Give the Drummer Some's
4 Favorite Downloads from the MP3 Blogosphere
In addition to the usual download selections, this week's Mining the Audio Motherlode offers a brief commentary on the recent Kanye West imbroglio.
Commentary:
The entire event seemed preconceived: The staging appeared blocked; the camera angles locked in; the Hollywood happy-ending scripted as if drawn up on a lunch napkin at Spago. Even more telling is that all involved had so much to gain: Kanye re-upped his bad-boy bona fides; Taylor got boosted into the pop-star stratosphere; Beyoncé cemented her status as the #1 one-name überdiva. Of course the increasingly irrelevant music biz profited most of all.
Set piece or not, what's truly disturbing about this third-rate melodrama is how the roles played by its three principals conjure those familiar old racist paradigms: 1) Angry black man; 2) innocent white ingenue (menaced by angry black man); 3) benevolent black mama (who cuts the black man down to size, reassuring the white power structure).
The detestable irony in all this is the unwitting involvement of President Obama, whose "jackass" comment only served to legitimize these standard-issue racial stereotypes. Is it any surprise that his off-the-record utterance was leaked? How better to cut our African-American-in-Chief down to size.
The whole thing was a trap. The extent to which we as a collective culture lock-stepped so willingly into its steel teeth suggests that there are still many more miles to trudge through the backwoods of the American soul before coming home for some steaming post-racial porridge.
Downloads:
R.I.P. Luther Thomas
Human Arts Ensemble ~ Live, Vol. 1"
(Nothing Is V2.0)
The Gaithersburg Address
The Muffins ~ "Air Fiction"
(Mended Records)
From the album: The Lagoon (mp3)
L'Affaire Messiaen!
Olivier Messiaen ~ "Petites Liturgies"
(Blog: A Closet of Curiosities)
Samm He Am
Bosho ~ "Chop Socky"
(Blog: Lucky Psychic Hut)
From the album: Rail (mp3)
Give the Drummer Some, Fridays on WFMU, 9 to Noon (ET).
Check out every installment of Mining the Audio Motherlode
A brief note about Mining the Audio Motherlode: The main focus here will be on
posts of rare and out-of-print recordings, but the blogs themselves are responsible
for the content they are providing.
A few helpful words about the downloads:
Follow the links provided to blog pages offering the downloads. Look for the download link on the page. (Occasionally, the link is listed in the Comments section. Also, if the original download link is no longer active, check further down in the string of comments; a new download link may be posted there.)
Some downloads deposit a folder on your desktop; others leave an rar. file, which needs to be opened using special software. This software is FREE and available online. (If you use a Mac, I highly recommend UnRarx.)
Some blogs provide passwords, which then must be entered when opening the rar. file. The password is typically listed right next to the original download link.
Be sure to search the archived pages at each individual blogs to find more musical gems. Also, check the blog rolls at each blog for leads to other great blogs.
Searching for a specific artist or album? Use Google's BlogSearch or the terrific music blog search engines Captain Crawl and Chewbone.
Posted by: Doug Schulkind | September 23, 2009 at 12:03 PM
I like the Bosho...a great blog as well.
Here's a nice Czech gem.
http://continuo.wordpress.com/2009/09/21/e-live/
Posted by: icastico | September 23, 2009 at 02:24 PM
I'm really happy for you and imma let you finish but, Louis Farrakhan was the best divisive racial commentator of all time.
Posted by: Eugene | September 23, 2009 at 04:49 PM
No, I think the fact that you can't see any of this as anything but a play of stereotypes is what indicates that we've got a long way to go. What are you looking for? The post-modern, extremely highly mediated version of Butterfly McQueen to please and reassure the hip urban elite? Tough on you, I guess.
Posted by: Oran Kelley | September 23, 2009 at 07:45 PM
mm hmm, maybe some things are not racially motivated, in a perfect world nothing is,right?
Posted by: rockford john | September 23, 2009 at 07:52 PM
there is nothing 'funny' about photoshopping in a picture of Obama's mother-in-law next to Taylor & Conway! some of us are sensitive to this kind of thing regardless of our social strata or which University we graduated from!
Posted by: j | September 23, 2009 at 08:03 PM
"there is nothing 'funny' about photoshopping in a picture of Obama's mother-in-law next to Taylor & Conway! some of us are sensitive to this kind of thing regardless of our social strata or which University we graduated from!" Got to Love it!
Posted by: Mike Yahwak | September 24, 2009 at 01:24 AM
Wow, that has to be the most asinine take on the whole "kanye" incident I've seen yet. Stick to talking about the music next time.
Posted by: DumbAscii | September 24, 2009 at 05:41 AM
Interesting thought there miner, but I think you should take the tin foil hat off now.
Posted by: YETI | September 24, 2009 at 10:22 AM
That's "Gaithersburg," not "Gaithersberg."
Posted by: David (a Marylander) | September 24, 2009 at 10:45 AM
@David from Maryland: Clearly you seized on one controversial aspect of this post. But seriously, thanks for the spellcheck. I have fixed the offending typo.
And to think:
1) I am a professional copy editor, and 2) I grew up about 30 minutes from Gaithersburg. (I remember back when they changed the name of the highway 70S to I-270.)
