Creating MadChange

Welcome earth people, to the MadChange blog. I plan to blog here about music that has both changed my personal relationship with music as well as music that has changed society's relationship with music. There will be elements of history and politics mixed into the blog and some of the music that I post will have been or will currently be directly political. I am a DJ and a music collector but this blog is not meant to be about me. It is meant to be about the ever changing landscape of music. A lot of this blog will be centered on roots music and the music that has evolved from roots music (which in my opinion is almost all music we hear post WWII). I plan to show modern examples of musical evolution contrasted with some of the earliest recorded examples of music and its' early evolution. I can guarantee you will not like everything I post to this blog. The same way you do not like all of the elements and genres of music itself. I only plan to post what I know (which is more than the common music fan or DJ, less than an ethnomusicologist or music historian). It may not be much in the scheme of things but bits of it will hopefully help someone, somewhere add to their ideas of what music exists, where it comes from and what it consists of as a whole.

I will probably not always have time to explain why I post certain things so let me just say now that all that I post will have something to do with what I wrote above. Whether it is a Folk track recorded in 1926 or a Moombahton track recorded in 2011 what I post will be what I believe has pushed and is pushing the evolution of music. I will, for the most part, stay away from things like Pop music, Rock and electric Blues. I am going to try and theme this blog more with political music, early American folk/blues music, world music and lesser known soul/jazz/hip hop music (I will also post some modern dance videos as well). Why I want to theme it around this I do not exactly know myself but a lot of my knowledge and interest in music seems to fall into those loose categories so it just makes sense (to me anyway).

I see modern DJ music much like folk music of past times. In 1930 many people were probably being asked to play "she'll be comin round the mountain when she comes" at dances and the like because it was "popular" at that time. There was a great deal of amazing music that was around at that time that somehow got retained (thanks to guys like Alan Lomax & Harry Everett Smith) and helped to change the history of music that was not "popular" and many people never even heard back then. The same holds true today in the sense that DJs are often being asked to play Michael Jackson or Black Eyed Peas (who by the way definitely change the landscape of music) because it is "popular" while, in my opinion, much of the amazing music of today goes unheard by the masses just as it went unheard 100 years ago. I want to showcase this undercurrent of music which has changed the evolution of music arguably more than any and all popular music because there is so much more of it. The undercurrent decides how fast and in which direction the river runs but the top layer of water is often all we see and give credit to for the direction and speed of the river. Much of the reason some of the amazing music of a century ago went unheard was because of people's inability to access it or because there was much less exposure to music in general. I believe much of the reason some of the amazing music of today is going unheard is almost for the opposite reason. It is because of the overwhelming amount of music that is accessible to us at any time as well as the over-saturation of commercialized music.

I've already posted a few tracks from some music legends utilizing the word "Change" only because I thought it would be fitting to start the blog that way. In addition to this blog, I will continue to post an assortment of music that has influenced my relationship with music over at my MadCoins blog so please check that out as well. The MadCoins blog will be geared more toward electronic music, IDM, Chillwave, Trip Hop and other oddities. Thanks for checking out what I have to share. Enjoy!