#aarabmuzik

[charlebaltimore420-blog]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY @therealswizzz x @liltunechi are dropping new music tonight at midnight off of Swizz’s new album #Poison prod. By @araabmuzik 👀 y’all think this beat slaps? #rp #swizzbeats #lilwayne #aarabmuzik #explore #baltimore422 @charle.huff.baltimore422 (at Cape Girardeau, Missouri) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bnriv3THVks/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=2k4v7hz77doz

[poloteddybear]

MPC GOAT

[thedigitaltraphouse2]

By Law - Joe Budden ft. Jazzy

[thedigitaltraphouse2]

Down By Law (Prod. by araabMUZIK) - Joe Budden ft. Jazzy

[queernuck]

Real Estate Music: Tax and the Category of Fine Art

As a result of municipal pockets growing ever-lighter in a time of global crisis, Cook County in Illinois has decided to enforce a tax they claim businesses have been dodging for years. Cook County includes the entirety of Chicago, one of America’s major cities and an important cultural center on both a national and global scale. The specific action targets two Chicago clubs, claiming that each owes $200,000 in back taxes due to noncompliance with county ordinances regarding a 3% tax on tickets for entertainment events. The clubs had been operating under the well-founded assumption that the DJ events they were having were included in the tax-exempt category of a live musical performance in a venue for under 750 occupants. However, as Cook County is arguing, because the tax code (written in 1949) specifically refers to “fine arts” in a manner that must be read as excluding “modern” music, these clubs owe $200,000 each in taxes. Deliberately including rock and country music in descriptions of DJ nights mostly for hip-hop or electronic music, the county claims that none of these categories may be considered with the label of “fine art” and thus are not exempt.

Thus, we are left with the unenviable position of needing to affirm the act of DJing, as well as the music played by DJs, as fine art. The classification of “fine art” is itself based in notions of taste unmistakably shaped by racism and barriers of class, whereby an ostentatiousness and inaccessibility is imposed upon the consumption and production of the art, so that only the rich may benefit from its performance even as the artists themselves struggle. Fine Art is a category that should only be referenced in order to acknowledge its framing properties, being an entirely contingent category based in certain structures of oppression and the ostentatiousness of proper decorum as a member of a class that may consume Fine Art.

There are important aspects of this decision to target art often enjoyed socially and disregarded by many as too common to be considered Fine Art, especially considering the origins of the art in question as well as the concentration upon a performative process of creation (opposed to curation) that is assumed to demarcate Fine Art. AarabMUZIK, given his skill in using an APC to mix samples live in a rather intricate fashion, is often regarded as an artist by those who are usually unwilling to recognize DJs as artists. However, that most DJs do not perform in this manner is specifically because AarabMUZIK developed his style from his career in producing tracks before crossing over to performing on his own. His debut album, Electronic Dream is a collection of mid-2000s trance tracks sparsely mixed and reworked in order to form an incredibly compelling recontextualization of these songs that plays upon the emptiness that so many trance songs use to create a dramatic effect, filling it with an often-punishing maximalist take that defies easy categorization. The manner in which AarabMUZIK combines curation (and a genuine affection for the music he samples, often rather mainstream electronic music verging on pop) and performance should not be confused with a negation of the curation as part of what makes his music interesting. 

To refer back to Chicago, discussions of this ordinance have rightfully highlighted Frankie Knuckles, one of the largest figures in the development of House music as a genre, giving it many of the characteristics that would come to define it, without setting out to do anything more than be a phenomenal curator. Frankie Knuckles was specifically known as one of the best in an absolutely legendary Chicago scene, one born specifically out of black and latin nightclubs, many of which were more specifically gay nightclubs, with a sound heavily influenced by disco’s dance floor appeal. That he specifically worked from this scene, at a time when widespread backlash against disco was frequently used as shorthand for homophobia and antiblackness, is important to understanding how troublesome the current arguments in favor of considering curation in this sense “Fine Art” become. 

To consider Frankie Knuckles a worldwide icon, a cultural pioneer, and the progenitor of an incredibly varied range of sounds is to merely begin giving him his due. However, to specifically categorize him as “Fine Art” is not to genuinely expand the category of Fine Art, but rather to make an exception intended to further exclude those who do not meet the arbitrarily placed standards around what makes Frankie Knuckles worthy of this category. Barring DJs from playing pop music, from playing music that has reached a mainstream audience, in order to maintain a category of Fine Art (as one might have to do in order to avoid the tax in question) would be limiting curation in a fashion that is absolutely untenable given how curation’s contextual aspect is often most sharply seen in the valorization of pop and popularization of the obscure. Recognizing that pop music can be strange, well-made, and that what constitutes “pop” is ever-shifting is vital to understanding that genre, as well as the way in which DJs curate the music they play. The postmodernity of a DJ’s performance is often vital to its effect, and ignoring this in order to make a claim about what DJs can theoretically do is specifically validating the framework of Fine Arts as a manner of categorizing art.

That so many have enjoyed rap music when seeing Hamilton, despite the soundtrack being within the standards of Broadway in a number of ways, is worth mentioning. Lin Manuel-Miranda himself has said that he has heard people say that his soundtrack is the only rap music they enjoy, despite how Hamilton draws upon a number of styles of rap (and frequently opts to simply go for a classic Broadway number) with the disparate aesthetics only connected by composer, performers, and contextuality within a Broadway show. Hamilton is emblematic of Fine Art, in that it is art that is not particularly good or noteworthy within a certain context being praised as revolutionary specifically because it takes on the signifiers of Fine Art. Other rap albums released the same year were far more meaningful for the genre’s development as well as simply more interesting, but because of the association with Broadway, Hamilton’s soundtrack is validated as more important. 

This same process is seen in both tongue-in-cheek and earnest covers by white people of rap and pop songs originally by black artists, usually in a conspicuously sparse arrangement on guitar or piano intended to show off vocals often far weaker than the original track’s. These covers are voraciously consumed, and while many saw the ridiculousness of this phenomena when covers of Beyonce’s “Partition” began to circulate, that this has been going on for so long and so predictably points towards a sort of white removal, a distancing through irony or recontextualization that forms a divide between the actual “art” as performed by a white person and the now-irrelevant source material. This divide is specifically of the same character as the one being made in order to specify “Fine Art” and only include specific cases of DJing and hip-hop music.

I absolutely understand that the two clubs in question will likely be unwilling to risk their very existence on a defense involving questioning the structure of “Fine Art” when it is so deeply entrenched in public aesthetics, however that most defenses of the DJs involved have not questioned the category is itself somewhat disappointing and furthermore an uncritical engagement with a framework that must be moved away from.

[ihiphop]

[queernuck]

AT2- AraabMUZIK

[agermparade]

Swizz Beatz shares photo of AarabMuzik recovering in the hospital

Click the URL to read full Post: %

http://wp.me/p4MFYY-Md2

Swizz Beatz shares photo of AarabMuzik recovering in the hospital AarabMuzik was shot in the jaw on Thursday night, and Swizz Beatz provided fans with an update on the producer’s condition by posting a photo to his Instagram page. Both Swizz and AarabMuzik, who was sporting a bandage...