Zaidi Kidogo

Screen to Shining Screen

Quick reviews of documentaries I been likin’ lately

Hip-Hop Colony: The African Hip-Hop Explosion.   Of course I loved this documentary, if only because it satisfied my longing for Swahili/Sheng for 1.5 happy hours.  I absolutely loved its narrative arc — hip-hop’s arrival in East Africa and subsequent transformation, plus all the exclusive bedroom-footage of Kenyan homeboyz gettin’ their freestyles on.  The last part of the film discussed some of the music industry’s setbacks, and why local Kenyan artists have such a hard time getting their careers off the ground.  The film brought briefly to light some of the twisted politics of Nairobi’s radio world, and the capriciously-curated media flows of the city, which is an issue I’ve been researching in the context of Dar es Salaam over the last few months.  Definitely a good watch, despite being ever so slightly outdated (made in ‘07).  Here is the bad quality trailer:

RIP : A Remix Manifesto.  Even though I agree with almost everything in this doc, Brett Gaylor (web activist and media lover) made a film that is tilted and jilted, mad at the man and shamelessly propagandic.  On the other hand, this documentary is really playful, really free, and made me reconsider the moral (dis)implications of artistic license and creative freedom.  The whole movie is done in remix-style — mashups of songs, movie clips, images and interviews, all probably ripped without permission.  It heavily featured two defenders of remix culture: the deejay/ remixer Girl Talk (I’ve seen him!) and the Stanford academe and activist Lawrence Lessig.  RIP hails the arrival of a new era of media freedom and the democratic hollowing-out of old copyright systems. It frames the entertainment industry as a Big Brotherish greed-machine, desperately clinging to its last shreds of power and influence. In one section, it portrayed people and families (including pastor’s kids and single moms) who were sued for hundred of thousands of dollars for downloading a few illegal songs.  While those interviews were supposed to provoke indignation, they just made me paranoid all over again about illegal downloads.  Luckily for us, the movie can be downloaded legally and for free at this site.  Here is the trailer:

The Freshest Kids: A History of the B-Boy.  I watched this one several months ago, but it’s stayin’ fresh in my mind, and I remember thinking Crazy Legs was the most beautiful human being I’d ever seen (when he was breakdancing and when he was just talking).  I think this film did a good job of repping the multipart reality of hip-hop, and it had some crazy footage from the first hip-hop throwdowns on Sedgwick Ave in the Bronx — images that gave an adrenalized, visceral, immediate impression of what that era mighta felt like.  The focus was obviously on b-boying/breakdancing, and the last part of the documentary zoomed out to take in the global b-boy scene, which I loved.  See a preview of the documentary here. 

Scratch (A Turntablism Documentary).  This was actually very similar to ‘The Freshest Kids’ in its treatment of hip-hop: interviewing the “originals” and incorporating rare footage from ye olden days.  This film had much more of an emphasis on deejaying as opposed to breakdancing, and Qbert featured prominently as one of the prodigy-pioneers of the scratchin’ technique.  The last third of the film focused a little more closely on the record retail industry and record-hunting as one oft-overlooked component of deejay-ism.  Exciting & informative. Watch the trailer here:

Peace Train

Musically Expressed Ideas About Music

“It was while acting as a participant-observer at clubs in Boston and on the blogosphere that I began to notice the subtle pedagogical power of particular forms of musical performance – in particular, DJ-mixing and mashup production, both of which are based on the art of juxtaposition, whether sequential or simultaneous – to shape one’s sense of the ways that musical style articulates, in a feelingful way, ideas about community, tradition, influence, and interaction. The parallel emergence of genre-blending DJs and genre-bending mashup artists drew my attention to the intrinsic cultural critique in such juxtapositions. I became aware of the ways one could structure a musical argument – drawing genealogies, counterposing seemingly distant sounds, mixing and mashing the obvious as well as the unlikely. To mix in Richard Taruskin’s voice, ‘good performers can teach receptive scholars a great deal.’  Thus, what I propose here is not so much an imposition of ethnomusicological method on mash culture, but a recognition and embrace of the ways that the two can work in dialogue, with music scholars highlighting the cultural work that mashups and mixes do as we employ these very forms to share our perspectives on music’s social and cultural significance – perhaps even issuing a creative challenge to producers and DJs to consider the forms and meanings of their mixes and mashes beyond clever or purely pleasurable correspondences in title, theme, tempo, rhythm, or key.”

- Wayne Marshall, in his article, Musically Expressed Ideas About Music

“Technology giveth and technology taketh away. No business model, art form, or practice has the inherent right to exist; it has to fit in with the social, technological, and market realities of its day. The world is poorer because short stories and poems have fallen out of favor, but legislating poetry back into the market would be insane. Successful poets today write songs, just as successful metalworkers today hack hardware, not horseshoes.”

— Cory Doctorow, Sound Unbound

street-smart in SF

Step 1: pick up two, slightly worn office chairs in the financial district — with wheels

Step 2:  and you got yourselves a ride

Reasonable Economics

“‘Electronic dance music is still something that you have to find,’ Raddon says.  ’It’s not on the radio, it’s not on TV.  These people really had to search me out.’  And the sense of shared community this engenders cannot be overstated.  Ten years ago, the dance music scene was finely sliced into such an interminable array of genre divisions that it became a joke: aquatic techno-funk, down-tempo future jazz, goa-trance, hard chill ambient, techxotica, and so on.  In the past decade or so, though, despite all the ways that the Internet encourages music to nichify, the rise of social media has actually pushed electronic dance music in the opposite direction.  Witnessing its sheer numbers, sensing its collective power, the dance scene has reunified, become more of a mass phenomenon — an undifferentiated subculture of millions.  It turns out that the thrill of collective identity, a moblike feeling of shared enormity, is far more exciting to fans than were their endless dives down rabbit holes of sonic purism.”

-Bill Wisak, ‘Crowd Control,’ Wired