The Blue Line

For the final project of "Under the Beat: Mapping Music in Providence," I created a trail called the Blue Line. The idea behind the project is to curate musical places in Providence into a sonic experience. Photography of the Blue Line is available at the end of this blog post. This is a powerpoint presentation of the project.

Welcome to the Blue Line, a musical tour of musical places in Providence. We'll also be listening to some Providence-based artists along the way. The trail will take 1 hour 30 mins (bus rides) to 2 hours (walking), if you spend 10 mins at each stop. Get your earphones out and get ready to roll.

While you're walking to Olympic Records, listen to Pucho Rock's Dulce Pop EP. It's about 15 minutes long. Pucho Rock is an acoustic rock artist born in Costa Rica. He's been part of two bands, Qimera and las Tokolas Rockeras. This particular album (released February 17, 2019) is very upbeat, perfect to kick off this journey.


Once you're at Olympic Records, take a moment to browse. You might even ask Kevin, the owner, for a recommendation.


Next, you'll be going to Symposium Books, which is in Downtown Providence. It's a 16-minute RIPTA bus ride (if you take the 92 at Governor & Wickenden and get off at Kennedy Plaza), or a 32-minute walk, during which you'll get to walk down Wickenden (a treat) and then down the canal (also a treat). Here's some music for the way.



Emotional Indulgence, self-described as "a swell of pink noise, a comfortability with the open fields of the heart," was released on April 19, 2019. The project was written and produced by Daniel Hill and Juliana Dieterich of EATQS/Ethereal and the Queer Show. This 17-minute musical experience (starting at "5. Powdery Blue") is perfect for a bus ride. If you end up on the bus and would like to know more about RIPTA, Providence's commuter service, scroll down a bit to the RIPTA blurb.



Get ready for some serious old school grooving because it's Evan's Vinyl Collection, a duo consisting of Unk-11 on the vocals and K-Vinyl on the beats. Released on March 16, 2019, Field of Dreams Deferred is full of poetic nostalgia, 44-minutes long for those who like to walk.

Once you're at Symposium Books, go in and have a look.

Here's some good browsing music by Bellerophon. Their album TEOSINTE, released in 2016, is full of uplifting electronic vibrations.



Next, you'll go down the block until you reach 276 Westminster St.

Aurora is now being transformed into office space, and you may notice it's nearly impossible to detect there was ever a music venue there.

You once again have the choice of taking a 12-minute bus ride or a 27-minute walk to Armageddon Shop, our next destination. This time, you will choose between folk music and acoustic music.

Folk music is by The Huntress and Holder of Hands. It's from an album called Avalon released in 2017. The opening track, Borealis, is one my favorites. This album is energetic enough for those who prefer to walk.

Acoustic music is Marion J. Battad's Paper Flowers, released in 2018. It's nice and melancholy, perfect for an indolent bus ride. It's also cruelly underrated, if you look at the listens per song. My favorite track is "Something Must Be Broken."

If you happen to take the bus, you might want to hop on the 28.

You're getting off on Broadway & Courtland. Armageddon shop should be a little way down the block.

A few streets down is Analog Underground, our next and final stop.

There, you've done it! You've left College Hill! These are places which shaped the past of music in Providence and are likely to inform its future. To get back, just hop on the RIPTA. There's a good chance it'll take you where you need to be.

Confession of a DJ feat. The Live Music Conundrum

Before I try my hand at intellectual analysis, can I just say: DJ Rupture's Gold Teeth Thief blew my mind. How dare you share this music knowing we'd have to drop everything and dance to the whole mix? Clayton's essay "Confessions of a DJ" actually made me think of an episode of my life ten years ago. I was enrolled in a hip-hop class on Manhattan's Upper East Side, which generally involves a veteran dancer from Brooklyn tasked with sprucing up a group of reticent white tweens (I could sense the teacher's frustration with our lack of swagger, and because of it, I danced twice as hard). One week, Ms. Aurelia reached a boiling point. She had just pressed play on (what I imagined was) one of her favorite songs for our warmup, and, as usual, the class of fourteen girls stood stiffly in our stiff "hip-hop" uniforms. The following quote is a paraphrase of what Ms. Aurelia said, assembled from memory:

"You have to pay respect to the music. Acknowledge the music. Bob your head or something. Tap your foot. Show respect. Show that you're listening. When you stand still like that it's like you're not listening."

