Archive for the ‘Cultural Change’ Category
Updating the archive: article on Moroccan Alternative Music for MTV IGGY
In Search of Alternative Music in Morocco
A DEEP DIVE INTO THE STATE OF MOROCCAN MUSIC OVER THE YEARS.
By MTV Iggy
September 27, 2012
Words by Jeffrey Callen, Ph. D.
In the late 1990s, an alternative music community came together in Casablanca that would dramatically change Moroccan popular music. Cultural outsiders, brought together by shared aesthetics and the support of a local community organization, hip-hop, rock, electronica, and “fusion” musicians joined together to make common cause to expand the boundaries of Moroccan music. Although it was their joining together in the late 1990s that would dramatically change the country’s musical landscape, each of these genres has its own separate history in Morocco.
The Prehistory— Genres on the Margins
Rock ‘n’ roll. The history of rock ‘n roll in Morocco goes back to the 1960s when young musicians formed hundreds of rock bands in cities throughout the country. By the 1970s, the first Moroccan rock explosion was over, eclipsed by a folk–revival that began in Casablanca and soon swept through North Africa, (to read the rest, click here)
The hipster — the “dead end” of Western civilization?
"fuck u hipster cookie cutters / leave"
Walking to the Zen Center in San Francisco, I passed by the first piece of anti-hipster graffiti I’ve seen. The nearby Lower Haight neighborhood is a hipster preserve and maybe this indescript portion of Laguna Street is feeling a wave of hipster-fueled gentrification, which made me think of the slew of anti-yuppie graffiti that appeared in various neighborhoods in S.F. during the ’90s & ’00s as that wave of gentrification crested. And yes, it’s true “yuppies kill culture” or at least replace it with a whole new set of aesthetics, which made me think of the recent trenchant critique of the hipster subculture.
We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality.
Take a stroll down the street in any major North American or European city and you’ll be sure to see a speckle of fashion-conscious twentysomethings hanging about and sporting a number of predictable stylistic trademarks: skinny jeans, cotton spandex leggings, fixed-gear bikes, vintage flannel, fake eyeglasses and a keffiyeh – initially sported by Jewish students and Western protesters to express solidarity with Palestinians, the keffiyeh has become a completely meaningless hipster cliché fashion accessory.
Two quotes from Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization by Douglas Haddow in AdBusters 79 — a well-written and influential piece of cultural commentary that echoes a common perception of those of us outside the hipster circle that it is a counter-cultural movement devoid of cultural critique. And Haddow’s description of a hipster is pretty spot on except it leaves out the small hipster hat and scruffy beards on the male members of the hipster tribe (and at least here in San Francisco, they seem to be self-identified as DJ’s as often as not). While I’m not sure this is the first subcultural movement devoid of cultural critique, it may well be the first not orchestrated by commerce or politics. From all I can see it is a fundamentally grassroots movement and the lack of substance may be just what hipsters are looking for.
Related articles
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Hipsters (time.com)
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Hipster Puppies: The Book You’ve Probably Never Heard Of (dogs.icanhascheezburger.com)
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Hipster Holocaust: 9 Reasons Hipsters are Annoying
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If Disney Villians Became Hipsters…. (blognametbd.wordpress.com)
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25 Hot Hipster Shoots – From Unsubtle Hipster Photography to Shoreline Shoots (TrendHunter.com) (trendhunter.com)
Short takes: different types of “creative metropoles”
Interesting project winding up in September 2011 looks at the different strategies taken by eleven European cities to develop and support their creative industries. The Creative Metropoles project is based on a premise I share and would like to see shared in the U.S.: “a facilitator of innovation, creative industries are essential for the development of other sectors.” The cities (as different as Berlin and Riga, Amsterdam & Warsaw) will each identify their own best practices and learn from each other’s experiences — “the ambition is not only to present the good practices but also deal with current problem issues and generate new knowledge and approaches.” The project is working in 5 policy areas:
1. structure of the public support for creative industries
2. business capacity and internationalisation of creative industries
3. space for activities by creative industries and creative city districts as creative incubators
4. funding schemes for creative industries
5. demand for the outputs of creative industries, including municipalities in the role of consumers.
