Rite of Myself

November 1, 2011 By 4 Comments

“I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

This Saturday I will perform a solo work called Rite of the Butcher at the United Solo Festival at Theatre Row near Times Square. I want to take this opportunity not just to plug the performance but to write briefly about it from a perspective I do not usually share: not the aesthetics of the work, not its relationship to other forms of theatrical and embodied research, not the technique that underlies it or the poetic language that structures it — but its meaning for me personally. Why do I do it?

Creating a work like this not only doesn’t pay but costs money. I have paid the festival to produce me and several studios to house my rehearsals over the past year, not to mention videography and a few other purchases here and there: things like a carving knife, a pair of round blue glasses, and a hem on the cuffs of a pair of black pants. And beyond the monetary cost there is a huge number of hours spent mostly in the studio developing and rehearsing the score. Plus the administrative work of applying for venues like this festival and of doing publicity for the show.

I no longer think of myself as an actor because I have not performed in a work directed by someone else since 2005. I have no interest in auditioning or being shaped and directed as actors and dancers usually are. Even in collaborative ensembles I always found myself unsatisfied on an intellectual and artistic level. I simply don’t like embodying performance scores unless I feel that I have been in on their development since the beginning. That’s why I’ve never trained in yoga or martial arts for more than a few months at a time. It’s not mine.

This sense of “mine-ness” could seem greedy or controlling, except that the thing that is mine does not exist, it is not an object, it cannot be possessed. In fact it’s not really “mine-ness” so much as “me-ness”. I want to do what I am; to be what I do; to know what I’m doing; to understand how and why I am doing it. In other words, I want to be the creator and the doer simultaneously. That’s why I can’t be an actor or a director, and why I don’t think of myself as a theater person even though I spend most of my time either creating or writing about theatrical performance. That’s also why for the past six years I have worked either alone or with a single other person in a long-term collaborative partnership.

From 2002 to 2010, I didn’t like to think of what I was doing as “theater” because I associated theater with the moment of spectacle and with a relationship to a public sphere that I couldn’t bring myself to believe in. These days, perhaps due to my academic work, I have a much stronger but more complicated sense of the public sphere. It no longer feels ridiculous or absurd to want to appear “in public” as doing something: writing a book, making a presentation, or giving a performance. I no longer dismiss the public sphere as entirely dominated by consumerism, even if mainstream entertainment and advertising remain omnipresent and nearly omnipotent.

But still I do not like to think of this performance as a “show”. That word for me remains stuck in too many dangerous connotations: above all, the passiveness or at least separateness of the spectator, as if what I am doing onstage is categorically different from what each of us does in our daily lives. It is not. My movements are just movements. My songs are just songs. My words are just words. Do not look at what I am doing for its strangeness. Do not admire it as a decorative object. Do not ask what I mean to say but what it means that I am doing it. Ask why I am doing it and look in it for what you recognize as your own. I do this because the details of this practice are me; they are what I am. But we all have practices, we all entwine ourselves in the details of specific field, and this is what makes the world go round.

More and more I think it is fundamental to remember how much of our world is created and sustained by human activity. The more artificial our world becomes, the easier it is to forget this and to think that the world sustains itself. But the family, the city, the institution, the social movement, the corporation, the bank, the court of law, the country, the tribe — each of these is created through embodied practices. Each is sustained through human work, and each can be dismantled or transformed in the same way. What would happen if, when we looked at things, we saw the work that went into them? Not the performance, but the performer — not the building, but the builders — not the institution, but the people.

[Photos by Ian Douglas. Rite of the Butcher created and performed by Ben Spatz. For more information and other projects please visit Urban Research Theater.]

Filed Under: Art, Culture, Media, Music, New York, Politics, Presentations, Process, Writing

Talons: A Case Study in DIY Educational Technology

June 17, 2011 By 2 Comments

On June 9, 2011, students in the music program at Gleneagle Secondary School, a high school in Vancouver suburb Coquitam, BC, played its spring concert to a packed house in a 450 seat auditorium. A first in Gleneagle history, the performance was broadcast live over Internet radio to listeners all over the world. And while  that might sound like a huge undertaking requiring serious AV and IT infrastructure, it was not. Not at all. In a brilliant feat of do-it-yourself EdTech (or what some folks might have once called edupunk), the concert was streamed live by Bryan Jackson, a Music and English teacher in the school’s TALONS program, and graduating senior Olga Belikov, with a Macbook, some free software and a USB microphone. That’s it. That’s all it took to broadcast the spring concert to anyone anywhere who wanted to hear it. And it sounded great.

