Azucar5

Co-written by DJs Ushka and Ripley.

When we talk about “global bass” as a genre and scene in New York, it’s not always clear what fits into this recently generated category. Who gets to claim “global bass” and what does it represent? This desire to cookie-cutter a range of musical genres as a way to identify a “scene” has in its doing led to the lack of inclusion, in media accounts, of many communities who are engaging with global music and culture in meaningful ways, with amazing music.

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I’m speaking today about a topic that I’ve been living for years, and only recently (and with the help of awesome Dj/Activist/thinkers like DJ Ushka) been able to articulate in a public way, and combine with my other scholarship: “Rocking the Body Politics; Musical Spaces for Resistance & Survival.” This is an extension of the workshop Thanu/Ushka and I organized at the Allied Media Conference last year on “Radical Organizing from the Dancefloor,” combined with ideas from my research and dj experience that I also presented at the Clandestino Institut in Göteborg, Sweden last year (Exile, Resistance, Occupation, Music).

mannbodypolitic

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Duttycast 001

This month, Dutty Artz kicked off a series of monthly livestream/podcast events called the Duttycast.

The Duttycast will alternate between conversations/interactive experiences where we dig deeper into some of the issues all of us, as artists crossing borders and boundaries, have to deal with; and live musical experiences representing the wide range of Dutty Artz talents.

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Ripley HalifaxMarch2013

One of things that connects fellow Dutty Artzer Thanu and I is that we both see dancefloors as political spaces. This doesn’t mean that people spend much time talking or signing petitions or getting out the vote in the club, it only means that the ways people relate to each other in the club (or warehouse, or open field, or basement) can shape what kind of power we have access to, individually and collectively. Some time after playing and dancing together and experiencing each others’ skills at building those moments through smashing dance parties, and finding more and more like-minded people (like Anthology of Booty, in DC, for example) we decided to organize a session for the Allied Media Conference called “Radical Organizing from the Dancefloor” where we got together with a crew of folks and strategized about how those liberating, connecting, transcendent, and unsettling moments on the dancefloor come about.

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