we jammin'

if you're in or around boston (well, actually, somerville) today--that's saturday, july 30--you should come through union square sometime between 4-8, where we'll be celebrating 30 years+ of hip-hop history with music, dance, graf, and good times.

here's the deets:

SAT, JULY 30, 4-8 PM. Free outdoor HIP HOP HISTORY JAM in Union Sq., Somerville, MA.

HOSTS:
Lyrical and Brick Casey

DJS:
WAYNE&WAX - Jamaican Roots
DJ YAMIN (Beats not Bombs) - Funk & Soul
DJ DEF ROCK (Monstamind/Megabug) - Birth of Hip Hop
DJ DRAMA (Elemental Compounds) - Old/Middleschool
DJ FLACK(Mashit/Beat Research) - Golden Age
DJ C (Mashit/Beat Research) -Back to the Future

B-BOY/B-GIRL PERFORMANCES by:
LOSST UNNOWN and members of the FLOOR LORDS

WRITERS:
ARTISTS FOR HUMANITY

The youth/activist collective CRITICAL BREAKDOWN and the MASSIVE RECORDS family will be there too. The INDEPENDENT (local bar) will be showing WILD STYLE and STYLE WARS all afternoon!

For more INFO:
http://libraryofvinyl.blogspot.com/2005/06/love-hip-hop-history-jam.html

yeah, so check the link above for directions, etc. i'm going to be representing hip-hop's "jamaican roots" from 4:00pm-4:40 by playing what i imagine herc would have played at those early parties in the bronx if folks weren't, as jeff chang excavates, "throwing jamaicans in garbage cans" (CSWS p.72) back then.

so what's that mean?

well, admittedly it's a subjective (and hopefully suggestive) interpretation, but i have a few specific goals in mind: 1) to play reggae songs that would have been popular in jamaica in the early 70s (and should have been popular in the NY diaspora); 2) to play reggae songs that have some kind of audible influence from soul and funk (so as to play up the interaction between the US and JA and to lead into the mid- to late-70s breaks and such); 3) to play a bunch of early DJ tunes, letting the jive-infused toasts of u-roy and dennis alcapone, big joe and tapper zukie suggest at least one of MCing's vocal lineages.

i'll be doing a little toasting and chatting (and maybe rapping) myself over the tunes and riddims, trying to bring a likkle edutainment into the mix and adding yet another layer of performance (i.e., me rapping over someone rapping over someone singing over someone's mix of someone's rendition of someone else's song). should be fun.

as a kind of run-up to the event, yesterday's boston globe ran a very supportive piece on me and my various, overlapping projects. between this and the undercover piece i linked to recently, this all amounts to a lot of affirmation all of a sudden, and i'm really touched that folks seem not only to be getting what i'm up to, but to be digging it. thanks for the support.

in other news, big tings are percolating (not rumbling) between me and some musical/critical cohorts. look out for something special coming soon. the more nodes the better, knamean? (thanks, y'all, for the referrals.)

finally, thanks to my dear girl, becca, for the slick update of my main site. not bad for a computational linguist. i've been meaning for a while now to revise the site so that it more accurately represents my most current thoughts, perspectives, endeavors, etc. i think this succeeds at that, and some. props, too, to clay ward for taking some great photos and making a boston jerk look slightly less so (perhaps).