Funk was born from the sludge, the grainy mud of the earth. It festered in the primordial soup until the spirit of life sucked itself into its own existence, and grew into form, and that form changed under the cycles of the sun and moon and stars. In the late 1960s, in the midst of the space race and race riots, the godfather of soul James Brown tapped into the essence of the funk — channeling its vital madness with wild guitar riffs and frantic horn blasts carried by a grooving percussive back-beat — and forever touched America and changed the world. Body and groove were united. The funk has since changed in shape and appearance, once nearly forgotten and then revived in the backbone of hip-hop, but now the possibility of a future funk is making itself clear.
When graffiti artist and experimental stop-motion animator Blu claimed his wall-painted video short, MUTO, was just a test for a larger, more thoughtful narrative, I didn’t quite know what to expect. His MUTO project was already decidedly impressive — the Italian (Maybe? The artist’s terrestrial positioning is somewhat cloaked in mystery, just like another iconoclastic vandal from the UK) artist used a camera to make his graffiti evolve in time through a frantic succession of images. Fantastical creatures emerged from floating blobs of paint; they traveled across the city walls and streets in a fluttering movement, and found their end in surprising turns of events.
In “BIG BANG BIG BOOM”, yes all caps, Blu offers his most decisive work thus far. It’s a mythological tale, seemingly lighthearted and playful, but bound together with a strong sense of caution and compassion. It’s a story of our cosmological origins, the evolution of the planet earth, and our likely end, plastered onto the surfaces of city space and then embedded in code onto the digital stratosphere, glowing electric like a Homeric fire pit, where lyrical stories of human folly and inevitable subjection to divine forces are still shared.
Reports have rushed in through Twitter and Facebook about the purported death of hiphop iconoclast Rammellzee. Before the skittering lyrics of Outkast, the space odysseys of Deltron, the spiraling flustered funk of Weezy, or the free-association spiritual vomiting of DOOM, there was Rammellzee. Best known for his ten minute trek into the mathematical chaos underlying tensions between rhyme and reason — with fellow lyricist K-Rob and production work from Basquiat in “Beat Bop”, as featured in the acclaimed hiphop documentary Style Wars — Rammellzee explored the futuristic poetics of hiphop at the dawn of its global diffusion. In many ways, he brought the abstract geometrical relations inherent in graffiti calligraphy to the art of freestyling and wordplay. [Read More]
We at Hydra are constantly on the lookout for innovative work on the cross-section of art and technology. That’s why we’re all for The Creators Project, a new online network from Intel and VBS, celebrating artists around the globe engaging with the creative potential of the analog/digital wave. The channel currently features a number of video interviews with musicians, animators, multimedia artists, and tech wizards like Seoul’s Hojun Song, who crafted a happy machine that spits out determinately positive messages through a slit-shaped mouth. Song insists that the jubilant robot can withstand horrendous acts of violence, such as a nuclear attack, without as much as a scratch. Just like the roaches. Then there’s an interview with the Sao Paulo to Los Angeles production duo, N.A.S.A., who break down their cosmic sonic inspirations and unique approach to creating frantic world-town beats. Oh, and EE, a retro-futuristic 80s outfit also from Seoul, explain their approach to tinkering “total art” immersion performances. Not to mention some words from staple groundshakers on the cusp of invigorating machine gun funk: Peaches, Diplo, Fool’s Gold, and Phoenix.
The Creators Project is curating a few inaugural events around the globe, featuring select music performances, installations, multi-media shows, and panel discussions. The first is Saturday, June 26th, at Milk Studios in NYC’s Meatpacking District. But if you happen to find yourself in other terrestrial locations, then you might still catch a digital feed of the event online.
I’ve just begun flipping through the pages of Megan Prelinger’s gorgeous book, Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957-1962, and I’m already hooked. The huge book traces the history of the post-war technological boom, a time when space represented both a spirit of endless possibility and the sprawling potential of human knowledge. It’s quite different from other books on the space race. Prelinger fastidiously researched the scientific imaginaire of the era as illustrated in the graphic art and texts of popular culture: pulp comics, advertisements, novels, movie posters, photos and corporate propaganda. What Prelinger reveals is a dreamy fiction constructed and realized not just by scientists and scholars but people from all walks of the earth.
Few album covers resonate like The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street. It’s one of those 12″ gatefold artworks that inspires a double-take — something like that vague feeling of wanting to reread a line of a poem. That’s a feeling that I typically don’t get when looking at tiny digital prints on the Internet. And there’s a lot of them now with Exile‘s reissue.
I remember first seeing Exile‘s front cover, that now iconic circus show photo collage, in a Los Angeles swap meet. It’s as if the record was made to age: the gritty and loose style fit for rediscovery 30 years later in a dusty record bin thrown among random assortments of parking lot junk. Similar collages on the back cover and inside the gatefold show the Stones in the streets of downtown LA and NY. As such, they aligned themselves with not only the misfit circus entertainers but both the poor and the outsiders of America’s neglected inner cities.
I’m not sure how I feel about Montreal. Ever since I started learning French I’ve associated the language with hostility and romantic impulses for sneering antagonism. The language of love and revolution. Or perhaps just indulgent protests and overpriced espresso. In all fairness, my narrow and decidedly cliche perspective is both the fault of and refers only to Parisians.
