Xmas Mix 2011

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.”

Xmas Mix 2011 (ZIP 115 MB)

1. Traditional Ethiopian – Genna

2. Baron – Drink Ah Rum

3. Billo’s Caracas Band – Brindis Navideño

4. Unknown – Money in the Bank

5. Scarface – Thiefing Santa

6. Colm III – Christmas Tree

7. Unknown – Funk Do Noel

8. Tosin Martins – Silent Night

9. Jacob Miller – Natty No Santa Claus

10. Susan Macio – Trini Christmas

11. Justin Bieber – Christmas Eve (Screwed and Chopped)

12. DJ Mingo – Burrito Sabañero (Reggaeton Remix)

13. R. Kelly – A Love Letter Christmas

14. Fernand Gignac – Le Feu Danse San La Cheminée

15. Willie Colon – Esta Navidad

16. Professor Ken Philmore – Christmas Stagger Riddim

17. Lord Beginner – Christmas Morning the Rum Had Me Yawning

18. Los Jibaros – Decimas De Nacimiento

19. Marry Harris – Happy New Year Blues

20. Corre Guachin – Papa Noel

21. August Burns Red – God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman

there is no cumbia on Puerto Rican radio…

… and knowing why that is (and why there’s generally no cumbia in the islands) might tell you a lot about both cumbia and the Caribbean. But sorry, honey, I ain’t the one.

There’s a lot of other stuff of course, from 80s grocery store pop — Tears for Fears may be the world’s most ubiquitous band — to rock en español, salsa, merengue, reggae, and corporate pop. Heard some of that Ke$ha for the first time, and can I say, this is what media conglomerates throw money at these days? To quote the name of a tourist trap Mexican place in the Condado neighborhood of San Juan, “Orale, guey!”

The urban stuff rules of course, which means LOTS of merengue de calle, a bit of dancehall, a (tiny) bit of U.S. commersh hip hop — the latter a music that conquered the globe five years ago only to all but completely recede into U.S.-centered provincialism a few years later. It would seem Lil Wayne doesn’t export well. And oh yes, Pitbull, who, along with mentor Lil Jon, anticipated the way to maximize international saturation would be to go deeper into the club, mining the trendiest house tracks of the year. They certainly speak Americano in this respect.

And, oh yes, reggaeton! You’ll hear the big pop tunes that you get on the radio in the states, autotune ballads. And Don Omar’s self-conscious global cross-pollination never sounded better pumping from a Jeep Wrangler on the north coast of the island.

This is of course the watering down of the wilder cacophonic kuduro that pricked up the ears of a thousand bloggers a few years back, smoothing things out for something more Carnival-ready. Gotta say I miss the dreds, Don.

What doesn’t make it over here, or at least to the Latin radio dominated by Central American tastes in the DC area, is reggaeton’s current throwback phase, exemplified by two of the best songs on PR radio. The first recalls the teched-out DJ Blass stuff that knocked me head-over-heels back in ’04, but with some of-the-moment (at least in Latin pop) autotunage. In PR, they don’t stop at the club, they tear the beach up too. And you’re in the right place if you can’t tell the difference between the two.

Quick digression: one of my favorite tracks of 2010 was the similarly Blass-inspired remix of Bomba Estereo’s “Fuego” by the Frikstailers. With this and moombahton, ersatz reggaeton was killing it last year.

Next, a track by reggaeton’s prettiest pretty-boy, Tito el Bambino. His last album was almost totally ballads underscored by gentle dembows, but here he teams up with my favorite spanish “ragga moofin,” Don Chezina, for a deliberate recall of the proto-reggaeton era of DJ Playero. The beat switches up mixtape-stylee, with some vintage Playero-riddims thrown in for good measure.

Perhaps post-crossover-crash, reggaeton’s nostalgically revisiting its roots.

Speaking of Playero, I scored a couple of mixes (37 and 39) at a record store at the seen-better-days mall/market of Rio Piedras, along with an Omega bootleg. You would think this would be the ideal place for CD-R mixtapes, but you’d be wrong. It does have an amazing food court, though. You know your roast pork’s coming from the right place when you’re getting it from a 350-poung guy named Junior who’s being assisted by an older gentleman with a prominent bypass surgery scar.

