seen.´s non-hippie reggae and dancehall blog

There´s probably no other genre having a higher output of singles per week than reggae and dancehall do.
If you´re not the kind of person digging in the crates every second day, but don´t wanna get lost in that avalanche of new tunes either, you might find it useful to be given a weekly overview of what´s hot and what´s not in JA.
And if your mindset is similar to ours, you might very likely want to get that overview for free.
Well, that´s exactly what Max Glazer, Keeny Meez and Disco D offer with their incredible Federation Invasion podcast. We soon gonna add their weekly mixes as a soundtrack to our website. Until then, you can also get them by clicking here and add the audio-feed to iTunes or whatever software you use to pull stuff off the web and on to your mobile MP3-device.

We first came across that multiple-award-winning film by director Stephanie Black, when we saw the official poster hanging on the wall at Tuff Gong on Marcus Garvey Road, Kingston, Jamaica, in early 2004. Unfortunately, there were no more copies of the VHS/DVD available back then and all our endeavours to get one haven´t been successful since then.
Today, a friend of ours send us a link to what looks like an authorized full-length version of “Life and Debt” on Google Video. Even though the video quality is quite poor, it´s well worth watching.
The film tells how “the complexity of international lending, structural adjustment policies and free trade will be understood in the context of the day-to-day realities of the (Jamaican) people whose lives they impact”.
Please also take a look at the official website of the film: www.lifeanddebt.org which gives you links to finally get the DVD featuring a whole leap of additional footage.

As Trojan Records is celebrating 40 years of outstanding and upsetting music, the online version of Wired magazine features an interesting article comparing today´s “share-alike” digital culture to the long-existing remix-culture in Jamaican popular music.
Also check out the interview they did with DJ Spooky, who - among others - put together a wicked selection for the label with the helmet.

That is the headline our friend Florian Falterer (Munich heads might remember him from legendary Bazooka Hi-Powa and the wicked Bassrutsche-sessions) chose for the picture-slideshow coming with his little article for the Sueddeutsche Zeitung online. It´s probably the first time you see a current Jamaican entertainer on the frontpage of a major German news-website - so you better surf by.