Think global, listen local
: Greg Allen has a great idea — collecting taxi music:
…the encounter rekindled a project I’d begun several years ago but abandoned: TaxiMusic.net….
I’d been in the habit of asking taxi drivers wherever I went if they had a tape we could listen to. The response was almost always the same: “you don’t want to listen to it; it’s ______ (Punjabi, Urdu, Island, Ethiopian) music,” followed by the floodgates opening on an enthusiastic explanation of what the music means. (“She loves the boy but cannot meet him.” “This is the Koran; it’s a prayer.”) Somewhere in our storage unit is a shopping bag of my own, full of tapes I bought from taxi drivers over the years before weblogs and mp3-streaming winamp.
Better yet, let’s get taxi drivers weblogging: real moblogging.
