BLOG – Page 18 – Roy Christopher

January 27, 2014

Dispatches from Digital Dystopia

David Hoffman once summarized George Orwell’s 1984, writing that “during times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” Aaron Swartz, Chelsea (née Bradley) Manning, Adrian Lamo, Aaron Barr, and Edward Snowden have all been pawns and prisoners of information warfare. As the surveillance has expanded from mounted cameras to wireless taps, hackers have evolved from phone phreaking to secret leaking. It’s a ratcheting up of tactics and attacks on both sides. Andy Greenberg quotes Hunter S. Thompson, saying that the weird are turning pro. It’s a thought that evokes the last line of Bruce Sterling‘s The Hacker Crackdown (1991) which, after deftly chronicling the early history of computer hacker activity, investigation, and incarceration, states ominously, “It is the End of the Amateurs” (p. 301).

These quips can be applied to either side.

Sousveillance: Steve Mann — Sousveillance device via Steve Mann, 1998.

The Hacker Ethic — as popularized by Steven Levy’s Hackers (Anchor, 1984) — states that access to computers “and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works should be unlimited and total” (p. 40). Hackers seek to understand, not to undermine. And they tolerate no constraints. Tactical media, so-called to avoid the semiotic baggage of related labels, exploits the asymmetry of knowledge gained via hacking (Branwyn, 1994; Lievrouw, 2011; Lovink, 2002; Raley, 2009). In a passage that reads like recent events, purveyor of the term, Geert Lovink (2002) writes, “Tactical networks are all about an imaginary exchange of concepts outbidding and overlaying each other. Necessary illusions. What circulates are models and rumors, arguments and experiences of how to organize cultural and political activities, get projects financed, infrastructure up and running and create informal networks of trust which make living in Babylon bearable” (p. 254). Sounds like a description of the tumult behind Wikileaks and Anonymous.

In This Machine Kills Secrets (Dutton, 2012), Andy Greenberg explores the infighting and odd cooperation among those out to break and build boundaries around certain strains of information. It’s a tale of rogues gone straight, straights gone rogue, and the weird gone pro. It’s a battle over stiffly defined contexts, lines drawn and defended. He writes of the leakers, “They take an immoral act out of some special, secret culture where it seems acceptable and expose it to the world of moral human relationships, where it’s exposed as obviously horrific” (p. 311). Theirs are easy acts to defend when the extremes are so evident, but what about the more subtle contexts? As danah boyd puts it, “Privacy isn’t a binary that can be turned on or off. It’s about context, social situations, and control.” Privacy is not secrecy, but they’re so closely related that the former seems to be lost in the fight against the latter. They’re also so close as to be constantly conflated when debated.

We Are Anonymous

Following Matt Blaze, Neal Stephenson (2012) states “it’s best in the long run, for all concerned, if vulnerabilities are exposed in public” (p. 27). Informal groups of information insurgents like the crews behind Wikileaks and Anonymous keep open tabs on the powers that would be. After a cameo in This Machine Kills Secrets, Aaron Barr takes a more central role in We Are Anonymous (Little, Brown, 2012) by Parmy Olson. A high-end security consultant, Barr set out to expose Anonymous unprovoked, and quickly found himself on the wrong side of the line. Again, hackers are easy to defend when they’re on your side. Wires may be wormholes (Stephenson, 1996), but that can be dangerous when they flow both ways. Once you get locked out of all your accounts and the contents of your harddrive end up on the wrong screen, hackers aren’t your friends anymore, academic or otherwise. The recent DDoS attacks on several major torrent trackers should be raising more eyebrows on both sides.

Hackers of every kind behave as if they understand that “[p]ostmodernity is no longer a strategy or style, it is the natural condition of today’s network society” (Lovink, 2002, p. 259). In a hyper-connected world, disconnection is power. The ability to become untraceable is the ability to become invisible (Kluitenberg, 2008). We need to unite and become hackers ourselves now more than ever against what Kevin DeLuca (2007) calls “the acronyms of the apocalypse” (e.g., WTO, NAFTA, GATT, etc.; p. 47). The original Hacker Ethic isn’t enough when Shit is Fucked-Up and Bullshit (Wark, 2012). We need more of those nameless nerds, nodes in undulating networks of cyber disobedience. “Information moves, or we move to it,” writes Neal Stephenson (1996), like a hacker motto of “digital micro-politics” (Lovink, 2002, p. 254). Hackers need to appear, swarm, attack, and then disappear again into the dark fiber of the Deep Web.

Lovink (2002) continues: “The world is crazy enough. There is not much reason to opt for the illusion” (p. 259). Who was it that said Orwell was 30 years off? Tactical media is where we watch the ones watching us.

References:

Branwyn, Gareth. (1994). Introduction: Hackers: Heroes or Villains? In Knightmare, Confessions of a Super-Hacker. Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited.

DeLuca, Kevin M. (2007). A Wilderness Environmentalism Manifesto: Contesting the Infinite Self-Absorption of Humans. In, R. Sandler & P. C. Pezzullo (Eds.), Environmental Justice and Environmentalism: The Social Justice Challenge to the Environmental Movement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 27-55.

Greenberg, Andy. (2012). This Machine Kills Secrets. New York: Dutton Adult.

Kluitenberg, Eric. (2008). Delusive Spaces: Essays on Culture, Media, and Technology. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.

Levy, Steven. (1984). Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday.

Lievrouw, Leah A. (2011). Alternative and Activist New Media. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Lovink, Geert. (2002). Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Olson, Parmy. (2012). We Are Anonymous. New York: Little, Brown, and Co.

Raley, Rita. (2009). Tactical Media. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Stephenson, Neal. (1996, December). Mother Earth, Mother Board. WIRED, 04.12.

Stephenson, Neal (2012). Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing. New York: William Morrow.

Sterling, Bruce. (1991). The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Bantam.

Wark, McKenzie. (2012). Telesthesia: Communication, Culture, & Class. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

January 25, 2014

Twin Peaks: The Forest of Symbols

Setting the screen for shows such as Picket Fences (1992-1996), The X-Files (1994-2003), Six Feet Under (2001-2005), Veronica Mars (2004-2007), Pushing Daisies (2007-2009), The Killing (2011-2013), and games like Alan Wake (2010), Mark Frost and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990-1991) was easily the oddest hit show in television history. Set among the trees and mountains of my beloved Pacific Northwest, the show hosted themes of dangerous dreams, reckless teens, and the paranormal, parallel, and perpendicular. With recently debunked rumors of its return and a Blu-Ray release imminent, it’s time to go back into the woods.

The Black Lodge

How in the hell this show was ever a hit is one of its many mysteries. Twin Peaks invaded the living rooms of America just as the Zeitgeist was shaking off the awkward, neon discomfort of the 1980s. The world was “wild at heart and weird on top,” in the words of Barry Gifford, and even if everyone knew it, no one was saying it. We let Frost and Lynch make our unease explicit. Collective pre-millennium tension notwithstanding, our anxiety never really relented.

Incest and child molestation are as American as apple pie. Or should I rather say cherry pie, the dessert choice of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks? Leland Palmer is the all-American Dad if there ever was one, so it’s more than appropriate that he is the one to be possessed by the evil spirit BOB, and to rape and murder his daughter Laura. This deed is necessarily something of a ritual, the founding gesture of the American nuclear family. — Steven Shaviro, Doom Patrols

Ritual abounds in Twin Peaks. Its liminality, the “between and betwixt” of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, is evident in Laura Palmer’s double life, “none-more-purposeful” (Neofetou, 2013, p. 77) Special Agent Dale Cooper’s limbo while investigating her death, the transubstantiation of BOB, and his toggling of Leland Palmer’s consciousness. The ephemeral existence of the Black Lodge is itself a flickering signifier of ritual. The coffee and doughnuts, the family dinner, even the recording and sending of messages are imbued with the gestures of ceremony.

