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The Game: Jay-Z will fuck 50 up in a battle!

2009-11-20T15:44:20Z

Here's the Game, in an interview with Complex, talking about how Fiddy don't want it with Jay, but Game would bite Jay's ear off.

Complex: 50’s been baiting Jay-Z recently. As someone who’s had issues with both of them, how do you feel about him going after Jay?

Game: Oh yeah, I already did that Jay-Z thing. 50’s just doing what I’m doing. Nobody went at Jay, I went at Jay. Now everybody wants to get at Jay, not saying anything about Beanie Sigel, that’s personal and I stay out of that. He’s just a man and he’s got all the right in the world, but I feel like I did something that people have been wanting to do, but everybody is scared because Jay-Z is so lyrically inclined to cut your throat and your career in half that nobody wanted to do it. But me? I just don’t give a fuck sometimes.

Complex: What do you think that the result of that battle would be?

Game: Jay-Z will fuck 50 up in a battle! It would be so fast and over with. 50 is funny, but Jay is witty. Jay-Z is not to be toyed with. If he fuckin’ responds, if he feels like you’re really pissing him off and he responds, he’s gonna fuck you up! He would fuck me up, I’m just glad he didn’t fuckin’ respond, so I didn’t have to go dig in my fuckin’ bag and try to fuck him up. I definitely think that Jay-Z didn’t come at me like he came at any other rappers because I definitely would have been more disrespectful and once you start a beef with me you better be ready to go the whole motherfuckin’ 12 rounds because I will try to chew your fuckin’ ear off like Mike Tyson. I’ll do it and I think he knew that—I’m disrespectful. So Jay, he did the right thing and just kinda let it die down and I let it die down ’cause it wasn’t anything really. It was fuckin’ fun and I really admire Jay’s career. I just really don’t care too much for the man himself.

Interview: The Game Talks R.E.D, 50 Cent, Jay-Z And Interscope [Complex]

And after the jump is KRS-One saying Jay-Z vs 50 Cent would be the greatest battle in the history of hip-hop.

Winner Takes All, Long Tails And The Fractilization Of Culture

2009-11-20T13:04:56Z

Shared by Rafi
Every niche has its own winners.

Reader Eileen points us to a thought-provoking article by Joshua-Michele Ross discussing the idea that, rather than a diverse "long-tail" culture, we're actually being driven to a homogenized "winner-take-all" culture thanks to the rise of our robot overlords, better known as online recommendation engines. Or something like that. It's a nice theory, with some interesting statistical modelling behind it. And, I've always been interested in "winner takes all" economies, since the guy who taught me Econ 101 literally wrote the book on "winner takes all" economics.

That said, I think this really only tells a part of the story -- and maybe not the most important or most interesting part. That's because (and, again, this may be due to my own econ education) it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that we'd see hits follow a winner takes all approach (that's how hits work). Nor is it a surprise that the effect would seem stronger as the world globalizes and borders and barriers become less of an issue. So, yes, of course there will be a "globalized" winner takes all situation at the hits level. But is that all?

What's much more interesting to me is what happens beyond the hits. And, as you start to dig down into subsectors or subcultures, you begin to notice an interesting pattern there as well: that those subsectors and subcultures follow that same power law pattern themselves. The big name bands in a subculture may seem "small" in the wider world, but they're huge within the subculture. Within that subculture, they're the winner who took all -- but from a more limited population.

In some ways, it's the fractalization of culture.

Just as a fractal repeats its same pattern as you zoom in and look closer on the smaller segments, so do cultural subsegments. And those segments continue to thrive, despite the recommendation systems just pushing people to the hits. Part of that may be that once you've begun exploring those subcultures, the recommendation engines and collaborative filters drive you towards the "hits within" the subculture -- or it may be that the impact of algorithmic recommendation engines isn't quite as dominating as some make it out to be. Yes, people do rely on those recommendation engines... somewhat. But they trust people they know even more. And once you get involved in a subculture you quickly find other people already involved in that culture who act as guides who point you both to the "hits" but also to the interesting and "diverse" long tail places to go as well.

So, yes, there is a winner take all effect found in the recommendation engines, but it hasn't resulted in less diversity within our cultural output or our cultural consumption -- and that's because people don't just follow that limited algorithmic overlord to find the content they want to consume. In fact, the original statistical model highlighted above more or less makes this point. Basically, it shows that even if each individual sees a more diverse culture, it can still end up with a more homogenized culture -- but really only among the hits. Basically, because the world is global, the really big hits go global and become winner-take-all in a much larger market. But, at the same time, the niches thrive as well.

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The amateur scientist (that's us)

2009-11-20T10:41:00Z

Many people buy a car (probably their single biggest discretionary purchase) based on slamming a door, kicking a tire and judging the handshake of a salesperson.

We choose a surgeon based on the carpeting in his office and a politician by his hair cut.

During the first week of swine flu vaccines in New York, most parents (more than half!) chose to keep their kids out of the program.

Interviewed parents said things like, "I'm not sure it's safe," and "I wanted to see if it affected other kids..."

No mention of longitudinal studies or long-term side effects. No science at all, really, just rumors and hunches and gut instincts.

This gut-instinct approach served people well for hundreds of thousands of years, but it's pretty clear that it doesn't work in a complex world. Eating salmon at a wedding feels 'safe' because we always have, but of course any professional scientist will tell you that farmed salmon is an ecological disaster. You can't see the problem, so you ignore it.

Audiophiles spend thousands of dollars rewiring the electrical lines in their house with .99999% pure copper, ignoring the fact that the power from the street is in the same old cables. Adding decimal points to our irrationality doesn't change much.

The problem with being an amateur scientist is precisely the reason that marketers relish the opportunity to sell to us, the amateurs: we make stupid decisions, easily manipulated by those who might choose to do the manipulation (on their behalf or on ours).

The news here is not that people are irrational, giving too much credence to the dramatic and the local and the short-term (that's not news), but that people have added a veneer of scientific rationality to their irrational decisions. Armed with Zagats or internet data or some rumor off Snopes, we act as though now we're supremely rational choicemakers.

This is one of the problems with breast cancer screening. It appears to give information, really good information, but in practice, it doesn't. Since the information is vivid, we give it too much credence.

The challenge for people trying to market vaccines or highlight long-term side effects of various consumer choices is that it's much easier to spread a story about exploding cars or hair falling out than it is to spread a story of 'nothing bad happens' or 'no one got the swine flu and died' or 'three years from now, this section of ocean will be dead.' We prefer the vivid anecdote to the dry and statistically useful fact, which in a complex world, is to our detriment.

PS if I was marketing the swine flu vaccine, I'd name it after a kid who died last season and put her picture on the release form. Alas, teaching amateurs like us to be real scientists is going to take a while.

Just The Numbers: XXL’s 100 Best Hip Hop Sites

2009-11-19T21:01:18Z

A statistical summary of XXL's Top 100 Hip Hop Sites.

Formlessness Meets Functionlessness: Stefan Ulrich’s Real Doll For The Creative Class

2009-11-19T18:04:25Z

The creative class are alienated not at the political, the economic or the social but at the most basic human level because they have chosen to be so in order to keep up with the dictates of money and success. German designer Stefan Ulrich aims to remedy this alienation with Funktionide.

According to the ancient poets there was once a King of Cyprus who commissioned a statue so beautiful that he managed to fall in love with it. Embracing the silent marble and lavishing kisses upon it, the king was able to imagine that it, in turn, loved him. When Shaw revisited the story of Pygmalion, marble was replaced with a far rawer material, an unrefined cockney flower girl named Eliza Doolittle. In Shaw’s play, Henry Higgins manages to fashion her into a woman of beauty and refinement.

For the Greeks it was a story about projection and the power that our creations come to have over us, but Shaw made it into a story about class and human relations. In the present day, when the objects that we possess seem to possess us, it seems that the earlier version of the myth has a greater resonance. No matter how much effort we put into molding our Eliza Doolittles, at some point, they will always be able to say “no.” Far better, then, to turn our attentions, and our affections, toward objects.

Turning away from human things, we run into the same problem as the old King: no matter how much we love our objects, or how many objects we amass, they cannot be made to love us back. Despite centuries of progress, we retain certain archaic emotional needs — friendship, love, companionship, understanding, and all the rest — that objects simply cannot meet. So we rely on others to meet them. And here is the beginning of all our troubles. Seeking emotional comfort in others who have variations on our own needs often requires a great deal of work. To get, it seems, we must give. Even worse, others have their own wills and desires that are often different from, or even contrary to our own. It may turn out that I seek to have my emotional needs met by somebody who is simply incapable of meeting them or, even worse, someone who wants nothing to do with me.

The result is a seeming unending horror of conflict, sacrifice and interpersonal politicking that is often quite frustrating, not to mention time-consuming. Who has time for such things? No matter how hard we try, other people remain other people, autonomous and separate from us. They may meet our needs quite well one day, only to disappoint us completely on the next.

This a fundamental paradox for the program of individuality: the emotional needs that make up our individual selves must be nurtured by other individuals with their own emotional needs. Until we reach a pure state of Randian self-interest and self-possession, it seems that we will always need, or at least think we need, other people.

Our human interactions, frustrating and difficult as they may be, are by the same token, a source of pleasure. When, for a time, we are able to overcome the difficulties and conflicts presented by the neverending human drama, the result can be joy, comfort, and connection. But one wonders, are all the messy difficulties really worth the paltry rewards?

An exacting and rigorous cost-benefit analysis must be performed on a daily, if not hourly, basis. Is it really worth it to take part in human relationships? Do our connections with others offer enough in the positive column to outweigh their time-consuming and frustration-causing negative aspects? Every day this question is answered in the negative as we turn to technologies that promise to mediate our personal and social relations.

I do not have the time or emotional energy to keep in contact with all the people that I have ever known. But my facebook alter ego is able to present a bold face onlne even when I am emotionally exhausted. It creates an illusion of connection that is always on display for those I no longer have the time or energy to really know in the personal sense. Little by little, I turn more and more of my “self,” my external relations with others, over to technological intermediaries. But still, I seem to need people. Will a true break, a true liberation ever be possible?

The rapid pace of computer and material technologies suggests that freedom is around the corner. German designer Stefan Ulrich sees a future in which our emotional needs will be met, not by other “people,” but by robots or other technologies. Ulrich has demonstrated one shape such robots might take with his marvelous and astounding Funktionide. Ulrich developed Funktionide as a sort of thought experiment intended (text in German with English abstract) to demonstrate how design might deal with the emotional needs of the alienated and marginalized creative class:

“This thesis does not only deal with a problem of our time — the social isolation of certain parts of our society, the following argument has also grown out of very personal circumstances. It reflects upon the question of how young people of the so called “creative class” can reconcile their desire for home, partnership and family with living personal career ambitions and with the continuously changing and demanding work- life conditions.

