todo mundo

TXTmob demonstrated the efficacy (and weaknesses) of SMS/text messaging as a communication tool for coordinating direct action during the 2004 RNC. This weekend, I’ve been following the Cold Snap legal team’s twitter feed. Chilling updates like these have been coming in all day:

Mass arrests on Jackson & 9th, including Democracy Now! journalists Amy Goodman, Sharif Abdel Kouddou, Nicole Salazar.
2 minutes ago from web

Girl seriously injured by car at 12th and Wabasha. Cops do nothing. In other news, Metro Transit resumes bus service into downtown St. Paul.
34 minutes ago from web

Person tased on 7th & Roberts.
40 minutes ago from web

Cops blocking all northern bridges over highway, moving systematically to wall folks into SE and kellogg park. Cops moving down Chestnut.
41 minutes ago from web

The Uptake just broadcast a live video of mass arrest from a mobile phone:

Regardless of your political affiliation, the extraordinary gulf between the mainstream and civic media is troubling. Consider the blog-style reporting from CNN (Thanks, Andrew):

“Police Sunday saw little disruption prior to a Republican National Convention greatly scaled back due to Hurricane Gustav.”
– Convention security plan going well, police say, 59 minutes ago

Bumming? Me too.

Grip this: The Wizard of Gaz recently dropped a breaky club track titled Now is the time!. An anthem for the Obama set. I love how it revives the forgotten deep house tradition of blending dance music with snippets of speeches and sermons. House is a feeling. Now is the time.

Months ago, I remember several unfunny boobs all stressed out that the Obama campaign would be the end of comedy because satirizing Obama could be offensive to some audiences. All I heard was, “wahhh wahh wahhhh but it will be HARD! wahh wahh wahh”

I shouldn’t talk though because I don’t know the first thing about stand-up. For real. I’m like that guy who has the 2 rap CDs that came free from Columbia House and throws them on when he wants to get “urban” at a pool party. That said, I can’t seriously do White Life without talking about comedy. Many of the bizarre things I hope to recount here are couched inside of humor. Jokes provide space to explore difference and tackle the strange, dirty, and uncomfortable topics that inevitably pop up when we live among other people. Yet they can also be miserably degrading, alienating, and offensive.

Lately, I’ve been watching clips from the Emmitt Smith Charity Roast trying to understand why Doug Williams (left) is such a brutal FAIL while Jeff Ross (right) seems hilarious.

Curiously, the person who posted the only clip of Michael Colyar titled it, “Is this joke racist?” Several viewers post responses in the comments for the video. Seems I’m not the only one struggling with the ephemeral tango of comedy and difference.

Althought I am obviously a tenderfoot Potter Stewart when it comes to explaining my reactions to blue humor, allow me to recount an unpleasant experience regarding racist Obama jokes.

After stuffing myself at a cookout, I sat on my hosts’ back porch with a group of friends and family of a variety of ages. Though people have different ethnic backgrounds, we’re all white. We’re sipping drinks, picking at cookies, and trading jokes and stories. One friend, who I’ve just met a few hours prior, offers to tell the “scariest joke in the world.” It goes like this,

Knock, knock.

- Who’s there?

Eyes yore

- Eyes yore who?

Ise your new president.

Classic White Life moment: the racist joke. This one is particularly bad, though. And by that I mean, it is a terrible joke - a groaner. Everyone at the table voiced disapproval and several were clearly taken aback by the racial connotations but no one (including myself) would interrupt the party vibe by calling out the teller. The weakness of the humor allowed people to reject the joke without confronting the teller if they felt offended. (Full disclosure, when I heard the punch line, I looked down at my plate with a half-smile and shook my head saying, “That is not a good joke. That is not a good joke.”)

The interesting part of the exchange was that the younger kids on the porch didn’t understand the joke because that characterization of African-American slang (”I’s a whatever…”) is so outdated that they do not recognize it! Various adults at the table stumbled over each other to try to explain the joke without either endorsing it nor making the teller look bad. “Well… you know, it’s about Obama and … - BUT! it is not a good joke… it’s bad…” To explain the joke revives a dying stereotype while not explaining the joke stymies racial curiosity.

The majority of the group clearly did not approve of the racist joke yet no one verbalized their disagreement. My reason is that I was the youngest adult at the table and I was just meeting some of these folks for the first time. I didn’t want to challenge someone and create an awkward situation to ruin the time for everyone else. Of course, I sat there much more quietly and less engaged following the joke than I had been prior. Did other people at the table feel the same way?

What do you do in these situations?

