Ear Conditioning

Mutamassik tipped me off to her latest text re: MashUp’s:

In whatever blaze of creative brilliance it may have started, ‘Mash-up’ has become synonymous with ‘Skim-Skam‘ (aka Lay-Z!), my term for the current musical/journalistic/PR trend that nonchalantly quotes and glibly references African, Jamaican, Arabic, Celtic, etc music (i.e., music embedded in a culture that means alot more to it’s people than an outsider could ever understand) without going deep (Skim), regurgitating it back out into the world with an air of ‘Uh-huh, got it‘  and making a career out of it (Skam).   {Seems to have become an especially useful cover for people who really have no ideas of their own, but still want to appear cool by affiliating themselves with whatever they’re ‘mashing up’}.

Then an email about this documentary Walking On Eggshells over at Boing Boing landed in the inbox.  It features DJ Ripley, Michael Cunningham, Eclectic Method, and DJ Earworm  among others.