[dizzy in frisco]

Dizzybam (MySpace)

Okay, so maybe you had to be there. Maybe you had to be packed into the Berkeley Square on a Saturday night, in a crowd that mixed university kids, cholos, skate punks, backpacker hip-hop kids from Oakland. Maybe you had to wait while the band set up their instruments — a couple guitars, a trap set, congas, horn mikes — dancing in the meantime to some song you'd never heard before, some kind of psychedelic masterpiece built around a broken Gene Chandler sample, while Japanese anime porn played on the screen in front of the stage. In those days, before the Web, these kinds of sights and sounds were something you had to travel for. And then the DJ would cut out, the screen would go up, and a crowd would pour onto the stage, as mixed up as the crowd on the floor, and led by Fredimac, a tall blond rapper who would whip us into a bouncing frenzy.

Dizzybam never went anywhere. Most of the bands from those days didn't — Fungo Mungo, MCM and the Monster, Blüchunks, Aztlan Nation — but that was never the point. And the demos never seemed to do justice to the experience of standing there at the edge of the stage as the horns hit and the singer started jumping and the crowd pressed in from behind. Dizzybam's no different in that respect: the record that remains is a shadow of what was. But I'm glad I found it out there to remind me of those amazing Berkeley nights when Dizzybam rocked the house and for a moment the world felt real.

[countries: afghanistan]

PA ZANY MAY TAZA
Shakeela Naz
Mastana.net

MORAD E DIL
Fawad Ramiz
Kamnoma

MUSLIMS 4 LIFE
Kandahar Prince
Mastana.net

There are 192 countries in the world. Today begins my alphabetical musical journey through all of them. Some, like the United States and the United Kingdom, will be overwhelming in their wealth of material. For others, like Kiribati, it may be hard to find anything at all. Nevertheless, here we go.

It's fitting that we begin with Afghanistan, which is more or less in the middle of the vast landmass that is Eurasiafrica and has long been a global crossroads. It's fitting, too, that the music has a rhythm that throws us off balance. Indeed, it's not just the rhythm: the music itself is a disorienting cross between Greek bouzouki music and North Indian light classical, tied together with the plinky-plinky sound of Central Asia. The merging of Greek, Persian, Central Asian and Indian influence is more or less the story of Afghanistan in a nutshell.

"Morad e Dil," by Fawad Ramiz, has more of a pop sound to it, but still that whirling rhythm that sounds like it's from everywhere: the Balkans, North Africa, Pakistan.

The last track, "Muslims 4 Life," is by the rapper Kandahar Prince, aka Hamid from Upstate, who likes to name-check Schenectady from time to time. I acknowledge that he's not very good, and one could quibble about whether a rap in English by someone living in Schenectady is genuinely the music of Afghanistan. But as we set out on a musical journey around the world, it's good to remember that borders are fictions and that cultures are malleable and endlessly overlaid and intermixed — as they have been in Afghanistan since the dawn of time.

I am grateful to Mastana.net for its vast collection of Afghani music, which is provided in an easy-to-browse interface that I thoroughly recommend checking out.

[the origins of g-funk]

FUNKY WORM (MP3)
Ohio Players
Pleasure

DOUBLE DUTCH BUS (MP3)
Frankie Smith
Children of Tomorrow

Let's start this off right!

Welcome to my new blog dedicated to music. The Ohio Players' Pleasure is a good place to start, since pleasure is at the heart of my love of music, and few forms of music give me quite the gut level of pure pleasure that funk does.

"Funky Worm," from 1972, is narrated by Grandma and tells the story of "the funkiest worm in the world." Naturally. What makes the song really stand out, though, is the astonishing synthesizer noise that takes off at 0:45, from which the entire edifice of G-funk was built. I only recently discovered this track, but it demonstrates definitively that Dr. Dre owes his whole career to about 10 seconds by the Ohio Players. As Grandma says, "Like nine cans of shaving powder: that's funky." A statement like that brooks no argument.

While we're at it, that whole wacky Snoop Dogg "Izzle" language also has a point of origin: the proto-hip-hop song "Double Dutch Bus" by Frankie Smith, from 1981. The Izzle kicks in at around 1:51.

Enjizzle.