the Crescent City, where the Central Business District (CBD) is intact and a few miles away there is still wreckage everywhere. Despite the platitudes he might have offered, I don't suspect he made a trip this time to New Orleans' other half. It's not far, difficult, or dangerous, and many people I encountered expressed how vital it is for any visitor not to see the city with rose-colored glasses.

I did my best last month to take in something besides the usual tourist axis of the CBD/French Quarter/Garden District, all of which have their charms, granted. But there is an aching, suffering city where the notion of recovery seems intractable. For one, I spied a sprawling shantytown under an I-10 overpass near Tulane Medical School downtown (didn't have the heart to photograph it myself). American favela?

Like the impulse to favela tourism, visiting New Orleans is an increasingly awkward experience. No one with a conscience really wants to indulge in the Big Easy and engage in willful self-deception about the reality outside the tourist pleasure sites. There's a Hurricane Katrina Tour, a suspicious enough commodification of the disaster. But going out on one's own and gawking at the I-10 shantytown, or driving through the 9th Ward, the locus of devastation, what does that do? In Rio, I had research and volunteer work that brought me into favelas to stay and hopefully better the community. Am I no better in NOLA than the favela tourists I scoffed at? It's surely easier to volunteer in New Orleans than to get down to Rio to do the same if you live in the U.S., and that strikes me as the best answer. But, I'm afraid, circumstances didn't allow that for me.

The 9th Ward, the worst hit, then. By my rough estimate, I would guess less than half of the homes there appear reoccupied, debris covers countless lots, and the stigma of FEMA spray paint scars nearly every one. Date the house was checked, number of dead bodies, number of dead animals, and condemnation codes.

This house, while chained and boarded up in front, looks reasonably intact and freshly painted, but the morbid tag persists. I saw folks on their front porches, rocking back and forth with the ugly numeration behind them on the wall. Do they leave it up as a reminder? Warning? Public display of wounds? It seems too indelicate to ask anyone about.

One of the bright spots in the Upper 9th, however, is the Habitat for Humanity Musicians' Village. Among the countless great works Habitat is doing, this one is turning 8 acres into 72 single-family houses to provide a home to musicians who fled the city.

It's an endlessly admirable (and beautiful) housing project, hopefully a model as the city struggles over plans to raze older public housing. The subject of housing in New Orleans also calls to mind a provocative perspective raised by New Urbanist Andreas Duany that is worth quoting at length:

The lost housing of New Orleans is quite special. It was possible to sustain the unique culture of New Orleans because housing costs were minimal, liberating people from debt. One did not have to work a great deal to get by. There was the possibility of leisure.

There was time to create the fabulously complex Creole dishes that simmer forever; there was time to practice music, to play it live rather than from recordings, and to listen to it. There was time to make costumes and to parade; there was time to party and to tell stories; there was time to spend all day marking the passing of friends. One way to leisure time is to have a low financial carry. With a little work, a little help from the government, and a little help from family and friends, life could be good! This is a typically Caribbean social contract: not one to be understood as laziness or poverty—but as a way of life.

This ease, which has been so misunderstood in the national scrutiny following the hurricane, is the Caribbean way. It is a lifestyle choice, and there is nothing intrinsically wrong with it. It is this way of living that will disappear. Even with the federal funds for housing, there is little chance that new or renovated houses will be owned without debt. It is too expensive to build now. There must be an alternative or there will be very few “paid-off” houses. Everyone will have a mortgage that will need to be sustained by hard work—and this will undermine the culture of New Orleans.

What can be done? Somehow the building culture that created the original New Orleans must be reinstated...the professionalism of it all—eliminates self-building. Without this there will be the pall of debt for everyone. And debt in the Caribbean doesn’t mean just owing money—it is the elimination of the culture that arises from leisure.

The link to the full article is dead, but more excerpts (including Duany's proposed solution) here. In Metropolis Magazine, he paraphrased himself by urging us not to think of New Orleans as the worst-managed, poorest American city, but as the best-managed, wealthiest Caribbean city. While Miami usually gets the nod as the American metropolis most tapped into the Caribbean network, one cannot ignore New Orleans' vital historical role, from the slave trade to fleeing French planters from Saint-Domingue (Haiti). It's a vital part of the world that made New Orleans, a scholarly approach I'm hoping to dig into soon (thanks w&w for the suggestion).

Fortunately, these Musicians' Village homes are a start at providing the necessary leisure time to NOLA's lifeblood. Like this rough-and-tumble old bluesman, Little Freddie King, who I chatted up as he enjoyed a fine spring day on his porch. He was kind enough to show me inside, which had the fine smell of a brand new house. He couldn't be happier.

That Saturday night on Frenchman Street, I saw a sign advertising Little Freddie King in one of the countless divey jazz clubs. I hopped in and caught a luscious set of funky blues that set the dance floor ablaze. He was glad I dropped by.

Too rich in music to cover much at all here, but I hope New Orleans' Caribbean leisure time will return enough to allow some more of these sounds to percolate:

Second Line brass bands (parallel to minor samba schools, perhaps?) -- i.e. Free Agents - We Made It Through That Water

Nawlins bounce (heavy club choons post-Saints games) -- i.e. DJ Black'n'Mild - Beyonce / Work It Out (rmx)

Bayou Country

2008-04-10T00:10:00.003-04:00

"The Acadians are perhaps America's most enigmatic people, equally misunderstood by outsiders and members of the group itself. The shroud of misunderstanding is the legacy of the group's unique North American experience, the co-optation of its leadership element by the regional socioeconomic elites, and the creatin and persistence of conflicting (uncomplimentary and complimentary) stereotypes by generations of popular American writers, journalists, and filmmakers. These arbiters of America's popular perceptions have generally visited the bayou country too briefly to acquire accurate impressions of the area and its inhabitants, and their depictions of Cajuns constantly reinforce the existing popular misconceptions about Acadiana."

--Carl A. Brrasseaux, French, Cajun, Creole, Houma: A Primer on Francophone Louisiana

With only a night and a day spent in bayou country, I can point the same finger squarely at myself. I'll resist too many interpretive moves, then, to simply express my amazement at discovering firsthand an oft-forgotten (and -neglected) corner of francophone America: There are 250,000 French speakers still inhabitating Louisana, especially in the southeastern and southwestern parishes.

The vast majority, of course, are Acadians / Cajuns, who ended up in Louisiana centuries ago after getting expelled from Nova Scotia. The first group of Europeans to establish a North American identity, they fiercely resisted assimilation up until the 20th century -- French was banned in Louisiana schools and the invasion of English TV really led to a decline in French proficiency. Cajuns were maligned as rednecks and the backwater of Louisiana.

