by Hazmat Modine from the album of the same name with two tracks featuring the Gangbé Brass Band from Benin
It’s nice, but it’s no Maceo Parker
Category Archives: Poetry
Hallo (featuring Tout Puissant Mukalo and Nelly Liyemge)
An album of Congolese artists is being produced by DRC Music, led by UK musician Damon Albarn. It seems to be in the vein of similar efforts such as Paul Simon’s Running with the Saints or David Byrne’s O Samba.
The question is thus whether Tout Puissant Mukalo, Jupiter and the Okwess International, Bokatola System, Evala Litongo, Nelly Liyemge and others will achieve greater international recognition, or is this really about Albarn? He did not use remote collaboration or cloud for the work and instead traveled in person with a huge crew to sit face-to-face and record and produce local sound in the Congo.
Hallo (featuring Tout Puissant Mukalo and Nelly Liyemge) by DRC Music
One of the strangest things I find is that Albarn lays down his fairly simplistic beats before Congolese sounds are layered over them. This is like an American executive from McDonalds traveling to France and telling a chef that they are going to “collaborate” on a meal by using the chef’s sauce on two all beef patties with a sesame seed bun. Albarn’s production crew could work on producing sounds and poetry on top but why take away the most important elements of Congolese music?
So the boring Gorillaz style of beat is what turns me away from the example above. Nelly Liyemge sounds awesome but totally out of place with the low-energy slow beat. Here’s another sample:
Lingala (featuring Bokatola System and Evala Litongo) by DRC Music
Boom, chick, boom, chick? The timeline should fade into the beat, not be the beat. It gets better after 30 seconds but still sounds watered down from the beats straight out of the DRC.
The above songs will be released on an album called Kinshasa One Two by Warp Records next month (October 3rd). They are said to be a benefit for Oxfam. Too bad Oxfam could not just release Congolese music directly to the world as a benefit. I wonder if they have to cover the costs of “production” by a large group traveling in person to Kinshasa, DRC.
Here’s a wonderfully complex soukous beat that Albarn misses completely in the above examples:
…not to mention street beats. Just about every song in the following compilation video, recorded live, puts Albarn’s production to shame. 5:18 is perhaps the most comparable style but on a whole different level:
Maybe Albarn just didn’t know what to do when he heard Congolese rhythms like the following drum line or maybe the project is really just about him being only slightly influenced by them:
Limbe
by the Italian group S-Tone Inc. from their 2002 album Sobrenatural (featuring Italian jazz vocalist Laura Fedele)
Translation by me.
| Le ciel c’est comme un voile | The sky it’s like a veil |
| c’est immobile le soir | all quiet in the evening |
| on entend pas le bruit | so there is no noise |
| de tes pas sur le sol | as you pass over the ground |
| Pas de destination | Without a destination |
| ni meme d’intention | but no intent for |
| total absence de joie | lack of joy |
| et de peine | or suffering |
| Tu viens vers tu n’sais quoi | You come to what you don’t know |
| unique la direction | single direction |
| Tu n’as pas de reponses | You have no answers |
| ni meme de demandes | nor any requests |
| Tu viens | You go… |
| Le but c’est inconnue | Purpose unknown |
| il s’agit de l’instinct | it is from instinct |
| tu ne t’interroge pas | Do not ask |
| si c’est bien ou si c’est mal | if it’s right or wrong |
| Comme un fantome qui glisse | Like a ghost that glides |
| qui n’a plus de sexe | who has more ecstasy |
| entre la realite | between the realities |
| l’inconscience et le reve | the unconsciousness and dreams |
| Tu viens vers tu n’sais quoi | You come to what you don’t know |
| unique la direction | single direction |
| Tu n’as pas de reponses | You have no answers |
| ni meme de demandes | nor any requests |
| Tu viens | You go… |
| Comme ca tu simplement tu viens | You enjoy how you simply |
| suspendu sous un ciel indefini | hover below an undefined sky |
| pas de couleurs | no color |
| pas de sons | no sound |
| pas de souvenirs | no memories |
| hier | yesterday |
| demain | tomorrow |
| rien | nothing |
| seulement le present | only the present |
| le moment qui passe, qui glisse | the moment passing, gliding |
| qui revient, exactament egale a lui meme | returning, exactly equal to itself |
| Tu viens | You go… |
I also noticed a Stone Roses style remix by Fred Ventura
The Interrupters
I spend almost every day now reviewing breach data and analyzing threats to deconstruct vulnerabilities. Some of my more popular work recently has been to convince IT management that they need to improve their analysis of threats to understand them better.