Posted by: Doug Schulkind | September 24, 2009 at 11:10 AM
i'm with you on the k-swift incident. they all win by falling into their respective roles. just like joe wilson and barak obama. although the moment seemed a bit wild, eventually both sides returned to status quo and made a lot of money for both their campaigns. i also believe serena william's fit was caculated on her part so that she can always say she never really lost the game because of poor tennis skills.
Posted by: C | September 24, 2009 at 02:29 PM
I'm just grateful for my solid taste in good music. I don't give a popcorn-fart about Kanye, Beyonce or Taylor. Hell, I couldn't pick Lil Wayne or Jay-Z out of a line-up to save my life. Eminem, Kid Rock... As Americans we've reached the bottom of the barrel when we give credibility to these talentless phonies. It makes us look like trailer-park trash to other countries. It's a popularity contest. Who will be the next flavor of the month?
Posted by: Spaceboy | September 24, 2009 at 04:39 PM
plenty of other countries have they own trailer park trash, as well as their share of crappy music - by the way, not everyone who has grown up in a trailer park is necessarily trash. that's a horrible stereotype. do you want other countries to think we are all upperclass snobs.
Posted by: C | September 24, 2009 at 05:06 PM
So nobody is responsible for what they do, right? It's everyone else's fault for being stereotyping racists? It isn't Kanye's fault that he made a drunken ass of himself. Maybe you should take race out of the equation and see if it still makes sense:
So let's say that there's this musician/singer/whatever. And let's imagine he's been around for a while and won his fair share of awards. At the same time, this very same figure has a notoriously huge ego to the point where he frequently makes embarrassingly self-glorifying statements. When a relative newcomer wins an award at some ceremony, the aforementioned ego-case drunkenly steals her moment because his opinion is just that important and must be heard because he is, after all, the self-proclaimed genius voice of a generation.
Oran Kelley is right: "...I think the fact that you can't see any of this as anything but a play of stereotypes is what indicates that we've got a long way to go." It isn't the big bad racist machine that made Kanye get drunk and act like a twat. It's Kanye that made Kanye get drunk and act like a twat. Nice try with the race card and all, but it's irrelevant.
Posted by: Pink Sovine | September 24, 2009 at 08:53 PM
DumpAscii is right. You're left. Way left. Stick to the music. Race baiter cant see a fool when it's center stage.
Posted by: Kola | September 25, 2009 at 01:08 AM
I'm sorry, but everytime I look at that photo of Kanye I keep thinking I am seeing a lost Achewood strip. Is he not the spitting image of Raymond Smuckles? All he needs is that idiotic thong. And Roast Beef somewhere off camera, his paw pressed against his forehead, eyes closed, mumbling "Why you got to do a Thing?"
Which is to say, all these people are shameless attention whores. If their collective music wasn't such shite I would have sympathy for their efforts to succeed commercially; but it is, and I don't. If you want to call it the 21st century minstrel show, you'd not be so far off base.
Posted by: K. | September 25, 2009 at 12:59 PM
It was all a sad scam to try and make eMpTy-V "relevant again. I mean, do they even play music videos anymore? Who cares.
Posted by: Shintaro Tezuka Tsuburaya | September 25, 2009 at 10:37 PM
It couldn't be more simple than what the Prez said, "He's a jackass." If you think this helped Kanye Prick's career you're crazy.
Posted by: Super | September 26, 2009 at 02:09 AM
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar...
Posted by: Droopy | September 26, 2009 at 08:39 AM
...in that photo it looks like kanye is attempting to shove his massive cigar in a place the defenceless fearful white girl doesn't want it while the benevolent older black women is about to explain how the matrix works.
Posted by: C | September 26, 2009 at 11:53 AM
Sometimes it's obvious when racism lurks beneath the media facade. And sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar. The people relishing in Kanye's latest scandal don't consider outbursts like these regular behavior for black people. They consider it regular for Kanye West, whos notorious for saying things off the cuff that make him look like a douchebag (voice of this generation, of this decade, yatta yatta). And you'd know that too if you weren't locked up in you're ivory tower looking for traces of the white power structure in every little event.
Posted by: Norm | September 27, 2009 at 12:43 AM
This post is utter bullshit. Reading in a racial narrative to this non-event, and especially such a sophomoric, conspiratorial one, truly smacks of "literary" desperation. Listen, buddy. I know you long for a prose that cuts our "male, white, corporate oppressors" down to size (a dubious claim in itself), but why not keep it to Live Journal or some other teen forum where such garbage is still taken seriously.
Posted by: Gibbonesque | September 28, 2009 at 07:13 AM
What. The hell. Are you talking about? Kanye West acted like a jackass and Taylor Swift didn't do anything really at all. That's not a racist narrative, that's just Kanye West acting like a jackass. He wasn't even angry. He seemed to just be being Kanye West.
And why would a journalist not leak what Obama said? In what world would you expect that not to happen?
Posted by: Allie | September 28, 2009 at 01:48 PM
Hi nice article here.I was searching Human R.I.P. Luther Thomas for download from long time but unable to search it thanks for sharing download link.It helps me.I have downloaded it.The rest of downloaded link is also awesome.I would say there is very hot stuff in your article.Thanks for sharing it...
Posted by: spiele | September 30, 2009 at 12:51 AM