I stayed in a B&B run by a couple who were the first in each of their families to speak English. We chatted in French over pain perdu in the morning, and surprisingly I found the accent easier to understand than Québécois French. The new generation of Cajuns is speaking a whole mix of accents thanks to CODOFIL, which promotes the French language in all its forms (even Creole!) in the state, and has brought in French teachers from Quebec, France, the Caribbean, and French Africa. Bilingualism can work in the Union, it seems, as long as it's not Spanish.

But the Cajun French persists. A Catholic priest compiled a dictionary of the predominately oral language in the '80s and there is a burgeoning Cajun literary scene. At a bookstore specializing in Louisiana French literature I picked up an autobiography by Jeanne Castille, a militant supporter of French in the mid-20th century, and an anthology of new Cajun fiction.

While I had to indulge my literary side, the oral tradition means music is never far behind. The Jean Lafitte Wetlands Acadian Cultural Center had an extremely well-articulated & well-curated section on music, arguing for cross-pollination between Cajuns and the various Africans and Europeans they came into contact with -- ultimately producing Cajun music on the one hand, and Zydeco on the other.

Get your accordion fix and take a listen for yourself --

Jambalaya - Bon Whisky
(from Cajun Saturday Night!)

Zydeco All-Stars - Hot Steppin' Zydeco
(from Ultimate Zydeco)

Crescent Ltd.

2008-03-26T11:12:00.001-04:00

* * *

One milestone past, this hefty block of writing and thinking has been put behind me. Hardly a step on the academic ladder, of course, if indeed that's even where I want to go. But significant enough that it now affords me some much-needed free time. Not to mention that it's the culmination of the principle interest I've been blogging about all these couple years, Rio--urban space--culture--music. As a fitting capstone, it's also landed me a seat at the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA) conference in New Orleans.

As part of this new-found free time, I took the scenic route.

They've been running the Crescent for nearly a century, daily trips from New York City down to New Orleans. I picked it up at Union Station in Washington, D.C., same as my grandmother used to.

The Crescent ran through some of the poorest parts of the country, still does I would imagine. In the pre-Amtrak days, it was painted a bright kelly green, a Gatsbyian green light at the end of the dock, designed to bring hope twice daily -- once northbound, once southbound -- to the communities it passed through. Better times were on the way, it supposedly declared, although I doubt if those too truly arrived.

As we went through Alabama, I had breakfast with an 80-year-old community organizer from D.C. who knew Dr. King from the days when he delivered sermons at local churches, before "I Have a Dream" (which she attended). She got off in Meridian, Mississippi.

26 hour later, I was here. Continuing service to Chicago on the City of New Orleans and Los Angeles on the Sunset Ltd, but not today, not this trip.

* * *

"Where is the corridor? To find it one must drive far from the interstate highway cloverlead, away from Main Street and Second Street; one drives downhill, for the corridor follows the gentle gradients of river valleys, or to the rundown part of town, for the corridor no longer enriches the structures struggled along it. In the city, one drives away from tall glass-skinned office towers to the grimy factories still watched by thrusting red-brick smoke stacks. In the suburb, one drives along the old parkway, along the former streetcar route leading to the commuter station. In the small town, one drives toward the grain elevator, the coal trestle, the creek bed. In the country one drives toward the line of telegraph poles. Always one drives toward the railroad right-of-way, the energizing spine of the corridor."

--John R. Stilgoe, Metropolitan Corridor

Harvardia Africana

2008-03-13T00:06:00.002-04:00

I'm approaching the 36-hour-till-deadline mark and don't think I'll be out in full force for the conference, but it's been the culmination of the African Hip-Hop Research Project's hard work, especially Lidet Tilahun, a one-woman rallying cry for the importance of African hip-hop. I'm nominally the research and collections coordinator, although the funding for that never did come through. We did get one of the guys from X-Plastaz on campus last year, and in fact MC Gsan's buddy Mohammed Yunus from the Aang Serian Peace Village, who was also there, will be back for this weekend's conference.

Other highlights include Emmanuel Jal (Sudanese ex-child soldier turned rapper, with some serious marketing muscle behind him these days) and Youssou N'Dour (Senegalese mbalax extraordinaire). The latter makes me scratch my head: If you're going to bring someone over from Dakar, undisputed capital of West African hip-hop (where even the election can get a hip-hop tinge!), why not Awadi or Alif or Pee Froiss?

He's a very world music choice too, and the conference seems short on the nu whirld music: no mention of kwaito or kuduro.

But maybe he'll perform at the as yet unannounced concert, which I believe is free. N'Dour and Jal on the same bill would be a steal -- I'm sure they're quite expensive elsewhere!

Back to work, clock is ticking and Rio isn't getting any easier to figure out . . .

South South Bronx [ed. Northwest South]*

2008-03-04T13:17:00.001-05:00

Buried in a thesis avalanche and will come up for air sometime after the magic date of March 14. Made it home from Carnaval in one piece, sem passaporte (another story), and Beija-Flor took the win.

Closer to home, some curious real estate wheelings&dealings -- over an affordable housing rec room. Mitchell-Lama, the unsung hero of hip-hop? The comments, if anything, are as interesting as the story. New York bias, Chicago inferiority complex, Bronx vs. Jamaica, it's all the Republicans fault . . . a classic NYC soapbox.

Not something you see everyday on a prominent NYT page.

P.S. See where the 1520 Sedgwick "rec room" led -- support artists in Rio and deepen your funk crates with some vinyl that can only be described as sinístro, mano: Funkeiros e Progresso EP

Massive CD with knowledge jewels galore dropping soon, more info when it arrives.

*Thanks to commenter Richard S. for correcting my geography.

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Só Alegria

2008-02-03T19:22:00.000-05:00

The parade is raging on the TV in the background and I'm preparing to head down to the Temple of Samba, the Sambódromo, ticket in hand.

"'What I would advise you to do,' Ana said, 'is forget about the note-taking. Stop trying to write down what happens. If you don't give in to the spirit of carnival, if you don't let it overwhelm you, you'll never understand what it's like, so how will you be able to explain it to others? If you have the experience, you won't forget a minute of it. Every detail will stay clear in your head forever.'"
--Alma Guillermoprieto, Samba

I had lunch with a friend in the suburb of Duque de Caxias on Tuesday, partisans to the escola of Grande Rio (Greater Rio). Our waiter at the food court (yes, shopping mall food courts have waiters for some reason) was wearing a Grande Rio shirt -- maybe he'll be out performing on the parade grounds tonight -- and every time he came over to our table he beamed a huge smile and announced, "Só alegria! (Only joy!)"

