I wonder who the audience for MZANSI BASS is supposed to be. Anyone who'd pay to download it from Bandcamp would be interested because they already like amapiano, gqom and 3-step.
"The other song is by TV Tairiku Ondo, whom Patrick St. Michel wrote about for The Japan Times. My brain keeps defaulting to Vampire Weekend for some reason? "
I keep tripping over untyped ellipses and missing paragraphs, so when you go from Simon's/Woebot's sutured rap mongrels to (a couple paragraphs later) hip mashups, with a couple sentences about your profs in-between, I'm left guessing who's doing what and what point anyone's making or not making about haves and have-nots. Is your idea that stuff like shanty house & your profs' dreams shouldn't *automatically* be a *favored* frame from which to reach out to the international music glut? If so, I agree in principle, but I'll also say that favela funk, budots, and amapiano are kicking everyone else's ass at the moment, and they do seem to arise maybe not from some "folk" process (or, at any rate, no more a folk process than indie is) but generally from populations that are impoverished. This isn't a general *rule* - after all, my favorite music ever is probably British art school in the early '60s. I'll say more about this below. But maybe shanty house was having a good moment when Simon and Woebot were writing. But so was the teenrock confessional (aka teenpop) in America.
I deleted a few paragraphs where I make these distinctions because I was being really snarky to that old MIA review. IIRC Woebot/Reynolds were critiquing the “shanty house,” not finding excitement in it, kind of digging at people like my profs. It was my profs who imagined the underclasses of the world uniting under art and leftist revolution; iirc Simon was sniffy about this and thought MIA specifically was a fraud.
The problem with the paragraphs that made this distinction was that I was really laying into Simon R about his own critique, muddying my thinking (which stayed muddy).
What rarely surfaced in my experience from my profs was the idea that poor people in other countries might be working toward their own vision of (what my profs would call capitalist) success and (what I would call) middle class or greater level comfort. In fact I only had one professor who ever really talked about burgeoning music and culture in a simpler more descriptive way, related to Nigerian cinema (“Nollywood”) and music.
So it’s true that a lot of regional music that emerges from poverty is kicking ass — what I object to is the patronizing framework. I think you get something like this in that gqom/amapiano collection, where a decent crop of songs gets treated like a secret underground has to be unlocked by insiders, when one part of the music kicking ass is that lots of people all over the world are listening to it already.
I suppose my general interest is how prescriptive political and class analysis just sort of missed a lot of what was really going on in the name of global understanding. There is a lot of good music that comes out of poverty and a lot of good music inspired by it and a lot of good music in Copenhagen art schools and burgeoning middle classes in the global south.
I will say that the boundaries between creator-deejay-curator are not altogether set. And M.I.A. and Diplo (if that's whom you have in mind) plugging favela funk vocalists into hip mashups rather than putting out well-curated albums of extant Brazilian funk isn't different *in* *kind* from DJ Marlboro interpolating a 2 Live Crew track (which itself interpolates an Ellie Greenwich/Jeff Barry song) into his own mashup rather than putting out albums of extant Miami bass; in fact, the Diplo/M.I.A. plug-ins might be inspired by Marlboro's. --Which doesn't make the two identical socially or aesthetically or commercially, but the social and the aesthetic depend on the particular artists and particular songs and the particular scenes and the particular year etc. and the *particular* music that they make, not just our decision as to which locales (Rio clubs and studios versus whichever clubs and studios M.I.A. and Diplo hang out at) somehow count as local and indigenous and which don't. (That last sentence is aimed at Simon a couple of decades ago, not you.)
Yeah my inclusion of Diplo there is a weak link — I loved and still love Piracy Funds Terrorism. And it’s not like people who wanted baile funk couldn’t hear it at the time, it just wasn’t as accessible as it is now. I had trouble landing my thoughts here which upon reflection is just how larger structural changes in tech made a lot of these specific ways of thinking and intra-leftist fights kind of moot (for the better, I think).
Don't know where SR ended up on these questions over the years, and I haven't had time to click the links tonight; one of the assumptions underlying my original Why Music Sucks essays starting 1986 is that you couldn't just decide that one *type* or *class* of person always makes better music than another; in fact, I was trying to understand why a set of people in 1986 were stinking up the joint in comparison to what a more-or-less *similar* set had been doing when everything was clicking in 1979, and the more general question of why Dylans and Jaggers of 1965 couldn't sustain their greatness ["punks don't grow, they stop"].
