Frank Kogan

The in-person day-to-day life has been overwhelming me for several months so instead of a well-wrought well-thought post I've got this catchup, things I hope to write or might write someday, fast thought, not too wrought, we'll see.

(1) Put Pipokinha In It. Making YouTube playlists may be the thing I do online that I care about most these days. Created a new Eardrums playlist in February, long overdue, am aching to write it up and scared of blowing it. South Africa, USA, and Brazil – more Brazil than the rest combined – favela funk hitting me not only as wildly experimental but as heart-touching, just as the K-pop/hip-hop of E.via and 2NE1 were touching me in 2010: a scrawny young woman in São Paulo whose twerking and dancing are barely competent but who seizes the spotlight and puts excitement into sound, gets recorded and sampled all over, all everywhere (but maybe that's only in the minds of the few of us who are looking for it, our minds hindered or aided by our not understanding the meaning or the social landscape). Brazil's northeast rhythmically reworking songs like hers, and in the process São Paulo penetrating the northeast.

Bota Pipokinha em tudo (Frank's Eardrums February 2024)


Note, Grateful Dead content, track 18, the Dead more than holding their own (a band that was adventurous in mood, texture, and rhythm as well as guitar solo, who stretched out and cut up, and Jerry Garcia's singing could be fetching). --One afternoon in 2003 a young woman, very smart and openhearted, early 20s, announced to the rest of us that she was of the Rave Generation (the context: the planning of a conference with dance attached).

A couple of days later, she told us she'd gotten tickets for the Dead.

The playlist also contains Linkin Park content, but I'll let you find it yourself.

(2) "A blonde woman named Anne." In September 1988 a woman gave a tremendously touching and edgy live performance, left me thrilled and with a lump in my throat and with lots of questions. "Eying someone in the audience, she breathed 'I really need you,' a tinge of sarcasm in her tone." Is quite possible that some of the edginess had to do with (unknown to me) her having been hired to pretend to be somebody else! In Wikipedia she's mentioned once, "a blonde woman named Anne," it says. If I had any reportorial chops I'd have long ago searched for and found and interviewed her, embarrassing myself by showing her what I wrote. --Yes, I'm being cryptic, this likely only making sense to someone who read my article (published in Jack Thompson's Swellsville in 1989, "Nietzsche With Tits," then collected in my book, pp 265-271. So read my book! [More buying choices $2.20 and up.])

In the audience, my friend Leslie and I thought we were seeing intellect within her edginess, and fantasized her as not just an intellect but an intellectual. I wonder what Anne would think of that, to be used in that way – used imaginatively, but still, what does that have to do with her?

This foreshadows equally ignorant extrapolations I'll be foisting on Pipokinha.

Got some bare knowledge* from the Internet, and an emotive, pretty good bread-and-butter freestyle track, the only song I could find under her own name:

Anne Williams "Cries In The Dark"


Earlier, impersonating Debbie, "I'm Searching"


(3) Yes, I can has a Substack. If you're reading this on Substack you already know I have a Substack, a free one (likely free forever). I possibly will write something up wondering what Substack is doing, esp. with Notes (like, let's be a gated community that acts like it's open to the world but is unfindable?). Anyhow, I use the Substack to reblog my Dreamwidth/LJ; in fact, everything I blog is triple-posted on Dreamwidth, LiveJournal, and Substack. The first two still allow simple HTML, result: (a) Dreamwidth is the best-looking. But Dreamwidth doesn't embed tweets well, nor does it embed vids in the comments at all, though my Dreamwidth has by far my most-extensive sidebar links as I'm a paying customer. (b) Linking to LJ seems to give the best previews, and LJ embeds tweets best. (c) Substack is the easiest of the three to use though clunky in look, so to draw your interest to Substack I've created a Substack-only "Meta paragraph" at the end of each of my posts where I let loose meanderingly.

So I recommend you look at both the Dreamwidth and the Substack versions. But I still tend to link old posts to the LJ version because those have the original comment threads rather than the reconstituted ones on Dreamwidth. --Btw, I assume a fraction of the micro-pennies that LJ gets through ads on my LJ goes to bankrolling evil fomented by the government of LJ's home country. But rather than delete LJ and hence my past to prevent this, I mitigate it slightly every now and then by avoiding a car-trip so as to make the world infinitesimally less dependent on home country's oil reserves, and, you know, I vote against the Repubs.

(4) Guilty Pleasures. Think the term "guilty pleasure" can have interesting uses, both work-ethic guilt and more guilty guilt. Don't think the term gets its due anymore; we thinking we know better.

Inspired to make a list. For a guilty pleasure there needs to be guilt; so anyway, great music where there's something fucked about my getting off on it or throwing it in people's face or it does bad things in the world or people were hurt in the making of it,

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) August 7, 2020

…TheEastlight. by their producer, Kim Wan Sun by her manager:

Rocket From The Tombs "Ain't It Fun"
The Velvet Underground "Heroin"
XXXTentacion "Sad!"
6ix9ine "Billy"
Bhad Bhabie "Cash Me Outside Trap Remix"
The Stooges "Rich Bitch"
TheEastLight. "Don't Stop (The Show)"

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) August 7, 2020

Kim Wan Sun "The Dance In The Rhythm"
Guns N' Roses "One In A Million"
The-Dream "Abyss"
Syndicate of Sound "Little Girl"

FBG Duck's "Slide" is now obviously a contender. If I liked 'em more, "I Don't Like" and "Tik Tok" in the debuts poll would be eligible.

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) August 7, 2020

(Fwiw, I've not read Kim Wan-sun's aunt/manager's side of the story, and a quick Web search isn't finding it.)

Sure seems that anything I adore by Cassie (and there's a whole bunch) will now dive us headfirst into guilt criteria, e.g., someone got hurt in the music's manufacture.

(5) Live versions of person-to-person love songs when they're sung by groups, e.g., Dion and the Belmonts "I Wonder Why" and Miss A "Breathe." The choreographed interaction among members ends up being an interesting message in itself, often outdoing and countering the interaction described in the lyrics. A sequel to an old post.**

Miss A "Breathe" on Music Bank


The lyrics have the young women flitting and fluttering and pretending not to breathe in the presence of their crush, whereas in performance they look like they could use their legs like a nutcracker to crack any potential crush's head open, if they weren't too busy mimicking comic opera and bonding all with each other.

(6) Dave Moore recently tipped "Mega Do Egito" by DJ Ws Da Igrejinha, MC Jessica do Escadão & MC Vuk Vuk, which occupies the Venn center of two different baile funk tendencies, favela-funk orientalism and tracks that refuse to get on track. For the latter we've also got an earlier Dave Moore find by DJ Arana.

MC Lan & DJ Arana "Abcdário Da Guerra"


Uncertain where tracks end and begin, but this is where today's post ends. Unless it doesn't.

*I linked the cached version, since I sometimes have trouble loading that page. If that doesn't work for you, here's the page itself:

https://myfreestylemusic.com/debbie-deb-freestyle-music-latin-hip-hop

**And see last week's entry for the old post's reconstituted comment thread.

CROSSPOST: HTTPS://KOGANBOT.LIVEJOURNAL.COM/392546.HTML

CROSSPOST: https://koganbot.substack.com/p/noite-de-crime-dj-wesley-gonzaga