Xmas Mix 2009

Ok, it’s become practically a yearly tradition — though for how much longer? I guess there are literally thousands more holiday tunes to sift through, but returns diminish… Yet I hate to disappoint. Here’s this year’s Xmas mix: Enjoy & Happy Etc Etc!

Xmas Mix 2009 (MP3 ZIP)

1.Sun Ra – It’s Christmas Time
2. Alton Ellis – Christmas Coming
3. Corporal Blossom – White Christmas
4. Pet Shop Boys – All Over the World
5. Headlights – Kicker of Elves
6. Marvin Gaye – Purple Snowflakes
7. La Playa Sextet – Navidad Negra
8. Martin Mull – Santafly
9. Doctor Octoroc – Carol of the Belmonts
10. Aventura – Dame La Mano Paloma
11. Belton Richard – Please Come Home For Christmas
12. Quad City DJs – Whachugot4Xmas
13. Torres Brothers – Nutcracker Suite (Dance of the Funky DJs)
14. Barrington Levy – Flash Your Dread
15. Morphine – Sexy Christmas Baby Mine
16. Pierre Barouh – Ce Jour la…
17. Horace Andy – Christmas Time
18. Sonora Matancera – Rumba Navidad
19. The Enchanters – Mambo Santa Mambo
20. James Brown – Go Power at Christmas Time
21. Trinity – Silent Night (Version)
22. The Blue Hawaiians – We Four Kings
23. Michael Doucet – Auld Lang Syne

You can find the previous years’ mixes here: Xmas 2007 Xmas 2008

Merengue de Calle in Hipster Crosshairs

Maluca – El Tigeraso.

Tasteful cod-mambo produced by Diplo (or is that “with production by Diplo”? hmmm….) with equally tasteful video. Ahem. Most telling part: 2:00 in, a band of “ethnic” chicas (maybe actually Dominican?) acting the face for the white producer. I am not opposed to musicians from the core experimenting with musics from the periphery out of hand, but this isn’t really pushing things forward. Swap the typical merengue bass for a slightly acidic synth. Of course, the audience for this is likely one that doesn’t know or care much about the source material, which is often far more wildly experimental.

Christmas is coming, anyone feel like buying me a gift?

Against the Brave New Streaming Future

So these guys aren’t the only technological determinists to say this, nor is the streaming future limited to music (see “cloud computing” hype). But they are emblematic of a line of thought that needs some strong tempering.

JS: It’s a streaming future.
EVB: Yes. I believe downloading music for free will eventually be seen as a waste of time and disk space.
JS: Music fans who can just grab it elsewhere are losing interest in P2P. The RIAA had very little to do with it.
EVB: And as fraught as the whole “bundling with service providers” thing is (will I have to subscribe to multiple ISPs if I want both ESPN and Spotify?), bundling is a promising option for getting people to pay.

These guys predict that the future of music is not in downloading files like mp3s, but in streaming services. Like cloud computing, the idea is that instead of containing files and programs on your hard drive, they are instead web apps hosted on a remote server that you access with a device connected to the internet. The real advantage to this scheme is that small devices with tiny hard drives, like phones, can have all the capabilities of a computer.

But there are some serious disadvantages to cloud computing that smart people are raising as well. They center around control — a company, such as Google, will hold your data and you have to access it remotely. You don’t have to be a huge privacy advocate to worry about hacking or internet outages keeping you from your stuff.

A “streaming future” shares some of these problems, as well as containing their own issues. What immediately leaped to my mind is how streaming-only would destroy a big part of what interests me in contemporary music production — the border-crossing remixing, mashing up, sampladelic world of global internet pop. Streamed music is fundamentally out of your control. You do not have access to the file, and therefore you cannot re-edit it, remix it, sample it, or incorporate it into a DJ mix — Goodbye Web 2.0, hello Web 1.0. You cannot play songs unless you are connected to the internet (so pony up that $4.95 when you’re at Starbucks or the airport for wireless access) and have a subscription to the streaming service. The streaming future effectively re-installs record labels (with their tech company allies) as gatekeepers between artists and listeners, with the added bonus of a frictionless data mining operation.

This is the pernicious aspect of the streaming future hype — it’s a ploy to get listeners to go back to the old model with corporations controlling distribution. Where legal action and threats failed in stopping P2P filesharing, technology promises to succeed through convenience (aided on the other side by significant victories against the major bit-torrent sites). The implications are huge — in a streaming future, music will need to obtain access to whatever services control access to devices (phones). You can imagine the cartelization that could ensue — just as telecoms allied with phone manufacturers, labels might align with particular streamers and ISPs to the exclusion of others, as the above quotation points out. If music samples or remixes unlawfully, it will be kicked off the streaming service (if it’s allowed on in the first place), just as YouTube repeatedly pulls videos for copyright infringement. And when it’s gone, it’s gone — you don’t have a file on your hard drive, so you can’t listen to it any more.

