Guile looking like he spittin spittin.
Dhalsim about to DROP it.
Chun li playing fat bass lines on her Moog.
Zangief definitely on some Chicago House mix.
Categories
Author: harold
Categories
One year of pandemic
I keep thinking about how the pandemic should have moved us to a more “we’re together” position and the exact opposite, time A Million, everywhere you look at, happened.
Categories
Appropriation
It’s a great article by Nelson George.
The core audience for most of hip-hop’s first thirty years, both white and black, were in deeply invested in an vision of “keepin’ it real” authenticity that valued a ghettocentric version of American life.
Very true. Which would make me uncomfortable with my white friends in France, so into KRS-ONE and Dr OCTAGON. The complete embrace of Black American Man’s Life lyrics seemed odd to me. True, I was into metal at that time but that’s the thing: I was into the sound, not the lifestyle or trying to be part to it. I was into the heaviness of those guitars and the fact that the more groove in the sound, the better, didn’t make me feel like appropriating. I felt doing my own thing rather than joining a culture. I felt like making up my own hybrid strain through a mix of genres.
In fact some of the most progressive forces in today’s hip-hop are more likely as influenced by Radiohead’s textures than the Bomb Squad’s block rocking beats.
Lyricism is really were things are lacking these days. Although, I really enjoy Kodak Black. He has some rather smart lines. Tyler has become so great at opening up and be who he is now.
Later Prince, Cameo and Jermaine Jackson were amongst the many black ‘80s acts to have hits by adapting the keyboard sounds, melodic ideas, and vocal arrangements of new wave bands. I guess that was all “appropriation” if you wanna make it a negative.
Well the thing is they appropriated a sound, not a genre of music. Early 80s were all about dramatically cut down production to have a very minimal, “cold” sound after the luscious 70s, right? It felt and feels more like an extension than appropriation to me. They built on top of that and created new music, 80s funk music with very distinct flavors. It is also a “going forward” type of appropriation.
The thing about Mars and Silk Sonic is that they sound like something else, and from the past. It feels a little bit more disingenuous.
But Bruno Mars is not stealing “our” music. He wasn’t a parody of R&B or new jack swing. In fact he was one of the only people with a mass audience keeping these styles alive. Putting out a record celebrating funk in 2015 or new jack swing in 2017 were as far from a commercial slam dunk as one could get. Black folks, both as creators and customers crave innovation, invention and the constant shock of the new. It’s why black music has moved like a tractor through the cow pasture otherwise known as American culture. The search for new sounds have driven everything from bebop to trap.
I loved that funk he put out there. I remember driving on the 101, volume up. The 24K Magic single was dope. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wished someone else was singing. Or that the music wasn’t so predictable. It lacked a little 2010s twist or something. I love 80s music, I can listen to it right now! And that’s where Mars didn’t search for new sounds, he looked for comfort and the labels said “there’s something to tap in here, that nostalgia from a generation and nostalgic envy from that other generation” and that was it. That’s fine. But that’s not innovation.
I heard Silk Sonic for the first time on the radio this morning, and I couldn’t tell from when it was, although .paak’s voice gave me away that this was new. Yet old. It makes the music enjoyable, but doesn’t “wow” you like the first time you hear Cameo’s She’s Strange, Rae Sremmurd’s No Type or King’s The Story (or their entire album). Those truly innovated. Those hit different.
What I’d like is a late 70sFUNK-late 00sTRAP music blend with a duet between a man and a woman, singing and rapping about our current debt life, without name dropping tech brands or celebrities, while being uplifting.
Now, that would be the future to me.
Categories
Insecure
Insecure, the show, is about to end with its latest season, season 5.
I think that’s a good run. Five seasons is a good amount.
Season 1 was great, funny, witty, I couldn’t get enough of it.
Season 2 starts great and then I feel like the sex themes were not on part with Issa’s sarcastic and hilarious tone that she has all through the first season. Kelli is funny AF though.
Season 3 goes a little bit in all directions at the same time. The original tone is not there as much, but it’s still enjoyable and cute.
Season 4 was refreshing, with a very nice little arc between Issa and Molly. It’s a calm season and it fit 2020 perfectly, I think.
For season 5 I hope they hose us with creative juice. Fuck it up, Issa. End your show with some animated movie, a bit like in Better Off Dead. Or music video ultra fast cuts in one episode. Girl go surrealist.
Categories
Joy & Pain
November ‘19 to April ‘20 is kind of a big blur before I re-emerged, missing someone heavy without noticing it at first but then facing it clearly.
I haven’t seen that person ever since, basically.
Categories
Architectural style: smh
A new building on Venice Blvd. Look at those balconies, and I apologize for the picture quality:
Like, there’s room for either furniture OR you and your boo. One does not simply fit both. If you try, –rent will make you believe things– thanks to the sliding door breathing down your shoulder, you can only have one elbow sort of at a normal angle, if 90° is, sitting on the railing. While the other is near your crotch.
This sounds voluptuously comfortable.
I mean, balconies are either outdoor attics or displays of “what it could be”, right?
Categories
Daft
As a music producer who grew up with their music in France, I have a different relationship with Daft Punk than most.
I thought they were outstanding music geniuses. They’re more likely just good music producers. And that’s fine.