“As a consequence of this conflict of interest and in order to remain attractive for the working world sacrifices are made regarding personal relationships. This can actually be one way into isolation. Whereas the isolation of marginalised groups of society can be ascribed to the fact that they do not fit into one of society’s schemes, the isolation of the “creative class” results from the “multilocality” of its job-nomads; the price a rising number of young employees are willing to pay — with drastic emotional consequences. The global job-nomad grows lonely, and his emotional world becomes continuously more one-dimensional.”

As Ulrich sees it, the creative class is marginalized because it has voluntarily given up the very things that give comfort to traditional marginalized groups. Creatives are alienated not at the level of the political, the economic or the social, but at the most basic human level. If the life of the poor is not the life we imagine for ourselves, it plays out as a parody of that life, following the same rituals of family, church, marketplace, and the political. At the center of all these rituals are the comforts of home, place, and humanity. Where the old alienation could be said to take place in a geographic location, the new alienation of the creative class is played out in lonely hotel rooms across the globe. And why is the creative class so alienated? Because it has chosen to be alienated in order to keep up with the dictates of money and success.

It is quite clear that when money and success, no matter how paltry, are at stake, they will win. We will continue to choose these things at the cost of everything else. We owe it to our “selves.” The ideology of the individual leads by an inexorable logic to the nomadic creative, alone in his hotel room, hungry for human contact and emotional connection.

Strange bedfellows: Funktionide the shape of things to come.

But that is changing. Funktionide is Ulrich’s proposed solution to the problem, and it is a glorious thing. It exists on the spectrum of objects somewhere between a body pillow, a security blanket and a sex doll. It has roughly the mass of a human body, but none of the signifiers of humanness. Its flesh, a stark iPod white, makes no reference to human skin. Nor does it have limbs or orifices of any sort. There is a sort of extreme of passivity in the lack of orifices: it cannot even offer itself to conventional connubial activity, and is entirely outside the human sphere. But Funktionide does do things. It is capable of generating its own lifelike warmth and of responding to electrical stimuli by generating wart-like domes that rise above its surface. It is also “breathes.” (In the video demonstration, this breathing is extremely unsettling, like the throbbing and heaving of a maggot.) In one of the videos, Funktionide even seems to move from floor to bed, though at a pace so slow that it seems like a trick of the mind or the camera. From the photos and videos of Funktionide in action, it seems that its main purpose is to be clung to by a lonely creative type.

Ulrich is obviously having fun with Funktionide. Perhaps he sees himself as one of the marginalized creatives at whom Funktionide is aimed, and he is certainly poking fun at the tenets of modern design which describe sterile and unnatural blobjects as “organic.” Ulrich openly admits that it is a critique, but never so much so that he gives away the game, as with this explanation that accompanies the video demonstration of Funktionide:

In this way the works intention is to create a provocative picture for discussion, which enables us to question how much we want technological products to satisfy our emotional needs. To ask these questions will become part of the responsibility of future product design.

The ambiguity of this scenario is, that it could be understood as a solution to a wide range of different kinds of loneliness. But it might as well be understood as a scenario which should be avoided by all means possible.

Funktionide, then, is either a technological solution to a problem that has long vexed us, or a vision of dystopia. In the future we will find our emotional needs met by Funktionide or similar technologies, or we will come to realize that there are certain needs that technologies cannot meet, certain problems they cannot solve. The pathetic and laughable image of the scruffy eurocreative clinging to Funktionide is either a modern Prometheus or an alienated depressive contemplating suicide. Technology is everything, or it is, in certain respects, a blind alley. It is this choice between opposites that Ulrich labels an “ambiguity.”

How does what seems to be an absolutely clear practical and moral choice become an ambiguity? This is where the bad faith of Ulrich’s critique is revealed, as the same bad faith found in all the pseudo-philosophizing and pseudo-critiquing of the futurists and other technorati. Ulrich is a designer: his works is research and development. The choice of what will be made is not his to make. And the conversation that Funktionide is meant to pose … well … just who is going to have that conversation? When venture capitalists arrive on his doorstep hoping to launch production of Funktionide, will Ulrich start the conversation with them, or will he do the work that he has been trained to do?

Love machine: the "blobject" of creative-class affection.

It is interesting to return here to the distinction that Ulrich makes between the creative class and the other “marginalized groups of society.” We imagine that the old marginalization takes the form of political, economic and social oppression and distinction. But even the slum dwellers and the urban poor have, as the saying goes, each other. The marginalization of the creative class is somehow unique, in that it is personal and self-chosen. But this is not really the case at all. How is the marginalization of the lonely creative in a Hong Kong or Paris hotel room qualitatively different from the marginalization of the migrant laborer who has left home for the same reasons? Any difference must occur at a purely ideological level. The migrant does so for base needs, while the creative does so for “career” and self-actualization. The distinction evaporates under close inspection.

The real marginalization of the creative class is not at the personal level that Ulrich points out, but at the level of their relation to the objects they create. Where the laborer or the maquilladoro can at least take pride in the fact of their labor as honest work for honest pay, Ulrich cannot even have that. Driven simultaneously by economic dictates and the ideology of design, he must always hedge his bet. He is at once prostitute and artist. If he cannot stomach designing the next generation of real doll, he must create an alibi in the form of half-assed critique. In realizing the potential inherent in new technologies, he must design work that he finds morally repugnant.

What Ulrich has demonstrated in Funktionide, is an object designed to relieve and soothe the alienated individual. It is not ideal, and it will certainly not be the last, but it is ready. It a critique only in that it critiques itself in the process of developing newer and better robots to fill human needs. Everything is here but the marketing campaign, the assembly line, and the satisfied end-users. And this is the problem of critical design. When Funktionide or Funktionide 2.0 eventually comes on the market and finds its users, it will not matter whether they are using it critically or ironically. It will only matter that they have turned away from the human and toward the machine. Any critique or conversation that occurs will take place on the customer service hotline.

Posted in culture Tagged: bubble culture, bubble living, bubble sexy, Henry Brulard

Rambling...

2009-11-19T16:00:00Z

Sticking with the theme, I find Community to be hit or miss--it has a kind above-average funny quality that's always there humming. From time to time you get an episode that goes further. I thought "Home Economics," for instance, was hilarious. But Community, with its rather diverse cast, also brought something else out for me--the notion of finally "getting past it."

TV takes it's share of hits for not having enough characters of color, but I think, over the past five years or so, they've done a decent job. Part of the problem is we want television to be better than us. Gawker has a piece up criticizing Hollywood for its lily-white male writing corps. I can't actually gauge the criticism, because I'm not familiar with what Hollywood is or isn't doing to attract a more representative group of writers.

But whenever I read that XX field isn't diverse enough, I don't so much doubt the truth of it, as I think the charge deeply underestimates exactly the price being exacted for white supremacy in this country, and the length of time for which it went unchecked. We're 50 years into a truly democratic, non white-supremacists America. Congratulations. But we we spent some 150 years in which the country's major institutions--its government, its business, its churches, its block associations, its military, its police force, its labor unions--in the main, aided and abetted white racism. There are certainly exceptions, but I tend to think that the long-term damage done is incalculable and has a lot to do with how we live today.

I'm reporting out a story now in which I had to talk with older black folks who'd grown up in an industrial city in the 40s and 50s. One of the things that comes through from them is that being smart and black, during that time, was really scary. I keep hearing these tales of black people with degrees in electrical engineering, who ended up working in the post office, driving cabs, or worse, running numbers. This is toward the end of Jim Crow, and after slavery, both of which did their best to exact a toll on uppity nigras, who though they were above their station. I don't think I would have made it past fourteen in that world.

What is the long-term damage of communicating a penalty, including death, for black intelligence while rewarding white intelligence? What is the long-term damage of having a federal government policy which intentionally seeks to retard the wealth of black communities? What is the long-term damage of using the police--theoretically the guardians of all that is right in society--as a kind of thug army charged with enforcing racist edicts? These are, literally, questions. I don't have answers for them, but when I hear people asking Hollywood to grapple with a history that we, ourselves, don't want to grapple with I wonder whether we really understand precisely what happened, how much we lost, and how long it will take to get it back.

And then I watch something like Community, where they're clearly aware of race, but not race-obsessed, Pierce is hot for Shirley, and Annie is hot for Troy, and I can almost see my kid, or my grandkid throwing it all off and walking into this world where we've settled our accounts. I watched "Home Economics" and I was envious, like I'm envious when I walk down Broadway and see the interracial couples hand in hand. And it's so incredibly common, now. I'm not envious because I hate Harlem, or because I regret Howard, or Mondawmin or banging Malcolm's "Message To The Grassroots." I'm envious because I never thought I had a choice. Nationalism wasn't in my blood--but, without religion, it was the only thing that made the world make sense.

I struggle with this, when it comes to my own kid. Of course we talk about race, but I worry about putting my shit on him. My politics were shaped by Willie Horton, Chuck D, the mythology of Superpredators. He deserves to have his own shot at shaping his own politics. The kid deserves a choice.

Slaughterhouse Five

2009-11-18T14:07:00Z

In December of 1944, whilst behind enemy lines during the Rhineland Campaign, Private Kurt Vonnegut was captured by Wehrmacht troops and subsequently became a prisoner of war. A month later, Vonnegut and his fellow POWs reached a Dresden work camp where they were imprisoned in an underground slaughterhouse known by German soldiers as Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five). The next month - February - the subterranean nature of the prison saved their lives during the highly controversial and devastating bombing of Dresden, the aftermath of which Vonnegut and the remaining survivors helped to clear up.

Vonnegut released the book Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969.

Below is a letter he wrote to his family that May from a repatriation camp, in which he informs them of his capture and survival. Transcript follows.

Source

Transcript

FROM:

Pfo. K. Vonnegut, Jr.,
12102964 U. S. Army.

TO:

Kurt Vonnegut,
Williams Creek,
Indianapolis, Indiana.

