popculcha

Cracking Teenagers' Online Codes

2012-01-22T09:14:00.000-08:00

Essential reading on teens and social media, all about the work of Danah Boyd. From today's (Jan. 22) New York Times.

Children today, she said, are reacting online largely to social changes that have taken place off line.

“Children’s ability to roam has basically been destroyed,” Dr. Boyd said in her office at Microsoft, where a view of the Boston skyline is echoed in the towers of books on her shelves, desk and floor. “Letting your child out to bike around the neighborhood is seen as terrifying now, even though by all measures, life is safer for kids today.”

Children naturally congregate on social media sites for the relatively unsupervised conversations, flirtations, immature humor and social exchanges that are the normal stuff of teenage hanging-out, she said.

“We need to give kids the freedom to explore and experience things online that might actually help them,” she added.

The Berkeley Radical Prints

2011-12-14T20:44:00.000-08:00

Great poster collection from "the Movement."

Here's one from the Kent State archive.

"What are kids supposed to do when they can't shop?"

2011-12-06T05:25:00.000-08:00

"The Role of Youth" -- short video by Jon Savage and Matt Wolf, from the New York Times, Dec. 6, 2011. They trace the history of the emergence of the teenager, and the recent involvement of young people in the Occupy movements, the riots in the UK, the Arab Spring. "These movements share a common goal: to re-imagine the future." Read their brief description here.

Simon Reynolds on Xenomania: How Nothing is Foreign in an Internet Age

2011-12-05T20:31:00.000-08:00

Great piece from MTV Iggy.

I hope this is true: "Recently there’s been a smatter of hipster chatter about the Egyptian dance music that gets played at Cairo street weddings." This needs to blow up. See my posts on this scene, here and here.

Viva DJs Islam Chipsy and Omar Haha and Figo.

In defence of pop, and perhaps, narcissism

2011-08-13T05:15:00.000-07:00

Nitsuh Abebe, writing in New York, defends contempo pop music against the moral panic over youth narcissism. And he makes sense of the trajectory of popular music on the charts since the '80s.

If I could choose, in retrospect, which set of music-based pathologies to spend my teenage years absorbing—the dogged outsider mumbling I picked up from indie-rock records or the brave thrusting entitlement and self-regard that allegedly speak through today’s pop—there’s a decent chance I’d take the pop.

Frankie Beverly and Maze in Brooklyn

2011-07-15T07:08:00.001-07:00

A friend of hawgblawg sent in this account of a concert in Brooklyn on Monday, July 11.

“Golden Time of Day”

On Monday night, as the sun set, and a moonlight spread over Brooklyn, a humid evening was made cool and bearable by the voice of an R&B legend. Thousands turned out for the first show of the Martin Luther King concert series that has taken place in Brooklyn’s Wingate field for the past 29

years. The first concert showcased the veteran singer, Frankie Beverly and Maze, a group that has been around “oh, only 45 years,” as Beverly told the audience. Beverly opened the evening with “Southern Girl.” Dressed in white and sporting a white beret, his powerful, soulful voice resonated across the field -- and all of Flatbush it seemed. Middle-aged women danced along as he sang his hit singles, songs from their youth “We Are One,” “Can’t Get Over You,” “Running Away,” and “Happy Feelings.” Whether he was singing his smooth classics -- slow jams played on the “Quiet Storm” on WBLS (the radio station sponsoring the MLK concert series), or jamming on the keyboard, or hooping like a preacher, or jumping up and down with band members -- Beverly displayed an astonishing energy throughout the two-hour show. As he wiped sweat off his forehead with a towel, he bantered with the audience, “I’m sixty-five years old - I got a three-pack, or maybe a can, or something!”

Beverly’s group was formed in Philadelphia in 1970 – and was initially called Raw Soul. Beverly moved the group to the Bay Area in 1972, and there they were given the name Maze, by none other than Marvin Gaye. “We’re from Philadelphia, grew up with Patti Labelle and Harold Melville. We moved to Cali in 1972 because of Sly and the Family Stone,” explained the vocalist. “One night we were playing in a rinky dink club and Marvin Gaye was there.” Gaye booked Maze on his 1976 concert tour and helped them secure their first album deal with Capitol Records. “Marv took us in, gave us the name Maze. We’re inspired by Marv – he took our feet out off clay and put them on solid ground.” Over the last forty years, Beverly has had nine top ten hits and eight gold records – but no Grammy, a point the singer joked about on stage. “I get mad sometimes, but then I’ve learned that you can either have re-wards or a-wards. Some of you have been with us for over thirty five years, that is the biggest reward, our following.”

The band, also decked out in casual white outfits, was pitch-perfect. Vance Taylor on keyboards, Calvin Napper on drums, and Jubu Smith, on guitar who, as per usual, delivered a beautiful solo on “Golden Time of

Day.”

Beverly closed the evening with a pulsating rendition of “Before I Let Go.”

Another magical night in Brooklyn.

Queer rappers

2011-06-26T16:10:00.000-07:00

An article in Resonance (issue 53, 2007) discusses the 2006 documentary about queer hip-hop, Pick Up the Mic, by Alex Hinton. Unfortunately, it's not available on the web.

The article discusses the following artists: Scream Club, QBoy, Miss Money, and Johnny Dangerous.

For the moment, this is just a resource.

Flash Mobs

2011-06-25T19:58:00.000-07:00

...were invented by a senior editor of Harper's Magazine. Read about it here. Juicy excerpts follow.

As first defined by Festinger, Pepitone, and Newcomb (1952), deindividuation is “a state of affairs in a group where members do not pay attention to other individuals qua individuals”...

Consider the generational cohort that has come to be called the hipsters–i.e., those hundreds of thousands of educated young urbanites with strikingly similar tastes. Have so many self-alleged aesthetes ever been more (in the formulation of Festinger et al.) “submerged in the group”? The hipsters make no pretense to divisions on principle, to forming intellectual or artistic camps; at any given moment, it is the same books, records, films that are judged au courant by all, leading to the curious spectacle of an “alternative” culture more unanimous than the mainstream it ostensibly opposes. What critical impulse does exist among their number merely causes a favorite to be more readily abandoned, as abandoned...it inevitably will be...

Over those who would sell to the hipsters, then, hangs the promise of instant adoption but also the specter of wholesale and irrevocable desertion...With a rising generation so mercurial, one wonders whether even the notion of “branding,” i.e., the building of long-term reputations, which has remained the watchword among our corporations for more than a decade, will itself come to lose its luster...the corporation will be content merely to hitch itself to a succession of their whims.

...Not only was the flash mob a vacuous fad; it was, in its very form (pointless aggregation and then dispersal), intended as a metaphor for the hollow hipster culture that spawned it.

I know this because I happen to have been the flash mob’s inventor...

What the project harnessed was the joining urge, a drive toward deindividuation easily discernible in the New York hipster population.

The basic hypothesis behind the Mob Project was as follows: seeing how all culture in New York was demonstrably commingled with scenesterism, the appeal of concerts and plays and readings and gallery shows deriving less from the work itself than from the social opportunities the work might engender, it should theoretically be possible to create an art project consisting of pure scene...

The mob was all about the herd instinct, I reasoned, about the desire not to be left out of the latest fad...

What the Times did, in fascinating fashion, was not just to run the backlash story (which I had been expecting in three to five more weeks) but to do so preemptively–i.e., before the backlash actually had materialized...

Nothing is more defining of hipsterism than semi-ironic coronation of its own celebrities...

I was pointing out that hipsters, our supposed cultural avant-garde, are in fact a transcontinental society of cultural receptors, straining to perceive which shifts to follow. I must hasten to add that this is not entirely their fault: the Internet can propagate any flashy notion, whether it be a style of eyewear or a presidential candidacy, with such instantaneity that a convergence on the “hip” tends now to happen unself-consciously, as a simple matter of course.

But hipsters, after becoming aware of this very dynamic, have responded in a curious and counterintuitive way. Even as they might decry this drive toward unanimity, they continually embrace it and re-embrace it in an enthusiastic, almost ecstatic fashion. No phenomenon of recent years illustrated this point as clearly as the aforementioned Strokes, who for most of 2002 held the top-band spot in hipsterdom. This was a band that, albeit enjoyable and skilled, had been clearly manufactured precisely for hipster delectation. Moreover, the hipsters were well aware of this fact, and they complained about it incessantly even as they cued up the record at parties and danced with special abandon...The Strokes made a natural object of this unanimity because their sound–derivative candy, 1970s punk simplicity dressed up with some 1990s indie-rock aloofness–was an easy common denominator...They were, moreover, easily discarded...

The most significant literary movement the hipsters have produced is McSweeney’s, which itself had essentially the characteristics of a pop-music fad...

Like the Strokes, McSweeney’s promised a cultural watershed for hipsters while making no demands on them...In its pages literature appeared as a sort of pot-luck barbecue where the young litterateur, merely by whipping up some absurdist trifle or other, could throw the Frisbee with established authors who were publishing their castoffs there...

Inevitably, even as McSweeney’s has matured and gained more seriousness of purpose, it has receded in hipster esteem, just as did trucker hats, Hush Puppies, the mullet. Like starlings on a trash-strewn field the hipsters alight together, peck intently for a time, and at some indiscernible signal take wing again at once. If they are the American avant-garde it is true, I think, in only this aspect–the unending churn of their tastes, this adult faddishness in the adolescent style...

In the media coverage of flash mobs, the most curious undercurrent was the notion, almost a wish, that they would someday become something serious....

The idea seemed to be that flash mobs could be made to convey a message, but for a number of reasons this dream was destined to run aground. First, as outlined above, flash mobs were gatherings of insiders, and as such could hardly communicate to those who did not already belong...Second, flash mobs were by definition transitory, ten minutes or less, and thereby not exactly suited to standing their ground and testifying. Third, in terms of physical space, flash mobs relied on constraints to create an illusion of superior strength...

just like flash mobs, the Dean campaign was also pure scene...

'Cash Rules Everything Around Wu'

2011-06-18T08:32:00.000-07:00

Great piece on the Wu-Tang Clan from Jeff Weiss and Tal Rosenberg.

The music [on Wu-Tang Forever] was even more dense and abstract than Enter the Wu-Tang. In his review for SPIN, Sasha Frere-Jones wrote that “Wu-Tang Clan are basically selling avant-garde music as pop to the world. “The first single off the album, a $1 million video directed by Brett Ratner, had no discernible chorus, and featured some of the most complex, intricate rhyming by the Clan members. It is also nearly six minutes long, the “Like a Rolling Stone” of the hip-hop era.

8 Openly Queer Rappers

2011-05-12T12:07:00.000-07:00

Via Color Lines, a list of five, from the inimitable Detroit rapper Invincible. Miz Korona, Mz Jonz, Thee Satisfaction, Las Krudas, and Skim. From Juba Kalamka, three more: Collin Clay, Wheelchair Sports Camp, and Big Freedia. Be sure to read about them.

And for more queer rappers, check out this earlier post on Yo Majesty.

Keen insights into hip-hop and feminism

2011-04-15T18:40:00.000-07:00

from the Crunk Feminist Collective.

More on Ari Up & The Slits: NPR's Post-Punk Female Mix

2011-01-20T07:17:00.000-08:00

I love this mix of women in post-punk from NPR's Anthony Fantano. Inspired by Ari Up (who passed away in October), it includes 56 tracks (!), which serve to give a sense of the imporant role played by women artists in this key musical moment. Lizzie Mercier Descloux, The Raincoats...Terrific. Please check it out.

photo: Abbey Braden

RIP (Belated): Ari Up

2010-12-11T12:31:00.000-08:00

Ari Up, singer for one of the absolute best bands of the punk era, The Slits, passed away on October 20. John Pareles wrote this about her and The Slits in 2009: “She sang mocking critiques of trendiness, romance and consumerism as the music juggled rock, ska, reggae and something like funk. The Slits came up with odd-angled chord progressions that better trained musicians wouldn’t touch.” The quote is from a very fine obit written by Colin Moynihan for the New York Times, which appears here.

Who will ever forget the cover of The Slits first album, Cut?

The music is even more memorable.

Here are a couple of Slits songs that I particularly like:

"Typical Girls"

And (later Slits): "In the Beginning There Was Rhythm".

Country Joe and the Fish, "Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag"

2010-11-02T07:48:00.000-07:00

The recorded version.

Country Joe at Woodstock:

British Orientalist Pop: Kula Shaker, "Govinda" + Yardbirds, "Over, Under, Sideways, Down"

2010-10-19T07:57:00.000-07:00

Queen Live: "Mustapha"

2010-10-19T07:54:00.000-07:00

Ibrahim, Ibrahim, Ibrahim,
Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah will pray for you.
Hey!
Mustapha, Mustapha, Mustapha Ibrahim.
Mustapha, Mustapha, Mustapha Ibrahim.
Mustapha Ibrahim, Mustapha Ibrahim
Allah, Allah, Allah will pray for you.
Mustapha Ibrahim, al havra kris vanin
Allah, Allah, Allah will pray for you.
Mustapha, hey! Mustapha
Mustapha Ibrahim, Mustapha Ibrahim, hey!
Allah-i, Allah-i, Allah-i,
Ibra-Ibra-Ibrahim, yeah!
Ibrahim, Ibrahim, Ibrahim,
Allah Allah Allah-i hey!
Mustapha Mustapha - Allah-i na stolei
Mustapha Mustapha - Achtar es na sholei
Mustapha Mustapha - Mochamut dei ya low eshelei
Mustapha Mustapha - ai ai ai ai ahelei
Mustapha,
Mustapha,
Ist avil ahiln avil ahiln adhim Mustapha,
Salaam Aleikum!
Mustapha Ibrahim, Mustapha Ibrahim
Allah, Allah, Allah will pray for you.
Mustapha Ibrahim, achbar ish navin
Allah, Allah, Allah will pray for you.
Mustapha, Mustapha
Mustapha Ibrahim, Mustapha Ibrahim, hey!
Allah-i, Allah-i, Allah-i,
Ibra-Ibra-Ibrahim, yeah!
Ibrahim, Ibrahim, Ibrahim,
Allah Allah Allah-i hey!
Mustapha Mustapha
Mustapha Mustapha
Mustapha Mustapha
Mustapha Mustapha
Mustapha,
Mustapha,
Vontap ist ahiln avil ahiln adhim Mustapha,
Aleikum Salaam hey!

Salt 'n' Pepa, "Shoop"

2010-10-12T08:16:00.000-07:00

Hey, yeah - I wanna shoop, baby

[Oooo, how you doin', baby?
No, not you
You, the bow-legged one, (ha-ha) yeah
What's your name?
Damn, that sounds sexy]

Here I go, here I go, here I go again (again?)
Girls, what's my weakness? (Men!)
Ok then, chillin', chillin', mindin' my business (word)
Yo, Salt, I looked around, and I couldn't believe this
I swear, I stared, my niece my witness
The brother had it goin' on with somethin' kinda...uh
Wicked, wicked (oooo) - had to kick it
I'm not shy so I asked for the digits
A ho? No, that don't make me
See what I want slip slide to it swifty
Felt it in my hips so I dipped back to my bag of tricks
Then I flipped for a tip, make me wanna do tricks for him
Lick him like a lollipop should be licked
Came to my senses and I chilled for a bit
Don't know how you do the voodoo that you do
So well it's a spell, hell, makes me wanna shoop shoop shoop

Shoop shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop ba-doop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop ba-doop ba-doop

Ummm, you're packed and you're stacked 'specially in the back
Brother, wanna thank your mother for a butt like that (thanks, Mom)
Can I get some fries with that shake-shake boobie?
If looks could kill you would be an uzi
You're a shotgun - bang! What's up with that thang?
I wanna know how does it hang?
Straight up, wait up, hold up, Mr. Lover
Like Prince said you're a sexy mutha-
Well-a, I like 'em real wild, b-boy style by the mile
Smooth black skin with a smile
Bright as the sun, I wanna have some fun
Come (come) and (hmmm) give me some of that yum-yum
Chocolate chip, honey dip, can I get a scoop? (please)
Baby, take a ride in my coupe, you make me wanna...

Shoop shoop ba-doop (Baby, hey)
Shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop ba-doop ba-doop
Shoop shoop ba-doop (Don't you know I wanna shoop, baby)
Shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop ba-doop ba-doop

Well let me bring you back to the subject, Pep's on the set
Make you get hot, make you work up a sweat
When you skip-to-my-lou, my darling
Not falling in love but I'm falling for your [super sperm]
When I get ya betcha bottom dollar you were best under pressure
[Yo, Sandy, I wanna like, taste you]
Getcha getcha lips wet cuz it's time to have Pep

On your mark, get set, go, let me go, let me shoop
To the next man in the three-piece suit
I spend all my dough, ray me, cutie
Shoop shoop a-doobie like Scoobie Doobie Doo
I love you in your big jeans, you give me nice dreams
You make me wanna scream, "Oooo, oooo, oooo!"
I like what ya do when you do what ya do
You make me wanna shoop

Shoop shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop ba-doop ba-doop
Shoop shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop ba-doop ba-doop

[Oh, my goodness, girl, look at him
He's the cutest brother in here
And he's comin' this way! Oooo!]

