Rogueish
Did Nicki fail pop, or did pop fail Nicki?
04/17/12
Except Bieber IS working with Hit-Boy! So did Rihanna. Her track wasn’t great, so I’m not particularly thrilled about this.
I think this makes clear the mistaken premise of the original post. I’m not at all sure hip-hop even exists as something distinct any more - the legacy of the Neptunes and Timbaland is that almost everything in the charts is more-or-less hip-hop now (in particular the influence of euro-house sounds on pop came via hip-hop, not as an alternative to it). Note that “The last actual hip-hop rap song to hit number one,” referenced in one of the earlier posts in this thread, “Black and Yellow,” was produced by Stargate, who I gues you could call hip-hop producers, but they’re also undeniably pop producers.
(Source: jordansargent)
Don’t Stop Beliebing
11/22/11
L: Perhaps the thing we should remember about the London riots is that they forced Levi’s not to release a commercial it had ready that was basically riot porn. For a second, those two things were too close…. We as anticapitalists have to trouble the relationship established during the counterglobalization movement between cultural products and left resistance. What good is culture jamming when the giant subway ads already read “RAGE” with a circled A? I think there’s an answer, and it’s no longer about injecting new stuff or emphasizing implicit consequences. It’s about revealing and contextualizing what’s already very much there.
X: Yeah, and it would be pretty crazy if people ripped those ads off the wall and showed up to the march with them on sticks. Reappropriate the reappropriated! Another nice culture jam or whatever would be a remix or mashup of all these songs without the lines where they talk about dancing – what’s left would be expertly produced war cries…. If someone took these insurrectionary fragments and stitched them together into a dance megamix, we’d have a genuinely dangerous piece of music. Could even the most innocent of bystanders resist the pure form when they’ve been fed the adulterants for so long?
(Source: thenewinquiry)
Soul Music — The American, A Magazine of Ideas→
03/09/10
I have something of a soft spot for Roger Scruton, as he’s one of the few analytic writers on aesthetics who actually discusses the aesthetic qualities of artworks. But this attempt to criticize pop music is an extraordinary example of building a detailed aesthetic argument on a fundamental misapprehension of its object (via Ian Mathers).
