Updates from Chicago’s Puerto Rican Pride Festival

As a follow up to my previous post, I thought I’d check out Chicago’s annual Puerto Rican Pride Parade and accompanying festival in the Humboldt Park neighborhood. Rumors of reggaeton’s death are be greatly exaggerated — there were certainly dem bows to be heard, but lots of other sounds as well.

The parade goes through the South Loop, featuring lots of tricked out rides, floats, and contributions from Chicago civic groups, politicians, and businesses.

Music was heavily featured in the parade, almost exclusively salsa. Practically every float had its own DJ or band. Even a few cyclists got in on the act.

One float was blasting reggaeton: B96, a station that recently altered their format slightly away from Top 40 to popular club dance. I haven’t heard any reggaeton on their station lately, but they lent their support to the parade.

The Parade is the big mainstream showing for Chicago’s Puerto Rican community. The Humboldt Park neighborhood is where they throw the party for themselves. The floats and politicians don’t show up, but the cars and bikers reconvene on Division Street to continue the parade.

Chicago architecture + Puerto Rican culture

The park itself turns into a carnival, with rides, food, vendors, and music. A local promotions company had a “reggaeton contest” where contestants (teenaged or younger) danced for Wisin Y Yandel tickets. There were a couple of young boys who danced as well, to my surprise. Unfortunately I missed winning performance, but the park was so crowded in the areas that weren’t mudpits that rushing around wasn’t an option. The crowd mostly took on the role of dutiful spectators, waving their flags when prompted, but I did notice a few guys grinding on each other in front of me. There was a sizable amount of gay pride to go along with Puerto Rican pride at the festival, which was great addition; I would love for gay activists to increase their visibility in Chicago neighborhoods that aren’t always on their radar.

Of course in any type of street market setting, I make a beeline to the mixtapes. In Chicago, that means that house will be in abundance. The Violator DJ Squad booth had dozens of house and freestyle mixes; I picked up a couple juke-centric CDs. I snagged another mix from bountiful Mother Earth, where it had been dropped.

DJ Cholo, who hails from Pilsen (where I hang my headphones), had a quite nice offering on his mix — he didn’t lean too heavily on the classic booty tracks and paid attention to sequencing and flow. I’m providing a sample germane to the reggaeton topic: a juked out remix of Jowell y Randy’s “No Te Veo,” one of the more recent reggaeton popular hits. Cholo substitutes the original soca-influenced backing track for a traditional Chicago-style drum machine workout. The smoothed-out autotune-vox (the Caribbean had been autotuning years before it took over American hip hop) is left intact.

DJ Cholo – Track 08 – Juke & Club Mix

Juke is a genre that stays visible by constantly offering remixes of the latest popular hits, so I wouldn’t call juketon a trend or anything like that (the next track gives a similar treatment to “Ayo Technology”).

Here’s a video (there are many versions of this song) of the original, apparently shot at a European harbor. Looks chilly.

DJ Phantom’s Latin Takeover is chock full of contemporary Latin club hits. The Dem Bow is definitely muted or completely absent in a lot of these tracks, instead there’s a kind of digital-dancehall feel, with lots of effervesynths and autotune. The way reggaeton (if you can call it that) is looking in 2009 is a hybrid of T-Pain R&B, Caribbean pop, and hints of trance. In spite of its futurism, the music draws the line at withdrawing completely from the human like techno does, grounding the songs in the traditional pop realms of sex and sentimentality. And it has a polished commercial sheen; earlier techno-reggaeton outings, like this for example, mined a vein similar to UK Hardcore — chopping, decontextualizing, ironizing, and dehumanizing the human voice. A few examples of the new stuff:

Ok, so on one hand these guys are trying out some Timbaland/lake styles which are big in big-tent clubland. But check out the videos and the lyrics: instead of the poststructuralist de-centering of the subject you see in hardcore and earlier reggaeton-trance, there’s a re-centering of the whole giddy confusing mediated world around individual sexual desire. Don Omar brings some heavy technology metaphors to seduce robots; Alexis and Fido praise technology for keeping (mediated) booty calls on the DL. These artists (along with counterparts in other genres) suggest a sexual pleasure obtained by interfacing with the machine, not leaps and bounds away from beating off to online porn in front of the computer (a recent cultural practice in sore need of examination); however, they cushion this radical notion (if we can call it that, it’s practically a commonplace by now) by underlining their humanity and individuality created means of their desire. And really, what could be more in tune with the dictates of late capitalism than a highly mediated desiring subject?

