Something of a tradition ’round these parts. In the spirit of Xmas I keep the tracks separate, so you can treat ’em like Legos and re-arrange and combine to your liking. This year has lots of soca and a lil Bieber (chopped up and not slopped up), but my favorite is DJ Mingo’s reggaeton remix of “El Burrito Sabañero.”
One of my favorite activities to do in any city, alongside visiting museums and sampling the local cuisine, is sniffing out mix CDs. Mexico City is awash in street markets, and practically any street market anywhere you go will have at least one vendor plying idiosyncratic sounds (this is true of D.C. too, but I have yet to do a go-go post. Maybe when I get back). Yesterday I took a long-planned trip through the market at the eastern end of the more upscale Avenido Obregon flea market for this very end.
The more upscale market had what appeared to be legit CDs, lots of new age stuff, to appeal to the clientele mas fresa. At the end, the market takes a turn away from antiques and arts&crafts towards the more mundane and quotidian: baby clothes, produce and meat, street food, and yes, bootleg movies and music. However, most of the bootleg stands simply provide standard popular music at a cheaper scale — MP3 CDs stocked with a chunk of the Nine Inch Nails catalog, copies of Shakira CDs, and tons and tons of compilations of 80s hits (corporate pop of the 1980s exercises an astounding hegemony over the world’s musical consciousness). In short, more major label Anglo pop and rock than anything, along with a lot of corporate Latin pop.
I finally found what I was looking for: the mixtape booth. Using a DVD player hooked up to an amp, a guy was playing samples of various mixes with homemade white paper sleeves to a couple prospective buyers. I sidled up and scoped out the CDs — mixes ranging from 80s pop to 90s alt rock to duranguense and even some Chicago house. The proprietor/DJ was trying to find mixes to appeal to a young woman with a handful of trance mixes, and it wasn’t long before I heard what I wanted. The CD started with a bewildering montage of Proyecto Uno hits before moving into terrain just as manic.”Latino Mix” was the name.
After he had served his other customers I told him I wanted the CD that had the “no pare, sigue sigue” on it. He actually wanted to make sure I wanted that one, telling me that the mix is more for exercise because it’s too fast for parties, and attempting to steer me to some disco mixes. He’s probably right — this is a manic trip through a lot of Latin tribal house, deconstructed cumbia elements, tropical polyrhythms (bubbling fans should find a lot to love here), and pitched-up banda. It’s actually quite expertly done, and I’m putting it up for your enjoyment. I left off the last eight tracks, which are actually a different mix of more commercial trance sounds.
No tracklisting por supuesto, but if your knowledge runs deeper than mine, do help in the IDs. In particular, Track 13 is a synthy slice of carnival that I’ve heard many times on D.C.’s tropical station that I would love to know the name of.
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!
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
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.
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’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.
Ricky Vera and Steve Allen – How Can Santa Come To Puerto Rico?
Booker T & The MGs – Santa Claus Is Coming To Town
The Roots – Millie Pulled A Pistol On Santa
Tino – It’s Christmas Time
Half Man Half Biscuit – All I Want For Christmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit
Rev. Horton Heat – We Three Kings
The Raveonettes – The Christmas Song
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.
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.”
La Bionda –Desert of Mars
Patrick Cowley –Megatron Man
Capricorn– Capricorn
Giorgio Moroder –I Wanna Rock You
Alexander Robotnick– Dance Boy Dance
Taana Gardner– Heartbeat
Prince– Sign O’ The Times
Freddy and the Flying Dutchman and the Sistina Band– Wojtyla Disco Dance
So, as alluded to earlier, I travelled to Armenia (AKA Hayastan), a place simultaneously marked by an ancient, uninterrupted history as well as by its relatively recent past as a Soviet socialist republic. Armenia’s current status is a small, landlocked, ethnically homogenous nation-state of around 3 million. There’s a large diaspora of around five million Armenians throughout the world, people who fled either the Turks, the Soviets, or the current poverty rampant in the country. This scattered nation is held together by a shared alphabet and language, religion (the Armenian Orthodox church), and foods (pomegranates and apricots are national symbols). And, of course, genocide recognition. Although I read stories that lauded Turkey’s Eurocup achievements as sticking it to White Christian Europe, it shouldn’t be forgotten that for many, Turkey was the imperial aggressor. I caught the Germany-Turkey match at a bar in Yerevan; when the Turkish team sang their national anthem, the bartender immediately muted the TV to raucous applause. Nevertheless, Armenia’s president sees soccer as a means to bridge borders. Music too provides a common bond for Armenians, but to me Armenian pop music belies its external influences more than a coherent internal character.
