Tag: New Media

  • Soulja Boy's Superman Subversion

    “Crank That” content occupies 5 of the top 100 YouTube videos. Advertising and Academia have written great articles and case studies about the Soulja Boy phenomenon. Even Disney let copyrights slide to join the party. Yup, it’s a new media coup.

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    So…the line “Superman dat (h)o!” means? It aint just some nonsensical wordplay.

    Last fall there was a flurry in the blogosphere about the lyrical ‘translation’, but it didn’t go viral, so the song and the artist have not been outcast by corporate America.

    The song/dance has remixed past the point of authorial intent, so the fact that people age 6-66 are Cranking in the classroom and at halftime is not really a prob, just really funny. It’s another example of hip-hop subverting dominant linguistic paradigms while working within it. Like in 2003 how Dave Chappelle and Lil’ Jon had millions of Americans blindly saying Skeet Skeet. Or in the late 90’s when LL Cool J slipped a FUBU ad into the text of a Gap TV spot – LL says on camera “For Us, By Us, on the low”. It flew under the radar of both the client and the agency, whom I’m guessing just heard it as some cool urban lingo, not an encoded advert for their competition.

  • Black Nerds: a reprise

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    Editors Note: The below text is a follow-up to Raafi’s now-famous post about Black Nerds.
    ———————————————————————————
    Over the past couple months I’ve had to do a lot of soul searching over exactly what the word “nerd” actually means and found myself in a sort of Potter Stewart limbo. After all, blogging about what it means to be a nerd isn’t very cool, but I digress. My fragmentary notion that the black nerd is an emerging presence in our culture that is under-recognized has provoked many sorts of reactions from the vituperative (I see you Tai) to the laudatory. In the process the link has found its way into blogs at USA Today, MIT, and Ebony/Jet. The New York Times called to say wassup and just this week I appeared coast-to-coast on Canadian radio. Did I mention that Clutch Magazine thinks I’m a black man to watch? (I’ll mention here, in passing, that the Beastie Boys once recorded a song entitled “Hey Ladies!”).

    (more…)

  • CBC: Black Nerds

    CBC: Black Nerds

    on the remix well before it was hip
    on the remix well before it was hip

    The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation picked up on Raafi’s Black Nerds and interviewed him for Spark, their show about the intersection of technology and culture.

  • Black Nerds: The Revolution No One Could Have Predicted

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    On a late weekend night, two days before the release of the much-anticipated Microsoft video game Halo 3, a group of 8-to-10 black nerds in their late teens walks down the Bowery, their conversation animated. The leader of the pack, his Ben Wallace afro in full bloom, turns to the others, “Master Chief is… the Jack Bauer of… the Halo universe!” The pack, each member clamoring to respond in the affirmative before the others, turns into a burger joint.

    The rise of the black nerd has been a blustery and uneven process characterized by large gains and deep swoons. Presaged by Clarence Gilyard Jr.’s portrayal of Theo, the computer ace who hacks into the building vault in the classic film Die Hard, the nerd who is possessed wholly of a black American masculinity is a specific character that enjoys a renaissance today even as the hip-hop world continues to project a cartoonishly grotesque opposite. The broadening media landscape, however, allows us greater access to the pulse of black America even as the mainstream media seems to be stuck on stupid infatuated with the images of black males that (used to) sell records.

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  • Video Site Quality Comparison (youtube, motionbox blip, crackle)

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    I made a “utility” movie to compare the quality of a bunch of video sites. It’s a 31 second movie that I have uploaded to a few sites. You can take a look for yourself and judge what’s best for you and your work.

    It’s 31 seconds and focuses on clarity, colors, synch (obviously, only up to 30 secs) and legibility. The original was created at 640 x 480 (sq. pix), 29.97 with no compression, non-interlaced. I uploaded the original uncompressed and let the sites do any and all compression and resizing.

    If you want more details, let me know. (original file, zipped up here) Also, any other sites or suggestions… let me know. So far, most of these sites do a better job than I expected!

    YouTube:
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    blip.tv

    Motionbox Crackle


  • Cam'ron Does HP

    Hip-hop has been down with tech since day one. Now tech is finally getting down with hip-hop. HP did spots with Jay-Z and Pharell, but they finally went ahead and got street with it. Peep game:

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    The guy who channels Cam in this vid has done it as well before and appears to be a serious actor too.

    link via startsnitching.