The night is a carnivalesque atmosphere of car stereo bass, inebriation, smoked meat, fistfights (and tales of them), and the occasional police helicopter. But I’ve already gone off on several tangents, and put in more work than one should have to on a lazy Sunday after a long night in Humboldt Park. I’ll end things here for now and tend to the grill.

Can We Talk About the Reggaeton Crash?

2005 seems so far away….

So I know it seems “trend-ish” to talk about musical cultures like they’re commodities, as if a genre with a geography and a history were equivalent to a fashion accessory (”kuduro is this year’s keffiyeh!”). But of course they are fashion accessories as well, right? Perhaps not to the well-meaning bloggeratti, who are exploring means of ethical consumption and creative interaction between the artists of the global south and enthusiasts of the imperial core. But in the brief period of time that we’ve seen international booty bass styles burst through our high-speed internet connections, a clear life-cycle has emerged that mirrors the economic structure that has laid the foundation for these styles and their consumption: boom and bust. In this post, I’d like to sketch this progression and interrogate the relationship of nu-whirled DJ-bloggers (of which I am a part) to it. And to provide myself a convenient escape hatch, I’ll classify this as an “intervention” to excuse any empirical oversights. I’d like this to provoke a conversation that has been largely ignored and tip-toed around by the most intelligent commentators of this branch of music, and will accept criticism and debate with an open mind.

The dominant narrative is well established: in the midst of urban poverty afflicting a community of color/nonWestern nationality, young people appropriate the techniques of hip hop/reggae/techno and make their own version of these established genres in their vernacular. A flurry of creativity creates an entire musical culture full of rapid stylistic changes and hybridity; meanwhile, the older generation and middle classes disdain the music as oversexual and immoral. Then the music hits the shores of the West, through immigrant diasporas, study-abroad programs, and canny journos looking for the next big thing. Gushing articles are written, cosmopolitan centers host parties centered around the sound, and the most recognizable sonic elements of these genres (dem bow, tamborazo) show up in remixes and DJ sets. A few artists are cherrypicked as leading the crop. A compilation album firms up the brand identity (what are genres but brands?). Tours and careers are launched. And then the genre fails to keep up with the rapid cultural turnover endemic to digital capitalism and interest fades. Luckily new genres from new locales spring up to fill the void.

Reggaeton in some ways was one of the first post-WWW examples of these genre cycles, and in many ways the most spectacular, but the model predates it (I would argue that Detroit ghettotech follows a similar trajectory but worked mostly through “old media” infrastructure). It is also unique in many ways (of course each genre has its own unique history) in that reggaeton became associated with the rising Hispanic population of the United States unlike the minimal mainstream penetration of funk carioca or grime, which had little in the way of newly acknowledged immigrant diasporas to piggyback upon. 

The tale is familiar: an explosion of interest from international media conglomerates, who flooded their distribution channels with the new style. Major labels signed the biggest artists like Daddy Yankee and Tego Calderon. The Source and Bad Boy Records launched Latino brands, rock stations changed to all-reggaeton formats overnight. Movie deals, NPR documentaries, club nights, and popular literature all followed. This had parallel support from writers and academics, who hailed the emergence as an opportunity for Latinos in the U.S. to forge identities, just as marketers saw it as an opportunity to sell these identities to a newly important demographic. Reggaeton encountered resistance from the older generation, but also notably from hip hop fans, Latino and otherwise, who (unjustly or not) pointed out the repetitive nature of the beats and the lack of lyrical sophistication from MCs.

