Recruiting Poster

As the first year of the new cycle of the Humanities Core Course winds to a close this week, lecturing professor Vinayak Chaturvedi has been discussing South Asian global remix culture in a number of genres of Indian hip hop, which incorporate classical, folk, and Bollywood melodies. Chaturvedi also points out that groups like Asian Dub Foundation are actively recruiting young remix artists through schools and community centers in Britain. For many of these musicians, MIDI instruments and the low-data size MIDI file format has been an important part of shaping their identities, as indicated by names such as "MIDI Warriors" and "MIDIval Punditz." Chaturvedi notes how the reputations of these global artists are often sustained by YouTube. For example, he showed this Britain's Got Talent clip, which has been viewed by millions, as a more mainstream form of the transnational hybridity of such analog-digital music.