Cool Dutty Artz interview/mini-doc featuring Shadetek and Jahdan over at XLR8R – part of their Labels We Love Series. Check iTunes for XLR8R Presents Labels We Love, Vol. 1 featuring a new tune from Chief Boima titled “Techno Rumba” (an official release will be out soon) and the Jahdan Blakkamoore banger “Buss It Pon Dem” (produced by Chancha Via Circuito.)
& here’s my request to johnnyvoodoo and all America voodoo doll makers, please make a doll of this man, David Brooks of the New York Times –
If you read his Op-Ed column last Thursday, I’m sure you will sympathize with me/my request. For a better understanding, Matt Taibbi clears the thickets by translating excerpts of Brooks’s essay so we can further appreciate his timely insight –
“This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It’s a story about poorly constructed buildings, bad infrastructure and terrible public services. On Thursday, President Obama told the people of Haiti: “You will not be forsaken; you will not be forgotten.” If he is going to remain faithful to that vow then he is going to have to use this tragedy as an occasion to rethink our approach to global poverty. He’s going to have to acknowledge a few difficult truths.
The first of those truths is that we don’t know how to use aid to reduce poverty. Over the past few decades, the world has spent trillions of dollars to generate growth in the developing world. The countries that have not received much aid, like China, have seen tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions. The countries that have received aid, like Haiti, have not.
In the recent anthology “What Works in Development?,” a group of economists try to sort out what we’ve learned. The picture is grim. There are no policy levers that consistently correlate to increased growth. There is nearly zero correlation between how a developing economy does one decade and how it does the next. There is no consistently proven way to reduce corruption. Even improving governing institutions doesn’t seem to produce the expected results.
The chastened tone of these essays is captured by the economist Abhijit Banerjee: “It is not clear to us that the best way to get growth is to do growth policy of any form. Perhaps making growth happen is ultimately beyond our control.”
TRANSLATION: Don’t bother giving any money, it doesn’t do any good. And feeling guilty about not giving money doesn’t do anyone any good either. In fact, you’re probably helping by not doing anything.
There was also an African apparition: Janka Nabay from Sierra Leone, wearing a straw skirt and singing and dancing to recorded tracks of what he said was a 500-year-old tradition called bubu music. The tracks were modern, and the beat, fast and skeletal and driven by bell taps, was unstoppable, demanding wider dissemination.
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listen to more audio from an interview Janka did with Straw vs Gold several months back.
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Here’s a list of key US retailers; where you can pick up a physical copy of the album:
AKA Music – Philadelphia
Amoeba SF / Berkeley / Hollywood
Angelos – Colorado
Bull Moose – Maine (9 locations)
Cheapo – Minnesota (4 locations)
Criminal Records – Atlanta
Dimple – Sacramento
Disc Exchange – Knoxville, TN
Disc N Dat – Tacoma, WA
Everyday Music – Oregon (Multiple Locations)
Ear Xtacy – Louisville, KY
Easy Street – Seattle, WA
Electric Fetus – Minneapolis / St Paul, MN (2 locations)
Fingerprints – Long Beach, CA
Graywhale – Salt Lake City, UT (7 locations)
Grimeys – Nashville, TN
Park Avenue – Orlando, FL (2 locations)
Twist And Shout – Denver, CO
Independent Records – Colorado (6 locations)
J&R – NYC
Melody Records – Washington, DC
Music Millenium – Portland, OR
Newbury Comics – New England (Mass/RI/CT)
Other Music – NYC
Rasputins – SF/Bay Area (7 locations)
Salzers – Ventura, CA
Shake It – Cincinnati, OH
Silver Platters – Seattle / Tacoma, WA (3 locations)
Sonic Boom – Washington (2 locations)
Soundgarden – Baltimore, MD
Streetlight – San Jose/Santa Cruz, CA (2 locations)
Vons – Lafayette, IN
Waterloo – Austin, TX
Zia – Arizona + las Vegas (10 locations)
Encyclopedic, scholarly and wielding deep faith in riddim and vibes—the alchemy of the Brooklyn-based Dutty Artz crew is completely mystical and slightly awe-inspiring. Its main proprietors, the power trio of DJ/producers Jace Clayton aka DJ/Rupture, Matt Schell aka Matt Shadetek, and Roberto Fernandez aka Geko Jones, are dudes preeminently known for soliciting and disseminating the globe’s bangingest dancehall, dubstep, and cumbia beats. They have explored metropolises, townships and favelas to seek out music in its indigenous state and found likeminded friends in Brazil’s Maga Bo, Montreal’s Ghislain Poirier, and Cape Town’s African Dope Records crew, and when they can’t get to the most outward of dance music’s niches themselves, they have a gang of colleagues to carry the load. When a friend recently traveled to Distrito Federal in Mexico City, Jones begged him to bring back whatever wild music he could find. Thus, when you Google “tribal guarachero,” duttyartz.com is the only non-Spanish blog that results. They are archaeologists scouring the globe’s nooks and crannies with the curiosity of scientists, not conquistadors. They are so passionate about the beat, and generous with their knowledge of it, you almost don’t know where to begin the discussion.
Click HERE to read the rest of Julianne Shepherd’s intelligent and sincere article from The FADER #61.
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