Créu Créu Créu

2008-02-01T09:09:00.000-05:00

Samba aside, I'm still keeping my ears peeled for funk in my scant time here. It's always been hard for me to keep track of "popular" songs, given how much they share samples and lyrics or remix each other. But Diplo didn't lie, "Dança do Créu" is a real phenomenon in the mundo funk carioca right now. It's blaring on cell phones, written out on t-shirts and shorts (that's a mannequin, FYI, I'm not that crude of a photographer), and even a bus-load of 2Bros kids that we took to a park for a field day this afternoon we're singing it in unison on the bus (and one of the girls was wearing a créu tank top).

What's it all about? Well, a dance, first of all, "simple" but of "5 speeds." This has been the most popular CreuTube video of it, even garnering some press coverage (Port.):

As for the key word in the otherwise straightforward lyrics, "créu," the MC claims it was just some gibberish his son made up and he ran with it. Now the guy, formerly Sérgio Costa, is "MC Créu," which sounds like a one-hit wonder kind of career move to me, but so be it.

MC Créu - Dança do Créu

Créu créu créu créu créu créu créu créu créu créu créu créu créu créu créu . . .

all the way into Carnaval. Créuval?

Favela Passport

2008-01-31T23:00:00.000-05:00

I first heard of the Grupo Cultural AfroReggae, an NGO that uses culture to keep favela youth out of drug trafficking, when I saw the documentary Favela Rising before my first trip to Rio in '06. Why I didn't take the initiative to volunteer with them then is beyond me, but I've been an admirer ever since and have slowly managed to visit most of their outposts around Rio -- always located in the favelas that they serve, always upbeat, always brightly painted and well-maintained. Culture is our weapon indeed.

Their newest nucleus in the notorious Complexo do Alemão opened in the midst of a vicious police operation that was the talk of Rio. The national guard was still stationed at the entrance when I visited later in August.

AfroReggae was still unpacking when I dropped by, and most of my visit ended up being in the company of Flávia, a 1o-year-old girl whose mother cleans the building. Flávia kept pestering me to take pictures of her, and I was happy to oblige.

She told me that she hadn't been to the beach in the 3 years, that teenagers sell drugs outside of her school (but she knows drugs are stupid), that she can only play a few feet in front of her house, that school was canceled during the recent police blockade. And here she was turning cartwheels on the roof with Alemão all around her. I was reading a book at the time whose title couldn't be more appropriate -- Favela: Alegria e Dor na Cidade (Favela: Joy and Pain in the City).

I headed off with the goal of visiting AfroReggae Digital, their Internet radio station (tune in!), located in Parada de Lucas, in the Zona Norte (north side) at the border with the suburbs. Lucas was at war with neighboring Vigário Geral, where the founder of AfroReggae is from, for almost two decades. It was a big step, then, for VG-based AfroReggae to open a nucleus on the other side of the tracks (literally, the SuperVia rail line divides the two communities).

I didn't make it before leaving in August, but I was able to go earlier this week.

More than just a radio station that uses radio as an educational tool, it's a whole community center, serving a neighborhood of 20,000-25,000 . . . as the only NGO. In contrast, I've heard that Rocinha has more than 80 for a population of approximately 200,000. In other words, there are 10x more NGOs per resident in Rocinha than in Lucas. That, unfortunately, is part of the divide between the Zona Sul and Zona Norte, with the Zona Sul consistently getting more investment and attention.

It was here, though, that one of the AfroReggae Digital organizers told me about the new HQ going up in Vigário Geral to be inaugurated in April. It will be open 24/7 and has been described as the favela Guggenheim -- a curious comparison in light of other Guggen-de-Janeiro proposals I've commented on. I can't wait to see it the next time I come back.

Finally, yesterday I hit a third AfroReggae nucleus, back down on my end in the Zona Sul at Cantagalo, the favela between Ipanema and Copacabana. I've been to Cantagalo many, many times now for their baile funk and finally had the chance to return in the daytime. The prime location commands some great views . . .

That's the cidade partida (divided city) for you right there.

The Cantagalo operation teaches, of all things, the circus. Júnior, the founder, got connected with Cirque de Soleil and now it's part of the AfroReggae stew. I caught them rehearsing for a visit by representatives of the Barbican Centre, a London arts behemoth, where AfroReggae has performed before, and will be artists-in-residence or a similar arrangement later this year.

Their director made a very telling comment in my interview with him. He said he sees his AfroReggae t-shirt not a shield -- one that will let you pass between rival favelas as a neutral entity -- but as a passport -- one that enables you to enter them and mediate conflicts, which he saw as AfroReggae's main goal.

I got a shirt for my trouble (and in truth picked one up last year, so that makes two), so I'll be wearing my passport on Sunday when the Bloco AfroReggae does its Carnaval parade in Ipanema.

Dirty Work

2008-01-29T00:06:00.000-05:00

For those cooped up in the Beantown cold, the Rio summer heat will be there in sound&spirit tonight at the Harvard Graduate School of Design for the opening of "Dirty Work: Transforming Landscape in the Non-Formal City of the Americas." The exhibit is up through March 16, and tomorrow (January 30), I encourage everyone to see Robert Neuwirth speak on the "21st century medieval city." His book Shadow Cities was a huge influence on my own understanding of Rio, and in fact he put me in touch with Two Brothers -- I certainly would not be sitting in the room I'm writing from if it weren't for him.

I can't be there in person to tonight (7 or 8 pm, I'd guess? No time listed on the site) for obvious reasons, so instead I sent in the following mix&commentary that will be played&displayed during the opening. It's practically another Blogariddims contribution (& one of the 76-minute specials at that) featuring tracks that diligent readers/listeners will recognize from both my own blogariddims funk mix and postings throughout the last year(s), but hopefully now contextualized in a different way. And of course, there's stuff I got just a few days ago, so it's fresh all around.

I'm quite happy about the title's twist on the name of the class that produced the exhibit (see below) -- the catchier Low Income Tomorrowland was unfortunately already taken.
___

Landscaped Beats for Low-Income Strategies
Mixed by Gregzinho in the favela of Rocinha
Rio de Janeiro, January 2008
75:46

The tracks in this mix come from the favelas, suburbia, periferia, villas miserias, or, in more technical parlance, low-income settlements, of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires, three of the seven cities featured in the exhibit “Dirty Work: Transforming Landscape in the Non-Formal City of the Americas,” a product of the Harvard Graduate School of Design class Landscape Strategies for Low-Income Settlements. The other four are certainly also rich in music that has its strongholds in the cities’ barrios, from Colombian cumbia and hip-hop (Bogotá) to reggaetón and other Caribbean sounds (Caracas), to Mexican music both traditional and contemporary (Mexico City and Tijuana). However, I was limited by what I know personally—having been to Rio, Sampa, and BsAs, I’m intimately familiar with samba, funk carioca, cumbia villeira, and Brazilian hip-hop and reggae. Tranquilo? Pronto? Vamos.