Dear people:

I'm told that you were probably never informed that I was anything other than "missing in action." Chances are that you also failed to receive any of the letters I wrote from Germany. That leaves me a lot of explaining to do -- in precis:

I've been a prisoner of war since December 19th, 1944, when our division was cut to ribbons by Hitler's last desperate thrust through Luxemburg and Belgium. Seven Fanatical Panzer Divisions hit us and cut us off from the rest of Hodges' First Army. The other American Divisions on our flanks managed to pull out: We were obliged to stay and fight. Bayonets aren't much good against tanks: Our ammunition, food and medical supplies gave out and our casualties out-numbered those who could still fight - so we gave up. The 106th got a Presidential Citation and some British Decoration from Montgomery for it, I'm told, but I'll be damned if it was worth it. I was one of the few who weren't wounded. For that much thank God.

Well, the supermen marched us, without food, water or sleep to Limberg, a distance of about sixty miles, I think, where we were loaded and locked up, sixty men to each small, unventilated, unheated box car. There were no sanitary accommodations -- the floors were covered with fresh cow dung. There wasn't room for all of us to lie down. Half slept while the other half stood. We spent several days, including Christmas, on that Limberg siding. On Christmas eve the Royal Air Force bombed and strafed our unmarked train. They killed about one-hundred-and-fifty of us. We got a little water Christmas Day and moved slowly across Germany to a large P.O.W. Camp in Muhlburg, South of Berlin. We were released from the box cars on New Year's Day. The Germans herded us through scalding delousing showers. Many men died from shock in the showers after ten days of starvation, thirst and exposure. But I didn't.

Under the Geneva Convention, Officers and Non-commissioned Officers are not obliged to work when taken prisoner. I am, as you know, a Private. One-hundred-and-fifty such minor beings were shipped to a Dresden work camp on January 10th. I was their leader by virtue of the little German I spoke. It was our misfortune to have sadistic and fanatical guards. We were refused medical attention and clothing: We were given long hours at extremely hard labor. Our food ration was two-hundred-and-fifty grams of black bread and one pint of unseasoned potato soup each day. After desperately trying to improve our situation for two months and having been met with bland smiles I told the guards just what I was going to do to them when the Russians came. They beat me up a little. I was fired as group leader. Beatings were very small time: -- one boy starved to death and the S3 Troops shot two for stealing food.

On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden -- possibly the world's most beautiful city. But not me.

After that we were put to work carrying corpses from Air-Raid shelters; women, children, old men; dead from concussion, fire or suffocation. Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as we carried bodies to huge funeral pyres in the city.

When General Patton took Leipzig we were evacuated on foot to ('the Saxony-Czechoslovakian border'?). There we remained until the war ended. Our guards deserted us. On that happy day the Russians were intent on mopping up isolated outlaw resistance in our sector. Their planes (P-39's) strafed and bombed us, killing fourteen, but not me.

Eight of us stole a team and wagon. We traveled and looted our way through Sudetenland and Saxony for eight days, living like kings. The Russians are crazy about Americans. The Russians picked us up in Dresden. We rode from there to the American lines at Halle in Lend-Lease Ford trucks. We've since been flown to Le Havre.

I'm writing from a Red Cross Club in the Le Havre P.O.W. Repatriation Camp. I'm being wonderfully well feed and entertained. The state-bound ships are jammed, naturally, so I'll have to be patient. I hope to be home in a month. Once home I'll be given twenty-one days recuperation at Atterbury, about $600 back pay and -- get this -- sixty (60) days furlough.

I've too damned much to say, the rest will have to wait, I can't receive mail here so don't write.

May 29, 1945

Love,

Kurt - Jr.

J-ZONE’S GUILTY PLEASURES: GREAT “BAD” RAPPERS

2009-11-17T14:09:22Z

Don’t tell me shit about his skill level, Tim Dog made one of the Top 5 rap albums of all time.

Dante, DJ Emz and myself got into a little debate a few weeks back about who would be the best fit for this accolade. Think about it…rappers that are so bad, they‘re actually pretty damn good overall. Me being the poster child for unpopular opinion, I always felt that the downfall in the quality of rap music in recent years isn’t as much due to banal lyrics as it is to the fact that so many artists don’t have a coochie hair of personality. To be honest, I’d rather hear a hilarious/unique artist with a questionable amount of skill than another lyrical lyricist spit 413 ill bars about "swag", sellin coke or a food name for some clothing that I’m too old to understand -i.e ‘yo fam I got them Rocky Road and sweet potato Nike dunks on son!’- over whatever Jay-Z instrumental is popular at the time. Or somebody using Kraft Macaroni & Cheese as a metaphor for the United States’ foreign policy in some enigmatic attempt to be clever or lyrical. Fuckouttahere. And if/when the said lyrical lyricist decides to drop an album the week after his 717th mixtape hits the streets, the subject matter never extends outside of the same Smack DVD hood/lyrical boasts he had on mixtapes 1-717. The freestyles over the Just Blaze instrumentals that anybody can sound good on got everyone excited, but the beats on the album will inherently suck, which will then be defended with an “I’m all about the lyrics” retort. After a few promo shows at the Remote Lounge NYC and an article in XXL, the said rapper will then fade into “bolivion” (sic, Mike Tyson tribute). How many hip-hop quotable rappers have fallen by the wayside because they chose to use the same confrontational tone they battled people in to rap about some Illuminati symbol on a dollar bill or their newly adopted vegan lifestyle? Only Willie D can get away with that shit. Or better yet, how many thought because they were such amazing lyricists that their beat selection was merely an afterthought? Oops.

I don’t give a fuck what anybody says, the thing that’s missing in rap today is really entertaining “bad rappers”. Dudes with laughable lyrics and styles that you knew they were dead ass serious about when they hit the studio, but somehow the recording engineer held back a bout of broken blood vessel laughter. Guys that you accused of ruining good beats, but in reality there’s nobody else that could’ve done a better job on them. Don’t get it twisted, bad rappers are in no short supply in 2009, hell fuckin no. But most of them just aren’t funny or entertaining. It’s not just about being a good MC, but making an album whose CD issue transcends drink coaster usage and whose MP3s avoid getting dragged into the recycle bin for a change. To voice unpopular opinion once again, I’ve always felt a sub-par rapper that can make enjoyable albums and songs holds more weight than another dime a dozen cypher destroyer/battle rapper/mixtape legend "lyricist" that can’t put together a cohesive piece of music that you can listen to more than once. People in New York always clowned Too $hort for being non-lyrical, but when one of these lyrical wizards has 18 albums in their catalog or makes a song as enjoyable as "Paula & Janet" or "Blowjob Betty" , somebody send me a God damn e-mail. Don’t get me wrong though, when a dude had exceptional skill and still managed to make a cohesive album (Chuck D, Ice Cube, LL, Kool G Rap, Big Daddy Kane, Scarface, Suga Free), it was a double bonus. After talking to a few other avid rap fans I respect, I broke down my four personal favorite “bad” rappers of all time.

MALACHI THE NUTCRACKER (from GROUP HOME)

This will inherently be the one I catch the most heat over, but I’m not surprised. Hip-hop has no sense of humor, and when people couldn’t see the genius of Malachi The Nutcracker, I knew we were in trouble. I used to hear textbook dreck like this from hip-hop purists when the Group Home album came out 14 years ago, and still do today…

“DJ Premier wasted the greatest beats he ever made on the Group Home album. Lil Dap is cool, but Malachi is atrocious, Premier should’ve given those beats to Biggie or somebody.”

Or something to that effect. Fuckouttahere, that Malachi dude was entertaining. His young teenaged voice, his “see Spot run” simplicity, his threats of random and senseless violence against old people and his nonsensical sociopath rhetoric coagulated to make the perfect spouse for Primo’s gutter jazz thump. Whether it was intentional or not (I seriously doubt it was), Malachi injected humor into a Gangstarr Foundation that albeit great, never produced any funny records. Regardless of how many Malachi detractors pop up when discussing this album -usually in regards to its production brilliance and it being the apex of Primo’s career, but it going in vain because of the rhymes- he was a known tough cookie, so I seriously doubt anybody ever said anything to his face. This guy was flat out entertaining. Lines like these don’t grow on trees…

“I’m outta sight on the mic do what you like/ I beat your moms in the head with a metal pipe” (Was it in the Billiard Room? Did he use Colonel Mustard? Sounds like a Clue confession to me. Mothers are overrated anyway.)

“When I take flight (like who kid?) like Mike!!!!” (Best Jordan reference ever)

“Ya know how I rock, I rock, non stop/ jump on stage, you jump…on my jock!” (It’s just that simple…literally)

However, the prime example of Malachi’s good badness would surely be his verses on “Up Against The Wall”. I don’t even think you can freestyle rhyme gymnastics on this level (he comes in at 1:05)

“You stupid muthafuckaaaa my rhyme is fat!!!!!!!!”

When I said (and still say) that Group Home’s Livin Proof album is better than both Jeru albums, I’m met with accusations of not knowing music. Fuck that, this is the home of unpopular opinions, and I’m letting all that shit ride in here. Malachi didn’t do too much after this album, but wherever he is, he’s got a fan in me. His actual rap skill left a lot to be desired, but he was ahead of his time with the senseless violence and his through the roof passion in the face of his overt simplicity. I know there’s a lot of MC’s who on paper would fit in the same category as Malachi, but they’re just not dope. Maybe it was just how Malachi did it, and style points are very hip-hop. I don’t give a fuck what anybody says, I want a Malachi solo album.

DISCO RICK

Disco Rick was Miami’s misogynist answer to Run from Run-DMC. He yelled with mass amounts of echo, but that’s where the comparisons stop. Disco Rick made his mark rapping about getting dome from everybody from Nancy Reagan to girls he knew named Margaret, Sharon, Karen, Jackie, Tyra, Lana, Dede, Sherry, Mona, Lisa, Laverne, Shana, Keisha, Marie, Laura, Janice, Barbara, Maria and Tina.

Here’s the song in question ("Suck That Dick")

Rick had a softer side though, fellatio wasn‘t always his forte. He also rapped getting stopped by the fuzz in the deep south, trampy looking broads in the flea market that needed to dress with more class and why mothers who abandoned their kids in trash cans deserved a thrashing. The latter concept (on a song appropriately titled “Babies In The Trash Cans”) found Rick actually on the way to providing a serious and viable concept song on an album full of misogyny, but about 55 seconds in, the line “we got to educate the hoes” just foiled the plan. Rick’s skill level being applied to a concept like that is the moment of good badness that actually makes him more enjoyable to listen to than anybody I’ve heard in recent memory…

TIM DOG

Tim Dog was widely recognized as being in the doldrums when it comes to rap skill in the early 90‘s. But that fact makes him even more incredible to me, because his first album (Penicillin On Wax) is only topped by Ice Cube’s Amerikkka’s Most Wanted and Public Enemy’s Fear Of A Black Planet as the greatest rap album of all time in my opinion (I can hear myself getting roasted in cyberspace for this one). I always felt that Tim’s full album performance on Penicillin On Wax is the most entertaining by any rapper in the history of hip-hop. It’s insane to think that a guy who rhymes “(Why you dissin Eazy) cause the boy ain’t shit/ chew him with tobacco and spit him in shit” on his album is a God damn genius. But when it comes to pure entertainment, it didn’t get any better than Tim Dog in 1991. I can actually go out on a limb and say that if he actually had superior rap skill, the album wouldn’t have been nearly as enjoyable. With the album artwork depicting Tim Dog in very early 90’s NYC ’hide your Starter jacket’ mode and the inner sleeve showing a posse photo with some very angry and big bat wielding gentlemen with ski masks on, the image is not one of lyrical dexterity, but brute force.