Although there are many frustrating examples of negligence and ignorance when it comes to security, no one should feel satisfied to always blame the victim after an attack. That is why the security industry can help with more balanced risk analysis instead of pounding only on customer vulnerabilities and writing-off every threat as “sophisticated”.
After a presentation on cloud penetration testing at VMworld this week I was asked by a customer of a provider why their instance was constantly being broken into. First, I went over how they should pinpoint the threat and not just the vulnerability in their particular instance. That was because, second, I explained that if you have a nice house with big windows and live in a dangerous neighborhood when you can afford to move to a better neighborhood…the choices become more obvious when translated to a more familiar risk context.
A medical professional who injects a virus in a patient in order to test and build up antibodies, for another example, makes an excellent simile for penetration testing a cloud environment.
The viruses in the flu shot are killed (inactivated), so you cannot get the flu from a flu shot.
They say you can’t get the flu from a simulation of the flu, but we all know that the flu shot still carries risks.
There are some people who should not get a flu vaccine without first consulting a physician. These include:
[…]
- People who have had a severe reaction to an influenza vaccination.
In the same vein (pun not intended) I strongly recommend to anyone interested in the study of information security and the interruption of threats (to protect the vulnerable) that they watch this movie:
Note that one of the movie protagonists, one of the Interrupters, is the daughter of Jeff Fort. He was a notorious Chicago gangster convicted of domestic terrorism in the 1980s.
For years Chicago’s El Rukns seemed like the average urban street gang, dabbling in racketeering, narcotics sales and the occasional murder. But El Rukns (Arabic for “the cornerstone”) was far more ambitious than that. Last week a federal jury convicted five members of conspiring to commit terrorist acts against the U.S. The plotters, prosecutors said, expected to receive $2.5 million from Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi for bombing buildings and airplanes and assassinating American politicians.
[…]
In the late ’70s, the 100-member organization turned to political militancy and religion. The leader, Jeff Fort, 40, regularly presided over meetings from an immense, high-backed throne atop a pedestal, surrounded by outsize posters of himself and Gaddafi.
The daughter of this guy is now trying to stop the violence. I would point you to a Wikipedia reference so you could read all about this amazing and inspirational woman — Ameena Mathews — who has dedicated her life to saving so many others, but a Wikipedia administrator — Fastily — has just decided to delete her page.
This page has been deleted. The deletion and move log for the page are provided below for reference.
00:03, 29 August 2011 Fastily (talk | contribs) deleted “Ameena Mathews” ‎ (Expired PROD, concern was: Does not meet notability guidelines. Lacks citations to significant coverage in reliable sources.)
Uh, she has been written up in the NYT, The Guardian, NPR, PBS…just type her name into a search engine to see the citations. Take her interview in indieWire as an example of the “coverage” she gets:
…you’ve been meeting up with similar groups across America. How has that been?
We met up with a lot of groups that replicated the model. There’s a lot of people out there doing a lot of great things, helping the war on poverty, getting kids in school so they can put the guns down.
[…]
There’s purple hearts for those that are wounded in Afghanistan, but not much for those who do our work.
Hey Wikipedia, get a f-ing clue. The Interrupters and their work to stop threats should be the very definition of notability. Let this be yet another giant blinking warning sign of why you should not automatically trust the supposedly well-intentioned administrators of cloud services to do some basic checks before they act, let alone care about risk and the security of information.