OK. So we know that the 90s are the new 80s, and now that it’s the first crispy day of fall, I’m ready to see if 2 classic brands come back 100% in hipster/rapster style: Champion logo sweatshirts and Starter Jackets. Internets, what do you think?
And – JSmooth has for us a great note about Hipster Rap:
The 2 strongest troupes from the MTV hit America’s Best Dance Crew, Jabbawockeez and Kaba Modern, help to illustrate that US BBoying is now very much ‘an Asian thing’. While Asian agency in hip-hop has been big since the late 90’s (turntablism + sneaker culture being the strongest), it’s now gonna go pop on the mass culture radar. Soon a raft of them cool brands will have ads featuring Asian breakers, a new move in representational politics for the danceform.
(the dad in the above McDonalds spot is not just wondering “What is my kid doing?” but “Who is this ad reaching?”)
In addition to the MTV show, the sharp doco Planet BBoy takes this conversation onto the global level, examining different crews from around the world. Witness a clip on the recent Korean BBoy explosion:
In all honesty, the last thing I want to see is more hip-hop used in adverts. In the 80’s, BBoys and breaking were overexposed in pop culture, and the form went back underground. Twenty years hence, with this ‘new’ BBoy writ large, I do wonder what connections (or caricatures) will come from Madison Avenue.
(photog credit)
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6/10/08 Model Minority?
smrtgrl Kat Hunt and I were talking about the newnew blog Postcards From Yo Momma – could it be the next
Stuff White People Like? Maybe so, maybe not, as a friend of Kat’s declared Momma passe….after two days, an ohso New York thing to do. We might be the fastest moving creatures on earth, but does this always lead to innovation?
Pre-2.0, part of being a New Yorker was about knowing secrets. In the era of Flavorpill, Thrillist, etc.. anyone can paratroop into town and dial into what was once clandestine. The counterpunch to this is a spike in secret clubs/bars – Milk+Honey, The Back Room, Old Rabbit Club – and guerilla dining units. Yet their currency is one of quick cool, not really innovative culture. Is our fairtown flatlining or just us types? Or is this question passe?
Like the artworld moving from Paris to NYC in the 1950’s, I wonder if BRIC will come to the cultural fore. TATA buying luxury while making the $2500 car. Baile Funk influencing Diplo then to Wburg. Moscow’s billionaires. China PWNing the web. In 2058, is there gonna be a new New York?
*my spies now tell me Momma’s got a book deal
As piracy remixes the old business models of music and film, the money ‘lost’ doesn’t disappear, it just gets spent elsewhere.
When I was a teenager, I’d spend money on music in the act of fleshing out my personality – (both publicly and privately) – Rolling Stones/Tribe Called Quest/Blues Traveller, etc… Each $12 CD added what I felt was another aspect to myself. And since the 90’s things done changed – thanks to the internets, a kid can change his entire music collection (and subsequent claims to identity groups) in an afternoon and at no cost. With the decrease in cost of music, so decreases the social value one can gain from association. Sacrifice of money is no longer part of the equation music = identity.
So where does the money + value go? While music can easily be ripped to possess, this is not yet possible with clothing or aspects of industrial and artistic design. Digital as we are, these products are still quite tangible, and I think now carry an even greater value in our quest to claim individuality. Witness the rise of Threadless and Etsy. Nowadays there are far more subsets and identity groups amongst teens – and the nuances are oft fleshed out via the visual language of clothes and accessories. Well, where is this heading?
In the 80s, Punk and Hip-Hop empowered everyone to become a musician. Cool kids were in bands. In the 90s, Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez did this for filmmaking – cool kids rocked a camera. Next? Premiering at SXSW, the doco Beautiful Losers, is a window into the world of the DIY artists that coalesced toward the end of the 90s. While once they were fringe, they have since become mainstream, and the new cool sees them kids rocking photoshop and silkscreens like an electric guitar.
Ed. note: corrections appended below.
One doubts that the home of the Whopper would have much client base in common with the paper of record’s Sunday magazine. Yet as a matter of course both Burger King and the New York Times Magazine stand behind the same face. Let me clarify. My first mentor in design once explained to me that a typeface was called such because, like a face, each one is unique. Of course, one could reliably say the same about snowflakes or tigers and still not be able to tell the difference between them even while having one’s arm gnawed off in Siberia, but the point stands. In the case of typefaces, a small subset of creative people cares very deeply about differences that most others would ignore. And in the eyes of today’s font gazers one of the movers in many circles goes by the name Rockwell.
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Is Vice positioned in the hipster snarketplace as Playboy for Millennials? Starting in 06ish, Vice’s editorial content moved toward an even split of Issues That Matter (like women’s lib in India, Authors or Pollution) and heaps more T&A. (under the aegis of fashion)
Maybe 15 year old lads are telling mom that they read Vice…for the articles. Now is the mag sending a message to women that they can best be a part of the Vice world sans shirt? Does it castrate the value of writing about India’s Gulabi Gang?
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MIT’s Futures of Entertainment conference last weekend was a stunna. The crowd was an even split of industry and academia; each camp was curious about the other and left their kool-aid and navel-gazing at the door. The lodestone for this was that the panelists and the audience both asked “WHAT is the Future?” – not stated “This IS the Future!”
And it’s this compass of questioning that helps keep a mind sharp. Even though the event was at MIT, I noticed that a fair amount of people in attendance did not have PDAs (aka Silicon Handcuffs). Curious, I asked why, which lead to convos along these lines: Supposedly PDAs make us more efficient. But efficient at what? Actual creative thinking? Or just the new call and response pattern of email and TPS reports?
Teasing out that thread – much of our techuse – AIM, PDA, Twitter – does not truly make us smarter. But it’s not the tech itself that’s dangerous, it’s our wonton use and the patterns formed in the name of progress. True progress is most often found by bucking patterns and remixing the norm. Without distance or a curious eye toward our techuse, soon we might have to stage South Korean style tech interventions for our USDA Millenials. Progress? 