Tim is actually at his best (and funniest) when he’s really attempting to be on a Kool Keith/ Big Daddy Kane hybrid level of lyricism.

“So whether ya think that I’m just a myth/to riff/the gift/the if/the fifth/the shift/the spliff is in control I hold a bowl/and make an ache and take a fake/ WHEEEEEWWW, and I’m still too great…Fuck Compton!”

Huh? Wow. It gets even better when Tim uses his imagination to go hardcore.

“Imma step to a wack MC/and if he try to get beef with me/ I’mma wax his ass, I’mma tax his ass, I’mma fax his ass and cold lax his ass”

You get the message that Tim is pissed off and the said ass is in trouble, but I always wondered how you can fax somebody’s ass. I guess the wack MC was a label mate, because he could just meet the dude in the label office, beat him down and put him on a fax machine and press send. But how he’d lax his ass, I don’t wanna know, as I’m assuming lax means laxative, or diarrhea. This album is probably the funniest hip-hop album ever made, but I think Tim Dog did it with a straight face, which makes it even funnier. Then there was the prime example of Tim‘s good badness, “Dog’s Gonna Getcha”. It’s essentially a three minute foray into threats, screams, grunts and non-lyricism, but it sounds better than most of The Source’s picks for hip hop quotable in the last 15 years. Here’s the whole song, a simple quote can’t do it justice…

The song is so lyrically bad (meaning bad) that I actually have it in my personal top 20 greatest rap songs of all time, and I’m not even bullshitting. I’m as serious as cancer, that song is God damn unbelievable, just not lyrically skilled…if you know where I’m coming from. Example: KRS-One’s “MC’s Act Like They Don’t Know” was OK, it was lyrically skilled, but it was nowhere near as good as “Dogs Gonna Getcha” when it comes to listening pleasure, not even fuckin close. Tim does actually have some decent rhymes on the album, but the majority is that rare display of unskilled hardness and humor that you just don’t see anymore. He may not have had much rap skill, but Tim Dog is more entertaining than one of those dudes who got a major label deal when skills were kinda-sorta in style that couldn’t produce an enjoyable album. Every rap fan should at least have a burn of Penicillin On Wax, it’s a five star hip-hop classic in the true sense of the word.

PROJECT PAT

When it comes to bouncing ball phonetics and Speak n Spell southern drawl, nobody is coming close to Pat. Every word is seemingly broken into syllables and sounds, and the actual rhymes are mind-blowingly countrified. But what really puts Pat over the top is the fact that he not only admits, but brags about feasting on the hog. Pork is high in saturated fat and cholesterol, but putting Pat up on the health benefits of Quinoa is useless…

“Buyin you/ taco bell/ but a pimp/ eatin steak/ corn bread, collard greens, chitaleeeeeens (chitterlings) on my plate.”

Or when he explains to a girl why his gas tank is empty, he has a worthy excuse.

“That’s just the meter broke/ u dontknawcha talkin bout/ anyway them new Jordan’s finna come out.”

Its safe to say that Pat isn’t the Pharoahe Monch of Memphis, but the absence of lyrical gymnastics in his style is what makes him as appealing as he is.

The pinnacle of P. Pat’s good badness would be the “Nature Of The Threat” level of depth he displays on “Gorilla Pimp”

"(I’mma call yo mama up), bitch that’s a no no!"

Tim Dog, Malachi The Nutcracker, Project Pat and Disco Rick…You can say what you want about their skill level (or lack thereof), but one thing is for sure. They’ll be remembered more than your latest 893 bar mixtape spitter who made one crap album. They also prove that having skills doesn’t necessarily equate with making great songs and albums, and being a sub par rapper by purist standards doesn’t prevent someone from making incredible music. Fuck all this talk about skills skills and more skills, somebody make a God damn entertaining album for once.

Once again, I’m on the road to being roasted anyway, so either shake your head and fail to see the genius in good/bad MC’s, or list your own personal favorites. Don’t forget, this is the home of unpopular opinion, not a rap message board!

Grant McCracken on Nike

2009-11-17T14:26:29Z

“Frame for frame, ‘Tag’ is probably the most exciting ad ever made. It had the drama of the chase scene in The French Connection. It won the admiration of the industry and a Cannes Lion Grand Prix.” An excerpt from anthropologist-economist Grant McCracken’s new book, Chief Culture Officer, is about ad exec Dan Wieden, who coined the slogan “Just Do It” for Nike in the late ’80s, and directed the “Tag” commercial in 2001. It has something of the last episode of Mad Men to it, the scene when Don Draper is asking Peggy to join him at the new firm and says, “There are people who buy things—like you and me. And then something happened. Something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves is gone. And nobody understands that. But you do. And that’s very valuable.” Or as McCracken puts it: “Max Weber, the German sociologist, believed that as the Western world grew more rational, routinized and commercial, our experience of this world became disenchanted. The personal, the traditional, the sentimental, the human scale, all of these were diminished. ‘Tag’ and its companion trends seemed to offer a restoration. Apparently, even strangers can make the city more playful and less predictable.”

Mainstream Press Waking Up To The News That Musicians Are Making More Money

2009-11-16T18:45:42Z

I believe that we were the first publication to report on the study released by PRS in the UK, way back in July, indicating that overall music revenue was up, even as the sale of recorded music was dropping. It showed how live revenue was making up a good part of the difference, and other aspects of the business were making up more than the rest. While we've pointed to that study numerous times in the meantime, we've been quite surprised that no mainstream press picked up on this seemingly remarkable news -- as it went against the prevailing favored narrative (as pushed by the RIAA) that the music industry was in trouble. Especially when combined with the recent Harvard study by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf, that also showed that revenue in the overall music ecosystem was significantly higher today than in the past, it really was quite amazing that the press (and politicians) continued to spread the lie that the music industry was in some sort of trouble. It's not. It's only the business of selling plastic discs that's in trouble.

The good news is that the mainstream press seems to finally be waking up to this. As a bunch of you sent in, the Times Online in the UK has published a nice study highlighting the PRS numbers, complete with some very nice charts, showing that musicians themselves are making more than ever. The other interesting part: for all the talk about how recorded music sales losses are hurting artists, the chart proves the point we've made over and over again: musicians see such a tiny part of recorded music sales that this has had almost no impact on their revenue at all. The amount of money musicians make from recorded revenue has remained just about constant.
Source: Times Online Labs blog

It's great that the press is finally starting to dig into this -- and the Times Online even admits that perhaps it should not have let Lily Allen claim in its own pages how much "harm" was being done to artists due to file sharing, because the numbers simply don't support it (of course, we pointed this out when the whole Allen mess was going on...).

Now, some people have raised some concerns over the numbers -- specifically, there have been some claims that the "live" numbers are distorted due to so-called "heritage" acts and legacy acts, who have been around forever and still pack large stadiums with increasingly higher ticket prices. And, indeed, that almost certainly has some impact on the numbers. It would be nice to see a similar report that starts to break out some of the details -- and we've been talking to a few people who are trying to dig deeper into the amount of "live" and "alternative" revenue streams to better understand where the money is going. Hopefully we'll have more complete data soon, but the initial things I've seen suggest that the original point remains true. Artists across the entire spectrum of the industry are making more in live revenues than they have in the past -- and, in part, the increase in live revenue is due to file sharing. In talking to different musicians, we've been hearing plenty of stories about how they're strategically pushing free versions of their songs on local audiences before embarking on tours or even individual shows -- and they're seeing larger turnouts than in the past because of it.

Hopefully, with more mainstream publications finally picking up on this, both the press and politicians will begin to recognize that the only real "crisis" in the music industry is for those who have stupidly relied on selling plastic discs for way too long. There are plenty of revenue opportunities for musicians, and because of that (in combination with better and cheaper tools for music creation), the actual music industry is thriving at levels never seen before.

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Don’t Sleep on this 50 Cent vs. WorldStarHipHop.Com Lawsuit

2009-11-16T16:53:03Z

A few months ago, a good friend of mine who runs a very big website pulled me to the side and put me on to how Curtis Jackson p/k/a “50 Cent” filed a lawsuit against the urban hip hop website WorldStarHipHop.com. He even sent me a copy of the papers. When I thanked him for the lead and said I was gonna give him a shout out for said lead, his response: “Fuck no man, keep my name the FUCK away from anything in connection with Fifty, that nigga crazy and I don’t ever want it with him. Fuck around, he’ll be shutting my shit down too!” I never got around to dropping that post.

Last week the lawsuit was announced publicly. The basis for the suit is claiming how WorldStar used all types of 50 Cent and G-Unit related images with no permission, how it purposely misled the public into thinking that WorldStar was in business, or somehow related to 5o and G-Unit. “I gotta lawsuit against WorldStar for utilizing my likeness,” 50 is quoted as saying “A lot of people felt like that was my site because they seen my face on the cover of [the website] for a long time.” Boo Boo is right in that, before this suit, and for years, WorldStar had hella images of the South Side bully and his conglomerate posted up like it was tomorrow’s wall paper. It very much did look affiliated. Looks like an open and shut case to me. This is not what this case is about.

Being an equal opportunity website, WorldStar has, over the years, allowed other rappers with beef against 50 the platform to air out their differences. Cats like Ja Rule have frequented the site, firing shots 50’s way. Being that Jackson is that no nonsense dude who lives by the “any enemy of mine should be an enemy of yours” creed, I’m sure 50 has taken offense against the site that so freely used his unauthorized likeness. Bigger still though, is the fact that over the years, Fifty’s own community website ThisIs50.com has grown to the point that it’s become one of WorldStar’s main competitors. Fifty likes competitors. Actually, he likes competitors for how he gets amped in taking them out, mercilessly burning them to the ground, obliterating them from existing in his path. In my opinion, WorldStar’s only offense is that they’re in the same business and are of the same scope in size to ThisIs50.com. This isn’t about copyright infringement. This is an actual territorial war on the corporate level, and one side won’t be taking any prisoners. Like Beanie Sigel used to say, “Get Down Or Lay Down!”.

