Major Lazer is Pretty Much a Genius

Major Lazer "Keep it Going Louder" from Eric Wareheim on Vimeo.

This is what dancehall videos look like in The Twilight Zone.

Sincerely.the lost bois

Queer Hip-pop tribute to being confident, to being silly, and to crushing hard.

Call for Dancers/Movers!

Jiggly Boo Dance Crew (founded by Alice Fu and Kantara Souffrant, MA candidates in Performance Studies @ NYU)

Is Seeking: Dancers who identify as having a “non-traditional” dancer’s body, specifically a “fat”* body. Dancers need not have “formal” training, and may come from any kind of dance background.

For : Participation in a spring semester series of workshops, discussions, movement, exercises, which will culminate in a final collaborative performance in April 2010.

When: Tentatively Sundays, January 24 – April 18, 2010, 4-6pm

Location: On NYU Campus, details TBA.

Additional information: Please see included information below. For any additional questions or if interested, please email JigglyBooDanceCrew@gmail.com


About Jiggly Boo Dance Crew
Jiggly Boo Dance Crew is a much needed project for exploring the intellectual and creative potential of the fat dancing body. Within the Western performance context, fat bodies are systematically excluded or typecast into demeaning or ancillary roles.

Within this framework, Jiggly Boo Dance Crew will run a series of workshops which will culminate in a performance. These workshops will create a space in which other self-identified female “fat” dancers, movers, and performers, can dialogue about the following questions: What is a "fat dancing body"? How are fat bodies read, understood, felt (emotively and viscerally) and represented? What does it mean to identify oneself as a “fat dancing body” and what are the political implications of identifying oneself as such? How can (re)presentations of fat dancing bodies be understood alongside critical discussions of race, gender, sexuality, and the political movement of bodies that have been traditionally marginalized and invisibilized within Western stage dance?

Through these workshops, which will build towards a final performance, we hope to personalize and politicize the fat dancing body and the fat dancer. Jiggly Boo Dance Crew hopes to re-write and re-imagine these scripts of the fat dancing body. We are neither invisible, nor hyper-visible objects of ridicule.

Workshops will be based on movement, academics, as well as the participants' personal experiences as dancers. By marrying readings from fields such as fat studies; critical race theory; gender, sex, and sexuality studies; (dis)ability studies; and dance and performance studies with sessions that emphasize movement, gesture, and performance, we will create a space that views theory and praxis as mutually informative and necessary for achieving our goals.

*On the usage of “fat”: Jiggly Boo Dance Crew intentionally reclaims and uses the word "fat" as opposed to other euphemisms (i.e. '"plus-sized" or "big-boned") to explore the politics of size-deviant bodies. Our reclamatory gesture also pays homage to area studies, such as queer studies, that have viewed the reappropriation of words as part of a larger political process of creating visibility and challenging hegemonic discourses and systems of oppression.

An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube

This is one of the most interesting and smart approaches to web 2.0 and YouTube culture I have seen thus far.  Fantastic primer to digital ethnography! Enjoy!

*Thanks to Daniel Nieves (CUNY) for sharing this video with me.

Message from Myriam Mercado, mother of Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado

Thanks to Blabbeando's Andrés Duque for posting and translating this video.

Gay Puerto Rican Teen's Body Found Brutalized in Hate Crime

The body of Jorge Steven López Mercado, age 19, was found decapitated, dismembered, and partially burned on Friday, November 13, 2009 in Cayey, Puerto Rico.  López, a resident of Caguas, was reportedly a well known member of Puerto Rico's gay community.

LGBT activists are calling for López's murder to be classified as a hate crime.  This would be the first crime of its kind to be designated as such, if authorities reclassify the case.  Pedro Julio Serrano, executive director of Puerto Rico Para Tod@s notes that although the Puerto Rican government added sexual orientation to its hate crimes laws in 2002, local authorities have not used it to prosecute those accused of anti-gay violence. The FBI has announced it will take jurisdiction over the case if local investigators conclude López’s killer or killers murdered him because of his sexual orientation

LGBT activists are also speaking out against homophobic remarks made by Investigator Angel Rodriguez’s that implied that López deserved what he got because of his “lifestyle.”  During a televised press conference Rodriguez said, “este tipo de personas, cuando se meten a esto y salen a la calle, saben que esto les puede pasar” [When these type of people get into this and go out into the streets like this, they know this can happen to them].  These comments sparked outrage and activist are calling for the Puerto Rico Police Department to take disciplinary action against Rodriguez.  Rodriguez has been removed from the case, but is yet to be sanctioned for his remarks.  A vigil will be held later this week for López, in addition to a protest calling for disciplinary action to be taken against Rodriguez.

López’s killer or killers remain at large.


For more info:

El Nuevo Dia: Exigen investigación de crímenes de odio

Primera Hora: Solicitan relevo de agente investigador en asesinato de joven homosexual en Cayey

Edge (Boston): Gay man’s gruesome murder sends shockwaves across Puerto Rico

GagaYonce

It's TOO much!  TWO Beyonce and Lady Gaga duets?  Insanity! The gay clubs are going to combust from so much excitement. 