The time of Twin Peaks wasn’t run by social media and cellphones. Secrets traveled via letters and landlines, diaries and cassette tapes. The latter of these played very important roles in the show and helped define the drama surrounding the two main characters. Laura Palmer’s secret diary and Special Agent Dale Cooper’s microcassettes respectively recorded the weaving mysteries of Laura’s short life and their postmortem unraveling. Both have been published as companions to the show. In addition, Frost and Lynch collaborated with Richard Saul Wurman to put together an Access Guide to the town of Twin Peaks. More than mere merchandising, these books prefigured the internet-enabled transmedia narrative of many 21st-century television shows.

The newly published Fan Phenomena: Twin Peaks, edited by Marisa C. Hayes and Franck Boulègue (Intellect Books, 2013), expands the between and betwixt of Twin Peaks-inspired writings by fans and crtics alike. It’s the first such collection aimed at fans rather than academics. For instance, In his Fan Phenomena essay, Andrew Howe catalogs the cultural artifacts of the series: posters, coffee cups, dolls, sculptures, and so on, while David Griffith confronts the show’s misogynist aspects with waves of feminism, what Diana Hume George (1995) facetiously calls a “double-breasted approach”(p. 109). Fran Pheasant-Kelly explores the physical spaces of Twin Peaks, and there are three Fan Appreciation interludes in between the essays. It’s a must for any fan of the franchise. Fan Phenomena collections are also available for Star Wars, The Big Lebowski, Doctor Who, The Hunger Games, Marilyn Monroe, and Audrey Hepburn, among others.

Fan Phenomena: Twin Peaks is yet another testament to the lingering legacy of Frost and Lynch’s vision of fucked-up family life as well as the power of good television.

References:

Frost, Scott. (1991). The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes. New York: Pocket Books.

George, Diana Hume. (1995). Lynching Women: A Feminist Reading of Twin Peaks. In, David Lavery (Ed.), Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, pp 109-119.

Lynch, David, Frost, Mark, & Wurman, Richard Saul. (1991). Welcome to Twin Peaks: Access Guide to the Town. New York: Pocket Books/Twin Peaks Prod./Access Press.

Lynch, Jennifer. (1990). The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. New York: Pocket Books.

Neofetou, Daniel. (2012). Good Day Today: David Lynch Destabilises the Spectator. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.

Shaviro, Steven. (1997). Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction about Postmodernism. New York: Serpent’s Tail, p. 147.

Turner, Victor. (1967). The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Turner, Victor. (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

von Gennep, Arnold. (1961). The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

January 6, 2014

It Toggles the Mind

Twenty years ago, Arthur Kroker described the predominant spirit of the times as a “spasm” (1993). What Bruce Sterling (1998) describes as “that violently oscillating 1990s state when you feel totally hyper and nauseatingly bored. That gnawing sense that we’re on the road to nowhere at a million miles an hour.” The feeling has expanded to the point where detached irony is our default emotional setting. David Foster Wallace called it “Total Noise” (quoted in Gleick, 2011, p. 403): An all-consuming cultural state that “tends to level everything out into an undifferentiated mass of high-quality description and trenchant reflection that becomes both numbing and euphoric” (Wallace, 2012, p. 301). It’s information anxiety coupled with complete boredom (Gleick, 2011). What happened to the chasm between those two extremes?

Always two things
switching.
Current runs through bodies
and then it doesn’t.
It was a language of sounds,
of noise,
of switching,
of signals.
…
On again.
Off again.
Always two things
switching.
One thing instantly replaces
another.

It was the language
of the Future.

— Laurie Anderson, United States

Constructing sameness is an essential intellectual activity that goes unobserved. — Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think

A skeuomorph is a design element that remains only as an allusion to a previous form, like a digital recording that includes the clicks and pops of a record player, woodgrain wallpaper, the desktop metaphor, or even the digital “page.” It’s obsolete except in signifying what it supplants. N. Katherine Hayles (1999) describes the concept, writing, “It calls into play a psychodynamic that finds the new more acceptable when it recalls the old that it is in the process of displacing and finds the traditional more comfortable when it is presented in a context that reminds us we can escape from it into the new” (p. 17; cf. Tenner, 2003, p. xii). Skeuomorphs meditate the liminal space between uncomfortable shifts and an uncertain future, translating the unknown into the terms of the known.

Translation is always an amalgam of hope and nostalgia, combining the yearning for home with the urge to press forward into new territories. — Matthew Battles, The Sovereignties of Invention

Just like a cramped muscle, the solution to Kroker’s metaphorical spasm is to stretch it out. In the most general sense, my central research question concerns the process by which we mediate our lives with our technologies. What I call The Medium Picture is that process, what it helps, hides, and hinders. A medium is literally a “middle, intermediary state” (Gleick, 2011, p. 153), and that is the place I’ve been investigating. Skeuomorphs bridge the threshold, obscuring the transition, and that is their purpose when it comes to adapting people to new technologies. They soften the blow of the inevitable upgrade. But every new contrivance augments some choices at the expense of others. What we lose is often unbeknownst to us.

… multifunctional lidless eyes watching, outside-in and inside-out; our technology has produced the vision of microscopic giants and intergalactic midgets, freezing time out of the picture, contracting space to a spasm. — Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects

With his finger ever on the flickering pulse, William Gibson (2012) writes, parenthetically, “(This perpetual toggling between nothing being new under the sun, and everything having very recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension of my work)” (p. 51). That binary belies a bulging, unexplored midsection. The space between that switch from one extreme to the other, that is what The Medium Picture is about.

References:

Anderson, Laurie. (1984). United States. New York: Harper & Row, p. 22.

Battles, Matthew. (2012). The Sovereignties of Invention. New York: Red Lemonade, p. 84.

Braidotti, Rosi. (1994). Nomadic Subjects. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 43.

Douglas, Mary. (1986). How Institutions Think. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, p. 60.

Gibson, William. (2012). Distrust That Particular Flavor. New York: Putnam.

Gleick, James. (2011). The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon.

Hayles, N. Katherine. (1999). How We Became Post-Human. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kroker, Arthur. (1993). Spasm: Virtual Reality, Android Music and Electric Flesh. Montreal: New World Perspectives.

Sterling, Bruce. (1998, October 4). Viridian Design. San Francisco: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Tenner, Edward. (2003). Our Own Devices. New York: Knopf.

December 24, 2013

Flyover Culture: The Death of the Mainstream

We’re all home for the holidays. Looking around the living room today at the family assembled there, most were clicking around on laptops, two were also wearing headphones, one was fingering a smartphone. The television was noticeably dark and silent with each of us engrossed in his or her own digital experience, be it a game, a TV show, or some, social metamedium. Jaron Lanier (2008) writes, ”…pop culture is important. It drags us all along with it; it is our shared fate. We can’t simply remain aloof” (p. 385). But what happens when we don’t share any of it anymore? Narrowcasting and narrowcatching, as each of us burrows further into our own interests, we have less of them in common as a whole. The mainstream has become less of a stream and more of a mist.