S and the P wanna kick with me, cool (uh-huh)
But I'm wicked, G, (yeah) hit skins but never quickly (that's right)
I hit the skins for the hell of it, just for the yell I get
Mmm mmm mmm, for the smell of it (smell it)
They want my bod, here's the hot rod (hot rod)
Twelve inches to a yard (damn) and have ya soundin' like a retard (yeah)
Big 'Twan Love-Her, six-two, wanna hit you
So what you wanna do?
What you wanna do?
Mmmm, I wanna shoop

Shoop shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop ba-doop ba-doop
Shoop shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop ba-doop ba-doop

Oh, you make me wanna shoop
Hey yeah, I wanna shoop, baby

some lesbian rap: Yo Majesty

2010-10-11T19:10:00.000-07:00

And that is how a lesbian rap group from Florida got an uptight Manhattan crowd to relax a little.

Julianne Shepherd, in The New York Times, Jan. 27, 2008, on the out lesbian rappers Yo Majesty & others.

Yo Majesty ([TIM SACCENTI)

It’s a lackluster time for mainstream female rappers, with M.C.’s like Foxy Brown and Remy Ma making more headlines for jail stints than for their music. Lil’ Kim hasn’t gone platinum since 2003, Eve’s comeback album has been delayed several times, and Missy Elliott’s first record in three years isn’t due until late spring. Fergie, with her singsong chants about her feminine wiles, is the closest thing to a female rap superstar these days. [OUCH!--T.S.] But in the wake of the critical favorite M.I.A., a new crop of young, multicultural, female hip-hop acts is causing a stir on the Internet and in indie-label conference rooms.

To wit, Yo Majesty, Santogold, Kid Sister, Amanda Blank.

Be sure to check out Yo Majesty's e.p., "Kryptonite Pussy." Yo Majesty has toured in the UK with The Gossip (of Searcy, Arkansas fame). And check out Shunda K, live, performing with Peaches in Berlin on "Buck You Like a Billionaire."

Spectacle Rules in Women's Pop: Jon Caramanica

2010-09-05T12:52:00.001-07:00

From the New York Times' Sunday Arts & Leisure section (July 25, 2010), this report by Jon Caramanica on the decline of "sincerity" (Lilith Fair, Sarah McLachlan) in women's pop and the ascendance of spectacle.

Featuring Lady Gaga, Christine Aguilera, Kate Perry, Kesha, Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj (below).

Gender & Indie

2010-09-04T10:06:00.000-07:00

Girls: don't try this...

From GuidedByVeal, posted on the Guardian Music Blog on Sept 1, '10. Read the entire post here. Juicy excerpts follow.

Without a doubt, indie has a more enlightened sense of gender relations than many musical genres. You can see this in a number of areas, such as pioneering co-ed bands (Pixies, Arcade Fire, Lush, the White Stripes, Elastica, My Bloody Valentine, Quasi, Slowdive, the xx , Autolux, Beach House, the Kills, feel free to carry on) and the blending of gender-coded imagery where androgyny has been consistent in clothing and physicality...Androgyny can even been seen in the common use of falsetto by male singers as a higher register is usually associated with femininity. The blending of gender imagery is common in rock and pop, but the central value of equality, even between performers and audience has made humanist gender relations the ideal in indie.

However, in practicality, indie does not exist in some parallel universe. I can't tell you the number of times I've seen female musicians ignored in interviews. Additionally, female spectatorship and fanship is sexualised. There is an assumption if you are female at a show that you are sexually available to performers...This assumption that audiences are filled with sexually overwhelmed girls is belied by the fact that for rock and metal as well as for indie the audiences are disproportionately male.

At indie shows, you still see gender distinctions in distribution patterns and activities. Women tend to stand right at the front and by the speaker stacks, rarely in the central area where dancing might happen. Groping is absolutely taboo, yet women are still loathe to crowd surf because it only takes one jerk in an audience to violate a woman which limits her ability to participate in audience activities available to males. During my research I've been told by countless women that they refrained from crowd-surfing and most of them (including myself) had been groped at shows...

The restriction of female participation was part of the rationale for stopping stage diving and discouraging crowd-surfing. British indie has been – and still is – consistently and significantly more egalitarian in terms of gender relations than America. In the noughties, when indie aesthetics overtook alternative music in the US, it ostensibly produced more female equality...

However, even in 2006, when Pitchfork reviewed my book on the culture of indie music, the writer actually talked about my cleavage!

(Meanwhile, regarding crowd surfing, Lady Gag thinks otherwise.)

Sony Walkman Ads

2010-08-30T19:06:00.000-07:00

Great resource for television and print advertisements for the Walkman.

Sony Walkman and Cultural Regulation

2010-08-30T16:31:00.000-07:00

This post expands upon the question of the cultural regulation of the Walkman (and more recently, the iPod).

Relevant bits:

Hector Gonzales, a substitute teacher in San Diego public schools, never hesitates to confiscate Walkmans or iPods (which he returns to students at the end of the school day). "When you wear them in public, headphones are anti-social devices [which] foster self-centered, elitist attitudes and prevent the kindling of conversation among fellow human beings. Especially with teenagers, who need as much social interaction as possible in order to be well adjusted adults. And they play [music] at such a high volume...anyone standing nearby can discern specific lyrics."

Shortly after talking to Gonzales, I come across a teenager - "Sammy" - seated at a bus stop on El Cajon Boulevard, though I hear him before I see him due to the volume of the music he's playing through his iPod headset. Once I coax him out from under the speaker pads, I ask whether he feels cut off from his surroundings when his "private" music is loud enough to drown out all outside noise.

"Some people give me dirty looks, but kids my age are into it. Like, if I see another guy [with a Walkman or iPod], we might start talking about what bands we're playing. So it's just the opposite as anti-social. It was a dude with a Walkman who turned me on to his Suicidal [Tendencies] CD, 'cause we swapped headsets to check out each others' tunes. That's a complete stranger, dude. The music's what got us talking."

..."When I'm at the gym, I put on [this] headset but there's nothing playing," says Deborah Macey, whom I spot wearing headphones at a Family Fitness Center...

"I thought you were hitting on me. See, I put [the headset] on to keep away all the guys who come here just to use pickup lines...

The jury is still out as to whether wearing HEADPHONES while working out to music is more damaging to your hearing.

On the premise that headphones isolate wearers and prevent them from hearing important sirens, threatening engine noise and car horn warnings, California's Vehicle Code section 27400 states that "No person operating any motor vehicle or bicycle shall wear any headset covering, or any earplugs in, both ears."...

The code is rarely enforced, although bicyclists sometimes find themselves cited. "It's not very fair, because there's no law against deaf people riding bikes," argues Jeremy Porter of Senior Spokes, a North County cycling club. "Earmuffs, the kind you use to keep your ears warm, aren't illegal to wear on a bike or in a car, but they 'cover both ears' and drown out a lot more sound [than headphones]. There is one good reason not to wear headphones [while bicycling]. If someone else hits you, it's a lot harder to collect from the other guy's insurance company if you get into an accident with headphones on! They'll say it was your fault because you couldn't hear what was going on around you!"

Porter points out that car manufacturers brag about how soundproof it is inside their vehicles. "By comparison, wearing headphones doesn't block out nearly as much sound as the closed windows and soundproofing in a new Lexus. Walkman headphones are optimized for frequency bandwidths from around 600 hz to 3000 hz. That's about the same as the average speaking voice. Noise at frequencies outside this range can be heard easily through the speaker pads, as long as the headphones aren't played to loud. Lightweight open-air mini-headphones aren't going to block out the sound of a siren or a car horn or even a barking dog."

...s for wearing headsets while listening to private music on the job, some studies indicate that allowing employees to do so increases productivity and boosts workplace morale - and eliminates arguments over what music should be played aloud.

n one study of organizational behavior, 75 out of 256 workers of a retail sales company listed to personal stereos on the job for four weeks. They showed a 10-percent increase in productivity compared to co-workers.

2010-08-21T13:21:00.000-07:00

Swinging London from Marc Campbell on Vimeo.

Found this on Dangerous Minds, which tells us:

"Look At Life" were a series of short documentary films produced in the 1960s by the Rank Organization. They were shown in British movie theaters before the main attraction. Shot in vibrant color, Look At Life often focused on ‘Swinging London’.

In these two clips we get a peek into the King’s Road fashion scene and hip London coffeehouses. Groovy.

A few sample phrases that I snatched from the "Swinging London" segment:

buy uniforms of the past to affront the uniformity of the present

caftan seekers from gay Arabia

a super charade of happy happenings

A screen capture of London male 60's fashion:

In the café segment, I learned that the Universities and Left Review (forefunner of New Left Review) started a cafe called The Partisan in order to fund the magazine.

Zoe Chace on women pop stars adopting personae

2010-08-12T10:01:00.000-07:00

Nicki Minaj as the Harajuku Barbie at 2010 BET Awards (Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)

There are some pop stars right now who look a lot like drag queens — Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Beyonce, Katy Perry, even Ke$ha.

Excellent report, on today's Morning Edition. Listen to it, or read it, here.

A few more juicy excerpts:

Gaga has started calling her fans "monsters." 18-year-old Darnell Purt is one of those them. He just graduated high school in Brooklyn. "We're all monsters," he says. "Like, if they think that I'm a monster because I'm bi, or I'm a hermaphrodite, or I dress funny, or I'm gay-friendly, then we're all monsters. We're all crazy monsters"...

This is a modern phenomenon, but that doesn't mean it's new, says Judith Halberstam, who teaches media studies at the University of Southern California.

"Look back at the 19th century at people like Oscar Wilde," she suggests. "Oscar Wilde may well be one of the early people who created a public persona for himself and then was happy, when called upon, to perform this role of the glib dandy who was full of one-liners."

Instead of spinning around helplessly in a media cycle devoted to his outlandish behavior, Wilde grabbed the steering wheel...

So are these stars controlling their fans, controlling their media coverage, or just enabling everyone's inner drag queen to come out?

Virginia Heffernan on digital photos and parenting

2010-07-10T16:42:00.000-07:00

Very perceptive article from the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Feb. 25, 2010.

Bits in bold are mine.

Framing Childhood
Has the curating of digital photos come to define modern parenting?

American children in 2010 have a bright, clear reason for being. They exist to furnish subjects for digital photographs that can be corrected, cropped, captioned, organized, categorized, albumized, broadcast, turned into screen savers and brandished on online social networks.

I’m trying my hand at anthropology here: where farmers bred to produce field hands, industrial workers bred because they couldn’t help it and Kennedy-era couples bred to goose the G.N.P. by buying sailor suits and skis, we form families in the Internet age so we can produce, distribute and display digital photos of ourselves.

The marching orders come immediately, with the newborn photo, which must be e-mailed to friends before a baby has left the maternity ward. A conscientious father — chief executive of the budding business — must snap dozens of shots of the modestly wrapped newborn, generally with a Canon PowerShot though sometimes with a showy digital single-lens-reflex camera or a lowly cameraphone. Back at a laptop, he uploads the haul, scrutinizing pixels with the intensity of Anna Wintour. He selects a becoming one. The mother signs off, often via e-mail, from her hospital bed.

A parent may also edit the picture, correcting red eye or composition or even complexion problems, perhaps adding a jolly border or animated confetti (depending on class affiliation). Enclosed in an e-mail message, accompanied by a line or two of introduction, the portrait is broadcast like direct-mail advertising.

Thus a parent is minted. Good thing the drill starts early, as the signature act of Internet-era parenting repeats itself, again and again, in tighter and tighter cycles, throughout a childhood. It determines the rhythms of beach vacations and snow days. Eventually the business of family-image production and dissemination incorporates increasingly sophisticated and expensive cameras and photo-edit software and microblogging and distribution and organization systems (Tumblr, Picasa, Picnik, MyFamily, Shutterfly, Snapfish, Kodak Gallery). Before long the family has become a multimedia publisher, and — though it imagines itself a producer — a consumer of digital tools, gadgetry and broadband.

For a parent, this time-consuming vocation has twin payoffs: it wins you a break from your actual children while bringing you closer to their images. Pictures of kids, like idealized Victorian boys and girls, can be seen but not heard.

The child’s life, reciprocally, becomes that of a model — and more. Every aspect of the family business becomes familiar to a child. Early on, she learns that she can examine a photo on a viewfinder as soon as it’s snapped; that she should monkey around rather than pose, as “film” is distinctly not at a premium; that a substantial share of her parents’ mysterious clicking at their computers consists of organizing and reorganizing images of her. My own son’s first word for laptop, when he saw a woman plugging away at one at Starbucks, was the word he used for himself: “baby.” What else could the woman be doing so intently at a screen but what he saw me do — paging through picture after picture of him?

The connection between parenthood and digital photography dawned on me during Apple’s video presentations of the iPad, the company’s latest personal-computing device. In the videos, a parade of Apple executives, clean-cut men with close-cropped hair, caress a glassy, oversize tile, while proselytizing about it. “It’s going to change the way we do the things we do every day,” raves Phil Schiller, an Apple vice president.

So which of digital culture’s great offerings — which of the “things we do every day” — are enhanced by the iPad? Let’s look at the demos. Are there shooter games, pornography, academic papers, live sports, message boards, chat, e-commerce, political blogs?

No. Instead, there are family photos. The iPad user, as we meet him, is a man alone, aswim in pictures of kids. Sure, he watches movies like “Up,” reads Ted Kennedy’s memoirs and plans and chronicles travel to Telluride, Colo. But what he does most ostentatiously is organize and exhibit photographs of children: at birth, on the beach, in Paris in the rain, with conch shells to their ears. One of Steve Jobs’s first boasts about the iPad screen? “People put their own photos on it.” Later, the iPad e-mail client is demonstrated as it sends a baby picture. Scott Forstall, a senior vice president at Apple, doesn’t hold back: “IPad is absolutely the best way to view and share your photos.”

Increasingly, personal technology seems like a delivery device for a lifestyle, a tacit prescription of how to live in the Internet’s symbolic order. Study something like the iPad closely enough, and it seems to set a course for how we’re now to use words and images for business and pleasure. Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising in shaky economic times that the highest calling for the heaps of digital devices in our lives, with their functioning in excess of anything we rationally require, is to shore up our families, and advertise them to the world, and back to ourselves.

Bourdieu's 'Distinctions' Summed Up

2010-05-03T21:42:00.000-07:00

Rob (John Cusack) in High Fidelity: 'What really matters is what you like, not what you are like.'

Colin MacInnes

2010-04-21T07:58:00.000-07:00

Fascinating account of the life of Colin MacInnes, author of Abolute Beginners, from Ed Vulliamy.

"Colin MacInnes was the first writer to pinpoint the birth of the 'teenager' and multicultural London. His books were alive with the city's subcultures. But, half a century later, as Absolute Beginners hits the stage, was his fascination with Notting Hill's emerging black culture radical, or something more disturbing? Ed Vulliamy, who grew up on those very streets, explores the iconclastic author's legacy."

"MacInnes was the decadent chronicler of 1950s Notting Hill, a restless, volatile neighbourhood which was home to one of the UK's biggest West Indian immigrant communities, and the scene of notorious race riots in August 1958. Openly gay when homosexuality was still an illegal taboo, MacInnes revelled in what he saw as the impoverished area's exuberant exoticism. Absolute Beginners was the first novel to capture the city's emerging youth culture, its lustful, teenage adventure dovetailing into MacInnes's sexualised idolisation of black life in Notting Hill and climaxing with the riots that seared the neighbourhood. Nowadays known to many only by way of Julien Temple's almost universally derided film of 1986, Absolute Beginners and MacInnes's preceding book City of Spades, achieved cult status after their publication, and were the first to chronicle, for a white audience at least, the culture of the new immigrants to London."

Rethinking Muzak: Audio Architecture, Audio Branding

2010-01-08T09:09:00.000-08:00

Great article by David Owen, in the New Yorker, on Muzak.

...The syrupy orchestral “elevator music” that most people associate with the company scarcely exists anymore. Muzak sells about a hundred prepackaged programs and several hundred customized ones, and only one—“Environmental”—truly fits the stereotype. It consists of “contemporary instrumental versions of popular songs,” and it is no longer terribly popular anywhere, except in Japan...All of Muzak’s other programs are drawn from the company’s huge digital inventory, called the Well, which contains more than 1.5 million commercially recorded songs, representing dozens of genres and subgenres—acid jazz, heavy metal, shag, neo-soul, contemporary Italian—and is growing at the rate of twenty thousand songs a month...

[Dana McKelvey says] "When we make a program, we pay a lot of attention to the way songs segue. It’s not like songs on the radio, or songs on a CD. Take Armani Exchange. Shoppers there are looking for clothes that are hip and chic and cool. They’re twenty-five to thirty-five years old, and they want something to wear to a party or a club, and as they shop they want to feel like they’re already there. So you make the store sound like the coolest bar in town. You think about that when you pick the songs, and you pay special attention to the sequencing, and then you cross-fade and beat-match and never break the momentum, because you want the program to sound like a d.j.’s mix"...