I’m not opposed to streaming out of hand — I “listen” to a lot of YouTube uploads as part of my steady diet of music. My concern is that it will replace P2P filesharing, in essence a far more radical threat to music as private property, as the primary way of distributing music online. If you care about at all about the incredible leveling effect the internet has had on music, and the unique creative forms it has inspired, you should oppose the streaming future. P2P filesharing will always have a significant following, but if it ceases to be the dominant form of obtaining songs, corporations will have re-asserted dominance over music.

A Response to Jonathan Simon on UC Strikes [Update]

I recently had the pleasure of hearing Jonathan Simon, criminologist and anti-prison advocate at UC Berkeley, speak at a colloquiam. His ideas were bold and interesting, although I wasn’t always sure if he could link them into one overarching project as he was attempting. I won’t summarize the talk, since it’s his next book idea, but he’ll no doubt discuss its ideas on his blog, which is definitely worth checking out.

However, I feel the need to respond to a recent post about the strikes at his workplace (which is also his alma mater), which he simply cannot support. Why? Because they should be protests about prison reform instead.

With a heavy heart I am not joining many of my students and colleagues who are striking against classes and educational activities at UC Berkeley and other UC campuses across the state beginning tomorrow (and through Friday the 20th). We ought to be united in mobilization to save higher education in California. But in choosing to make the fight a convenient and ideologically satisfying (but for the most part phony) story about privatization, down-sizing, and pernicious, corporate minded university leadership, UC’s unions and their student and faculty allies are missing a historic opportunity to engage our fellow citizens in a critical dialog about our state’s future.

That future has been mortgaged to expensive dysfunctional prisons and a bipartisan law-enforcement establishment that is committed to mass incarceration at any price. But across three decades in which that project of exiling tens of thousands of largely poor and minority Californians to a prison archipelago of mammoth proportions (which yet remains grotesquely overcrowded) has been constructed, the supporters of higher education in this state have remained silent, assuming that the incarceration of people who don’t go to college anyway is not our problem. Now the chickens have come home to roost.

First of all, I think he is simplifying the reasons for student activism in California (and nationwide — sorry, worldwide). They aren’t merely neutered critiques against corporatization of the university, they related to larger critiques of capitalism — that the generation coming of age now must shoulder the burden of debt-fueled neoliberalism come asunder. Essentially, the buck stops with Generation Y. Simon’s disdain for the strikes is barely concealed, shocking when you think of how his interests in making detailed, critical scholarship are threatened, as education becomes stripped down to professional training. Perhaps law/criminology people haven’t felt the acute pinch like humanities folks, but he’d probably change his tune if he had 4/4 loads of composition classes.

Simon’s bigger oversight is that he poses these problems in an “either/or” false choice. You either protest the privitization of schools (wrong) or you protest prisons (right). What he doesn’t understand is that movements start in a grassroots way, addressing local concerns. He really should have understood this, since the Free Speech movement at Berkeley (itself inspired by the civil rights movement) grew into a much larger youth movement, protesting war, capital, racism, essentially against a constricted version of the American future. Students are natural starting points for radical protest, and their earliest protests are likely to be about school issues. In the same way, workers start protesting their own labor conditions first. The drastic measures happening in California (and really at every public institution in the U.S.) have been met with vehement student response, containing a strong anti-capitalist element. What Simon should do is see this as an opportunity — you want an anti-prison movement, then make it a part of the movement happening right now! That’s where the energy is. He has the background to incorporate a critique of the prison-industrial complex into what the student movement is already geared up about: in addition to being immoral, our justice system is a drain on the economy, which affects all public spending. But he has to take positive action, take the time to make the argument, instead of sniping “where were you when the state built thirty prisons and enacted laws like 3-Strikes?” Well, Jonathan, I was 12 when Three Strikes went into effect; most of these students were younger. Where were you?

This sarcastic tone belies Simon’s obvious envy of the student movement’s enjoyment. This is why he writes absurd things about missing “three precious days” of classes — I’m guessing people learned more by engaging in protest and battling cops than sitting in classrooms. Perhaps it’s generational, perhaps it’s structural due to Simon’s privileged postion in the university system. But if he really wants to start an anti-prison protest movement — and I hope he does — this activism is the exact place he should start.

UPDATE:

I just attended a panel discussion on student organizing. Victor Sanchez, president of the University of California Student Association, the representative body for the entire UC student population, mentioned college funding in context of prison funding. Twice he brought up that California is #1 in prison funding nationwide, and attributed this to the powerful prison guard lobby. They are planning a march on Sacramento with faculty and administration in March. Dr. Simon, the door is officially open.

