did the whole 'support tonic' thing and went to see Devendra on Monday. Yikes! Dude looks good in earrings (ya I crush, love those teeth, you're right!) and wow the Rejoicing material was beautiful, artful and joyously offhand yet there's his voice filling the whole room with tiny little brushes of guitar, then then then...the stage was suddenly full of freaks! like tarantula (openers who i'd never spent any time with and my god do they bear a frightening sonic likeness to the trans-siberian orchestra. Blargh to the fake virtuoso!), Coco Rosie/girlfriend and Currituck County dude and some yes some guy in a (roommate sample comment 'wow daphne, you were right about how this show would features someone in a) cape and jaunty hat' hopping down like freak flag style playing the flute and gesticulating, which is not a word i use lightly or even really know how to spell, and then there was a charles manson cover, and a canned heat cover. my god. i surrender! you are hippie garbage! please start making funny, weird songs again, or beautiful, heartbreaking songs even - just please. songs.
am interviewing lady sovereign tomorrow, way too early. digging on 'random' tho the hook's not what it could be. that said, diggin on durrty goods' 'gimmie dat' which is just a straight spit, usually not my thing (more a wiley girl, i like a good comedy). the Lady's constant laughing on each track is prolly my fav sound thread of late. it's wicked and silly.
abt the below: was thinking about the whole nightclub lighting cause i went to the Roxy on Sunday for Motherfucker starring Bloc Party, who bored me to death with their earnest, jittery songs - that dude's singing is okay, but when he goes into the falsetto thing (aka, like every chorus on the whole album) for the shout hook, it is madly artless. Even the bass player looked bored. Oh, well anyway I was thinking about how all the blue flashers were totally inappropriate to the music, but then again is Bloc Party a Roxy kind of band? and how weird that whole experience is - the rock party anachronism, esp. like three years to its current rehash. No one danced, at all.
2.22.2005
nightclubs, hip hop, making out on couches
I just wrote this for class. Does anyone know more about the history of pre-disco dance clubs and violence? I am thinking mod bank holidays, etc etc. and the types of weaponry (switchblades - but guns?) involved. The argument I make about hip hop and violence is not entirely fleshed out, so don't think me some asshole Tipper Gore freak, just point me towards better resources.
-------in praise of shadows---------
I write about nightclub lighting for a living. It’s something I do. I know the different between a par can and a moving mirror fixtures, about rotating gobos and strobes, mirror balls and LED displays because everyone in the nightclub industry is obsessed with illusion. Club sound design is about transmitting signals with minimum noise, with the highest attention to reproducing audal detail. Club lighting, however, is purely about the cover up, about the mood and atmosphere of the semi-shade, about the space between light and dark where the things that make good nightclubs great go on.
This shade is the unseen by virtue of its darkness, although there is nothing unseen in a nightclub because security and the help staff know where to look. The darkness draws deviance, but it is encouraged and if not malicious, ignored. These are the corners, the nooks and crannies designed by people who know nightclubs are about escape and encourage it second only to how they encourage drinking. Traffic flow is about alcohol, seats in dark places are for everything else. People who write about nightclubs as dance spaces miss the point. The nightclub is an auditorium, and the dance floor is a stage. The spotlights move continuously, giving dancers the chance to be the spectacle, which the rest of the club watches hungrily. They watch in the darkness, often, with parlor like lamps naturalizing the setting, the couches, the drinks placed like those on a friend’s coffee table. It is in these spaces that the (dis)utopian dream of the darkness is fulfilled.
If you listen to Hot 97, New York’s number one station for hip hop and R&B, you know that the street has been replaced by the club as the place of business, the social place, the proving ground for in the popular discourse of the black American male. If hip hop’s new street is the club, it’s new streetlight is club lighting, a complex, digitally controlled environment creating a world of spotlight and shade. There is no bright, concentrated bath of light and little pretense of illumination. It is colored, quick, non-focal – like police chasers, strangely, but here symbolically rendered powerless to their function as omnipotent eye-of-the-state by Hakim Bey’s TAZ (ridiculous, imagined, mythical) promise of the limbless body of libidinal, apolitical pleasure. Like in Vegas, we’re told, what happens there, stays there. There is no law, is no death, is no consequence. An illusion. Clubs have always served privacy behind closed doors, but nightclubs upped the ante by turning off the lights and looking the other way.