McKelvey, a creative manager at Muzak, is one of twenty-two “audio architects”—the company’s term for its program designers. All but two are in their twenties or thirties, and all have serious, eclectic, long-term relationships with music...

People at Muzak sometimes speak of a song’s “topology,” the cultural and temporal associations that it carries with it, like a hidden refrain. When McKelvey works on a program for a client whose customers represent a range of ages—such as Old Navy, whose market extends from infants to adults—she has to accommodate more than one sensibility without offending any. The task is simplified somewhat by the fact that musical eras and genres are not always moored firmly in time. Elvis Presley (who is represented in the Well by fourteen hundred and five tracks) sounds dated to many people today, but teen-agers can listen to Beatles songs from just a few years later without necessarily thinking of them as oldies...

Today, the company estimates that its daily audience is roughly a hundred million people, in more than a dozen countries, and that it supplies sixty per cent of the commercial background music in the United States...

In 1997, the company adopted [Alvin] Collis’s concept—the main element of which he called audio architecture—essentially in its entirety. Muzak went through an exhilarating period of self-examination and redefinition, and moved its headquarters from Seattle to Fort Mill—mainly for economic reasons, but also to sever itself from its stodgy past. In a relatively short time, it transformed itself from a company that sold boring background music into one that was engaged in a far more interesting activity, which it called audio branding...

A business’s background music is like an aural pheromone. It attracts some customers and repels others, and it gives pedestrians walking past the front door an immediate clue about whether they belong inside. A chain like J. C. Penney, whose huge customer base includes all ages and income levels, needs a program that will make everyone feel welcome, so its soundtrack contains familiar and relatively unassertive popular songs like “Kind and Generous,” by Natalie Merchant. The Hard Rock Hotel in Orlando, which appeals to a more narrowly focussed audience, plays “Girls, Girls, Girls,” by Mötley Crüe, and cranks up the volume. (Imagine how teen-agers would perceive the jeans and t-shirts at Abercrombie & Fitch—not a Muzak client—if those stores played country-and-Western hits.) Audio architects have to keep all this in mind as they build their programs. They also have to be aware of certain broad truths about background music: bass solos are difficult to hear, extended electric-guitar solos annoy male sports-bar customers, drum solos annoy almost everyone, and Bob Dylan’s harmonica can make it hard for office workers to concentrate. Audio architects also have to screen lyrics carefully. They removed the INXS hit “Devil Inside” from many of the company’s playlists after a devout Christian complained, and they are ever vigilant for the word “funk,” which almost everyone mistakes for something else...

Dave Keller, who is the creative director of the company’s music department, told me recently, “Audio architecture involves looking at a client’s brand, and then matching music to the attributes of that brand. In its simplest form, you use keywords to define a personality for the brand. You might say that it’s bright, or energetic, or fun, or classic, or something like that. And then you find music with a subtext that reinforces that personality. This all really comes from Alvin Collis’s vision”...

During Muzak’s early decades, office workers and others sometimes complained that public background music was an invasion of privacy. Some people feel that way today, although the first thing many of us do when we find ourselves alone with our thoughts is to reach for the handiest means of drowning them out—by putting on a pair of headphones, say, or by sliding a disk into the car’s CD player. Audio architecture is a compelling concept because the human response to musical accompaniment is powerful and involuntary. “Our biggest competitor,” a member of Muzak’s marketing department told me, “is silence.”

Footnote: Muzak files for bankruptcy, Feb. 2009.

"Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture," by Jon Savage

2009-12-31T12:44:00.000-08:00

Reviewed by Camille Paglia (ugh!) in the New York Times.

Bobby-soxers, the female swing fans with their sporty outfits and dance-ready saddle shoes, screamed en masse for Frank Sinatra and laid the groundwork for gyrating rock ’n’ roll fandom. Swing helped end segregation: not only were swing crowds racially mixed, but large jazz orchestras “integrated a decade before sport or military organizations.”

Savage heralds the arrival, in 1944, of Seventeen, a fashion and pop magazine targeted to high school girls, as a landmark crystalization of teenage identity. Now “teenagers were neither adolescents nor juvenile delinquents,” who had been a social worry for decades. American consumerism, whose expansion Savage disapprovingly follows, had found its perfect partner in the protected, self-absorbed middle-class teenager.

Savage abruptly ends his book in the mid-1940s, alas, with no overview of the teenage fantasia to come...

"Japan cracking US pop culture hegemony"

2009-12-31T09:48:00.000-08:00

To be read in conjunction with Ian Condry's book on Japanese hip-hop. From the Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 15, 2008, by Amelia Newcomb. Excerpts follow:

Today, Japan sets the trends in what's cool. Sarah Palin's famous glasses came from a Japanese designer. [Palin, cool???!!! T.S.] Tokyo has the most Michelin-starred restaurants in the world, with eight of them earning three stars. Even America's favorite food show, "Iron Chef," is a Japanese import. Japanese women are pushing the limits of literary pop culture with blogs and cellphone novels. Japanese comics occupy ever-greater shelf space in bookstores, and animé-influenced movies like the "The Dark Knight" and "Spider-Man 3" find huge audiences in the West.

What all these media share is a nuanced Japanese aesthetic that has infiltrated global sensibilities – a sort of new "soft power" for Japan. In the process, they're challenging delineations of good and evil from the world's main purveyor of pop culture, Hollywood, as well as American ideals of the lone action-hero."The American 20th-century ideal of the individual superhero is wearing thin," says Roland Kelts, professor at the University of Tokyo and author of "Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S."

Ann Powers, "Authenticity takes a holiday"

2009-12-29T09:21:00.000-08:00

The ever-incisive Ann Powers, writing in the Los Angeles Times. "Pop music notes on the decade: Authenticity takes a holiday."

Of all the aspects of pop that went into fatal mutation mode in recent years, the cult of authenticity was hit perhaps the hardest...

One major one has to do with what we think is most real, most able to embody sincere and powerful emotions...

The most fascinating personalities of this new era would never present themselves as unwashed or genuinely unplugged. They're show people who are able to dance, crack jokes and work all the knobs that power their multimedia extravaganzas. Eminem and Britney Spears, will.i.am and Kanye West, M.I.A. and OutKast, Rihanna and Lil Wayne: In nearly every niche, millennial artists have shown a marked preference for artifice over raw expression, costume and theatrics over plain presentation and foregrounding the tools they use to make music over pretending that it all comes "naturally"...

As the decade ends, pop grows ever more bent on making inauthenticity ring true... There are obvious reasons for this abandonment of solid-feeling values -- not just "authenticity" but also "purity" and "rawness." Novelty and sonic shine are primary values in a music business powered by catchy ringtones and downloads instead of albums. Technology also has profoundly changed the way music is made; kids are learning how to play synthesizers before they bother with guitars, and tools like Auto-Tune and Pro Tools have made "natural" sounds passé.

But even as the dire economics of music-making (and, by the way, music journalism) call for a lament, I celebrate the return of glitter and weirdness and fakery in pop. It's opening up the doors to those who didn't fit more constrictive paradigms of authenticity: more women, more gay and lesbian faces, more multiracial and international voices. In general, it's making for a fuller reflection of life in our fragmented, hyper-accelerated time of struggle...

We've finally all learned the lesson of the disco prophet Sylvester: only by admitting that nothing is straightforward can we feel Mighty Real.

Disney targets boys, $50 billion at stake

2009-12-27T12:22:00.000-08:00

"Disney Expert Uses Science to Draw Boy Viewers," by Brookes Barnes, New York Times, April 13, 2009, pp. A1, A 14. Some experts.

Ms. [Kelly] Peña and her team of anthropologists have spent 18 months peering inside the heads of incommunicative boys in search of just that kind of psychological nugget. Disney is relying on her insights to create new entertainment for boys 6 to 14, a group that Disney used to own way back in the days of “Davy Crockett” but that has wandered in the age of more girl-friendly Disney fare like “Hannah Montana”...

Fearful of coming off as too manipulative, youth-centric media companies rarely discuss this kind of field research. Disney is so proud of its new “headquarters for boys,” however, that it has made an exception, offering a rare window onto the emotional hooks that are carefully embedded in children’s entertainment. The effort is as outsize as the potential payoff: boys 6 to 14 account for $50 billion in spending worldwide, according to market researchers...

media companies over all have struggled to figure out the boys’ entertainment market...The guys are trickier to pin down for a host of reasons. They hop more quickly than their female counterparts from sporting activities to television to video games during leisure time. They can also be harder to understand: the cliché that girls are more willing to chitchat about their feelings is often true...

In Ms. Peña’s research boys across markets and cultures described the television aimed at them as “purposeless fun” but expressed a strong desire for a new channel that was “fun with a purpose...

Creating a need or bringing a real need into public view? The Bodygroom

2009-12-27T09:55:00.000-08:00

"Buzz Marketing" by Rob Walker, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, August 5, 2007. Excerpts follow:

About a year ago, Philips Norelco began the push to sell a device called the Bodygroom as a product to help men shave areas of the body other than the face. At the time, according to Jim Olstrom, director of the home division of the retail-data collection firm NPD Group, the idea of a product specifically made for below-the-neck shaving barely existed. Today, the Bodygroom is one of at least four products in what’s seen as a distinct and fast-growing category; nearly 250,000 body-hair trimmers have been bought in the United States in the last year...

All of this suggests a problem that no one was aware of before its solution went on sale. But Michelle Schwartz, a Philips Norelco brand manager, maintains that this is not so. She says the company, in the course of research into what was missing from the “grooming portfolio” of the typical male consumer, concluded that “over half the guys we were talking to between the ages of 20 and 50 were doing some body-hair maintenance.” Moreover, they were not happy with their options...

How to puncture this conspiracy of silence? Marketing. Specifically, Philips Norelco’s online campaign involving a video at a Web site called ShaveEverywhere.com. his site, started in May of last year, features a young man in a bathrobe who explains the benefits of using the Bodygroom on the back, underarms and other body parts that are bleeped out...it’s extremely hard to imagine a staid public company like Philips putting a message like this on television. On the Internet, however, it was a huge hit...

Philips Norelco claims that 60 percent of Bodygroom buyers say they learned about the product via ShaveEverywhere.com...Novelty and boundary-pushing aside, the strategy has done one of marketing’s traditional jobs, clearly linking a product to a particular use.

Nerds

2009-12-26T08:16:00.000-08:00

Excerpts from, "Who's a Nerd, Anyway?" by Benjamin Nugent, New York Times Sunday Magazine, July 29, 2007.

Nerdiness, [Mary Bucholz] has concluded, is largely a matter of racially tinged behavior...Bucholtz notes that the “hegemonic” “cool white” kids use a limited amount of African-American vernacular English; they may say “blood” in lieu of “friend,” or drop the “g” in “playing.” But the nerds she has interviewed, mostly white kids, punctiliously adhere to Standard English...“hyperwhite” works as a description for nearly everything we intuitively associate with nerds, which is why Hollywood has long traded in jokes that try to capitalize on the emotional dissonance of nerds acting black...Bucholtz sees something to admire here. In declining to appropriate African-American youth culture, thereby “refusing to exercise the racial privilege upon which white youth cultures are founded,” she writes, nerds may even be viewed as “traitors to whiteness.”...On the other hand, the code of conspicuous intellectualism in the nerd cliques Bucholtz observed may shut out “black students who chose not to openly display their abilities.” This is especially disturbing at a time when African-American students can be stigmatized by other African-American students if they’re too obviously diligent about school. Even more problematic, “Nerds’ dismissal of black cultural practices often led them to discount the possibility of friendship with black students”.... If nerdiness, as Bucholtz suggests, can be a rebellion against the cool white kids and their use of black culture, it’s a rebellion with a limited membership.

Brooklyn's MLK concert series

2009-07-29T10:04:00.000-07:00

A friend of popculcha sent in this review of the MLK concert series in Brooklyn, Monday, July 27. BK!

“Giving You the Best…”

The Martin Luther King Jr. concert series in Brooklyn’s Wingate Field has taken place every summer for the past 27 years and showcases the biggest names in gospel, soul, R&B, ska and calypso, but as New Yorkers and aficionados across the tri-state area know, these Monday evening concerts are best known for bringing R&B legends and pioneers to this corner of “the BK.” Last night was no exception. Some 12,000 people, many wielding portable chairs and small battery-powered fans, packed the concert field, to see Charlie Wilson of the legendary Gap Band, and Anita Baker, the eight–time Grammy-winning songstress. Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz and Senator Charles Schumer welcomed the crowd (with the latter reminding everyone “I live in Brooklyn, shop in Brooklyn - I breathe Brooklyn! I’m the first senator from Brooklyn in a 140 years!), and then, arms linked with Anita Baker, Mayor Bloomberg came on stage and introduced Charlie Wilson.

The heat and humidity did not slow down or distract from the 56-year old Wilson’s intense performance, as he belted out Gap Band classics (“Early in the Morning” “Outstanding”) and his most recent hits, including “Beautiful” recorded with Pharell, and “There Goes My Lady.” Wilson, who had all but vanished from the music scene since the 1980s, made a dramatic comeback this decade with two solo albums, including Bridging the Gap which produced the hit “Without You” and the more recent “Charlie, Last Name: Wilson.” “Uncle Charlie,” as his friend Snoop Dogg calls him, regaled the crowd: one moment he was doing the “running man” and other lively routines, with his four scantily-clad background dancers (who also doubled as violin players), and then he’d shift into slow jam mode, crooning, writhing, unbuttoning his shirt, drying himself with a towel, in creative renditions of tracks like “Yearning for Your Love” and “Let’s Chill” – a number originally done by the Guy. Midway through the show, Wilson pointed at the sky, and in gratitude for his successful comeback, and his recovery from prostate cancer, gave a stirring, hooping-style tribute to Jesus.

By the time Anita Baker came on the stage, the humidity had lifted, and dusk had settled over the field. As the multi-platinum chanteuse sang her classics (“Sweet Love” “Caught Up in the Rapture”) her voice felt as balmy as the breeze that had now stirred over Brooklyn. She sang “Angel,” in honor of all the children in the audience, some of the youngsters had by now dozed off in their mothers arms. “Mommies, thank you for your bringing your babies. Entire families can come to my shows – aunts, uncles, mothers and kids can come to my concerts. No one will be offended, everyone will be enriched with something lovely.” (Her own teenage son was playing guitar.) Baker concluded the evening with her 1988 single “Giving You the Best,” but cries and cheers brought her back out to perform “Fairy Tale” and another encore – before the elegant songstress bid everyone good night and exited the stage.

It was close to midnight as attendees began filing out of the Wingate field. Donna White, a kindergarden teacher from East New York, looked exhilarated, “I come to these concerts every year, and this show is the greatest. Charlie Wilson is a phenomenal person. I was so moved when he talked about his struggle, his spirituality, where he was and where he is now – that was so inspiring for our youth.” Fati Tanriverde, an exchange student from France, appeared awed, “It’s extraordinary, a free concert of this level of talent – the grande dame of R&B comes to Brooklyn, and I get to see her. What an honor!”

“How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll”: Elijah Wald

2009-07-12T10:38:00.000-07:00

Book review from today's New York Times. Sounds intriguing. Here are some pithy excerpts:

if you’re looking, as Wald’s subtitle has it, for “an alternative history of American popular music” — specifically from the turn of the 20th century to roughly the mid-1970s — you’ve found it...

While Wald never says in so many words that the Beatles destroyed rock ’n’ roll, he does take a stance several degrees removed from standard-issue Beatles worship. He suggests that their ambitious later work, widely hailed as a step forward for rock, instead helped turn it from a triumphantly mongrel dance music that smashed racial barriers into a rhythmically inert art music made mostly by and for white people...

[Wald] has set himself a deceptively simple task: to write about the popular music of the last century by concentrating on what was actually popular, and to figure out why people — not critics or historians but the people who bought the sheet music and the records, listened to the songs on the radio and went to the dances — liked it.In doing so he ends up taking aim, for example, at the notion that mainstream pop music in the early 1950s was mired in white-bread mediocrity, as embodied by the likes of Perry Como, until Elvis Presley and company came along to rescue it...

He also makes a case for the importance, and the lasting influence, of artists like Paul Whiteman, a bandleader who was phenomenally successful in the 1920s and ’30s but has rarely received anything more than grudging respect from music historians, and has more often been either attacked or ignored.

In his heyday the appropriately named Whiteman was billed as the King of Jazz, which in artistic terms he clearly wasn’t; Wald acknowledges that his often syrupy music is less interesting than Fletcher Henderson’s or Duke Ellington’s. But he also says that no matter how corny it may sound to contemporary ears, it deserves to be taken seriously — not least because Whiteman’s admirers included, among many others, Henderson and Ellington. (While white musicians have long drawn inspiration from black musicians, he points out, the inspiration has sometimes flowed in the other direction as well.)

