ALAN LOMAX CENTENNIAL

Born on January 31, 1915, enthomusicologist, folklorist, archivist, writer and musician Alan Lomax would have been 100 years old January 30, 2015. 

On January 28, Bodega Pop Live on WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio celebrated his life's work archiving music from around the world with three hours of especially blistering and gorgeous tracks from the thousands of hours he recorded, compiled and edited.

Listen to the show now in the archives

OUM SWEET OUM

Oum Kalthoum is widely acknowledged to have been the greatest Arabic singer of all time and one of most popular singers in the world, period. 

On Wednesday, January 21, Bodega Pop Live on WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio spun three solid hours of classic and rare tracks by her precursors, direct competition, some major collaborators and of course the Voice of Egypt herself.

Listen to the show now in the archives!

JE SUIS UN AUTRE

On Wednesday, January 14, we celebrated our first year of Bodega Pop Live on WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio!

Listen to the show now in the archives

Over the course of 52 three-hour episodes we've featured 1,693 mostly non-English-singing artists from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and have dedicated shows to Palestinian protest music, Brazilian hip-hop, Cambodian rock, and much more (see full list of archived shows to the right).

Special guests have included Thai music expert Peter Doolan, international music-focused DJ Poodlecannon, live band GAL PALS and fellow GTDRadio DJs Jesse Kaminsky and Amanda Nazario.

Many of you have been very supportive -- by listening, commenting, linking, emailing, liking, etc. -- and your support has meant more to me than I think you know. Thank you!

DIGGER'S DELIGHT

We're started 2015 off with a bang! Bodega Pop Live's first show of the year on Wednesday featured a head-spinning 3-hour collage of turntablism, sampling, plunderphonics, mash-ups and breakcore from more than 40 artists from the Bay Area to Badang.

Thrill to brand new tracks you never even knew existed (ever heard of pisscore? DJ Sotsura? DODDODO? El Iqaa? 鰻屋?), side by side with classic and rare cuts from critically acclaimed DJs, sound artists and scratchers you've loved for years. 

Listen to the show now in the archives

PARTY FOR YOUR RIGHT TO FIGHT

Bodega Pop Live on WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio dropped the Bomb Squad on Times Square.

Get ready to turn your back to the NYPD and shake your booty with gun-toting Māori rappers, guitar-wielding Cameroonian writers, MCs from Monterrey, Sheffield electropunks, and politicized DJs from Beirut to Long Island.

Shake it up in the archives: HERE

A Look Back at 2014

On December 17, Bodega Pop Live on WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio spun tracks by some of the people on Earth not actively contributing to the horribleness that was this past year.

From massive box sets by Nigerian greats to Vietnamese and Thai guitar shredding to the first D'Angelo album in a decade and a half, we covered everything that rocked our world -- or at least what we were able to cram into our three-hour time slot.

Listen to the show now in the archives

Rock Simera! (Rock Now!) | 1971

Listen to "They All Mean Bad"

Listen to "Imaginary Doctor"

Grab the whole collection here

Found today at the Greek Music Superstore on 31st Street here in Astoria. Hopefully this mostly awesome Greek psych-era collection makes up somewhat for my relative neglect of this blog this year. 

I promise a Best of 2014 before the end of the year. And I know that most of the links here are dead. I'll get on it. All. Soon.

LET IT FLOW | 3 HRS of PSYCH + GARAGE

Listen to the show in the archives now!

On Wednesday, December 10, Bodega Pop Live on WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio brought you three hours of mind-blowing, guitar-driven, sex, drugs & revolution-soaked psychedelic and garage rock from Belgium, Chile and Korea, to the former Yugoslavia and Zambia.

Hoàng Oanh | Saigon Siren 1960-1975

Listen to "Le Bong"


Listen to "Mua Gat Moi"


Listen to "Tinh Yeu Tra Lai Trang Sao"

Just reupped this Bodega Pop exclusive album here.

I've long wanted to put together a collection of the Bodega's favorite Hoàng Oanh songs, especially since the three or four full albums I've previously posted of hers were taken down early last year. But perpetual busyness coupled with chronic exhaustion has kept me from the task -- until today. Not that I suddenly find myself free and clear, alas. No, it's just that I'm facing an inevitable, looming deadline so severe, so intractable, so humiliating if I miss it, that I just can't help but procrastinate. Lucky you!

Born Huỳnh Kim Chi in 1950 in Mỹ Tho, about 45 miles southwest of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), Hoàng Oanh is considered by many contemporary Vietnamese singers to be a primary influence. No doubt in part because she was at the helm of her own career decades after most would have given up, compiling, editing and distributing her classic recordings from an address in Fountain Valley, Calif. 

A couple of things about the title of this particular BP-exclusive album. First, it might be a stretch to call her a "Saigon Siren"; for, other than her proximity to the cultural capital, Oanh was always considered more country simple than urban sophisticated -- at least, according to a fellow writer of mine from Vietnam. 

Another stretch: I'm not sure about those dates: 1960-1975. I have songs on a couple of CDs that are attributed as far back as 1964, when the singer presumably was 14, but no one song from 1960 when she was 10 or 11 ... all I have to go on for that, is this:

That's from one of her self-compiled-and-distributed albums, so I'm guessing she would know the dates. (And, no, Nhạc Yêu Cầu does not mean "Songs Other People Sang First"; it means something more like "Song Requests" -- at least, to the extent we can believe Google Translate. Unless of course it does mean "Songs Other People Sang First," in which case, mystery solved.)

Did she really begin her career as a pre-teen? She wouldn't be the first female vocalist to have done so, of course; I simply find it remarkable, given how mature her voice sounds throughout all of the recordings I have. Does it matter? I suppose not. What matters -- to me, at least -- is that, of all of the musicologists, ethno- and otherwise, we have taking up space at colleges and universities across the country on any given day, not a single one of them has seen fit to trek out to southern California and interview this living legend. (To say nothing of the dozen or so other exiled Vietnamese singers living near and around Oanh's home and offices.) There's a book just waiting to happen. Maybe not a bestseller. But, presumably, a potentially awesome read.

Bodega Hop: Latin Hip-Hop, Rap + Reggaeton | Bodega Pop 15

Listen to the first track


Listen to the next track


Listen to track 8

Just reupped the 24-song mix here.

Before I moved into my new apartment last month and discovered the little Mexican bodega off Broadway near Steinway from whence the CDs on which I found many of these tracks were plucked, this mix wouldn't have been possible. Was that sentence grammatically correct? It's late; I can't tell. More importantly, I don't care.

I do care about my regular visitors and I'm well aware just how much I've neglected the Bodega shelves since the big move. So this insanely great ear-curling collection goes out to all of you, with the promise of much more to come.