Love is the Message: Dance, Music and Counterculture

This is an excerpt from a patrons episode. To hear the full show, plus lectures on Fordism, Marxism and music, book readings, interviews and more, become a patron from £3pcm by visiting Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod In this patrons-only bonus episode, Jeremy and Tim have a conversation about what music has been on their turntables recently. Tim and Jeremy play and discuss Malian Blues-inflected moder...

A major technological innovation to emerge from the milieu of NYC 1975 was the 12" single. In this episode, Jeremy and Tim uncover the demands of dancers and DJs in the discos for longer tracks, the precursors found in acid rock and Bob Dylan, and tell the story of individual releases that presaged widespread adoption of the 12" format. Tim and Jeremy also talk album aesthetics, the Penny Lane / S...

This is a excerpt of a patrons-only episode. To become a patron from just £3pcm, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. In the concluding episode of the mini-series, Jeremy completes his account of those Marxist academics and thinkers whose work either makes reference to music or can be brought to bear on it. Picking up in the 1950s, we hear about ways of understanding music's autonomous capacity to af...

In this episode Tim and Jeremy continue the story of the NYC Record Pool. We hear how the Pool invited the record labels to their inaugural meeting in the basement of David Mancuso's Prince Street Loft, the demands they made of them, and the egalitarian way they wished the Pool to be organised. These techniques of self organisation and collective self-assertion are set against the wider contempora...

This is an excerpt from a patrons-only episode. To become a patron from just £3 a month, got to Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod In this patrons-only episode, Jeremy dons his professorial gown to deliver the first of two lectures on music and Marxism. What is historical materialism? What does it mean to apply historical materialist analysis to culture? Jeremy shows how Marxist theory can be - and has be...

In this episode Jeremy and Tim begin the first of a two-parter on the New York City Record Pool - a cooperative venture that saw DJs in the city come together to distribute the records they received from the labels equally and with a spirit of egalitarianism.   We hear about the lay of the land for early DJs in the city, the ways in which they tried to make money, the role they played in 'bre...

This is an excerpt of a full length episode currently only available to patrons. To become a patron and support what we're doing from £3 per month, head to www.patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. In this patrons-only episode, Tim and Jeremy react to Louis Vuitton's latest menswear line "Fall in Love", designed by the late Virgil Abloh and, according to the LV publicity, inspired by David Mancuso and the L...

Love is the Message series 4 continues apace. In this episode Jeremy and TIm continue to examine the dynamic environment of New York City around the 1975 Fiscal Crisis, contrasting pessimistic and optimistic accounts of the time: was the Big Apple a depressed town cut off from the rest of the country, or a city enjoying its own cultural renaissance? Or both? We hear about the early emergence of Ne...

This is an excerpt of a full length episode currently only available to patrons. To become a patron and support what we're doing from £3 per month, head to www.patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. In this patrons-only bonus episode, Jeremy and Tim have a conversation about what music has been on their turntables recently.  We hear more music from the Californian psychedelic renaissance, another dose o...

Love is the Message is back for a new series! Early this year we travelled the world in search of Afro-Psychedelic sounds, but in now we're bringing it back to New York City. Tim and Jeremy will be exploring the melting pot city around the year 1975: at the pinnacle of the musical and art worlds, yet teetering on fiscal collapse and almost bankrupt, transforming from industrial to post-industrial...

As listeners will know, we've come to the end of our series on Afro-Psychedelia. Tim and Jeremy will be back soon with a whole new series, but in the meantime Love Is The Message is very happy to share 'Screwed and Chopped', an episode from the archive of the Phantom Power Podcast. Phantom Power is an excellent podcast about sound, sound art, music, and the scholarship that surrounds it. It's beau...

As we finally come to the end of our series on Afro-Psychedlia, Tim and Jeremy bring us back to New York, David Mancuso and the dancefloor of The Loft via Puerto Rico, Salsa and the Latin influence on the city in the early '70s. We hear about the mighty Fania Records - a classic example of the sort of small labels who found a commercial audience while still releasing amazing music - and the band t...