Here's a playlist, Favela Bratty Beats, which is my attempt to resurrect out of YouTube clips a CD mix I had made for Lucy back in 2005 (resurrection not altogether successful; think for instance that Track Six isn't the "Bingo Pimpin'" I'd originally had; guessing that Diplo himself doesn't feel he can keep Piracy Funds Terrorism uploaded; others, fortunately, have pirated the pirate). Anyway, I have Bonde Do Tigrão copying the Baha Men; I don't have "Injeção" where Deize Tigrona samples Rocky, or "Bucky Done Gone," where Diplo and M.I.A. copy her idea of sampling Rocky, but "Injeção" made it to a 2022 YouTube mix of mine called "Miami Bass Without The Bass" where "Injeção" appropriately follows right after Nathan Evans's version of the sea shanty "The Wellerman."
Did I ever email you-Don-Mark-Lucy-John-Chuck (the six apostles) a link to the resurrected Favela Bratty Beats? I've got a long email to you guys on my computer but I suspect I never sent it. Probably the most potent paragraph was in praise of fake Latin American music from France and Belgium, and there was a complaint that Diplo and M.I.A., for all their talent, didn't *swing* as successfully as the franco Latinos or Fannypack's dance music for imaginary block parties (tho also speculated that there was no reason Liège couldn't support a Hispanic population that wanted its Latin music to sound like Hi-NRG Eurodisco).
Simon changed his views about M.I.A. over time to more favorable, according to Wikip. When he'd written the M.I.A. review he was still in the category Colleague I Could Imagine Sometimes Conversing With. He's the one who didn't continue an email convo with me in 2007; I originally assumed his nonresponse was just 'cos he ran out of time – I'm not the world's most dutiful correspondent either – rather than his making a deliberate break. (And I always could've emailed him "WTF?" during subsequent Bliss Crew pathology.)
You did! It was in a big thread of various funk-related things, including an exchange I don't remember about tamborzão vs. "hard clave" but am glad to see again!
The main reason I deleted the MIA review stuff was because I didn't think it was worth rehashing -- I thought I'd left a comment to this effect already (maybe forgot to send?) but at the time I don't think I thought anything about the review except that I disagreed with him. Now I think I have more grounding to be kind of offended by the creation of "shanty house" as a term that unifies very different types of music all in the name of a kind of flattened conception of global poverty. Once I was on my second or third paragraph double-hedging that Woebot/Reynolds were *critiquing* this framing (sort of) but also were doing the framing, I thought it felt too far away from the point.
And I shared this over on Bluesky re: my initial motivations for starting the post:
"What I really wanted to write about was something I realized I just don't know enough about to even start, which is complicating assumptions about global poverty in music right now (i.e. how much of the global music is not coming from "ghettos" as they were imagined/romanticized 20 years ago)"
That was sort of where the essay started, but I realized I really had no basic information to support this claim even though it *seems* true from my engagement with lots of different artists from lots of different places. (Think I can critique the writing from 20 years ago as a caricature without having to open the whole can of worms of what is or isn't a "ghetto," which I am not equipped or prepared for!)
Dave. upon reflection, I have this request: Do not do not do not write about Simon Reynolds, the Bliss crew, critiques of so-called poptimism, and so forth, unless you run the rough drafts by me, first. That's because your instinct is to pull your punches, try to rise above or remove yourself from the discourse as if you're not *in* it, and retreat into unintelligibility.
I do have *hypotheses* as to what I'll see when I click the "shanty house" link or reread Simon's review of Arular; it'll be interesting if those hypotheses *don't* altogether hold up (remember, that particular review is not necessarily where Simon ended up). Also, in my mind I'm treating his nonresponse to my email in 2007 as his breaking with me, even if at first he hadn't intended a break (I'd certainly had no sense at the time that he considered us adversaries [and if that's where we ended up, it's 100% on him]); but he might have had other reasons not to respond besides not wanting to or not having time to: it was a *group* email exchange, initiated by the wonderful Steacy Easton but including our friend Mark Sinker, who has his own ideas about Simon and let loose with a missive *after* my email. --That said, Simon Reynolds (in my retrospective opinion) was a bad actor in those years, and my self-conceit is that maybe if he hadn't run away from me, I'd have been able to rescue him. [I sometimes say that I have "co-dependent" tattooed on my forehead in vampire ink, so everyone else can see it but when I look in the mirror, it's invisible.]
In the meantime, here's "They Put The World At A Distance" from Sept 2009, including your own comments.
I wonder who the audience for MZANSI BASS is supposed to be. Anyone who'd pay to download it from Bandcamp would be interested because they already like amapiano, gqom and 3-step.