The final report, particularly the appendices (Good Practices from European Cities) offers an interesting view of the diversity of approaches to developing creative industries that have had significant success and point to the need to both localize (i.e., collaboration for mutual benefit among Berlin) and reach across national boundaries (i.e., relationship building between artisans and designers in Fes, Morocco and Amsterdam). There’s a lot of material and I’ve just been browsing but my first impression is there’s a lot to learn.c
One for the archives:”Yoga-Tainment for the BlackBerry Generation” (@ East Bay Express)
I keep an archive of all my published writings (with a few exceptions — encyclopedia entries for example) but somehow this piece from 2010 got overlooked.
Yoga-Tainment for the BlackBerry Generation
A plethora of events highlights music’s growing role in yoga.
Late night in the Mission, the class begins with the sound of kirtans accompanied by slowly pumped chords on the harmonium. The class members respond hesitantly, repeating back the unfamiliar sounds chanted by the teacher. The call-and-response chanting subsides and the teacher announces the first asana as tinkling sounds from a kora replace the languid chords of the harmonium. For the next two hours, the class moves forward with the musical accompaniment of the kora and manipulations of its sounds through a small array of electronic devices. It’s not the background music typically heard in an American yoga studio, but it’s not quite foreground either. Solidly in the middle, it works sometimes, fitting perfectly with the slow movements; other times, it seems distracting, an extraneous element unconnected to the physical activity.
Every Friday night since October 2007, the Midnight Yoga class at Laughing Lotus Yoga Center in San Francisco’s Mission district has offered live music as accompaniment to yoga. Developed by the yoga center’s parent studio in New York City, the class features various genres and musical configurations: kora and electronics; freestyle guitar, bass, and keys; cello, voice, loops, and percussion toys. Yael Kievsky, who has taught the class since December, says that live music to accompany yoga is simply an extension of the use of taped music as background that has been a part of yoga classes in the United States for decades.
But the addition of live music changes things: The class becomes an event — a “full-on experience”… (to read more go to East Bay Express)
The Art of Agency 3 (Asian Improv aRts @ SF State)
From March 2 through March 5, Asian Improv aRts (AIR) and SF State’s World Music and Dance Program are holding a “collaborative presentation of public dialogue, workshops and performances exploring the intersection of traditionality and hybridity in the formation of community.” It is an interesting mix of events, culminating with “Sounding Asian Improv aRts (AIR),” the keynote session of the Annual Meeting of the Northern California Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology.
ImprovisAsians 2011! – The Art of Agency 3March 2nd – 5th, 2011San Francisco State University College of Creative ArtsAll events are free and will take place at San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue
Wednesday, March 2ndDiaspora Tales #2 – An interdisciplinary work featuring music by the Francis Wong Unit, spoken word by A.K. Black, dance by Lenora Lee and media design by Olivia Ting. “1969” reflects upon the Third World Strike at UC Berkeley and Wong’s family history from the period.
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Related Articles
- The Northern California Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology – Call for Papers (popculturetransgressions.com)
New book: Peter Gabriel, From Genesis to Growing Up
Self promotion aside (although my chapter, “‘I need contact’ – rock ‘n’ roll ritual: Peter Gabriel’s Security tour, 1982–83” is quite good), this is an excellent collection on an influential figure in popular music. Out on Ashgate on December 23, 2010. From the publisher’s press release:
Ever since Peter Gabriel fronted progressive rock band Genesis, from the late 1960s until the mid 1970s, journalists and academics alike have noted the importance of Gabriel’s contribution to popular music. His influence became especially significant when he embarked on a solo career in the late 1970s. Gabriel secured his place in the annals of popular music history through his poignant recordings, innovative music videos, groundbreaking live performances, the establishment of WOMAD (the World of Music and Dance) and the Real World record label (as a forum for musicians from around the world to be heard, recorded and promoted) and for his political agenda (including links to a variety of political initiatives including the Artists Against Apartheid Project, Amnesty International and the Human Rights Now tour). In addition, Gabriel is known as a sensitive, articulate and critical performer whose music reflects an innate curiosity and deep intellectual commitment. This collection documents and critically explores the most central themes found in Gabriel’s work. These are divided into three important conceptual areas arising from Gabriel’s activity as a songwriter and recording artist, performer and activist: ‘Identity and Representation’, ‘Politics and Power’ and ‘Production and Performance’….
