Yes. Hell yes.

Vanity Fair have a really interesting article about the design rut Fashion, arts, entertainment, popular culture, style etc finds itself in and why.

It’s easy to say “fashion’s cyclical”, but Kurt Anderson’s article nicely reminds us that it didn’t use to be so; and it’s easy to think about the innovations in technology that have driven us forward, leaps and bounds, in the last 20 years (or even 10, as a recent article referred to on TheScrapBook reminded us)… but actually this “progress” is a fallacy – we’ve not moved on. Not in the last 20 years, we havent.

I have long thought about defining recent decades in terms of significant musical innovations. It’s no a hard and fast science, and I wont pretend that my timings are accurate nor specific to the year, but consider these broad moments of decade defining/influencing popular musical history:

1947 – Rock’n'Roll

1957 – Rock music

1967 – Disco

1977 – Punk

1987 – Dance music (even that’s

1997 – ? Sampling culture? Maybe…

2007 – ?? Erm…

Perhaps Hip Hop is 2007+ given its ubiquity today… but it’s surely more 1987+? And that’s part of the point that Anderson’s article makes. Certainly, “Sampling culture” plays into that hand.

This broad decade-defining should cause lots of debate (which I welcome), and I admit I’m brushing over all sorts of sub-genres – New Romantic, Pop, Grunge etc etc etc – to make the point, but to refer to Anderson again, the last 20 years has not been innovative in music, and where it has it’s been exceptions that prove the rule.

Below is an excerpt of Anderson’s article about the stagnation of popular culture over the last 20 years, and I urge you to read the full piece.

Try to spot the big, obvious, defining differences between 2012 and 1992. Movies and literature and music have never changed less over a 20-year period. Lady Gaga has replaced Madonna, Adele has replaced Mariah Carey—both distinctions without a real difference—and Jay-Z and Wilco are still Jay-Z and Wilco. Except for certain details (no Google searches, no e-mail, no cell phones), ambitious fiction from 20 years ago (Doug Coupland’s Generation X, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow) is in no way dated, and the sensibility and style of Joan Didion’s books from even 20 years before that seem plausibly circa-2012…

If, in 1990 or 1980 or 1970, you’d examined a comparable picture from 27 years earlier—from 1963 and 1953 and 1943, respectively—it would be a glimpse back into an unmistakably different world. A man or woman on the street in any year in the 20th century groomed and dressed in the manner of someone from 27 years earlier would look like a time traveler, an actor in costume, a freak. And until recently it didn’t take even that long for datedness to kick in: by the late 1980s, for instance, less than a decade after the previous decade had ended, the 1970s already looked ridiculous.

There are, of course, a few exceptions today—genuinely new cultural phenomena that aren’t digital phenomena—but so few that they prove the rule. Twenty years ago we had no dark, novelistic, amazing TV dramas, no Sopranos or Deadwood or The Wire or Breaking Bad.Recycling bins weren’t ubiquitous and all lightbulbs were incandescent. Men wore neckties more frequently. Fashionable women exposed less of their breasts and bra straps, and rarely wore ultra-high-heeled shoes. We were thinner, and fewer of us had tattoos or piercings. And that’s about it…

Part of the explanation… is that, in this thrilling but disconcerting time of technological and other disruptions, people are comforted by a world that at least still looks the way it did in the past. But the other part of the explanation is economic: like any lucrative capitalist sector, our massively scaled-up new style industry naturally seeks stability and predictability. Rapid and radical shifts in taste make it more expensive to do business and can even threaten the existence of an enterprise. One reason automobile styling has changed so little these last two decades is because the industry has been struggling to survive, which made the perpetual big annual styling changes of the Golden Age a reducible business expense. Today, Starbucks doesn’t want to have to renovate its thousands of stores every few years. If blue jeans became unfashionable tomorrow, Old Navy would be in trouble. And so on.

Capitalism may depend on perpetual creative destruction, but the last thing anybody wants is their business to be the one creatively destroyed. Now that multi-billion-dollar enterprises have become style businesses and style businesses have become multi-billion-dollar enterprises, a massive damper has been placed on the general impetus for innovation and change.

This is one of the best articles about Hip Hop I’ve read in recent years, comparing Jigga to the USA, 50 Cent to Russia, southern rap’s rise as that of Asia’s increased power, the West Coast (Snoop, Dre et al) as Europe and perhaps Eminem as India or Brazil – a power in his own right that seems neither influencing nor affecting the wider world.

The following are extracts, but I urge you to read the full article by Marc Lynch, here.

