Stakes Is High

It has been almost 5 years since the last essay! Even though I occasionally share stuff I find interesting and related to this project, I haven’t shared my thoughts on what I’m working on and going through. As mentioned in the last essay I wrote, this project is not synonymous …

Read more

But yeah I can relate to you for sure…

J. Myracks: you learned a lot from having more exposure to like a larger corporation and kind of seeing the ins and outs of their business which is probably helpful for what you’re going to do in the future as well. I don’t want to make it a negative conversation, but are there any low lights that you experience if you can talk about it?

Evin Groves: Frustrations that I would have, like hey a hip-hop music producer needs X Y and Z features, we need these things and I felt at times those weren’t priorities for them. It was about hey, let’s hurry up roll it out, let’s you know… let’s see how it can… I want it to make as much money as possible was more of the priority than what I was after. I’m a hip-hop producer at my core first so I need those things for a hip-hop producer addressed in this product…

Some of those things we’ll find out in the future… because some of those things that they probably push back on, maybe they were right… like I don’t know. I don’t have all the answers. And yeah there was some push back there on things that I wanted to see for the culture and our audience.

J. Myracks: I can completely relate to that because that’s that’s kind of what I experienced at native [instruments] as well. Obviously the market is bigger than hip-hop and we kind of have to have some balance in the approach. But I also kind of felt like in some ways the data says that hip-hop still has the greatest market share of music consumption, so I would expect that there was a little bit more prioritization on the needs of the hip-hop culture since it is the dominant Market in music. That was always a challenge for me as well, so I can completely relate. But who knows, maybe those decisions were the right decisions in the end as you said, we’ll see… but yeah I can relate to you for sure!

Diaspora as Translation and Decolonisation

“I think we need to challenge north-centric understandings of migration diaspora, and also ethnic diversity, because these north-centric approaches, they are often unable to see others, for example the colonized or racialized diasporas as sources of ideas and concepts. They fail to recognize that racialized diasporas in the global north, through their struggles, have actually conceptually and practically expanded ideas about equality and freedom.”

– Ipek Demir, 2022

Hip-Hop Epistemology

This video is from a Q&A with P. Khalil Saucier from the conference Hip-Hop Transcultural: Constructing and Contesting Identity, Space, and Place in the Americas and beyond (2021). After his Keynote entitled: TransCultural Flow and the Problem of the Cipher. I asked the following question:

Do you (or others) see anything constructive in viewing Hip-Hop as an epistemological invention, then, as the bridge between ontology and the lived and practiced experience? I’m not sure where that takes us, but have you or others worked on such framing before?

The answer is yes, but…

Bedroom Beethovens

Hear stories from notable music-makers on what they sacrificed to create the music you love.

– Bedroom Beethovens

The Conflict of the Faculties

At first glance we seem to be dealing with a double circle: that which is to be proved is already assumed, and we test our assumptions in implementing them. In actual fact, however, this is not self-referential at all; it is a dynamic chain of interactions, transformations, and articulations that may ultimately produce more reality.

Henk Borgdorff, 2012