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My dental floss is at Disney World
Dec. 1st, 2009 02:52 amI changed planes in Baltimore, but my bags chose to continue to Orlando.
Dec. 1st, 2009
Koganbot feeds on Tumblr and Twitter
Dec. 1st, 2009 03:17 amRight. Don't get excited*, I'm not actually on Tumblr or Twitter, I'm merely linking my livejournal there (a link and first couple of lines on Tumblr, title and link on Twitter).
http://koganbot.tumblr.com
http://twitter.com/koganbot
*Dear Mr. Koganbot,
You have a skewed idea of what gets people excited.
Sincerely,
A Friend
http://koganbot.tumblr.com
http://twitter.com/koganbot
*Dear Mr. Koganbot,
You have a skewed idea of what gets people excited.
Sincerely,
A Friend
John Storm Roberts
Dec. 1st, 2009 12:57 pmLuc writes:
Sharing this with you-all because I don't know anybody else who would appreciate it. I bought my local newspaper this morning (the Kingston Freeman, which I look at three or four times a year), and opened it to find an obituary for John Storm Roberts, aged 73, who lived in my town although I never met him. He wrote two books of variable quality (Black Music of Two Worlds and The Latin Tinge), but more importantly for 20 years ran Original Music of Tivoli, which got me (and a lot of other people) really really excited about African music, country by country, in what were effectively a series of mix tapes. (Did he ever actually acquire the rights to the material? Dunno.) In the early '80s in NYC you could find Fela and King Sunny Ade and some soukous and township jive compilations, but Roberts brought out tarabu and Kenyan dry guitar and that postwar period when Congolese music went Cuban, and much more besides. It was manna. So I take off my hat to him.
I'll add that while The Latin Tinge was too much a list - and the update left out freestyle altogether - it was a list that changed my perception of where a lot of America's music comes from ("America" meaning the United States, in a bit of unconscious chauvinism I grew up in without noticing). Three-chord rock, for instance, plays progressions that I now think of as coming up from Mexico and the Caribbean. And the Bo Diddley rhythm is a cousin to the Cuban clave. And then there's the quite well-known impact on jazz and swing and reggae and raggaeton and country. Still, when the U.S. thinks of "Latin" music there's still a sense of exotica, as something irreparably foreign.
Sharing this with you-all because I don't know anybody else who would appreciate it. I bought my local newspaper this morning (the Kingston Freeman, which I look at three or four times a year), and opened it to find an obituary for John Storm Roberts, aged 73, who lived in my town although I never met him. He wrote two books of variable quality (Black Music of Two Worlds and The Latin Tinge), but more importantly for 20 years ran Original Music of Tivoli, which got me (and a lot of other people) really really excited about African music, country by country, in what were effectively a series of mix tapes. (Did he ever actually acquire the rights to the material? Dunno.) In the early '80s in NYC you could find Fela and King Sunny Ade and some soukous and township jive compilations, but Roberts brought out tarabu and Kenyan dry guitar and that postwar period when Congolese music went Cuban, and much more besides. It was manna. So I take off my hat to him.
I'll add that while The Latin Tinge was too much a list - and the update left out freestyle altogether - it was a list that changed my perception of where a lot of America's music comes from ("America" meaning the United States, in a bit of unconscious chauvinism I grew up in without noticing). Three-chord rock, for instance, plays progressions that I now think of as coming up from Mexico and the Caribbean. And the Bo Diddley rhythm is a cousin to the Cuban clave. And then there's the quite well-known impact on jazz and swing and reggae and raggaeton and country. Still, when the U.S. thinks of "Latin" music there's still a sense of exotica, as something irreparably foreign.