The Walmart shareholders are congregating, as they do every year about this time. But it seems that organized protests against the Wal are not happening this year. I guess we are turning into sheep.
Meanwhile, Roger Waters is still agitating against that other (apartheid)wall, according to this AP report, via Salon.com (and thanks to Alannah for the heads up).
Ex-Pink Floyd rocker wants Israeli wall down
Jun 2nd, 2009 | AIDA REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank -- The legendary rocker and co-founder of Pink Floyd says he would give a concert in a flash if Israel's West Bank wall is torn down.
Roger Waters made the promise Tuesday during a visit to a Palestinian refugee camp that is hemmed in by the separation barrier's tall slabs of cement.
The 65-year-old co-wrote Pink Floyd's iconic "The Wall" album and performed music from it in 1990 at the site where the Berlin Wall once stood.
Waters had harsh words for the West Bank barrier, which Israel says was built as a defense against Palestinian militants.
The musician says the wall amounts to an oppressive grab of Palestinian land and that he hopes that "this thing, this awful thing, is destroyed soon."
Go here for previous posts on Roger Waters, who has been been involved in the campaign against the Wall for several years.
1. Jace Clayton has penned a nice piece on Autotune for Frieze. I have noticed of late that all contemporary rai vocals coming out of Algeria seems to be 'autotuned.' It drove me crazy, but more recently, and thanks largely to Clayton, I now see the virtue of its uses. Clayton discusses Autotune as a global phenom, and discusses its ubiquity in North African pop. Here are some excerpts--but I urge you read the entire article.
The most important piece of musical equipment of the last 10 years is not an instrument or a physical object. It’s called Auto-Tune and is used on roughly 90 per cent of all pop songs...Auto-Tune bends off-key notes into pitch perfection...
After joking about vocalists who ask him to ‘make their voice robotic’, Moroccan producer Wary says: ‘Sometimes you have great singers who don’t know how to use Auto-Tune and it sounds really bad.’ Traditional singing chops aren’t so useful in Auto-Tune’s world. It’s neither a fight with technology nor love of it; it’s more like glossy coexistence, a strange new dance of give-and-take.
T-Pain’s R&B isn’t the only example highlighting the ‘impassioned melismas’ that Rosen says ‘powered black popular singing’ before Auto-Tune messed everything up. Melisma is equally if not more prevalent in Maghrebi music. This explains the plug-in’s mind-boggling success across North Africa. Contemporary raï and Berber music embrace Auto-Tune so heartily precisely because glissandos are a central part of vocal performance (you can’t be a good singer unless your voice can flutter around those notes): sliding pitches sound startling through it. A weird electronic warble embeds itself in rich, throaty glissandos. The struggle of human nuance versus digital correction is made audible, dramatized. Quite literally this is the sound of voice and machine intermodulating...
At his home studio in the Parisian suburbs, Wary explained that Auto-Tune hit the Arab world with a single in 2000 by Algerian Chaba Djenet (below). Since the start of this decade, it’s been hard to find an album of North African Berber pop where the Tamazight dialect vocals don’t have full synthy Auto-Tune (it’s surprising how much a female voice can sound like a violin on these recordings)...
From the US to Mexico, Jamaica, Africa, and beyond – Auto-Tune usage has splintered, with different approaches from scene to scene and artist to artist. (It remains the most sonically extreme in Berber Morocco.)...Rather than novelty or some warped mimetic response to computers, Auto-Tune is a contemporary strategy for intimacy with the digital. As such, it becomes quite humanizing. The Chaba Djenet youtube video for "Gwit Galbi Wahdi" is a must-see, because it features the music of Chaba Djenet over a video of Lebanese "pop tart" sensation Haifa Wehbe singing. Hilarious!
2. Courtesy Time magazine, an interesting piece on the latest iteration of graffiti on the apartheid wall. (Thanks, Daniel)
Thanks to a group of Dutch and Palestinian activists, people can now immortalize their words on the wall without a passport or a can of Krylon. For $40, you can compose a message at www.sendamessage.nl, and a trio of Palestinian graffiti artists will spray your words on the wall and e-mail you a photo as proof. The only restriction: no messages of hate or anti-Semitism...
So far, the group has written 850 messages, ranging from the quirky (a falafel recipe) to the anarcho-romantic (JOIN THE RESISTANCE: FALL IN LOVE) to the sardonic (ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS NO MATCH FOR NATURAL STUPIDITY). But most are mushy love notes (M.L. LOVES HER FUNKY D). So one of the organizers, Dutch theater director Justus van Oel, decided to up the ante. He commissioned Farid Esack, a South African religious scholar and former antiapartheid activist, to write a 1,998-word letter, in English, to Palestinians urging nonviolent resistance to the Israelis. The work is now being painted in 2-ft.-high letters along a 1.6-mile stretch of wall near Ramallah. The writing will consume more than 400 cans of spray paint and has been paid for by private donations. The South African was chosen, says Van Oel, because "Esack gets beyond the anger. He is a reconciler." The letter, in part, reads: "Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? In your land, we are seeing something far more brutal, relentless and inhuman than what we have ever seen under apartheid."
3. Check out Syrian-American vocalist Gaida on her myspace page.
"Gaida’s forthcoming CD, Levantine Indulgence, a song sequence of alluring beauty, is steeped in the traditional music of her Syrian heritage, but also shows the eclectic worldview of a New York singer-songwriter," writes David R. Adler, in Timeout New York. I have to say I prefer the "traditional" songs to the more updated material--but check it out for yourself.
4. Finally, the new Narcisyst CD, P.H.A.T.W.A. is now available.
I'm posting a lot of photos on my flickr account (go down a ways on the righthand column and click, or go here), and I also end up writing descriptions. I reproduce one below. I visited the wall at Abu Dis (east of Jerusalem) on Thursday.
A construction worker invited me on to the roof of a 5-story building he was working on. When I got to the top he said, "Nice view, eh?"
The "separation barrier" is ostensibly a security measure, to protect Israeli Jews from suicide bombings and other terrorist acts.
In fact, tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs reside on the other side of the wall. And the Jewish settlement of Ma''ale Adumim (pop. 35,000) is on THIS side of the wall, just down the road from here, to the east.
I met a middle-aged gentleman who lives very near here, right next to this beautiful wall. He has two brothers who live just the other side of the wall. He can't visit them without getting permission from the Israeli secuity (often hard to get) and driving by a very circuitous route. (There is NO crossing close to here.) He used to have 200 sheep, but now only has 6, because of problems with water caused by the wall.
Another man I met used to work as a head nurse at a Jewish hospital on the other side of the wall. Now, he can't work there any more, and has to eke out a living selling coffee and small pastries at a tiny kiosk.
Professor of Anthropology, University of Arkansas. Author of Memories of Revolt: The 1936-39 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past. Co-editor of Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Popular Culture and of Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity.
"Gaida’s forthcoming CD, Levantine Indulgence, a song sequence of alluring beauty, is steeped in the traditional music of her Syrian heritage, but also shows the eclectic worldview of a New York singer-songwriter," writes David R. Adler, in Timeout New York. I have to say I prefer the "traditional" songs to the more updated material--but check it out for yourself.