Gleneagle’s Principal was aware of what was going on but wasn’t entirely clear on the details. During one point in the concert, he  walked backstage where Bryan explained all the moving parts: the unremarkable laptop and microphone, the free software, the web radio station (DS106Radio — read about it in my last post and here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), how he and Olga used Twitter to build a live audience of listeners from from all over the US and Canada, and  that the broadcast was being recorded and would be posted for posterity to Soundcloud, a free audio sharing site, so that anyone in the Gleneagle community or anyone else anywhere could listen to and respond to any part of the performance. Bryan also explained how he had been using various other social media tools at Gleneagle including YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, blogs, and web radio to enhance lessons, to share performances, and to communicate with students and colleagues. His Principal was duly impressed. The administration had been aware of and supported Bryan’s and other teachers’ use of social media but had never up to this point fully engaged their potential to increase engagement, promote programs, and share and interact with parents, teachers, students, and district administrators or anyone else. While they had an inkling of what teachers were doing with free web tools, this broadcast, its recording, and the new interest at the school in webcasting were, according to Bryan, probably the first tangible outcomes of Gleneagle teachers’ experiments with creating and sharing on the web. Here is a one minute audio clip of Bryan describing the Principal’s visit backstage:

Bryan Jackson on Broadcasting the Spring Concert

I love the irony here: Bryan tells us that he was able to experiment with various social media and web publishing tools and explore how their use might benefit his program and school only because one of the school’s IT people gave him his computer’s administrative password, which he really wasn’t supposed to have. It’s fairly common practice for IT departments in companies and educational institutions to withhold admin access to computers from end users for fear that they will go messing where they shouldn’t and damage the computer, contract a virus, install unauthorized software, or do things on their machines of which the IT department or the institution does not approve. This also ensures that end users have to rely upon IT personnel to perform simple maintenance tasks, modify configurations, and to update or install software. This is the traditional model where IT is in control of who has access and who does not while the end users are disempowered and must rely upon IT to make any changes to their machines. Here’s a wonderful example of a teacher who was trusted with full access to his computer and was able to use it to break new ground without hinderances imposed from above. When creative teachers have the latitude to experiment with the technology that’s readily available to them, wonderful things can happen. If there was ever an argument in favor of rethinking the model of how and to whom administrative access is granted at educational institutions, this is it.

I don’t know much about the general feeling at Gleneagle toward the privacy and security implications of web publishing and social media in instruction and for promotional purposes so I can’t speak to that. But it seems to me that, generally, there’s still quite a bit of trepidation about such things among educators. That trepidation, I’ll argue, tends to grow out of 20th Century notions of public exposure and our relationship with mass media and their roles in our lives. Privacy and security are certainly real concerns (FERPA exists for a reason), but it does appear that the discourse around them is often animated by outdated ideas about the production and consumption of media. It used to be that if you appeared on TV or radio, or in print, you had done or were involved in something a small group of editors and producers felt it was their imperative to broadcast. It had to be fairly remarkable, for good or for ill, to make the papers. Having your image or story broadcast to the world via a mass medium like radio or television, was special — something fairly unusual in the “look, Mom, I’m on TV!” sort of a way, unless you were among the relatively few who made a living in front of a camera or microphone.

Now, when anyone can shoot a video on a mobile phone and upload it immediately to YouTube, where it can potentially be seen by thousands, if not millions of people within just a few days, there’s a real banality to this sort of exposure. Most of our students share their lives on the internet in some way  every day. More and more of them live their lives in both physical and virtual space — this is something that those of us in their 30s and 40s who teach and administer programs are just now getting our heads around. Whats more, the means of media production, it has been said again and again by new media thinkers like Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky and a host of others, are now in the hands of everyday people, no longer just media professionals. With relatively little effort and technical expertise, anyone can publish to the web. Anyone can broadcast audio or video to the internet on a mobile phone and an application that costs almost nothing. Heck, a bunch of us edtechhers built an open community radio station out of nothing more than a $25/mo server and a desire to play radio DJ.

