Colloquium

“Oyinbo, I go chop your dollar” -- A Talk By Christopher Waterman

Start: 10/09/2008 - 17:00

End: 10/09/2008 - 19:00

Timezone: Etc/GMT-4

Location:

701C Dodge Hall

“Oyinbo, I go chop your dollar”: Yahoo Boyz, dirty money, and 419 politics in Nigerian popular music
A talk by Christopher Waterman
Dean of the School of the Arts and Architecture, UCLA

Thursday, October 9

5:00 PM

701C Dodge Hall

In Africa as elsewhere, popular music has long been complexly articulated with the struggle to create, texture and defend viable life-spaces under challenging economic circumstances. This talk is a reflection on recent developments in Nigerian popular music, focusing on songs dealing with the 419/internet scammer controversy ("Yahoozee," by Olu Maintain, "No More Yahoozee [The Reply]," by Harri Best Moradiyo, and "Oyinbo, I Go Chop Your Dollar," by Nkem Owoh), and on musicians' reactions to the Central Bank of Nigeria's recent attempt to outlaw the "spraying" of cash at ceremonies.

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A Survivors' Music Manifesto: On the Singing of Korean Survivors of the Japanese Military 'Comfort Women'

Start: 04/29/2008 - 17:00

End: 04/29/2008 - 19:00

Timezone: Etc/GMT-4

Location:

701C Dodge Hall

Sponsored by the Department of Music
Please note the 5PM start time is one hour later than many of our previous events.

Josh Pilzer is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Music at Columbia. He holds an MA in Ethnomusicology from University of Hawa'ii and a PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago. His research and teaching focus on Korean and Japanese folk and popular singing and the experience, memory, and memorialization of traumatic events in East Asian modernity. He is currently working on a manuscript based on his doctoral dissertation, about singing in the lives of Korean survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery. He received the Society for Ethnomusicology?s Charles Seeger Prize in 2001; his articles have appeared in Ethnomusicology, in The Courtesan's Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Oxford University Press 2006), and elsewhere.