Music Video: Miraculous - ยังเสียใจ (Still Sad)

There's something that I always enjoy about really hip-hoppy/poppy reggae.  If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you'd know that I love artists that combine upbeat melodies and hip-hop influenced vocals with syncopated Caribbean and African rhythms.  So, artists like Seeed, Afroreggae, Irie Révoltés, and Culcha Candela get a lot of play here.

Well, just because I am going all the way to Thailand today does not mean that I will break with this tradition.  In fact, if you replace the German and English of Seeed, or the French and German of Irie Révoltés, or the Spanish and German of Culcha Candela with the Thai and English of Miraculous - as you do on their song ยังเสียใจ (Still Sad) - you will not feel overwhelming culture shock.

Unfortunately, like much of the music that I find from Asia, I am having a difficult time finding information about Miraculous that I can actually translate.  Bing Translator does yeoman's work of attempting to translate the band's bio on Last.fm from Thai to English, but the result is largely an unreadable garble. This is made even more difficult because, like a frustrating number of bands from around the world, their name is neither terribly unique or easily searchable.  That having been said, if you know anything about Miraculous, please post to the comments.  I'd love to know more.

Music Video: AfroReggae - Tempo Sem Medida

AfroReggae is one of those bands that, as a non-Portuguese speaker, you would come to think of as being a pleasant enough purveyor of fairly traditional reggae from Brazil.  Dig a little below the surface, though, and you find that AfroReggae is a very political group of young artists striving for bottom up social and political change.  Formed by former drug trafficker Anderson Sá as Grupo Cultural AfroReggae, the band AfroReggae is a project to wean the poor children of the Brazilian favelas away from the deadly world of drugs and gangsterism through education - particularly music education.  As you can hear from the track Tempo Sem Medida, AfroReggae can lay down a pretty solid groove, while also serving to educate the world about life in some of the world's most dangerous slums.