Rappers, not content with the anonymity offered by such spaces, continually celebrate/confess their private sins of acting the fool (The Game), taking drugs (50 Cent), sneaking in the back door (Ludacris), or paying for sexual favors (the Ying Yang Twins) in lyrics about clubs. Or, they threaten, by dint of character bearing striking relation to the artists themselves, that another may not come out of the club. And thus the street’s violence, not an illusion, but real fists, real guns and real death come indoors for club riots (Chicago) and shootings (by Shyne, C-Murder, or outside of concerts by Money B, Ja Rule, G-Unit, or at hip hop nights in Florida and Rhode Island to name the ones I can think of off the top of my head). The club can be as dangerous as the street, only, as private space, it is supposed to offer protection and community, entertainment and release. If you die there, which happened in the past mostly from drugs (the excess of illusion), it was often your own damn fault.
Electronic dance music has always celebrated the danger in the shadows, not for the least because it mocked white, mainstream hetero culture’s paranoia with the other, but something new has arisen in clubs where the illusion of criminality has moved from drug-use to gunplay. Is there a death drive behind putting one’s self in a small, smoky, dark room with no windows and few fire exits filled with strangers on drugs whose motivations are maybe not so pure? And more recently, a space whose illusion is heavily armed? Perhaps it is best thought of as just another mass gathering whose success is largely hinged on the catastrophe that does not occur in such a space, in the knowledge that somehow, for some reason, the majority of the people who come together do so to sit on the edge between the light and the dark, dancing and maybe joining some stranger outside the spotlight, knowing that the privacy they have is a grand illusion.
-------in praise of shadows---------
I write about nightclub lighting for a living. It’s something I do. I know the different between a par can and a moving mirror fixtures, about rotating gobos and strobes, mirror balls and LED displays because everyone in the nightclub industry is obsessed with illusion. Club sound design is about transmitting signals with minimum noise, with the highest attention to reproducing audal detail. Club lighting, however, is purely about the cover up, about the mood and atmosphere of the semi-shade, about the space between light and dark where the things that make good nightclubs great go on.
This shade is the unseen by virtue of its darkness, although there is nothing unseen in a nightclub because security and the help staff know where to look. The darkness draws deviance, but it is encouraged and if not malicious, ignored. These are the corners, the nooks and crannies designed by people who know nightclubs are about escape and encourage it second only to how they encourage drinking. Traffic flow is about alcohol, seats in dark places are for everything else. People who write about nightclubs as dance spaces miss the point. The nightclub is an auditorium, and the dance floor is a stage. The spotlights move continuously, giving dancers the chance to be the spectacle, which the rest of the club watches hungrily. They watch in the darkness, often, with parlor like lamps naturalizing the setting, the couches, the drinks placed like those on a friend’s coffee table. It is in these spaces that the (dis)utopian dream of the darkness is fulfilled.
If you listen to Hot 97, New York’s number one station for hip hop and R&B, you know that the street has been replaced by the club as the place of business, the social place, the proving ground for in the popular discourse of the black American male. If hip hop’s new street is the club, it’s new streetlight is club lighting, a complex, digitally controlled environment creating a world of spotlight and shade. There is no bright, concentrated bath of light and little pretense of illumination. It is colored, quick, non-focal – like police chasers, strangely, but here symbolically rendered powerless to their function as omnipotent eye-of-the-state by Hakim Bey’s TAZ (ridiculous, imagined, mythical) promise of the limbless body of libidinal, apolitical pleasure. Like in Vegas, we’re told, what happens there, stays there. There is no law, is no death, is no consequence. An illusion. Clubs have always served privacy behind closed doors, but nightclubs upped the ante by turning off the lights and looking the other way.
Rappers, not content with the anonymity offered by such spaces, continually celebrate/confess their private sins of acting the fool (The Game), taking drugs (50 Cent), sneaking in the back door (Ludacris), or paying for sexual favors (the Ying Yang Twins) in lyrics about clubs. Or, they threaten, by dint of character bearing striking relation to the artists themselves, that another may not come out of the club. And thus the street’s violence, not an illusion, but real fists, real guns and real death come indoors for club riots (Chicago) and shootings (by Shyne, C-Murder, or outside of concerts by Money B, Ja Rule, G-Unit, or at hip hop nights in Florida and Rhode Island to name the ones I can think of off the top of my head). The club can be as dangerous as the street, only, as private space, it is supposed to offer protection and community, entertainment and release. If you die there, which happened in the past mostly from drugs (the excess of illusion), it was often your own damn fault.
