bulgarian borat video via ljova.
according to comments on youtube, this is several years old, so it's not a conscious emmulation of the khazakhstani journalist.
notice the solo around 3:10 and the proto-reggaeton beat

The Guardian is tracing the recent clash of egos on the trans-Atlantic "Gypsy/Balkan music scene". As it turns out, neither is it a scene ("most of these musicians have never met" if we're to believe the author), nor is there Gypsy or even Balkan music (according to Shantel). Still in this definitional vacuum there's an (un-)surprising amount of finger pointing and name calling.

I don't find authenticity particularly interesting these days (any Roma musician in Bulgaria claims to be more "authentic" than the next, just like in any other music scene, existing or not); even less interesting are rigorous definitions of the genre - leave it to the gurus in the World Music section of Virgin to come up with the most marketable category. What is fascinating to me is Zach's pseudo-naive question "Isn't a melody enough?"

A DJ would never (I hope) permit herself such innocence in using/appropriating a style of music. When I spin an Arabic track form Israel, mixed into Palestinian rap, going into Albanian hip-hop with a cocek beat, I can't let myself forget what a risky juggling act this is. Same goes for favela funk, Balkan brass, kwaito... Even when everything flows organically and the set feels to put itself together, it is built on choices upon choices upon choices - not unlike a fractal graph. Unlike a fractal graph though, I retroactively stand by my choices. Or is this what a neo-Marxist would call "false consciousness"?

Through DJ /rupture's blog, I ran across Orlando Patterson's piece on the dialectic between Western/American culture and Third World cultures and the weakness of the enduring stereotype "globalization=homogenization". Clearly American hegemony doesn't mean the rest of the world just passively swallows WASP values; just as clearly American culture - especially urban/metropolitan culture - is extremely heterogeneous. And Fanfare Ciocarlia did play 'Born To Be Wild' on 'Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan'. Still, Borat's Soundtrack and Putumayo's upcoming release of 'Balkan Grooves' (to which I decided not to contribute) seem to have been produced under the same carefree artistic license as 'Gulag Orkestar'.

So, when all is said and played, "isn't a melody enough"?

overheard at the subway platform: "the train is coming. that's so cute, i just smiled."

people display an uncanny sense of poetry when it's cold. is the advertised advent of another ice age - global warming's ironic isotope - going to usher in a new age of poetry? language's ecological return?

two stops later the subway operator gets inspired: random act of kindness toward the runner-up-the-stairs, reopens the doors to spare him from night chill's dog bite. things begin to acquire crystalline shapes in fahrenheit's lower 40s. gestures become simpler, movements get stripped down and choreographed to an urgency.

mode: rushing to get home...