So while you imitatin’ Al Capone
I’ll be Nina Simone
And defecatin’ on your microphone
–Lauryn Hill
the high priestess
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Tag Archives: music
sinister resonance
“Sinister Resonance begins with the premise that sound is haunting, a ghost, a presence whose location in space is ambiguous and whose existence in time is transitory. The intangibility of sound is uncanny–a phenomenal presence both in the head, at its point of source and all around–so never entirely distinct from auditory hallucinations. The close listener is like a medium who draws out substance from that which is not entirely there. Listening, after all, is always a form of eavesdropping.”
Book review coming soon. Stay tuned.
rainy day in oakland
Young bodies navigate the city streets more gracefully than luxury vehicles.
i feel love
everything is everything
Remember this music video, in which New York city is imagined as record on a turntable? The Empire State at the center, anchoring the spinning city, the steadiness of the needle’s shadow. Lauryn’s movement is classic New York: a woman on foot in elevated shoes–sometimes it seems/we’ll touch that dream.
“Change will come eventually.”
The city is accessible just by going out and walking it, all the parts are connected. New York is the spinning record, and sometimes we get scratched.
the DJ still runs this house
For a long time the word “house” referred not to a particular style of music so much as to an attitude. If a song was “house” it was music from a cool club, it was underground, it was something you’d never hear on the radio. In Chicago the right club would be “house,” and if you went there, you’d be house and so would your friends. Walking down Michigan Avenue, you would be able to tell who was house and who wasn’t by what they were wearing. If their tape player was rocking The Gap Band, they were definitely not house, but if it was playing Loleatta Holloway or (surprisingly enough) the Eurythmics, they were and you would probably go over and talk to them.
One day soon, Chicago [black, gay] kids would invent a stark new kind of dance music, and because of where this came from [The Warehouse], and because of where it was played, it would steal the name for itself. But for several years, house was a feeling, a rebellious musical taste, a way of declaring yourself in the know. Certainly the word house was used long before people started making what we would now call house music.
–Bill Brewster & Frank Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey, (1999)
But, where does house music begin?
Adrian Piper’s funk lessons
Consider the history and style of funk dancing, as a form of expression in urban black America, and then as a popular American dance form. Consider how this form has disappeared, in a sense, from our everyday physical vernacular. How are popular dances, ways of moving and self expression, archival practices?
Notes on Funk I (excerpt)
by Adrian Piper
1985
From 1982 to 1984, I staged collaborative performances with large or small groups of people, entitled Funk Lessons. The first word in the title refers to a certain branch of black popular music and dance known as “funk” (in contrast, for example, to “punk,” “rap,” or “rock”). Its recent ancestor is called “rhythm and blues” or “soul,” and it has been developing as a distinctive cultural idiom within black culture since the early 1970s. Funk constitutes a language of interpersonal communication and collective self-expression that has its origins in African tribal music and dance and is the result of the increasing interest of contemporary black musicians and the populace in those sources elicited by the civil rights movement of the 1960s and early 1970s (African tribal drumming by slaves was banned in the United States during the nineteenth century, so it makes sense to describe this increasing interest as a “rediscovery”).
MJ
(from a paper, given with Barbara Adams, at the Royal Academy of British Architects, London, July 2009)
I remember the first Michael Jackson music video I ever saw; in my grandparents’ living room in Lagos, during the evening hour when state television showed the latest in American, British and Caribbean black pop music.
The glowing halo of curly black hair, the even skin, shy white smile. The fragile teen-aged body. Tuxedo jacket open, with a large, loosely-tied bowtie, sleeves pushed up to the elbows, one hand finger-snapping, one hand in pocket. White socks, black loafers.
Falling suddenly, into a marbled sky, and to me, an avid marble collector, and fan of blowing soap bubbles, this seemed like a dream—I want to be there! I want to be where he is. He splits into 3 loosely synchronized selves in this music video, each one imploring me, in stereo, not to stop til I get enough rocking, snapping, spinning, freezing.
Here, I should tell you what this is not about:
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