Ivan Martinez has been steadily blogging about the fascinating world of the YouTube music communities that have emerged over the last years. He is obviously both a devout fan and follower of this community, and what is fascinating is that much of the music that’s coming out of this platform for sharing. He has been focusing on (but not limited to) the explosion of popular music from distributed communities of young Asians from around North America that may not fit the common pop model vision, but have been taking YouTube by storm, check out his posts on D-Pryde, Joseph Vincent, and Scott Yoshimoto for a few examples of this.
He also link to this awesome video Canon Rock, which features a number of rad Japanese guitarists rocking out together alone.
What has been so amazing about the recent developments in Ivan’s blog is not only that he has been sharing and talking about stuff he’s both passionate and knowledgeable about, but he has started sharing some original work on his blog. Take for example this duet (featured below) wherein he sings alongside his unnamed, yet extremely talented, friend who wrote and plays the music for this song.
Or his most recent post wherein he takes on the Axis of Awesome’s mashup 4 Chords:
This is a model of student blogging in this class as a final project. You share what you love, you teach us about what you know, and you take a risk by getting in their yourself and making art. Bravo! Man, there seems to be so much unrecognized talent at UMW—can’t we do something to fix this?
I can say without exaggeration that Ivan’s blog format might be my absolute favorite of the semester. He chose an incredibly niche genre and just continually slammed out amazing posts. I hadn’t heard of a single artist he posted about and they’re all incredible at what they do. For me he has highlighted in a unique way the power that YouTube gives to independent musicians to become their own publishers. Taking it further and exploring his own creativity and musical skill through that same medium was a natural progression. I sincerely hope he continues to blog all this past the end of the semester.