Re: geography and The urban experience


Moonlight (roesch@augsburg.edu)
Fri, 03 Dec 1999 17:42:54 -0600



>But add tall buildings, more people and traffic and it sounds like crap.
>Conversely, listening to hip-hop in a cornfield doesn't feel right at all.

I agree, but i prefer orbital's "Middle of Nowhere" for those drives.
Maybe it's just the name, but i think it works real well on sunny summer
days though nothing (southern Idaho and Pieces of Washington and Oregon are
the specific exerience in my mind).

Yet i have to quote Saul Williams's awesome "Twice the First Time":
"Not until you listen to Rakim on a rocky mountain top have you heard hip
hop. Extract the urban element that created it and let an open-wide
countryside illustrate it. . . . you [forgot] to walk through the woods
which ain't good cos you ain't never walked through the trees listening to
'Nobody Beats the Biz' then you ain't never heard hip-hop..." The whole
song is a great pun-filled arguement that agrues the other side: separtion
of the music from its context shows it as it really is. And yeah,
Rubberoom did sound pretty good driving through the Bitteroot range. And
Barry Adamson's "As Above, So Below" through North Dakota.

Yet, once in rural Oklahoma, i had my first and only jonesing for top-40
country. It works both ways.

(BTW, if anyone wants the Saul Track, it's on the Big Dada compilation of
(mostly british) hip-hop, "BlackWhole Styles."

_________________________________
Adam Roesch / roesch@augsburg.edu
Augsburg College / Minneapolis / MN / USA

http://dogbert.augsburg.edu/~roesch/pork/
My Fila Brazillia/Pork Recordings fan site (Updated 16/11/99)

http://dogbert.augsburg.edu/~roesch/nt/ My Nobukazu Takemura Discog

"And me? I got a bug to squash." B. Adamson



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