"Wamono" by HIFANA

Thanks to insomnia, I caught this tweet by Roger Ebert to a set of Japanese hip hop videos. That led me to a video by a duo that calls itself HIFANA. "Wamono" can translated as "traditional Japanese things" so the visuals here play on a variety of images and practices that would be seen a Japanese and non-Western. They blend them with their hip-hop virtual personae and contemporary Japanese visual vocabulary, in a little story of a fishing trip that turns into something else:

HIFANA's "Wamono"

Sunday morning gratitude songs

A tired but happy Brother Ali (another local artist we appreciate in this household) sings "Fresh Air" after returning from his successful tour: gratitude for Sunday mornings, for the Twin Cities, for family, for his good fortune.

This video has his words in closed caption; it's worth reading along. "Us" is another great CD I'll be picking up at The Fifth Element!

"I started rhyming just to be somebody. Found out that I already was."

Note to self: Get Dessa's new CD "A Badly Broken Code" today.

Here's a video from a live performance in The Current's studio by Dessa, featuring Jeremy Messersmith and Aby Wolf. I am in going to walk down the street later today, frozen rain or not, to buy her new CD "A Badly Broken Code" at The Fifth Element on Hennepin.

I first heard Dessa sing with two other women in a collaboration they call Boy Soprano (Aby Wolf and Jessy Green, both equally amazing singers) on MPR's Midmorning show and fell in love with her voice, her musical sensibility, and her intelligence.
Here she is performing with fellow Doomtree artists P.O.S. and SIMS live at The Walker last year. She has paid her dues on the spoken word circuit as well, and collaborates with other rappers like SIMS in teaching as well as performing. "Veteran" showcases her rhyming and what it's like to be an MC and a woman in the hip hop scene.

Tutting (updated)

LOVE THESE GUYS!



Di Zhang (Moon), Phillip Chbeeb (Pacman) and Hokuto Konishi (Hok) here integrate waving and hand tutting into a dance they apparently created and filmed in just three days. Moon and Chbeeb teach and dance with a group called MarvelousMotion. Chbeeb was a very popular contestant on Season 5 of So You Think You Can Dance (sytycd), while Hok competed in Season 4 (and his crew auditioned together earlier). Hok and his buddies are now the Qwest Crew which won America's Best Dance Crew (abdc) last season.

Tutting (as in King Tut) is a type of hip-hop dance movement that emerged in the early days of hip hop dance, along with popping and locking. The group of dancers called The Electric Boogaloos had a huge influence on young kids who saw them on Soul Train (omg, awesome!).

Tut movements were inspired by Egyptian images and meant making right angles with the arms; these movements have been refined into various types, including hand tutting, which you can see here. Click on some of the links below for some more You Tube videos:

pacman chbeeb hok hokuto konishi di zhang moon tutting waving popping sytycd abdc
The masters break it down for us:

Rap around the world video

I am absolutely fascinated by this video: it's a sampler of rap in 30 languages from all around the world. A testament to the power of hip hop culture as a world-wide phenomenon, it also shows--ever so briefly--how languages with different sounds, rhythms, and tone systems have taken what young people identify as some of the basic elements of rap, and made them fit their own circumstances. I would so love to have an idea of WHAT they are singing about!


The YouTube info lists the 30 languages and identifies most (but not all) of the artists. Two notes: the language identified as simply Chinese is, I believe, Mandarin Chinese (because Cantonese is a Chinese languge too). And there is no language called "Swiss" so I suspect it is Swiss-German but I have to listen again.