And he finds parallels between Whiteman — who commissioned “Rhapsody in Blue” and whose quasi-symphonic approach was said, in the unfortunate terminology of the time, to have made an honest woman out of jazz — and the Beatles. Whiteman, he explains, took a music that had been seen as rough and uncouth and made it respectable to a wide audience; the Beatles did the same thing with the string-quartet elegance of “Yesterday” and the operatic grandiosity of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

The Walkman: 30 Years

2009-07-05T06:48:00.000-07:00

(Douglas Kirkland/Corbis)

From Dan Barry, in the Sunday New York Times "Week in Review" section, a meditation on the 30th anniversary of the Walkman:

Thirty years ago this month, the Sony Corporation made a huge contribution to human interaction by ensuring there was less of it. No longer would people who did not want to engage the world have to stick fingers in both ears and say, over and over, “La, la, la, I’m not listening!”

Wrong! Or just simplistic, and banal. As the book, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (du Gay et al) suggests, the Walkman connected one to the social world, the world of pop music, of youth culture, of mass media.

And just look at the image that accompanies the article (reproduced above). Is this Walkman user really just thumbing her nose at the world?

(Useful classroom exercises for the du Gay volume here.)

How Calypso Made Bermuda a Tourist Destination

2009-05-24T11:52:00.000-07:00

Informative obituary of Ray Talbot, calypso musician who performed with the Talbot Brothers.

"In their heyday, the late 1940s and ’50s, the Talbot Brothers were a major attraction at Bermuda’s hotels and clubs and at the private homes of wealthy Americans who were discovering the island. Their popularity is often credited with playing an important role in putting Bermuda on the tourist map. Songs like “Bermuda Buggy Ride” and “Bermuda’s Still Paradise,” with their smooth harmonies and easy, swinging beat, helped establish the islands’ image as a carefree, no-worries leisure destination."

Read on.

Wayne Marshall on Kool Herc

2009-01-18T12:18:00.000-08:00

A must-read: Wayne Marshall's essay on hip-pioneer Kool Herc.

Here's the full bibliographical information:

Marshall, Wayne. “Kool Herc.” In Icons of Hip Hop: An Encyclopedia of the Movement, Music, and Culture, ed. Mickey Hess, 1-26. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2007).

"You Just Can't Kill It": The New York Times on Goth Style

2009-01-17T17:19:00.001-08:00

Check out this very extensive treatment of the history, and longevity, of Goth style, from the New York Times Thursday Styles section (Nov. 18, '08).

Be sure to check out the slide shows.

Siouxsie Sioux and Diamanda Galas, of course, get their props. But why no mention of Gothic Bellydancers?

A word to those who seek to express their inner gothdom:

“Gothic style should be as opulent, decadent and individual as possible,” Danielle Willis wrote. “If you’re not up to making the effort necessary to carry off this most high maintenance of affectations, try wearing plaid shirts and listening to Nirvana instead.”

(Photo: Daniel Levitt)

"YouTube dispute underscores music labels weak hand"

2008-12-29T17:30:00.000-08:00

"The first thing kids do when they hear about a band now is go on YouTube to find out more, according to our focus groups," said an executive at one of the major music labels, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Not just kids, of course.

Read the entire article here.

Pop Music: Licensing Everything

2008-12-28T08:42:00.000-08:00

The notion of "selling out" seems to have completely gone by the wayside, as this article by Jon Pareles from today's New York Times shows. I really like Santogold and I thought she was kinda 'indy,' so I'm just astonished that 3/4 of her album has already been licensed.

Pareles lays out all the reasons why today's musicians are resorting to licensing, and it seems that we, the consumers, who are not buying albums and are doing lots of free downloading, are in part, or largely, to blame.

But is there no limit? Are their corporations that are just beyond the pale? What about Mary J. Blige shilling for CitiBank? Why would she want to align herself with a corporation so up to its neck in the subprime mortgage scandal, and the recipient of largest government bailout in history?

Read on:

Songs From the Heart of a Marketing Plan

By JON PARELES

In “Creator,” the rawest track on Santogold’s debut and self-titled album, the singer Santi White boasts, “Me I’m a creator/Thrill is to make it up/The rules I break got me a place up on the radar.” It’s a bohemian manifesto in a sound bite, brash and endearing, or at least it was for me until it showed up in a beer commercial. And a hair-gel commercial too.

It turns out that the insurgent, quirky rule breaker is just another shill. Billboard reported that three-quarters of Santogold’s excellent album has already been licensed for commercials, video games and soundtracks, and Ms. White herself appears in advertisements, singing for sneakers. She has clearly decided that linking her music to other, mostly mercenary agendas is her most direct avenue to that “place up on the radar.”

I know — time for me to get over it. After all, this is the reality of the 21st-century music business. Selling recordings to consumers as inexpensive artworks to be appreciated for their own sake is a much-diminished enterprise now that free copies multiply across the Web.

While people still love music enough to track it down, collect it, argue over it and judge their Facebook friends by it, many see no reason to pay for it. The emerging practical solution is to let music sell something else: a concert, a T-shirt, Web-site pop-up ads or a brand.

Musicians have to eat and want to be heard, and if that means accompanying someone else’s sales pitch or videogame, well, it’s a living. Why wait for album royalties to trickle in, if they ever do, when licensing fees arrive upfront as a lump sum? It’s one part of the system of copyright regulations that hasn’t been ravaged by digital distribution, and there’s little resistance from any quarters; Robert Plant and Alison Krauss croon for J. C. Penney and the avant-rockers Battles are heard accompanying an Australian vodka ad.

The question is: What happens to the music itself when the way to build a career shifts from recording songs that ordinary listeners want to buy to making music that marketers can use? That creates pressure, subtle but genuine, for music to recede: to embrace the element of vacancy that makes a good soundtrack so unobtrusive, to edit a lyric to be less specific or private, to leave blanks for the image or message the music now serves. Perhaps the song will still make that essential, head-turning first impression, but it won’t be as memorable or independent.

Music always had accessory roles: a soundtrack, a jingle, a branding statement, a mating call. But for performers with a public profile, as opposed to composers for hire, the point was to draw attention to the music itself. Once they were noticed, stars could provide their own story arcs of career and music, and songs got a chance to create their own spheres, as sanctuary or spook house or utopia. If enough people cared about the song, payoffs would come from record sales (to performer and songwriter) and radio play (to the songwriter).

When Moby licensed every song on his 1999 album, “Play,” for ads and soundtracks, the move was both startling and cheesy, but it did lead to CD sales; an album that set staticky samples of blues and gospel to dance-floor beats managed to become a million seller. Nearly a decade later, platinum albums are much scarcer.

For all but the biggest names — like AC/DC, which made Wal-Mart the exclusive vendor for CDs of its long-awaited “Black Ice” album, got its own “store within a store” and sold more than a million copies in two weeks — a marketing deal is more likely to be its own reward rather than spawn a career. With telling ambivalence, Brooklyn Vegan, the widely read, indie-loving music blog, recently started a column, “This Week in Music Licensing: It’s Not Selling Out Anymore,” but soon dropped the “selling out” half of the title. There’s no longer a clear dividing line for selling out, if there ever was.

And as music becomes a means to an end — pushing a separate product, whether it’s a concert ticket or a clothing line, a movie scene or a Web ad — a tectonic shift is under way. Record sales channeled the taste of the broad, volatile public into a performer’s paycheck. As music sales dwindle, licensers become a far more influential target audience. Unlike nonprofessional music fans who might immerse themselves in a song or album they love, music licensers want a track that’s attractive but not too distracting — just a tease, not a revelation.

It’s almost enough to make someone miss those former villains of philistinism, the recording companies. Labels had an interest in music that would hold listeners on its own terms; selling it was their meal ticket. Labels, and to some extent radio stations and music television, also had a stake in nurturing stars who would keep fans returning to find out what happened next, allowing their catalogs to be perennially rediscovered. By contrast, licensers have no interest beyond the immediate effect of a certain song, and can save money by dealing with unknowns.

As the influence of major labels erodes, licensers are seizing their chance to be talent scouts. They can be good at it, song by song, turning up little gems like Chairlift’s “Bruises,” heard in an iPod ad. For a band, getting such a break, and being played repeatedly for television viewers, is a windfall, and perhaps an alternate route to radio play or the beginning of a new audience. But how soon will it be before musicians, perhaps unconsciously, start conceiving songs as potential television spots, or energy jolts during video games, or ringtones? Which came first, Madonna’s “Hung Up” or the cell phone ad?

Not wanting to appear too crass, musicians insist that exposure from licensing does build the kind of interest that used to pay off in sales and/or loyalty. Hearing a song on the radio or in a commercial has a psychological component; someone else has already endorsed it. Musicians who don’t expect immediate mass-market radio play — maybe they’re too old, maybe they’re too eccentric — have gotten their music on the air by selling it to advertisers. That can rev up careers, as Apple ads have done for Feist and for this year’s big beneficiary, Yael Naim, whose “New Soul” introduced the MacBook Air. (Sites like findthatsong.net help listeners identify commercial soundtracks.)

The Sri Lankan art-pop-rapper M.I.A. already had all the hipster adoration she could ever want for her song “Paper Planes,” which compares international drug dealing to selling records, and it turns gunshots and a ringing cash register into hooks. But having the song used in the trailer for “Pineapple Express” was probably what propelled the song to a Grammy nomination for record of the year.

(Grammy voters often seize on music from everywhere but the albums they purport to judge; they seem particularly drawn to film soundtracks.) And if the song now conjures images of the movie trailer for many listeners, that’s the tradeoff for recognition.

The old, often legitimate accusation against labels was that they sold entire albums with only one good song or two. Now there’s an incentive for a song to have only 30 seconds of good stuff. It’s already happening: Chris Brown’s hit “Forever” is wrapped around a jingle for chewing gum.

Apparently there’s no going back, structurally, to paying musicians to record music for its own sake. Labels that used to make profits primarily from selling albums have been struggling since the Internet caused them to lose their chokehold on distribution and exposure. Now, in return for investing in recording and promotion, and for supplying their career-building expertise (such as it was), they want a piece of musicians’ whole careers.

Old-fashioned audio recording contracts are increasingly being replaced by so-called 360 deals that also tithe live shows, merchandising, licensing and every other conceivable revenue stream — conceding, in a way, that the labels’ old central role of selling discs for mere listening is obsolescent. Some musicians, like the former record company president Jay-Z, have concurred, but by signing 360 deals not with labels but with the concert-promotion monolith Live Nation.

Maybe such dire thoughts are extreme, since some people are still buying music. The iTunes Music Store has sold more than five billion songs since 2003. But it’s harder and harder to find a song without a tie-in. It took Guns N’ Roses 15 years between albums to complete “Chinese Democracy,” certainly long enough to receive worldwide notice when the album was released this year. But instead of letting the album arrive as an event in itself, the band licensed one of the album’s best songs, “Shackler’s Revenge,” to a video game that came out first. >Metallica fans have complained that the band’s new album, “Death Magnetic,” sounds better in the version made for the “Guitar Hero” video game than on the consumer CD, which is compressed to the point of distortion so it will sound louder on the radio. But they take for granted that the music will end up in the game in the first place. Consumers reinforce the licensers almost perversely: they pay for music as a ringtone, or tap along with it on the iPhone game Tap Tap Revenge, but not as a high-fidelity song.

Perhaps it’s too 20th century to hope that music could stay exempt from multitasking, or that the constant insinuation of marketing into every moment of consciousness would stop when a song begins. But for the moment I’d suggest individual resistance. Put on a song with no commercial attachments. Turn it up. Close your eyes. And listen.

More photos of the South Bronx, early '80s

2008-12-01T07:31:00.000-08:00

The desolate landscape of hip-hop's ground zero. If you ever get discouraged, just look at these photos and imagine that one of the most vibrant cultural movements of the twentieth century was invented here. Check out the slideshow of Ray Mortenson's South Bronx photos, courtesy the New York Times. At left is one of them.

Sakamoto Kyu, "Sukiyaki"

2008-11-20T08:18:00.000-08:00

This song was a number one hit on US Billboard charts in 1963, something no other Japanese musician has accomplished. The original title was "Ue o muite aruko" (Walking Along, Looking Up), and for some reason, it was sold under the name Kyu Sakamoto. As Ian Condry notes, "no food is mentioned in the Japanese original."

East End X Yuri: J-Rap

2008-11-20T07:45:00.000-08:00

According to Ian Condry, it was two 1995 hits by East End X Yuri that put rap on the map in Japan., and spawned the popular, "fun" brand of mainstream rap known as J-rap. The singles, "Maicca" and "Da.Yo.Ne" both sold about a million copies.

I think this is the song "Maicca":

Here's "Da.Yo.Ne":

"Race and the Safe Hollywood Bet"

2008-10-19T06:59:00.000-07:00

Progress for African-Americans in Hollywood?

"With the stakes high, many studio executives worry that films that focus on African-American themes risk being too narrow in their appeal to justify the investment. Hollywood has nonetheless shown a willingness in recent years to bank more heavily on African-American actors and themes....

But Hollywood’s open-mindedness only goes so far. Studio executives remain hugely skeptical that moviegoers are impartial to race. “The bottom line is that the major studios want assurances that film projects have the potential to attract a significant white audience,” said Joe Pichirallo, a veteran producer whose latest film, “The Secret Life of Bees,” opened Friday."

Read the entire article here.

Reeves: review

2008-10-16T07:30:00.000-07:00

Check out this rap timeline, courtesy Jeff Chang and Mother Jones.

And go here for incisive critiques and updates on hip-hop activism, from Jeff Chang.

More music/video for Reeves, "Somebody Scream!"

2008-10-14T07:37:00.000-07:00

Notorious B.I.G., "Big Poppa."

Notorious B.I.G., "Hypnotize." Biggie goes Bond.

Jay-Z, "Hard Knock Life."

Jay-Z, "Big Pimpin'" (sample: Abdel-Halim Hafez).

here

Music and vids for Chapter 8, Reeves, "Somebody Scream!"

2008-10-05T12:10:00.000-07:00

(I guess we can credit Pac for popularizing this ugly style innovation?)

Tupac Shakur's "I Don't Give a Fuck," from 2pacalypse Now, 1991. Unlike much of his later work, the song is strongly anti-racist and critical of police violence.

I Just Dont Give A Fuck - 2 Pac

"Brenda's Got a Baby," from 2pacalypse Now, the poignant story of a 12-year girl who becomes pregnant, in which Tupac expresses tremendous sympathy for his subject.

Brendas Got a Baby - 2Pac

"Keep Ya Head Up," from Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z. (1993), where Tupac expresses his support for stron sistas.

Keep Ya Head Up - 2 Pac

Video for "I Get Around," from Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z.. Fun and games, poolside.

"I Get Around"--the sound is better here than on the vid above.

I Get Around - 2Pac

"Holler If Ya Hear Me," from Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z.. Thug Life.

Holler If Ya Hear Me - 2Pac

"Dear Mama," from Me Against the World (1995). A heartfelt account of Pac's relationship with his mother.

Dear Mama - 2pac

"So Many Tears," from Me Against the World. Pondering mortality.

So Many Tears - 2Pac

"Skandalouz," from All Eyez on Me (1996). New levels of thug misogyny?

Skandalouz - 2 Pac/Nate Dogg

"California Love," from All Eyez on Me (1996). Hedonism, materialism, in Southern Cali. Gone are the urban blues and the resistance to police repression.

CALIFORNIA LOVE 2 pac - CALIFORNIA LOVE 2 pac

Is Television "tell-a-lie-vision," "Death of a nation, breeding ignorance and spreading radiation"?

2008-10-05T10:54:00.000-07:00

The effects of television have been questioned and critiqued almost from the moment that this medium appeared. And in particular, its negative effects on children have been widely assumed. (My mother banned the watching of the "Popeye" cartoon in our house in the mid-fifties, after reading that it might insult violence in children. So we watched the show at our neighbors' house.)

Anti-t.v. sentiment is particularly prevalent among the middle-class would-be literati. Sometimes I think the only people in the US who don't own television sets are university professors, and the Honors students I teach are likely to claim that they don't watch t.v. And although I appreciate how Five Percent hip-hoppers break the word television down to its basics ("tell-a-lie-vision") and I love the Michael Franti-led Beatnigs' 1988 song "Television" ("TV is the reason why less than ten percent of our nation reads books daily"), I couldn't live without my Mad Men and my Daily Show and my Breaking Bad.

Here's an article from the Wall Street Journal that argues that t.v. might, under certain conditions, have positive effects. (Although I'm not sure that could ever be the case with Fox News.) Here's an excerpt:

University of Chicago Graduate School of Business economists Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro aren't sure that TV has been all that bad for kids. In a paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics this year, they presented a series of analyses that showed that the advent of television might actually have had a positive effect on children's cognitive ability.

The two are part of a tight-knit group of young economists using statistical techniques to examine how television affects society. The group's research suggests TV enabled an earlier generation of American children in non-English-speaking households to do better in school, helped rural Indian women to become more independent and contributed to lowering Brazil's fertility rate.

Music for Chapter 7, Marcus Reeves' "Somebody Scream!"

2008-10-04T11:52:00.000-07:00

"Nuthin' But a 'G' Thang," from Dr. Dre's The Chronic (1992), which introduces the world to Snoop Doggy Dogg. And g-funk.

