Tag Archives: Video

Chap Hop & Race

Music, Pals, Video, , , , ,

Appropriation and remix is how we make new things. Chap hop is hip hop plus anachronistic victoriana. I first heard Professor Elemental’s “A Cup of Brown Joy” and it blew me away. Great rhymes, great subject, great presentation.

White rappers always face the history of rap music. It started as black music, just like rock. And just like early rockers, most white rappers adopt the poses and styles of black rappers that came before them. I like that chap hop borrows from hip-hop, a black music tradition, and adapts it in a fresh way. They take the structure and the mechanics, but substitute an entirely different culture and origin myth.

Good appropriation and remix cites sources, calls back to the places it came from. I like Mr B the Gentleman Rhymber’s “Straight Out of Surrey”. Totally it’s own thing, but totally tipping a bowler to the origin.

Like most rappers and rockers, these guys are presenting a facade, they are concerned with keeping it straight. But these guys aren’t trying to maintain “authenticity”. They aren’t trying to make their image fool you.

Hey, did you catch that cameo by Mr B? His rough treatment by Professor Elemental is another part of the callback. Rap battles and diss songs aren’t going to be the same in chap hop, but here is the Professor calling out Mr. B for biting his style.

Yeah – the whole battle is a great way for them to generate interest and sell albums… But isn’t that what most of the great rap rivalries turn into?

The thing that irks me about this fun and silly genre is that it takes rap completely from black people. Just like white people who loved black rock eventually turned it into a white only club, these guys have made chap hop representative of the ethnic monoculture of the victorians – white white white. If the whole thing is a laugh and no one is pretending this is really the 1800s, can we welcome in some color? Hopefully its a matter of time till we get some more chap hop performers – and some of them might bring in a different culture.

I’ll leave you with a great rap battle mixdown between the two:

Years of play

Music, Pals, Video, ,

I really like this live performance by Grimes. She sits on the floor, twists knobs, taps buttons, and moans into a mic like it was the most casual, natural thing in the world. It looks like you could sit beside her, turn the knobs a bit differently, tap other buttons and you could make a different song.

The years of play, of experimenting and trying are covered in her ease. It’s like watching a great athlete at play on her chosen field.

Make a new thing from that old thing

Music, Pals, Video, , , ,

Here’s the big argument why copyright should be off by default: the world makes more interesting things when sharing is on by default.

First up is Kutiman, who took the little demos that folks upload to youtube and turned it into a whole album, called Thru You.

PLEASE go check out the rest of that album.

The opposite side of that is fans love doing remixes and covers of the musicians they love. Then they share those covers. That is how culture is supposed to work. Sometimes the artists freak out and try to stop that sharing. Some artists say thank you. Some artists do even better and actually make a transformative work out what their fans did. I don’t know of anyone who has done this better than Gotye with Somebodies:

For more, watch Everything is a Remix.Here’s episode one.

Everything is a Remix Part 1 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

 

— Whoops! I’ve been trying to do a music video Monday thing – looks like I scheduled this post for the wrong day.

Glenn Beck and the new reality of video distribution

Incentives, Pals, User Experience, Video, , , , ,

My man Jamie Dubs did a great talk at the XOXO fest on how Glenn Beck is the unloved rockstar of the new media landscape. Jamie did the amazing VHX.TV, worked on Add-Art, started Know Your Meme, led the Internet Famo Class… He’s the Kevin Bacon of my internet, but everyone has a max Jamie number of 3.

Anyway, get your learn on:

Why aren’t all music videos this good?

Art, Music, Software, Video, , , ,

New media is different than old media. Books are great, and I love them – but hypertext is way way better. I love music videos – they are great, but why aren’t more of them using the amazing new tools available to us.

I want more music videos like this:

Johnny Cash – Ain’t No Grave.
This is the king I think. The song is worth it. The artist Johnny Cash – nuff said. This is a crowd-sourced participatory art music video that you can swim through in multiple dimensions.
They took a music video and gave everyone who loves Johnny Cash a way to pay tribute. Go on there and you can draw a frame from the music video. You can rate the frames of others. And then you can push your way through the dimensional space of all this and watch the video with highest rated frames or most abstract frames or any of the other dimensions they’ve carved up. It’s a beauty and executed perfectly. I hope everyone clicks through to this.

Arcade Fire – The Wilderness Downtown
This was the first new media music video I heard about. Couldn’t get a browser to run it for the longest time. It pushed the limits so far and does so many things.

Watch the video. Birds fly through all the different frames. You run along the streets where you grow up, you write a letter to yourself and watch it grow like trees. A dream.

Yung Jake – http://e.m-bed.de/d
I’m not as much of a fan of this one because the music isn’t as good, the rhymes are sloppy. This perfectly marries the content to the form though. It’s about being shared, being embedded, the new narrative of music distribution. And it shows as it tells.

RO.ME – 3 Dreams of Black
Can’t watch it – don’t have WebGL. Supposed to be good.

Ellie Goulding – Lights
Ditto.

Chris Bathgate – Big Ghost
This is the counterpoint. See, this doesn’t feel like a new video. This feels like it’s just a new trick on an old concept. 3D is so hyped and so pointless most of the time. I mean seriously, BOOKS tell stories. We don’t need 3D unless it adds something.

Alt-J

Music, Video,

I have to share this new band I’m into. First watch the best new video I’ve seen in dog years.

I KNOW. Shows you that Memento could have been a hell of a lot shorter.

But that’s not my favorite song. Here’s the one that Chris and Sheep Robby have both picked up on:

Here’s a quieter one, but still great.

So this is just a post to let you know that I am now subscribed to the alt-j channel on youtube and http://soundcloud.com/alt-j/. And I’ll be seeing them live next time they are in town. I have it on excellent authority that they know how to play instruments in front of a crowd. Go ye forth and listen and share!