Bryan Jackson and his colleagues at Gleneagle understand this well and are making amazing use of it. Thanks to a leadership that seems to appreciate the possibility the new media order offers educators, they have been empowered to use a combination of social media to do on their own what once was the province of AV professionals and marketing departments and required substantial infrastructure. While we’re by now used to seeing inklings of this sort of thing on the post-secondary level, it is encouraging and inspiring to see in happen in K-12. Bravo, Gleneagle Music! Bravo!

[This post is cross posted at my personal blog, thisevilempire.com]

Filed Under: Audience, Computer Mediated Instruction, EdTech, Education, edupunk, Internet, Media, Music, Social Media, Web 2.0 Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Sharing stories, expanding worlds

October 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I was recently introduced to the work of a wonderful British singer/songwriter  Catherine Paver. Her self-introduction reads: “I write storytelling songs in an acoustic/Americana style. I love deserts, rivers and dusty little towns full of stories. I am a London-based singer/songwriter and accompany myself on guitar and keyboards.” At the midpoint of the semester, when you’re swamped with work and terrified by deadlines, the expansive spaces of the American West and Southern Africa in her photographs are dangerously inviting, as are the touching stories told in her lyrical songs, as you can tell from their titles: “The Fire of the West,” “River Song,” “Thunder Gold.”

On Paver’s website, you can find mesmerizing photos of the places that have inspired her songs. Many of them feature proverbs and aphorisms originating in those places along with the lines from her songs. One saying stood out to me, mainly because it managed to express my dissertation thesis with the clarity, precision, and suggestiveness I could never hope to achieve in my writing: “People are people through other people” (Xhosa proverb).

I was also tempted to read this in connection to our last Great Works faculty roundtable that centered on the different uses of student writing in the classroom: modeling, peer reviews, blogging, writing workshops, collaborative writing (i.e., wiki). One faculty member voiced a very common concern that students are not always ready to give each other constructive criticism in peer reviews. One could add that more often than not the recipients of their peers’ feedback tend to ignore it, jumping to the professor’s comments for obvious reasons. Yet, we still try to find ways to encourage students to open doors into each other’s writing, and through that into each other’s experiential realities and thinking paradigms. Isn’t it, in the long run, about helping them grow as people through other people (other than the authority figure of their professor)? David Ignatow says it better than I ever could in his poem “My Place”:

I am good to talk to,

you feel in my speech

a location, an expectation

and all said to me in reply

is to reinforce this feeling

because all said is towards

my place and the speaker

too grows his

from which he speaks to mine

having located himself

through my place.

Filed Under: Faculty Development, Feedback, Music

On Paglia on Gaga

September 23, 2010 By 3 Comments

I’ve been following with some curiosity the groundswell of blogosphere rage  following Camille Paglia’s attempted takedown of Lady Gaga in the Sunday Times. (A few of the many examples here, here, and here.) Each day for the past week or so, every glance at Twitter or my RSS feed yields up another vehement rebuttal, attacking Paglia’s thesis (an admittedly shaky one, centering on the disembodied asexuality of Gaga and her generation) and Paglia herself (comments range from critiques of her archaic interpretations of feminism to pretty vulgar bursts of outright misogyny). Given Gaga’s immense popular appeal, as well as the fact that she’s become a novel cultural “text” to be continually unraveled by and for the academic community (she’s even the subject of a self-described, hagiographically-titled academic journal, Gaga Stigmata), this is unsurprising.

But the more I read, the less interested I became in analyzing Paglia’s argument and its various deconstructions, and the more I began to speculate whether more effective writing on Paglia’s part might have won a few more readers over to her side. Respondents parsed her arguments (fairly accurately, it seems) without critiquing her actual writing. But the writing itself fails to function as the academic work of cultural criticism it’s framed as, structurally and syntactically. It’s rife with generalizations—and dated ones, at that (ie., Gaga is often seen “tottering down the street in some outlandish get-up,” with a “bizarre hairdo assembled by an invisible company of elves,” and a face that’s “creepy” as it mouths “insipid” lyrics). Tucked amid dangling modifiers and abrupt transitions, her generalizations shift in the direction of Gaga’s demographic, a generation of “atrophied” voices forced to “communicate mutely through a stream of atomized, telegraphic text messages.” Of course, this generation comprises Paglia’s students at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she teaches media studies—ostensibly without attempting to understand new conventions in communication. I have to wonder, though—does she understand the old ones, either?

