boothism

Kalup Linzy “Chewing Gum” & “Dirty Trade”

So thinking back on last week’s post I really started questionning the young/avant garde parts of the title. Don’t get me wrong, I love all the cats on the list, but I’m not sure I’d classify them all under that banner again.  I mean Oxbow alone’s been making audiences uncomfortable for over 10 years, Spooky and the Fellinis for damn near the same amount of time. And while Greg Tate (in this week’s post) and his Burnt Sugar crew are have been giggin (as far as I know) for less than 10 years, Tate’s been putting literary and artistic smackdown on the industry for damn near quarter of a century.

So with that in mind, and seeing how in some ways pulling out a list of at least half old school artists only echoes Morgan Craft’s  sentiment in the original article, I’m giving myself a new mission: to find the most out there, “cutting edge (it’s early, and it’s the 1st desctiption that came to me)” diaspora artists out there.  Check back every so often and see who I dig up.  But until then, some mo’ favorites: (more…)

This is already snowballing into something bigger.

I woke up this morning to the usual coffee, smokes and words and an article I’d been meaning to get to for a while. Back in March, over at Esther Ivereem’s excellent Seeing Black site, black American experimental musician Morgan Craft asked the question where are the young Black America experimental musicians under 50?

While I was waiting for approval to join the discussion on their forum I said fuck it, and figured I’d just start a list.

It’s getting to be a pretty long fucking list.

Which is great news for a longer, more involved project I’m working on (hint: black, white, read all over an bigger than a breadbox) but bad news for someone who’s on deadline and needs to be writing. So in the interest of brevity, and me getting my ass to work on time, here’s the 1st ten. There a couple of gimme’s and a few you probably haven’t heard, or at least heard much of.  I’ll post another 10 later. The rest I think I’ll just keep in the pocket for now.

I was pretty liberal with what defines avant garde and experimental, and there’s some punk, some rock and a little hip hop and out there R&B.  We can follow the Rob Fields school and label them all as Black Rock or we can classify the groups as “other” or just wait ’til some young enterprising music journalist finds a way to lump them all together, (or at least until I’ve had enough coffee to start being creative for the morning).

But until then…

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