It’s a good collection! It’s just kind of weird to treat the music like you’re doing on the ground work of preservation of a scrappy local scene
"The other song is by TV Tairiku Ondo, whom Patrick St. Michel wrote about for The Japan Times. My brain keeps defaulting to Vampire Weekend for some reason? "
Red Hot Vampire Chili Peppers Weekend
(said with 0% snark I loved the song)
I keep tripping over untyped ellipses and missing paragraphs, so when you go from Simon's/Woebot's sutured rap mongrels to (a couple paragraphs later) hip mashups, with a couple sentences about your profs in-between, I'm left guessing who's doing what and what point anyone's making or not making about haves and have-nots. Is your idea that stuff like shanty house & your profs' dreams shouldn't *automatically* be a *favored* frame from which to reach out to the international music glut? If so, I agree in principle, but I'll also say that favela funk, budots, and amapiano are kicking everyone else's ass at the moment, and they do seem to arise maybe not from some "folk" process (or, at any rate, no more a folk process than indie is) but generally from populations that are impoverished. This isn't a general *rule* - after all, my favorite music ever is probably British art school in the early '60s. I'll say more about this below. But maybe shanty house was having a good moment when Simon and Woebot were writing. But so was the teenrock confessional (aka teenpop) in America.
I deleted a few paragraphs where I make these distinctions because I was being really snarky to that old MIA review. IIRC Woebot/Reynolds were critiquing the “shanty house,” not finding excitement in it, kind of digging at people like my profs. It was my profs who imagined the underclasses of the world uniting under art and leftist revolution; iirc Simon was sniffy about this and thought MIA specifically was a fraud.
The problem with the paragraphs that made this distinction was that I was really laying into Simon R about his own critique, muddying my thinking (which stayed muddy).
What rarely surfaced in my experience from my profs was the idea that poor people in other countries might be working toward their own vision of (what my profs would call capitalist) success and (what I would call) middle class or greater level comfort. In fact I only had one professor who ever really talked about burgeoning music and culture in a simpler more descriptive way, related to Nigerian cinema (“Nollywood”) and music.
So it’s true that a lot of regional music that emerges from poverty is kicking ass — what I object to is the patronizing framework. I think you get something like this in that gqom/amapiano collection, where a decent crop of songs gets treated like a secret underground has to be unlocked by insiders, when one part of the music kicking ass is that lots of people all over the world are listening to it already.
I suppose my general interest is how prescriptive political and class analysis just sort of missed a lot of what was really going on in the name of global understanding. There is a lot of good music that comes out of poverty and a lot of good music inspired by it and a lot of good music in Copenhagen art schools and burgeoning middle classes in the global south.
I will say that the boundaries between creator-deejay-curator are not altogether set. And M.I.A. and Diplo (if that's whom you have in mind) plugging favela funk vocalists into hip mashups rather than putting out well-curated albums of extant Brazilian funk isn't different *in* *kind* from DJ Marlboro interpolating a 2 Live Crew track (which itself interpolates an Ellie Greenwich/Jeff Barry song) into his own mashup rather than putting out albums of extant Miami bass; in fact, the Diplo/M.I.A. plug-ins might be inspired by Marlboro's. --Which doesn't make the two identical socially or aesthetically or commercially, but the social and the aesthetic depend on the particular artists and particular songs and the particular scenes and the particular year etc. and the *particular* music that they make, not just our decision as to which locales (Rio clubs and studios versus whichever clubs and studios M.I.A. and Diplo hang out at) somehow count as local and indigenous and which don't. (That last sentence is aimed at Simon a couple of decades ago, not you.)
Yeah my inclusion of Diplo there is a weak link — I loved and still love Piracy Funds Terrorism. And it’s not like people who wanted baile funk couldn’t hear it at the time, it just wasn’t as accessible as it is now. I had trouble landing my thoughts here which upon reflection is just how larger structural changes in tech made a lot of these specific ways of thinking and intra-leftist fights kind of moot (for the better, I think).
Don't know where SR ended up on these questions over the years, and I haven't had time to click the links tonight; one of the assumptions underlying my original Why Music Sucks essays starting 1986 is that you couldn't just decide that one *type* or *class* of person always makes better music than another; in fact, I was trying to understand why a set of people in 1986 were stinking up the joint in comparison to what a more-or-less *similar* set had been doing when everything was clicking in 1979, and the more general question of why Dylans and Jaggers of 1965 couldn't sustain their greatness ["punks don't grow, they stop"].