Speaking of Omega, he’s more prominent than Daddy Yankee these days. His CDs were everywhere. Check out his own Dembow homage. Fuerte!

I finally came across that universal figure of hood modernity, the bootleg guy, hanging at a pool hall on Luquillo Beach, where the cars are hot, the music is loud, and the ballcaps are askew at impossible angles. And the mixtapes are more expensive than what I get in DC. I tried to go for the 3-for-10 deal I get from the go-go dudes at the Florida Market, only to be told by my very stoned vendor that he works for someone else and can’t make deals. Todos somos trabajadores!

The mambo I got there was some of the most creative music I heard on the island. As it emerges from its convention-establishing phase, mambo is mixing with club sounds in a variety of weird ways. Zombie Nation’s soccer anthem “Kernkraft 400” makes an impromptu appearance among Dominican polyrhythms:

Fútbol is really the path towards global crossover, which, just like capital, is where pop music wants to go.

The compilation closes with a timely remix of MJ’s “Remember the Time” (labeled presumptuously “Omega FT Michael Jackson”). I noted the explosion of mambo remixes of Michael Jackson acá.

Here’s the whole compilation, which is the first I’ve ever purchased with a prominent twitter link printed on the cover. Don’t sleep on the merengue remix of 704 Boyz, or the soon-to-blow-up Prophex.

DOMINICANHITS.COM PRESENTS: MERENGUE ELECTRONICO VOL. 1 (103 MB ZIP)

 

Mexican Music Metal Mashups

Pushingit was kind enough to identify Track 13 of Latino Mix D.F. as “El Sonidito” by the Mexican group Hechizeros Band. A nagging mystery finally solved!

He also forwarded me a “cover” by the German heavy metal group Rammstein:

I’ll admit I was fooled — and incredibly perplexed — for the first few seconds. It’s actually a well done mashup (of course), and there are a lot more in this vein: metal concerts and videos with the music replaced by Mexican styles.

Here’s Guns ‘n’ Roses playing cumbia:

Metallica playing norteno:

Korn playing banda:

There are dozens more stretching back to 2007 (a sort of YouTube heyday in retrospect). They’re cheekily labeled “covers” and, Doors and Susan Boyle versions notwithstanding, seem to really hone in on metal. So why? Perhaps contrast. Whereas metal presents itself as serious and dark, the Mexican genres are sonically (if not lyrically) lighter, made for dancing. A sprightly accordion part seems on the other end of the spectrum from a distortion-fueled guitar solo. And yet, it’s the similarities that make some of these work so well: full band set-ups, lots of instrumental breakdowns, percussion solos, machismo, and huge, wild drunken crowds. Generically far removed, but as social worlds, closer than we might think — a point these videos drive home.

And they do cut both ways:

Latino Mix D.F.

La Roma Graffiti

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.

Latino Mix D.F. (55.72 MB – 19 tracks – 40:30 min)

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.

-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)

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.

Spreading My Tentacles

I’ll be blogging over here for the next few months, along with my classmates, as part of the seminar I’m taking on Popular Music in the Americas. You can check out the syllabus here.

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…

Cumbia de Novio Metrosexual

Well, this ought to get some crossover buzz for cumbia… maybe even catch some gringo ears (“Gasolina” taught us much about the cruciality of cognates).

The cute, hip, knowing style for some reason reminds me of “hipster hop” like Chicago’s Cool Kids. A kind of middle class art-student aspirational aesthetic going on here, conceptual and stylish, a strategic use of (white) punk-rock signifiers to mark a remove from the streets and the barrios. The “backlash” (are we all required to have consensus on likes/dislikes so that we can put it all in a coherent timeline of hype-backlash-acceptance?) against hipster hop seems class-related to me, and I’ll have to do some more digging (and slow translating) to figure out where Amandititita fits into all this.

Weird white liberal angst notwithstanding, a good video, and a song I hope to hear in my neighborhood soon.

Promised Ashlee review forthcoming.