After only 31 views, I received this notice:

Dear Member:

This is to notify you that we have removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by Warner Music Group claiming that this material is infringing:

T.1. ft. R1hanna “L1ve Your L1fe”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_nseiCJm-g

Please Note: Repeat incidents of copyright infringement will result in the deletion of your account and all videos uploaded to that account. In order to prevent this from happening, please delete any videos to which you do not own the rights, and refrain from uploading additional videos that infringe on the copyrights of others. For more information about YouTube’s copyright policy, please read the Copyright Tips guide.

If you elect to send us a counter notice, please go to our Help Center to access the instructions.

Please note that under Section 512(f) of the Copyright Act, any person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification may be subject to liability.

Sincerely,
YouTube, Inc.

You win some. You lose some.

And, in some cases, you continue to lose.

Spent a few hours riding around Boston yesterday listening to this MJB / Big Boi collabo on serious repeat.

Mary J. Blige ft. Big Boi, DJ Drama - “Something’s Gonna Have To Give”

Some folks thought I was disrespecting Mary in my thesis presentation or implying that she is over-using Auto-Tune. Hardly! I only brought up her name to highlight the role that Auto-Tune plays in music criticism these days. Reviewers will credit Auto-Tune with all sorts of gaffs that might otherwise be attributed to a producer, songwriter, engineer, or performer. Mary is doing just fine.

Big Boi supports Obama on CNN

CNN: “You’re going to have to pay more in taxes. How do you feel about that?”
Big Boi: “It ain’t a good feeling but at the same time, it’s not just all about me.”

Sam Cooke - “A Change Is Gonna Come” (Thanks, VJ Lana.)

T.I. ft. Rihanna - “Live Your Life”

This week, the world shuddered on its axis a bit when people heard the latest leak from the new T.I. album. Featuring Rihanna on the hook, “Live Your Life” samples the infamous Romanian dance anthem “Dragostea Din Tei“.

O-Zone - “Dragostea Din Tei” (live)

While it is certainly fashionable to sample house and techno in some corners of hip-hop these days, the sampling in this track has much stranger roots. There’s no doubt Just Blaze knows O-Zone because of Gary Brolsma’s 2004 lip-synching performance. His lo-fi homevideo was instrumental in the migration of the Numa Numa phenomenon across the Pacific into the English-speaking world.

Gary Brolsma lip-synching

All was calm and lulzy for the first twenty-four hours but Atlantic’s internet squad pounced on this leak faster than I’ve ever seen a major label act on anything. Within two days, it was gone from every mp3 blog and direct-download site I could find. All six YouTube videos were removed for copyright claims (since re-upped by other users) and only the piratebay listing remained alive.

Though wiser new media strategies certainly exist, Atlantic is acting within its rights to pursue these takedowns. As they often do, the behavior of a major label got me thinking about ownership and I started imagining the bizarre negotiation that must have taken place between O-Zone’s label and Atlantic over the “Dragostea” sample. Assuming Atlantic licensed it in a typical fashion, they must have arranged remuneration for a track on an album that will definitely sell hundreds of thousands of copies.

Joshua Green is starting new research this fall that will investigate the ways in which media industries assign value to their - um - “properties.” If my assumption is correct and Just Blaze would never have sampled O-Zone without Gary Brolsma’s performance then it’s fair to say that Brolsma contributed mightily to the value of that recording. Couldn’t one then argue that he deserves some cut of the licensing deal?

Of course, I’m playing in fantasy larp-space here but this whole notion of owning digital media and assigning it value is so funny and fuzzy that I couldn’t help myself. In fact, I find that the industry works in such surprising ways that perhaps my suggestion is quite reasonable, given the context.

Incidentally, I learned about Numa Numa a few weeks before I saw Brolsma’s video. During indoor lunch recess in 2005, one of my brilliant middle school students played me a version she found (presumably on an otaku forum) that predates Brolsma’s. It features cartoon seafood and humor that relies on a phonetic mushiness between the Romanian lyrics and humorous phrases in a Chinese dialect. Serious PhD-level major-league multi-lingual punning.

Chinese Numa Numa

PS. Gary, I know you are vanity-googling this so let me say that you are a foolish, foolish man for snubbing ROFLCon. I had a whole room full of people doing your dance at the afterparty!

Thesis progress presentation, CMS Orientation, 26 August 2008

Fifteen minutes of me riffing on the main topics of my master’s thesis from the CMS orientation event. Two semesters to go, my dogs!

As always, you can grip the slides for more digital digging. (Hint: use the arrows to move forward and backward through them or press “a” to see them all on one page.)

i went to brooklyn. i went to the cape. i went to milford. i went to the emergency room. now i am back and it’s time to GET TO WORK!!!

