Less
More
Archive for February, 2008
Here.
Cool, no?
Paper Planes has been a pretty cool mainstream crossover track. On the Homeland Security Remixes EP it is redone by DFA, Afrikan Boy, Diplo, and others. I bittorrented it here. Also, the Remix For The Children Of Adrock.
Iraq…
This is a very good thing.
New Feature… !PEOPLE!
Every once and a while I’ll take a look at someone who is truly changing the game and making something decent. The first !People! feature focuses on Anthony Volodkin, the genius behind my current obsession, The Hype Machine. So the Hype Machine has been around for a little bit, but for all of you who are unaware, it basically takes a look at thousands of music blogs and displays to you some of the more oft-posted songs. I remember hearing about the idea of the Hype Machine a few years back but always thought that it would be some shitty web 2.0 pipe dream that never quite lived up to its completely unrealistic expectations… so wrong… so wrong… Instead its amazing. The interface is really clean and simple (deceptively 2.0 for a 3.0 site; anyone? anyone?), the blog list is gargantuan (see here), and the programming that supposedly brings you the best new music from all these disparate music blogs, really does.
SO, this is really cool in of itself… but it gets a lot better. You can subscribe to different rss feeds via iTunes, and then you can simply download the songs into your library. whoa. This is Web 3.0 done so god-awfully right.
Also you gotta love the backlash, which I shouldn’t even go into, but the two sentence version is that all these mp3 blogs are like GOSH! We give this music CONTEXT (i.e. we tell you why its good/why it sucks) and all this site does is blindly aggregate mp3s, BLINDLY AGGREGATE MP3S!!!… Remove pole from ass. Even if you are some kind of mp3 blog purist, which I didn’t even know existed before this Hype Machine backlash, you should still be able to appreciate a new way of getting music to hoi poi (even if it eats up some of your bandwidth).
So, thank you Anthony Volodkin, thank you. From the bottom of my heart, you have made my life better.
NBC 10 video here.
Volodkin’s tumblr account.
I’m sorry. Too many Kanye posts. But this is too good. Director: Spike Jonze…
Classic.
Everyone and their mother blogged about this when it came out earlier last year. Then something terrible happened and my computer crashed. Lost everything. Stereogum took this mix off of their site so I was left without it for a while. But I finally found a place to download the thing. In case you missed it… get it here.
Cool video interview with Uniqlo founder Tadashi Yanai. The first part is a sit-down interview. The second is a walk through of one of Uniqulo’s show rooms in Japan, where the company was started in ‘84.
Three things; 1. the Gap comparisons… kinda’ wierd.
2. Much more apt would be an American Apparel (or, to a lesser extent H&M) comparison; The anti-brand, basics, quality (though not in the case of H&M).
3. I love his skinny jeans to wide jeans prediction. I don’t know Yanai, I don’t know.
There is also a interview transcript here.
An NYT article here.
via psfk.
So I posted a similarly titled “American Apparel Racist?” article a while back, which gets probably more hits than anything else that has been on this blog. The post was… I don’t know… (check it out here)… inflammatory? No. Not really… ummm… The picture was very questionable. That’s all I’ll say. And certainly many people felt strongly about it.
Anyway, so I had been reading through this new Vice photo book and I thought to do some Vice research online. I came across this NYTimes article from 2003… Below are some quotes that I was totally unaware of.
Few of Vice’s fans or customers seem to realize just how deeply hostile Mr. McInnes is to the liberal live-and-let-live ethos of traditional bohemian culture. It is a fair bet that a majority of the downtown population opposed the Iraq war and dislikes the policies of George W. Bush. But in an interview Mr. McInnes advocated changing New York license plates to read ”Liberalism Gone Amok.” Last month, he wrote an article for Patrick Buchanan in The American Conservative boasting of having converted Vice readers to conservatism.
He actually leans much further to the right than the Republican Party. His views are closer to a white supremacist’s. ”I love being white and I think it’s something to be very proud of,” he said. ”I don’t want our culture diluted. We need to close the borders now and let everyone assimilate to a Western, white, English-speaking way of life.”
In an interview in The New York Press last year, Mr. McInnes’s views came through in the coarse ethnic expressions he used in saying how pleased he was that most Williamsburg hipsters are white. As a result, he became the focus of a letter-writing campaign by a black reader. Vice apologized for Mr. McInnes’s comments.
Some people assume that such remarks are posturing, akin to the ethnic and anti-gay slurs that pepper the pages of Vice, establishing its rebel credentials. They argue that for 20-somethings raised in a multicultural society, ethnic slurs — part of contemporary street patois — do not have the sting they do for older generations.
“I don’t want our culture diluted”?!?!
Buh????
What an ass. I never get this vibe from hipsterdom but this is really disappointing. He just seems like this angry white kid that wants to react against a world that has only been in his corner. Fortunately, just last week the guy left Vice (Gawker article here). Lets hope his spirit leaves with him.
A buncha’ new stuff at Chuck Anderson’s site, NoPattern. Getting a little pricey, but always really nice work.