Wikipedias of the Ruling Class

Perhaps a series in the making?

I was trolling around Wikipedia late at night as I am wont to do on occasion and stumbled upon this fascinating (really!) entry for Boston Consulting Group, a firm dedicated to the dark arts of management consulting. Management consultants, for those of you who have never had corporate experience, are the engineers of Big Capital. They come in with a toolkit filled with buzzwords and best practices, making businesses more efficient by homogenizing them, and then charging a hefty fee. They’re those guys in Office Space who interview everyone to find out who to fire.  They are also responsible for “strategy” (the military metaphor is not a coincidence), and thus are a prime site to analyze ideology, particularly the stories Capital tells and sells to itself, fantasies of frictionless accumulation, endless growth curves, and workers who approximate Sims characters in their malleability. These are terrible people who hold terrible meetings.

And in apparently terrible places to work — can you imagine walking down the hallways with people who invent terms like “globality”? It’s like hanging around with dozens of yammering Tom Friedmans. BCG prides itself on its “employee-focused culture” (translation: one helluva boozy holiday party), and landed on Fortune’s “Best Places to Work” list, the only management consulting firm to do so. Tokenism? I’m sure Fortune’s editorial board is the picture of objectivity.

BCG’s major innovation is applying the “experience curve,” which says that the more a company does something, the more efficient it gets. Thus, businesses should “capitalize on” (funny how that is always a synonym for “take advantage of”) these trends by always making more of whatever crap they make — pencils, cars, TPS reports. The prime source of efficiency comes from the workers themselves, who “become physically more dexterous. They become mentally more confident and spend less time hesitating, learning, experimenting, or making mistakes. Over time they learn short-cuts and improvements.” In short, they become more and more a smooth operating circuit inside a business: their bodies and minds steadily conform to the needs of their corporate overseers. And they produce more, though we shouldn’t presume that more productive workers are better compensated; these savings translate into profit and increased market dominance. All for an idea that says “whatever you do, do it more.” People talk about making an “ethical capitalism” and this is precisely why they are mistaken: Capital has decades of experience doing what it must always do, which is grow and conquer. There is no space for “sustainability” (a term that sounds suspiciously like management consultant jargon) except as a fashionable brand that allows you to capture market share. Become physically more dexterous or get out of the way.

Can you believe there are FOUR credited authors for this book?

Globality is another of these idiotic concepts dressed up in a Brooks Brothers suit: “the end-state of globalization – a hypothetical condition in which the process of globalization is complete or nearly so, barriers have fallen, and ‘a new global reality’ is emerging.” Chilling, no? This is one of those corporate fantasies of total control, an end of history wet dream when the neoliberal imperial project is complete and all questions are management-related — no politics necessary. Nations’ borders ebb away, governments recede, and corporations get about the business of “competing with everyone from everywhere for everything.” Shocking that this book could come out in 2008, after the leading instrument of toppling governments, U.S. military power, has been horribly discredited. Although, you know, with almost a decade of experience occupying Middle Eastern nations, you’d expect that the military’s experience curves are accelerating — we’ll be ready for Pakistan, Yemen, or Iran in no time, capturing more of that sweet, sweet market dominance. As our soldiers become physically more dexterous at their jobs (barring the occasional death or maiming), we can draw them down in our captured markets and redeploy them to emerging ones. See how it works?

In addition to having offices in every major financial center from here to Kiev, BCG boasts an impressive array of former employees, a veritable who’s who of the ruling class. GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt, who managed to tank his company’s stock by 80%. He was then appointed to Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, a move that no doubt inspires great confidence among the citizenry. Other all-stars formerly on the BCG gravy train: the CEOs of Pepsi, Red Hat, Bertelsmann Media, airlines, military contractors, etc.; such notable politicians as Benjamin Netanyahu and Mitt Romney; celebrities such as John Legend and the guy from Season 1 of The Bachelor. Consulting groups are a kind of finishing school for the ruling class: once you graduate from your top tier college (your major isn’t important), you become steeped in the work culture and ideology of the top 15% while paying off your student loans. After a few years, you get an MBA and try your hand at running a company (or a country) or you win some Grammys. Either way, your path to power will be smoother because all your ideas will align with the dominant ideology of politics-as-management, workers-as-capital, efficiency-at-all-costs. In short, what we see on this nice little Wiki is Capital reproducing itself.