From then on, I can't stay passive when it comes to music. Yeah, cool, I get to be an energetic dancer when it's expected: the club, concerts, listening at home. But the flip side is that I use all spaces that play music - supermarkets, coffee shops, bad concerts, food trucks, cars prowling at night - as an opportunity to bob my head and tap my foot. I can never go back to a place where music is neutral, because it isn't. Not anymore. Clayton uses his piece to dispel the myth of "passive" dancing in relation to a DJ. He describes building communication skills with regard to space and energy. To a lesser extent, I've encountered enough mediocre DJ's to weave criticism into my dancing (half-hearted swaying is one of them). But the bottom line is that all music deserves (initial) response. So maybe we should be more discriminate with where we play music. Or maybe we should play it everywhere.

This brings me to the Amen Break (which I noticed in the beginning of the Gold Teeth Thief mix). The Youtube documentary solidifies the Amen Break as a cornerstone of electronic music, to the point where it sounds intuitive, and sampling it is also sampling the entire history of its use, like building on a pile. As result, the drummer who originated the Amen Break gets buried a little, and hasn't received compensation anywhere close to what he deserves legally. But the way Clayton rationalizes this phenomenon toward the end of his piece is that DJ'ing (and musicking in general) isn't lucrative in its purest form, except if you consider experimentation and breakthroughs to be riches (which he does, in a way). Are artists supposed to swallow down a lack of recognition in order to contribute to a larger musical patchwork? If an artist needs money to survive but money ruins musicking, can music be made under a capitalist system?

One thing that Clayton only touches on is the listener's physical experience in a space. How does space determine the type of dancing, listening, and socializing that goes down on the floor? I was thinking about these things when I went to a concert at Finlandia two weeks ago. My roommates - Sarah and Abby - and I got there in time for the second act, Orange Guava Passion. Finlandia - the "venue" - is clearly someone's house, but that creates college atmosphere. Everyone is between the ages of 18 and 22. When it comes to the experience itself, here's my insight: height is capital. Being the tallest in my group, I had a wonderful time, barring one song where my head was right in front of the speaker. I could see fairly well without bobbing around, and I wasn't getting pushed as hard. I wanted to say that it was a problem with the space, but the truth is, this had been my experience in all "open-pit" concerts I've ever been to. The sweat, the violation of personal space, and the crushing were all part of the experience. But what if it was the space? OR: the lack of it.

The reason why Finlandia (dubbed Findi) is so successful (and crowded) is that it's one of the only not-Brown-funded-or-meddled-with spaces that hosts live music on campus. And maybe this is me signaling to Brown University that it should embrace these rough attempts at musicking, not quash them into nothingness, so that my shorter friends can enjoy live music, close to home, without suffocating. But what if the crowdedness is the experience?? Okay, that was all I had to say.

Listening Across Borders + Middle Eastern Jazz

The movie and readings this week were a cool little music odyssey. I started by watching Yangon Calling. I enjoyed this documentary a lot because it shows how punk is a transferable cultural phenomenon. Indeed, many of the "punks" in the movie don Ramones and Sex Pistols t-shirts. One musician remarks, correctly, that one doesn't need musical talent to play punk rock. In the documentary, the genre's core values are geared toward a rebellion which has seemingly higher stakes than when punk was born (I think this is fair to say... countering 70's Western mainstream seems less heavy than risking death in a Burmese prison). The fact that punk is being used as a means for survival makes me proud, and while I initially thought of Scum as a deadbeat, I quickly came to sympathize with his chosen lifestyle: how can I judge someone who creates a sense of freedom for themselves against all odds? Thanks to punk's transferability and the role that it has taken in Yangon, the genre has grown as a whole, taking on new, deeper meanings and hues.

Clayton's discussion of Auto-tune also explores transferable music, though this time we're talking about software (which, I won't lie, makes me bubble... musicking for everyone!). What I found most interesting about the reading was Clayton's note about how certain vocal qualities are required to create "successful" Auto-tuning, and traditional vocal talent doesn't necessarily suit this style. In fact, it's better to purposefully hit notes off key. During the reading, I was thinking about the outro to Kanye West's "Runaway." This heavily auto-tuned segment makes sense of Kanye's garbled lamentation. Here we have a technology that celebrates "failure" and "misuse," and perhaps this is what makes Auto-tune so transferable. Listening to Berber pop music, and thinking about the Berbers' resistance to dominant groups, turns Auto-tune into a political matter.