1. Dudu Nobre – Batucada 01

Dudu Nobre is a young, popular samba composer out of Rio de Janeiro and the fierce rhythms of batucada, a percussion-heavy samba variation with strong African influence, set a proper tone to start things off.

2. G.R.E.S. Imperatriz Leopoldinense – Liberdade! Liberdade! Abre as Asas Sobre Nós (Liberty! Liberty! Open Your Wings Above Us)

The story of the rise of samba in Rio—and later Brazil writ large—is inextricably tied to the growth of the city’s favelas, where samba—once outlawed for being too African—took refuge in the first decades of the 20th century. Groups of sambistas who performed routines around Carnaval began organizing themselves in escolas (schools) around 1930 and by the post-war era became the premiere attraction at Carnaval time. This 1989 samba enredo (story samba, the elaborate, scripted routines performed in the official parade at the Sambódromo) commemorates the centenary of the proclamation of the Republic of Brazil, which was precipitated by the abolition of slavery a year prior in 1888—itself an important theme in the 1988 sambas, especially given samba’s origins in slave music. Imperatriz Leopoldinense hails from the Ramos neighborhood in Rio’s north side, which includes the Complexo da Maré, a large complex of favelas that greets visitors as they get on the Linha Vermelha expressway at the international airport and head downtown.

3. Cartola – Verde Que Te Quero Rosa (Green That I Want You Pink)

Cartola is quite simply the most famous sambista of the 20th century, and one of the founders of the most famous samba school: G.R.E.S. Estação Primeira da Mangueira. Green and pink are Mangueira’s colors and were chosen by Cartola.

4. Digitaldubs Sound System ft. Ras Bernardo – Morro Não Tem Play (The Hill Doesn’t Have Playgrounds)

Digitaldubs is a contemporary reggae sound system in Rio. In addition to importing the latest 7”s and dubs out of Jamaica, they produce and perform their own Brazilian reggae, with MCs toasting in Portuguese and their DJs mixing in other Brazilian music, including funk carioca (see tracks 6-14). This lament about conditions on the morro (hill, a catch-all term for favelas in Rio, which are often located on hills), especially for children, fits perfectly with the social concerns that reggae has traditionally taken up.

5. Capoeira Mestre Suassuna - Macuele

The dance/martial art of capoeira, like samba, has its roots in Brazilian slave culture but has since become a prominent part of Brazilian culture. While the best capoeiristas don’t necessarily come from favelas, the historical link between enslaved black Brazilians, and favelas is well documented historically. No surprise, then, that the ginga (rhythm) of capoeira is cited as an influence on the development of the tamborzão (big drum) beat, which has been the basis of most funk since about 2000.

6. MCs Leonardo e Júnior – Endereço dos Bailes (Address of the Bailes)

Funk carioca (carioca is the adjective to describe someone or something from Rio) or just plain “funk” to those who live it and love it, is something like the new samba—nurtured in favelas, persecuted by authorities, bane of the middle and upper classes, but slowly gaining respectability. Musically, its most direct antecedent is not American funk (from where the name comes) but rather Miami bass, the syncopated, minimal-beats-maximum-bass hip-hop style of the late ’80s (think 2 Live Crew). Black American dance music (funk, disco, soul, early hip-hop and techno) had been popular in Rio for some time, but when Miami bass arrived, it took the black dance crowds by storm and, coupled with technology that allowed producers to record local vocalists on top of looped Miami bass beats, became an immensely popular Brazilian style. “Endereço dos Bailes” is a 1995 track by this duo of brothers from the favela of Rocinha, Rio’s largest, and shouts out the different bailes funk (funk balls) taking place in favelas across the city, forming a kind of alternate tourist map to the one they describe in the opening lines, featuring the usual gamut of sun, soccer, sand, and samba.

7. MCs Cidinho e Doca – Rap da Felicidade (The Happiness Rap)

Also from 1995, this song became a national hit, its plaintive “Eu só quero é ser feliz, andar traquilamente na favela onde eu nasci (I only want to be happy, to walk peacefully in the favela where I was born)” resonating as Rio was racked by violence in the early ’90s. Cidinho and Doca hail from Cidade de Deus (City of God), whose reputation for violent gang activity was immortalized (and to some extent sensationalized) in the Oscar-winning movie of the same time.

8. MCs Leonardo e Júnior – Rap das Armas (The Arms Rap)

Back to the brothers from Rocinha. “Rap das Armas”, from the same era, is another anti-violence song. The lyrics are basically a run down of the different kinds of guns (Uzi, M-16, AK-47, etc.) that the two saw on a daily basis in Rocinha. It concludes with a call for peace, but was misinterpreted by the media as an apology for the criminal factions. They fell on hard times, ultimately working consecutive 12 hour shifts as a taxi driver (so the car was always on the road), but are now rebounding and recorded a new version of “Rap das Armas” for Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad), a film that promises to be the new City of God and will be released in the U.S. this year.

9. MC Binho – Meu Sonho (My Dream)

Sticking with Rocinha, but more recently, is MC Binho, a current funk MC who handed me a CD with this track over the weekend. The more electronic, almost techno sound in the track is a new trend in funk production. While definitely a positive dream—to become a big star in music or on TV—it doesn’t have quite the same conscience as the previous three tracks. But then again, I can’t blame the guy: He squeezes his MCing in between shifts working as a cobrador, the guy who takes your fare in one of the vans that supplement the bus system.

10. Beto da Caixa – Blindão

Beto da Caixa is another current artist who deals more directly with the reality of favela life. “Blindão” is a slang term for the favela code of conduct—it comes from the word for ‘armor’—and Beto swears by it in this track. “Tenho fé não tenho medo / A gente é sempre no blindão (I have faith, I don’t have fear / We’re always in blindão),” goes the refrain.

11. Menor do Chapa – Vida Louca (Crazy Life)

Beto’s lyrics hint at one of the obvious preoccupations of funk tracks: the criminal factions that are, for all intensive purposes, the chief authority in a vast majority of the city’s favelas. Funk has evolved as the soundtrack of the favela—blasting out of nearly every corner bar and car window—and a particular subgenre called proibidão (extremely prohibited) sings exclusively about, and in favor of, the factions. Menor do Chapa has built a career praising the Comando Vermelho (Red Command, abbreviated CV), the city’s first, and most notorious, narco-trafficking gang.

