![]() ![]() “It’s good that there are codes of conduct that have been negotiated over the years by people like Wayne Marshall and DJ /Rupture, these ethics of cross-cultural dialogue,” he admits. Use your keyboard’s arrow keys or hit the prev / next arrows on your screen to turn pages (page 1/2) It’s only a problem if creators are cut out of their own story… Who am I as a friend of the sound to feel protective of it? That’s a lot of old DJ culture that needs to be confronted.” “That’s what people were afraid of with vogue music, but the people who created it are getting credit for creating it,” he says, and he has a point: it might have taken a few years, but the Vjuan Allures and MikeQs of the world are in-demand across the globe. “Products get out of creators control so quickly,” he explains, launching into a larger point about the ballroom world. ![]() “With the ‘Harlem Shake’, my first thought was, “poor Baauer.” Does anyone really think this dude meant to make a politically problematic, copycatted, crackerfication of hip-hop? He didn’t mean to do that, that’s all these idiots on the Internet.” “For years, there’s been derivative tech-house and derivative hip-hop, or derivative jazz for God’s sake,” he says. ‘Why did I make this? why should it be in the public domain?’ There are so many people that are technical wizards making ‘genre of the day rip-offs’: kids with great ears and trained fingers that don’t necessarily have anything to add to the conversation.”ĭespite the sound and the fury of such ‘genre of the day rip-offs’, he dismisses the move to “problematize” copying. “People don’t ask themselves ‘why?’ enough. “I feel like holding yourself accountable for originality is essential nowadays, because it’s so easy to be influenced by everything around you,” he says. Does anyone really think this dude meant to make a politically problematic, copycatted, crackerfication of hip-hop?”Ī word not usually associated with free-wheeling club music is accountability, but for Friedberg, it’s a guiding principle. “With the ‘Harlem Shake’, my first thought was poor Baauer. “Even mood-wise, they can get very bi-polar: some tracks I make are really saccharine happy hardcore, ‘everything’s gonna be great, embrace the sunshine,’ and others you’re getting burned alive in some cave in St. Even if I don’t explicitly state them, I try to write stories for each track that I make,” he explains. “If a song of mine doesn’t have a story, no one is gonna hear it. “I was also a raver at the same time I wanted things at 200bpm.”Īs he’s grown as a producer, his focus has been on creating tracks with narrative elements, rather than replicating existing genres. Playing Latin gay nights allowed him to mash all of his influences, as he could mix Masters at Work, reggaeton, hip-hop, dancehall, and vogue beats, with a touch of hard house. “That was always very inspiring because it was high energy and vicious,” he remembers. This was nearly a decade ago, when Vjuan Allure and MikeQ mixtapes were being chopped up into “garbled messes” and uploaded to imeem. While drawing from the Caribbean sounds he had immersed himself in during a year-long college exchange program in Trinidad, he was also engaged in the “very small, very mean little ball scene” of Hartford. “I was chasing the idea of the euphoria of Caribbean music but with a darker electronic influence.” “I was trying to play weirder music and pop and Caribbean-style music,” he says, “so my production technique came out of making edits.” While he anticipated the tropical-electronic sound that producers like Dubbel Dutch and Murlo would eventually develop, it was an “anemic little field” at the time. His style evolved from his experiences throwing college parties for a diverse list of cultural houses.
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