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Kuduro – One Year Later (kuduro series)
Posted on October 23rd, 2007 8 comments
Last year quite around this period of time Kuduro popped up in the hipster blogosphere and took over it in a quite impressive whirlwind manner. Everybody got really excited by both the Buraka Som Sistema EP (released in July 2006) and Frederic Galiano‘s project. The tracks posted by Fat Planet on October 27th started the thing, alongside that post, dated a month before, and both have been quite a reference as you can see here.
Regular readers of Fat Planet, we played a few tracks in our radio show the days after and then started to search for new music, which brought us to broadcast several mixes in November and December 2006 and then do the Month of Kuduro in February. It’s interesting to watch the history of the mp3s tagged kuduro on the Hypemachine and the history on Technorati.
But let’s be clear, I’m not saying that nobody talked about Kuduro before Sept-Oct 2006. Actually you can see here, that Dj /Rupture mentioned it in 2005. It’s not my goal to determine who was the first one (it could be interesting but I honestly don’t really care), I would rather point out that the beginning of a lot of international and hipstery (me included) attention on this music started last year, with a couple posts on blogs here and there.I’m writing that post for 2 reasons. First, well it’s been a year and I thought it might be a good idea to have a look back on this. Second, I’ve been talking to Wayne&Wax and Maga Bo about it, and they both talked to me like this attention was still pretty strong and important and I feel the inverse.
I’m under the impression that the trend crashed down actually pretty fast a bit before summer 2007. The lack of new music being posted on mp3 blog, seems to be the most important factor to me (check Hypemachine). My experience is that it’s more difficult to get new Kuduro than new Baile Funk. Also, the fact that Buraka Som Sistema haven’t been playing North America yet (as i know, but maybe they did) would be another reason of a lack of media attention. I tried to book them for Pop MTL 2007, but Petty, the lead singer who seems to blow minds of all the people I talked to or who wrote about it, is 17 years old and still in school, so she won’t travel but week-ends. Dancers are supposed to add a lot to the show, so it’s quite a big amount of transatlantic flights to cover and don’t expect monetary support from the Portugal embassy. Anyway, the way Bonde Do Role sustain attention on Baile Funk (in a good way or a bad way, I’ll let you decide), doesn’t seem to be the way of BSS for Kuduro.
I’m sure there will be a lot of people out there interested in hearing new stuff and now that Pop 2k7 craaaziness is behind me, I’m thinking of listening to some of the kuduro stuff I stocked and haven’t quite been listening to really. But i guess the whole thing I’m trying to say is: where is the new exciting material (ie that appeals to white nerds like myself)? I know there’s kuduro production going on in the community of Cape Verde in France, Portugal and elsewhere. I hope there’s still things going on in Angola, even though Galianno sounded pretty pessimistic on the phone and the record shop guy where I bought cds in Paris did say the same. I know Dj Manaia is regularly posting mixes with his own remixes and new sounds. But yet, I feel like if things continue this way, we or Paul Devro would have to re-use the same words he used for Hyphy, while introducing kuduro back in Nov 06.
I guess I’m waiting for somebody to start a discussion about this now. Oh and sorry I haven’t been posting a lot recently, I was all busy organizing Pop.Uncategorized Baile Funk, Buraka Som Sistema, kuduro, maga bo, wayne and wax-
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