-mba Etymology

The use of the term timba in popular language and songs points to a close semantic relation between the words timba and rumba Discussing the origins of tumba, Leon relates the word to “a series of terms of Afroamerican origin like tumba, macumba, tambo, and others meaning collective partying, with the general meaning of group, meeting.” This seems to suggest an identity of words such as tumba, timba and rumba, meaning both drum and the occasion where drumming and dancing takes place. The hypothesis seems to be corroborated by folklorist Rogelio Martinez-Fure, who “suggests that mba, the root of the word rumba, now refers to dance and is found throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. According to him, it represents similar festive dance events and has similar accents in the dancing, e.g., on flirtation, chase of the female, or bumping the pelvis area.” This might confirm a semantic connection between words such as rumba and timba and names of other Afro-Latin American dances like Cuban mambo, Puerto Rican bomba, Colombian cumbia, Brazilian samba, Argentinian and Uruguayan candombe and Peruvia malambo.

–Vincenzo Perna, Timba: The Sound of the Cuban Crisis (2005)

Badiou on Obama, Communism

Enjoy the Symbolic. Don’t trust the state.

Badiou offering some sage advice on the Obama victory. I actually think that people in the U.S. are less sanguine about Obama than Europeans, but nicely stated all the same. Via Lacan.com — seems like bit of a rough translation unfortunately, but lots of nice nuggets, such as this:

We are much closer to the 19th century than to the last century.

Maybe this explains steampunk? Anyway, I can’t argue with this:

Just like maybe after 1840, we are now confronted with absolutely cynical capitalism, more and more inspired by the ideas that only work backwards: poor are justly poor, the Africans are underdeveloped, and that the future with no discernable limit belongs to the civilized bourgeoisie of the Western world. All kinds of phenomena from the 19th century reappear, extraordinarily extended forms of misery within these countries themselves.

And thus the world once again finds itself ready for the Communist Hypothesis. Not some sort of program, but the expansion of the boundaries of what is possible — true freedom and equality. This dovetails well with my fashion prognostication: Communism is about to be sexy again. Let’s reclaim the term, comrades!

 

America: Still Fascist and Loving It

Reading Benjamin for the umpteenth time…

Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.

If that’s the case, we’ve been fascist since at least World War 2… Something I’ve suspected for a while, really. I wonder if Marcuse had any rejoinder to this.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.

Ah, yes. The kicker.

Epilogue from Mussolini:

We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary for it to be a reality. It is a reality in the sense that it is a stimulus, a hope, is faith, is courage. Our myth is the nation, our myth is the greatness of the nation! For us the nation is not just territory, but something spiritual. A nation is great when it translates into reality the force of the spirit.

Indie Sounds Like Commercials

Your trippy sound effects, retro drum machines, reverb and delay…. and all I can think about it cheese cascading down a taco, bathmats on sale at Target, the latest romantic comedy dressed up in vintage clothing….

Cross-post: Fusilamiento

I’m blogging at hist525.wordpress.com as part of a class I’m taking in transnational popular music. I thought I’d cross-post this, since it’s relevant to posts I’ve made on merengue de calle. The original post is a response to Paul Austerlitz’s book on merengue, which is quite good.

Original post:

This concept definitely caught my attention. On page 93:

Many bands practiced what was called fusilamiento (shooting, assassination), basing merengue arrangements on foreign hits.

In Austerlitz’s account, merengue is a very, shall we say promiscuous style, able to adapt to many forms, which is the key to its popularity across Latin America. Of course, covering hits to get attention is nothing new and certainly not limited to merengue, but that there is an entire concept built into the culture is certainly interesting! In my limited exposure to merengue, I’ve definitely come across many versions of popular songs, including Western pop covers. I like this video because I also had the experience of hearing the merengue version of “Don’t Worry Be Happy” in a cab in the DR. I’ve also heard it on Spanish-language radio in DC.

Side note: I visited the DR for a long weekend a couple years ago. My driver was also a cop (remember, Austerlitz says they make very little money — tourism is the only way to get paid), middle aged and conservative in composure. We didn’t listen to much merengue or bachata in the car — his favorite station played 80s soft pop — think grocery store music. He did like Aventura, but who doesn’t?

Here’s an example of fusilamiento at work. The first song is a classic by the Spanish singer Camilo Sesto. I first heard this on the Mexican oldies station in Chicago, called “Recuerdos” (Memories).

Here’s a merengue version I found on YouTube. I have an mp3-CD from Guatemala with a similar merengue version, but with some drum machines and a few other electronic effects added.

Another merengue style (though it’s classified as “mambo,” which in the DR is an urban style of merengue).

Here’s a bachata version for good measure. I’ve also heard other bachata versions of this song.

But the fusilamiento concept permeates lots of Latin genres. Here’s a cumbia version.

I’d like to explore this concept further: does it originate in merengue? Do other genres have names for it? And how does it relate to more contemporary music practices such as remixes and mashups? Here are some recent “assassinations” of Michael Jackson songs done in the mambo/merengue de calle style. There are dozens of these on YouTube.