About (The Evolution of This Strange Blog)

[New "About" Page written 4/13.)

The Evolution of This Strange Blog:

April 2007:  I decided to do a music blog as spinoff from a mostly political blog.  By writing music reviews, I was going back to an old vocation, as I’d written for a few meidum-small pop and alternative rock magazines throughout the ’80s and ’90s. 

(Yes, I’m old - 46 now.   In the ’80s and ’90s I was sort of a postpunk and then a goth and then a techno fan and then a fan of global electronica (especially Indian-influenced global electronica, “Asian Underground” - though my own ethnic roots are technically Russian-Ukrainian-Jewish, strangely enough).  But this is the mid-late 2000s.  You’d think that by the age I’m at now, I would have grown out of my obsesisons with pop music and so many of its offshoots.  But never mind…)

My intention, specifically, was to do a blog on global electronica.  Most of all, I wanted to write about M.I.A.  I had fallen in love with M.I.A.

May-June 2007:  I put off starting the new blog for two reasons:  My old computer was just getting worse and worse, and I also had to move.  I’d been living for a year in a house in the southern part of the South Bronx.  (This was a neighborhood just a couple of miles south of one of the places where I grew up.  Only now the music of The Bronx was different, because there wasn’t as much salsa, it was almost all reggaeton!  I really enjoyed listening to the reggaeton coming out of the bodegas and radios in the street.  I actually was living in a house with a bunch of “indie rock” types who played music I would have liked more 20 years ago.  But now I preferred the reggaeton.)  Anyway, the lease ran out and the people in the house had other plans that did not involve me.  So, after some unpleasantness (I really didn’t want to move), I settled on a move to Woodside, Queens, on the edge of Jackson Heights.  One of the reasons I moved here was that I would be very close to New York’s Little India.  I could get lots of Indian food here (which I had known for ten years, ever since this relationship that I had with a Pakistani woman…), and I could get Indian music, etc.  And as it turned out, Little India had a big influence on me.

July 2007:  So I started this blog that was supposed to be “global music with synthesizers.”  In addition to M.I.A. I intended to focus on some older favorite artists of global electronica, such as Cheb i Sabbah, Natacha Atlas, and Transglobal Underground (which I still do - love them all).  I was also still very much into reggaeton and dancehall at the time, but my focus was starting to shift. 

Early August 2007:  By the beginning of August, I had already heard just about all the songs that would be on M.I.A.’s second album, Kala.  I loved the first one, Arular, but I simply went nuts over the songs on Kala.  And I had gone even more nuts when I saw M.I.A. do an outdoor show at Coney Island at the end of the July.  The blog was becoming an M.I.A. fan blog, at least for a short time.   

August-September 2007:  Kala came out on August 17,  and I started exploring all the influences…  I loved the Indian influences, especially the samples that she used.  I discovered that three of the samples were taken from Indian films, and a fourth song contained references to yet another Indian film.  I started to trace all the samples and references back to the original movie scenes. (My new computer worked pretty well with Flash and YouTube. )  At the same time, I was taking a lot of walks into Little India, where I could look at the covers of Indian film DVDs in a dozen shop windows.  So, the fascination with Indian films - especially Kollywood and Bollywood - began.  I started looking at a lot of clips on Youtube.  And once I started looking at those clips, I couldn’t stop.

October-December 2007:  A few visits to the Indian music stores…  Another show by M.I.A. (this one was even better, an indoor show at Terminal 5)…   Started exploring and downloading Indian film music (mostly from the ’50s through the ’80s), found at a few good blogs.  Started downloading whole albums from Parties, Sarees and Melodies.  Also got a little into mujras.  I posted some scenes from my favorite mujra dancer, Megha, and wrote a post about mujras.  (And by the way, whether I like it or not, my stats tell me that this continues to be the most popular post.)  When I posted on mujras, I got a comment with more mujra links from Sitaji at Bollywood Food Club.  I’d visited Bollywood Food Club a few times, but I didn’t  visit it regularly until Sitaji contacted me.  And I found that Bollywood Food Club was a good source of information on Bollywood, delivered in a fun and personal style.  I added it to my blogroll, and it became one of the sites that I visited most frequently (and still is).  

January-February 2008:  I started getting inundated by presidential primary crap.  This made me think that maybe I would make this blog a little more political too.  I wrote a little about my opposition to the major parties and posted some stuff from Patti Smith and Ralph Nader.  But the political aspect didn’t really take hold.  Even when I lost my job in January 2007 - which got me to start thinking once again about how screwed up the economic system really is - I didn’t want to do too much politics on this blog.  I had done politics on another blog for a long time.  I was excited about doing something different here.

During the winter months, I also settled on an all-time favorite Indian actress-dancer, Padmini.  I went nuts over Padmini.  I’d even venture to say that in my weird psyche, Padmini - especially the Padmini between about 1958 and 1971 - started to replace M.I.A.  (And why do I get so crazy about these artists?  I wonder sometimes if it has anything to do with the fact that I haven’t had a girlfriend in a long time.  But I’m sure it’s much more than that…)  I also started taking more to this South Indian film music - mostly, Carnatic music - and the great classical dance known as the bharatanatyam.  I started noticing Padmini’s niece, Shobana…

March-April 2008:  I still do like the electronic music…  I saw Cheb i Sabbah and Karsh Kale in March and that was great.  I even still like the more western-style electronic music and hip-hop (I certainly write enough about that too - in phases).  But this Bollywood/Kollywood addiction has really taken hold, especially now that I’m watching whole films.  I’ve been kind of shy about shopping for movies even though there are all these stores nearby (and frankly, I’ve also been cheap about it, because now I don’t have a regular job), but I discovered several sites where I could watch Tamil films - mainly for the music and dance, since most of them don’t have subtitles - and I found out also that there were a lot of Bollywood films appearing on YouTube with subtitles.  So, now, this is starting to look at least 50 percent like a Bollywood/Kollywood film blog.

And that’s where we are right now, in the early spring of 2008.  Some of my old political comrades or my very old acquaintances from the days when I liked postpunk music and goth music might be a little puzzled at this point.  (Although goth music really isn’t very far away from a lot of Bollywood, actually.)    But I’m just having a hell of a good time posting lots of my favorite videos and film clips and writing about things, especially music, dance and movies, that I love.

I had some idea, maybe when I started this blog, that I would be one of the champions of the New World Music, like Wayne of Wayne&Wax, or DJ Rupture of Mudd Up!, etc.  But I’m not really that.  Sometimes my tastes coincide with the hottest trends, but sometimes I don’t care about the trends at all.  So I don’t really care about keeping up with “Global Ghettoteque” or whatever, I just want to post what I like.  It’s got a multi-cultural/global flavor, but it’s less determined by world trends than the trends in my own mind.

The original queen of this blog, Ms. Arulpragasam, still figures a lot into it.  Most of my tastes connect quite a bit with the things that she did on Kala.  On the other hand, I’m not crazy about every direction that she’s going in right now.  (I do like those “Sounds of Kuduro”; it was great to hear her voice on that record.  But, I don’t know, I’m getting a little tired of her indie-rock-hip-hop entourage and her forays into the fashion world, among other things.  I don’t condemn her for these trendier tendencies, but these are not the things that I like most about M.I.A.  I would like to hear her do more with the Indian film music, but I’m not seeing signs of that.)  So, anyway, this is not really an M.I.A. fan blog anymore, even if she still figures big in it (and even if it retains a name taken from a line in one of her old songs).

This blog is just its own strange thing.  And I hope some people like it…

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