Uproot Quotes

“Imagine if one of the shirtless, pantless aborigines had spoken to the audience between songs instead? “Our white handlers have been performing their managerial duties for decades … centuries now. This is a traditional Australian cultural arrangement…” Would I have been the only one applauding?”
― Jace Clayton, Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture

“The secret of Vegas is that money is boring.
Hence all the bluster.”
― Jace Clayton, Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture

“This Lebanese variant involved men stamping and chant-singing in unison over thumping electronic beats. I asked where to buy it. Better than shopping tips, Tame invited me to grab some off his phone via Bluetooth. He insisted that I take last year’s big hit, which runs for more than half an hour. Even if you don’t enjoy dabke, it’s impossible to be mad at any pop tradition where songs clock in at such extravagant lengths.”
― Jace Clayton, Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture

“Yet even years after 3Ball’s breakthrough, no other tribal groups have signed record deals. The industry only supports the trio, treating them as a singularity rather than as artists in an active genre. Who wouldn’t want to see neo-Aztec rave music nights in Las Vegas and Berlin? For this to happen 3Ball needs competition, peers.”
― Jace Clayton, Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture

“Rewind five hundred years, before the Spanish arrived: Zócalo was the center of Tenochtitlán, the Aztec island metropolis that was one of the world’s largest cities. Workers building a subway line in the 1970s found leftover pyramids. Tepito has been an active market since Aztec days too. “In Mexico,” wrote novelist Carlos Fuentes, “all times are living, all pasts are present.”
― Jace Clayton, Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture

“Digital tools, on the other hand, shrink us down to a small set of options. Virtually all music software is made in the United States or Europe. These programs all tend to do the same thing, in varying amounts, and that thing defaults to a narrow concept of what music can or should be. It matters because more and more music is being made using this tiny number of systems. Software tools are never neutral. They reinforce their builders’ blind spots and biases and, once widely distributed, play an active role in maintaining those assumptions.”
― Jace Clayton, Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture

“Japanese noise taught me that experiencing the world via music or travel is supposed to be strange. Acknowledging that you don’t know what’s going on while being willing to linger, listen, and learn is all it takes. Noise appreciated as poetry becomes music.”
― Jace Clayton, Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture

“To kids coming of age in a world of technology and unhinged capitalism, our music seems to sound the way global capital is — liquid, international, porous, and sped up.”
― Jace Clayton, Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture

“Bands perform songs. DJs perform records.”
― Jace Clayton, Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture