The inadvertent future

sufi said:

What 3rdF was saying the other day about killing dead things; plastic is oil is ancient dead things, our future is made of dead stuff

(doubt that's what 3f was on about of course )

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it's very poetic, and worth paying attention to the poetry of this situation in order to understand wtf is happening to us i believe,
(while science lets us down completely)

sadmanbarty said:

How is the future presented to you lit in the 90’s different from the one presented to me in the 2010’s?

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I was an avid Wired-reader as a teenager in the 1990s. A lot of which Wired predicted/extrapolated has become reality today. It's just it got way crappier than expected. Like everybody on the net, hand held devices as connectors, pay per view incarnated as netflix etc.

Various futures.

London in the Victorian era

Paris late 18th c

New York early 20th

Tokyo late 20th

Then... Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, Shanghai, the shanty towns of the global south

Crowley what do you think of this notion of bones thugs and harmony style triplets/ensemble rapping plus generic big budget Atlanta production (ambient exotica) as the most futuristic music of all time?

Are you ready to go along with it? Serious earnest question

Who invents the future? Who forsees the future?

Let's try and get more of this lucid, focussed brilliant third and use him to goad bart into really exerting himself. So the veins in his temples start pulsing. It'll be like hagler hearns or bjorg mcenroe or benn eubank

We all need to team up, like we did with craner, to really push our two young lads into excelling. Don't let them rest on their laurels

They're so evenly matched. It's meant to be. I don't want the Tom and Jerry, I want the warrior code. Total respect for the opponent. Bushido.

I'm a big believer in this thread. It's going to go stratospheric. I'm going to go out drinking and I'll come back and orchestrate some more. Remember its not just the third and Bart show, we can all be brilliant and contribute. Show us your best side.

luka said:

Third likes all this corporate fourth world electronica that sounds exactly like global capital. Exactly like an HSBC advert. The daughters of middle eastern diplomats who went to art school in Camberwell.

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I actually hate most of that stuff, yes that Iranian guy I rep was the son of an architect, but so was Xenakis.

But all that club chai and tobago tracks stuff is really not my thing at all. sub talvin singh efforts.

Neoliberal darbuka techno. something tansu çiler's grandkids will be listening to in 2045. now that's future. maybe by then they will have murdered my kurdish corpse and commodified me into an abhorrent istanbulite. my dad will entirely be to blame for this abhorrent state of affairs. I will not be kind to him on judgment day if this happens, I swear to allah almighty.

have Migos really done anything new since young rich niggas and No Label II?

Like, it's not very future when you're talking about something that is already 6 years out of date.

Was "the future" (as we understand it) invented in the 19th century, along with steam power? We're not talking about the abstract temporal state, we're talking about technology advancing. If there was no technology to advance we wouldn't have a future to think about. How do remote tribespeople think about the future? It's an interesting question I've never considered.

Corpsey said:

Was "the future" (as we understand it) invented in the 19th century, along with steam power? We're not talking about the abstract temporal state, we're talking about technology advancing. If there was no technology to advance we wouldn't have a future to think about. How do remote tribespeople think about the future? It's an interesting question I've never considered.

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Well there's the apocalyptic future of the bible

luka said:

Crowley what do you think of this notion of bones thugs and harmony style triplets/ensemble rapping plus generic big budget Atlanta production (ambient exotica) as the most futuristic music of all time?

Are you ready to go along with it? Serious earnest question

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Well third's bringing up a good point in that Which Migos or whomever Atlanta group is Barty maybe implying because there are diff periods for them.

Also what sort of 'futuristic' is the futuristic b/c for me the closest I think we got to that in rap for a little while was maybe Sage the Gemini?

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Phenomenal understanding of how to mess w/ distortion and making records sound not layered but dense in spite of their being so stripped down.

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p. sure Blissblogger was into this one

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Also his delivery was fascinating to me. Incredibly technical but not necessarily in a constant triplets sense, also delivered in a way that sounded like it was programmatic language based on function: "I enter: through the exit."

ofc. I could be not grasping the subject altogether tonight.

"Gas Pedal" was my favorite song of whatever year it was

sounds incredible in a car at night in LA

that kind of sound (Travis Scott, the Migos of Culture / Culture II, some DJ Mustard thing, Jeremih "Oui" etc etc ) does sound "future"

BUT

it is a sound that is an extension of other earlier sounds / images that also connoted in the same way in their own time - visually, e.g. the look of that Hype Williams video for Busta Rhymes / Janet Jackson, which now looks clunky and charming in a retro-kitschy kind of way, but at the time seemed impossibly advanced

it's an idea of "future" (sterile, slick, glossy, overtly man-made, no organic /acoustic elements, no wood) that has a long history behind it at this point - these sort of associations of futurity with plastic and synthetic go back to the Sixties if not earlier

even the sort of smooth aesthetic of smartphones etc is not so different from the flip-top communicators in the original Star Trek TV series

the thing I find is I don't have mental images of what the year 2050 will look (or sound) like

2050 will probably sound like harsh noise, and not in a good way...

Also I utterly detest Orwell.

Corpsey said:

Was "the future" (as we understand it) invented in the 19th century, along with steam power? We're not talking about the abstract temporal state, we're talking about technology advancing.

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Good question, and arguably yes, I'd say. Nearly all the technology that defined life in the first half to 2/3 of the 20th century was really a refinement of tech that had been invented in the 19th - internal combustion engines, refrigerators, light bulbs, thermionic valves (and hence radio, amplified music), electric motors, plastics, synthetic drugs. Of course subsequent developments such as nuclear energy, semiconductors and digital technology would have been impossible without those earlier discoveries. And it's in the 19th century that science fiction begins to emerge as a genre we'd recognise today. Prior to this time, stories with futuristic or otherwise speculative settings usually focussed on social developments or on human encounters with 'lost worlds' or 'aliens' of some sort (Gulliver's Travels etc.), rather than on the possibilities opened up by developments in (human) technology.

Corpsey said:

How do remote tribespeople think about the future?

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I'd imagine they have no concept of it, if 'uncontacted', or are profoundly pessimistic about it, if 'contacted'.

Good post tea, thank you. There's lots of anthropological studies on savages conception of time corpse, although I'm never sure how trustworthy it is.

luka said:

There's lots of anthropological studies on savages conception of time corpse, although I'm never sure how trustworthy it is.

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Spengler talks a lot about different conceptions of time in different cultures - I was thinking about him earlier when someone (you, I think) said "Who predicts the future?", and I remembered that Spengler predicted postmodern architecture and was only out on the timing by a couple of decades. Although that's all not so much "studies" as one man's opinion. Sorry, I know this is in the music forum and I don't have much to add on that front.

"time corpse" is a great phrase, by the way.

Don't worry about it being the music thread we've expanded the scope of the conversation to consider how the future is imagined and represented.