What We Share

A friend of mine noted recently that The Long Tail has gotten so long and so thick that there’s not much left in the Big Head. As the internet-enabled market supported a wider and wider variety of cultural artifacts with less and less depth of interest, the big, blockbuster hits have had ever-smaller audiences. This wasn’t the case just a decade ago. The audiences seem to decrease in proportion to the size of the screens. I have found this splintering more and more in the classroom as I try to pick somewhat universal media artifacts to use as examples. Even the biggest shows and movies I brought up this semester left nearly half of my students out, and if I ever got into the stuff I actually like, I was greeted with little more than cricket sounds. The postmodern promise of individual viewpoints and infinite fragmentation is coming closer to fruition.

Cultural divisions as such used to be framed as high versus low culture. New Yorker writer John Seabrook (2000) argues that we have evolved past such hierarchies into what he calls “nobrow culture.” Definitely erring on the high side, Seabrook doesn’t know Stormtroopers from Sand People. Depending on which side of the high/low fence you stand, he and his ilk have “condescended and/or pandered,” in the words of Hal Foster, to you for far too long. The mixing of high culture’s concerns with low culture’s lack thereof only makes sense if there’s a market in the middle. The mainstreaming of anything requires a middle class.

Middle Class, R.I.P.

The middle class is traditionally thought of as the masses of people who are above “working” class but also not quite “upper” class. By definition, membership in the middle class requires a certain amount of discretionary income. Mainstream pop culture relies on that. As that income diminishes and less of the extant money is spent on media due to an increasingly tech-savvy populous, the funding for frivolous entertainment decreases. Art and commerce have always been odd bedfellows, but their offspring are the least interesting children in history. Focus groups, product placement, and everything “brought to you by” a brand are not cool conventions. Mix that division and decline with pop culture’s obsession with its own past, what Simon Reynolds (2011) calls “retromania,” and we get reality television, ubiquitous advertising, and endless remakes and remixes. Reynolds likens the state of the culture industry to global economics, predicting an inevitable crash: “The world economy was brought down by derivatives and bad debt; music has been depleted of meaning through derivatives and indebtedness” (p. 410-420). If the rest of pop culture ends up like the demonetized music industry, then we can bury the middle class next to the mainstream.

None of this is to say that underground culture is inherently better. It’s never made much sense to describe something aesthetically in terms of the mainstream, and now it makes less than ever. Working the ends against the middle trying to get the best of both worlds, so-called “nobrow culture” ends up with the bad of both without any of the good. Watered-down, diluted, widely disseminated, what’s left of the mainstream is the cultural equivalent of the muddy, middle heartland, viewed from an airplane window. It’s flyover culture.

Wittgenstein (1953) once said there was no such thing as a private language. The presumption being that a language only works if it is shared. The same can be said of culture. It only works if it is shared. Here’s hoping we can continue to find some overlapping dirt to dig.

References:

Anderson, Chris. (2006). The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling More of Less. New York: Hyperion.

Lanier, Jaron. (2008). Where Did the Music Go? In Paul D. Miller (Ed.), Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 385-390.

Reynolds, Simon. (2011). Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. New York: faber & faber.

Seabrook, John. (2000). Nobrow: The Marketing of Culture and the Culture of Marketing. New York: Knopf.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing.

————

This post benefited greatly from discussion and correspondence with Mark Wieman and Tim Baker.

December 21, 2013

Nagging Narratives: Stories of the Year

Some stories are like other worlds we visit for a little while. Some climb in our minds and manipulate our thoughts. “[O]ur brains are built to try to process everything we see as a story,” writes David Wong of Cracked.com, so it’s no wonder that some stories are so powerful. These are the ones that haunted my head this year.

Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color is easily the best movie of the year. As I wrote elsewhere, the hollow, breathless feeling I always choke down at the climax of his previous movie, Primer, was evident throughout Upstream Color. If the grammar of Primer is mechanical, spurred on by engineers spending their off hours tinkering in the garage, then Upstream Color is organic, revealing itself through rote ritual, hypnotic motion, and passages from Walden. Where Primer was wordy, stacked with dialogue and guided by Aaron’s answering-machine voice-over, Upstream Color is primarily nonverbal, a collage of scenes, snatches of dialog, subtle sounds, and spacious music.

Another collage-like experience, Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers is as beautiful as it is bewildering. Its heist scene might be the best few minutes of cinema I’ve seen in years. Brit (Ashley Benson) and Candy (Vanessa Hudgens) rob the Chicken Shack restaurant with a hammer and a squirt gun while Cotty (Rachel Korine) circles the building in the getaway car with the camera (and us) riding shotgun. Our limited vantage point gives the scene an added tension because though we are at a distance, it feels far from safe. Much like the security camera footage of Columbine and Chronicle, and the camera-as-character of Chronicle and Cloverfield, we receive a crippled information flow while experiencing total exposure. Their mantra: “Just pretend it’s a fucking video game. Act like you’re in a movie or something.”

The book of the year is The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes (Mulholland Books). Beukes’ easily digestible prose and gleefully nagging narrative betray a convoluted timeline and staggering depth of research. Drifter Harper Curtis quantum leaps from time to time gutting the girls as he goes. The House he squats in his helper, enabling the temporal jaunts. He’s like an inverted Patrick Bateman: no money, all motive. Where Bateman’s stories are told from his point of view in the tones of torture-porn, Harper’s kills are described from the abject horror of the victims. And the victims, who are all strong-willed women with drive and purpose, are only victims at his hand. Otherwise they shine with potential and promise.

Also worthy of mention are Year Zero by Rob Reid (Del Rey/Ballantine), Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon (Penguin), The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner (Scribner), the nonfiction The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit (Viking) and Present Shock by Doug Rushkoff (Current), and the reissued, 20th anniversary edition of Vurt by Jeff Noon (Pan Macmillan).

December 12, 2013

My Seidr Ginnungagap Review on Reality Sandwich

I wrote a review of Seidr’s new record, Ginnungagap (Bindrune Recordings), for Reality Sandwich. Seidr is one of my favorite bands made up of members from some of my other favorite bands: Panopticon, Wheels Within Wheels, Kólga, and others. These folks make some of the most expansive doom available anywhere in the galaxy.

Seidr

Here’s an excerpt:

Though their name comes from Norse religion, Seidr is as low-key as they are Loki. A subtlety that’s often missing from heavy genres is the mark here. With members from some of my other favorite bands (e.g., Panopticon, Wheels Within Wheels, Kólga, etc.), Seidr is more than a supergroup: They are a collective of seers, mapping new territories in consciousness and the cosmos. Ginnungagap is only their second missive, but it sounds like the product of eons. “A Blink of the Cosmic Eye,” “The Pillars of Creation,” “Sweltering II: A Pale Blue Dot in the Vast Dark,” and the title track churn and smolder like dying stars. This is doom on the largest possible scale.

You can read the whole review over on Reality Sandwich. Thanks as always to Ken Jordan, Faye Sakellaridis, and Daniel Pinchbeck for the opportunity.

December 10, 2013

Download, Spin, or Stream: Ten Records, 2013

Unlike last year, 2013 found me mostly listening to one strain of metal or another. With the embedded videos and off-site links on this page, I’ve tried to provide a way for you to hear a bit of each of these lovely records. There’s never been a better time to be a music fan.

