dances with drones: MIA and Eleven Play (Japan)

Two more examples of drones in pop culture:

MIA has just released a new, self-directed video, of her song "Double Bubble Trouble" from the album Matangi. It's another one of MIA's patented full-of-radical-gestures and a wild stew of images. The main issues she seems to raise are "violence" -- and the danger that this might proliferate as guns are made with 3D printers -- and drones -- which in the vid seem to be both agents of surveillance and targeted killings. (There is a quick shot of a poster on a wall that says: "Drone Survival Guide.") The drones that circle above the dancers at the end of the video are in the shape of peace signs. And MIA warns us that "1984 is Now." Go watch it, see what you think, MIA puts these things out there to raise controversy and discussion, as far as I can tell.

And then there's this beautiful and much more easily read drone dance from the Japanese troupe Eleven Play (courtesy Dangerous Minds). And I think Dangerous Minds says it all: [the troupe] manages to utilize drone technology for art and beauty, while simultaneously depicting all of its potential insidiousness. At first the dancers interact cautiously and experimentally with the drones, then the machines become more active and more threatening. With no control over the increasingly volatile technology, the women flee the stage in fear. In the end, the only ones left dancing are the drones themselves. 

And the Palestinians in Gaza who live with Israeli drones constantly in the air call them: zanana. 

Meaning variously, "a wife’s relentless nagging", or "to nag with drone-like talk."

Saâda Bonaire

This is a publicity photo for the early '80s synth dance band Saâda Bonaire. Problematic, isn't it? Especially given the name, the first half meaning happiness in Arabic (سعادة).

The 'ayn is often rendered as "â" in French.

I guess this photo (evoking what? catwoman in burka?) goes with not only the name of the group but also their track "The Facts," which is a wild synth-pop-goes-world dance number, entirely of its time, synth with "Eastern" instruments mixed in. Fact recently announced the "rediscovery" of the group and the release, over thirty years after their recording, of a single released in 1982 (two sides, it was the days of vinyl) and 11 previously unreleased tracks. All produced by the amazing Dennis Bovell, who also worked with The Slits and The Raincoats and Pop Group among others.

Of the tracks that I have managed to hear so far, it's "The Facts" that has that Eastern feel. Fact says it "is a decisively weird collision of Pet Shop Boys-influenced FM synth, pummeling disco rhythms, deadpan female vocals and, yep, Middle Eastern flutes and what sounds like Oud. It shouldn’t work at all, but we’re glad it does." I don't think it's flutes and I think it is a bouzouki (or in Arabic, buzuq), but Fact does get the idea. It does, somehow, work. (But I admit, I love that 80s synth sound.)

And it seems, according to this source, that the musicians on the recordings were "culled from the local immigration center." Hmmm, I wonder how much they were paid...

culled from the local immigration center

joined by dozens of local musicians culled from the local immigration center. - See more at: http://capturedtracks.com/news/coming-soon-saada-bonaire-2xlp-cd/#sthash.vrHPVB4B.dpuf

Here's the video for the song, featuring the two German vocalists, Stefanie Lange and Claudia Hossfield, in various states of undress. Very eighties. You've been warned.

Stefanie Lange and Claudia Hossfeld

And here is the cover of the release, just out on November 12. Yep, Arabic on the cover.

Here's a photo of Saâda Bonaire without the weird "burqa":

And a couple more Saâda Bonaire tracks on youtube. "Invitation" (with bagpipes that also "work" and what sounds like a sampled Middle Eastern female vocal). "You Could Be More As You Are." And "Funky Way," which is very dub, but with "Eastern-sounding" horns, and the best track of theirs I've heard so far.

However, I just bought the album (it came out two days ago, 12 November), so maybe I'll find more that I like.

Note: for some strange reason "Funky Way" is not on the just-released album. So grab it from youtube. You've got the link.

ADDED November 16: You can now stream the entire album here.

Apache (Apaçi) Kurdish Turkish dance. Or is it?

Young Turkish Kurds (reportedly from Ağrı, near the border with Iran) doing 'Apache (apaçi) dancing' (a Turkish subcultural dance style) to a song by the Mehmet Ali Arslan Grup. Well, I assume they are Kurds. (Turks and Azeris also live in Ağrı.)



A comment on a blog that discusses "Apache dancing" tries to explain:

Actually "apaçi" is a trending word in Turkish slang. It is used when describing uneducated and wannabe young people that has immigrant parents and live in suburbs of big cities like Istanbul, Ankara or Izmir. These young people can never completely integrate themselves to the city life because of their origins and that's why they have a "mutant" style, a bit from city life and a bit from their conservative family life.

"Apaçi dance" term came up from a dance style that is performed by these apaçi people when they're in a clubs :)

It's seems then that apaçi is a pejorative term used to describe young Kurds in Turkey. A term of denigration that, perhaps, young Kurds have embraced and attempted to detourn?

A friend who is in Alanya, Turkey, which is far from Turkey's eastern border but has lots of workers from the east, says "the young men with those kinds of hairstyles (standing up in the middle, lots of gel, long on the sides and back, etc) call their style 'apache'."

Meanwhile, as far as I can determine, Mehmet Ali Arslan is from Northeastern Turkey (near Ardahan) and the music may have Georgian, Azeri and Iraqi (Kurdish) influences. (I used Google translate to try to make sense of this.)  

Interestingly, the dance performed above is very similar to the dance performed in the video below. This is from Iranian Kurdistan. Fatima Al Qadiri has written about it here. Not very informatively, as she doesn't even mention that the singer, Mehdi Alizadeh, is from Iran. He is really great, no? 