I told ya’ll before that 50 Cent was not a rapper. He’s a savage, a mother fucking beast who we’ve fucked up in allowing to amass an empire, a master thug not only on the street level, but on the business level, on the legal level. This whole lawsuit might seem boring to most, not the usual red meat, blood and guts we get to witness when our favorite rappers beef on records, on video. This shit is extremely fascinating to me. Curtis Jackson continues to evolve at an incredible rate, into something beyond a monster. I like 50 for the way he moves, but sometimes dude reminds me of how nations slept on that dude who became a dictator in Germany during them years that led up to World War II. Is this man going to eventually take over the world? Will we mourn the day we didn’t unite to take him out before it was too late, later wishing that there was a time machine in existence that would allow an assassin to go back in time to take care of business before it before it became a problem that got out of hand? I dunno, maybe I’m going too far.

Fifty also said “I have lawyers on retainers and I have to pay them so much money anyway, so we’ll go back and forth to court until [they] can’t afford a Subway sandwich. It’s already too late for [them].” He’s right, WorldStar fucked up, it’s too late for them, they’d best be stocking up on them sandwiches. Game over. We already know Fif won’t stop until the fat chick hits them high notes. It might also be too late for us. Shawn Carter p/k/a “Jay-Z” might actually be an incredibly smart man in how he doesn’t want it with Fif. At this point, I don’t blame him. God save us all.

Beyoncé ft Jay-Z - Crazy In Love. Best of 2003: You all know...

2009-11-16T17:09:26Z

Beyoncé ft Jay-Z - Crazy In Love.

Best of 2003: You all know this one, but I can’t let 2003 go by without mentioning it.

Beyoncé is 21 years old and about to conquer the world, setting aside Destiny’s Child and taking centre stage on her own. Her superstar boyfriend shows up to help her out, but by the time he arrives she’s already stopping traffic and showing us what she can do: for example, her impressive ability to go from confident strut to sitting cross-legged on the floor within a split second at 0.30.

But first, a quick nod to her old life: between 1.06 and 1.40 she’s hanging out as one of the girls, relaxed in a baseball cap, trackie bottoms and messy hair, popping bubblegum in a street alley without a care in the world.

Then presumably on request of his missus, Jay-Z sets fire to his car with a version of Beyoncé inside - the helpless, weak, ordinary Beyoncé of old (who needed a group to support her) is up in flames! Long live the new, fur-clad phoenix Beyoncé! But despite his loving gesture, B barely looks at J and even reprimands him with a flick of her stole. She doesn’t need him either, and even neutralises his actions by kicking open a fire hydrant.

(Btw I’m utterly fascinated by Beyoncé’s and Jay-Z’s relationship - especially the version we see in their collaborations. I’ll collect my thoughts and write more about this at some point.)

By now the transition is complete: between 3.00 and 3.56 Beyoncé is a high-fashion catwalk diva in a harsh industrial setting, fiercely asserting her power and dominance over the other dancers - paler imitations. Even her dance moves are more precise than before - the girl that was wiggling her bum with her mates a few minutes ago is now just a pile of ashes. “I’m not myself… baby I DON’T CARE!” The new Queen B is here to stay, and I’m still in awe of her every time I watch this.

The Template: Diamond District Remix

2009-11-16T14:40:20Z

Shared by Rafi
oddisee on the importance of metrics to making album sales money in 2009

After writing The Template: Planning Your First Album, I’ve been re-thinking it ever since. I’d like to introduce you to Oddisee, the DMV renaissance man, who’s got a system that’s proven to work and gives us some real numbers to work with. Diamond District’s debut album, In the Ruff, is more than just one of the best hip hop albums that’s come out this year. It’s also a perfect case study of how to make everything that’s “wrong” with the industry today work for you.

“If you go about putting out hip hop the old way, you’re going to be destroyed by leaking and bootlegging. If you’re still subscribing to the formula of ’my albums done and I have to give it to press immediately 3 months before, and I have to promote a single on college radio and be underground, and do a tour 3 months before and 3 months after,’ you will be destroyed by downloading.”

Source: Crate Kings

If you dig Audible Hype you should definitely be checking Crate Kings—it’s the best source for news on hip hop production I’ve found. They’re also paying close attention to the business end, and it was this video that first made me realize how ambitious Oddisee was.

The Oddisee Template

“The most recent projects, they kinda came out right at the same time. Diamond District came out on April 14th, which was a group album, Mental Liberation is a compilation album that I produced, which came out May 5th, and then I dropped an EP called Odd Summer on May 29th.

Those three projects are kind of a new formula that I’m experimenting with, of putting out a limited version of those projects for free, gaining the numbers and the statistics from those, and then using those numbers to go to labels and get bigger deals once I re-vamp the record.

Same thing with Diamond District: it was 12 songs, edited, with slightly different cover art. So now that it came out, 12,000 downloads later, rave reviews, all of the legends I look up to bigging us up, tour offers, etcetera...I pitched that album for new distribution, and it’s coming out, again, as a physical version and on iTunes. It will have 14 songs, it will be un-edited, you’ll also be able to get the instrumentals free when you download it, it will be on vinyl...all different types of incentives to purchase something.

I believe in statistics, really. If I can get—by the time it comes out—20,000 people to download it...that means I can get, units sold, 5 to 8 thousand to buy it. Just based off sheer numbers. And that 5 to 8, translates to a “a living.”

The “new distribution” pitch found a home at Mello Music Group, which is run by Michael Tolle, someone I’d like to interview before 2010 rolls around: “We heard In The Ruff and thought ‘this is the best album of year.’ We had to document it in a physical, tangible way. MP3’s are cool, but in the end, we wanted to leave behind a cd, some vinyl – something audiophiles could hold in their hands.”

Mello Music Group pursued the same approach Oddisee does: testing the waters to gather data before the full release. They led off with two early iTunes single releases: I Mean Business on Sept. 15th and Who I Be on Oct. 6th. Both Tuesdays, in case you were wondering. Exactly 2 weeks later, they dropped the full LP on iTunes.

Audible Treats: Digital PR Done Right

Check out how Audible Treats sets up their promotion page for Diamond District. Simple, clean, and it includes everything that a blogger or a journalist (or a potential corporate sponsor) could want.

Writing good Bio copy is not easy, but it’s necessary. Bad writing doesn’t have to happen to you. Check out Greg Rollet’s very useful and powerful exercise, Learn to Describe the Crap Out of Your Music.

In Dubious Battle: Co-creation and the Coming Insurrection

2009-11-16T13:46:16Z

The onset of The Great Recession seemed a moment ripe with revolutionary possibility. But as this moment passed another revolution was just gaining impetus, one which threatens to divorce the very idea of revolution from the dream of emancipation.

The revolution wasn’t supposed to be televised. The idea was that we would all unplug from all the administered culture that stupefied us and transform the world with spontaneous justice and generalized, self-evident righteousness. Youth would lead us away from our square, suburbanized plastic hassle of a life and into the streets to speak truth to power and turn the military-industrial complex on its head. Our voices, buoyed by a sense of emancipation for the first time in humanity’s history clearly in view, would be raised in a deglobalized communal chorus for peace.

But instead of eschewing pop culture to wage political battles, many young people, as it turned out, delved ever deeper into it, convinced that it was their culture and they were, in some obscure way, guiding it. The route to power was not via opposition to the existing power structure but through mastery of the minutiae of art and music scenes. Everyday life would be change by making it cooler.

And as communication technology became more intrusive and expansive, it appeared that the chance to transform society wasn’t nearly as pressing as the opportunities to transform the self. With the spread of reality programming, internet usage, Web 2.0 interactivity, user-created content, social networking and mediated sociality, high-tech tools to manage our identity became widely disseminated, and the self-as-brand took on true economic significance. The revolution would not only be televised; the revolution was that we could all be on television.

The authors of The Coming Insurrection (pdf), a 2007 tract written in French and signed by the Invisible Committee, recognize this as the dissolving of the social into a neutralized, atomistic anomie:

To call this population of strangers in the midst of which we live “society” is such an usurpation that even sociologists dream of renouncing a concept that was, for a century, their bread and butter. Now they prefer the metaphor of a network to describe the connection of cybernetic solitudes, the intermeshing of weak interactions under names like “colleague,” “contact,” “buddy,” “acquaintance,” or “date.” Such networks sometimes condense into a milieu, where nothing is shared but codes, and where nothing is played out except the incessant recomposition of identity.

The very possibility of association and affiliation seem under threat; that we might get together with other people for any reason other than to parade our own identity is undermined by the mediated, technologized situations in which our social interaction occurs. Fetishized individuality, played out as an ongoing broadcast of one’s efforts at self-fashioning, becomes hegemonic. After all, consumerism is finally giving us a chance to be creative. What goods can’t we customize or find off-label uses for to better express who we really are?

Though The Coming Insurrection was composed before the 2008 global financial crisis, it seems well-suited to the soul searching that ensued after investment banking as we knew it collapsed and stock markets fell precipitously. Earnest questioning could be heard in all quarters, in the staid pages of the establishment financial press as well as in leftist blogs and anarchist manifestos, as to whether the capitalist system was broken, whether the state needed to direct investment decisions for the economy in the name of “stability,” whether humans really are rational market actors or inescapably befuddled by the concept of risk, whether we can escape from debilitating investment bubbles, whether a new age of post-consumerist frugality had finally settled upon us. It seemed as though what The Coming Insurrection insisted — that “the catastrophe is not coming, it is here,” that “we are already situated within the collapse of a civilization” — was actually the case, and you could even read about it in the Financial Times.

Present tense: crisis and revolutionary revival.

In that atmosphere, one could dare to dream about local, distributed small-scale economies replacing globalized capitalism and multinational corporations. One could foresee bands of urban homesteaders clearing the rubble of the capitalist crisis. That is to say, one could imagine that others might be taking the Invisible Committee’s advice: Form de facto communes, stay out of exclusionary milieus. Work out barter deals outside the open economy. Learn how to make things again. Seek an internal exile, an invisibility. Maybe ordinary people, people who didn’t read social theory or even the newspaper, were about to follow it by instinct.

