Jace Clayton, better known to some as DJ Rupture, used to host a radio show called Mudd Up! on WFMU in New York. Clayton makes my musical taste look downright provincial, and Mudd Up! introduced me to pockets of world music and microgenres and fusions of sounds from all corners of the globe that I can’t imagine having discovered otherwise. Not all of it was good, but almost all of it was interesting, some of it was challenging, and it always contained unexpected moments of pleasure.
Since shuttering that show, Clayton has done some performing, some composing, and, in 2016, released his first book, Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture. If the topics interest you, this is a must-read, a fascinating set of reflections on the rise of digital music by someone whose entire professional life has been spent at the center of its borders.
That turn of phrase is intentional: Clayton’s musical passion focuses on music from isolated villages in Saharan Africa, from bustling urban enclaves in Cairo, from youth-organized daytime raves in Mexico City. What makes the book special, though, is that the breadth of musical insight is matched with intelligent and insightful reflections on the impact of digital distribution and production of music in a global context. So, the focus of the explorations into Berber music center around the gendered use of autotune within traditional musical forms; his analysis of the dominant tools in use by DJ’s not only recognize how software–the open source utopian savior of the arts to many–actually limits and determines your artistic choices.
Clayton’s music (both his own and that which he loves) moves around the globe through quasi-legal filesharing sites, through cell phone transfers, through bluetooth swaps in taxicabs. And he’s very aware of the complexity of the situation, from the simultaneous democratization of the tools of production and the increasing control of the flow of profit away from the artists to the ways in which advanced technology can hide a lack of talent as easily as it can be a tool used elegantly in talent’s service.
Enough. If any of this interests you, this book is absolutely, enthusiastically recommended. I’m off to chase down a copy of the software he created as part of his explorations, Sufi Plug-Ins.
#WhatIWishICouldDo
Write for a popular audience. My academic training is in a niche area, my fiction is aimed at entertainment, not education. I think it must be cool to write something that you think is smart and that you know others will read, and learn about the world in doing so.