And then the crash. By 2006, all-reggaeton formats were diversifying by including bachata, salsa, and other types of Spanish pop into their mix. Calle 13’s (promoted by academics as the “conscious” alternative to the machismo of most reggaetoneros) biggest hit, “El Nadie Como Tu” isn’t reggaeton at all. In 2009, La Kalle was dropped from the Chicago market altogether; in its place was “Recuerdos,” an oldies format. The Source magazine declared bankruptcy and Source Latino has evaporated. While I could hear the occasional Dem Bow blasting from car stereos in my neighborhood during the summer of 2007, I have yet to hear it at all this year. Even established reggaeton artists have dropped under the radar. Most recently (the spark for this post) I bought  a bootleg mix CD at a block party entitled “REGGAETON DEL 2009.” As new reggaeton had disappeared from my radar as it had largely disappeared from most of the blogs and magazines I turn to for such information, I wanted to see what was going on in the genre today. Fewer than half the tracks were reggaeton at all; instead were bachatas, some mambo tracks, pop-R&B from Don Omar and Ivy Queen, and, yes, a few songs with some of that ol’ Dem Bow, alongside newer trends like Autotune. Even reggaeton CDs lacked reggaeton. 

So what happened? Obviously in the case of reggaeton, media conglomerates overexpanded, creating a bubble of interest. Just as speculation on real estate caused an artificial inflation of prices and a subsequent crash, so too went reggaeton. Similar bubbles affected other emergent genres of the same time: funk carioca (branded as baile funk) no longer appears in DJ sets or on the albums of fashionably globo-chic artists like Diplo and MIA; grime’s biggest artist Dizzee Rascal is leaving the sound behind to focus on mainstream pop. These genres are by no means dead — they still retain cachet in their places of origins, and maintain devotees in the places of export. I still enjoy all of them. But it seems plainly obvious that interest has moved elsewhere, and equally obvious that the same thing will happen again to Baltimore club, juke, kuduro, cumbia, bassline, kwaito, and whatever else comes along.

So why the silence from the perceptive writers of global ghettotech? There are precious few articles such as “The Demise of Hyphy” that describe the rise and fall of a music genre and how it came to pass. I have some theories on contributing factors. First of all, it’s a lot more fun (and easier) to jump on the bandwagon early and promote a new exciting musical genre than sift through the detritus of an older one. I should know — I’ve been that bandwagon jumper, and those articles were easier and more fun to write than this one. If you’re of progressive leanings, it’s distasteful to dismiss another culture, especially if you’ve tied it to identity politics — slam reggaeton and you risk slamming the people who still like it, those people who you were standing up for a couple years back. Finally there’s a self-interested motivation: if you are an early-adopter booster, you jeopardize your credibility as a tastemaker by calling attention to your own critical oversights and boosterism. But if we are going to be responsible commentators on global ghettotech, I think we have to shine a light on our own contexts (and not in the navel-gazing PoMo way) — how this stuff works in the cosmopolitan West, when it doesn’t work, and how interest (and profits) are generated and lost. Gregzinho’s post on Cabide DJ’s lackluster U.S. tour is getting there, but it still seemed like he was pulling punches; to bring a DJ unknown in the States several years after interest in funk peaked was going to be a tough sell. I went to the Zizek Tour when they stopped in Chicago, and even when they were plugged on all the appropriate sites, the venue was more than half empty. More recently I saw an interesting spectacle: ghetto house pioneer DJ Slugo opening for Egyptrixx, who makes a kind of international bass fusion music heavily in debt to juke. At a nearly empty club (on a Saturday night no less), the new (white middle-class) kid on the block, headlines, while the artist who helped shape the sound gets second billing (the first DJ, who played your standard global ghettotech genre-hop, left immediately after his set finished). Slugo had the biggest crowd response of the night; most people left when the headliner started up. When I left I wanted to throw in the towel for nu-whirled music, at least as it appears in indie clubs.

I don’t want to harp on the failure of music I enjoy, but I do want to understand what is going on. Bad venues? Bad promoters? Audiences committed to only the latest trendy beats? It’s obvious that a certain segment of educated middle class young urbanites have a symbiotic relationship with genres that have a very different resonance in their native contexts, but ironically  I don’t see much analysis on it from the writers and DJs on their own context (again, SELF INCLUDED! SELF INCLUDED!). Like whiteness in general it’s become an invisible presence in these genres. Whether this relationship is mutualistic (both sides benefit), commensal (one side benefits, the other is unharmed), or parasitic (one side benefits at the expense of the other side) requires a lot more analysis, particularly of the economics that can get uncomfortable especially if you make income from this relationship. Focusing only on identity or semiotics, I feel, will not adequately address this. Without a political economy of global ghettotech we won’t understand the nature of this relationship, we won’t be able to make sure that interest in the privileged portions of the globe helps those places that make the music we love, and we won’t be able to make sure that these genres can be sustained. Wayne’s proposal looks promising, and I hope to see others follow the lead. As for myself, I feel only tangentially related to this stuff sometimes (I have but a likkle blog and no gigs, still haven’t learned how to laptop DJ), but I’ll be starting a PhD soon and looking for a diss topic… plus I love to throw darts…