Social Connectivity & Innovation — “Where Good Ideas Come From”
The trailer for Steven Berliner Johnson‘s new book, Where Good Ideas Come From, offers some food for thought on the role of social environments in the creation of innovative ideas.
The book is built around dozens of stories from the history of scientific, technological and cultural innovation: how Darwin’s “eureka moment” about natural selection turned out to be a myth; how Brian Eno invented a new musical convention by listening to too much AM radio; how Gutenberg borrowed a crucial idea from the wine industry to invent modern printing; why GPS was accidentally developed by a pair of twenty-somethings messing around with a microwave receiver; how a design team has created a infant incubator made entirely out of spare automobile parts. But I have also tried to distill some meaningful—and hopefully useful—lessons out of all these stories, and so I’ve isolated seven distinct patterns that appear again and again in all these innovative environments. (Each pattern gets its own chapter.) (from StevenBerlinerJohnson.com).
If you want a longer version, here’s a talk Johnson gave at TED, starting with the role the introduction of the coffeehouse (and the replacement of alcoholic beverages with coffee) had on the development of innovation in the U.K.
Related Articles
- Chance Favours the Connected Mind… (customerthink.com)
- People and Places That Innovate (nytimes.com)
- Chance and the Connected Mind (laf.ee)
- Chance favors the connected mind (speedofcreativity.org)
- Where Good Ideas Come From (laughingsquid.com)
- Off the Shelf – In New Books, a Look at People and Places That Innovate – Review – NYTimes.com (nytimes.com)
- “How to get good (transformative) ideas” and related posts (martin-koser.de)
- New books on innovation (rs.resalliance.org)
- Good Ideas and My Thanks to Dorothy Roberts (sociological images)
- Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from [Greg Laden’s Blog] (scienceblogs.com)
Thinking about Research – Short Takes (3)
What is thinking outside the box?
A little gem from Seth’s Blog (marketing guru Seth Godin):
The decision before the decision
That decision is far more important and much more difficult to change than the decision you actually believe you’re about to make.
This is the one that was made before you even showed up. This is the one that sets the agenda, determines the goal and establishes the frame.
The decision before the decision is the box.
When you think outside the box, what you’re actually doing is questioning the decision before the decision.
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Thinking about Research — Short Takes (2)
The paradoxes of choice overload — another installment of Kyle Bylin’s series on the paradoxes of choice overload of cultural products (on Music Think Tank). The article uses the I-Pod as an example and applies choice theory to the analysis and how the I-Pod can make “maximizers” miserable and turn “optimicizers” into maximizers. [A short excerpt below]
Savor Your Music: The Effect of Abundance in Culture
III. Overloaded With Choice
As you might guess, fans who exhibit the tendency to maximize their music experiences are also those who are the most susceptible to the paradoxes of choice overload. When a fan is overwhelmed by the number of songs on their iPod; it will be easier for them to regret a choice if the alternatives are plentiful than if they were scarce, especially if the alternatives are so plentiful that not all of them could be investigated. This makes it easy for them to imagine that they could’ve made a different choice that would’ve been better. All the imagined alternatives then, induce the fan to regret the decision they made, and this regret subtracts from the satisfaction they get out of the decision they made, even if it was agood song. It is, however, not the best song. To consider the attractiveness of the alternative songs that they rejected causes them to become less satisfied with the one they’ve chosen, leading them to keep scrolling through their iPod. The more songs they consider, these missed opportunities add up, and collectively diminish the amount of satisfaction they get out of the chosen alternative.
Deciphering Culture
Deciphering Culture 