Deafheaven Sunbather (Deathwish, Inc.): I’m not sure what else can be said about Deafheaven that wasn’t said during 2013, but let there be no question that Sunbather is the record of the year. In conception and construction, no other record came close to its heights and depths. As I wrote in my review of the record, even with a space seemingly cut out for them by a family of description-defying groups, Deafheaven is likely to work loose from any label applied to their sound. Neither the bands nor the fans come up with these categories anyway. If it moves us, we don’t care what you call it. In spite of their often caustic heaviness, there’s a pop sensibility in there that can’t help but shine through. Purists of all kinds had plenty of smack to talk, but Sunbather defies category and critique, rewards the repeated listen, and leaves behind the feeling that opposition only makes one stronger.

A Storm of Light Nations to Flames (Southern Lord): Late to these ears this year comes the latest from A Storm of Light. Nations to Flames brings together the best of the band’s abilities. The depth, breadth, weight, and ferocity of past outings are all here with a precision their peers often lack (See “All the Shining Lies” for one extreme example). If you still think of them as a side project, it’s high time to stop. Where so many others have stagnated in the past, A Storm of Light is burning new paths in the futures of heavy music.

Cult of Luna Vertikal (Density): On Vertikal, Cult of Luna plays songs about cities composed with the weight of concrete. Not unlike their past few releases (i.e., Eviga Riket, Eternal Kingdom, and Somewhere Along the Highway), this one is the product of many minds working overtime. Unlike the rural themes on those records, the band worked inside the city limits this time partially inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). The companion EP Vertikal II includes Justin Broadrick‘s essential remix of “Vicarious Redemption,” which is ironically and atypically half the length of the original track. Here’s their video for “Passing Through”:

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Wire Change Becomes Us (Pink Flag): Wire have been together for nearly 40 years, and they released one of their best records in 2013. Change Becomes Us is made up of reworkings of older, unrealized, and unreleased ideas from Wire’s classic, late-1970s era (cf. Pink Flag, Chairs Missing, 154). It’s also everything they do well in one place. It’s as punk as it is post-everything else, and proves why they’re one of the most influential bands of the late 20th century. If you don’t like “Re-Invent Your Second Wheel,” then we probably can’t be friends anymore.

Seidr Ginnungagap (Bindrune Recordings): Though their name comes from Norse religion, Seidr is as low-key as they are Loki. A subtlety that’s often missing from heavy genres is the mark here. With members from some of my other favorite bands (e.g., Panopticon, Wheels Within Wheels, Kólga, etc.), Seidr is more than a supergroup: They are a collective of seers, mapping new territories in consciousness and the cosmos. Ginnungagap is only their second missive, but it sounds like the product of eons. “A Blink of the Cosmic Eye,” “The Pillars of Creation,” “Sweltering II: A Pale Blue Dot in the Vast Dark,” and the title track churn and smolder like dying stars. This is doom on the largest possible scale.

Mouth of the Architect Dawning (Translation Loss): Along with the new releases by Deafheaven and Cult of Luna above, the new Mouth of the Architect was one of my most anticipated records of 2013. Dawning is a sprawling six songs, the least of which is still just under seven minutes long. While they get lumped in with the usual suspects of post-metal (e.g., Neurosis, Isis, Pelican, etc.), Mouth of the Architect’s sound is subtly different in distinctive ways. It’s metal and majestic, heavy and heavenly, gruesome and graceful, and difficult to describe in detail, but you’d be hard pressed to confuse them with anyone else.

Watain The Wild Hunt (Season of Mist/Century Media): In the battle of the most brutal, it’s hard to beat Sweden’s Watain. They just keep pushing further into the darkness. After last year’s Opus Diaboli DVD, it was difficult to imagine how much darker or heavier they could get, but they managed to mangle expectations like so much dead meat. Here’s the absolutely perfect video for The Wild Hunt‘s “Outlaw”:

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My Bloody Valentine mbv (mbv): My Bloody Valentine finally followed up on their genre-defying and defining classic, Loveless (1992), with mbv. Like Wire’s Change Becomes Us, mbv is an amalgam of old and new recordings, some reworked from rough drafts done during their demise in the mid-1990s. With nine songs total, mbv is a trilogy of trilogies. It hangs together as a whole, but one can easily discern three movements. Three floes in the waves. After 21 years, this was possibly the first record lauded as much for not existing as it was upon its release. One thing’s still for damn sure: No one does this sound better than My Bloody Valentine.

Light Bearer Silver Tongue (Halo of Flies): Light Bearer has been not-so-quietly building a body of work worthy of the most discriminate collectors. Silver Tongue is the second of a four-record concept called the Æsahættr Tetralogy. If feminism writ its largest could be an anti-religion, Light Bearer is writing it that large, chapter and verse.

Altar of Plagues Teethed Glory and Injury (Profound Lore): The last word from a band that deserved to be heard much more. Like their American peers Falls of Rauros, Panopticon, Wolves in the Throne Room, and Deafheaven, Ireland’s Altar of Plagues was pushing traditional Black Metal into new territories, and Teethed Glory and Injury is their best statement of purpose yet. R.I.P., A.o.P. Here’s the clip for “God Alone”:

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Others worthy of mention and attention: Portal Vexovoid (Profound Lore), Russian Circles Memorial (Sargent House), Nails Abandon All Life (Southern Lord), Lumbar The First and Last Days of Unwelcome (Southern Lord), Medicine To the Happy Few (Captured Tracks), Run the Jewels Run the Jewels (Fool’s Gold), Palms Palms (Ipecac), Vhol Vhol (Profound Lore), Wolves in the Throne Room BBC Session 2011 Anno Domini (Southern Lord), God is an Astronaut Origins (Rocket Girl Label), and Pelican Forever Becoming (Southern Lord).

November 29, 2013

Swarm Cities: The Future of Human Hives

The densely populated spaces of our built environment have been slowly redefining themselves. In 1981 there were the nine nations of North America. In 1991 the edge cities emerged. In 2001 we witnessed the worst intentions of a tightly networked community that lacked physical borders, what Richard Norton calls a “feral city.” From flash mobs to terrorist cells, communities can now quickly toggle between virtual and physical organization.

"Ephemicropolis" by Peter Root — “Ephemicropolis” by Peter Root

The city, as a form of the body politic, responds to new pressures and irritations by resourceful new extensions always in the effort to exert staying power, constancy, equilibrium, and homeostasis.
— Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

According to Joel Garreau (1991), an edge city is one that is “perceived by the population as one place” (p. 7), which, like neighborhoods, are staunchly identified with and defended by their residents, resisting outside influence. Conversely, one of the key insights in Richard Florida’s latest book, The Great Reset (Harper, 2010) is that rapid transit increases the exchange of ideas between such areas, thereby spurring innovation (Where the car used to provide this mass connection, it now hinders it). Deleuze called these areas “any-space-whatever,” but the space in his view is only important for the connections it facilitates. Adam Greenfeld (2013) writes that “the important linkages aren’t physical but those made between ideas, technical systems and practices.” After all, the first condition for a smart city is “a world-class broadband infrastructure” (Townsend, 2013, p.194). Connection is key.

Urban planner Kevin Lynch (1976) writes, “Our senses are local, while our experience is regional” (p. 10). In Great American City (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Robert J. Sampson argues for behavior based on our sense of local roots. The neighborhood effect is sort of a structuration between the individual and the network, the local and the global (cf. Giddens, 1984). The neighborhood is where the boundaries matter. It’s where human perception binds us within borders, where nodes are landmarks in a physical network, not connections in the cloud.