I Hate The 80s

Lately on Conflict Diamonds Radio I’ve been exploring a theme called “I Hate The 80s” where I play 80s music (meaning 80s sounding if not always literally from the 1980s) while avoiding all the typical video hits. Lots of italo disco, cold wave, proto-EBM, house, techno, and synthpop. This blossomed into a fortnight-long Giorgio Moroder bender, which produced an entire show focused on his productions. A friend was generous enough to not only record several shows on cassette, but also to rip them to mp3s. 

So in a rather absurd example of media transfer, several of these songs have traveled 30 years on a journey from vinyl to mp3 to CD-R to internet radio to cassette to mp3. All just to get to you. Don’t you feel special? Files below; each is about 30 minutes long. As you might imagine there are lots of sonic idiosyncrasies; I had to leave out the EXCELLENT Side A of one due to quality issues. You get what you pay for. Tracklists will be forthcoming.

I Hate The 80s Tape 1 Side B

I Hate The 80s Tape 2 Side A

I Hate The 80s Tape 2 Side B

Giorgio Moroder Tape 1 Side A

Giorgio Moroder Tape 1 Side B

Giorgio Moroder Tape 2 Side A

Giorgio Moroder Tape 2 Side B

Recent Google-Directed Traffic

 

Answer: No.

Conflict Diamonds: New Old For The New Year

Blah blah blah I promise to update blah blah blah. When real life calls I don’t apologize.

I didn’t even do a best of 2008 this year. Itunes says my #1 most played song was a mixtape version “idance” by Soulja Boy, but I don’t trust it. I think it was actually the mashup of “Walk It Out” and “Que Calor” (possibly the best song about box wine ever).

I

Celebrity Death List 2009

 

To be honest I was a little apprehensive about doing another celebrity death list this year — not only is it morbid, but I felt that such an endeavor falls short of the quasi-intellectual tenor I gesture towards in this blog. Plus Charles kicks my ass every year. On the other hand, celebrity death allows an unparalleled peek at the awful economics of the fame industry — Charles’ often-brilliant commentary (unfortunately relegated to a long-dormant Myspace profile) parses who’s been unjustly overlooked, who’s been given a token farewell, who had the misfortune of dying in the same week as someone more famous or more beautiful, exposing the merciless side of celebrity (the side that includes, of course, lists such as these). So I’m doing one for 2009 — in any case, I think I’ve gotten better at this and might actually have a decent showing for once. 

1. Nancy Reagan – Recent hip problems are the fabled “kiss of the death” for the elderly.
2. Nate Dogg – Two strokes have left him in a coma. 
3. Ted Kennedy – News articles are already treating him as a dead man walking.
4. Robert Novak — Brain problems, and I don’t mean his Republican affiliation.
5. Dick Clark – Eternal teenager no more.
6. Dear Abby – Has been suffering from Alzheimer’s for over 10 years.
7. Michael Jackson – It’s gotta happen sooner rather than later.
8. Jerry Lewis – Hasn’t looked healthy in a while.
9. Patrick Swayze – Cancerous.
10.  Dick Cheney – I think he’s accomplished all the evil he set out to do.

Lots of Republicans on this list — wishful thinking about marking the end of an era?

xmas 2008 = presents!

I’ve started a yearly tradition of making Christmas mixes around the holidays — ok, last year was the first time (mix re-upped — check it!), but I’ve gone and done it again. Here’s my 2008 mix.