Likewise, A Tribe Called Red cannot dissociate from politics: the quote "As indigenous people, I think we're political from the moment that we're born" really stuck with me. Maybe this is because ATCR reframes self-expression as survival, and it becomes a question of "which tools are we going to use to express ourselves (in order to survive)." These tools, as it turns out, can be borrowed from other cultures and help enrich these source genres (this is true for Burmese punk). How does the need to survive inform musical borrowing? Should all such exchanges stem from shared struggles?

On a different note, this week saw the return of sonidero studies. This time, the reading (by Lippman) focuses on the significance of sonidero performances for the Latin Diaspora. Creating a "home away from home" is central to this phenomenon in the US, and "¡Un Saludo!" allows just that. Relating to the other readings, I find it interesting how cumbia sonidera is both transferable and non-transferable: on one hand, this style of music travels great distances (from Columbia to Mexico City to L.A.) and on the other hand, the genre evolves new characteristics locally, plus the saludos are specific to a certain moment in time and space. It is cool that they're immortalized in certain mixes though. But who will know what they mean in fifteen years? How contingent on presence are Mexican cumbia mixes?

Well yeah, I've run out of logical segues. Last Sunday, Mea and I went to the Parlour, a bar that often features live music. In addition to witnessing Middle Eastern Jazz (which was novel and wonderful in and of itself), we made buddies with three Armenian women. Two of them used to be in a dance group and bravely performed a few steps during one of the livelier songs. The gist of this genre mashup was improv jazz using Middle Eastern instrumentation such as a reverb clarinet, an oud, and a synth. I've rarely felt so enriched by a musical performance, and I hope I get to return to the Parlour for some more quality music.

Music Everywhere feat. An Adventure at Alchemy

Well, I didn't find much common ground among the readings and movie for this week, but I was interested in most of them. Gopinath and Stanyek's "Anytime, Anywhere" was a dense read, and not particularly helpful. I get the importance of defining terms, but forty pages seems a bit overkill to describe such an intuitive concept as mobile music. What's insightful about saying that music is in motion? How else is it supposed to reach our ears and help us connect with others? We live in a three-dimensional plane involving exchanges of energy. What's new?

On the flip side, "Searching for Sugar Man" is a work of ethnomusicology that's both intelligible and concrete. The subject himself, Sixto Rodriguez, is a model of musical humility. Far from academic pontifications, the documentary actively untangles music issues: music can be transplanted, but at what cost? "Searching for Sugar Man" seems at times to suggest that ethical issues (regarding money and recognition) are tangential to Rodriguez's story - a rare take in today's academic circles, where social phenomena are examined primarily through power relations (thanks a lot, Foucault). "Well what about the struggles we have in common?" asks the documentary, showing how Rodriguez's music fueled the fight to end Apartheid in South Africa. I would be lying if I said I wasn't refreshed by this viewpoint.

Juris' "Frequencies of Transgression" grapples with autonomy: is autonomy about living independently from one's society and its oppression, or living within it, opening up "new social-historical forms" as means to resist? My favorite philosopher, Jacques Ellul, says "to exist is to resist," (implying that closing oneself off completely is impossible) and this is certainly true for Juris' radio show, as well as for other community ventures he describes. I sympathize with the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), so Juris' mention of Mexican free software efforts really landed on me: how is pirating and sharing software a way of enforcing autonomy? What are the challenges of this? How does this struggle manifest differently in a country like Mexico, "given [its] widespread practice of unregulated media circulation"? In tech communities, we encounter problems with leadership, like how to give voice to individuals given the anonymity of free software. So who do we chose to define us? Where do we situate hope in the struggle for freedom, regarding software but also expression and music?

Finally, the article on sonideros was a fascinating read. I was in Mexico City over winter break and witnessed firsthand this relationship between power and sound: street vendors used their voices as marketing (a loud voice is an asset, I remember thinking, but is it a commodity?) and there were a few blocks dedicated solely to sound system shops (sound waves colliding for attention). The article added nuance to my experience, portraying a grapple for authenticity in a scene where music is becoming less and less important: "This is a critique that I hear from many seasoned sonideros—that these events have become too much about the sheer size and spectacle of the experience, and not enough about the music."

