Under the banner of “’cause motherfuckers are bored,” Definitive Jux has been bringing its brand of boom bap to the masses for over a decade. Label co-founder and artist in his own right, El-P has been challenging preconceived notions of what it means to do Hip-hop since the early 90s when he was one-third of the germinal crew Company Flow. His ability to channel his frustrations with the world, the music, and himself into creative output is largely responsible for his abrasive sound, as well as that of his label’s …

Culture is technology-driven William Gibson once said, and, with the proliferation of digital media, the aphorism is less and less debatable (if it ever was). If technology is indeed the engine and infrastructure of our culture, then understanding it is tantamount to understanding ourselves.
The books written on the topic could fill a library, and two recent ones caught my eye. The first attempts a broad-reaching macro-view. Brian Arthur’s The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (Free Press, 2009) promises not only to get to the bottom …

In the mid-1990s my friend Dave Allen published a zine called “The Clutter of Pop” (followed by a record of the same name). In one of them he wrote an essay about the glut of entertainment media choking our attention spans. I’ve long since lost the zine and I can barely remember Dave’s insights, but I do keep thinking about it in light of the ever increasing glut since its publication.
It is often said that  we only use ten percent of our brains. While that’s not exactly true, we often …

“The tape cassette is a liberating force…” proclaimed Malcolm McLaren thirty years ago. “Taping has produced a new lifestyle.” Cassettes made recording and customization possible. Cassette players made listening on the go possible.

More than any other subset of culture, youth culture was created — and is enabled — by technology. The telephone supposedly created the Teenager, and even if it didn’t, those formative years of the socialization process wouldn’t be the same without the dialtone (even metaphorically), and for my generation, the same could be said for the cassette tape.
“Home …

In the early 90s, AT&T ran a series of commercials that posed some futuristic, technologically enabled task (e.g., “Have you ever borrowed a book from thousands of miles away?”), and then answered it emphatically (“You will.”), claiming they’d be the company to technologically enable such a task. I believe they’ve all come to pass except one. As Stewart Brand once said, “Technology marches on, over you or through you, take your pick.”

I can’t help but think that many of the technological advances we debate and marvel about were downright inevitable. …

For my latest piece for Daniel Pinchbeck and Ken Jordan’s web publication, Reality Sandwich, I poached and updated a few things I’d written about here. Here’s an excerpt:
Technology curates culture. As such, the alienation we feel from our technologically mediated “all-at-once-ness” (as McLuhan called it) comes from a disconnection between physical goals and technology’s “help” in easing our workload.
“For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life,” Alice Kahn once quipped, “please press three.”  I’m not anti-technology, but I have been trying to …

Magazines have always been my favorite form of media. Having grown up in rural areas of the South, I found the window to my interests opened in their glossy pages. The big photos and words from other worlds kept me connected to all that I wanted to be a part of. If this sounds a bit romantic, it was. The grocery store newsstand and the mailbox were the modem jacks of the time.
Back then, it was music, skateboarding, and BMX magazines, and though those still capture my attention on a …

Sandra Ordonez from OurBlook, which is named after a portmanteau of “blog” and “book” and whose tagline is “Today’s Voices, Tomorrow’s Solutions,” asked me a few questions about citizen journalism and whether or not it could save newspapers.

In his book Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (Pantheon, 1999) James Gleick described the need for natural pause. Email allows one to heatedly and immediately respond to an off-handed message, where even FedEx gives one a day to cool off, to think it over, to sleep on it.

With the slow demise of the compact disc, the music industry’s last physical organizing principle, I thought it appropriate to ask some people inside and on the margins of that industry how the CD’s death was affecting their conception of recorded music. In ironic honor of Record Store Day, this month’s roundtable question is How has the decline of the compact disc affected the way you approach the idea of recording music? I asked producers, musicians, emcees, DJs, and label folks.