Telephone appears on Gaga's The Fame Monster and Video Phone, appears on Beyonce's I Am… Sasha Fierce (Deluxe).

*tip of the fitted to Mun2

Looking Backward at Reggaeton’s Futurity

What up mi gente! As promised here are my comments from Princeton's "Reggaeton: Critical Perspectives" roundtable.  Feel free to hit me up with any thoughts...

Looking Backward at Reggaeton’s Futurity

I want to thank Alex[andra Vazquez] for organizing this panel and inviting me to participate.  She asked that I say a few words about the future of reggaeton, and where I think the genre is going both socially and sonically.  I found this to be a surprisingly difficult assignment, mainly because it is a challenging task to speculate about the futurity of a genre that has already been declared dead on multiple occasions.  Like Mark Twain, however, the reports of reggaeton’s demise have been greatly exaggerated, but it nonetheless remains important to consider why critics and others have been so quick to write obituaries for a genre that seems to be alive and kicking. 

This discourse is not new, instead it is something that tends to (re)appear at moments of increased visibility and growth.  Back before reggaeton was reggaeton, when it was simply known as underground, the genre was at the center of a moral panic in Puerto Rico that resulted in efforts to ban it from the airwaves and the confiscation of hundreds of cassettes due to allegations that the music violated local obscenity laws.  Dismissed as porquería, or trash, detractors assumed that the genre would die a swift death at the hands of Puerto Rican authorities who sought to contain its social impact because it was too black, too poor, too American, too sexual, and too crass.  And Raquel [Z. Rivera] does a great job of breaking this down in her chapter “Policing Morality, Mano Dura Stylee,” for those of you who are interested.  Despite efforts to contain and even eradicate the genre, reggaeton was able to break into the market and achieve international success and recognition.  It is at this moment that the pronouncements of reggaeton’s death were once again being sounded.  So, I’m interested in why at a time when reggaeton was becoming increasingly successful in commercial terms and cultivating a wider fan base, would critics, and even reggaetoneros themselves, say that reggaeton is dead?

Like similar pronouncements in salsa and hip-hop, the death of reggaeton comes at a moment when the genre perceived as moving away from, or beyond, its original audience and social milieu.  The death of reggaeton encapsulates competing and often conflicting notions of what the genre was, what it is, and where it is going, both sonically and socially.  Similar to Nas’s 2005 assertion that “Hip Hop is Dead,” some reggaetoneros seems to be looking backwards in order to construct a more authentic future for reggaeton. 

Here I am thinking of Las Guanabanas’ recent mixtape called Regreso al Underground [Return to the Underground] which calls for a return to reggaeton’s “roots.”  This past is reduced to the genre’s early emphasis on themes of smoking weed, drinking, screwing and partying.  

This turn, or I should say nostalgic return, to underground aesthetics is no doubt in response to the increasing popularity of the reggaeton romantic ballad known as Romantiqueo, or ReggaePop.  Artists such as Ñejo & Dalmata, Guelo Star, J-King & Maximan, and Jamsha have all dismissed romantiqueo as inauthentic and as an affront to reggaeton’s masculinity.  On the track “Sendo Cabron,” Guelo Star announces, “Somos los reyes del underground.  Reggaeton for Life!  Fuck ReggaePop!  Pop Lollipop-ers.”  

Guelo Star attempts to reassert a certain mode of reggaeton masculinity, by questioning and challenging the heterosexuality of artists who perform romantiqueo.  I see this move by Guelo Star, and other artists like the ones I previously mentioned, as attempting to negotiate shifting understandings of class, race, nation, sexuality, and masculinity within reggaeton after its explosion in the international music scene. 

All this is to say that if we are to speculate about the future of reggaeton we have to take into account the significance of its many deaths and resurrections, in addition to how reggaetoneros reach into the past in order to formulate a reggaeton futurity.  Calling time of death as well as the injunction to return to an idealized and nostalgic past can thus be understood a means for reggaetoneros to reconstitute themselves within reggaeton’s constantly shifting terrain.

"Get Some White Friends"

In a twist on the usual racial fetishization formula Duece Poppi trots out his white friends as accessories in the video for "My White Friends."  I'm ambivalent about this video.  Thoughts?

Reggaeton: Critical Perspectives @ Princeton University 11.12.09

Above is the palmcard for a roundtable discussion I'll be participating in at Princeton University this Thursday @ 4:30pm.  The panel will also feature scholars and artists Raquel Z. Rivera, Wayne Marshall, Miguel Luciano, Ines "Deevani" Rooney and DJ El Niño.

I'm very excited to participate in this event, it promises to be off-the-chain.   I am also really excited about the opportunity to meet Ines Rooney-Saldana aka Deevani, the hindi-vocalist on the tracks "Mirame," "Flow Natural," "Dancing," and the new song "Que Buena Tu Ta"  with Fuego of Chosen Few.

Followers of this blog know I have written about Deevani in my work on the reggaeton subgenre of bhangraton, so I'm really looking forward to hearing her take on the (sub)genre and where it is headed.

If you're in the Princeton area check us out.  I'll be posting my remarks from the panel on Friday.