Filed Under: Art, Media, Music, Politics

Reggie Watts for Poet Laureate

September 22, 2010 By 2 Comments

So last night, my colleague and friend Amy buzzed me about a free comedy show at Upright Citizens Brigade. She is doing her dissertation research on stand-up comics in New York, so such locales constitute fieldsites for her. There would be other comedians, including Jeffery Joseph relating his experience teaching ‘at-risk youth’ from Riker’s Island, Ron Lynch playing an animatronic comedian of the future, Daniel Kitson on existential loneliness, and surprise heavyweights Louis CK and Jim Gaffigan.

The draw for me, however, was Reggie Watts. The man came out for the final set, when my lungs had already been effectively inverted from hard laughter by the preceding parade of absurdity. Watts burst through the flimsy curtain, his face hidden somewhere between the ‘fro clearly outta contro’ and complementary beard and pot-belly. He looks a bit like Lenny Kravitz if he let himself go, a lot. Only with much more of what the experts call ‘talent,’ no offense to LK or his devoted dozens of followers.

On stage he’s armed with two mics, one of which is plugged into a doo-dad on a stool with little knobs and switches. Mostly his weapon of choice is his voice, which he wields with unpredictable grace. The gizmo is to loop beats and modulate sounds beyond the limits of his larynx, which is expansive as it is. His show is part beat-box concert, with organic renditions of hip-hop- and soul-inspired music, part pastiche theater of impersonations. But not impressions of celebrities or political figures or cultural stereotypes. In rapid-fire, Watts channels the everyday speech patterns and lingo you can put a place but not quite a face to. Then suddenly he’s breaking into song again. It’s a linguistic and musical kaleidoscope that reaches trascendental ground: Watts in some moments seems to turn himself into a pure instrument of sound and vernaculars. I’d say he takes joy in reproducing, like scrambled ethnographic recorder stuck on play, words and beats, if it weren’t for the deadpan delivery that leaves the audience in wonder. I ought to report: while half of the audience giggled in delight at Watt’s virtuosity, the other half stared in bewilderment. I wouldn’t be surprised if the latter were the more intended reaction.

I try to describe this performance, but I honestly don’t know what to make of Reggie Watts. I only sense that an obligation to tell others about him, maybe to warn them maybe to claim that I saw him long before he got famous and sold out or jumped the shark. My first encounter with Watts was this meta-hiphop music video, F*ck Sh*t Stack, where he skewers, in successive verses, rap’s most cherished stereotypes: curse words, the objectification of women, and conspicuous consumption. But satire is not Watts’s modus operandi. It’s too sincere, in a way. (Although musically, he does have his intimate serious side.)

Rather, I direct you towards some of the philosophical and linguistic buffonery, like this clip where Watts opens with an Esperanto-esque gibberish monologue:

or this gig at Google headquarters that seems to go right over the poor egg-head employees:

Or this Max Headroom-esque mix:

In effect, he’s all very -esque. Watts has even faked his own death (and life) as an Exxon ‘maintenance man’ who donates his body to his employer to be turned into fuel (“I, I think I’d like to be a, uh, candle…”)

I suppose I present Watts to the emerging discussion on this site over the relationship between thought and language, content and style. How can language refer to absolutely nothing, yet carry so much meaning? To watch him shape-shift in front of your eyes so jarringly from Queen’s-English professorial cadence into Bed Stuy street slang makes one suddenly aware of the intimate relationship between language as a performed, public activity and cultural identity. It also makes one wonder at how Watts can so effortlessly assume these voices. And finally, there’s the phenomenon of humor at work here: it’s hilarious to speak through the idioms of others, while it’s not funny at all to speak about them, as I have done here.

Filed Under: Fun, Language, Music, Non-Standard English, Style, To Ponder

The Performance Artist and the Archives

February 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment

During the fall of 2009, I took a course at the Graduate Center with Prof. Jean Graham-Jones, “Contemporary Latin American Theatre and Performance.” Going in, I had assumed that much of the archival material we would be referencing would be from the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL), a collaboration between New York University Libraries and NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. This digital venue brings together videos of performance throughout the Americas that would otherwise be “inaccessible to scholars.”

While it’s true that this is a respected and reliable one-stop reference place to find (and preserve) such materials, given the contemporary focus of the class, YouTube offered hours of browsing enjoyment. The two resources serve very difficult functions—and have very different levels of functionality. (Especially since the Hemispheric Insititute’s archive is frequently restricted to performances that they themselves have had filmed at their own events.)