Nothin But a G Thang - Dr. Dre

"Let Me Ride," from The Chronic. Cali car culture, g-funk stylee.

Let Me Ride - Dr. Dre

The video, "Let Me Ride." It takes a couple minutes to get to the actual song. The video ends with footage of George Clinton's band Parliament, whose "Mothership Connection" and "Swing Down, Sweet Chariot" are extensively sampled in the song.

"Gin and Juice," from Snoop Doggy Dogg's Doggystyle (1993), which gave a boost to Tanqueray and Seagram's sales.

"Who Am I? (What's My Name?)" from Doggystyle. You listen and you think, could g-funk ever have been possible if it weren't for George Clinton?

"For All My Niggaz & Bitches," from Doggystyle, "which turned venomous words for blacks and black women into badges of honor for all (including whites) to claim and wear proudly" (Reeves, 148).

niggas and bitches - snoop dogg

Reeves doesn't mention it, but one of the best g-funk songs ever is Warren G's "Regulate" (1994).

Warren G - Regulate.mp3 -

And, "Cop Killer," from Ice-T's side project, thrash metal band Body Count (1992). This caused a major uproar, and prompted major labels to drop a number of hardcore acts. Eventually Ice-T agreed to take the song off the album Body Count. It's basically a punk "revenge fantasy." Listen to it here.

Music and video for Chapter 5, Reeves, "Somebody Scream!"

2008-10-03T15:00:00.000-07:00

The first local LA sensation, DJ Toddy Tee, with "Batterram."

Ice-T, with his first hit, "6 'N the Morning." (The video is nothing special, but at least you can listen to the song.)

The inspiration, the original rap gangsta, Schooly D, with "Gucci Time" (1986).

Gucci Time - Schoolly D

NWA, "Straight Outta Compton" (title track from the 1989 album).

NWA, "Fuck the Police" (Straight Outta Compton).

Gangsta Gangsta (2002 Digital Remaster) (Explicit) - N.W.A.

NWA, "Gangsta Gangsta" (Straight Outta Compton).

Gangsta Gangsta (2002 Digital Remaster) (Explicit) - N.W.A.

The first defector from NWA, Ice Cube. "Endangered Species (Tales from the Darkside)," from 1991's Amerikkka's Most Wanted. (Chuck D, and Hank and Keith Schocklee are co-writers with Cube, and Chuck makes a cameo.)

The Rodney King beating, March 3, 1991.

Music for Chapter 4 of Reeves, "Somebody Scream!"

2008-10-01T08:48:00.000-07:00

The first single, "Public Enemy No. 1"

"Bring the Noise," from It Takes a Nation of Millions.

"Night of the Living Baseheads," the video, from It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988).

"Don't Believe the Hype," from It Takes a Nation of Millions.

"Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos," the video, from It Takes a Nation of Millions.

"Fight the Power," from Fear of a Black Planet (1989).

"Fight the Power," the video, directed by Spike Lee.

Hank Schocklee of Public Enemy and the Bomb Squad comments on the current state of rap music

2008-10-01T07:06:00.000-07:00

From an interview in Dazed Digital:

The pop culture business is monitored all the way round. Look at hip hop – it’s not saying anything any more. Hip hop used to be the voice of people. Who are the stars and what are they really talking about? I’m quite sure Lil Wayne is just as much of a rebel as he wants to be. He’s a rebel in every other aspect of his life – why is he not on record? Jay Z is a big icon, but at the same time, why are his records so safe? There are so many artists I could mention. In their real lives, there’ll be drugs involved, shootings and gun-running and all type of stuff, but the one thing they do manage is to make a safe record. Why don’t we hold up the artists that are talking about something real but got a clean background? If that doesn’t show the music industry is monitored, what does?

These days, Hank is way into dubstep, as you can hear from this mix put together by the Bomb Squad.

A tip of the tarbush to wayne&wax for turning me onto this.

Music and video for Chapter Three, Marcus Reeves' "Somebody Scream!"

2008-09-27T10:55:00.000-07:00

"With the release of [Run D.M.C.'s] 'Sucker M.C.'s,' the earliest b-boy sound--the uncompromised funk and competitive nature of hip-hop music--finally arrived" (Reeves, 40).

Here, Run DMC perform "Sucker M.C.'s" on the shortlived TV show, "Graffiti Rock," from 1984. It's followed by some freestyling by Run DMC, Kool Moe Dee, and Special K.

Run DMC's "Rock Box," blending hardcore rap and heavy metal guitar. The first rap video ever played on MTV (1984).

Run DMC's "King of Rock," the title track from their platinum album (1985). "I'm the King of Rock, there is none higher/Sucker MCs should call me sire." African-Americans reclaim the mantle of rock'n'roll. View it here.

Hardcore competition to Run-D.M.C.: LL Cool J's "Rock the Bells," from his 1985 album, Radio.

Rock The Bells - LL Cool J

And Eric B & Rakim's "Eric B is President," from the album, Paid in Full (1987).

Eric B. is President - Rakim

From Run-D.M.C.'s Raising Hell (1986), which Rolling Stone called "the first true rap album"--"My Adidias," which marked the group as the first rap artists to get a sneaker endorsement deal.

My Adidas - Run DMC

And from the same album, Walk This Way," with Aerosmith. View the video here.

Birthplace of the Hip-Hop Revolution: The South Bronx

2008-09-26T17:01:00.000-07:00

Photographs (and descriptions) from Mel Rosenthal's In the South Bronx of America, courtesy Duke University Libraries. See the full exhibit here.

I was born and grew up in what is now called the South Bronx. After twenty years away, I returned in 1975, to a neighborhood in ruins. The sturdy well-constructed buildings that had once housed tens of thousands of people were gutted and burned out.

The last building left standing in the neighborhood was on the East 173rd through 174th Street block. A few days after this picture was made, the building was bulldozed and the people who lived there were sent to shelters and single room occupancy hotels.

And here are some vivid images of the South Bronx, from the opening to the 1981 film, Wolfen.

Product placement in pop music

2008-09-20T12:11:00.000-07:00

From wired.com, this article by Eliot Van Buskirk: "Products Placed: How Companies Pay Artists to Include Brands in Lyrics."

Here's the punchline:

"things have gotten so weird in the music business that high-profile acts are inserting ads into their song lyrics. The next time you hear a brand mentioned in a song, it could be due to a paid product placement. And unlike magazines, songs are not required to point out which words are part of an advertisement."

the specials: rudeboy version 2--two-tone

2008-09-18T08:57:00.000-07:00

more skins

2008-09-18T08:23:00.001-07:00

skins

2008-09-18T08:17:00.001-07:00

Siouxsie Sioux: Fetish Wear, Swastika

2008-09-18T07:16:00.000-07:00

One of the best examples of the kind of transgressive punk style, as described and analyzed in Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style--Siouxsie Sioux, of Siouxsie and the Banshees. As Hebdige observes, punks' use of the swastika was meant to shock the bourgeoisie, not out of any political affinity for Nazism.

Lord Buckley on Groucho Marx

2008-09-17T07:32:00.000-07:00

Among other things, Buckley performs his "jive translation" of Shakespeare's rendering of Brutus' funeral oration for Julius Caeser.

Amy Winehouse and blackface

2008-09-12T08:11:00.000-07:00

This is a particularly acute analysis of Amy Winehouse and her (mostly) occulted relation to the Black female vocal r&b/soul tradition, from Daphne Brooks, in The Nation.

"Black women are everywhere and nowhere in Winehouse's work."

"Uncommon Valor": More POW/MIA Disinformation

2008-09-03T11:25:00.000-07:00

If you're looking for another film that propagates the POW/MIA mythology (effectively demolished in H. Bruce Franklin's Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, there is Uncommon Valor (1983), starring Gene Hackman. It airs pretty regularly on AMC.

I can only recommend it for historical/research purposes; not for any cinematic values.

Music and video to go with Chapters One and Two, Marcus Reeves' "Somebody Scream"

2008-08-21T20:19:00.000-07:00

One of the deep sources of rap was Muhammad Ali (born Cassius Clay,) who "taunted opponents and incensed white America with his boastful rhymes" (Reeves, 8).

Another deep source: the Last Poets, "the New-York based poetry group who fused spoken word poetry and African rhythms with the message of black pride, nationhood, and activism" (Reeves, 9). "Niggers Are Scared of Revolution," from their first, self-titled album (1970). Lyrics are here.

One of the most famous original sources of the "break," or the instrumental break, that DJ Kool Herc used to construct his soundtracks, using two turntables, flipping back and forth, "extending a five-second breakdonw into a five'minute loop of fury" (Chang, 79). This is The Incredible Bongo Band's "Apache" (1973).

The first commercially successful rap recording, "Rapper's Delight," released in October 1979.

Kurtis Blow's "The Breaks" (1980), the second rap single to certify gold, and the first rap song built around a concept or hook. (Reeves, 26).

"Freedom," from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five (1980). The star is the DJ, Grandmaster Flash: the first time "non-hip-hoppers heard a hip-hop DJ ply his trade..." (Reeves, 29).

But the real tour de force of Grandmaster Flash is this: "Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel" (1981).

The video for Afrika Bambaata and the Soul Sonic Force's 1982 hit, "Planet Rock," complete with scenes of breakdancers, which ushered in rap's "electrofunk" era. "His crew dressed like a wild cross between a band of New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians and interstellar Afrofuturist prophets" (Chang, Can't Stop Won't Stop, 170-71). The song samples Babe Ruth and Kraftwerk.

"Planet Rock," the longer, 12" version, in full effect.

The video for Afrika Bambaata and the Soul Sonic Force's 1983 release, "Renegades of Funk." Bam & co. align themselves with other renegades like Sitting Bull, Tom Pain, Martin Luther King, and Malxolm X.

This is the cover of the Renegades of Funk 12": Bam and the Soul Sonic Force as superheroes.

The video for Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "The Message" (1983). According to Jeff Chang, "The song was a home-studio concotion of Sugar Hill songwriter and house band percussionist Ed 'Duke Bootee' Fletcher, feathuring a memorable synthesizer hook from Jiggs Chase...Bootee and sugar Hill mogul Sylvia Robinson could not interest Flash in recording it...But Robinson and Bootee recorded the track anyway, peeling off Furious Five rapper Melle Mel to add his last verse from a forgotten version of 'Superappin' [a song released by Grandmaster Flash in 1979, one month after "Rapper's Delight" appeared]...Flash saw where this was going, and he pushed th rest of the Five into the studio to try to rap Bootee's lines. It didn't work...The video appeared, with Flash and the crew lip-synching along to a rap only Mel had helped compose."

The record was the fifth rap single to hit gold.

At the end of the video is a streetside arrest skit that does feature the Furious Five.

Buying into Pabst Blue Ribbon

2008-07-31T19:13:00.000-07:00

Farhad Manjoo penned a great review in last Sunday's New York Times Book Review of what appears to be a very important book: Rob Walker's Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are.

I was particularly intrigued by Manjoo's account of what Walker calls "murketing"-- the ad industry's "underground method of selling that depends on our complicit embrace of brands." By way of illustrating, Manjoo recounts Walker's story of Pabst Blue Ribbon, or "PBR," that is so beloved by today's punks. And I quote:

Consider Pabst Blue Ribbon. Beginning in the 1970s, the cheap beer that had long been synonymous with the blue-collar heartland began a steep decline, with sales by 2001 dipping to fewer than a million barrels a year, 90 percent below the beer’s peak. But in 2002, Pabst noticed a sudden sales spike, driven by an unlikely demographic: countercultural types — bike messengers, skaters and their tattooed kin — in hipster redoubts like Portland, Ore., had taken to swilling the stuff. When asked why, they would praise Pabst for its non-image, for the fact that it seemed to care little about selling.

Traditionally, a company that spots a sudden market opportunity responds by gearing ads toward the new customers. But Neal Stewart, Pabst’s marketing whiz, had studied “No Logo,” Naomi Klein’s anti-corporate manifesto, and he understood that overt commercial messages would turn off an audience suspicious of capitalism. Thus the company shunned celebrity endorsements — Kid Rock had been interested — and devoted its budget instead to murketing, sponsoring a series of unlikely gatherings across the country. Like “some kind of small-scale National Endowment for the Arts for young American outsider culture,” Pabst paid the bills at bike messenger contests, skateboarder movie screenings, and art and indie publishing get-togethers. At each of these events, it kept its logo obscure, its corporate goal to “always look and act the underdog,” to be seen as a beer of “social protest,” a “fellow dissenter” against mainstream mores.

Pabst’s campaign was designed to push beer without appearing to push it. To the extent that it conveyed any branding message at all, it was, Hey, we don’t care if you drink the stuff. To people sick of beer companies that did look as if they cared — don’t Super Bowl ads smack of desperation? — Pabst’s attitude seemed refreshing and inspired deep passion in its fans. Many customers did more than just buy the beer. Walker speaks to one who tattooed a foot-square Pabst logo on his back. Pabst’s low-fi marketing is “not insulting you,” the fellow tells Walker....

Walker doesn’t always pin down how much these marketing efforts contribute to the coffers of the companies that employ them. What he makes clear, however, is how thoroughly such campaigns invade the culture, especially youth culture. Members of a hyper-aware generation often hailed for their imperviousness to marketing are actually turning to brands to define themselves. Want to protest a “corporate” beer? Well, get a Pabst tattoo!

In reality, Pabst Blue Ribbon’s anticapitalist ethos is, as Walker puts it, “a sham.” The company long ago closed its Milwaukee brewery and now outsources its operations to Miller. Its entire corporate staff is devoted to marketing and sales, not brewing. “You really couldn’t do much worse in picking a symbol of resistance to phony branding,” Walker writes. But P.B.R.’s fans don’t care. In the new era of murketing, image is everything.

Pretty amazing, eh? Especially if, like me, you've been at punk events where everyone was consuming PBR like mad. Two things I find especially remarkable. First, that Pabst marketing studied Naomi Klein's No Logo to figure out how to sell PBR to the punks and the skaters. And second, that PBR has outsourced its operations to Miller. According to wikipedia, "In 2001, [Pabst] closed its last brewery in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The InBev purchase of Anheuser-Busch in July 2008 prompted Pabst to claim to be the largest American-owned brewer. In fact, it is a 'virtual brewer,' a marketing company whose 85 brands are brewed by either Miller or Lion."

"Sham" doesn't begin to describe it...despite what (Frank) Dennis Hopper says in Blue Velvet:

Nazi Rockers ... Fuck Off

2008-06-08T12:15:00.000-07:00

From DC Larson, in Counterpunch.

Rock'n'roll was born from a multiplicity of racial and cultural idioms including r&b, hillbilly country, blues, bluegrass and gospel. Proudly embracing that taboo diversity, it thrust its middle finger into the aghast mug of stilted, button-down propriety. (I speak here of the raw, original item, and not subsequent, commercially-cultivated replicas.)

It acted as a socially-unifying component of the growing Civil Rights movement, and brought people together on the dance floor just as others would unite at polling places.

Not to paint too rosy a picture. It wasn't the entire solution but it did help spark the crucial process. And its service in helping to usher away racial segregation should not be forgotten.

Review of Somebody Scream!

2008-04-15T11:35:00.000-07:00

“Soul Train” in 1976 (Michael Ochs Archives/Corbis)

Good review of Marcus Reeve's new book, Somebody Scream: Rap Music’s Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power. The book will be required reading in my Popular Culture class in the fall. I hope it works well!

How Teens Learn to Buy Identity and Distinction (If They Read)

2008-03-22T21:43:00.000-07:00

I thought this article, from Newsweek (March 17, 2008), was quite remarkable. Do we really want teenage girls to read? They could just watch t.v. to get this information.

Article to be read alongside Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.

"Branding for Beginners," by Eve Conant

Chanel Vamp Lip Gloss, Jimmy Choo heels, Gauloises cigarettes, Absolut vodka: they're the kind of brand-name products you'd expect to find in a glossy magazine. But they're popping up with astounding frequency in novels aimed at teen girls, according to a new study by Naomi Johnson, a communications studies professor at Virginia's Longwood University. Johnson looked at six best-selling novels from the "Gossip Girl," "A-List" and "Clique" series, and found that brand names appeared an average of more than once per page: 1,553 references in all. Among them were 65 allusions to brand-name alcohols, cigarettes or prescription drugs. The brand names helped drive plotlines and define characters, says Johnson, who also noticed a degree of snobbery at work: almost all 22 references to Keds served to label the girl wearing them a loser. Other lessons: don't wear Target bikinis; do wear Chanel. (A spokesperson for Alloy Entertainment, a marketing-firm subsidiary that holds the copyright for each line of books, told NEWSWEEK that it does not accept payment for product placement in any of its titles.) "The Judy Blume books I read as a kid were about life lessons and defining yourself," says Johnson. "The life lesson here is that you can buy your identity."

Symptomatic quotes:

from Dial L for Loser: "Her purple eyelet Betsey Johnson halter dress...and BCBG wedges were way more eye-catching than Alicia's...sarong."

from Gossip Girl #8: Nothing Can Keep Us Together: "A few girls lounged in leather armchairs. Jenny recognized a red-and-white patterned Marc Jacobs top on one of them."

from The A-List: "Taste testing was done...between where Skye's sheer Galliano shirt ended and her low-slung D&G camouflage pants began."

