It’s the day of San Lázaro / Babalú-Ayé. The 11th anniversary of the ill-fated Obama opening to Cuba. open.spotify.com/track/6AJwRC...

fans of my newsletter: i had to skip december’s booked outing due to illness. i wouldn’t be surprised if something else turns up before the end of the year, though.

for the morning crew

of course i can’t sleep when i have to get up early for travel so instead i’m mentally laying out a comprehensive index of twentieth century high, pop, and junk culture called The Omnibrow’s Handbook

i do have a front-runner for my song of the year, which i have not noticed publicly before even though i’ve been compulsively listening to it since may. afro-colombian dancehall with resonances across all the empires of the americas. llegó babylon indeed. youtu.be/bE9-mgRmLIY

Post a black and white panel and tell us who drew it. This one is El Cubri (artist: Pedro Arjona)

my christmas present to myself has been sorted.

i'm still ~200 songs shy of getting through my 2025 to-listen backlog, after which i can start to weed through the 1K+ songs i've saved to return to, i have no chance of winnowing it down to a top anything reasonable by the end of the year

this is the video i would have shared so boosting ann’s words is a bonus

19, my first email account was juno rather than aol but otherwise, yes, i was alive in the twentieth century

the death of the twentieth century continues apace.

just spoke out loud for the first time in a few days after having been down with the worst illness i’ve experienced since covid in 2021 and it took longer than expected to shake the rust off

the similarity between the UK and US versions of Xmas pop is that they are both reprieves from stereotype: in the US, gentle, nostalgic music is a reprieve from loud nonstop hustle work-hard play-harder life, in the UK jolly carousal is a reprieve from keep-your-head-down mustn’t-grumble grayness

jesus christ you'd think i'd never written longform before, i've been working on this piece since goddamn august and i think i'm going to have to start from scratch again

exactly! i don’t want to write about what everyone else has already written enough to train an llm on! i want to create new knowledge! even though (maybe even specifically because) it’s not profitable!

first book printed in english, let’s go en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictes_...

thinking about how i first learned to type diacritics in order to spell george pérez’s name correctly, and now every time i restart my computer i have to go into settings and remove the basic usa keyboard because windows 11 hates difference

uh oh

i'm too late to say i'll go first youtu.be/cVUgQ9xL-TY

actual bluesky challenge: post your favorite work of art from fifty years before you were born.

hazards of taking years between blog posts: i'd completely forgotten that i listed a certain record (rec. 11/32, rel. 1/33) in my 1932 roundup and was halfway through a writeup of it for 1933 before noticing.

maybe it's just the ascetic religious separatism in my upbringing talking, but the idea that all cultural production is doomed because a bunch of megacorps are sunsetting the late 20th century model of funding and distribution feels premature. i'm not even a big DIY guy but: people will make art.

been thinking about ways to mark my 50th birthday, coming up in two years. i already have one project about a quarter done that will run all of 2027, but a more personal one, engaging with the art made in my lifetime that has mattered to me, is brewing,

anyway,

"no star (wars or trek), lotr, marvel, disney animated or pixar" is a pretty good thumbnail sketch of my aesthetic wheelhouse, as someone who grew up loving all of the above insofar as i had any access to it. but 1 Cor 13:11

wilco discourse on my timeline like a quarter century didn't happen

And since I don’t want folks to think that the only thing notable about Albert Dorne was his resemblance to Abe Vigoda, here’s a reminder that he was, in fact, a world-class badass draftsman.

Europeans refusing to recognize black Americans as Americans and considering the U.S. a white supremacist nation even more than white supremacists here do (they're trying to make it one again, which means they know it isn't) fuck off

listened to Titica's new album on my walk today, her third in fifteen years as Angola's premiere trans recording artist. kuduro, semba, dancehall, kizomba, and what i think i'm going to have to call funk angolana, using Brazilian rhythms in non-Brazilian ways. www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

there are always more pathways to get lost in chicagoreader.com/music/the-se...

my favorite silent these days is most likely Límite (1931), one of the great monuments of Brazilian modernism and a late example of the populist avant-garde that vanished overnight with the conversion to sound. www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWDW...

J. Bogart klaxon: French-born singer of Cape Verdean immigrant parents blending CV coladeira and FWI shatta youtu.be/YzpFr2B94to-d-

i just now realized that every time i've read the name paul dano i've been picturing paul bettany

i know i'm the only person liable to be affected, but a new French avant-r&b singer and an established Brazilian rapper (among, I'm sure, others) both using the mononym Ebony is going to complicate my 2025 longlist bookkeeping

anyway here's one of my favorite current Cuban singers covering my all-time favorite classic salsa song: youtu.be/ey3DSihbp9E?...

the christmas canon in my house growing up

December 4. In Cuba, the day of Santa Bárbara / Changó. The day on which both Machito and his Afro-Cubans and Los Van Van were founded. m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y06C...

i must be a music writer because i'm not anything else worth mentioning, even though i only briefly wrote for publications fifteen years ago. this, the 50th and final in a series of mini-essays i wrote over the first 25 days of the year, is the best i got: www.jonathanbogart.net/blog/2025/01...

opened spotify for the first time in months. i'd spent 0.2 days listening to it in 2025, and my listening age is 73, which honestly seems low my tidal rewind is better, since i listened to an album every weekday from april to october, but my top artist is just because i put on two Urias albums

i agree with this not just because of course i would, but because it is increasingly obvious to me that the generational shifts that happened with jazz, rock, and hip hop/electronic is now taking place with international music. yes, that's too diffuse a term to mean anything. so were the others.

did the bsky insights, my wordcloud is too dominated by music challenge hashtags to be interesting, but i was chastened to note that i mostly post around this time of day and then close the app

what i'm wearing to the bluesky christmas party

hm, YouTube is showing me videos from channels i'm a paid member of (YouTube's in-house version of Patreon) in all of my profiles instead of just the one where I'm subscribed. don't like that. i keep my profiles algorithmically segregated for a reason.

i am so period cartooning-pilled that i read the entire copy looking for the sociopathy before realizing that it was the humorous illustration that was noteworthy

strangely inspirational

a decade ago i made a 24-hour mix of music from 1977 (the year i was born). i've been casually browsing in the filmmaking of 1977, and aside from the usual notables it's been a reminder of why i don't fuck with film the way i do with music: the highs are high, but the lows are unbearably tedious

i can make a definitive promise that my 2025 year-end list will be months into 2026

Christmas music discourse is on the timeline again, none of it recognizable to me, for whom hymnody and the tin pan alley canon remain the only real signifiers of the holidays to me: everything else, from Brenda Lee to Mariah, might as well be the Chipmunks for how emotionally affecting i find it