The impossible quest for that ersatz authenticity is wearing us down. In the absence of sustaining, reciprocal, non-schematized relations with others, however, the self, as the Invisible Committee asserts, begins to break down: “The more I want to be me, the more I feel an emptiness. The more I express myself, the more I am drained. The more I run after myself, the more tired I get.” Even though consumerism reifies and exalts individuality, it is ultimately self-annihilating. Rather than losing ourselves in the flow of socially meaningful and useful activity, we are congealed in the aspic of our stultifying self-consciousness, replaying strategies of competitive selfhood, disguising ploys for attention as disinterested solicitude. The ceaseless cynicism is corrosive. But these are the social relations that consumerism requires:

The weak, depressed, self-critical, virtual self is essentially that endlessly adaptable subject required by the ceaseless innovation of production, the accelerated obsolescence of technologies, the constant overturning of social norms, and generalized flexibility. It is at the same time the most voracious consumer and, paradoxically, the most productive self, the one that will most eagerly and energetically throw itself into the slightest project, only to return later to its original larval state.

The productiveness of the consuming self, though, is not especially paradoxical. It’s an expression of the cutting edge of capitalist management technique, as Detlev Zwick, Samuel Bonsu and Aron Darmody point out in “Putting Consumers to Work: ‘Co-creation’ and New Marketing Govern-mentality” (abstract). They argue that corporations have encouraged the often innovative work that consumers — obnoxiously renamed “prosumers” in some marketing literature — perform in making brands meaningful and commoditized goods useful to individuated customers. Moreover, they have figured out ways to seize and exploit it. Once it was sufficient for corporations to secure growth by squeezing out more productivity from the production process — driving wage laborers harder, dividing labor more thoroughly into microgestures, and rendering assembly-line-like procedures more mind-numbingly efficient.

We see a co-creation economy as driven by the need of capital to set up processes that enable the liberation and capture of large repositories of technical, social, and cultural competence in places previously considered outside the production of monetary value.

This requires “experimenting with new possibilities for value creation that are based on the expropriation of free cultural, technological, social, and affective labor of the consumer masses.” We who perform this “free” labor hardly understand it as work, since its ultimate product from our point of view is our own identity.

Free labor wasn’t invented with the internet, of course. In his analysis of David Harvey’s Limits to Capital (pdf), Bob Jessop cites Harvey’s recognition that

the crucial commodity for the production of surplus value, labour power, is itself produced and reproduced under social relations over which capitalists have no direct control.… though labour power is a commodity, the labourer is not.

Raising the next generation requires more than wages; it requires parental care, emotional education, traditional rites of passage, the proverbial village. Capitalists can’t control this realm of production and “value creation” directly, but as with co-creation, they are able to use social leverage to exploit it. Jessop notes that

the wage, the bundle of commodities that it can buy, and the role of non-commodified goods and services (as provided, for example, through domestic labour and/or collective consumption) are determined in the first instance through a combination of class struggle and the interest of certain capitals in expanding the market for consumption goods (cf. Grundrisse: 409, cited by Harvey 1982: 49).

Working-class families need not be paid a subsistence wage, because some of the cost of “reproducing labor power” is borne voluntarily by parents, friends, extended family, and so on. And competition among capitalists leads some sectors to seek to profit at other sectors’ expense, offering proletarians occasional bargains. But the other side of this is that much of the value extracted by capitalist firms may have its ultimate origin in the private sphere, outside of the factory and in the domestic care and productive kindness of familial human relations. We raise children through all sorts of uncompensated labor, and we sustain friendships and meaningful relationships through similar work. We work on friendship-building projects that have the side effect of yielding commoditizable goods and services.

Capitalism finds ways to extract the productivity of sharing, caring and collaboration by alienating it from the relations in which it is situated, and by driving us to live in conditions that either deny opportunities for such caring and sharing or make them more readily exploitable. This is a chief function of social networks. (Borrowing heavily from Tiziana Terranova, I described this phenomenon at length here.)

Radical gesture: the information age's dehiscence of signs.

But consumerism represents a streamlining of this extracurricular production — under the guise of convenience, it strips away the unpredictability and uncertainty of organic friendships (Other people? Who needs them for anything but an audience?) and assures by means of the fashion cycle that self-fashioning work goes on routinely. The discontent generated by the treadmill of consumerist self-production is channeled back into the process to fortify it:

Marketing’s desire to produce cultural conditions that allow for more subtle ways to insert brands and products deeply into the fabric of consumer lifeworlds has resulted in a style of marketing practice that now aims at completely drawing consumers into the production and, more importantly, innovation process itself. This practice, rather fortuitously, invites those consumers into the fold that tend to mount the most stubborn resistance to corporate power, including political and counter-cultural activists, as well as open-source innovators.

Unfortunately for radical revolution, political and counter-cultural activists open-source innovators were most likely the sort of people the Invisible Committee were expecting to mount the insurrection, to seize upon the general atmosphere of crisis to reconstitute life on a different footing. But the Committee fail to grasp that entertainment and labor have been merged: “Gains in productivity, outsourcing, mechanization, automated and digital production have so progressed that they have almost reduced to zero the quantity of living labor necessary in the manufacture of any product,” they claim. “We are living the paradox of a society of workers without work, where entertainment, consumption and leisure only underscore the lack from which they are supposed to distract us.” This is not all that paradoxical either. The “living labor” is no longer bound up in the goods as in their meaning, as in the process that animates their circulation. And that labor manifests as entertainment or self-fashioning — the authors point out that “producing oneself is becoming the dominant occupation of a society where production no longer has an object” and argue that “it now becomes possible to sell oneself rather than one’s labor power, to be remunerated not for what one does but for what one is, for our exquisite mastery of social codes, for our relational talents, for our smile and our way of presenting ourselves.” The crucial difference is that this effort is paid for not in wages but in attention.

This identity-building project has the extra benefit for capital of producing a self that is always already alienated — “we participate in our own exploitation, and all participation is exploited,” the authors note — so there remains no “I” that can recognize what has gone wrong. In the identity-formation process, consumerist capitalism hijacks our will to be autonomous, rooting it in same procedures that generates its codes. We make ourselves in the same way we breathe life into brands through “co-creation.” We are ourselves co-created.

This is why any social movement that promises us chances for a more creative life is now doomed — that revolution has come and been co-opted. The goal of boundless self-expression plays into the hands of the consumerist powers that be, which seductively amplifies the quest for recognition into individualistic self-aggrandizement. The revolution, should it come, must dissolve subjectivity into a process that refuses to become conscious of itself, that fixes its energy on a larger goal, a collective identity, or a multiplicity of possible selves. But the idea is so nebulous, so unsupported by our material conditions, that it is difficult to articulate — it’s nearly impossible to think from inside of it.

Posted in consumerism Tagged: consumerism, economic crisis, Rob Horning, theory

In Dubious Battle: Co-creation and the Coming Insurrection « Generation Bubble

2009-11-16T14:22:27Z

Julia Beverly and the Art of Scamming Rappers

2009-11-09T14:54:54Z

The music industry is known to be a cutthroat business where shady characters are always attempting to cash in on the dreams of aspiring artists. There have been stories of artist exploitation that date back almost as far as the business itself. From bad contracts to fake show promoters, the industry is full of scams. Given the current climate of the business, it is no surprise that maintaining integrity is low on the priority list for some in the music industry and many are resorting to some pretty deceitful tactics in order to make a buck.

My colleague George forwarded me a copy of an email exchange that took place between him and Julia Beverly, who heads Ozone Magazine, a popular hip-hop publication that primarily focuses on artists from the South and West Coast. George was responding to a Twitter post Beverly had made stating that she was acting as the middle-man for any artist looking to feature a verse from Louisiana rapper Lil Boosie on one of their records.

This news struck me as odd because I know Lil Boosie to be an artist on the roster of Asylum Records, as I worked promotion for one of his albums a few years back when I interned at the label. The rapper was recently sentenced to a 2 year prison term for a drug possession charge, so I figured the label may be liquidating his material in order to cash in before he begins his term.

As I read the initial email exchange, I was astounded by the scandalous nature of the transaction Beverly was attempting to broker.

From: George

Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2009 19:18:19 -0500

To: <jb@agencytwelve.com>

Subject: Boosie verse

Hello,

I saw on Julia Beverley’s twitter that Boosie has verses for sale. I’d like to know what the prices are.

Thank you
George

This was her response:

On Sun, Nov 1, 2009 at 9:28 PM, <jb@agencytwelve.com> wrote:

He’s looking for around $7k+ cash. This week only. He has several prerecorded verses already done. Price does not include label clearance.

This would actually appear to be a pretty good deal for an upcoming artist, given that Lil Boosie has a pretty descent sales record and a loyal following throughout Louisiana and some other Southern markets. The real problem is that she overtly revealed that this price does not include label clearance, meaning she was attempting to sell verses that could be used on a track, but ran the risk of being shut down at any time by the label if they were to catch wind of the existence of these records.

The exchange continued:

From: George

Sent: Tuesday, November 03, 2009 3:08 PM

To: Julia Beverly

Subject: Re: Boosie verse

I have the cash ready to go. What’s going to be involved in getting label clearance? I plan on pushing the track to radio.

–

From: “Julia Beverly” <jb@agencytwelve.com>

Date: Tue, 3 Nov 2009 15:41:11 -0500

To: George

Subject: RE: Boosie verse

You would probably have to pay the label another $5-7k to get it cleared. Honestly, the clearance isn’t generally a major issue unless the song blows up and/or you get a deal with a major label.. so if that happens, it’ll be a good problem to have.

At this point, I became curious as to what exactly was going on here. I could not believe that someone of Beverly’s standing in the industry was attempting to dupe someone with such little remorse. I began to throw some suggestions to my colleague and attempt to clarify the clearance issue, as I thought this was being treated somewhat lightly.

From: George

Date: Tue, 3 Nov 2009 22:10:27 -0500

To: Julia Beverly<jb@agencytwelve.com>

Subject: Re: Boosie verse

Cool i’m worried about the label clearance and i’m going to try and find a link to [Asylum Records Executive] to see what he says it’s gonna cost me.

–

On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 10:11 PM, <jb@agencytwelve.com> wrote:

It would go thru trill not [Asylum Records Executive]. With label clearance its gonna be like $15k.

–

From: George

Sent: Tuesday, November 03, 2009 10:24 PM

To: jb@agencytwelve.com

Subject: Re: Boosie verse

Would i need to wire you the 15K and you will handle the clearance and can i expect some love from Ozone when the record drops?

