Dadifox & PDDG - "Tchu Cala Baby Kuduro Rock"

Rock music is the strangest piece of furniture in the living room of popular music: non-specific yet ever present. A curator of this room is just as likely to know what larger role, if any, rock is meant to play as any visitor. Is it meant to be sat on? Is it meant to be covered with cloth? ...so on, and so forth. Unfortunately no one has the heart to tell rock the words no one ever wants to hear, "It's time to move on." Rock has only Cleveland to return to; Miami is big enough for only one Cavalier. Alas, rock's service time and unspoken tenure must be considered; a hefty severance package is in order.

For all its strangeness, rock is unique. Its cultural heydey doubles as a compressed history lesson. Rock of the 1960s and '70s - subjective exceptions sporadically sprouting in the 1980s and '90s - was a culmination. The often passed over "n roll" does like a rolling stone and goes on with no direction home. Rock took everything that came before, reimagined it with the technology of the time, and improved it beyond most imaginations. Destined to become a rebellious institution, it was eventually torn down by its own rebels. Rock backed itself into a corner. Just as well, Pendulum, Bloody Beetroots, and Skrillex, did not lift sounds from the Lomax archives to fuse the with tastes of their present. Drum'n'bass, house, and dubstep all eventually put lipstick on "rock" the style and now society is coping with a plaster caster that should have never been.

In his version of this travesty Dadifox makes his intentions clear. He enlists PDDG to help with "Tchu Cala Baby Kuduro Rock," and includes a note reading, "a ideia é trazer coisas novas (the idea is to bring forth new things)". As respectable as the intention, but nonetheless unorthodox. A series of neck movements are not required to catch a glimpse from the optimal angle, but doing is helpful. Listeners are greeted by a rare juxtaposition: a foghorn introducing the electric guitar. A riff is not molded, rather the desired bits are manually extracted. The remainder of the song is like relying on myopic eyes for a hallway's visual description, which is to say certainty is never found. Like a good rock venture, the song lasts upwards of three-minutes. Changes, though, come every five or ten seconds, meaning that like the rhythm the song's organization comes from kuduro. Following a twenty-five second head, the guitar notes are modulated and a single vocal sample is played as the hook. A trend emerges. This is a song that is actively competes with itself. An identity is found briefly with the tempo changes and the notes becoming shorter. A bridge (0:46 - 0:52) and two distinct "break-downs" (0:52 - 0:55 and 0:56 - 1:07) are formed but are just as soon discarded. Just after the minute mark the guitar dissipates, and like a good kuduro beat the song begins to wrap up leaving with in a brief but impactul memory. As the digital drums play on, the ambition, like the song itself, becomes larger and unmistakable. As the second loop begins it becomes clear the clumsiness is unavoidable. In the mean time, the weird piece of furniture that is rock music now has a new tchotchke to support.

- John Noggle