“[The] basic argument [is] that Jay-Z handled his hegemonic position by exercising restraint, declining to engage in most provocations in order to avoid being trapped in endless, pointless battles. Jay-Z battling the Game would have risked being dragged down into combating an endless and costly insurgency with little real upside. Better for the hegemon to show restraint, be self-confident, and to carefully nurture a resilient alliance structure to underpin leadership…

The structure of the balance of power in the rap world continued to evolve towards multipolarity over the last two years, if not an actual hegemonic transition, in the midst of a serious financial crisis afflicting the entire industry — a situation not unfamiliar to the White House…

Rap’s center of gravity was being pulled relentlessly away from its New York roots, taking on a more southern and more international feel. The entire industry faced a massive financial crisis, as the internet and market fragmentation continued to contribute to the steady collapse of the business model for albums and record companies. What is more, there was every reason to view Jay-Z himself as a declining power. While a Jay-Z album could still dominate the rap space as completely as the U.S. military could dominate any global battlespace, that dominance rested on deteriorating foundations…

Watch the Throne therefore should not be judged as an album, but rather as a move in this savvy strategy of institutionalizing hegemony in the face of potential decline. Kanye and Jay-Z’s alliance offers a new blueprint for managing decline in a turbulent world from which international relations scholars and American foreign policy practitioners alike should learn. And if political scientists don’t want to take lessons from hip hop artists, then allow me to give the last word to Cyhi Da Prince: “my haters got PhDs, y’all just some major haters with some math minors.”

Brilliant writing from my new news source, Foreign Policy and Marc Lynch. Props.

Music video for the upcoming concert season @ Bellavista Social Pub.
Director: Bante
DOP: L. Semplici
Hero: Moussa Kaba
Producer: Frisca
Dog: Ultimo
Production: Filmatindustriali

Thanks @thekingmob

Very good mix from Quiet Village, featuring all sorts of Hawaiian-tropic soundtrack goodness… whatever that means. Definitely includes Tropicalia, Hungarian funk covers, Nina Simone, Turkish psyche pop, Johnny Harris, America and Eurythmics.

Theo Parrish is coming back to Plastic People on April 2nd.

If you know, you know.

If you think you know, but dont really know - read this

If you think you know, and dont think you want to know - read this

If you really dont know, then know this

The Doors: You have been bitten by an animal while trying to get it stoned.

The Who: You own a Goldwing with a baby-changing station.

The Rolling Stones: You own three cars and no stereo.

Canned Heat: You own three stereos and no car.

Deep Purple: Some part of a law named after a young girl applies to you.

Led Zeppelin: The first three things you smoked were banana peels, catnip, and poppies, in that order.

Jimi Hendrix: You are under 20 or over 65

Black Sabbath: Your greatest joy is painting unventilated rooms.

David Bowie: There is still, somewhere, a Dig Dug or Zaxxon machine with your high score on it.

The Eagles: You can only reach orgasm while listening to talk radio.

Crosby, Stills & Nash: You own an oversized hat.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: You own three or more oversized hats.

Jefferson Airplane: You make your living buying and selling oversized hats.

AC/DC: You only remove your socks to shower, and then only reluctantly.

Aerosmith: You know a store that still sells puffy Reeboks.

Santana: You have had an hours-long conversation with someone before realizing it was just a pile of clothes.

Allman Brothers Band: You do not own a bong, but can quickly make one from a piece of fruit or an abandoned toilet.

Bad Company: You have sustained several alcohol-related injuries involving sheetrock.

Cream: You know a guy who knows a guy who worked on Star Wars.

Steely Dan: You have snorted cocaine off a copy of Remembrance of Things Past.

Fleetwood Mac: You have snorted cocaine off a copy of The Hobbit.

Jethro Tull: You have a favorite rune.

Silophone is a unique & interactive sound installation in a huge disused grain silo in Montreal.

Go to the website http://www.silophone.net switch on ‘listen to silophone” and upload an audio clip (less than 1mb). The clip is then sent over the web to speakers within the building, played into the silo, picked up through mics in the silo & broadcast back over the web for you to hear the enormous 20 second+ reverb of the building.

” The sound is captured by microphones and rebroadcast back to its sender, to other listeners and to a sound installation outside the building. Anyone may contribute material of their own, filling the instrument with increasingly varied sounds.”

found over at deepsound

Fela! reveals Kuti’s controversial life as an artist and political activist – the true story of the legendary Nigerian musician whose soulful, stirring Afrobeat rhythms ignited a generation.

Inspired by his mother, a civil rights champion, he defied a corrupt and oppresive military government and devoted his life and music to the struggle for freedom and human dignity.

He was also a polygamist, an insighter of violence, and socialist, as well as maker of a unique sound blending psychedelic, highlife, and James Brown funk that later came to be known as Afrobeat. Characterized by a fairly large band with many instruments, vocals, and a musical structure featuring jazzy, funky horn sections. The “endless groove” is used, in which a base rhythm of drums, shekere, muted West African style guitar, and bass guitar melodic riffs are repeated throughout the song

Fela! launches at the National Theatre next month. With his backing band played by Antibalas when performed off Broadway, and winning 11 Tony Nominations (joint highest ever nominations for a production), this is set up to be an amazing performance at the Olivier Theatre.

It was been produced, by the way, in association with Shawn ‘Jay-Z’ Carter, Will & Jada Pinkett Smith, and Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson, amongst many others.

Everybody say yeah yeah.