I’ve spent the last several days reflecting on Adam Yauch and the Beastie Boys, their music, their projects, and their place as a cultural force. Growing up when I did, the Beasties were unavoidable. Every car, every boombox, every top-ten radio countdown had License to Ill (Def Jam, 1986) on blast. I hated it, but as much as I was repelled by the frat-boy antics of that record, it was impossible to ignore the significance. You knew you were witnessing something historic, that somehow things were different after that. And …

I was pulling into my friend Thomas Durdin’s driveway. By the volume of the AC-DC sample that forms the backbone of Boogie Down Productions’ “Dope Beat” (the first song on the second side of their 1986 debut album, Criminal Minded), I knew his mom wasn’t home. Along with the block-rocking decibel level, I was also struck by how the odd and primitive pairing of Australian hard rock and New York street slang sounded. It was gritty. It was brash. It rocked.

De La Soul’s 1995 record Stakes is High opens with various voices …

In anticipation of the new Justin Broadrick solo project, Posthuman, under his old Techno Animal moniker JKFlesh, I’ve been listening to lots of similar sounds. Not only old Godflesh (since I’m hoping to write a book about their debut long-player, Streetcleaner, for Continuum/Bloomsbury Academic’s 33 1/3 Series), but also other 3by3 Music releases (e.g., Cloaks and Dead Fader), as well as Ad Noiseam stuff (e.g., Larvae and Oyaarss). Thanks to one of my past students (Thanks, Felicity!), I’ve also gotten into Death Grips, which brings me to the point.
In the …

I’ve been working on a new book called Hip-Hop Theory: The Blueprint to 21st Century Culture about how Hip-hop culture preconfigures many of the forms and norms of the now. I gave the following talk to my class at The University of Texas at Austin, which shows me fumbling through some of the major concepts from the book [runtime: 37:01]:

Here’s a brief overview of the book:
The many innovations of Hip-hop now undergird our Western culture. From appropriating technology and reinventing language to street art and advertising, as well as the intertextual nature …

If you’ve ever gotten the impression that the music industry is run by crooks, reading any part of Frederic Dannen’s Hit Men (Vintage, 1990) will more than confirm your suspicions. The false nostalgia some of us feel with the onset of the so-called digital age sees the past as something to which we need to return. A little research will dispel any delusions one might have about a golden age as far as the music industry is concerned. Nowhere is this feeling more prevalent than in Hip-hop. Ask anyone and they will …

Borrowing everything from the Scandinavians except the panda paint, America Black Metal bands blend the core aesthetic with other subgenres to great effect. Over the past few years, it has become my favorite accompanying sound for almost any activity. Its energy, its all-encompassing crests and crumbles, its sheer power moves me in ways no other genre has in many years. And I am not alone: The darkness of this stuff touches something in us, something buried deep in our beings, in our nature.

We cannot understand and fight evil as long …

SXSW can always be considered an extreme example of the platitude “when it rains, it pours,” but this year, it was a bit too literal. SXSW Interactive weekend was a rainy, sloppy affair like I haven’t seen in my few years in Austin. Someone — nay many ones — downtown likely made a killing on rain boots and umbrellas because they were everywhere, and I know nobody packed those for the trip. Once Interactive was over and the guard changed for Music, the rain had subsided and the sun shone …

Bear with me for a second here… A couple of years ago, my friend and longtime skateboarding partner Greg Siegfried lent me the Thelonius Monk documentary, Straight, No Chaser (1988). Wait, let me back up: I’ve watched The Usual Suspects (1995) dozens of times. It’s one of those heist movies that rewards you with something new upon repeated viewings. So, while watching the Thelonius Monk joint, I saw a scene that freaked me out in its similarity to a scene in The Usual Suspects. Benicio Del Toro’s character, Fred Fenster, talks in …

When John Naisbitt was researching his best-selling book Megatrends (1982), he had a file system of shoe boxes. The shoe boxes were labeled according to major trends he had spotted in local newspapers from across the country and filled with the actual clips from those papers. Not only is this method of research rendered obsolete by the all-encompassing web, in light of the web’s ubiquity (especially to the so-called “digital natives” who’ve grown up with the web), it sounds downright silly.
Kevin Kelly has a lot of books, and like me, …

My dad is an air traffic controller, so I’ve grown up with a special relationship with airports. These grounded waystations are like family members, some close siblings, some distant cousins. Is there a more interstitial space than an airport? It is the most terminally liminal area: between cities, between flights, between appointments, between everything. The airport is a place made up of on-the-ways, not-there-yets, missed-connections. The airport is a place made up of no-places.
In the late 1970s, Brian Eno attempted to sonically capture the in-between feeling of being in a airport. He’d …