Funk was born from the sludge, the grainy mud of the earth. It festered in the primordial soup until the spirit of life sucked itself into its own existence, and grew into form, and that form changed under the cycles of the sun and moon and stars. In the late 1960s, in the midst of the space race and race riots, the godfather of soul James Brown tapped into the essence of the funk — channeling its vital madness with wild guitar riffs and frantic horn blasts carried by a grooving percussive back-beat — and forever touched America and changed the world. Body and groove were united. The funk has since changed in shape and appearance, once nearly forgotten and then revived in the backbone of hip-hop, but now the possibility of a future funk is making itself clear.
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 Most people will miss the total solar eclipse that will darken tomorrow’s evening over the South Seas, east of Oceana to Argentina. A lucky family of humpback whales making their way back from a summer in the Antarctic Ocean might be lucky enough to see the illumined phantom. They might even be reminded of an ancestral song composed for such an occasion. An inveterate composer could even be inspired to create their own. And far removed from human eyes and ears, a dirgeful paean for a shaded sun might burst over the dancing foam. [Read More]
Karen Dalton is making a comeback. She is now included consistently in mixtapes, compilations, artist retrospectives, but so much more is still to be known about her.This is what we do know. Karen Dalton was Bob Dylan’s favorite singer from the Greenwich Village folk revival set. She was half-Cherokee, beautiful, lanky, wore her long, black hair down, obscuring her face. She lost two front teeth while in a fight with two lovers. She played a 12-string guitar and a banjo and supposedly hated recording so much she had to be tricked into it. She lived in a small cabin in the mountains of Colorado and was “living the life” of the real folk artist while other folk-poseurs took the spotlight in her stead. She had troubles with recording executives because of her heavy drug and alcohol use, hot temper, inability to compromise her sound. In some accounts she died on the streets of New York, alone, forgotten, after years of battling AIDS, and in other accounts she was well-cared for by friends, and died peacefully.
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In 1968 Andy Warhol invited an experimental rock group to open for his exhibition “Screens, Films, Boxes, Clouds and a Book.” at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm. Warhol had always shown a keen aptitude for identifying musically forward-thinking artists (cf. The Velvet Underground), and when he chose Parson Sound to perform its avant-rock compositions as a prelude to his show it was no different. Formed in 1966 by Bo Anders Persson, a student of music at the Royal Academy Hall who had become disillusioned by the sterile tenor of his academic environment and who decided to form a group that would fuse minimal structures of classical music to a rock idiom and combine all this with an emphasis on euphoric states in live performance. By 1968 Parson Sound had already achieved a notoriety in Swedish circles as a compelling avant force and as such became an apt choice for Warhol’s filmic art exhibition. [Read More]
1977 was the year the Sex Pistols released their first and only studio album “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols”, and the same year The Clash released their self-titled debut (just a year after The Ramones had released their own self-titled debut). 1977 was also the year Elvis Presley died, when disco was at its peak, and hip hop was brewing out of the percussive riddim vat of soul, funk, disco, and dub breaks. Meanwhile, across the Pacific in South Korea, three Seoul-based brothers, still heavily under the influence of late 60s psych rock, released their first album as Sanullim (산울림, translated as “Mountain Echo”). Sanullim is something of an anomaly in rock history. At a time when vintage rock was dying and new cultural tropes were diversifying the palette of pop music, Sanullim appeared on the margin in a country whose pop music landscape, heavily censored by the authoritarian bureaus of Park Chung-Hee, mainly consisted of traditional trot ballads and dance-pop music. Sanullim’s heavy bass lines, thunderous drums, chromatic fuzz guitar-work, and psych-image lyrics were a revival shock in a system which had gone dormant since the early 60s scene singlehandedly engendered by Korean rock godfather Shin Jung-Hyeon.
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He rhymes as weird as I feel
- Mos Def, on MF DOOM
The abstraction of hiphop – sonically & visually – is a progression other commentators have discussed in relation to instrumental/beats artists like Flying Lotus and the unparalleled Dilla. But what of the lyrical persona in the abstract world? Which is to say, in this constantly expanding kaleidoscope universe, what happens to the MC?
Hints to an answer can be found in Mos Def’s awed (stoned?) appraisal of MF DOOM. In [this video], Mos big-ups the “abstract … that kind of wild energy” in Doom’s lyricism: “that kind of raw shit.” Like Mos, I admire the psychedelic-painterly abandon with which DOOM approaches his craft (“Please read the signs: no feedin the baboons / Seein as how they got ya back bleeding from the stab wounds…”), though I am also partial to the mouthfeel of his near-gibberish wordplay (“Good googly moogly, see that loogie? / Yeah, but keep it on the D.L. Hughley…”). These flashes of violence and garble interspersed into rhyme make me double-take the way I do when I’m conversing with a stranger on the street and only five minutes in realize she’s schizophrenic. Lately, I’ve been double-taking a lot, as hiphop continues what appears to be an accelerating embrace of the freakish.
