One Foundation: Curating Around Reggae

November 17, 2017

As Cam and I have been getting ready to start our program, One Foundation, people have been asking us, "So is this a reggae show?" Our answer: No and Yes.

No, in the sense that we'll be playing a wide variety of musical styles from around the globe, especially from the Caribbean, Latin America, and the diasporas of those regions throughout the world. Reggae might be the majority of what we play, but you could say we're "hardly strictly reggae." 

But yes, we're a reggae show in the sense that the idea of reggae, both as a genre and as an ethos, is the organizing force behind our curation of weekly playlists. For each show, we will have a theme, such as a region of the globe, a socially relevant topic, or an historical moment in the Americas, and reggae will always be the fundamental thread to communicate this theme, even if we're playing a bunch of hip hop, salsa, blues, bomba, or mento. We find it more generative to assemble programs around a style, playing with somewhat flexible sensibilities, rather than situating programs within a single musical tradition or geographic region, trying to fit our selections into tight and contested boundaries.

What's the point of this? Well, we think of the DJ or "selector" role as a vocation of curating. More specifically, we are not setting out to be "tastemakers" who introduce or reinforce elements of style; rather, we see this program as a type of mediation. By introducing new artists from outside of the mainstream, juxtaposing them with older and more well-known artists, foregrounding various neglected content or unexpected tropes, and showcasing musicians who problematize genre labels, we hope to re-contextualize reggae as a way of sounding-in-the-world rather than an identity within music worlds.

As long-time lovers of reggae music, Cam and I don't take this lightly. We want to pay our respects to our favorite artists while applying thoughtful criticism against the habits of thought that dominate the music industry, often disenfranchising artists.

At the same time, we want to make our show as fun as it is educational, to play with styles and concepts, and not take ourselves too seriously. Some of our shows will be more planned out than others, and we intend to have guests ranging from ethnomusicologists to up-and-coming local artists. We're both graduate students, after all, so we can only do so much planning. At the end of the day, we just want to broadcast our contagious love of good music and make some new friends in the worldwide KDRT community.