Here’s a thing about moombahton, a dance genre’s that’s been building buzz over the past year or so. There’s now a Mad Decent compilation, Blow Your Head Vol. 2: Dave Nada Presents Moobahton that’s well worth your time and even, money. Nada does a really great job of sequencing the thing as if it were a mix, letting tracks bump into each other so the momentum’s never lost, but allowing each song to still stand alone. You can pretty much just put it on and bliss out to the slow-fast grooves. Munchi’s “Hope,” is song-of-the-year maybe. If only it weren’t originally released last year.
The piece however, is also the second part in a kind of unofficial “trilogy” of pieces I’ve been working out that are about Internet hype. This was part 1, here is part 1.5, and next month’s Spin, out really soon, will have a nice long piece on the topic. Hype is something that needs to be addressed and worked through, I think, especially in the current climate. In this moombahton piece, I wanted to make a really good case for Nada’s creation, while also suggesting that there’s some questionable aspects to its dissemination.
Moombahton immediately leached out to blogs closely connected to Nada. Within days of the EP’s release, DJ Ayres—whose label, T&A, put out the EP—interviewed Nada for The Fader’s blog, repeating the skipping story and instigating buzz. Brooklyn label Fool’s Gold called moombahton “the latest obsession of [their] pal Dave Nada” and put up a mix. “The internet was crucial for its growth and it still is,” Nada says. “‘Born in D.C., bred worldwide’ is the tagline.”
That Nada’s creation even has a tagline is, in part, why it took off. Moombahton arrived fully-formed, the product of a talented, savvy, well-connected DJ. The domino effect of blog coverage immediately took hold of the genre, and once one site declared it important, all the others followed—if they didn’t, they risked appearing out of touch. It helped too that D.C. had a new thing to call its own. Less than a year after the Moombahton EP, the cover of Washington City Paper announced “Our Year in Moombahton.” A bunch of people told a bunch of other people that a new, regional subgenre with a fun origin story and a cool global sound was, like, the thing…
Are You A Serious Comic Book Reader?
I appreciate your wp format, where did you get a hold of it?
this page is not affiliated
11 Jun 12 at 7:46 pm