There are patterns because we try to find them. A desperate attempt at order because we can’t face the terror that it might be all random. — Lauren Beukes, The Shining Girls

Lynch called cities, “systems of access that pass through mosaics of territory” (1976, p. 21). In Out of the Mountains (Oxford University Press, 2013), David Kilcullen defines four global factors determining the future of such mosaics of territory: population growth, urbanization, littoralization, and connectedness. As more and more people copulate and populate the planet, they are doing so in bigger cities, near the water, and with more connectivity than ever. Basically the future of human hives is crowded, coastal, connected, and complex.

Today, we are witnessing the rise of swarm publics, highly unstable constellations of temporary alliances that resemble a public sphere in constant flux; globally mediated flash mobs that never meet, fuelled by sentiment and affect, escaping fixed capture.
— Eric Kluitenberg, Delusive Spaces

These “swarm cities,” as I call them, are only as physical as they need to be. And, as connected as they are, are also only as cohesive as they need to be. But the networked freedom to live and work anywhere doesn’t always make the neighborhood irrelevant, it often makes it that much more important.

References:

Beukes, Lauren. (2013). The Shining Girls: A Novel. New York: Mulholland Books, p. 324.

Florida, Richard. (2010). The Great Reset. New York: Harper.

Garreau, Joel. (1981). The Nine Nations of North America. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Garreau, Joel. (1991). Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. New York: Doubleday.

Giddens, Anthony. (1984). The Constitution of Society. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.

Greenfield, Adam. (2013). Against the Smart City. New York: Do Projects.

Kilcullen, David. (2013). Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kluitenberg, Eric. (2008). Delusive Spaces: Essays on Culture, Media and Technology. New York: NAi/DAP. Inc., p. 285.

Lynch, Kevin. (1976). Managing the Sense of a Region. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

McLuhan, Marshall. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Houghton-Mifflin, p. 98.

Sampson, Robert J. (2013). Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Townsend, Anthony M. (2013). Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

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Special thanks to Scott Smith of Changeist, who posted a “smart cities” reading list on Twitter a couple of weeks ago. Much of the recent reading I’ve done on the topic came from that list.

November 14, 2013

Johnny Ciggs: Gritty City Cesspool [by Mike Daily]

“Music is pretty much the only thing that has ever mattered in my life,” says Johnny Ciggs, a major member of the Gritty City Family. I was introduced to this creative crew of rappers and producers by my man Tim Baker over at SYFFAL. He sent me the clip for “Hunnid Dolla Bills” by Fan Ran, Skweeky Watahfawls, and the dude Johnny Ciggs [embedded below]. I’ve been following the fam ever since. Johnny’s “Write Like the First Day” (featuring Fan Ran) off of his 21 Tracks About Malt Liquor, Fat Asses, and Other Ill Shit mixtape has been my go-to hype song for a minute now. Vee Aye All Day.

The following interview was conducted by my close friend and colleague Mike Daily with photos by Sirus the Virus. — Roy C.

Johnny Ciggs

Johnny Ciggs and the Gritty City Family from Richmond, Virginia are killin’ it. That’s what I heard from my professor Roy Christopher, so I followed up on it. I liked much of what I heard and saw. They rock shows, throw backyard pool parties and close bars—literally, as key members of the crew serve alcohol to make a living. The rawness is real. All too real, at times. In Fall 2013, I picked up a few CDs direct from Johnny Ciggs as he was passing through Portland on a road trip and conducted the following interview with him.

Mike Daily: I like the video that shows you guys bootlegging power from your neighbors’ house with the extension cord.

Johnny Ciggs: [Laughs.] Yeah. That was funny. We didn’t have the money to pay our electric bill for like two months. I was sayin’ to Sirus [the Virus], “We gotta pay that bill, man.” And he was like, “Yeah, I know. We should do that.” We just kept sayin’ that like every other day for two months. I woke up that Monday and my clock was off and I was like, “Why is my clock off?” For a while there–me and Sirus livin’ together—we were both makin’ no money at all. I can’t remember what song it is—I think it’s on Toilet Wine—I talked about splittin’ ramen noodles on the kitchen floor because we didn’t have any furniture and all we had was a pack of ramen noodles. I think the thought of bills—now that we’re makin’ a little more money—scares us still. We act like we’re still broke like that.

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MD: You said “makin’ a little more money.” Is that from music?

JC: No, I wish. We actually just got lucky and got a good bartending gig at a good bar in town. We were both servers for a while but we were barely scrapin’ by. We knew all the bartenders at a bar down the street and Sirus was lookin’ for a job. He got one up there and then got me a job up there. I don’t make much money off the music itself but I make money off the merchandise like t-shirts and hoodies. I don’t think it would be enough to live off of but it’s just nice to get a little bit, so we can buy supplies like the new mic we need, CD cases…stuff like that.

MD: Is that where it’s at now with music in general? Shows and merch over music sales?

JC: Yeah. Especially at the level we’re at right now. We’ve got a pretty decent local following. Instead of thinking that we’re owed something at the level we’re at now, we just want to get people to hear us, so we’ll go hand out CDs for free, hang out with people and find out what kind of stuff they’re into. We’re out around town all the time so we’re basically working on connecting our faces to the brand. We’d be foolish to try and sell our CDs for 15 bucks or something. That’s how you turn people away. We’re trying to bring people in. New music is everywhere. You have to give people a reason to care and separate you from the rest. Where music is at right now–where everything’s free and there’s so much stuff and the whole scene is watered down by the internet and everything–it’s really hard to ask—at least in my opinion—to ask for money, when you’re just tryin’ to promote yourself. I spent like 300 bucks gettin’ these CDs printed for the trip. I’d rather do that–that’s a few bar tabs. I’d rather just stay in a few nights here and there to get the CD out, you know, than spend 300 bucks for a headache.

MD: In that “Power Outage” video, there’s a BMX bike sitting there. Whose is that?

JC: That’s Pandemic’s. He rides that around town. It’s the worst bike in the world. I had to ride it to work one day. It’s terrible. The seat’s super low and the bike’s just tiny in general. It doesn’t ride like a normal BMX bike. It rides like no bike I’ve ever ridden before in my life.

MD: Does it have brakes on it?

JC: No.

MD: Do you guys skate?

JC: Not all of us. I came up as a big skateboarder. I’d ride skateboards ever since I was a little kid, and then startin’ when I was like 14, I really started gettin’ into it. I still skateboard here and there—mostly just mini-ramp. Not as much as I used to. My passion kinda died out a little bit probably like three, four years ago. A lot of my friends who skated left Richmond, and then the mini-ramp that I would go to all the time, a tree fell through it, and it was just kinda like, “What the hell now?” Skweeky [Watahfawls] was a sick skateboarder in his day too, but he doesn’t skate much anymore either.

Johnny Ciggs in the studio.

MD: That’s right around the time you must have started rapping.

JC: Yeah, so it just kinda worked out. I still like to skate when I can–it’s just hard to do. I work like 12 hours a day and then the rest of the time is all spent recording, writing, rapping or whatever the hell we’re doing.

MD: The first raps you made, how did you know how to make bars and choruses?