The Soviet Union looms as the largest influence when one wanders the centrally planned streets of Yerevan: lots of concrete, large garish buildings that are at once imposing and cheap, and a personal sense of style devoted to major European luxury brands and excessive ornamentation — were I of less proletarian sympathies, I might call it nouveau riche. Armenia, like most of the Soviet world, never had the tension between elites, bourgeoisie, and workers to create tricky strata of “taste” and “sophistication” in fashion: quite simply, more means more. If you can add screen printing, ruffles, rhinestones, or bows to a dress, you do it and charge that much more for it. And like Russia today, Armenia has its own class of oligarchs in charge of the nation’s industries (the guy who owns the sugar monopoly also owns the tobacco monopoly, hence Grand Candy and Grand Tobacco), as well as its own mafia in charge of smuggling and sex traffic. They hang at the numerous strip clubs around the city, as well as the karaoke bars that wouldn’t let me in. There’s such a market for Soviet kitsch in the former USSR that the markets have bootleg Soviet goods. There’s even a commie theme restaurant in the center of the city.
Russian pop music, itself in thrall to European dance-pop, is everywhere on the radio, as well as on television — Yerevan gets about 20 TV stations, half of which are Russian, and several which show music videos throughout the day. In fact, the major pop radio station (there are several devoted to classical music and jazz as well as Armenian traditional music) is instructive in tracing the influences running through this tiny country. About a third of the music is straight-up Russian pop and dance music. Perhaps the most arresting of these was a remix of 50 Cent’s “Ayo Technology” by DJ Baur.
Yes, the 50 Cent global hegemony is in full effect in Yerevan. Hip hop is popular, but only the biggest rappers — 50 Cent, Ludacris, Snoop Dogg — show up on the radio. Tupac has a presence due to the large Armenian diaspora population in Los Angeles. There are also Armenian rappers, most of whom hail from LA (Glendale specifically), none of whom I found very interesting. Hip hop is either club music or the realm of a few over-serious acolytes with lots of dour beats — if there is any insurgent or politically-aware hip hop, I didn’t find it. If you are the rebellious type of Armenian, you are probably into metal. Super Sako is one of the more successful Armenian rappers: his latest hit “I Love You” features English rapping and traditional style Armenian singing on the hook, an oft-repeated formula for Hye-rap division of labor.
More compelling to my ears was the increasingly strong native pop industry. Following the progression of Turkish popular music (a strong, if stridently unacknowledged influence on Armenian pop), Armenia has incorporated “R&B” structures into the relentless Eurodance onslaught, with melismatic singing and danceable syncopation. They even have some nice video budgets on occasion. The biggest song in Yerevan during my visit was the quite excellent “Vortekh Gitnem” (Where I Find) by Sofi Mkheyan, which is also probably the most entertaining music video I saw.
Sofi is about as close to girl power as it gets in Armenia; unlike most female pop stars, she eschews tight dresses and sexpot sultriness for straight up kicking ass. An older Sofi hit shows her battling between her good girl persona (preferring trad Armenia ballads) and her more defiant “hip hop” persona who wants to jam to Daddy Yankee. Oh yes, reggaeton is popular here (along with salsa), but again, you only hear the biggest hits.
Rivaling Sofi’s chart domination was Arame’s “Ur E.” Arame has recently ventured into R&B after sticking largely to ballads, surprising to many Armenians because as someone unnaturally tall (6 feet!), it was assumed he could not dance. He probably won’t win contests with his moves in this video, but he has some!
Notice the celebrity cameos, ripped from films and pasted in the video. Bruce Willis shows up in his Fifth Element gear, and I’m pretty sure he’s not getting any royalties from this. Armenia shares Russia’s cavalier attitude towards intellectual property, and bootlegs can even be found in official videos! Bootleg DVDs and CDs were the norm — there were no places to buy “official” licensed copies, although the bootlegs claimed their own copyrights in a bid to imitate every aspect of a legitimate release.
Note the "All Rights Reserved"
You have two choices — a top-of-the-line bootleg compilation for 1500 dram ($5), or a much more economical MP3 CD which holds 6-10 albums for about the same price (even cheaper in the countryside). I bought several of each, and perhaps my most interesting MP3 CD was “Best of Rabiz Music” by Grisha Aghakhanyan.
