Guides In All Directions
Welsh reggae, Brazilian funk, and hip hop from the Middle East and Pacific Northwest
This title referring, of course, to geographic guides, but also temporal ones. Bandcamp Daily provides histories on Peruvian chicha and Cajun/Creole folk, Dazed contemplates next steps for Brazilian bailes, and the Mags (DJ + Mix) report on contemporary happenings in Lisbon and Seoul. Plus a host of writing about the up-and-coming in North Africa and what artists there can learn from Bad Bunny.
The Album
Grupo Celeste, …El Fabuloso!” (Peru): Spiky, brightly-colored rhythms twisting past vocals that carry a trans-lingual sense of longing.
The Reports
Felipe Maia explores the future of baile funk for Dazed, speaking with seven scene insiders about what’s next for a genre that, despite its global success, is facing a new wave of repression within Brazil itself.
Martine Douglas is our expert guide through the Pacific Northwest’s winding underground rap scene in this Bandcamp Daily feature.
Also in Bandcamp Daily, Michal Wieczorek pens a history of Peruvian chicha, charting the genre’s course from Amazonian cumbia to the cultural juggernaut it is today (with some obligatory struggles against government hostility along the way).
Tom Lea and Chal Ravens dedicated an entire podcast episode to Baltimore’s club music scene which, in the grand scheme of America’s urban dance music, certainly hasn’t gotten much attention. In classic No Tags style, the actual interviews begin after an entertaining half-hour intro.
Is Lisbon’s club scene undercovered? Doesn’t matter - April Clare Welsh’s in-depth report on her resident city for DJ Mag breaks new ground, describing the economic and political forces that are making the scene increasingly inaccessible for already marginalized communities.
Mixmag contributor Jun Kim comes out with a longform piece on how more and more Korean DJs are getting their start through university clubs called dongari, creating a new path onto the DJ circuit that’s somewhat unique to South Korea.
Daniel Dylan Wray takes on another history for the Guardian, this one diving into the forgotten legacy of Black soundsystem culture in Wales.
I’ll admit I have not spent much time thinking about the role of the accordion in the music of Southwest Louisiana, but Devon Leger’s fascinating Bandcamp piece on the Cajun and Creole artists that built this tradition has convinced me to pay attention.
Rolling Stone Magazine’s MENA branch published a couple of interesting end-February pieces I’ll sneak in here, one on the producers building Egypt’s hip hop scene (Engy Hashem) and another in conversation with a few artists representing North Africa’s “new wave” (Dounia El Barhdadi). Slightly more recently, OkayAfrica’s Amuna Wagner ponders if Bad Bunny’s ability to achieve worldwide fame without shying away from political topics could be a blueprint for North African artists as well.