Their first album was super fresh and raw. Like, we had never really heard anything like this before in the way that it was special, unique, yet fitting those eclectic musical times in electronic music: big beat, house, jungle were raging out in Europe. They became the French Touch ambassadors and whatnot.
THEN comes their best work, Discovery. That thing was everything I wanted to make and still is: a full Digital Electro Funk album with anime visuals. I’m still jealous. This shit was absolutely so perfect.
But then as a music producer, I did my research.
I realized that what I thought was the result of them jamming and sampling themselves, like they had mostly done on their first album, wasn’t.
I was particularly blown away by Digital Love and Harder, Better’s samples in the background, thinking Daft Punk had played and recorded that music. They had not, it was a straight forward loop of a George Duke’s intro and Edwin Birdsong’s groove. I felt bamboozled so damn hard.
Their next album Human After All, without the funky sampling, is without question the least inspired. The best track samples Breakwater, an 80s funk band.
Their last album Random Access Memory is clearly the work of Nile Rodgers and other black music producers. And ever since, they haven’t done anything as peculiar and lovely as Discovery. They disbanded last week.
Categories
Computers are appliances now
This is a fantastic in-depth article about computers.
We show each of the three parts of the fragmentation cycle are already underway: there has been a dramatic and ever-growing slowdown in the improvement rate of universal processors; the economic trade-off between buying universal and specialized processors has shifted dramatically toward specialized processors; and the rising fixed costs of building ever-better processors can no longer be covered by market growth rates.
And it is just fine. Computers are amazingly resilient. My “main” machine is a 2012 mid-range laptop in which I immediately put a SSD in. It’s been working like a charm ever since, 16 hours a day. Buying a newer machine and gaining 1s on booting a browser is not progress. It’s being anal.
Computers are amazingly powerful and we use a tiny fraction of their power. The same 2012 laptop allows me to run 50 tracks and 27 subgroups in my audio software. That is huge. For comparison, most 60s and 70s music uses 16, maybe 32 tracks at the very best. It’s still wonderful music. We know quality isn’t tied to numbers per se.
Sure, I could probably run 200 tracks on a 2021 laptop but I don’t need it and probably never will. Computers already cover 99% of what we need them for. We don’t even need them to be smaller, they have been human-sized for a while now: they can fit in a tiny room, a tiny pocket. I would say, they need to become fanless and silent. It’s happening too.
The computer paradigm made us addicted to numbers, making us very excited when those numbers keep going up. But numbers are not everything, at all. We’re humans. We’re not numbers. Call of Duty needs more than 500 GB now but it’s still a FPS with most of its gameplay being exactly the same as a 500 MB –one order of magnitude smaller– Call of Duty game.
I can see myself buying older machines for the rest of my life. Like I buy old appliances on Etsy right now.
Categories
Leaving Flickr
After many years, I’m leaving Flickr. It was fantastic, and went down from there.
Flickr certainly changed my life, as this is where I connected with my first US friends, which led me to my first trip to California three years later, and the rest is history. The internet was still mostly about connecting with interesting strangers, and we did just that. We’re still friends and caring about each other in this new 2020s life.
Flickr the service, was ahead of its time. I really wish Automattic had acquired this incredible source of inspiration, and made it a serious competitor to the rising Instagram at the start of the 2010s.
There’s something extremely freeing about packing my stuff and not having to worry about numbers (views, favs, tags) and anxiety-inducing feeds. Also, no more payments (it was $25 for 2 years, it’s now $70 for a year).
Thank you, creators of Flickr.
Categories
Raceless
For her part, Lawton went along with the story because she loved her father. But as she notes: “Ideas from our parents about who we are form the backbone of our identities, the bedrock to personal truths that we can recite and remember like prayers from church or poems from school.” And hers was rooted in a denial of how the rest of the world saw her. “Race was dogged in its desperate pursuit of me,” she writes. “And as much as I tried to brush it off, as much as I tried to believe what I was told, race attached itself to me, a little more, year on year.” This dissonance, a “dull roar in the background” of her childhood, grew into “a persistent buzz” at the back of her brain by the time she was a teenager.
Yup. I experienced that as well. And this is what I tell most people about it: race, racism, cultural differences are not something we look after. It finds us and tells us that we’re deemed inferior. So we fight back.
Shortly after her father died of cancer in 2015, Lawton learned through DNA testing that she wasn’t his biological child. In fact, she was 43 percent Nigerian. The revelation inspires Lawton to live in Black communities in Brooklyn, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and Cuba, only to bump up against the same European beauty standards that she tried and failed to adhere to growing up in her white English village.
It’s interesting. It’s similar yet different from my own path on this. The lack of black folks around me pushed me to be curious and go live in a blacker community, for sure. The way my white friends dismissed Trayvon’s murder and so many things compounded to lead me to get some Black Air, you know? I needed it.
The European beauty standards never hit me because well I’m a dude, it’s very low pressure compared to women. I never rated European beauty standards over others, though. 90s supermodels? Well Naomi was killing everyone even when my friends were telling me she wasn’t. They were simply wrong. I’ve always had strong resilience to peer pressure, I put that on France’s values (at that time) and my own internal, constant questioning.
I can’t wait to work on my book and have y’all read it. The draft is still good when I peruse it, and there’s SO much more than I can add. It’s going to be amazing.