At any rate, it was a bit of a shock to speak the language to the warm and helpful Quebecois. For instance, I stopped by the Museum of Fine Arts for an exhibit on the life and work of Miles Davis (“We Want Miles“), which included a couple of his original paintings (who knew?), and the female worker at the gift shop didn’t even erupt in laughter when I screwed up the word for stamp. I had just bought a postcard of Mati Klarwein’s strange and brilliant gatefold cover of Bitches Brew (shown above), Miles Davis’ first foray into the funky side of jazz. Timbre said the museum attendant, her face wrinkled into a professorial concentration, generous and stern, the word for a stamp as well as the creator of that art. She fingered my postcard. I looked at her slightly confused. Someone who is crazy in the head.Her face finally dewrinkled and she gave me directions to the nearest post office.
South Korea resumed operations of psychological warfare against North Korea — effectively ending a six-year moratorium on propaganda — in response to the sinking of the Cheonan warship. The broadcast began yesterday evening at 6 p.m. on FM radio when a female anchor announced, what she called, the “voice of freedom”. What followed was a dance-pop song by girl group, Four Minute, titled “Huh”. The lighthearted melodies of freedom waded into North Korea, pulsing over a heavily synthesized bass line. Fairly assertive girlish voices — occasionally autotuned into a robotic growl — paraded their ability to do whatever they wanted while underscoring the dangers of overeating.
A couple nights ago I dropped by my new favorite Los Angeles cinema, the historic and tragicSilent Movie Theater on Fairfax, now completely reimagined by the oh so excellent curatorial group Cinefamily. As part of a series on animation for grown-ups, Cinefamily hosted a special screening and presentation on the origins of Nick Jr.’s strangely brilliant pre-school kids program, Yo Gabba Gabba.
Gabba is the brainchild of a couple skate-punk musicians (Christian Jacobs of the Aquabats and Scott Schultz of Majestic) who as new fathers found themselves quite disappointed with the limited creativity of children’s programming on television. That disappointment spawned wonder and fortunately, they found a dude as charismatic and as Easy Reader cool as DJ Lance Rock (another musician, Lance Robertson) to host the show. Gabba has become something of a phenomenon, gripping audiences from all age brackets, not just its two-year-old target market, and constantly pushing the envelope of how creative and musically inspired a kids show for the pre-linguistic can be. Now moving into its third season, Gabba is just getting more and more bizarrely fascinating.
A couple months ago I wrote a blog post about how music videos were getting a bit monstrous. At the time, I didn’t yet find it odd that I was even watching music videos even though that MTV had long stopped playing them, and well, who watches the television nowadays anyway? Looks like the Internet brought them back in full force. Did you realize Soulja Boy’s “Crank That” is pushing nearly 75 million views? New York magazine published an excellent article earlier this week tracing the history of the music video, its death, and now its revival thanks to high definition streaming on Youtube and Vimeo and the fact that we’ve all become obsessive media consumers on the web.
A few of the directors (including Spike Jonze, back again) are even turning the craft into an art again. It seems that the purpose of the music video is primarily to become viral, so we keep seeing more and more outrageous, sensuous and all around captivating videos. A good gimmick works as well; after all, OK Go is credited with putting this beast on the treadmill. If you haven’t been keeping up, I’ve got some treats after the jump — a prison love affair between Beyonce and Lady Gaga, a hybrid human-panda intoxicated takeover of LCD Soundsystem, and Beyonce again, whoa.
In 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote an influential essay in the Atlantic titled “ Is Google Making us Stupid” ? Since that essay’s publication the use of the Internet and its effect on our brains has become a highly divisive topic which has produced a large spat of journalistic and academic articles in its wake. [Read More]
Sanullim is something of an anomaly in rock history. At a time when vintage rock was dying and new cultural tropes were diversifying the palette of pop music, Sanullim appeared on the margin in a country whose pop music landscape, heavily censored by the authoritarian bureaus of Park Chung-Hee, mainly consisted of traditional trot ballads and dance-pop music. Sanullim’s heavy bass lines, thunderous drums, chromatic fuzz guitar-work, and psych-image lyrics were a revival shock in a system which had gone dormant since the early 60s scene singlehandedly engendered by Korean rock godfather Shin Jung-Hyeon. [Read More]
The abstraction of hiphop – sonically & visually – is a progression other commentators have discussed in relation to instrumental/beats artists like Flying Lotus and the unparalleled Dilla. But what of the lyrical persona in the abstract world? Which is to say, in this constantly expanding kaleidoscope universe, what happens to the MC? [Read More]
If Martin Scorsese had stopped making films after the 90s, he’d still prove an invaluable part of cinema history on the basis of his current film preservation efforts. Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, which works to “help developing countries preserve their cinematic treasures,” has gone a long way in preserving and promoting little seen, almost lost films from a wide range of countries. [Read More]
The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film last year was bestowed onto an Argentine mystery romance; a film that intermixes the pathos of unspoken love and the torture chamber of memory, and parallels these alongside the shadowy contours of law and corrupt politics. As the film frames all these disparate elements within a novelist’s remembrance of a rape and murder investigation that he was involved in as a young attorney in the court halls of Buenos Aires in the early 1970s, it continuously draws analogies to the mercenary political machinations of a dictatorial Argentina. This brilliantly scripted and acted film was written and directed by Juan Jose Campanella, a director who has now catapulted himself onto the international film scene with this minor masterpiece. [Read More]
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