Greg Kot via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Greg Kot:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Greg Kot
- City: Chicago, Illinois
- Country: United States
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Since 1990, Kot has been the music critic at the Chicago Tribune, where he has comprehensively covered popular music --- from hip-hop to rock en español --- and reported on music-related social, political and business issues (see his daily blog, Turn it Up, at the chicagotribune.com web site).
With Jim DeRogatis, Kot cohosts Sound Opinions, "the world's only rock 'n' roll talk show," on national public radio. The show has a worldwide audience via its web site, soundopinions.org, and is nationally syndicated through its home base at Chicago Public Radio, WBEZ-FM 91.5.
The show’s guests have included Radiohead, Yoko Ono, Arcade Fire, Peter Bogdanovich, Mission of Burma, Tom Petty, Anthony Bordain, Laurie Anderson, Jon Brion, John Cale, the Strokes and Cameron Crowe.
Kot’s books include Wilco, “Learning How to Die” (Broadway Books), “Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music,” (Scribner) and “I’ll Take You There: Mavis Staples, the Staple Singers and the March up Freedom’s Highway” (Scribner).
He also coauthored “The Beatles vs. The Rolling Stones: Sound Opinions on the Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Rivalry” (Voyageur Press) with DeRogatis.
His music criticism and journalism also has appeared in Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Cash: By the Editors of Rolling Stone,” "Harrison: A Rolling Stone tribute to George Harrison," "The Trouser Press Guide to '90s Rock" and "The Rolling Stone Album Guide."
A longtime contributor to Rolling Stone, Kot has written for a dozen national publications, including Details, Blender, Entertainment Weekly, Men's Journal, Guitar World, Vibe and Request. He blames Ira Robbins, Jack Rabid and Greil Marcus for his lifelong obsession with music and music-writing.
In his spare time, Kot is a youth basketball coach, and is proud to say that both his daughters survived his coaching and went on to lead happy and productive lives (so far, at least). He and his partners operate Over the Edge, a travel-team program based in Chicago that prepares grade-school athletes to compete at a high school level with an emphasis on the game’s fundamentals. For more information, visit overtheedgehoops.com. With his fellow Over the Edge coach Keith Miniscalco, Kot is coauthor of “Survival Guide for Coaching Youth Basketball” (Human Kinetics).
Kot has lived on Chicago's Northwest Side through numerous character-building winters with his wife, Deb, two daughters and far too many records.
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Book Purchases: http://gregkot.com/books.html
- ▶ Twitter: gregkot
- ▶ Website: http://gregkot.com
- ▶ Articles: http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/greg-kot/
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging through New Orleans and Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... and Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