XMAS08 (m4a ZIP)

1. Busy Boys – Funky Fresh Christmas
2. Elastica – Gloria
3. Michael Palmer – Happy Merry Christmas
4. The Ventures – Silver Bells
5. Jose Barros – Navidad Negra
6. J. Dilla – Hannukah Song?
7. Al Green – It Feels Like Christmas
8. The Descendents – Christmas Vacation
9. Ghostface Killah – Ghostface X-Mas
10. Barrington Levy – Christmas Day
11. Clarence Carter – Back Door Santa
12. Los Destellos – Para Elisa
13. Yo La Tengo – Rock N Roll Santa
14. The Tamlins – Last Christmas
15. Ricky Vera and Steve Allen – How Can Santa Come To Puerto Rico?
16. Booker T & The MGs – Santa Claus Is Coming To Town
17. The Roots – Millie Pulled A Pistol On Santa
18. Tino – It’s Christmas Time
19. Half Man Half Biscuit – All I Want For Christmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit
20. Rev. Horton Heat – We Three Kings
21. The Raveonettes – The Christmas Song
22. The Dogg Pound – I Wish

Also, in about an hour (4PM CST) I’ll be on the air at UIC Radio doing a holiday-themed show, my last of the year. Goodies from the mixes and special gems from beyond. Point yr internets thataway.

Conflict Diamonds 11/21/08 – Disco Edition with Special Guests

Here’s the playlist of my latest show and a (partial) recording to listen, cherish, and preserve for all time with your preferred media storage method. Don’t forget, UIC Radio is “Blazin’ 24/7.”

1. La Bionda - Desert of Mars
2. Patrick Cowley - Megatron Man
3. Capricorn - Capricorn
4. Giorgio Moroder - I Wanna Rock You
5. Alexander Robotnick - Dance Boy Dance
6. Taana Gardner - Heartbeat
7. Prince - Sign O’ The Times
8. Freddy and the Flying Dutchman and the Sistina Band - Wojtyla Disco Dance
9. Fingers Inc - Break Down The Wall
10. Sleezy D - I’ve Lost Control
11. Lil Jon - Snap Ya Fingers
12. College Club - College
13. N.O.I.A. - True Love
14. Glass Candy - Life After Sundown
15. Jacno - Triangle
16. A Certain Ratio - Knife Slits Water
17. Dondolo - Peng
18. Marie Moor - Pretty Day
19. Dark Day - Hands In The Dark
20. The Juan Maclean – Simple Life
21. Michael Pogo Kreiner - Konigin der Nacht
22. Loose Joints - Is It All Over My Face
23. Syclops - The Fly
24. Man Friday - Love Heartache
25. Sparks - Number One Song In Heaven

Link (M4a, 80 minutes)

Armenian Rap in the Blogosphere

Prancehall has a sarcastic post on Armenian rapper Kro, who, like many Armenians, is based at least partially out of L.A. That explains dude’s hackneyed Tupac style. As I’ve said before, most Armenian rap is pretty weak, especially lyrically, and Kro, who raps in broken English, is no exception.

Much better is Erevanski’s remix (in Armenian!) of “Lollipop,” named after the Chupa Chup brand of lollipops:

I think the Armenians could do big things with Autotune.

Conflict Diamonds Radio Show

Ok, so I have a weekly radio show at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Fridays from 4-6 PM CST I offer up a set of international booty bass / global ghettotech / other horrible name with questionable racist/classist/sexist assumptions built in for regularly scheduled liberal guilt trip. Hotness without borders, questionable reference to imperialism present and unreconciled. 

The station is internet-only, which bums me out, since I am a big believer in the possibilities for local radio to re-territorialize space, to bring out connections among people living close together… plus, many people (self included) only listen to radio in the car. Not to mention there’s no possibility of that serendipity when you’re perusing the left side of your FM dial and hear that bizarre track that you just HAVE to call the DJ about — I used to have this Spanish breakcore fan call into my late late show on WHPK on the regular (best quote: “Yeah, I sold all my records except my breakcore and my acid house”)… On the other hand, potentially anyone with an internet connection can listen to my show. 

Anyway, I digress. I’m going to post playlists from my shows on the blog because, well, why the fuck not? I’m too busy with teaching/grad apps/travel/radio shows at the moment to spend lots of time on lengthy analytical posts, WHICH I LOVE TO DO — I barely have time to read blogs let alone MAKE them. In the future I might try to host shows as mp3s/podcasts once I figure out how to record in the studio. Until then, tune in in real time! After the break, my first five shows: