thirdform

pass the sick bucket
the pioneering mumble rap tune.

gleefully post-human and superficial. chorus like a jingle


Yeah, but i could also market it as a 'digital emo' tune.

That does take much of the post-human and futurist rhetoric away doesn't it? would really like crowl to chip in and explain how rap supplanted rock in the states. truth be told I'm insulated here we're still implacable enemies, the rock music fans live in a mythological world to me. i don't mean like, fuckin ash ra tempel or henry cow boffin rock but like my chemical romance and bullet for my arsecrack.

That's why i am into chief keef because it's a deconstruction of that alt rock orientation, I'm sure I'm bolloxing it all up though.

It's weird, rock sensibilities being integrated into rap music should really have my intellectual Paul Gilroy-black-atlantic juices firing like mad. ultimate reclamation of a once proudly black genre through globalised diaspora.

Yet years upon years of encountering white rock fans has given me a visceral disgust for most of the mainstream rock cannon. otherwise I'm still interested in iranian fuzz or slammin nuggets from Benin and Togo. and as everyone knows I like heavy, dark shit. Why is that? I have no idea.

I was gonna say lollipop is a 'digital alt rock tune' but digital emo just seems to be more catchy.

Maybe the battle we have to fight is between digital emoism and digital hardcorism.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
take this as the metaphorical provocation it is intended to be rather than racial/gender essentialism.


Listen to the singing. it's white isn't it? Listen to the rapping, it's nu metal isn't it? Isn't it?
 

other_life

bioconfused
"digital emo" succinctly describes so much of the music i wasted my time on in high school and shit my peers r still fixated on. a few are open about it being emo as well like in 'soundclown raps' it's not at all covert/disavowed
 

other_life

bioconfused
"digital emo" succinctly describes so much of the music i wasted my time on in high school and shit my peers r still fixated on. a few are open about it being emo as well like in 'soundclown raps' it's not at all covert/disavowed

the drone/improv bullshit i do is also DEFINITELY 'digital emo' but whenever i try to make something Hardcore idk it feels like it falls flat. i dont have the reference points. cut my teeth on 'alt rock'
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
so if i'm reading this right it was always white kids fucking with other white kids at chart pop nights and black kids at hardcore nights getting policed instead
i fuckn knew it

yes. of course. but our guardian experts were always like re grime: it's not the lyrics, it's a depiction of real life! which was absolu-tely irrelevant. there are many death metal songs that describe raping women in excruciatingly painstaking detail but because a black boy says bitch the whole world pounces on him.
 

DLaurent

Well-known member
This is actually posthuman.


Sounds as hood as anything on the M6. Real cyberpunk. More location dependent than microgenre synthwave stuff which I suppose comes into it. Always has done to an extent unless you get the old overriding cultural styles.
 

version

Well-known member
"digital emo" succinctly describes so much of the music i wasted my time on in high school and shit my peers r still fixated on. a few are open about it being emo as well like in 'soundclown raps' it's not at all covert/disavowed

I've always felt that stuff like Peep and even Citgo sounded like Blink 182.


 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket


student bars, tasteless surrey lads not even feigning to be gangsta, frigid humourless straight birds, £5 for a double, 13 doubles in a night, sit at home alone the next day with a bottle of ouzo in hand whilst puking up,, man this shit brings back all the memories that ruined my life.
 

version

Well-known member
"Fifty years after his mescalin trip beside a Hollywood garden, when we have flown to the moon and engirdled our planet with an entertainment culture more suffocating than anything visualised in Brave New World, we may be right to think that the expedition Huxley undertook into his own brain is the last journey waiting for all of us, whether by chemical means or through some less hazardous door, the inward passage to our truer and richer selves."
I think even this is under threat now. You see people who unconsciously type like they're writing clickbait, they've internalised the language of Vice and Buzzfeed and Twitter. If you took a high enough dose to move beyond language then you could still escape it, but that comes with its own risks. I don't think I've ever taken enough to completely obliterate subvocalisation.
 
I think even this is under threat now. You see people who unconsciously type like they're writing clickbait, they've internalised the language of Vice and Buzzfeed and Twitter.

there's a phrase for this, @luka came up with it, can't remember it now....

This is a great thread, i need to go back to the start and read it all
 

qwerty south

no use for a witticism
Did loads of writing on this in relation to hip hop / 'urban' music (some archived as blog host shut down):


1. An investigation of whether Beyonce's song 'Single Ladies' was written as propaganda for the diamond industry. See https://www.seolondonsurrey.co.uk/blog/beyonce-and-the-diamond-marketing-machine

2. An investigation of the conflicted hip hop marketing man and social campaigner Russell Simmons (former head of Def Jam Records): http://www.leftlion.co.uk/articles.cfm/title/the-ceo-of-hiphop/id/814#.UYzV0bWyAtU

3. An investigation of the origin of Run DMC's song 'My Adidas': http://web.archive.org/web/20110831202639/http://ukhhreviews.posterous.com/moral-panic-marketing-by-chris-byrne

4. An investigation of subliminal brand placement in the music of P Diddy & Pharrell Williams: http://web.archive.org/web/20110831202639/http://ukhhreviews.posterous.com/sonic-branding-subliminal-brand-placement-by

5. An investigation of the use of Run DMC's Jam Master Jay in advertising after his death:

http://web.archive.org/web/20110831202639/http://ukhhreviews.posterous.com/even-jam-master-jays-in-the-cemetery
 
I don’t know if its been stated in these terms here, but personal brands and influencer marketing are the major shift in the couple of decades. It’s been going on for years but the ubiquity is important, most of us have now internalised the ‘abstract logic of the commodity’ see ourselves as commodity, and in a sense this has demystified and democratised art and artist

but the democratisation has come at a cost, ie you must subscribe to market logic and operate in a branding ecosystem to succeed, and idols and stars lose a little of their power too

the experience of nostalgia for a time when music was "real" -- which most people probably experience at some point -- is really nostalgia for a time when music's unreality wasn't so obvious and could be enjoyed in an unselfconscious way (e.g. when you were 16 and could fully buy into the intensity of the image without cynicism or self-knowledge).

Self-branding is the starting point for new artists, DJs will be thinking about names and logos and idents before they have songs written

And as we age and learn how the machine operates we get jaded, because the magic is gone and because even though we understand a little of how it works, we still can’t make it work for us

This why i‘m not sure the raw material can be replaced by AI. because the focal point of the energy is the individual, selling selves and lifestyles. The industry runs on aspiration and resentment so it needs to speak through human faces
 

Leo

Well-known member
good point, @version . not to say the AI couldn't somehow develop it's own persona and backstory. think of the Japanese pop hologram singer Hatsune Miku.

and agree with @vimothy's and your points, why we aging dissensians often write off so much new music: we're encountering it with that knowledge of it's unreality. sausage is better before you know how the sausage is made.
 

version

Well-known member
I was talking to Barty the other day about how the Americans in particular treat capitalists as culture heroes, in the same way people deify pop stars. Biopics about Steve Jobs. The Conflation of Elon Musk with Tony Starks. Ed Dorn's Gunslinger deals with this on its treatment of Howard Hughes. These become magical figures with the ability to materialise their desires, to make money grow on trees.

The latest development along these lines is people pumping out films about the products themselves: Tetris, Pop-Tarts, Flamin' Hot Cheetos, the BlackBerry phone and Nike coming up with 'Air Jordan'.
 
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