The White Stripes: Thoughts on Immigration

2008-01-19T13:18:00.000-08:00

From "Icky Thump":

Well, Americans:
What, nothin' better to do?
Why don't you kick yourself out?
You're an immigrant too.

Who's usin' who?
What should we do?
Well you can't be a pimp
And a prostitute too

Watch the video here.

Globalization and pop music

2008-01-01T21:24:00.000-08:00

From "As U.S. Pop Wanes Abroad, Talent Scout Looks Wide," Jeff Leeds, NY Times, December 5, 2007

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 4
Sales [of pop music] began shifting more than a decade ago. In 2000 roughly 68 percent of worldwide sales derived from so-called local repertory — artists working in their native country — up from 58 percent in 1991, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a trade group in London. Though American stars like Beyoncé and the Red Hot Chili Peppers still connect with fans in territories around the world, the ranks and global appeal of major United States acts appear to be waning, many music executives say. In Spain, for instance, only one American album — the soundtrack to “High School Musical 2” — is in the most recent Top 10 chart.

Facebook & Papua New Guinea?

2007-12-03T11:04:00.000-08:00

New York Times, December 2, 2007
Myspacebook.past.
Friending, Ancient or Otherwise
By ALEX WRIGHT

THE growing popularity of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Second Life has thrust many of us into a new world where we make “friends” with people we barely know, scrawl messages on each other’s walls and project our identities using totem-like visual symbols.

We’re making up the rules as we go. But is this world as new as it seems?

Academic researchers are starting to examine that question by taking an unusual tack: exploring the parallels between online social networks and tribal societies. In the collective patter of profile-surfing, messaging and “friending,” they see the resurgence of ancient patterns of oral communication.

“Orality is the base of all human experience,” says Lance Strate, a communications professor at Fordham University and devoted MySpace user. He says he is convinced that the popularity of social networks stems from their appeal to deep-seated, prehistoric patterns of human communication. “We evolved with speech,” he says. “We didn’t evolve with writing.”

The growth of social networks — and the Internet as a whole — stems largely from an outpouring of expression that often feels more like “talking” than writing: blog posts, comments, homemade videos and, lately, an outpouring of epigrammatic one-liners broadcast using services like Twitter and Facebook status updates (usually proving Gertrude Stein’s maxim that “literature is not remarks”).

“If you examine the Web through the lens of orality, you can’t help but see it everywhere,” says Irwin Chen, a design instructor at Parsons who is developing a new course to explore the emergence of oral culture online. “Orality is participatory, interactive, communal and focused on the present. The Web is all of these things.”

An early student of electronic orality was the Rev. Walter J. Ong, a professor at St. Louis University and student of Marshall McLuhan who coined the term “secondary orality” in 1982 to describe the tendency of electronic media to echo the cadences of earlier oral cultures. The work of Father Ong, who died in 2003, seems especially prescient in light of the social-networking phenomenon. “Oral communication,” as he put it, “unites people in groups.”

In other words, oral culture means more than just talking. There are subtler —and perhaps more important — social dynamics at work.

Michael Wesch, who teaches cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, spent two years living with a tribe in Papua New Guinea, studying how people forge social relationships in a purely oral culture. Now he applies the same ethnographic research methods to the rites and rituals of Facebook users.

“In tribal cultures, your identity is completely wrapped up in the question of how people know you,” he says. “When you look at Facebook, you can see the same pattern at work: people projecting their identities by demonstrating their relationships to each other. You define yourself in terms of who your friends are.”

In tribal societies, people routinely give each other jewelry, weapons and ritual objects to cement their social ties. On Facebook, people accomplish the same thing by trading symbolic sock monkeys, disco balls and hula girls.

“It’s reminiscent of how people exchange gifts in tribal cultures,” says Dr. Strate, whose MySpace page lists his 1,335 “friends” along with his academic credentials and his predilection for “Battlestar Galactica.”

As intriguing as these parallels may be, they only stretch so far. There are big differences between real oral cultures and the virtual kind. In tribal societies, forging social bonds is a matter of survival; on the Internet, far less so. There is presumably no tribal antecedent for popular Facebook rituals like “poking,” virtual sheep-tossing or drunk-dialing your friends.

Then there’s the question of who really counts as a “friend.” In tribal societies, people develop bonds through direct, ongoing face-to-face contact. The Web eliminates that need for physical proximity, enabling people to declare friendships on the basis of otherwise flimsy connections.

“With social networks, there’s a fascination with intimacy because it simulates face-to-face communication,” Dr. Wesch says. “But there’s also this fundamental distance. That distance makes it safe for people to connect through weak ties where they can have the appearance of a connection because it’s safe.”

And while tribal cultures typically engage in highly formalized rituals, social networks seem to encourage a level of casualness and familiarity that would be unthinkable in traditional oral cultures. “Secondary orality has a leveling effect,” Dr. Strate says. “In a primary oral culture, you would probably refer to me as ‘Dr. Strate,’ but on MySpace, everyone calls me ‘Lance.’ ”

As more of us shepherd our social relationships online, will this leveling effect begin to shape the way we relate to each other in the offline world as well? Dr. Wesch, for one, says he worries that the rise of secondary orality may have a paradoxical consequence: “It may be gobbling up what’s left of our real oral culture.”

The more time we spend “talking” online, the less time we spend, well, talking. And as we stretch the definition of a friend to encompass people we may never actually meet, will the strength of our real-world friendships grow diluted as we immerse ourselves in a lattice of hyperlinked “friends”?

Still, the sheer popularity of social networking seems to suggest that for many, these environments strike a deep, perhaps even primal chord. “They fulfill our need to be recognized as human beings, and as members of a community,” Dr. Strate says. “We all want to be told: You exist.”

Jeff Chang on hip-hop activism

2007-11-11T22:24:00.000-08:00

The man always comes correct. From Mother Jones...

"Can rap sell activism as well as it has $150 sneakers, bottle service, and grill work? Can the very people who've made vast fortunes off selling stupid help reform the industry?"

Jeff Chang on M.I.A.

2007-11-11T22:14:00.000-08:00

from The Nation...

"If rootlessness is the defining condition of the planet of slums, then what does it mean for art to come home? Kala's answers--like all great "political" art--cannot be any more than provisional. But now, at least, no longer running to or from someone else's utopia, M.I.A. is behind the wheel, switching the lost youth of the Fourth World into the network society, her radio on."

In Defence of Fashion

2007-09-02T21:13:00.000-07:00

I'm starting to feel a bit shallow and ill-read and it's showing--do I only read the New York Times?? Perhaps. In any case, I found this article by the inimitable Guy Trebay quite invaluable.

Some of the main points:

Intellectuals, feminists, "thinking people" love to deride fashion.

The academic uniform "is intended to make you look like you’re not paying attention to fashion, and not vain, and not interested in it." (Anti-fashion fashion.)

"Clothes are ideas...costume serves to billboard the self." (Identity would be impossible to convey without fashion.)

"[T]he appetite for change so essential to fashion is a more culturally dynamic force than is generally imagined."

Fashion is essential to the New York City economy--reason enough not to deride it so cavalierly.

Here's the article in full:

New York Times, September 2, 2007
Admit It. You Love It. It Matters.
By GUY TREBAY

DEPENDING on who is doing the talking, fashion is bourgeois, girly, unfeminist, conformist, elitist, frivolous, anti-intellectual and a cultural stepchild barely worth the attention paid to even the most minor arts.

With Fashion Week beginning in New York on Tuesday — the start of a twice-yearly, monthlong cycle of designer presentations on two continents and in four cities that will showcase hundreds of individual designers — it is worth asking why fashion remains the most culturally potent force that everyone loves to deride.

“Everyone” is not here intended to imply the deeply initiated, those pixie-dust people for whom the shape of a dress or the cut of a sleeve is a major event. There is certainly a place for those types, whether they are cuckoos like the late fashion editor Diana Vreeland (who once wrote, “I’m told it’s not in good taste to wear blackamoors anymore, but I think I’ll revive them”), or extravagant mythomaniacs like John Galliano, the Dior designer — who plays a pirate one season, a gypsy the next — or even the young celebrity brand pimps who would probably be offering paparazzi a lot more gratuitous crotch shots if designers didn’t provide them with free clothes.

No, everyone means the rest of us, those who scorn fashion outright and those who don’t but who nevertheless have the uneasy sense that this compelling world of surfaces and self-presentation is unworthy of regard.

“There is this suggestion that fashion is not an art form or a cultural form, but a form of vanity and consumerism,” said Elaine Showalter, the feminist literary critic and a professor emeritus at Princeton. And those, Ms. Showalter added, are dimensions of culture that “intelligent and serious” people are expected to scorn.

Particularly in academia, where bodies are just carts for hauling around brains, the thrill and social play and complex masquerade of fashion is “very much denigrated,” Ms. Showalter said. “The academic uniform has some variations,” she said, “but basically is intended to make you look like you’re not paying attention to fashion, and not vain, and not interested in it, God forbid.”

When Valerie Steele, the director of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, declared an interest at Yale graduate school in pursuing the history of fashion, colleagues were horror-struck. “I was amazed at how much hostility was directed at me,” Ms. Steele said. “The intellectuals thought it was unspeakable, despicable, everything but vain and sinful,” she added. She might as well have joined a satanic cult.

And that, substantially, is how a person still is looked at who happens to mention in serious company an interest in reading, say, Vogue.

“I hate it,” Miuccia Prada once remarked to me about fashion, in a conversation during which we mutually confessed to unease at being compelled by a subject so patently superficial.

“Of course, I love it also,” Ms. Prada added, and her reason said a lot about why fashion is a subject no one should be ashamed to take seriously. “Even when people don’t have anything,” Ms. Prada said, “they have their bodies and their clothes.”

They have their identities, that is, assembled during the profound daily ritual of clothing oneself; they have, as Colette once remarked, their civilizing masks. And yet, despite its potential as a tool for analyzing culture, history, politics and creative expression; as a form of descriptive shorthand used through all of written history (including the Vedas, the Bible and the Koran); as a social delight, fashion is just as often used as a weapon, a club wielded by those who forget that we are saying something about ourselves every time we get dressed — not infrequently things that fail to convey the whole truth.

Why else was Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign moved to attack the fashion critic of The Washington Post for attempting to read the candidate’s clothes? The editorial blitz that followed Senator Clinton’s outraged response to some blameless observations about a slight show of cleavage on the Senate floor was instructive, as was Mrs. Clinton’s summoning up of feminist cant about the sexism of focusing on what a woman wears to the exclusion of her ideas.

But clothes are ideas; to use a fashionism — Hello! Scholars like the art historian Anne Hollander have spent decades laying out the way that costume serves to billboard the self. One would have thought that few people understand this truth as well as the woman occasionally known as Hairband Hillary, who, after all, assiduously recast her image from that of demure and wifely second-banana to power-suited policy wonk, dressed to go forth and lead the free world.

Politicians are far from the only people who act as though the concerns of fashion are beneath consideration. When the Italian film legend Michelangelo Antonioni died recently, film critics and obituary writers went into raptures about his classic “L’Avventura,” a movie few people outside of cinema studies classes are likely, at this point, to have seen. Some remarked that the Antonioni of that early film had already begun losing his edge by the time he detoured into films like “Blowup,” whose plot revolves around the fashion world.

Never mind that “L’Avventura” is a sharply stylish movie and that in Antonioni’s hands wardrobe does the work dialogue would for more talk-prone directors. Absent plot, clothes are used by Antonioni to frame the mood of upper-class anomie and to make graphically his distaste for the Italian neorealists, who all seemed to have costumed their movies using the same set of Anna Magnani’s hand-me-downs.

Like most Italians then and now, Antonioni had a sympathy for the role clothes play in human theater. And while “Blowup” is set in a fashion (or “mod”) milieu, it is less about fashion, really, than about an accidentally photographed murder and the instability of what is seen and known. Even 40 years on, the film’s surfaces remain so stylishly assured and so cool they automatically arouse intellectual suspicion. Trusting in appearances, Antonioni always seemed to suggest, may be a losing proposition.

But investing in them, as Ms. Steele said, can be far worse.

“In our deeply Puritan culture, to care about appearance is like trying to be better than you really are, morally wrong,” she said.

It is to be driven by the dictates of desires and not needs. And yet the appetite for change so essential to fashion is a more culturally dynamic force than is generally imagined. Luxury, and not necessity, may be the true mother of invention, as the writer Henry Petroski observed. This proposition is an easier sell when the luxury in question is an iPhone, and not a Balenciaga handbag, but the same principles hold.

In places like Silicon Valley the quest for newer and better stuff results in technology patents, a clear measure of economic robustness. Fashion innovations may be harder to patent or track, but it seems obvious that huge sectors of the New York City economy would churn to a halt if all the Project Runway types suddenly stopped migrating here in the belief that the world could be changed by the sort of innovation inherent in how a garment is cut.

“Fashion is so easy to hate,” said Elizabeth Currid, a professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Policy, Planning and Development and the author of “The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York City” (Princeton University Press).

“Cultural industries like fashion are sometimes seen as something only the skinny girls in high school think about,” said Ms. Currid — and less often as a fascinating field for cultural study and also the bill-payers keeping thousands of seamstresses, cutters, pattern makers, truckers, real estate brokers and publicity hacks employed.

Analyzing Bureau of Labor statistics, Ms. Currid arrived at the not-altogether-startling conclusion that the densest concentration of fashion designers in the United States is in New York. A glance at the roster of foreign designers showing at New York Fashion Week, Sept. 4 through 12 — Russia, Turkey, India and Brazil are represented — suggests a good reason for that.

“Even if, on some level, fashion is fantasy, the concentration of events that go into producing it and the resulting social spillover,” as Ms. Currid said, can result in a huge cumulative economic advantage for a city. While the seasonal shows in the tents in Bryant Park, with their enforced passivity and aura of feminine spectatorship, lend themselves to derision, enforcing the sense that all those fops and dandies and flibbertigibbets, all the socialite geishas and second-rate celebrities and editorial priestesses are little more than idlers and dupes, big business goes on. Odds are that the same journals whose critics score easy points off fashion are economically propped up by the life-support provided by advertising for dresses and bags and shoes.

One of the most startling findings of her research, Ms. Currid said, was how powerful something as superficial, girly, bourgeois, unfeminist, conformist, elitist and frivolous as fashion can be in creating the intangible allure that attracts money, talent, beauty and enterprise to cities.

“How does one place make itself different from another in a world where there’s a Starbucks on every corner?” she asked. “People have to believe that this is the place to be.” Fashion has that effect.

‘Originals’ today are yesterday’s same old songs

2007-08-25T09:17:00.000-07:00

This article, reprinted in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on August 23, is a quite original take on the question of "originality" in today's pop songs. Is cyberspace threatening to destroy musical creativity, due to rampant sampling, recycling, versioning and cut'n'mixing?

‘Originals’ today are yesterday’s same old songs

BY ANN POWERS, LOS ANGELES TIMES

Elton John’s outburst about the Internet’s effect on pop — he suggested that a five-year cyberspace shutdown might be the only way to renew the music’s creativity — was greeted with eye rolling and the general consensus that he should splurge on an iPod. But his consternation is understandable.

The music industry is in tatters; the noise that amateurs once kept to themselves emanates from every corner of cyberspace, and between the money-obsessed mainstream and the hype-addled underground, there’s no agreement on what will endure. For a traditionalist like John, it’s a scary time — old standards are dying fast.

Consider one of the enduring myths of pop: that originality is paramount. This idea always has been pretty much a lie, given the history of music-making as a borrower’s art.

In an essay on the merits of playing copycat published in the February Harper’s, Jonathan Lethem traced the origins of American pop to the “open source” culture of blues and jazz and noted that recording techniques, which allowed for literal duplication of sounds, have steadily enhanced the artful cribbing pop’s innovators employ.

“As examples accumulate,” Lethem writes, “it becomes apparent that appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act, cutting across all forms and genres in the realm of cultural production.” (Lethem later reveals that he “stole, warped and cobbled together” his essay, including this idea, which came from the book Owning Culture by Kembrew McLeod. )

Lethem’s point might seem obvious to any sample-chasing hip-hop fan or Dylanologist who has traced the master’s loving thefts over the decades. Yet the idea that a song or a sound can be unique remains potent, especially for musicians.

The financial structure of the music industry, which rewards creativity when it’s copyrighted, has upheld the idea that one person can “own” a song.