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South Korea resumed operations of psychological warfare against North Korea — effectively ending a six-year moratorium on propaganda — in response to the sinking of the Cheonan warship. The broadcast began yesterday evening at 6 p.m. on FM radio when a female anchor announced, what she called, the “voice of freedom”. What followed was a dance-pop song by girl group, Four Minute, titled “Huh”. The lighthearted melodies of freedom waded into North Korea, pulsing over a heavily synthesized bass line. Fairly assertive girlish voices — occasionally autotuned into a robotic growl — paraded their ability to do whatever they wanted while underscoring the dangers of overeating.
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A couple months ago I wrote a blog post about how music videos were getting a bit monstrous. At the time, I didn’t yet find it odd that I was even watching music videos even though that MTV had long stopped playing them, and well, who watches the television nowadays anyway? Looks like the Internet brought them back in full force. Did you realize Soulja Boy’s “Crank That” is pushing nearly 75 million views? New York magazine published an excellent article earlier this week tracing the history of the music video, its death, and now its revival thanks to high definition streaming on Youtube and Vimeo and the fact that we’ve all become obsessive media consumers on the web.
A few of the directors (including Spike Jonze, back again) are even turning the craft into an art again. It seems that the purpose of the music video is primarily to become viral, so we keep seeing more and more outrageous, sensuous and all around captivating videos. A good gimmick works as well; after all, OK Go is credited with putting this beast on the treadmill. If you haven’t been keeping up, I’ve got some treats after the jump — a prison love affair between Beyonce and Lady Gaga, a hybrid human-panda intoxicated takeover of LCD Soundsystem, and Beyonce again, whoa.
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Said a speaker at a recent conference I attended: “Every nation has within it its own Global South.” Retorted my friend, “that misses the meaning of the word global.” Au contraire, friend of mine! Alter-globalization, with its many polycentric manifestations (Global Civil Society; the World Social Forum; the Third World; la Red; TSMo‘s; the Diaspora; the Developing World; the Majority World; the South) has been able to realize within and across national borders “un mundo donde caben muchos mundos” (if you’ll permit me the zapatismo). And alongside this political blossoming has sprung an international artists’ movement of analogous tone, variety, and timbre. I’ll nick a nomer for the length of this post, and refer to that musical-aesthetic movement as “World Town“.
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Listening to Ariel Pink is like being placed inside a jukebox time machine filled with simulated pop songs from the past. His music exists somewhere between the waking and dreaming state – the equivalent of a drifting delirium while perched at a razor’s edge of lucidity. They are the half remembered songs from your adolescence, it could be Hall and Oates “I Can’t Go For That” or Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon”, or any song that might have seemed hapless and sentimental in all the wrong ways at the time; but which now you look back upon with a fond sympathy. There is a translucent nostalgia that seeps in through his music, a product of the emotions that could only have been borne out of the meridian of your life. [Read More]
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Featured Articles
 How Does The Net Affect our Brains? Nicholas Carr and A Glimpse into the Debate
By Oscar Paul Medina
In 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote an influential essay in the Atlantic titled “ Is Google Making us Stupid” ? Since that essay’s publication the use of the Internet and its effect on our brains has become a highly divisive topic which has produced a large spat of journalistic and academic articles in its wake. [Read More]
 Sanullim: Mountain Echo Psych
By Jose-Luis Moctezuma
Sanullim is something of an anomaly in rock history. At a time when vintage rock was dying and new cultural tropes were diversifying the palette of pop music, Sanullim appeared on the margin in a country whose pop music landscape, heavily censored by the authoritarian bureaus of Park Chung-Hee, mainly consisted of traditional trot ballads and dance-pop music. Sanullim’s heavy bass lines, thunderous drums, chromatic fuzz guitar-work, and psych-image lyrics were a revival shock in a system which had gone dormant since the early 60s scene singlehandedly engendered by Korean rock godfather Shin Jung-Hyeon. [Read More]
We are Freak (Rap)
By Adri Wong
The abstraction of hiphop – sonically & visually – is a progression other commentators have discussed in relation to instrumental/beats artists like Flying Lotus and the unparalleled Dilla. But what of the lyrical persona in the abstract world? Which is to say, in this constantly expanding kaleidoscope universe, what happens to the MC? [Read More]
 ‘The Housemaid’ – A Comparison of Two Korean Films
By Jose-Luis Moctezuma
If Martin Scorsese had stopped making films after the 90s, he’d still prove an invaluable part of cinema history on the basis of his current film preservation efforts. Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, which works to “help developing countries preserve their cinematic treasures,” has gone a long way in preserving and promoting little seen, almost lost films from a wide range of countries. [Read More]
 Film Review: The Secret in their Eyes (El Secreto de sus Ojos) dir. by Juan Jose Campanella
By Oscar Paul Medina
The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film last year was bestowed onto an Argentine mystery romance; a film that intermixes the pathos of unspoken love and the torture chamber of memory, and parallels these alongside the shadowy contours of law and corrupt politics. As the film frames all these disparate elements within a novelist’s remembrance of a rape and murder investigation that he was involved in as a young attorney in the court halls of Buenos Aires in the early 1970s, it continuously draws analogies to the mercenary political machinations of a dictatorial Argentina. This brilliantly scripted and acted film was written and directed by Juan Jose Campanella, a director who has now catapulted himself onto the international film scene with this minor masterpiece. [Read More]
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