–

From: Julia Beverly <jb@agencytwelve.com>
Date: Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 10:27 PM
Subject: RE: Boosie verse
To: George

Yes, we would send you an invoice and take care of getting the paperwork signed. It can sometimes take several weeks to get the paperwork but we can get the verse done right away. This is going through my booking agency, Agency Twelve, so technically it doesn’t have anything to do with Ozone, but we could probably at least post the record on the Ozonemag.com site when it’s done.

This was definitely an interesting turn of events. What started off as a $7K deal with no label clearance involved had become an easy deal to broker for $15K that would include the proper paperwork to make the record legal. How did that happen so quickly? I told him to get some clarification.

From: George

Sent: Tuesday, November 03, 2009 10:43 PM

To: Julia Beverly
Subject: Re: Boosie verse

I’m a little confused. Do i pay you once the paperwork is completed? Otherwise how can I be certain I have a legal clearance?

–

From: Julia Beverly <jb@agencytwelve.com>
Date: Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 11:21 PM
Subject: RE: Boosie verse
To: George

We will have a contract/invoice in place to make sure that your funds are safe. I am waiting for the label to confirm the price with clearance.

Wait a minute. An hour ago she was ready to take $15K and was assuring a full clearance. Now she was waiting for the label to confirm the price? I would hope most would walk away from the deal long before this, but clearly this was too interesting to not continue pushing. I actually believed she had to know that George was not serious at this point, as it took almost an entire day before she responded with the “confirmation” he was waiting for.

On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 7:38 PM, Julia Beverly <jb@agencytwelve.com> wrote:

Please do NOT forward this link, here are the verses that are available for $7-8k. Just spoke to the label and they said that clearance would NOT be an option at this point.

The message included a link with the 8 verses she was trying to sell available to download. All were tagged with a voiceover shouting “Bad Ass Entertainment” over top, which is a common precaution used mostly for records delivered to DJs that labels do not want leaked.

What confused me about this message was the fact that she was boldly stating that the label would not clear the record under any circumstances. Knowing this information and having addressed George’s previous concerns, you would think the deal would be dead at this point. My guess is that she believed by dangling the verses in front of George, he would forget his previous inhibitions about making this deal and decide to move forward under her original guidance by not worrying about clearing the record with the label.

George continued to play ball with her, but made sure to reiterate his concerns about making this a legal record. I told him to express his desire to make this happen and to even give some information on his own budget, as I knew this would give her an idea of what he was working with.

From: George

Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2009 8:50 PM

To: Julia Beverly

Subject: Re: Boosie verse

I really love two of the verses actually love them but i’m putting 30K into radio promotion but i’m worried that my record will get shut down. So if the label can’t clear it i’m going to have to find another artist.

–

From: Julia Beverly <jb@agencytwelve.com>
Date: Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 12:27 AM
Subject: RE: Boosie verse
To: George

They’re going to get me a definite price on the clearance tomorrow. What’s the most you’re willing to pay total, including label clearance? And which two verses did you like..

In case you’re having trouble following this. We started with a verse that was going to cost $7K with no label clearance. Then she was able to provide a full clearance for $15K. But then after speaking with the label, no clearance was going to be available under any circumstances. Now, after mentioning that he had $30K for radio promotion, the option to get this record cleared was back on the table, but Beverly was intent on finding out how much she could shake him down for.

I figured there was no need to take this any further and advised George to shut it down. Needless to say, Beverly was not happy about the idea that he did not believe this to be a smart business move.

From: George

Date: Thu, 5 Nov 2009 09:49:54 -0500

To: Julia Beverly<jb@agencytwelve.com>

Subject: Re: Boosie verse

You already told me that the label wasn’t going to clear it and this seems to be an illegitimate transaction. Now you’re asking me how much i’m willing to pay. I’m going to step away from this and go with another artist. Thank you

She quickly followed up. Twice.

From: jb@agencytwelve.com

Date: Thu, 5 Nov 2009 16:19:15 +0000

To: George

Subject: Re: Boosie verse

Lol.. I do this all the time and even sent you the audio. I asked you to call me if it makes you more comfortable and I never heard from you. You don’t seem to understand how clearances work, but okay.

–

From: jb@agencytwelve.com

Date: Thu, 5 Nov 2009 16:29:56 +0000

To: George

Subject: Re: Boosie verse

As far as the label, I’m only relaying what they’re telling me. You should research who you’re speaking to before you start throwing around words like “illegitimate” and basically accusing me of trying to scam you. Kind of disrespectful.

This is where the conversation ended. It’s funny that Beverly took offense to the idea that this transaction appeared to be a little fishy after flip-flopping on the clearance issue numerous times during the exchange. Additionally, she never asked him to call to discuss the deal and even if she had; how would that make this deal any more legitimate? The scary part is she claims to “do this all the time.”

Most people in the hip-hop industry who have ever worked with an independent artist know that promoting that artist properly is a high-stakes business. In order to gain radio airplay without major label backing requires independent artists to seek out and pay people that specialize in getting records on the radio. This will generally require an initial investment of at least $20K in order to see results. In this case, George has indicated he may be willing to drop $37K on a single record and with no remorse Beverly claims he won’t face any problems unless the song “blows up.”

Even more troublesome is the fact that she has no certainty of the actual cost to clear the record with the label and danced around the issue of clearance in an attempt to milk as much money from George as he was able to spend. The truth of the matter is she can’t quote a price because she’s setting up a deal with no boundaries. If George were to attempt to clear the record with the label prior to pushing it to radio, he’s at the mercy of the label and the chance would exist that they could flat out deny the clearance altogether causing him to waste $7K for the verse. His other option would be to take Beverly’s advice and go ahead with radio promotion without a clearance, at which point the label is free to step in at any time and demand an exorbitant fee for a clearance or threaten to send cease & desist letters to any radio station playing the record. Either way, George loses a lot more money than he intended to spend.

This is what has become of a once prosperous industry. Beverly has used her magazine to establish trust with aspiring artists only to turn around and abuse her position of power for her own personal gain. By offering these fly-by-night verses without clearances, she is selling false hope to the aspiring artists that loyally support her magazine each month. Rather than focusing on ways to improve the editorial content of her magazine, Beverly has decided to sink to the level of a two-bit scam artist under the impression that any allegations of shady business practices one could make will quickly be squashed through her control of her publication.

In this case, Beverly is not the only one to blame, as she is clearly in collusion with Lil Boosie in this endeavor. It’s impossible to tell who all stands to benefit from these crooked deals, but it is certainly not the aspiring artist who is just looking for an opportunity to further their career.

When discussing what transpired with Beverly with another colleague who works in the music industry he brought up the point; what if Boosie really needs that money? My response to him was that Boosie needs to have a bake sale. There is no excuse that makes it acceptable to prey off of the innocent people that support you and are just looking for the same opportunity you were given. Once you sign a record deal, you are bound by the clauses of that deal, and if you’re not confident you’re going to be able to support yourself through the earnings you make by signing that contract, then don’t sign it.

This is just one example of the many pitfalls an independent artist may encounter when trying to improve their career. It should serve as a warning that artists must be careful who they are doing business with, especially during these turbulent times in the industry, as it is clear that even those with established reputations in the industry are not above pouncing on an opportunity to take an artist’s hard-earned cash. It is always a wise decision to align yourself with knowledgeable people who can instruct you on the best moves to improve your career. A good manager or entertainment attorney will help protect you from falling victim to these types of scams and are definitely worth the cost especially when they can help you avoid wasting money by engaging in illegitimate business deals.

It is sad to see someone like Beverly, who I once respected for her ability to keep Ozone Magazine thriving during turbulent times for both the music industry and print publications, engaging in this sort of unscrupulous behavior. I still remain confident that better days are ahead for the music industry, but tough times is no excuse for abandoning integrity.

Why the mainstream media is dying

2009-11-08T14:56:00Z

Every once in a while you get to see a mainstream outlet cover a story right alongside a blog, so you can put them up against each other and see why one was so much better than the other. This week TechCrunch and the New York Times (photo) provided just such a lesson.

The issue was a company called Zynga, which makes online games, like FarmVille, that have become incredibly popular on Facebook among people who are missing parts of their brains. On Oct. 31 TechCrunch broke a big story called "Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem of Hell" about how Zynga was making money by selling scam ads -- the kind that trick kids and other frigtards into signing up for useless subscriptions to stuff they don't want.

Arrington packaged his story with a video of himself taking on Anu Shukla, CEO of one of the scam-ad distributors, at a conference. He also ran an "insider's confession" piece by a former scammer explaining how these guys operate. He followed with a story about how Zynga CEO Mark Pincus had acknowledged the problem and said Zynga would stop running those ads, and another story about how Anu Shukla had been pushed out of her company, and another story about Shukla's replacement admitting that the company had, indeed, been running scammy ads. On Friday Arrington capped it off with a coup: he dug up a video clip from earlier this year in which Pincus, the CEO of Zynga, told a laughing audience of scumbag developers about all the scumbaggy things he had done to generate revenue with his games.

After all this, we woke up Saturday to find a story in the New York Times, also about Zynga (and other Facebook game companies) with the headline, "Virtual Goods Start Bringing Real Paydays." The Times put two reporters on the knob-polisher, and somehow they managed to interview Pincus, and to quote him -- and yet they included not a single word about the scammy ads. Not. A. Fucking. Word. The piece could not have been nicer if it had been written by Zynga's PR people themselves. Gist: Virtual goods, stupid idea, people play, some spend money, VCs love it, isn't this great.

Ahem.

So: they walked into this shit-storm and somehow, by some miracle, managed not to notice the fecal matter flying all around them. It's like covering a football game that took place in the middle of the blizzard and neglecting to mention the weather.

Now, maybe they did all the reporting before Arrington's stuff broke. In which case they should have gone back and updated their info. Or maybe, just maybe, Zynga's PR people teed up a Times story as a kind of rebuttal to what Arrington was reporting. Either way, that's what ended up happening: Zynga used the Times to deflect the bad shit flying at them from Arrington. They need good press because they're hoping to cash out by going public next year. That story in the Times will be worth millions. Many millions.

Meanwhile, Arrington, still digging, blasted again on Saturday night, reporting that sleazy ads had popped up again on Zynga, despite promises that they would be taken down.

Um, New York Times? If you guys are still wondering why people are dropping their subscriptions and getting their news from blogs instead of you -- this is why.

And to all those people who go around wringing their hands and saying what are we going to do when the "real newspapers" all die and we have to get our news from Gawker and HuffPo and TechCrunch? Friends, I think we're going to be just fine.