ACCUSED Avril Lavigne has been accused of a host of rip-offs, including the chorus of her hit “Girlfriend,” which so closely resembles a 1979 song by the power-pop band the Rubinoos that it has spurred a lawsuit. [You decide!] Lavigne’s former collaborator, Chantal Kreviazuk, subsequently accused her of pilfering ideas (Kreviazuk recanted her accusation after Lavigne threatened to sue her ). And then it surfaced that another new Lavigne song might not be so fresh: The beats and vocal cadence of “I Don’t Have to Try” mirror those Peaches employed in 2003’s “I’m the Kinda.” [Note: check this video and decide for yourself.] One would think a striver such as Lavigne would crumble under this scrutiny, but the very fans who have been tracing her transgressions are beginning to make a case for forgiving her. On YouTube, some videos make the argument that Lavigne is just part of a chain: A new single from High School Musical star Vanessa Hudgens sounds uncannily like an older Lavigne hit, and the Rubinoos borrowed their barking chorus from The Rolling Stones in the first place.

The written word is never as convincing as hearing the musical connections themselves, and the huge archive of recordings available online allows for instant comparison. Where once an old blues tune that Bob Dylan borrowed from would be known by only the obsessive few, now anyone can argue about it in voluminous posts on the Expecting Rain (expectingrain. com ) message board.

Hip-hop already had made the patchwork nature of pop obvious years before through the collage technique of sampling. Cyberspace has made everyone a participant in the disc jockey culture of “digging in the crates.” Artists still might want to make music no one has heard before, but they’re forced to admit that even their most creative moments are just part of a long chain.

Even artists who do burst forth with a startling take on pop eventually will find themselves accused of being derivative. Maybe that’s why M.I.A., the British-Sri Lankan polymath who’s as fresh as artists come these days, shouted “This is my song!” as she began “Jimmy,” from her new album, Kala, during a July show in Los Angeles. “Jimmy” is not technically M.I.A.’s song; it’s a cover of a song from a 1983 Bollywood movie Disco Dancer. [check it out on youtube.) M.I.A. can’t pretend she never knew that source — she grew up loving Bollywood music. But her statement of ownership also held an opposite meaning: Past versions be damned; the vigorous new beats and vocals she applies make her “Jimmy’s” rightful owner now.

DISTINCTION MATTERS With the very idea of originality in flux, another trait defines today’s most interesting stars. Distinctiveness is what matters, the ability not to separate from the crowd but to stand out within it. The occasional lawsuit aside, pop stars are now much more willing to wear their influences proudly and make clear how they’re building their music from them.

Pop that aims for distinctiveness acknowledges its influences, tries to do them one better and, at its best, works real transformation. The White Stripes are distinctive because they’re high-concept, putting the blues through an art-school wringer and coming up with a sound that’s so far from “authentic” it finds a different road into truth. Brad Paisley is distinctive because he combines a neo-traditionalist Nashville sound with lyrics that poke gentle fun at contemporary mores. Beyonce is distinctive because her rhythmconscious vocal style updates the approach of the soul divas she emulates.

Some artists seem more beholden to their sources than others; this is where self-awareness comes in. Imitation becomes creative only when it’s acknowledged and truly examined. Amy Winehouse, the young English singer whose work with producer Mark Ronson painstakingly re-creates the feel of 1960 s girl-group soul, offers the most obvious example of how bold imitation can become personal expression.

Sometimes the thrill of the caper gives music that borrows heavily a distinctive ring. Sean Kingston’s debut album is a case in point. The young singer, who was born in Miami and reared in Jamaica, has one of the year’s biggest hits, “Beautiful Girls” — a song that sounds just like a chart-topper by ubiquitous R&B crooner Akon.

In a hip-hop-dominated scene full of mercenary lovers and ghetto businessmen, Kingston projects sweetness. In the end, “Beautiful Girls” isn’t an Akon song, as Kingston is slightly in awe of women. Akon never would sound this vulnerable.

Kingston and producer J. R. Rotem didn’t stop at seizing that Top 40 moment. Like much bubble gum, the CD Sean Kingston has more going on beneath the shiny surface. Mining the rich connections between Caribbean music and hip-hop — and incorporating elements of classic rock, gangsta rap, jazz and vaudeville — the album presents Kingston as a kid roaming through the candy store of popular music.

Best of all is “Got No Shorty,” the song owing the most unexpected debt. Over a hand-clap beat, Kingston sings the melody penned by pioneering black composer Spencer Williams in 1916. It’s “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” one of the 20th century’s most enduring little ditties.

It would have been easy for Kingston and Rotem to reference David Lee Roth’s post-Van Halen version, which brought it to the attention of rock-era listeners. Instead, they reach back to Bing Crosby, pulling out the horns from his 1941 version with the Woody Herman Band. That move makes another connection: “Hey Ya!,” OutKast’s genre-redefining hip-hop hit, used a similar horn sample.

To music fans who still believe that heroic individualism is the essence of great music, the clever juxtapositions within Kingston’s hits will seem shallow. But they are the ones pop is leaving behind. Originality is dead. Long may creativity flower as it rises from the earth of a million songs and sounds that have come before.

The Gossip in NYT, on the True Colors Tour

2007-06-20T08:35:00.000-07:00

A nice plug for The Gossip (Beth and Brace are from Searcy, Arkansas) in today's New York Times, in a review of The True Colors Tour concert in NYC. The True Colors Tour features The Dresden Dolls, Erasure, Debby Harry, and Cyndi Lauper as the headliner. It's in support of the Human Rights campaign, a GLBT advocate, and to raise awareness about the Matthew Shepard Foundation and PFLAG.

"For vocal incandescence, though, she couldn’t top Beth Ditto, whose band the Gossip delivered the night’s most unpolished and gripping performance. Backed by the guitarist Brace Paine and the drummer Hannah Billie, Ms. Ditto unleashed a bluesy yowl that sounded even bigger than the room. Their better tunes — like a heat-blasted disco-punk closer, “Standing in the Way of Control” — felt stranded between styles, and better for it."

(The print version, but not the online version, features a photo of Beth.)

Women's pop revenge

2007-06-15T06:06:00.000-07:00

This syndicated article appeared in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on June 14.

Women singing a vengeful tune

By JESSICA YADEGARAN MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

Thursday, June 14, 2007

LITTLE ROCK — Watch out, boys. The new women of pop, rock and country don’t bother with getting mad. They skip to getting even.

Years ago, when female vocalists across genres tapped into lost love or unfaithful men, they usually crooned over broken hearts and the inability to move on. Billie Holiday. Dolly Parton. Trisha Yearwood. Mariah Carey. Even Britney Spears confessed that the loneliness was killing her.

Sure, there were beacons of strength. Nancy Sinatra showed us the purpose of those boots. And Aretha Franklin taught us how to spell “respect.” But, when it came to breakups, there was no lack of women singing about wonderful men who walked out the door, and how they’d never be the same again.

Until now. Music’s new seven-letter word is “revenge.”

Country star and Grammy-winner Carrie Underwood calculates hers in her recent single, “Before He Cheats.” In the video, Underwood digs a key into her unfaithful boyfriend’s truck, slashes the tires, smashes the headlights with a Louisville Slugger and carves her name into the leather seats before declaring: “Maybe next time he’ll think before he cheats.”

Think that’s painful? In “Smile,” Britain’s doe-eyed 21-year-old popster Lily Allen sics her friends on her cheating ex. They rough him up in an alley and trash his apartment. When he begs for her back, she spikes his coffee with a substance that - ahem - disrupts his bowels. “At worst I feel bad for a while,” Allen sings, “but then I just smile, I go ahead and smile.”

And then there’s Beyoncé. In “Irreplaceable,” she owns the house. She owns the Jag. And she’s throwing her man out for running around with another woman. She’s not falling apart; rather, she’s self-possessed and rejoicing: “You must not know about me,” Beyonce proclaims. “I could have another you in a minute. Matter of fact he’ll be here in a minute.”

These current chart-toppers are not the first of their kind, says Danyel Smith, editor of Vibe magazine.

The genre, which Smith defines as varying degrees of “revenge fantasy,” started about a decade ago, shortly after the release of Toni Braxton’s hit “Breathe Again.” In the video, a gorgeous Braxton crumbles in a hallway, warning “If you walk right out of my life, God knows I’d surely die.”

In 1995, the year of Braxton’s downer, Alanis Morissette unleashed her fury at a two-timer in “You Oughta Know.” The Dixie Chicks, Erykah Badu and Kelly Clarkson later followed with songs about leaving him behind.

“Now, girls are interested in saying, ‘Hey I love you, but if you hurt me, cheat on me, or break up with me, I’m gonna be all right,’” Smith says. “There’s sadness in breaking up, yes, but I don’t think women are feeling as bad about that anymore. They’re more comfortable showing their anger.”

And the mainstream music industry is more comfortable letting them. It would’ve been a huge risk for a woman, at least in pop music, to sing songs like these 25 years ago, Smith says.

Nancy Einhart, editor of the entertainment Web site Buzzsugar.com, believes that similar female breakup songs have always existed in punk rock and underground circles. They are simply bigger pop hits now, Einhart says, and they tend to focus on relishing freedom.

Nearly a decade after Braxton was losing her breath, Clarkson found hers in 2004’s runaway hit: “Since you been gone, I can breathe for the first time, I’m so moving on, thanks to you, now Iget what I want.”

Einhart believes the songs are a reflection of pop culture and celebrity gossip trends.

“We have a lot of examples of famous women who have ended relationships - Cameron Diaz, Reese Witherspoon, Mary LouiseParker,” she says. “And the treatment of them in the media hasn’t been negative, but rather, their careers seem to be taking off and they look better than ever.”

It’s also how society - and the songwriters - are viewing women, Einhart says.

While Morissette, Allen and Badu (the anthemic “Tyrone”) write their own songs, a majority of breakup and revenge-fantasy songs are penned by men.

A new wave of young male writers, such as R&B star Ne-Yo, are tapping into the modern, independent woman’s psyche.

“A lot of their mothers were strong and they saw them get left by men, work and raise their kids on their own,” Smith says.

Of Ne-Yo, who wrote Beyoncé’s No. 1 “Irreplaceable,” Smith gushes: “He’s a young, passionate guy who gets it. He grew up in a house full of women. He heard the dirt.” Even superdivas Celine Dion and Whitney Houston have tapped the 24-year-old for songs.

Still, for every breakup song written by a man, there’s one written by a woman, says Andi Zeisler, editor of Bitch magazine, a pop culture ’zine with a feminist twist.

“I don’t even think the amount of songs has changed as much as the tenor has changed,” Zeisler says. “Songs like ‘These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ and ‘You’re So Vain’ were angry songs, but because the form was so pretty and melodic, it didn’t come across [that way].”

In the world of music videos, where images come across loud and clear, tenor’s no longer much of an issue. Especially when it comes to more serious issues, such as spousal abuse. Zeisler recalls the Dixie Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl,” the ultimate revenge fantasy, in which Mary Ann helps Wanda kill her abusive husband out of self-defense.

“At least women today aren’t growing up listening to songs like ‘He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss),’ and the ’50s idea of standing by the bad boy because that’s who he is,’” Zeisler says.

“They’re definitely growing up with a more empowered sense.”

Style, Pages 35, 37 on 06/14/2007

Plunge in CD sales: rap down almost 21%

2007-06-07T10:55:00.000-07:00

Interesting article by Jeff Archer that appeared today in my paper, originally published in the New York Times on May 28 (available in full here). More info on the decline of the music industry, particularly the big music industry--what used to be the big seven now down to the big four, with Universal Music Group recently purchasing BMG, formerly in the big seven. How can so much concentration be healthy?? What really caught my eye was this, that rap music sale, "which had provided the industry with a lifeboat in recent years, fell far more than the overall market last year with a drop of almost 21 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan." Has the creative juice begun to run out? Stay tuned.

Jihad Barbie

2007-05-03T11:13:00.001-07:00

Here's a whole new way of "queering" Barbie...

Guitar Heroines

2007-03-24T08:10:00.001-07:00

Is rock male-dominated? Are there only guitar heroes and no heroines? Is the guitar phallic?

A recent article, "Guitar Heroes, Make That Heroines, In Indie Rock" by Will Hermes in the New York Times (March 11) makes some interesting observations regarding these points, by way of a discussion of female guitarists Marnie Stern and Kaki King. Here are the most compelling bits:

That [Marnie Stern's] now a woman who ''shreds'' -- the verb for super-fast, heavy metal-esque guitar playing -- doesn't strike her as unusual, even though many still see rock guitar playing as an expression of male sexuality, and the guitar itself as phallic prop (as illustrated recently by the brouhaha over Prince's Super Bowl halftime performance, which involved a guitar solo performed in silhouette behind a sheet some thought suggested the act of masturbation -- more so than usual, anyway). ''I'm conscious that I'm a woman playing the electric guitar relatively well, and that it's not that common,'' Ms. Stern said. ''But -- and this maybe sounds really cheesy -- there's the personal relationship I have with the guitar which doesn't have to do with gender or anything like that. It's the thing that produces a creative side in me. I just see it in a totally separate way.''

Kaki King, 27 -- the sole woman featured in last month's Rolling Stone cover story on the ''New Guitar Gods'' -- sees the question somewhat differently. ''I've always thought of the curves of a guitar as so feminine,'' she said in a telephone interview from her apartment in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. ''Yeah, it's always been a phallic symbol. But if you look at any classic-shaped guitar -- a Les Paul, a Spanish classical guitar -- they all have these womanly curves. So maybe the guitar is more androgynous than we think.''

My favorite guitar heroines are PJ Harvey and Carrie Brownstein & Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney.

Peaches & Yoko Ono: "Kiss Kiss Kiss"

2007-02-25T21:35:00.000-08:00

Peaches and Yoko Ono: a dream team! Listen to the single here. This track is from Yoko's new album, Yes I'm A Witch, which includes remixes of Yoko songs by the likes ofjavascript:void(0) Le Tigre, Hank Shocklee, The Flaming Lips and Cat Power.

Lakshmi Chaudhry on "Micro-Celebrity"

2007-01-20T09:10:00.000-08:00

From The Nation, on how, increasingly, "everyone wants to be a star"--how, "thanks to MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, LiveJournal and other bastions of the retooled Web 2.0, every Jane, Joe or Jamila can indeed be a star."

Pertinent quotes:

A 2000 Interprise poll revealed that 50 percent of kids under 12 believe that becoming famous is part of the American Dream. It's a dream increasingly shared by the rest of the world, as revealed in a recent survey of British children between 5 and 10, who most frequently picked being famous as the "very best thing in the world." The views of these young children are no different from American college freshmen, who, according to a 2004 survey, most want to be an "actor or entertainer."

In the 1950s, only 12 percent of teenagers between 12 and 14 agreed with the statement, "I am an important person." By the late 1980s, the number had reached an astounding 80 percent, an upward trajectory that shows no sign of reversing. Preliminary findings from a joint study conducted by Jean Twenge, Keith Campbell and three other researchers revealed that an average college student in 2006 scored higher than 65 percent of the students in 1987 on the standard Narcissism Personality Inventory test, which includes statements such as "I am a special person," "I find it easy to manipulate people" and "If I were on the Titanic, I would deserve to be on the first lifeboat."

A Harris poll conducted in 2000 found that 44 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 24 believed it was at least somewhat likely that they would be famous for a short period. Those in their late twenties were even more optimistic: Six in ten expected that they would be well-known, if only briefly, sometime in their lives.

Jeff Chang on Jay-Z in The Nation

2007-01-20T08:34:00.000-08:00

A very incisive piece by Jeff Chang, author of Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation and the zentronix blog, on the career trajectory of Jay-Z, Jay-Hova--"his transformation from street hustler to high-end brand name" and how he helped found "what advertisers now call the 'urban aspirational' market." At its origins, Chang notes, it appeared to many that rap was the new counterculture--although rappers were pretty clear about it being also, or maybe mostly, business. By now, it's big, big bizness. Now, he observes,

"Corporate media's massive economies of scale favor a drastically limited scope of rap archetypes that, not coincidentally, traffic primarily in stereotypes of black sexuality and criminality. Labels make fewer signings, so there are fewer "types" to represent. Furthermore, those signings tend to fill old boxes: the party girl in furs and stiletto heels, the gunslinger at odds with rivals and cops, the crack dealer on the corner."

Within these constraints, says Chang, maybe the "crack rappers" like the Clipse, T.I., and Young Jeezy are the new counterculture:

"This music, which is being pushed by global corporate conglomerates, sells a myth of street life that makes crack production a metaphor for the new economy.

Amid war, post-Katrina unrest and, especially, expanding joblessness, the small-time hustlers of crack rap provide a strange kind of comfort. In a "free-agent nation" where fortysomethings routinely find themselves pink-slip obsolescent and twentysomethings are encouraged to prepare themselves for an insecure occupational future by becoming their own brands, perhaps crack rappers--whose desire for the good life is matched by the insecure certainty of the kitchen-and-corner struggle--have become the new countercultural heroes. Of course, this counterculture too comes with its illusions...The tragedies of crack rap are the stories never told, the fallen bodies never counted."

On the other side of the new economy, Jay-Z's partner Beyoncé shills for Walmart.

The Gossip diss Scissor Sisters; chart in UK

2007-01-20T08:25:00.000-08:00

This item is copyrighted by Jonty Scruff, 19 January 2007 Skrufff-E #293

The Gossip's Malicious Gossip

Fast rising electro-rock star Beth Ditto tore into US popsters the Scissor Sisters this week, telling Mixmag touring with the band was 'a really soul-sucking experience.'

