The excellent Ethan Hein has written a lot about remixes. Lately, what he’s been doing is putting beats under canonical classical works. What came out of the experiment were tracks that helped displace the canon and demonstrate the essential qualities of iconic Afrodiasporic grooves. Here’s more from Ethan Hein:
Music participation is great, and the music of the African diaspora tends to be more participatory than the European classical canon, but remixes aren’t intrinsically a challenge to whiteness. The anti-racist potential of this project isn’t the fact of the remixes; it’s the idea of using iconic Afrodiasporic grooves: the Funky Drummer break, the Amen break, the Apache break. It feels subversive to combine these particular beats with these particular canonical works, the combining of two musical idioms that are supposed to be diametric opposites. My lazy mental shorthand is “white” vs “black” music, but that’s too broad and inaccurate. George Lewis suggests “Eurological” and “Afrological,” and that’s better. But for now, I’m going to use the canon and the groove.
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