01Ten Men, One Newspaper, and a Democracy Still Outing People.
In 1973, ten men left Los Tarantos in costume. The police took their freedom for a night. The newspaper tried to take the life awaiting them the next morning.
Read the note ↗Independent journal · Four languages
Notes on
Music
← Back to the journal01
02Music · Politics · Society · Party
Communism Washed Folklore Clean. Weddings Got It Dirty Again.
Between Song to Romania, Electrecord, the “de-pollution” campaign and the tape recorded at a wedding, the state tried to manufacture folklore without sweat. The audience asked for an encore.
Read the note ↗
03Gay life · Politics · Party · Music
The party that paid for the revolution: when gay activism settled its bills on the dance floor.
In 1971, at 99 Wooster Street, a former firehouse became a club, political headquarters and cashier’s desk for gay liberation. Admission was about two dollars. The profits funded the revolution.
Read the note ↗
04Romanian folklore has a credit problem: the lăutari built it, the state signed it.
Five centuries of enslavement, four instruments with foreign passports, a state orchestra and one indecently simple question: who gets credit for the national sound?
Read the note ↗
05Disco did not die in 1979. The industry just pretended it no longer knew it.
They blew up records at Comiskey Park and declared the genre dead. The beat, not officially notified, carried on under the name house.
Read the note ↗
06The Balkans Are Not in 7/8. The West Is Simply Obsessed with Counting Them.
Uneven rhythms are real. The myth that they alone explain Balkan music is just exotic arithmetic, beautifully packaged for export.
Read the note ↗
07The disco story everyone knows began with a lie
A fabricated article, Tony Manero, the Bee Gees, and how Hollywood compressed disco’s Black, Latino and queer history into a single white suit.
Read the note ↗
08Who stole whose music? Probably everyone from everyone.
From Banat’s lăutari to Azur cassettes and ethno techno: how Balkan music crossed borders, regimes and labels without asking permission.
Read the note ↗