Ah, I have been waiting for my big chance to vent on this issue.
As a resident and taxpayer of that incredible love-it-or-hate-it place (i live
in the same neighborhood as king britt and ursular rucker, close to where some
of the roots grew up, really an incredible neighborhood...if you can take a
little ghetto, you get crazy crazy flavor in return...in a few blocks you can
have your choice of several etheopian, eritrean, senegalese, and other
restaurants, grab a huge bag of curry and a $.50 samosa, pass a couple anarchist
squats and an anarchist community center, a few churches, some of which are
hotbeds of radical political activity, get a beer where everyone does know your
name and if they don't, they ask, pick up some soy milk at the co-op, get
some affirmation at the Wise Women's center, save your soul at Crooked Places
Made Straight church and "academy", drop your litle one off at the community
day care or co-op homeschool, get a bag of chips, plaintain chips that is, at
the domican-owned "People's" convenience store, oh, and tune into 88.1 for some
community radio), I feel a lot of pride and equal shame. (but can you tell i
love my neighborhood?)
The connection you speak of is really the activity of a handful of people, the
high-ups in the scene. Even they can have problems getting a decent turnout
around here so you can imagine what it's like for us little folks. Yes, we had
our share of PHILLYTEST copies around and that's a good thing, but King said it
himself in a private email a few weeks ago: "Philly is silly". As far as broken
beat and all its diasporic tendrils, we have a small, tight little scene here.
Most of the djs who are pushing these sounds know each other and are very
friendly and allied, and there is a good amount of decent music around. but
it's an uphill battle for everyone, even the big wigs. I'm not putting down
Philly, I love it, but it's no paradise, and the "scene" that people talk about
is kind of seperate from the rest of the city. This stuff gets created and
exported, then reimported larger than life. I have often wished I could take
the prestige that Philly has in this respect around the world and make the local
folks aware of it. They would probably appreciate it more, and be more willing
to come out for something other than house. Philly is orders of magnitude
smaller than New York or London, and we will just never have a Co-Op or
Turntables on the Hudson (or Delaware, or Skuylkill for that matter).
But we keep trying and have fun doing it.
Hmm, I don't think I anwwered your question, but I would stress that I think
this connection has much more to do with like minds than with location.
On Tue, 4 Dec 2001, Mark Bartlett wrote:
> Found the PHILLYTEST as well, does look questionable, haven't seen a
> "proper" release of it anywhere. Great tune though.
>
> Loving the Philly/West London connection happening right now, which I
> understand has been happening for at least the last 5 years or so. They way
> I heard it was ?uestlove tracked down Dego while in London on tour
> supporting Do You Want... They were each big fans of the other's sounds.
> Dego blessed Ahmir with the junglistic shuffle that eventually made it's way
> onto "You got me" (which was originally a Jill Scott cut). ?uestlove
> reciprocated and connected Dego with Ursula Rucker and Jill Scott. Philly
> heads, or others in the know, please correct my mythmaking...Any other info
> on how these two creative communities came to flow so well together would be
> greatly appreciated.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Tue Dec 04 2001 - 19:51:41 CET