12. Anonymous – Proibidão do Cantagalo

While Menor do Chapa’s proibidão has almost gone mainstream, much of it is recorded live or on rough studio equipment and stays very local—as in, specifically about the faction of the MC’s favela. In the case of Cantagalo, the favela between Ipanema and Copacabana, the CV is in charge—“minha facção, claro que é o CV (my faction, clearly it’s CV)”. It’s this kind of proibidão, however, that isn’t just an apology for drug trafficking, but also a vital form of communication within the favela. The proibidão MC speaks from the faction to the community, certainly, but also from the community back to the faction, and can articulate local concerns in communities that don’t have another medium in which to do so. While this role, at least in my opinion, absolves the proibidão MC from being a simple apologist for the gangs, they still tend to remain anonymous because of the possible trouble it can lead to from police or rival gangs.

13. MC Alex – Seu Presidente (Mr. President)

The lo-fi production values are a hallmark of funk—all it takes is a cheap sampler and some mics—as the bricolage quality of the music is, in many ways, reflective of the architecture and visual environment that supports it. Here, MC Alex from a favela in the Zona Norte (I never did get the name of it), sings as a “pobre cidadão” (poor citizen) against both the corruption of politics and the corruption of the gang, the latter complaint having made it very difficult for him to find bailes to perform at, as the gangs are usually the financiers in favelas, throwing huge bailes da comunidade (community balls) that are free to all.

14. DJ Sandrinho – Medley Yazoo

That said, lo-fi production values are becoming a thing of the past, especially among the best DJs and producers who oftentimes have top-notch computers and recording equipment. Funk has commercialized, commanding huge radio audiences and massive festivals, but that doesn’t mean it has entirely left the favela. DJ Sandrinho still lives and maintains his studio in the favela of Borel, despite having been the DJ to Mr Catra, hands down the most in-demand funk MC in all of Brazil, and also having toured Europe several times and had tracks on foreign releases. Clearly, his place of residence hasn’t diminished his access—and interest—in the wide swath of music he pulls into this feijoada de funk: new wave (Yazoo’s “Don’t Go”), early disco-house (Indeep’s “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life”), and commercial alt-rock (Nirvana’s “Come As You Are”). It’s amazing what an Internet connection can do.

15. MV Bill – É Nós e A Gente

Rio rapper MV Bill helped found the Central Única de Favelas (Central Favela Factory, abbreviated CUFA), a national NGO that focuses on hip-hop culture as an alternative to the drug trade. He riffs on the arbitrary divisions of the narco-trafficking world in Rio by juxtaposing “é nós” and “é gente,” two slang expressions that mean the same thing—it’s us—but come from rival gangs, the CV and the Amigos de Amigos (Friends of Friends, abbreviated ADA), respectively.

16. Xis e Profeta – Us Mano e As Mina (Profmix)

MV Bill is really an exception to the rule: Funk is the music of Rio, and hip-hop is the sound in São Paulo. The two are considered very different, with paulista hip-hop fans looking down on funkeiros as juvenile and vulgar compared to the serious social concerns that SP hip-hop tackles. Xis’s 2002 track with Profeta doesn’t directly deal with the favelas paulistanas, banished to the periphery of the world’s fourth largest city, but the sound sets the right mood for the hip-hop paulista mindset.

17. Criminal Master – Pobreza (Poverty)

Going back to the roots now—“Pobreza” is from the 1988 hip-hop compilation Consciência Black. Lamentation in verse about the constant urban condition, all set to a funky (this time the American sense) beat.

18. Racionais MCs – Pânico na Zona Sul (Panic on the South Side)

Racionais MCs formed in 1988 and also contributed to Consciência Black with this track, launching a career that turned them into Brazil’s best-known rap group, a very serious voice for the millions of favelados in São Paulo. “Justiceiros são chamados por eles mesmos / Matam humilham e dão tiros a esmo / E a polícia não demonstra sequer vontade (Hired killers as they call themselves / Kill, humiliate, and shoot at random / And the police doesn't show any will to stop them).” Guess who opened for Public Enemy when they came to São Paulo?

19. Sidestepper – Mas Papaya (More Papaya)

Moving south to Buenos Aires, but picking up a sound that comes from further north. Cumbia is a Colombian folk music, but in its various mutations throughout Latin American, it has sprouted as cumbia villeira in the Ciudad Autónoma, popular in the villas miserias with hardcore lyrics about gangs and drugs, in a way akin to funk proibidão. A new breed of DJs and producers in BsAs has recently picked up cumbia and begun blending it into other global urban sounds, including Jamaican dancehall. [Edit: A commenter pointed out that Sidestepper is Anglo-Colombian -- so maybe I hit Bogotá after all -- but I got it off a compilation I bought at ¡Zizek! in BsAs, which evidently isn't a reason to assume every track is porteño.]

20. Colon Colon – El paena loco (The Crazy Crown)

Pure cumbia without other styles mixed in—the telltale shaker (shickishin is the local onomatopoeia) is cumbia’s signature sound.

21. Princesa – Aquí Princesa (Princess Here)

Princesa is a porteña MC who has been tearing up the local scene with a fierce blend of reggaetón and dancehall.

22. G.R.E.S. Acadêmicos da Rocinha – Rocinha é minha vida, Nordeste é minha história (Rocinha is my life, Northeast is my history)

Beginning with a forró flourish, the Acadêmicos da Rocinha chose to honor the heritage of many of the community’s residents in their samba enredo for the 2008 Carnaval parade—it will be performed on Saturday night, February 2, at the Passarela do Samba (known colloquially as the Sambódromo) in the Series A & B competition. The population of favelas in Rio’s largest cities has swelled in recent decades with an influx of nordestinos (northeasterners), fleeing the most impoverished region of Brazil. They in turn have increased the popularity of northeastern music, like forró, in Rio. Mangueira, for example, is commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of frevo, a rhythm from Pernambuco, in their performance on Sunday night in the Grupo Especial. Broadcast live on national television with the winning samba school feted in Brazil as much as Super Bowl champions will be in the U.S. that same night, samba endures as a striking example of what the non-formal city in the Americas can accomplish culturally.