We're almost at the end of our series on Afro-Psychedelia. The final stop on our tour is the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico, an unincorporated territory of the USA, with a rich musical tradition and close migratory ties to New York City, where our journey began. We hear about the accessible complexity of the percussion-rich music of Puerto Ricans like the mighty Tito Puente; hear how Cuban and Ja...

In this week's podcast Tim and Jeremy complete their three-parter on Brazil, looking at music in the country from 1968 - 1975. Against a backdrop of managed democracy, repression and censorship for musicians, we hear about a number of exciting artists who combined inventive experimental radicalism with a popular imagination to create electrifying music. Jeremy and Tim introduce Fusion groups like...

In this week's podcast Jeremy and Tim continue with the second of three episodes evaluating Brazilian music from 1965-1975 as they turn their attention to Tropicalia. We hear about the origins of Tropicalia, or Tropicalismo, set against the turbulent political climate and eventual military coup of the country in the mid-'60s. Via music from the Gilberto Gil, Tom Zé, Caetano Veloso and more, T...

This is an excerpt of a full length episode currently only available to patrons. To become a patron and support what we're doing from £3 per month, head to www.patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. In this patrons-only bonus episode, Jeremy and Tim have a conversation about what music has been on their turntables recently.  Jeremy brings a pair of Indian compositions from very different ends of the mus...

This is an excerpt of a full length episode currently only available to patrons. To become a patron and support what we're doing from £3 per month, head to www.patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. In this patrons-only episode Tim concludes reading from his essay Decolonising Disco—Counterculture, Postindustrial Creativity, the 1970s Dance Floor and Disco , published recently in the collection Global Dance...

In this week's podcast Jeremy and Tim turn their atteniton to the musical cultures of 1965-1975 on some of the smaller islands of the Caribbean: Trinidad, Guadalupe and Haiti. We hear about Trinidad's particular combination of Afro-diasporic and South Asian populations during Imperial rule, how Calypso mediated the island's relationship to the British Empire, the emergence of the steel pans on the...

This is an excerpt of a full length episode currently only available to patrons. To become a patron and support what we're doing from £3 per month, head to www.patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. In this patrons-only episode Tim reads from his essay Decolonising Disco—Counterculture, Postindustrial Creativity, the 1970s Dance Floor and Disco , published recently in the collection Global Dance Cultures in...

This is an excerpt of a full length episode currently only available to patrons. To become a patron and support what we're doing from £3 per month, head to www.patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. In this patrons-only episode, Jeremy and Tim conclude their mini-series ‘Heavy Dub Theory’ (for now). They talk about the work of the French radical philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, introducing thr...

In this week's episode Jeremy and Tim travel to New Years Day 1959 as Che Guevara's forces defeat Batista to complete the Cuban Revolution. We hear about the military embargo imposed by the USA on their island neighbour, its impact on life for musicians on both sides of the border, and is resonances with American foreign policy in Latin America more broadly. Tim and Jeremy also consider the nation...

In this week's episode we move away from Jamaica across the Caribbean Sea to Cuba. To explain the theological precursors to modern Cuba, Jeremy and Tim start with the history of slavery on the island and the influences of Congolese and Uruban religious and musical practices the trafficked people brought with them. We hear about pantheism, master drummers and a musical culture centered around dance...

This is an excerpt of a full length episode currently only available to patrons. To become a patron and support what we're doing from £3 per month, head to www.patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. In this patrons-only episode, Tim and Jeremy continue their deep exploration of the aesthetics of dub. We begin with a history of MCing, toasting and chatting in Jamaican music, taking in famed MCs like U-Roy alo...

LITM returns with the second half of our examination of the life and work of Bob Marley and the Wailers. Jeremy and Tim pick up the story in 1973, with the release of Burnin', the band's split, and the launch of Marley in the rock star mode. A discussion on the strange case of Eric Clapton's cover of I Shot the Sheriff follows, along with Marley's first international smash, No Woman, No Cry. Tim a...

Unlocked - for a number of personal reasons, we've been unable to record the episode on Bob Marley and the Wailers. In its stead, we've taken this opportunity to unlocked both parts of our interview with Daphne A. Brooks, previously only available to patrons. Become a patron from £3pcm to access much more of this material at www.patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. We'll be back to pick up with Afro-Psyche...