WORK NIGHT

Tuesday, 8/26

Ryan Durkin
Mayhem
Lone Wolf

Free / No Cover
9:30pm - 1am

CAN U DIGG IT?

Like some fuzzed out snow crash, Bitch Ass Darius is playing at the offline version of Todo Mundo this Thursday in Jamaica Plain! Come on down and do some ethnography on the dancefloor. To get why this is so funny + weird + awesome, check my previous post about B.A.D. and booty musicsz.

Starting today, recurring feature Translation Nation will be joined by White Life, an exclusive peek at the wild weird world of Straight White Men from your boy on the inside.

As anyone who has spent time with me in a populous urban environment can tell you, I have a tendency to attract the conversational attention of strangers. I’m a young white man of Irish descent with short hair and a medium build living in Boston. Because of this, I can look as much like a cop as a banker as a grad student or a hoodrat on the T. Gay men read me as gay, straight men read me straight. Norms read me norm and weirds read me weird. Wealthy people have occasionally thought me down-and-out while the down-and-out ask me for money.

Some have found this chameleonism suspect. My first roommate in Boston had a recurring nightmare that I’d one day stab her in the back and laugh in her face. (We are still friends.) It makes me feel like a living, breathing DMZ marking the borders among several different social strata in the city. Ankle-deep in many puddles, if you will.

Of all the people I interact with on a regular basis, white men definitely initiate the most bizarre conversations. All their/our phobias, isms, and insecurities air out in the close confines of a shared elevator or sundown bus terminal.

White Life will be a chronicle of the strangest of these interactions. Here’s the first.

In the Miracle of Science last Friday, I approached a guy leaning against the wall next to the bathroom door.

“You in line?,” I asked him.

“Naw. My girlfriend’s in there,” he replied.

Being straight-literate and seeing that he was guarding the door for her, I nodded, moved a few steps away, and turned around so that we didn’t have to share any unneccessary eye contact. I took out my phone and started scrolling through text messages when I heard him rustle behind me.

“Hey. I need a ruling on this one…”, he gestured out the window at a group of women in line for the club next door, “Is she pregnant or just fat?”

“Uh… I don’t know.”, I replied, sounding as disinterested as possible.

“Because, man, that really pisses me off. Pregnant like that and smoking? That’s fucked up. You know?”

“Yeah, well. Maybe she is, maybe she isn’t.”

“Pregnant chicks should NOT be smoking. Man, if she’s pregnant, you know what I’d like to do? Go out there and just punch her in the face. Bam. Fucking smoking when you’re pregnant.”

Before I could formulate a thought, his girlfriend opened the bathroom door and his investment in our conversation evaporated. He put his arm around her shoulders as I brushed past them and walked back into the bar.

In the months since I likened the prolific best rapper alive to Miles Davis, I have enjoyed seeing others try out their own genre-bending comparisons as we all try to find an archetype to fit Mr. Carter into our personal pop histories.

Malcolm & Coltrane on A Love Supreme

Last week, Mark Anthony Neal dealt a wonderfully provacative comparison between ‘Trane and Lil Wayne on his Vibe blog. I especially love his discussion of Wayne’s voice as an instrument in the context of Matt Shadetek’s recent musings on monolingual DJs and their multi-lingual crates.

“Many of us expend remarkable (and unremarkable) energy denoting the lyrical atrocities of everybody’s favorite commercial rapper (and I stand accused), very few admit that some of these cats matter simply because of the sound of their voice–and in that regard Lil Wayne is peerless. ” — Mark Anthony Neal, A Love Supreme? John Coltrane, Lil Wayne and the Post-Trauma Blues, 28 July 2008

Neal goes on to beautifully describe Wayne’s recorded voice as “slurs, blurs, bleeps and blushes” and compares its deployment to Trane’s spiritual exploration of the saxophone’s sonic limitations. I’d love to extend Neal’s analysis further as I believe he overlooks Wayne’s experiments with Auto-Tune in his discussion of Miles’ wah-wah 70’s fusion. Is not Auto-Tune the wah pedal of today’s Black pop?

Miles Davis & Keith Jarrett, 1971

Before he transformed himself into T-Wayne on “Lollipop”, Wayne’s pop prescence was limited to guest versus and unauthorized freestyles. In the same way that Miles equipped Hendrixtech to stay pop-relevant, Wayne’s flirtation with the VST plugin du jour brought him updial from JAMN 94.5 to KISS 108.

Lil Wayne, “Lollipop”, 2008

Ryan Ghostdad dug a bit further afield on Mofo Radio this week when he compared keytar whiz George Duke with the Waynester. Check this video and decide for yourself:

George Duke synth solo

Also, this shit is in the water somehow.