Carnavalesco

2008-01-28T23:21:00.000-05:00

Fresh on the heels of my Israel-Brazil urban musings, I have to come clean: I'm back in Rio one last time before plunging into full thesis writing mode, and have the great fortune of being here for Carnaval 2008. I'm staying in Rocinha again, where it's been impossible to avoid advertisements for this year's samba enredo (story samba, the performance in the official parade at the Sambódromo) by G.R.E.S. Acadêmicos da Rocinha. This year they've chosen to honor the community's nordestino (northeastern) heritage -- internal migration has pushed many northeasterners out of the region, Brazil's poorest, and into the big cities.

G.R.E.S. Acadêmicos da Rocinha - Rocinha é minha vida, Nordeste é minha historia

It begins with a forró flourish and then dives into the elaborate ways that Rocinha and the Northeast are tied together. It's a pretty good samba even though I don't like forró that much and I'll be interested to see how it fares on Saturday night at the Series A & B parade, when Rocinha will strut its stuff on the big stage.

I may not make it to the Sambódromo that night -- angling for Super Bowl (Super Samba?) Sunday, to see the Grupo Especial heavyweights like Mangueira -- but I did go this past Saturday, just a few days after arriving, to the final dress rehearsal at their quadra, where the samba school practices, at the base of Rocinha.

The pounding drums of the bateria

Portas-bandeira (flag-bearers)

Costumed dancers

This year's queen of the bateria

Her scantily-clad highness segues appropriately into the passistas, the best dancers in the school, who when female, also wear very little (freer hips swing faster?)

The headline act for the evening, meanwhile, was popular sambista Dudu Nobre, one of the official commentators on the parade for the Globo network, as I saw advertised on TV the next day.

Earlier in the day at the Saturday Rocinha fair I picked up a CD (pirated, of course) on which he covers famous sambas enredo from across the last century.

Dudu Nobre - 100 Anos de Liberdade: Realidade ou Ilusão?

This was Mangueira's 1988 samba, commemorating -- and questioning -- the 100th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. A good samba at its best can be a very bold and public statement of politics or social values, although criticism has mounted against escolas de samba in general over the last couple decades, especially since the opening of the Sambódromo in the mid-80s (financed by the Rio government's tourism arm). Every year the tickets get more expensive (i.e. tourists and not locals attending the parades), the routines are more rigidly choreographed, there are more and more professional dancers and musicians, and in short, the spontaneous spirit of samba and the physical presence of the communities that these schools supposedly represent seems to be eroding.

I had a chip on my shoulder about samba when I first came to Rio, captivated as I was by this elusive thing called funk. I've been to enough bailes now that as of last summer I wanted to discover more of the samba world, but didn't find much going on in July and August, as it was just before the rehearsals began. Now, in full Carnaval season, samba is everywhere. That's no reason not to still think critically, but it's plenty of reason to enjoy as the big weekend approaches.

Sandscapes

2008-01-27T20:50:00.000-05:00

"Dans le désert, on doit faire paix avec soi. (In the desert, one must make peace with self)"
--Albert Memmi, Le Désert

Mediterranean Modernism

2008-01-27T19:37:00.000-05:00

The other side of the Israeli urban equation from Jerusalem is its seaside counterpart: Tel Aviv, the image of Israeli modernity, cosmopolitanism, secularism, and according to some, political apathy. It is all of these, and more. The city was founded in 1909 on the beach just outside of Yaffo, an ancient port city, by secular Zionists looking for an ordered, gridded urbanism outside of Yaffo's dense chaos. Tel Aviv grew to swallow Yaffo (the city's official name is Tel Aviv-Yaffo), then sprouted skyscrapers, financial centers, Bauhaus and Art Deco architecture, museums, cafés, record stores, and now, nearly a century later, shows evidence of global city formation.

Airplanes -- that great symbol of modernity (Brasilia isn't shaped like one for nothing) -- fly over its Mediterranean shores heading for Ben-Gurion Airport, hub of El Al, the flagship Israeli carrier.

On Friday night while the Shabbat masses gather at the Western Wall, Tel Aviv's clubs are just heating up, while on the right block you'll find Hebrew stencil graffiti.

"Zionism = Real Estate"
Who said Tel Aviveans weren't political?

And the all-important rave flyer. Tel Aviv: hub of the Israeli psy-trance scene, one node on that vast global psy-trance network . . . global city indeed.

I didn't make it to one of the famed mesibot desert parties, and truthfully there was only a little trance at the club I did make it to, a friend's cousin's birthday party or some such affair. But it was bumping out of car windows and in the stalls at the market at the end of Shenkin Street.

Shulman - New Paradigm

Consider this the chill out room track, then. From Shulman's Soundscapes and Modern Tales.
__

I had too little time in Tel Aviv; it's hard to resist a Mediterranean city. But in the brief chance I did have, I found quite striking the duality between it and Jerusalem. One which I linked to the dichotomy between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. In what, as friends rightly pointed out, was probably the first time Jerusalem has ever been compared to Rio, I likened the axis Tel Aviv/São Paulo - Jerusalem/Rio. The basic distinction is between cosmopolitanism and particularism. The universal ease with which Tel Aviveans or Paulistas see themselves on a map with Milan, New York, London, Barcelona, Miami vs. the local customs, traditions, mores, dress that are hard to slip into. I love Rio, but I will probably always feel like an outsider, not the least because of skin tone. Likewise in Jerusalem, if you are not in liturgical rhythms, you will feel out of place. Both, too, engender more tourism, another distinction that separates you from the city. But people circulate into, out of, and within São Paulo and Tel Aviv on such a rapid basis that it's easy to slide in, hop on the metrô or go to the beach (and yes, Rio and Tel Aviv share a beach, but Rio's has its own rigid code where it's easy to feel like an outsider), and find that you don't stand out.

That kind of cosmopolitanism is seductive (and expensive -- I always spend more money in São Paulo and than I do in Rio; likewise a stroll down Shenkin cost me more before I knew it than any promenade in Jerusalem), but ultimately I try to resist it. There's a challenge in not being able to fit in, and an enjoyment that comes from enduring that regardless -- picking up the language, the music, whatever it takes to at least have an exchange, even if it would be 10x easier to become a carioca than a paulista, a Tel Avivean than a Jerusalemite.

At the same time, the cosmopolitanism of global cities brings with the interstices of culture -- gaps that allow for the constant innovation, creative use of space, and readaptation in cities like London, New York, and Berlin. Or Tel Aviv, as in DJ C's loft party. When I go back to Israel, I think I'll be spending more time by the sea.

Whose Jerusalem? Microglot & Polytical

2008-01-27T12:31:00.000-05:00

Everyday life in Israel is micropolitical in a way that is unfathomable to me and must be extremely wearing for those who live there -- doubly so for residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Unsurprisingly, the Palestinian Territories were not on our itinerary, but flipping through a guide book I had the realization that, in fact, the Territories are not such a terra incognita. There's even a counter-Birthright to take you there. I try to avoid the polemics as best as I can, but crossing the green line will be an imperative for me whenever I can next make my way there.

