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Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Album A Word on Gabriel Teodros' Mixtape

Posted by Charles Mudede on Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 12:27 PM

What made Gabriel Teodros' Ethiopium: A Jitter Generation Mixtape one of my favorite records last year was, one, the passion he put into his raps ("the more emotion I put into it, the harder I rock"), and, two, the fact that he was rapping on beats produced by Oh No and collected on Ethiopium, an experiment that processed Ethiopian pop and jazz into hiphop. Not only was GT and Oh No a perfect match, but GT, a black Ethiopian, was in a sense giving praise to Oh No, a black American, for successfully processing parts of Ethiopian pop. It does not end with just that. Oh No's Ethiopium contains many samples from the fourth record in the highly regarded Ethiopiques series, Ethio Jazz & Musique Instrumentale, 1969-1974, which features compositions by Mulatu Astatke, the father of a form of music that processed black American jazz into new Ethiopian substances. And so what we find in Ethiopium: A Jitter Generation Mixtape is this rich complexity: a black Ethiopian rapper is processing the beats by a black American producer who processed Ethiopian tunes that were produced by processing black American jazz and funk. This is nothing but the very meaning of hiphop—processing, processing, processing.

Five or so years ago, I and my cousin DJ Shingi—black Zimbabweans—processed Mulatu Astatke's "A Man of Experience and Wisdom," and it went a little something like this:

Ethiopiques Beat One. All of this processing is making me itch.

The image, which is taken from GT's Myspace place, is by Canh Nguyen.