I don’t know if it counts as procrastination or further research, but I whittled away many evenings that semester watching clips of the dynamic performers we had been studying.

First, here’s a link to a performance by Mexican cabaret performer, Astrid Hadad, from the HIDVL. Her performance, ‘Amores Pelos,’ was filmed in Monterrey, Mexico, in July 2001, as part of the Second Annual Hemispheric Institute Seminar. It’s a long clip, but worth the time to see the costumes changes involved in the “wearable art” of her hair. The site provides a bit of context for those first meeting this artist’s work: “Hadad blends popular songs and ranchero, son and bolero music and political satire with highly theatrical precision to create a genre of music she calls ‘Heavy Nopal’.”

And then, below, is another unique Hadad performance, this time from YouTube (and featuring some well-placed self-flagellation). It brings us into the actual performance space, and is part of a larger documentary about Hadad.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OutdQW_jz0g[/youtube]

Filed Under: Art, Fun, Internet, Media, Music, Politics, Resources Tagged With: , ,

“Songs of freedom kept coming…”

November 10, 2008 By 1 Comment

Remember Wyclef Jean’s “If I Was President”?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pq_3OheqzU[/youtube]

Watching the video now, I can’t help but think about how much of the song and the imagery both predicts and falls short of our current moment. It presents the idea of a Black man as president as a desirable possibility paired with the worry that it may ultimately be dangerous for the person elected. So, the chorus makes me kind of… nervous. However, the song has to be historicized: it was released around the time of the last presidential election, which had a totally different political climate. More importantly, it is certainly not about our current President-elect, who was barely on the national radar at the time. Despite the nerve-wracking chorus, the song is ultimately one of hope and dreaming for things like an end to war and poverty, better schools in the ‘hood, and a cure for AIDS and cancer.

I bring up Wyclef’s video because I just saw will.i.am’s new video, in which cynicism and fear have been replaced by pure joy and celebration.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHWByjoQrR8[/youtube]

What a difference four years makes. It’s like Wyclef went to sleep four years ago dreaming of being president, and will.i.am woke up “feeling brand new/ ’cause the dreams that I’ve been dreamin/ finally came true.”

Finally, there’s no official video yet, but what do people think about Nas’s “Black President”? You can find fan videos on youtube, or listen to it at his myspace page.

Filed Under: Music, Politics

Come on up for the Rising

November 6, 2008 By 1 Comment

A lot of people are talking about how President Elect Obama and his team ran a virtually flawless campaign from start to finish. I’d like to briefly reflect on one aspect of the campaign – music. Music has always been a powerful form of communication. The right song can define a movement, a generation, and even a campaign. Howard Wolfson (Communications Director for Hillary Clinton’s campaign) noted in a NY Times Opinion piece published on Monday November 3:

“Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Don’t Stop’ set the modern standard for campaign songs when Bill Clinton adopted it as his own in 1992. Its admonition, ‘Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow,’ dovetailed perfectly with the premise of Mr. Clinton’s run. Sixteen years later, Hillary Clinton’s campaign spent a considerable amount of time deciding on its song.”

Hillary’s team eventually selected Celine Dion’s “You and I,” which Wolfson admitted he “jokingly predicted would signal the end of the campaign.” Well … the Obama team obviously fared better, and they used a variety of songs.

First there was Ben Harper’s “Better Way,” a song with a positive message of change that likely appealed to younger voters. The campaign also used Stevie Wonder’s fun and upbeat Motown hit “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours,” which is more well-known and likely appealed to voters of all ages. This was played before Obama took the stage late on Tuesday night, but it’s the song they played immediately after he gave his speech that I found most intriguing – Bruce Springsteen’s, “The Rising.” “The Rising” was originally released in July 2002, the title track on Springsteen’s album that he wrote in response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The lyrics of the song allude to the struggles of the firefighters who responded on that morning, climbing higher and higher into the Towers in attempt to rescue people. 343 of these men never returned home.