“Rabiz” is a hard-to-translate slang term that was variously described to me as “flirt” or “low-class,” but essentially means an Armenian version of an East Coast “guido.” Grisha is part parody, part homage to rabiz culture. Most of his songs are covers of songs popular in Armenia, many of them American (Grisha now lives in LA). Here’s his version of “Gasolina,” which I am pretty sure is bemoaning high gas prices (about the same price as the U.S. with a much lower per capita income) while lampooning Armenian car culture.
“Bom Bom Ashotik”, which interpolates the Macarena at the end, strikes me as very ghettotech:
National questions always loom large for Armenians, especially since they have been without a state for so long. What makes all this stuff “Armenian,” or any music part of a nationality)? The language plays an important part: Mesrop Mashtots, inventor of the Armenian alphabet, is still revered as a national hero.
And partially it is music produced for a specifically self-identified Armenian market, which spans the globe in spite of its largest distribution channels existing in the nation itself. But it’s also Armenian because of the parts from “outside” seeping in: the Russian electropop, the Turkish melodic structures, Middle Eastern instrumentation, U.S. fashion. There is no ontological core of Armenian-ness to any of this music, and just as Armenia historically had to shift alliances with larger powers to preserve its autonomy, so it selectively appropriates foreign musical traditions to shore up its sense of ethnic identity, without which those dollars and rubles and Euros and pounds and lira made by diasporans wouldn’t be converted back into dram in the motherland.
Ok, so after I check out this awesome mambo mixtape I got in the Dominican Republic, of course I wanted more. And I knew from my days combing for bongoflava that this wouldn’t be as simple as firing up the ol’ Soulseek. This was going to be navigating through the slapdash HTML slums of the Third World Internet armed with only Google and a passable knowledge of Spanish. Luckily I stumbled upon something promising right off the bat, something that was much more than the mambo treasure trove I desired. This was Tecnorumba, a Spanish-language social-networking site hosting videos, chat, and most importantly, thousands of mp3s. I found plenty of mambo (I think Tecnorumba is based in the Caribbean, if not the Dominican Republic) as well as… well, everything else. The latest American rap, Eurodance, reggaeton, bhangra, old school salsa, and LOTS of homemade remixes branded with that mark of piracy-based mongrel music — “Made with Sonic Foundry ACID.” This was something foreign and yet familiar at the same time, and I could almost envision the soundwaves of the poorly beatmatched 50 Cent/cumbia mashups as I started a massive binge of downloading.
What I find interesting about Tecnorumba is that it’s a node in the vast series of Intertubes in which the music of the Global Postmodern — mainly indigenized and hybridized forms of hip hop, reggae, and dance music from throughout the developing world — collects and mutates, almost with a mind of its own. Indeed, sifting through the vast amount of music on the site, my browsing imitated a data-mining virus more than a record connoisseur. I scooped up as much as I could through a series of preset inputs (“search ‘reggaeton'”; “search ‘remix'”), then went back through to pick out the valuable pieces of information. So several weeks later, after picking through bad songs, broken links, odd titles, shitty mastering, and the kind of bizarrely wonderful cultural soundclashes you only find through a mixture of serendipity and perseverance, I could come out with this value-added compilation of harvested data that will fit on any standard CD-R: Tecnorumba: The Mix.
The music of Caribbean has always been subject to clashing cultures wrought by economic imperatives, and Tecnorumba is just a late installment in this long history. Still, I wonder at the weird kinds of identities being produced by this proliferation and collision of culture, where Turkish DJs make reggaeton hits big in Dominican clubs, where Tanzanian hip hop mixes made by Dubai DJs find their way into Eastern Europe via digital trade routes through the Caribbean, where microgenres formed in the crucible of geographic and cultural isolation suddenly invade the hard drives of youth worldwide hungry for shared contexts. This is what I mean by “Translatinidad,” in which identity becomes ingrained more through cultural collaboration and mixture than through political boundaries or racial categories, although a shared language seems to be one major organizing principle. I’ve got at least one more installment of the Translatinidad theme planned, hence “Vol. 1.”
DJ Mauro Martinez – Cumbia Crunk – excerpt from a mix of cumbia rhythms and rap acapellas
Omega – Me Persiguen Los Mamberos – Omega is the king of mambo: although not necessarily its most representative artist, he could be the genre’s most talented. He’s got a whole band, and his songs have that spontaneity of a live performance, although structurally they’re similar to other mambo songs.