So maybe (as Sherifa has noted in a bit of conversation about this on FB), there isn't any specific "Apache" dance tradition, so much as it is a matter of apaçi-s who are doing it.

Here's another Mehdi Alizadeh vid.




Who knows, maybe this is more like what Apaçi dance is supposed to be:

Revolutionary debke in Hama, Syria

I got this via today's New York Times. This was filmed yesterday in the Halfaya neighborhood of Hama. Apparently this is a regular, morning event. 100's gather to dance the debke, as someone chants and the crowd responds, to the backing of live percussion. Pretty stirring.



You will recall that Hama is famous for its revolutionary debke chants. It is the source of that famous chant,  "Come On Bashar, Leave," sung by Ibrahim Qashoush, who shortly after a video of him chanting at a demonstration circulated widely, was found with his throat slit, on July 4. I posted about it here. The recently-departed Anthony Shadid, the intrepid journalist for the Times, got into Hama in July 2011 and reported on the song, the song's author, and conditions in Hama.

It's cheering to see that, despite the deadly assaults by the regime, Hama is still at it. I hope that someone can fill the shoes of Anthony Shadid. I don't know whether I'm more pessimistic about that or about the future of Syria.

(The expert on Syrian debke is Shayna Silverstein, graduate of the University of Chicago. I look forward with keen anticipation to her publications on the subject.)

Dissin' skinny jean (and pashmina scarves, i.e., kufiyas)

The world's gone mad, the world's gone drag. Boys in their little sister's jeans like DAMN!!!

"Skinny Jeans (The World's Gone Mad)" is a kind of old-skool attack--or maybe better put, a satire representing a particular vision of old skool--on the new male style trends associated with the "jerk" scene, and in particular, the skinny jeans. (Thanks to Wayne Marshall to telling me about this vid.)

The Protracktorz and The Incomparable Shakespeare deploy a number of rhetorical strategies to put down the skinny jeans. They associate it with drag (i.e., homosexuality), with effeminity (sister's jeans), and with other purportedly unmanly fashions: to wit, pashmina scarves (which are really kufiyas) and plaid shirts.

Pashmina scarves, plaid shirts, oh no.

The skinny jeans and associated styles are also associated here with "boys" as opposed to men, with styles worn in 5th grade, with accessories like the man purse, with posing.

The "news broadcast" that interrupts the vid presents a number of femme-sounding synonyms for tight jeans: slimmies, thigh riders, hip handlers, bootie huggers, denim with spandex or mandex, soccer pants, butt wranglers.

Added to this is that the male models are made to look decidedly "unmanly" in the "American Idle" spoof that is the vid.

This model has nerdy glasses, is "too" light in skin color, and sports the offending pashmina/kufiya and the plaid shirt. Which of course don't match. Not to mention the skinny jeans.

This male model is at least a bit darker in skin tone, but he wears a pink shirt, with the image of girl on it, and that of course immediately makes him suspect. As does that strangely colored hat. The nerdy glasses don't help either. The cute shop assistant is impressed by neither of these dudes.

When you see the vid, you also notice that an important part of the objection to these styles (skinny jeans and pashminas/kufiyas and [maybe?] plaid shirts) is that they are also associated with white hipsters. What could be more hipster than skinny jeans and kufiyas?!

Wearers of skinny jeans, in sum, are damned for being girly, adolescent, associated with whiteness.

As opposed to the real, authentic black men who are mocking and protesting against the tight jeans. The homophobia here is scarcely veiled.

What this is all about is a cultural phenomenon associated with a dance music known as jerk, that hails from LA, that is very much a teen phenomenon, and that is very much about the skinny jeans. The band most famously associated with jerk, the New Boyz, have released an album called Skinny Jeans and a Mic. Check out the vid for their song, "You're A Jerk."

The video gives you a good sense of how fun and energetic the jerk scene is. How it resembles original hip-hop, in that it is not merely about rapping, but also about a style of dancing and a sense of fashion and a location in the street. Guy Trebay's lively and compelling account of jerk is here.

Stephanie Diania, New York Times

And notice that no one in the vid looks anything like the male models who are spoofed in the Protracktorz video. The "jerk" kids look like hip-hoppers, but with tight jeans. There are no "pashminas" or plaid shirts in sight.

I was recently in Philadelphia, and I did see a lot of twenty or thirty-something African-Americans wearing kufiyas. They weren't teenagers from the jerk scene. But neither were they slavishly imitating white hipsters, although there were certain stylistic commonalities. Kufiyas have been around in the black communities since the '70s, and are not signs of unthinking adoption of "white" style.

New Boyz defend the skinny jeans style here. They argue that it's not novel, that it's a style that was big in the West Coast and East in the 80s. "A lot of the people who are hatin' on you are people who are scared of change."

The Protracktorz are just jealous old guys, worried that something new is up that they don't get, something that it is going to pass them by. They don't understand jerk at all. Or kufiyas either.

And...

On skinny jeans as a global phenomenon, please listen to Wayne Marshall's recent lecture at MIT, "Skinny Jeans and Fruity Loops."

And for Wayne's exhaustive(ing) archive of items on skinny jeans, go here. (How does he do it? Is he super-human?)

UPDATE: April 6, 2010. Please see comment one. I completely missed the point that this vid is a spoof of narrowminded and conformist views within hip-hop towards new phenomena. Damn. I apologize to The Incomparable Shakespeare. Now I love the vid even more.