It's embarrassing to admit that I had let news coverage so completely define my perception of the place. Ramallah to me was inextricably linked with Yassir Arafat's compound and that image had no place for say, these guys (many great links & mpfrees to be had), or the supposedly many hip bars with contemporary Arabic music. Arafat's compound, meanwhile, is a few miles outside of town. I should've known better: I'm originally from the D.C. area and I hate the assumption that everything "inside the Beltway" is the federal government (and not say, hip-hop/go-go fusion like my recent favorite W.A.L.E.).

In truth, I did visit the West Bank, to be precise the Jewish settlement of Gush Etzion. The whole place put me on edge, beginning with the History Channel-esque documentary in their "Gush Etzion Museum" of the history of Jewish settlement there and the battle that took place in 1948. At the end, the screen recedes and behind it lies the underground bunker where the last defenders of the kibbutz there were killed. The very fact that they need a master narrative to justify their presence made me inherently suspicious of the settlement's legitimacy, despite claims that it's not of the same ilk as more radical, most definitely illegal, settlements.

As if to underscore this difference, the largely American-born residents of Gush Etzion prefer to think of themselves as a suburb of Jerusalem, carving out a sense of normalcy precisely by painting it as suburbia, a disturbing slice of the Inland Empire in Israel. West Bank, CA.

12 minute drive to downtown Jerusalem aside, what kind of suburb is it if you have to pass through a checkpoint and along the infamous Wall? (How much is security fence and how much is wall I won't bother getting into here; on the Jerusalem-Gush Etzion byway [bypassing the Palestinian city of Bethlehem], it's a concrete wall, an attractive wall, but a wall all the same.)

Checkpoint at dusk from the bulletproof window of an armored bus.

Upon return to Jerusalem, lights across the city proudly proclaim the 40th anniversary of (re)unification.

Out of sight, out of mind?

Not exactly -- the division between (Jewish) West Jerusalem and (Arab) East Jerusalem along the fault line of the Old City has no pronounced borders or checkpoints, but it's the subtler linguistic distinctions that make me question the proclamation of unity. Polyglot Israel has three official languages: Hebrew, Arabic, and English. Official signage is very good about including all three.

In ultra-Orthodox West Jerusalem neighborhoods, Arabic is nowhere to be found (no photos out of respect for the community -- they did have large signs in every possible tourist's language asking visitors to dress modestly, not come in groups, and not take photos). Even just a few hundred yards into East Jerusalem, meanwhile, Hebrew script becomes noticeably scarcer. Especially on the buses: On the whole, West Jerusalem (Hebrew/Jewish) buses don't go to East Jerusalem, nor do East Jerusalem (Arabic/Muslim) buses go to West Jerusalem. Disappointing as it is, it's also endemic of the systematic discrimination against East Jerusalem neighborhoods in terms of municipal services. Yet 40 years of being one city has yielded substantial integration, whether friendly or not, and if a two-state solution means dividing East and West, it will require microsurgery indeed.

Even the incredible sensory overload of going to the market was, at times, fraught with reminders of ongoing tension.

How many articles have I read about olive trees destroyed, olive groves cut off by barriers, the bitter taste off the branch, sour in the mouth but so easy to swallow?

The police were watching all the entrances, a reminder of the very real terror of the Second Intafadah, when buying ingredients for Shabbat dinner (I took these photos in the Friday afternoon pre-Sabbath rush) was done at one's own peril. I suspect Arab residents, by choice or by dint of racial profiling, keep to their own market, but that doesn't mean they can't slip through under cover.

A stall selling all manner of religious, secular, Hebrew, Arab, Israeli, Egyptian, Lebanese, Moroccan, &more CDs was, to me, a triumph of the hot & polyglot multicultural stew that, at its best, the Middle East can be -- and that I believe Israel, as a democratic state, warts and all, fosters better than other nation-states (not that particular cities can't, at the local level, foster them -- Beirut, Cairo, Ramallah, Marrakesh).

The heavy strings in vintage Arab popular music accompany the lilting voice of a great chanteuse, like Egypt's Faiza Ahmed, extremely well. It was a joy to turn the dial on my trusty FM radio while in Jerusalem and come across the rich textures, the fantastic tonal interplay between voice and instrument.

Faiza Ahmed - Set El Habayeb (Al Oum)

All the more reason to learn Arabic and Hebrew for that matter.

Sunset over Har Herzl (Mount Herzl), home to the Israeli national military cemetery -- tombs of presidents, prime ministers, generals, famous Zionists (including Herzl himself), dead soldiers, innocent bystanders. Below this picture, I had just finished hearing the leader of our trip recount the death by suicide bombing of his fiancée in front of the memorial wall to victims of terror on which her name is inscribed.

There is no one side here.

Zion ina . . . Zion

2008-01-26T20:32:00.000-05:00

Much too much delay, but my trip to Israel merits comment all the same. Some might be affiliated with the vast cottage industry of Taglit-Birthright, whose main goal, according to friends who have gone, is to convince you to make aliyah (right of return -- instant Israeli citizenship for all Jews worldwide). I had the fortune of attending a similar (in the sense of free) trip, that thankfully wasn't so ideologically driven. The politics are inescapable and I want to get to them, but first I need to share some of my Mesopatamian soundtrack.

Hip-hop may get the lionzion's share of the credit for having gone global, but it's (older) brother-from-another-mother has definitely gone a global too. It was not too much of a surprise, then, to find Jewish reggae that decidedly isn't black-Jew-face. Instead, they had the imprimatur of Sabbo Ronen of the Soulico Crew (check out their mix of Israeli party beats), who happened to be behind the counter of a record store I hit up in Tel Aviv -- and part of the same crew as DJ C's friend Itai, the one who hooked him up with B-more ina Jerusalem a few summers back, although I unfortunately didn't have the same opportunity given my tight schedule. Small, small beat-friendly world, it is.

Ex-Centric Sound System - Blessed Love (ft. Richi Bless)

"This one have African paws innit, this one have Nubian paws innit, this one comin at you from Israel! This one is straight from anywhere all over the world."

Eccentric, like Israelis gone a foreign? Ex-centric like Jamaica as point of reference, not that omphalos at the center of it all? Jerusalem Syndrome--Messiahs--Haile Selassie--Ethiopia--Operation Solomon?