This is a perfect segue to my musical adventure this week. Three friends and I went to Alchemy on Sunday to check out an event titled "Grind Mode Cypher Presents: Open Mic & Performances." The performance ended up being a bit disappointing, but I did witness a couple of things. For one, the performers were all male-presenting and displayed extraordinary levels of self-confidence. They just barked away at the microphone, regardless of the fact that the dance floor hosted a sparse, lethargic group. It's interesting to see patriarchy in practice after being so sheltered on College Hill. If I could stand up on a stage and accept failure like that, what else could I achieve? Where can I get that kind of self-confidence? Is there anything to learn from hyper-masculinity? Where do I situate empowerment? This is especially intriguing to me, as a longtime fan of hip-hop: how can I reconcile my gender with the sexism in certain songs I love? Is it okay that they empower me? Should I be listening to these songs at all?

Reflections + A Musical Adventure to Olympic Records

My discussion questions are marked in bold.

The common thread I detected in this week's readings was how to weather the power dynamics affecting ethnomusicology. Michelle Kisliuk proposes we document music culture through experience, embracing our subjective stance. This pushes back against the objectivism of colonial anthropologists, a painful past that Kisliuk confronts throughout her experience.

Given that music is embedded in subjectivity, we can ask how music performance is framed to create power. Small's "A Place for Hearing From Musicking" shows how building grand concert halls designed for classical music performances is a way to uphold Western music hegemony. Everything from their imposing structures to the codified human performance that accompany these concert halls (I especially enjoyed the foyer bit - needing a transition space into the sacred hall itself) suggests that this whole opera house trend isn't really about music: it's about power.

If you need further convincing, ask Kevin, the wonderful owner of Olympic Records. The first time I interacted with him, I asked about those classical music records rammed into a few crates. A fan of Prokofiev, I wanted to know if he classical recommendations. I was extremely shy, and felt like an idiot for even asking: the moment I did, Kevin conveyed that he had little interest in classical music. He did, however, inform me that secondhand classical music vinyls are a sure bet: "the people who owned these things never played them," he said, holding a crisp Romeo and Juliet between his palms. What's the difference, then? When music becomes pure performance, or the mere suggestion of culture, does it stop being music? As soon as Kevin bagged the vinyl for me, I went home and played my mint condition Romeo and Juliet. Even now I play it as much as I can, to make up for lost time.

At the same time, a moment in Small's piece that seemed damning for concert halls - "nor does any sound enter from that world, and none of the sounds that are made here will be allowed to escape out into it" - represents, for Harlem's ball culture, a blanket of secrecy that was ripped off when "Paris is Burning" hit the mainstream circuit. Though the glamor of the scene was immediately embraced, little was done to compensate the black and Latinx performers who face ongoing violence and precariousness. This is discussed at length in Ashley Clark's retrospective critique of "Paris is Burning." I agree that the director went about the release in imperfect ways, and in doing so her documentary shed light on the perhaps grim reality of ethnomusicology: will it inevitably harm the subject it seeks to illuminate? In that respect, should underground music cultures be kept in secrecy, airtightness, and therefore relative safety, as the opera houses of Sydney, New York, and Philadelphia?

What I'm getting at is the idea that exclusivity is power. As long as the Harlem ball scene was able to shut out white supremacy from this particular space, it allowed queer folks of color to express themselves freely. Who decides when an underground scene should be thrust into the world, brought to everyone's attention? Had they wanted to come out to the world, did the ball performers have the necessary clout to do so? Matters of power always complicate the act of shedding light.

Now that what's done is done, it's time to listen to the members of this subcultures and meet their needs. There's no reason why ethnomusicology should be detrimental, especially not in the spirit of fieldwork described by Kisliuk. Jennie Livingston made a documentary about the Harlem ball scene because she believed that other people could learn from this subculture and its values. We should make sure that this learning process is respectful of the subjects. We've done the taking - as evidenced by "Paris is Burning"'s zealous voyeurism - and now it's time to give back.