JC: Well, I’ve been a drummer my whole life. I started drummin’ when I was a little kid. I just understood it. I didn’t even really understand how to write bars necessarily at the time, but just like I do these days, I basically used every syllable as a drum hit–that way I would stay on time. My first verses would just round out to 16 somehow by chance. Sixteen is the basic length of a rap verse. It just kinda worked. It changed my writing once I realized how to count out the words by bars though. With that, I was able to write more cohesive verses and build my own formula on how a basic Ciggs verse should be put together. What gave me more trouble was taming my voice and getting a smoother flow. When it comes to hooks, I hate them. I can write them, but I don’t enjoy it. That’s Sirus’ department. He loves writing hooks.

MD: You said you favor flow over lyricism, but you do have some lyrical lines.

JC: Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, I do have the ability to get lyrical. The fellas always make fun of me when I start makin’ mythology metaphors and stuff like that. I just don’t want it to sound like rappers trying to sound overly lyrical. That just bothers me. It didn’t always but now it just really bothers me. I like there to be a little style. A lot of rappers who are trying to be too lyrical will come out with some seriously intelligent shit, but it will have no personality and will be the most boring shit you’ve ever heard in your life. I feel like there’s certain rappers—who I won’t name names—that could be great rappers. They’re already great, but they could be even better if they just dumbed it down a little. Not even “dumb it down”—that’s a bad way to put it. But just not try so hard and make it a little more natural. I don’t want to hear what a rapper thinks he should spit or what he or she thinks will blow away their listener. I just want to hear rappers spit what they spit. That’s all I do. The lyrical ability comes naturally to me. I worry more about rockin’ on a track. And the only way to really rock in my book is to have a nasty flow. Peace to Treach.

MD: Do you do storytelling, would you say?

JC: That’s something I want to get back into. I used to do a lot of storytelling earlier on. On my first mixtape [21 Tracks About Malt Liquor, Fat Asses, and Other Ill Shit, May 2012], there’s a few stories. What I’ve heard is my greatest track ever is “Street Stories,” where I tell two stories with a middle verse from the homie Che Broadway. I really like storytelling. I’ve just kinda gotten away from it on what we’ve been workin’ on lately. I’m plannin’ on gettin’ back into that. The album I’ve been tryin’ to figure out how to put together, I think I finally got a feel for it. There’s gonna be a lot of storytelling on that one.

MD: When you say “tryin’ to figure out how to put together,” do you already have the beats in mind? Do you have the concept for the words?

JC: I’ve got so many beats for this album, it’s ridiculous, but I still need more. With Gritty City, the thing is there’s no politic’in’ your way into it: You gotta get down with us. We’re all really good friends. We all hang out all the time. It’s just been a rough year. We just lost another member of Gritty City, Joe Threat—Rest in Peace. And it’s just, you know, with stuff like that, it’s just been… This was supposed to be the year where we were gonna do 16 releases, and it hasn’t worked out. We’ve still been doin’ a lot, but there’s been other stuff gettin’ in the way. I just want to do an album that reflects on the lifestyle and things I’ve seen—more than just the punchline rap and stuff like that. Which is fun, but I feel like people wonder where exactly everything we talk about comes from. I just want to more blatantly go out there and put it out there and talk about the life we lead, and reflect on that—get into my head about thoughts I have, doubts I have, the whole bipolar nature of my existence. I want this album to have more to offer and be more personal than my past releases. I feel a lot right now, I just gotta figure out how to say it. Don’t worry though. There will still be plenty of the classic Johnny Ciggs rawness on there, too.

MD: What do you mean by “lifestyle”?

JC: I don’t even know how to explain it without sounding like we’re totally out of our minds. We’re just fuckin’ crazy. [Laughs.] I’ll put it like my homie Seap One (R.I.P.) used to say before he passed: “Lemme tell you bout this life…” If anyone ever asked him what he meant, he would laugh and shake his head and repeat himself. Let’s just say we have a good time.

MD: You guys work full-time jobs and you’re prolific, making music every chance you get. That’s “lifestyle”, right?

JC: Yeah, that’s lifestyle. It’s just what goes on. We talk about the way things have happened in our lives and everything. We took the harder route, maybe you could say. We all have had our problems with just bein’ stupid kids and gettin’ in trouble. We’ve seen friends pass from drugs. Some people have recovered from drugs and now they’re doin’ this. We all drink too much and stuff like that. And just everything that goes along with that—the crazy women that come around. Just…whatever. I mean, I can’t even really explain it in a sentence. That’s why I’m trying to figure out how I’m supposed to do it—back to the original question—I can’t figure out how to say it. Fan Ran said it the best. He’s like, “What you gotta understand is 99% of people ain’t as crazy as we are.”

MD: How many guys are in Gritty City?

JC: There’s eight of us total, including Seap and Joe. Delta Automatik, Skweeky Watahfawls, Pandemic, Fan Ran, Sirus the Virus and myself. Those are the artists, but we’ve got friends all over the town like the Divine Prophets guys. Fan Ran is in Divine Prophets as well, which is an old Richmond group. I don’t know if you all have heard of them, but that was like the big Richmond hip-hop group, forever. And they actually just lost their producer this year as well: R.I.P. Chadrach. We hang out with those guys all the time. I don’t know if you heard in the songs, we talk about Main Street Mafia. There’s a strip in Richmond where it’s like the dive bar scene, and we all just hang out around there and get smashed and make rap music. That’s basically it. Then we also got extended fam like the homie Devious Kanevil, Oktober 9, The Fugitive 9 crew, which is family ties right there. We got members married to the same mob and shit: RT, BC Music First, Sleaze. There are a few rappers that show their face around the Gritty City house pretty regularly. We love all of them.

MD: How old are you?

JC: I’m 29.

MD: I first heard about you guys in a text that Roy Christopher sent me: “Check out Adam Zombie and The Gritty City Family (especially Skweeky Watahfawls and Johnny Ciggs): Richmond, VA is killing it.”

JC: [Laughs.] Skweeky Watahfawls is my favorite rapper. That dude is hilarious. What you gotta understand about Skweeky Watahfawls is: Skweeky Watahfawls is the biggest asshole on the face of the earth. He’s a douchebag, asshole, drunk piece of shit, and I love him. But he’s a fuckin’ dick. That’s what’s so funny…I feel like people appreciate him for his lyrics, but if you know that guy personally and you listen to some of the stuff he says, it is just the funniest shit you ever heard in your fuckin’ life. This is another one that’s just unexplainable in words. He is hilarious, his wit is incredible, he’s super smart and then on top of that, he’s just a fuckin’ dirtbag so it’s just like a perfect mix. He’s like a comedic rapper, in my mind. When me and him write together—we work on a lot of songs together—we’ll go line for line, just tryin’ to make each other laugh. And if we laugh the whole time we’re writin’ it, then it’s gonna be a good song. But back to the original question, yeah, Richmond, VA is killin’ it. There is a lot of good hip-hop happening and I’m honored to be able to say that I work closely with most of my favorite rappers in town. This city will be on the map here soon. Just wait.

MD: Does Skweeky have a solo album?

JC: He’s workin’ on it. We’re about halfway through. He was livin’ at my house before Seap was livin’ there and we were workin’ on his stuff pretty heavily, but then he moved and got a different job and things just changed. There’s been a lot of shiftin’ around lately. It kind of got put on hold but it’s gonna be real sweet. It’s good. He’s almost got more of like a Beastie Boys sound on it. Where other guys do more like hardcore and soulful hip-hop, his has got a few rock samples on there and things like that, but it just really works with the way he raps, so it’s good. It’s called Cocaine ‘n Demons. Keep your eyes peeled for that one.