DJ Hakki – Kolbalsti – From what I can tell, DJ Hakki is a Turkish DJ who makes reggaeton-inflected Turkish club-dance. Reggaeton is HUGE in the nascent Turkish pop industry, and Hakki’s in turn found fans in the Caribbean.
Africanos – DRAGON ROJO – Champeta used to be a kind of Spanish afrobeat from Cartagena, Colombia, but now can refer to any number of sonic mixtures hailing from the area. This one is more cavernous Latin house than anything.
rumba portuguesa – I have no information on the artist, but it sounds like it’s from a mix of rave-influenced Latin music. There’s some cubia-style accordion as well as trancey synths.
Punto Rojo feat. Nastasja – Calabria (Dominican Remix) – The 2007 reggae-fied remixes of “Calabria” by Danish producer Rune are blowing up Spanish radio. Here’s the Dominican version.
Mambo Infinito feat La Mayor – Coje Lo Tuyo – This is basically mambo ghettotech and as such IT OWNS. We’ll see how long it takes for this to migrate from my blog into Diplo’s DJ sets.
DJ Sam – Minimambo Mix – A 10-minute mix of merengue, street and classic.
Huaynos – Llaqta – Ok, I don’t know if I got the info right, but this is an example of the guitar+female vocal music of the Andes that influenced cumbia. Heartwrenching singing!
Charly Dyen– Esposa amp Amante. This is labeled “Bachatatango,” which means you get that arpeggiated guitar with some FUNKY bass for your troubles. Oh, and some drum machine kicks and claps for good measure. This cuts off abruptly, so was probably part of a mix I wish I had.
DJ Blu – Chingue Tu Madre. Yes, they are acquainted with the dance genre of ‘breaks’ in Latin America as well (proximity to Florida probably helps).
Don Chezina – Te Pongo Mujer. Don Chezina was in Playero 38, the DJ crew that got reggaeton started from a hodge-podge of Spanish dancehall and 90s hip hop. This particular track is a perreo-style romp through the beatboxing from Doug E Fresh’s “Freaks.”
Tempo – Donde Estan Las Girlas – Another older Puerto Rican track, with the synth riff from “I Like to Move It Move It” and some dem bow drums. Tempo was the doyen of dirty lyrics in the pre-crossover days of reggaeton; unfortunately he was in prison when Daddy Yankee broke big. Truthfully he is a bit lacking as an MC.
DJ Ricky – Los Power Ranger En Mambo – El nombre dice lo que es. DJ Ricky is the go-to guy for mambo remixes (sort of like DJ Kazzanova in reggaeton). Here he covers the Power Rangers theme, while throwing some 50 Cent and Nate Dogg acapellas over top apropos of nothing. Zany!
El Original – Te Doy (rmx) – This is the token cracked-out cumbia track, with a reggae interlude for good measure. I had hoped to find more druggy-as-hell cumbia in Tecnorumba, but came up short.
Omega y Su Mambo Violento – Por Telefono No – Omega begging his girl not to break up with him over the phone. Great theme for a track like this, and once again Omega’s performance doesn’t disappoint.
Arcangel – Siente El Mambo – Another DJ Ricky remix. The hushed vocals and unreleased tension remind me of the Whisper song.
Hector El Father – Tumba -Reggaeton heavyweight with some merengueton; melodically this owes more to standard merengue than the ultra-minimal mambo/merengue de calle. A nice spice to what otherwise could be one of those drearily portentuous reggaeton anthems.
Guanabanas – Chinga – Some bhangra drums and bed-squeaking (a la Trillville’s “Some Cut”) with your reggaeton? Yes, please. “Chinga” means “fuck,” so you can guess what this song’s about.
El Rookie – Papel y Pluma – Old school (1998) Spanish dancehall! Maybe Panamanian?
Residente Calle 13 – Japon (DJ Sticky Remix) – Another mambo remix of a reggaeton track, with all the appropriate seriousness that Residente commands.
Jessly – Adios Amor – More of that beautiful musica de indios Andeando, but very well produced. The shimmering off-kilter guitar rhythm has a “glitch-remix” feel to it, but it’s all natural. Does Bjork listen to this stuff?
Coming soon: More Translatinidad mixes! And should you find anything worthwhile on your own Tecnorumba expeditions, drop me a line.
Posted by Gavin Mueller 
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