Culture As Advertising.

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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
even in drill's heyday when it wasn't on advertiser's radar's, it was still very literally gang promotion. the language of having #[gang name] is essentially an advertising one; it was advertisers who pioneered the hashtag as a promotional tool. drill coopted it.

so even at it's most dangerous and underground, drill was steeped in the language of advertising.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
luka said:
No banter please lads this is a serious intellectual thread. The corpsey quote I opened the thread with makes a distinction between surface and depth and says advertising can only ever be surface, transforms everything into surface. Fashion does the same thing. Meaning is drained away. There's a seductive side to this. An appealing playfulness and semiotic literacy.
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I mean, I know I said that, but is 'surface/depth' anything more than a cliche? What does it actually mean?

🔥:cool:🔥
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
sadmanbarty said:
even in drill's heyday when it wasn't on advertiser's radar's, it was still very literally gang promotion. the language of having #[gang name] is essentially an advertising one; it was advertisers who pioneered the hashtag as a promotional tool. drill coopted it.

so even at it's most dangerous and underground, drill was steeped in the language of advertising.
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I think there's a danger here of a reductionist erasure of difference. Of robbing yourself of the conceptual tools required to seperate the commodified version from its progenitor. As I said with regards to Padriag this is by no means straightforward and unambiguous. It's slippery. And yet it's a distinction we keep making, as if it was obvious.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
"Reading Ballard's introduction to 'The Doors of Experience' the other day and he talks about how the entertainment/media has 'engirdled' the earth, so that the only way to escape fiction is to pursue/plumb the inner depths"
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Luka got me like

giphy.gif
 
S

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
luka said:
I think there's a danger here of a reductionist erasure of difference. Of robbing yourself of the conceptual tools required to seperate the commodified version from its progenitor. As I said with regards to Padriag this is by no means straightforward and unambiguous. It's slippery. And yet it's a distinction we keep making, as if it was obvious.
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i see.

one crucial thing to talk in that context then is russ' jacket from 'gun lean'.

he went from talking about stabbings outside his local dry cleaners and shaking a stick in some weird suburban forest to being dressed in 70's-era elvis jacket, with a sports car next to him and rapping about 'don't worry we're not really violent, we just do a funny dance'.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
You could argue, from a cynical, but not stupid or contemptible position, that what we are asking for is fantasies we can believe in. Love can be thought of in this way. It ends when it's foundations in fantasy are uncovered. Disillusioned. Just mutually compatible projections.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
"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."
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Gun lean is an obvious accommodation to and internalisation of market logic. I think it's important to be able to draw that distinction.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Freud continually uses archeological metaphors, with the unconscious visualised as beneath, deep, buried.
 
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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
luka said:
You could argue, from a cynical, but not stupid or contemptible position, that what we are asking for is fantasies we can believe in. Love can be thought of in this way. It ends when it's foundations in fantasy are uncovered. Disillusioned. Just mutually compatible projections.
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i'm currently experiencing with drill, what you would have done around the same age as me with grime.

we both saw cultures that we'd grown up around and were intimately familiar express themselves musically. we were really invested in musics that had made our lived experience manifest sonically.

then that changes. skepta and jme aren't real people. you'd never met anyone behave like jammer started to by 2006.

likewise i've never heard an actual human being talk like unknown t. never new anyone who got obsessed about coke and danced around golf courses talking about it.
 
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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
i suppose that's it. when does the music become alien to lived experience? that's the biting point.

that explains why it's not so painful to watch american rappers sell out. i'm embarrassed by quavo's boo loo stuff, but it doesn't hurt.

whereas even something as minor as unkown t not quite being proper drill is disturbing and shocking.

it's because migos were never a lived experience whereas drill was.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Atlanta is Hollywood. Before anyone jumps down my throat incidentally this is completely detached from aesthetic valuations. You can love 'Gun Lean' and still mark the distinction.
 
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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
this thread pertains to aaliyah's iconic status.

the inverse process happened to her. rather than being a real person that became an advert, she was an advert that was tragically revealed to be human.

a complete dullard in interviews, she didn't write her own stuff or nothing. the cover of aaliyah looks like a billboard poster. then suddenly she dies. even worse we discover she was the victim of pedophile.

the hollowness and vacuousness of aaliyah becomes haunting and eerie. all the makeup and clothes and generic lyrics suddenly are tarred by this poor girl being habitually raped by a powerful older man. her art in retrospect becomes a reflection on how the artificial and superficial does little to address the human condition. it all seems in bad taste given what happened to her.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Or like the horror stories that emerge out of k-pop. Demonic abuse and exploitation.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
sadmanbarty said:
i suppose that's it. when does the music become alien to lived experience? that's the biting point.

that explains why it's not so painful to watch american rappers sell out. i'm embarrassed by quavo's boo loo stuff, but it doesn't hurt.

whereas even something as minor as unkown t not quite being proper drill is disturbing and shocking.

it's because migos were never a lived experience whereas drill was.
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I suppose in simplified outline the story which repeats every generation or so goes

Start out exemplifying values and attributes and abilities prized within the community in which you are embedded, get raised up by that same community, hometown hero, then in the attempt to leverage that local fame, disavow those values and shoot for something more nebulous and universal. The problem being the universal is a fiction. It doesn't really exist.
 
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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
the gully gaza war was a battle between two visions of jamaica. alliance/gully were religiously observant, socially and sexually conservative whereas gaza flirted with atheism and satanism, pushed sexual boundaries in jamaica, bleached skin, made women more prominent in the empire.

mavado is soulful. his voice haunting and gritty, whereas kartel has never made a single song that isn't tongue-in-cheek or disingenuous. kartel relished in product placement. he shifted jamaican music from real world feelings of religious devotion, rivalry and aggression to something far more plastic and ironic.




 
luka

luka

Well-known member
The universal is the face of the market. In some very strange way these people become the mouths and bodies of capital. I've talked about this a little bit before. How we are trolled by these young, beautiful rich faces, but the actual voice is impersonal. It doesn't belong to a human.
 
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