Part of it is the form of the media itself. If you're a reporter at the Times, you get one story, and a fixed number of inches, and you're smothered by layers of editors. At TechCrunch it's one guy who can get his teeth into something and there's no limit on how many articles he can do.

What really cracks me up is how often I still hear people say that bloggers are mere "aggregators" and the "real journalism" gets done at places like the Times.

Because time after time, blogs are simply beating the shit out of the newspapers. They're the ones who still dare to go for the throat, while their counterparts at big newspapers just keep reaching for the shrimp cocktail.

As for the newspapers: Faced with their own demise, fearful of losing even more advertising, newspapers have made the huge mistake of becoming ever more timid, more cautious, more in bed with the companies they cover.

It's the exact opposite of what they should be doing. The truth is, if newspapers want to survive they should go back to doing what they started out doing -- muckraking, stirring the shit, calling bullshit.

The other truth is, when these papers are dead, they will not be missed.

Paul F. Tompkins debates comedy ethics with Improv Everywhere's Charlie Todd

2009-11-14T09:19:33Z

great discussion, and it's hard not to see where both are coming from [via]

on nirvana, the 1990s, irony, and how david foster wallace predicted rivers cuomo's decline, all at great length

2009-11-12T22:18:00Z

As a kid, in the early 90s, I didn’t listen to a ton of Nirvana — already too caught up in mopey, romantic British stuff, your Smiths and Cures and whatnot. Soon enough Cobain was gone and alt-rock had shot off in new directions anyway; the band felt more like background and bedrock, the starting gun for “alternative” as a newly commercial thing — settled news among fresh battles. This is probably why I haven’t been able to resist picking through this new Live at Reading release: it’s honestly one of the first times I’ve listened closely to Nirvana in hindsight, with adult ears and new perspective. (That, after all, is the whole utility of these packages, these attempts to milk new product out of acts that don’t exist any more — we get to re-hear the music, outside our frozen reactions to recordings we already know too well.)

The things that keep grabbing me, of course, are all the reflections of that time itself, all the stuff that leaps out as of-the-moment. I’d never noticed, for instance, that the interlude in “Drain You” is basically a Sonic Youth tribute, right down to the way Cobain rakes over his guitar’s strings on the far side of the bridge — one of those Ranaldo/Moore signature Jaguar/Jazzmaster tricks.

And then there’s just a little thing at the beginning of “Sliver” that seems to have volumes wrapped up in it. Listening to a different live version, it seems like Cobain’s usual trick was to push through the first half of this song in his lower register — the one that sounds human — and then shoot up, like a key change, into that high windy scream he’s known for. (Note that this was exactly how Cobain’s contemporary Evan Dando — a guy he allegedly died thinking had an affair with his wife — sang three quarters of everything he wrote.) But at the beginning of this run through the song, his difficult lower voice swings off the notes, and he laughs into the mic over it, and then sings the next line — “kicked and screamed, said please, don’t go” — in a different way. An interesting way. Part of it is just acting out the fit the lyrics describe, drifting into this clipped, bratty bleat, kicking and screaming.

But part of it is also a form of looseness or casualness or self-mockery — fucking up the tune of the previous line and then shrugging and plowing onward in an ironic who-cares yelp. In other words: it reminds me of Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus. A lot. And he continues it throughout the song, swinging heedlessly in each line from the higher register to the lower one, with that same early-90s attitude we tend to associate with Malkmus: that thrillingly shruggy who-cares deflation of rock singing. Who knows: maybe his voice was strained, maybe he just needed a drink of water, couldn’t stretch up to the higher notes and had to swerve down to get through it. But the attitude comes off similar — comes off as tied to that moment. You can hear it in just about every aspect of his singing, here and elsewhere: the way he flattens and stretches his vowels in a mocking, bratty way, or the way he’s louder at the ends of syllables than the beginnings, like an annoyed kid. (“Dropme aaaahf at Graaaaaanpa Joes.”)

It’s worth saying again, of course, that this brattiness comes in a song that’s itself about brattiness — about abandonment, yeah, but also about weird 1970s childhood and throwing helpless fits. His parents go out and leave him at his grandparents’ house, where the meat is tough and he stubs his toe and just wants to leave. The chorus mostly just repeats one bratty line: “Grandma, take me home!” If you asked me why Nirvana so often gets held up as the last big legendary thing to happen to rock music, I’d skip right over the stuff about audience and sales or history and accessibility and suggest this: that for a long time they were the most recent popular band to introduce — and act out — an emotional state that was new to the vocabulary of rock. Bratty, helpless, sullen, frustrated, surly, passive-aggressive, and sarcastic. (“If you want, if you need / I don’t even care.”) That melodic, Beatlesque sensibility they’re always commended for, the sing-song thing that supposedly made them accessible: there’s even a weird shade of mockery in that, as if they needed to encode pop into their music in order to act out their mixed feelings about it. Listen to the shruggy (and somewhat Malkmus-like) way Cobain does the beginning of “Drain You” — this bouncy, melodic, square opening that’s treated so slack, refreshed by not really caring about it. Compare with the “In Bloom” video, which actually dresses them up like squares and puts them in the environment they’re meant to be breaking everyone free of.

Because that’s the other thing: that “weird 1970s childhood” stuff is important, too, considering just how much the attitudes and iconography of the 1990s “alt” and “slacker” mentalities rest on it, refer to it, are inevitably “Gen X” manners. There’s a particular line on this you’d have heard, at the time, from any commentator on how this generation worked. Cobain: born 1967. Malkmus: born 1966. (I’ll bet you kinda conceived of Malkmus as younger, right?) At the time, you’d have been told that they were born during a “baby bust” — a massive drop-off in birth rates that ensured youth culture would be dominated by audiences several years older than them. You’d have been told they were squarely timed to grow up right in the heyday of the After-School Special and the last hurrahs of Breck hair, to grow into their teen years with The Love Boat on television — to be shaped by a still-centralized mainstream culture that was pretty sunny and glitzy and earnest, aspirational and escapist and unironic, a big pullback from 1960s tumult.

That’s the Gen-X line, anyway; and of course, you could say similar things, to a lesser extent, about the childhoods of people my age, more than a decade later. This, it’s said, is why some of us ate those guys up. Let’s be clear about something: the 1990s were nowhere near as ironic as people suspected at the time. (They seemed, as a young person, strikingly earnest and optimistic, especially around Earth Day.) But there’s a certain kind of inflectional irony in those singing voices. It’s an irony that seemed — in that moment, and weirdly — to express something earnest. This was the line at the time, and it’s a reasonably sound one: that people of that generation had grown up, largely ignored, amid a profound split between the pie-eyed glitter of the monoculture and the reality of economic pain and broken homes, and all that inflectional irony was an earnest and legitimate response to that. (See, again, that “In Bloom” video, actively playing the band off against a black-and-white monoculture.) In other words: you try watching hours and hours of after-school specials without deploying a special brand of sullen irony as a response.

You can’t, of course, because that attitude is now fully absorbed into the nation as a whole, common to nearly everyone, even successfully trucked into the irony-resistant world of political commentary. (Jon Stewart: born 1962, eleven months after Douglas Coupland.) Where Gen-X theorizing possibly goes wrong is trying to attach this development to some momentous grass-roots youth revolt, when it was pretty obviously more sly than that. David Foster Wallace (also born 1962), in “E Unibus Pluram,” traces it out in a much more top-down way — one in which the masters of the monoculture (e.g., advertisers) themselves spend much of the 1980s slipping into self-mockery and who-cares shruggery and self-consciousness to do their work.

Wallace was remarkably sensitive and ahead of the game on this front: this is a guy who talked in the 90s about loving The Simpsons but finding its ironic mien ultimately somehow soul-deadening, unwatchable in anything other than small doses. He also got how easily that irony could become non-earnest, not a reaction, and turn into a pointless, morbid game of references and sarcasm that never actually says anything. Which, oddly enough, predicts the entire career of Weezer and Rivers Cuomo (born 1970, amazingly): compare the squareness ironized in the “In Bloom” video with the happy referentiality of the “Buddy Holly” one, and then compare the “Buddy Holly” one with what Weezer does now — this is an object lesson in the slide from this stuff being earnest to being fun to just being stupid and soul-crushing.

Listening to the Nirvana obviously brings home a lot of this stuff, and a lot of the time period itself. And once again, it clarifies what the big argument was between alt-rock kids and everyone else who liked the band — not a fight between hipsters and Johnny-come-latelys, not just annoyance at jocks liking your favorite band, not a matter of underground versus mainstream. More a feeling that they were being received, in many corners, as raucous and masculine and powerful, despite their whole demeanor being practically craven — sullen, bratty, helplessly frustrated, meekly ironic. Courtney’s lucky that the skill with which they did that stuff — and the way it comes off somehow moving, somehow less than petulant — gets clearer as time goes by.

World Premiere: Gucci Mane “My Own Worst Enemy” and why he hopes Young Jeezy will hear him out (Update: Gucci in jail)

2009-11-12T11:27:53Z

It’s been a hotly debated topic in the comments section every time we’ve had a Gucci Mane-related post, drawing lines in the sand between fans claiming regional prefs, or fans fighting about the merits of high-brow vs low-brow raps, or even the Team Jeezy fans vs. the Team Gucci splits. But one thing that keeps coming up again and again is the recognition of this widespread Gucci-Mania that has gone from “the Trap,” to pop radio to indie hipster to music-tv takeover, and more.

Well I got to see what the mania was all about when I was down in Atlanta….Gucci has very limited free time, but in between shooting multiple videos, eating lunch at the scripclub (lol), dropping 3 mixtapes at once, and holding court with his rabid fans, Gucci took me to the very housing complex where he grew up and admittedly screwed up in Zone 6/East Atlanta….to chat about many things (his history with T.I., being blacklisted in ATL, his childhood,etc). But in this clip, we talked about the song that surprised me the most.

Far from a diss song, is “My Own Worst Enemy” an “at-peace” song?

New Music: Gucci Mane “My Own Worst Enemy” (CDQ) (Produced by Drumma Boy)

(as Eskay says, this is an NMC+1 world premiere ; ) (thanks to director/producers Kareem Johnson and Tory Edwards)

UPDATE: Just about an hour ago, a judge sentenced Gucci Mane to 12 months in Fulton County jail for probation violations. He was then taken into custody. He will most likely to do 6 months at minimum. (BET’s Carl Chery just posted this report)

After the jump….Meka/2DopeBoyz produced this Digiwaxx sit-down with Gucci’s labelmate and buddy, OJ da Juuman

One-On-One with OJ Da Juiceman (Video) from Digiwaxx TV on Vimeo.