Ex-Centric Sound System - Wildest Dub (Solomon's Dub)

"I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broadways I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not." (Song of Solomon, 3:2)

En Route

2007-12-30T11:56:00.000-05:00

Where do you want to go today?

Winter in Zion, and I don't mean that Zionistically . . . Israeli reggae and thoughts on this complicated corner of the Middle East when I return. Roots and routes intertwined indeed.

Stirring the Pot

2007-12-17T19:57:00.000-05:00

Timo (aka DJ Rideon) was kind enough to big up my mix A Seleção do Gringo on the Rio Baile Funk blog. But he raised some questions about my admittedly ad homonym (or at the very least sneaky linky) digs at some of my fellow "funky mediators." I expected as much and he's fair to call me out on my URL trickery, so lemme explain:

Diplo -- I've been writing about funk&Rio, among other sounds&cities, for going on a year and a half, but I've largely avoided mentioning Mr. Pentz, whose shadow certainly looms large over the crowd of gringos who've gone south. I have to admit that back in the spring of '06, I was still easing my way into the heady world of int'l sounds, c/o knowledge jewels like Music E-145 (and hey, now I'm the TA!). And it was via Diplodocus that I, like many who live above the equator, first heard of Rio's booty beats. Not that there weren't contemporaries or even precursors -- cf DJ Philomena and the unfortunately-named Slum Dunk Presents Funk Carioca (in part orchestrated by Tetine, who claim the equally unfortunately-named album L.I.C.K. M.Y. F.A.V.E.L.A.)

But I'm definitely of the opinion that some of his early efforts at popularizing the genre were problematic.

Favela On Blast / Favela Strikes Back / Piracy Funds Terrorism

This mixtape triptych from '04, when funk was the hottest thing in the Diplo repetoire, is shockingly disrespectful to the music he was building a reputation on (not to mention the cavalier use of "favela"). All three do not credit any tracks with artists or titles, and in Piracy Funds Terrorism, tracks named "Baile Funk 1" "Baile Funk 2" &c brush up with properly credited MIA mash-ups and dirty south hits.

Why are funk MCs less important as artists than The Clipse?

I'll grant that o movimento funk itself is not known for its scrupulous organization, and plenty of mixtapes you pick up in Rio are creditless too. But it's not like Favela On Blast is chock full of hardcore proibidão (where anonymity is the order of the day) -- it's got mainstream funk hits like Bonde do Vinho's "Labarinto vs. Vem Cá Nenem" (popular here too for using a "Rock the Casbah" instrumental) and one of the many remixes of the Flamengo anthem (both of which are on Seleção do Gringo, properly credited).

Timo points out that I, too, have some uncredited tracks in my mix -- but I tried to avoid them (they are the exception, not the rule) and at the very least I explain why I don't have the info, even after some hunting around Google Brasil.

A review of Favela Strikes Back ultimately argues that such culture vulture moves may not be so bad if, in turn, they translate into $$ (or more precisely R$R$) in the hands of artists, although the review itself really flounders with terms to describe the music (hardly an unknown occurrence outside their indie rock bread and butter). Difficult questions about favela economics (will it just lead to more gringos buying drugs?) and commodification aside, I agree that Diplo and early funkeiros up north certainly paved the way for DJ Sany Pitbull, DJ Sandrinho, and MC Dudu do Borel (among others) to bring the funk direct without relying on such mediators. But how much of a north-south reversal are they making if Sany ends up playing at a place called Favela Chic, which could easily happen the night after he plays the baile funk in the favela of Cantagalo (which in turn I've heard called "baile chique" because of the number of well-heeled cariocas that have been coming up for the party)? And of course, it's only a select class who are making the leap outside of their communities, much less Rio. Trickle-down economics definitely don't apply.

This is, of course, dating back a few years, and I applaud more recent efforts like HeapsDecent and the Favela On Blast film (which could go either way) as making up a little bit for past transgressions.

It's a question if he can really focus long enough on these projects to make sure they come to fruition properly. As Wayne&Wax has already pointed out, move too quick and you'll miss the details.

[After delivering a similar argument in a Music E-145 guest lecture two weeks ago, I copped Soy Cumbia!, a MadDecent podcast mix that is mad indecent -- BsAs champ Sonido Martines loses remix credit and rumor has it that vocal drops and shout outs (y'know, local color, marks of identification) were cut from the beginning of the tracks. Just go listen to Sonido on RuptureRadio . . . he spends a lot more time in BsAs than Philly's finest.]

Essay/Man Recordings: As an acknowledged commercial success with two hit compilations, it might just seem like a case of jealousy. But I think these comps were another opportunity squandered -- the cropped mid-sections of the first cover replicating the same anonymous-as-exotic canard of Diplo's mis- or non-labeling. I feel better about the more recent Funk Mundial and Baile Funk Masters series, as they actually draws distinctions between different DJs and MCs, their personalities, the styles they bring to the table. Funk is not monolithic in this format, and that's a big improvement. Still, as recently as this summer, an MC I'm friendly with who ended up on this release said the contract presented to her was in English and explained to her by a (European) bilingual friend of Man's man on the ground, Daniel Haaksman, who in turn is still struggling through his Portuguese ABCs. I'm really shocked that after so many releases, they haven't gotten their act together enough to find a Brazilian lawyer and draft a contract in the lingua franca (or just have a notário do a certified translation). I haven't seen the contract, although I offered to look it over, so I don't want to claim that it was misrepresented or offers poor terms, but the fact of it still strikes me as a disservice.

CokeGunsBootyBeats: My favorite example of hyper-sensationalized funk coverage. This guy Alex Bellos, "reporting deep from the slums of Rio de Janeiro" like a modern-day Livingstone, has produced one of the most telling statements in English-language press about o mundo funk carioca. "Welcome to the most exciting--and the most dangerous--underground club scene in the world." The real message here is that it's the most exciting because it's the most dangerous. The interest of Bellos ("a world expert on Brazil" ?! -- stick to futebol) and his readership is fueled by an image -- even a fantasy -- of drug- and violence-infested third world slums populated by 12 year olds snorting cocaine and holding AK-47s. Does proibidão, the focus on Bellos' article, revolve around the culture of drug trafficking in Rio? Of course. But it doesn't require such preposterous reporting, cf Machine Gun Voices.
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All of which makes me appreciate all the more the kind of approach engendered by the Blogariddims series. I realize I'm comparing apples to oranges with a podcast stacked up against record label releases, mixtapes, journalism, and well, another podcast. But there's room in each to show a little more care (and interest -- is it about you or the artists you're bringing to another audience?) w/r/t cross-cultural contact.

Moral of the story: If the world were more like Blogariddims, maybe it'd be a more ethical place.