[Note: As I was wrapping up the article, Johnny Ciggs said in a voicemail message: “I know your boy Roy Christopher and you had been askin’ about me and Skweeky Watahfawls and everything. I don’t know if y’all care but me and him in the past couple weeks started an album together. We’re about halfway done with it and just wanted to give y’all a heads up on that. It was actually kind of influenced by y’all though so we thank you for the compliments. We decided to run with it, do somethin’ together, so hopefully y’all will like that when it comes out here in the next couple of months.”]

MD: A friend of mine said that he considers himself one of a thousand rappers out there. I was really surprised to hear that because I think he’s a great artist. Do you think like that?

JC: You mean sayin’ that I’m just one of a thousand guys all tryin’ to do it?

MD: Yeah.

JC: I don’t really consider myself that way and I don’t consider really anybody in my group that way. I had trouble explainin’ the whole lifestyle thing, but it’s like…what we bring to the table is more than just like, you know, “Yo, I’m an MC, look how dope I am at rappin’.” It’s more than that. A huge part of it is really just personality. We’re not gangsta rappers and definitely not anything like all those club rappers out these days. We’re not doin’ that. We’re not really followin’ any sort of mold. We’re just touchin’ on what feels right, and I really do feel like it’ll help us stand out in time. There are thousands of other rappers out but a lot of them dudes are just boring. Even a lot of those “real hip-hop” rappers out these days are wack as fuck, even more wack than the music that they supposedly hate. We can rhyme, man. That’s one thing I know for sure. I’d put my team up against anyone. We are hip-hop, even when we’re drinkin’ bottles of Bud and listenin’ to hair metal. We’re original and anyone who crosses paths with us realizes it. We’re about to release some “day in the life” videos and cribs episodes and shit. We feel like we’ve done enough music–now we’re tryin’ to show people who we are. We don’t just make this shit up. People ask us, “Where do you come up with this shit?” I’m like, “I live it at my house. I just sit back and watch, if I’m lucky enough that night to not be directly involved. Some total fuckin’ weirdos come through there. And what happens next… It makes for some good rap music.”

MD: What’s it take to stand out now?

JC: I don’t know. Just somethin’ original. I don’t even know if what I do is actually original, but it’s fun and I never stray from being myself. Because of that, the product is what it is. I feel like our music is good on its own but I really do want to start puttin’ more faces to the names—gettin’ some more videos out there. Not just music videos. We’ve got video footage from the past three years of us just hangin’ out. I’ve got a video comin’ out that’s a day in the life of Joe Threat and Johnny Ciggs. Every day that we were able to hang out—like probably three days a week—he and I would get up, get some food, maybe go check out the swap or whatever, and then do a track, and then we’d go out to the bar and close the bar. It was just these crazy, super eventful days that we were doin’ every time he and I kicked it, for months. We were like, “We should videotape this.” So we did a day where we just basically videotaped ourselves all day on just a standard day that me and him would have. Just little things like that. I’m tryin’ to find ways to make us stand out as a crew of characters–not just another group of drunken rappers. Everybody’s funny, everybody’s got their own works, everybody’s got their own style. Everybody’s a general in their own way. The world must know about it.

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MD: How long has Sirus been writing?

JC: I don’t know…two years; three years? He started rapping because he was staying on my couch for a while and I was recording myself all the time. Next thing we knew we had some songs together. I’ve been rappin’ three-and-a-half years, so no longer than that. Sirus is like my best friend. I’ve known him for like 10 years. We used to beef over graffiti way back when we were livin’ a couple neighborhoods apart from one another. I like his stuff a lot. He’s got some real funny verses, which fits his style perfectly. When he first started rappin’, he didn’t even understand how to ride a beat. I’ve got Sirus verses that are just all over the place. He just stuck with it and now his shit’s nasty. I love seein’ that progression. He didn’t even ever really wanna be a rapper—-he just did it for fun–and he’s still havin’ fun with it. He’s made incredible progress. He’s dope now. He’s among the Virginia elite.

MD: What’s the story behind your track “Hunnid Dolla Bills”?

JC: It’s a beat that Fan Ran originally gave to somebody else and they never did anything with it. We were just sittin’ around my house—me, Skweeky and Ran—not really doin’ shit, and Ran was like, “You guys wanna write to this beat? I really like this beat. I wish that somebody would do somethin’ with it.” So we wrote to it. It was funny because Skweeky…that was when he first started workin’ with us, and that’s totally not his type of beat. He was like, “I can’t write to this shit.” He’s more into faster boom bap-type beats. He did it anyway. That was the second verse he did with us. He had just moved to Richmond. He killed it, too. Me and Ran came real correct on it and it just became a monster of a track. That track was a total accident and it’s our most popular joint. It blows my mind.

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MD: How popular is it? Did it get a lot of downloads?

JC: We don’t even have it up for download. I need to do that. We did that video just for fun. It was this hot-ass day. We were all hungover as hell and we went out and shot a video for it–just havin’ fun. That video… I haven’t checked it for a while, but it’s got 1500 views, which is probably the most views we have on any of our videos. Which I know is nothin’ in the grand scheme of things, but you know, I’ll take it. That video was the one that those guys at SYFFAL did a write-up on, and that was the first time we saw anybody from out of town talkin’ about our shit except for some people that we had met personally, but that’s different. They said they got it through that dude Roy Christopher. I don’t know, I guess people just like it. Alaska and Blockhead did a write-up of the pool party video, which had us all crackin’ up. Blockhead called us “suburban whigs,” and we were dyin’! It was funny as hell. That video was actually shot in our backyard in the city, where we live. I know who Blockhead is—that’s cool. He didn’t give us the best review, but at least he said somethin’… Even though his facts were mad twisted. Shout to SYFFAL.

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MD: Blockhead? The producer of Aesop Rock’s early stuff?

JC: I guess.

MD: I wrote to Roy Christopher and said that I wanted to get some Gritty City stuff on CD, but it seems that isn’t how you’re rolling for distro, unless it’s local. Roy wrote back, “Those guys don’t have money to make CDs!”

JC: [Laughs.] We have ways of making CDs but yeah, a lot of times it’ll be like just a few. And then we’ll get money together and do like a hundred copies of whatever’s newest. We got our little hustle for how we can get that cheap, so it works. But the only one we’ve ever done professionally was the Delta [Automatik] CD, the first one [The Resume]. We saved up for that for like two years, and then we realized gettin’ it professionally printed was expensive as hell and not worth it. So we’ve just been doin’ our own packaging now. Because like you said, it’s just a local thing. There’s no reason for our shit to be shrinkwrapped. Half the time when we’re givin’ out CDs, I’m givin’ ‘em to someone at a bar. They say, “I’m gonna listen to this on the ride home!” And hopefully they do. Drunk people don’t need to be unwrapping shrinkwrap while driving. But yeah, it doesn’t need to be like that anymore, because it’s all digital now, which I hate to see because I’m a collector of music myself. I don’t download anything, except I’ll download my own stuff just to have on my iPod or whatever–if I even remember to do that. I’ve got like one or two of our CDs on my iPod. It is really sad to see that that’s goin’ out, but nobody really seems to care except for me and I guess you and maybe like five other people I know, tops. But no, it really is too bad. I like hard copies. Like I said, I’m a collector. I’ve got thousands of CDs and records that I’ve just been collectin’ my whole life. I refuse to not release hard copies.

MD: Can you name some stuff that you’re stoked that you have in your collection that you revisit and listen to for inspiration?

