Guess which PBS star was at Harvard's Hip-Hop Symposium!
Party Dip: US Weekly for hot PBS goss!!
party dip’s continuous mix of articles, shows, books + more worth raving about
this week: Korean pantry, Harvard’s hip-hop symposium, Nicolas Jaar, SNL’s music, scroll to b2b for: MIKE hip-hop album of the year contender? and f5ve remixed by Dorian Electra and Count Baldor
Chicken powder and Korean noodles
Discovering the nearby Korean grocery store transformed my cooking and I’ve only been twice. This Chinese chicken powder is everywhere yet I’ve slept on it! It was great for my noodle soup!
I plan to add more Korean and Asian staples to my pantry. For now, I’ll keep obsessing over seaweed snacks and the array of frozen dumplings.
The Future of Hip-Hop Symposium
Still thinking about Kendrick’s Superbowl Half-Time show? You might enjoy this free stream of Harvard’s The Future of Hip-Hop. (I’d love to take an Ivy League Kendrick class to dissect his Feb 9 performance.)
1 hour in is “Afrikaaps” and countering the erasure of their existence.
2 hr 20 min: poetically signifying a Lauryn Hill song, the most sampled James Brown song1, and sampling Lenny Williams (used by Twista).
In a delightful PBS sidebar (2 hr 11 min), the speaker makes an ancestry reference and calls out “Skip,” aka Henry Louis Gates, Jr.!
He jokes, “I got a DNA kit!” The crowd roars. I had to run it back. (PBS is still the best. Have you seen new episodes of Finding Your Roots? Watch the Amy Tan / Rita Dove episode.)
Nicolas Jaar’s Bandcamp interview
His whole Piedras project is fascinating. Here’s a snippet that hooked me well before they got to the deep cultural history and symbolism of water.
“One of the songs from Piedras asks, ‘What does it mean to be from here?’ and I think through the entire process of writing the radio play from 2019 to early 2023, my ideas of ‘here,’ ‘who,’ and ‘us” began to feel like the noise between radio stations. In other words, I began identifying more and more with the static between stations. That is my ‘here.’”
Mash-me up I’ll never stop!
Questlove spent a year making the opening mash-up track to Ladies and Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music. Let your ears have fun for 7 minutes. “Mmm-Bop” really got me goin!
back 2 back music bumps for the soul
MIKE - “man in the mirror & Artist of the Century”
the embodiment of the present and future of hip-hop, nyc’s MIKE. laid back low-res, half-silly visuals to suit his flow.
Dorian Electra & Count Baldor remix J-pop girl group f5ve - “UFO”
some things just make me happy they exist.
Funky Drummer: it’s in damn near every hip-hop song you know!