Here's a playlist, Favela Bratty Beats, which is my attempt to resurrect out of YouTube clips a CD mix I had made for Lucy back in 2005 (resurrection not altogether successful; think for instance that Track Six isn't the "Bingo Pimpin'" I'd originally had; guessing that Diplo himself doesn't feel he can keep Piracy Funds Terrorism uploaded; others, fortunately, have pirated the pirate). Anyway, I have Bonde Do Tigrão copying the Baha Men; I don't have "Injeção" where Deize Tigrona samples Rocky, or "Bucky Done Gone," where Diplo and M.I.A. copy her idea of sampling Rocky, but "Injeção" made it to a 2022 YouTube mix of mine called "Miami Bass Without The Bass" where "Injeção" appropriately follows right after Nathan Evans's version of the sea shanty "The Wellerman."
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLshHxICULapn5yYioHIt0fsrc7GUIioQm
A minor complaint about the term "shanty house" is that it excludes a whole genre of shanty-based house music that should have that term instead!
Did I ever email you-Don-Mark-Lucy-John-Chuck (the six apostles) a link to the resurrected Favela Bratty Beats? I've got a long email to you guys on my computer but I suspect I never sent it. Probably the most potent paragraph was in praise of fake Latin American music from France and Belgium, and there was a complaint that Diplo and M.I.A., for all their talent, didn't *swing* as successfully as the franco Latinos or Fannypack's dance music for imaginary block parties (tho also speculated that there was no reason Liège couldn't support a Hispanic population that wanted its Latin music to sound like Hi-NRG Eurodisco).
Simon changed his views about M.I.A. over time to more favorable, according to Wikip. When he'd written the M.I.A. review he was still in the category Colleague I Could Imagine Sometimes Conversing With. He's the one who didn't continue an email convo with me in 2007; I originally assumed his nonresponse was just 'cos he ran out of time – I'm not the world's most dutiful correspondent either – rather than his making a deliberate break. (And I always could've emailed him "WTF?" during subsequent Bliss Crew pathology.)
You did! It was in a big thread of various funk-related things, including an exchange I don't remember about tamborzão vs. "hard clave" but am glad to see again!
The main reason I deleted the MIA review stuff was because I didn't think it was worth rehashing -- I thought I'd left a comment to this effect already (maybe forgot to send?) but at the time I don't think I thought anything about the review except that I disagreed with him. Now I think I have more grounding to be kind of offended by the creation of "shanty house" as a term that unifies very different types of music all in the name of a kind of flattened conception of global poverty. Once I was on my second or third paragraph double-hedging that Woebot/Reynolds were *critiquing* this framing (sort of) but also were doing the framing, I thought it felt too far away from the point.
And I shared this over on Bluesky re: my initial motivations for starting the post:
"What I really wanted to write about was something I realized I just don't know enough about to even start, which is complicating assumptions about global poverty in music right now (i.e. how much of the global music is not coming from "ghettos" as they were imagined/romanticized 20 years ago)"
That was sort of where the essay started, but I realized I really had no basic information to support this claim even though it *seems* true from my engagement with lots of different artists from lots of different places. (Think I can critique the writing from 20 years ago as a caricature without having to open the whole can of worms of what is or isn't a "ghetto," which I am not equipped or prepared for!)
Dave. upon reflection, I have this request: Do not do not do not write about Simon Reynolds, the Bliss crew, critiques of so-called poptimism, and so forth, unless you run the rough drafts by me, first. That's because your instinct is to pull your punches, try to rise above or remove yourself from the discourse as if you're not *in* it, and retreat into unintelligibility.
I do have *hypotheses* as to what I'll see when I click the "shanty house" link or reread Simon's review of Arular; it'll be interesting if those hypotheses *don't* altogether hold up (remember, that particular review is not necessarily where Simon ended up). Also, in my mind I'm treating his nonresponse to my email in 2007 as his breaking with me, even if at first he hadn't intended a break (I'd certainly had no sense at the time that he considered us adversaries [and if that's where we ended up, it's 100% on him]); but he might have had other reasons not to respond besides not wanting to or not having time to: it was a *group* email exchange, initiated by the wonderful Steacy Easton but including our friend Mark Sinker, who has his own ideas about Simon and let loose with a missive *after* my email. --That said, Simon Reynolds (in my retrospective opinion) was a bad actor in those years, and my self-conceit is that maybe if he hadn't run away from me, I'd have been able to rescue him. [I sometimes say that I have "co-dependent" tattooed on my forehead in vampire ink, so everyone else can see it but when I look in the mirror, it's invisible.]
In the meantime, here's "They Put The World At A Distance" from Sept 2009, including your own comments.
https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/170121.html