Can’t see nothin in front of me
Can’t see nothin coming up behind
I make my way through this darkness
I can’t feel nothing but this chain that binds me
Lost track of how far I’ve gone
How far I’ve gone, how high I’ve climbed
On my backs a sixty pound stone
On my shoulder a half mile of line
Left the house this morning
Bells ringing filled the air
Wearin’ the cross of my calling
On wheels of fire I come rollin’ down here

Luke commented in his last post about how “somber” Obama looked when he took the stage, and I agree. He struck a tone that was less celebratory and more reflective of the struggles this country has to face in the years ahead. That’s why “The Rising” proved to be the perfect song to play after his speech to communicate this message. With one choice of song, he offered a subtle and respectful homage to the victims of 9/11, showed that he recognizes we’re in a dark period right now (Can’t see nothin in front of me, Can’t see nothin coming up behind), but if we stick together there is hope for redemption:

Come on up for the rising
Come on up, lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising tonight

Filed Under: Music, Politics, Uncategorized

A New Generation of “Native Tongues”

April 16, 2008 By 1 Comment

Parenthood is undeniably a blessing.  Yet, if I were to speak honestly, I’d note that there are certain drawbacks, not the least of which is ceding control over the soundtrack to your life.  My sweet soon-to-be four year old doesn’t want to listen to many of my tunes.  I’m fortunate that her choices are usually pretty tolerable.  While I dig Dan Zanes or Laurie Berkner in small doses, they get play in our house mostly because the munchkin wants them.

Of course, she’s allowed her own music.  I know our tastes will likely diverge through her adolescence, and we’ll have less of a chance during those years to connect over common sounds.  That’s part of why I’m so glad that she’s worked the Dino-5 into her rotation recently.  This collection of hip-hop heads is organized by Prince Paul, who produced the landmark De La Soul albums 3 Feet High and Rising, De La Soul is Dead, and Buhloone Mind State, and features Ladybug Mecca (formerly of the Digable Planets), Chali 2na (Jurassic Five), Wordsworth (an underground Brooklyn MC who appeared on records by A Tribe Called Quest and Blackstar), and Scratch (the vocal turntable, formerly of the Roots).  Their debut album is a storybook, narrated by the poet Ursula Rucker, about 5 dino friends at their dino school.  My kid is now walking around, rapping in the deep voice of 2na’s character, T-Rex, “I may be big and scary, but I’m really pretty nice.”

Dine 5

What’s so striking about the Dino 5 for me is the way they capture the essence of hip-hop as it was during its golden era in the late 1980s-mid 1990s, before capital swooped in and co-opted what was once predominantly an alternative and oppositional art form.  Popping off about your fly Adidas or your adversary’s nappy head and rotund relatives, rapping about dancing, music, girls, boys, friends, enemies, and the neighborhood.  Most of that gave way to Big Pimpin’, bling bling, and baseless braggadacio.

Hip-hop is still a vibrant art form, always will be, but there’s a reason that the areas of the music that challenge listeners aurally, poetically, and politically moved “underground,” out of site from the casual observer who doesn’t have the time or the passion to dig for those sounds.  Hip-hop ain’t dead, y’all, far from it; it’s been integrated in interesting ways into other forms, it’s been globalized, and there’s still plenty of innovation happening.  Yet hip-hop’s foundational meaning has been clouded over the past generation by its loudest voices.

So I’m happy to share with my daughter a feeling similar to what I got during my adolescence, listening to De La transmit live from Mars.  The Dino 5 represent the best of hip-hop: role playing, storytelling, deep danceable beats, learned references and musical quotations, wicked flow, and lyrical playfulness.  Their music is both nice enough for a four year-old and “nice” enough for her purist dad.  Kid tested, pops approved.

As my daughter takes her first tentative steps towards reading, it heartens me to be able to introduce her to the poetry and artistry of hip-hop with something that’s her speed.  Soon enough, she’ll be barraged with beats and words and sounds.  The Dino 5′s album gives her hip-hop that’s more sophisticated than the corny rapping on Sesame Street.  Hopefully, it will help her sort through the cacophony that she’ll meet as she grows, and find something that’s as meaningful to her as the music of my youth is to me.

Here’s a couple of brief clips to tack sound onto my words.

T-Rex struggles with how other kids see him, and hopes that they can think twice about how nice he may be:

[audio:trrex.mp3]

Tracy Triceratops has a tough time keeping her voice down:

[audio:scream.mp3]

Posdnous introduces the “D.A.I.S.Y. Age” on De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising (1989):

[audio:daisy.mp3]

Filed Under: Asides, Fun, Interpersonal Communication, Music