"It wasn't gigs, it was 'concerts', you know like when you're nine and New Kids On The Block come to town and you camp outside the mall all day to get your ticket," she complained. "The audience were moms wanting chart hits. They've never seen a John Waters movie or heard the Ramones."

Her comments appeared as The Gossip's UK label Back Yard announced that they're re-releasing Standing In The Way of Control in March, after the (excellent) Soulwax mix was broadcast relentlessly on Channel 4, when it was used on a trailer for new TV series Skins. The track previously reached the Top 40 in November though is now expected to chart highly, almost certainly selling to the same 'moms wanting chart hits' who like the Scissor Sisters.

It's also worth checking out The Gossip on myspace, where they describe themselves as punk/soul/experimental, and write, among other things, "We are interested in art, crime, politics, food, change, the underground, dancing, fashion, subversive individuals and movements. We will nvr die + we will nvr diet...we are still not interested in credit in the straight world."

But if they place high in the UK top 40?

Rolling Stones: highest-grossing tour ever mounted

2006-11-30T12:06:00.000-08:00

The Rolling Stones (prematurely ridiculed for their advanced age, starting years ago, as the Strolling Bones) have just mounted the highest-grossing tour ever. According to Monday's New York Times (Nov. 27), their Bigger Bang tour, which started in August 2005, has grossed $437 million. Formerly U2 were at the top, their Vertigo tour having grossed "only" $333 million, and expected to top out at $377 million in December.

Apparently, the Stones were not hurt one bit by their Condi-critical song, "Sweet Neo-Con," released last September.

The Gossip, Live on Jonathan Ross (BBC)

2006-10-21T07:18:00.000-07:00

Doing "Standing in the Way of Control."

Buffy Sainte-Marie's censored sounds

2006-08-22T10:03:00.000-07:00

Interesting but flawed article about government attempts to suppress the music of Buffy Sainte-Marie, as well as other Native American artists like John Trudell, during the 1970s.

Unfortunately, this is based in part on the testimony of a former government covert operative named Charles Schlund.

Now, in federal court, Charles August Schlund III stated he is a covert operative and supports Sainte-Marie's assertions that the United States took action to suppress rock music because of its role in rallying opposition to the Vietnam War...

In his federal court affidavit, Schlund said he has knowledge of ''the detailed plans for the break-up and destruction of rock n' roll music including the assassinations of many people to achieve their goals. The detailed plans to replace rock n' roll music with all-American music called country western.''

''This massive CIA and DEA covert operation was being conducted to stop political overtones in the rock n' roll music and to stop foreign influences on Americans caused by the exposure to foreign music. This operation was conducted because the Rockefellers had lost the Vietnam War because of the protest that was in part directly linked with rock n' roll music. In these files, the Rockefellers had needed the natural resources of Vietnam for the expansion of their corporate empire and they blamed the loss of the war in part on rock n' roll music.

''The assassinations started long before Vietnam but the plans to replace rock n' roll with country western music started during the Vietnam War and have continued to the present,'' Schlund stated to the court.

In his federal court affidavits filed in Maricopa County in Arizona, Schlund also stated that singer Buddy Holly, killed in an airplane crash in 1959, was considered a threat to the U.S. government.

The article brings out other evidence to suggest that the US government did make efforts to suppress Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Schlund may indeed have had knowledge of this. But "The Rockefellers"? And Buddy Holly?! Please!

"In Nashville, Sounds of Political Uprising From the Left" (New York Times)

2006-08-21T19:15:00.000-07:00

"Country music, the genre of lonely hearts and highways, lost jobs and blue-collar woes, has become a cultural battleground. Conservatism is widely seen as having the upper hand, a red-state answer to left-leaning Hollywood.

Democrats on Music Row, the country music capital here, have grown frustrated with that reputation. A group of record-company executives, talent managers and artists has released an online compilation of 20 songs, several directly critical of Mr. Bush and the Iraq war."

Gays in Metal

2006-08-17T14:38:00.000-07:00

Good overview of gays in metal music, as well as punk, by Anthony Bartkewicz, in Decibel Magazine.

I was particularly interested in this observation: "punk rock has had its share of openly gay provocateurs, like the Big Boys' Randy "Biscuit" Turner [top picture], the Dicks' Gary Floyd [bottom picture, in center], and Martin Sorrondeguy of Los Crudos and xLimpwristx, who deliberately, often satirically, confronted or gay stereotypes in their lyrics and performances. The flamboyant Turner defied any homophobes in his audience by belting out hardcore in a tutu and eye makeup."

When I lived in Austin in the late 70s and early 80s, the Big Boys and the Dicks (who later moved to San Francisco) were an important part of the lively punk scene. I recall their queer provocations, and don't remember people reacting negatively. It's not correct, however, that the Big Boys were "hard core"--they were very funk influenced, their sound in some ways resembling the Gang of Four. One of their best songs was a cover of "Hollywood Swinging" by Kool and the Gang. I think my favorite Big Boys show was when they opened for Trouble Funk. (Biscuit, who was an incredibly sweet guy, died in August 2005.) The Dicks, on the other hand, along with another celebrated Austin band MDC (who also later moved to S.F.; MDC stands for, among other things, Million Dead Cops), virtually defined what hardcore stood for/stands for.

Tags: punk, queer, heavy metal, Austin

"Burn Baby Burn Hotsauce": Selling the Black Panther Party Memory

2006-08-14T13:05:00.000-07:00

This item is a year old, but still worth recording. You can buy the "Spirit of '66" t-shirts here.

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 (SF Chronicle)
BLACK PANTHERS HOT AGAIN/Huey Newton's widow resurrects militants' memory with 'Burn Baby Burn' barbecue sauce
Rick DelVecchio, Chronicle Staff Writer

Former Black Panthers in Oakland have cooked up a hot sauce called "Burn Baby Burn" [pictured] and plan to ship it to stores in the coming weeks along with a new clothing line [a t-shirt example is pictured] trading on the legacy of the late-'60s revolutionary Huey Newton.
Newton's widow, Fredrika Newton, came up with the idea for the new brand of spicy condiment, and original Panther David Hilliard brewed the recipe at home in West Oakland, with help from his musician and amateur-cook friend Al Green of San Francisco.
The Huey P. Newton Foundation, headed by Hilliard and named for the co-founder of the militant group born in Oakland, filed an application with the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office last year to secure the phrase "Burn Baby Burn" for commercial trademark purposes.
"It was a catchy phrase, and I thought it would be reminiscent of the '60s," Fredrika Newton said Tuesday. "I sure didn't want it to be a call to burn anything other than our taste buds."
Green said: "We have a number of different kinds, and some of it is really hot -- I mean, incredibly hot."
The phrase is associated with the race riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965. Onlookers started chanting it after police arrested a young man for drunken driving. The confrontation triggered six days of rioting, resulting in more than 30 deaths, 1,000 injuries and devastating fire damage to the neighborhood.
Each bottle of Burn Baby Burn Revolutionary Hot Sauce will come with a tag noting milestones in the history of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which was formed in 1966 by Huey Newton and his college classmate Bobby Seale. Newton was fatally shot by a drug dealer in Oakland in 1989. [No mention of the FBI's COINTELPRO program that targeted the Black Panther Party for neutralization and resulted in the murder of Fred Hampton and other Panthers.]
The tags will highlight the group's social legacy, Fredrika Newton said.
"I guess I want to celebrate the history and to let people know the actual facts of the Black Panther Party and how some of these programs are woven in today, like free breakfast programs and the call for free health care," she said.
Newton's idea is that the phrase should recall the Panthers' social programs. Children who benefited from the Panthers' free breakfasts in the '60s might reminisce over the taste of a mild, medium or spicy barbecue sauce, and young people might learn about the Panthers for the first time by reading the tags.
"It's not about violence, but the hot sauce will remind people of the rebellion in Watts and how the slogan came about," Hilliard said. "But this is an emphasis on using some of the revenue used by our hot sauce to educate."
Profits from the merchandise will support literacy programs, Hilliard said.
The nonprofit Huey P. Newton Foundation is rolling out the hot sauce and its "Spirit of '66" clothing line in advance of events commemorating the Panthers' 40th anniversary in October 2006.
"The hot sauce and the clothes are all a part of us trying to find new formats for marketing our history," said Hilliard, the foundation's executive director.
He sees two generations of potential customers.
"It's the hip-hop market, and certainly there's people who have a nostalgia for the '60s -- people who are looking for retro clothing, people who are still listening to Bob Dylan," he said. "And most recently, Carly Simon has a retro CD out."

Carly Simon fans are eating this up: The Black Panther clothing store's website, accessed today, says this:

We're sorry, but due to the growing popularity of our clothing line we are currently experiencing a high volume of orders and have had to suspend any future orders until we receive more stock.

Check back again soon! We thank you for your understanding and patience.

- The Black Panther Clothing Staff

Tags: Black Panthers

Medine: "French Muslim Band Speaks Against Racism, Terror"

2006-08-07T08:43:00.000-07:00

Cleaining out the e-mail box, I found this, which is just a little dated, but still useful. The original, from IslamOnLine, is no longer up, so I post it in full.

French Muslim Band Speaks Against Racism, Terror

The band’s albums have sold a record number in France.

By Hadi Yahmid, IOL Paris Correspondent

PARIS, March 26 (IslamOnline.net) – In France, rap music no longer conjures up images of hip-hopping boys and girls or doped teenagers after a Muslim band has given it a new look.

Singing primarily against terrorism and racism, Din Records seven members are priding themselves on being Muslims moved by the sufferings of their fellow Muslims from Palestine to Chechnya.

“Other rap bands are united by drugs, but we are united by prayers,” the band’s vocal Medine said on the band’s Web site.

Established in 2002, the band denounces the injustice done to Muslims in the occupied Palestinians territories, Iraq, Afghanistan and Chechnya.

It also condemns terrorism and expresses heartfelt sympathy with the oppressed worldwide.

Din Records songs, which topped France’s music charts and sold briskly, include “Jihad” “9/11,” “Guantanamo” and “The School of Life.”

“We want to give voice to the sufferings endured by Muslims throughout the past three years in the aftermath of the attacks,” Medine says.

“9/11”

The 9/11 ditty, which has been banned by the French TV, shows a mixture of the havoc caused by 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington and the destruction caused by the US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It also features the deplorable conditions of the Palestinians and the wide-scale destruction of their lands and homes by the Israeli occupation army.

“I keep looking for the root of the world’s disasters/Only to find out that the storm is blowing everywhere,” read the song’s lyrics.

“But the eyes are fixed on the twin tower/You don’t understand anything neither do I/But listen to the story from the very beginning…From September to September…From Ramallah to Manhattan…From Kabul to Baghdad,” they say.

The song says that the 9/11 attacks have had their domino effects on Muslims in France with the secularism drive picking up steam.

“In the country of the three-color flag, you have to be secular and enlightened/You must respect the values of the republic/Muslims are not allowed to wear beards or take on the hijab in schools.”

And it hits out at the media blitz against Muslims.

“In the newspapers, they accuse us of inciting violence, war crimes/They accuse us of being against the Americans though the Americans are rallying behind Michael Moore,” the US filmmaker who directed the anti-Bush “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

The song also touches on the torture and sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers.

“Two or three million dollars and we will forget about Abu Gharib,” the scene of the pornographic and shocking practices meted out to Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers.

Guantanamo

The songs “Guantanamo” and “The School of Life” have to do with the humiliation of Muslims in the West.

“The storm is blowing down Islam and the residents of the suburbs, who are marginalized in transports because of their hijabs/And those young people with beards, who are banned in airports/It is a plausible reason for Islamophobia,” read the lyrics of “Guantanamo”.

“The School of Life” adds: “They tell me that I belong in the third generation of immigrants/Though I have been born here and lead a simple life/Indeed, [the Hijri year] 1425 is a minaret for our fathers, mothers and brothers.”

The International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF) said in a recent report that Muslim minorities across Europe have been experiencing growing distrust, hostility and discrimination since 9/11.

“Pre-existing patterns of prejudice and discrimination have been reinforced and Muslims have increasingly felt that they are stigmatized because of their beliefs,” said the report.

Click for “9/11” video clip
Click for Din Records Website

Lusty lyrics spur teen sex

2006-08-07T06:45:00.000-07:00

From the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, August 7.

(The underlying assumption seems to be: teen sex = BAD.)

Study: Lusty lyrics spur teen sex
BY LINDSEY TANNER THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
CHICAGO - Teens whose iPods are full of music with raunchy, sexual lyrics start having sex sooner than those who prefer other songs, a study found.
Music’s influence on teen behavior appears to depend on how sex is portrayed, researchers found.
Songs depicting men as “sexdriven studs,” women as sex objects and with explicit references to sex acts are more likely to trigger early sexual behavior than those where sexual references are more veiled and relationships appear more committed, the study found.
Teens who said they listened to music with degrading sexual messages were almost twice as likely to start having intercourse or other sexual activities within the following two years as were teens who listened to little or no sexually degrading music.
Among heavy listeners, 51 percent started having sex within two years, versus 29 percent of those who said they listened to little or no sexually degrading music.
Exposure to lots of sexually degrading music “gives them a specific message about sex,” said lead author Steven Martino, a researcher for Rand Corp. in Pittsburgh. Boys learn they should be relentless in pursuit of women and girls learn to view themselves as sex objects, he said.
The study, based on telephone interviews with 1,461 participants aged 12 to 17, appears in the August issue of Pediatrics released today.
Most participants were virgins when they were first questioned in 2001. Follow-up interviews were done in 2002 and 2004 to see if music choice had influenced subsequent behavior.
Natasha Ramsey, a 17-year-old from New Brunswick, N.J., said she and other teens sometimes listen to sexually explicit songs because they like the beat.
“I won’t really realize that the person is talking about having sex or raping a girl,” she said. Even so, the message “is being beaten into the teens’ heads,” she said.
The Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the U.S. recording industry, declined to comment on the findings.
Benjamin Chavis, chief executive officer of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, a coalition of hip-hop musicians and recording industry executives, said explicit music lyrics are a cultural expression that reflect “social and economic realities.”
Martino said the researchers tried to account for other factors that could affect teens’ sexual behavior, including parental permissiveness, and still found explicit lyrics had a strong influence.
However, Yvonne K. Fulbright, a New York-based sex researcher and author, said factors including peer pressure, self-esteem and home environment are probably more influential than the research suggests.
“It’s a little dangerous to just pinpoint one thing. You have to look at everything that’s going on in a young person’s life,” she said. “When somebody has a healthy sense of themselves, they don’t take these lyrics too seriously.”
David Walsh, a psychologist who heads the National Institute on Media and the Family, said the results make sense, and echo research on the influence of videos and other visual media.
Martino said parents, educators and teens themselves need to think more critically about messages in music lyrics.
Fulbright agreed.

Shaviro on the New York Dolls

2006-08-04T14:53:00.000-07:00

On the occasion of the release of the New York Dolls' new album, One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This.

"...what was so great about the Dolls’ sound, a sound far more down ‘n’ dirty than the Stones ever had, with an intensity born of desperation, an energy that kept on building but never broke through into ecstasy, and was all the more impassioned for that...they seemed to inhabit a place in which questions of authenticity or not, sincerity or not, committment or satire, passion or performance raucous excess or calculated effects… simply made no difference...The new album is an unsatisfying simulacrum...Except — and here’s where things get both difficult and interesting — that my (overly obvious) criticism of the latter-day Dolls would seem to depend precisely on the categories of originality, authenticity, etc., which I praised the original Dolls for rendering thrillingly irrelevant."

Cristina Verán on Native Hip-Hop

2006-07-14T13:23:00.000-07:00

Interviewed by Jeff Chang:

Far more common, however, are situations where Native hip-hop artists remain as marginalized within the larger hip-hop scene as they do from the mainstream, national culture overall. In the U.S., Indian Country's parallel "Reservation Hip-Hop" scene remains virtually excluded from an African-American dominated mainstream which doesn't really even acknowledge its existence.

Jeff Chang: Hip-Hop: Pro-Logo or Pro-Liberation?

2006-07-14T13:19:00.000-07:00

From the author of Can't Stop Won't Stop: a History of the Hip-Hop Generation. The answer is (sorry to give it away): yes to both.

Chase credit card: "All You Need Is Love"

2006-07-11T07:35:00.000-07:00

Tirdad Derakhshani, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, on Chase's new TV add that uses the Beatles' 1967 single, "All You Need Is Love."

"It's a big, ugly piece of situational irony: companies using anticonsumerist, antiestablishment art to sell consumer products." Correct, but no surprise. Thomas Frank's The Conquest of Cool, demonstrates that this strategy has been at the heart of advertising for several decades, a trend that started in the late 50's.

Reading for this week

2006-04-24T15:20:00.000-07:00

One of the readings for this week is: P. Silverstein & C. Tetreault, “Urban Violence in France,” and you can find it here.

Fun^Da^Mental's official website

2006-04-20T05:54:00.000-07:00

Go here for info on Fun^Da^Mental, for free downloads, to view videos, etc. Global chaos!