Karaoke as Gender Performance: Don't You Want Me

You're in New York, Lower East Side. You just had dinner at an Indian restaurant advertising live music. The restaurant turns out to be mostly empty, aside from this white man plucking a sitar. Strange. But it doesn't faze you. You're just hyped for karaoke.

That's about where I was that wintry Saturday night, flanked by my best friend Celeste. It was a girls' night out for two pairs of sisters: Celeste and Hortense and Victoire and me. The idea was to find a Korean karaoke spot at St. Mark's Place and have a fun night before we exploded across New England once more: Hortense to Cornell, Celeste to Brooklyn, and me to Providence.

We finally find a place, advertised by a lit-up sign, coaxing us down a narrow corridor into a dingy elevator. Once we're there, the place is nearly empty. We put down a deposit and pile into a tiny room: there's a monitor on the wall and two binders full of songs.

We start off easy: "Take on Me" by A-ha does to our vocal cords what a carpet beater does to a welcome mat. It's good practice. The Human League's "Don't You Want Me" is where Kevin Brown's thesis materializes. While I perform the macho guy's verse, Celeste performs the feminine counterpart: "I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar." She holds a hand to her face in affected nostalgia. I belt out "don't you want me baby," and arch all the way back on the "O-o-o-oh," gripping a microphone that no longer works. I've become a dude convinced of his own sex-appeal. My movements are Elvis meets Sting, hip gyration but also tremors.

I take on a similar persona when Eminem comes on. Suddenly, I'm able to hit all the lyrics in "Real Slim Shady," even that tricky third verse, almost instinctually, bouncing with the beat. Karaoke is puzzlingly good for self-affirmation. I enjoy performing masculinity. And like Nora in Brown's piece, performing karaoke as a macho man reveals little about my true identity, except that I seek out spaces where experimentation is condoned. Being surrounded by girls I trust doesn't hurt. In fact, when I tried karaoke in a bar last summer, my rendition of "Real Slim Shady" was horrifying. I feared that the strangers present (especially the men) would see me as a failure. Now, Brown's piece has me thinking that maybe failure is the point when it comes to karaoke.

For the most part, I'm expected to act how I look. During karaoke, the personalities in my head with the smallest voices rush forth and scream out. At the end of the day, I have confessed myself to Victoire, Celeste and Hortense, as they have confessed to me. We tried out different personas and failed as a group, in relative privacy. If I wake up with a sore throat the next morning, at least I know I gave it my all.

T.S. Eliot: Making a Case for Theft

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”

T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

I always go back to this quote when I need clarity on issues of appropriation. Right off the bat, T.S. Eliot does something quite curious. He redefines the verb "steal" as an enviable action which requires skill and maturity. It may seem like Eliot is encouraging artists to wrong other artists, when really, the poet is demanding authenticity. Imitating is noncommittal, and through imitation an immature poet eclipses the essence of the imitated work. "Theft," on the other hand, involves shouldering the whole weight of a work's meaning and assuming the consequences.

When I see Japanese footwork, I think "imitation." I can't dispute that the Japanese footworkers we witnessed in class found a way to build on the original dance: the club scene has come to symbolize a legitimate rebellion against the status quo. That being said, it remains a superficial performance. Chicago footwork dancers draw on economic and racial hardship: because of these limitations, they must think outside of the box, experimenting creatively with what they do have. What part of Japanese footwork pushes the limits of possibility? There must be some kind of power structure to push back against in a local way. The fallout of "imitation" is a fragile sense of identity. When will the Harlem club-goers, the Japanese who buy fake dreadlocks, decide they're black enough? How will they ever feel authentic in their performance? The act of imitation is not only disrespectful, it's shortsighted.

Then what does equitable cultural exchange look like? I came across a social media squabble from 2017 involving two basketball players. Retired player Kenyon Martin called out Jeremy Lin for having dreadlocks. In response, Lin posted "i think as minorities, the more that we appreciate each others cultures, the more we influence mainstream society" after mentioning Martin's Chinese tattoos. All right. But is this equitable? I would tend to say no, because dreadlocks on black folks has long been associated with criminality, whereas on other races it's considered fashionable.

Equitable cultural exchange isn't a contest of who gets the most hurt in the process. Equitable exchange means not taking a culture for granted. Being diligent. Empathetic. I want to think it can happen, but it seems difficult in a society where we privilege sharing over listening.