Electronic dance music has always celebrated the danger in the shadows, not for the least because it mocked white, mainstream hetero culture’s paranoia with the other, but something new has arisen in clubs where the illusion of criminality has moved from drug-use to gunplay. Is there a death drive behind putting one’s self in a small, smoky, dark room with no windows and few fire exits filled with strangers on drugs whose motivations are maybe not so pure? And more recently, a space whose illusion is heavily armed? Perhaps it is best thought of as just another mass gathering whose success is largely hinged on the catastrophe that does not occur in such a space, in the knowledge that somehow, for some reason, the majority of the people who come together do so to sit on the edge between the light and the dark, dancing and maybe joining some stranger outside the spotlight, knowing that the privacy they have is a grand illusion.
2.21.2005
2.19.2005
center of the world
in masculin feminin, chantal goya asks her radical beau, 'what is the center of your world' and then is astounded when he doesn't say that it is himself.
i am not the only person to take a picture of the gates, but i am one person who did. happy birthday matos!
2.11.2005
what's in a favela, once you look past the booty
Had a brief conversation with Columbia's OTHER totally amazing ethnomusicologist, Ana Marie Ochoa about the rise of interest in Rio's favela 'funk'. Ochoa has spent a considerable amount of time working with members of Brazil's slums, and hadn't heard that this portion of the musical output had made it hipside (via Diplo, no?) in the last year or so. I first heard favela hip hop thru the unsurprising source Luke Fishbeck, and was immediately struck by the incredible joy and desperation that was bound up in it. Is the magnificent Douglas Wolk the only person who feels "uncomfortable about feeling like the genre matters more than the artists," which goes a long way, I think, towards thinking about how kinda messed up it is to enjoy an empoverished culture's products without understanding the people and their situation in any way. Just a thought - It's easy to say that 'favela funk' sounds like Miami booty bass, because of the sound, but what about the people who make it? Sniff sniff, doesn't it sound exotic? I would love to read what a scholar of Brazilian pop music has to say about this phenomenon, not for the least because I expect that these anonymous MCs have a story worth hearing besides what gets rapped over Bittersweet Symphony (also, to hear some, follow the Douglas link, he has a link in his VVoice article).
Anyway, this gets to the whole musicologist/ethnomusicologist n' 'it's just good jams' v 'these jams mean something besides just the body rock' viewpoint that hip hop writers have been so amazing at blending (and calling to attention as important, the level of social conciousness in OG hip hop writers is astounding) for the last 15 years. It's often astounding to me that I still find writers/critics who think that it's okay to write about music as if it exists in a vacuum, as if it only performs for you in your bedroom without any flesh-bound artists, industrial processes, marketing strategies, or peer influences. The words lazy, irresponsible, elitist, disengaged come to mind - but I meet smart people who do it, and I know that the truth of writing is that deadlines must be met and we can't know it all...Alas, I wonder for the end of the omnipotent tone taken most especially when one knows little about the world behind the jewel case. That's why Douglas' piece, which begins with both 'i love the booty' and 'i know that it's not the whole story' is an amazing piece of work on the subject - he is fixing himself in space and time, giving his considerable ears and mind to something but leaving room for the fact that he isn't the end opinion, and in fact, that he's just the beginning.
Anyway, this gets to the whole musicologist/ethnomusicologist n' 'it's just good jams' v 'these jams mean something besides just the body rock' viewpoint that hip hop writers have been so amazing at blending (and calling to attention as important, the level of social conciousness in OG hip hop writers is astounding) for the last 15 years. It's often astounding to me that I still find writers/critics who think that it's okay to write about music as if it exists in a vacuum, as if it only performs for you in your bedroom without any flesh-bound artists, industrial processes, marketing strategies, or peer influences. The words lazy, irresponsible, elitist, disengaged come to mind - but I meet smart people who do it, and I know that the truth of writing is that deadlines must be met and we can't know it all...Alas, I wonder for the end of the omnipotent tone taken most especially when one knows little about the world behind the jewel case. That's why Douglas' piece, which begins with both 'i love the booty' and 'i know that it's not the whole story' is an amazing piece of work on the subject - he is fixing himself in space and time, giving his considerable ears and mind to something but leaving room for the fact that he isn't the end opinion, and in fact, that he's just the beginning.
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