JC: Wu-Tang Clan’s like my favorite group ever. Them or Mobb Deep were both like neck-and-neck. I think Wu-Tang’s got the upper hand. I could go on forever, man. LL Cool J is the greatest rapper of all time. AZ, Nas, guys like that are right up there too. Cam’ron is my shit. I got so many hip-hop CDs, it’s out of control. I recently revisited Motley Crue stuff. It had been a couple years since I really got into them. I love Motley Crue–up until the late ‘80s. I lost interest, let’s say, after probably their fourth or fifth CD, if it even goes that far. The stuff that people don’t realize I liked, which kind of makes people laugh, is I absolutely love Luther Vandross and R Kelly. I just can’t help it. Bobby Womack, Poet 1 and 2. Awesome. Barry White. Marvin Gaye. He’s great. Dokken, Van Halen, ZZ Top. It doesn’t stop. Music is pretty much the only thing that has ever mattered in my life.

MD: What stuff do you currently have your eye out for?

JC: Fred the Godson. He’s the nastiest rapper out right now–new rapper. That guy… I slept on him forever. My roommate would play his stuff and I just didn’t even really listen–I don’t know why. And then the other day when I was in L.A., they had a Fred the Godson and the Heatmakers CD. The Heatmakers I’ve always loved—-beats they made over the past probably like 10 years now. And I was like, “Alright, I’ll buy it. It’s only six bucks. Whatever.” And I just loved it. And then I went and revisited the mix tape that Sirus had been playin’, and it’s just nasty. That guy’s just real clever. He’s got good concepts, good flow… He’s a good rapper. That’s who I’m checkin’ for these days. I just got the new Alchemist and Prodigy CD—-Prodigy and Mobb Deep–and that’s a great CD. Besides that, when it comes to new hip-hop, I’m not really checkin’ for too many besides Raekwon. Raekwon is the king of rap music and no one notices for some reason. No one is doin’ what Rae does. He’s everywhere and he’s not showing any sign of slowing down. But yeah, rap ain’t offerin’ me much else these days. I’m not tryin’ to hate on anybody. I’m just listenin’ more for old soul and hair metal. [Laughs.]

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Bonus Track: The Sickness of Seap by Seap One: “Seap One’s one and only album, the album that released a couple weeks before he passed—The Sickness of Seap–is on there and that album is fuckin’ bananas. It’s a look into his life, his problems, his shortcomings. It’s a pretty sad album but it is beautiful at the same time. It’s an album about depression, drug use, jail, wishing he could do certain things and stuff like that. It was an honor to be a part of that one. I didn’t know we were gonna lose him right after that but the whole process was great and it was awesome workin’ with him.”—Johnny Ciggs

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Contributor Bio:

Mike Daily is a novelist, journalist, zinemaker, spoken words performer and co-creator of the Plywood Hoods freestyle BMX team. He lives in Oregon. Daily is at work on his third novel, Moon Babes of Bicycle City, which will be published by Portland’s Lazy Fascist Press.

November 10, 2013

Shooting Starlets: Girls Gone Wildin’

The transition from adolescence to adulthood is rarely an easy one. As we watch Miley Cyrus shed her youth in real-time, I am reminded of a young Drew Barrymore, coming out of rehab for the first time at age 13. The movies Spring Breakers and The Bling Ring represent the grown-up debuts of beloved childhood Hollywood princesses, Selena Gomez and Emma Watson respectively. The two films are also similar for their adult themes and media commentary. No one would say that a refusal to grow up is endearing, but resistance is fertile. There’s nothing quite as cool as youthful nihilism — especially when wielded by young women. Live fast, die young: Bad girls do it well.

Spring Breakers

The similarities here remind me of when in 2007 the Coen Brothers and Paul Thomas Anderson both did adaptations—both camps tend to write their own scripts—of stories set in West Texas. No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood are companion pieces in the same way that Spring Breakers and The Bling Ring are, but here the ladies are the ones with the guns.

Spring Breakers‘ heist scene might be the best few minutes of cinema I’ve seen in years. Brit (Ashley Benson) and Candy (Vanessa Hudgens) rob the Chicken Shack restaurant with a hammer and a squirt gun while Cotty (Rachel Korine) circles the building in the getaway car with the camera (and us) riding shotgun. Our limited vantage point gives the scene an added tension because though we are at a distance, it feels far from safe. Much like the security camera footage of Columbine and Chronicle, and the camera-as-character of Chronicle and Cloverfield, we receive a crippled information flow while experiencing total exposure. Their mantra: “Just pretend it’s a fucking video game. Act like you’re in a movie or something.”

Alien (James Franco) arrives as the girls’ douche ex machina, an entity somewhere between True Romance‘s Drexl Spivey (1993), Kevin Federline, and Riff Raff, the latter of whom is supposedly suing over the similarities. He bails them out of jail after a party gone astray and takes them home to his arsenal. What could possibly go wrong?

Spring Breakers' Alien

Selena Gomez does the least behaving badly, but her role as Faith is still a long way from Alex Russo or Beezus. As she tells her grandmother over the phone,

I think we found ourselves here. We finally got to see some other parts of the world. We saw some beautiful things here. Things we’ll never forget. We got to let loose. God, I can’t believe how many new friends we made. Friends from all over the place. I mean everyone was so sweet here. So warm and friendly. I know we made friends that will last us a lifetime. We met people who are just like us. People the same as us. Everyone was just trying to find themselves. It was way more than just having a good time. We see things different now. More colors, more love, more understanding… I know we have to go back to school, but we’ll always remember this trip. Something so amazing, magical. Something so beautiful. Feels as if the world is perfect. Like it’s never gonna end.

Spring break is heavy, y’all. “I grew up in Nashville, but I was a skater, so I was skateboarding during spring break,” writer/director Harmony Korine told Interview. “Everyone I knew would go to Daytona Beach and the Redneck Riviera and just fuck and get drunk — you know, as a rite of passage. I never went. I guess this is my way of going.” Ultimately the movie illustrates Douglas Adams’ dictum that the problem with a party that never ends is that ideas that only seem good at parties continue to seem like good ideas.

Speaking of bad ideas, Sophia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, which is based on a real group of fame-obsessed teenagers, is full of them. Not since Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen (2003; which features Spring Breakers‘ Hudgens) has a group of teens been so overtaken by expensive clothes, handbags, and bad behavior. This crew of underage criminals uses internet maps and celebrity news to find out where their targets (e.g., Paris Hilton, Audrina Partridge, Megan Fox, Orlando Bloom, et al.) live and when they will be out of town. Once caught, they seem more concerned with what their famous victims think than with the charges brought against them [trailer runtime: 1:46]:

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It would be remiss of me not to note that two of my favorite composers, Cliff Martinez and Brian Reitzell respectively, put the music together for these movies. The mood of Spring Breakers is mostly set by Martinez in collaboration with Skrillex, Gucci Mane (who’s also in the movie), and Waka Focka Flame, among others. The Bling Ring features a mix of Hip-hop, Krautrock, and electronic pop that reads more eclectic than it actually sounds: Sleigh Bells, Kanye West, CAN, M.I.A., Azeailia Banks, Klaus Schultze, Frank Ocean, and so on. Discounting the importance of music in creating the pressure that permeates these films would be an oversight.

Though these films are both cautionary tails of an extreme nature, they prove that caution isn’t cool. Youth might be wasted on the young, but our heroes don’t concern themselves with consequences.