Author: jenks

by jenks

have you ever tried not being a mutant?

one of my favorite movie moments of the past decade has got to be that moment in x-men 2 when iceman and the rest of the teen mutants are hiding out at iceman’s house and his mom asks, him “have you ever tried….not…being a mutant?” like it would just solve everything.

i went to see the movie with a whole posse of my best friends, and was sitting next to one who happened to be gay, and he burst out laughing. i mean the whole theater was laughing, but it was even more pointed coming from sean. the question was the kind of thing that no doubt many a gay kid has had to endure from their parents, “well, have you ever tried… not… being gay?”

i think in general we like to assume that there are lifestyle choices we make, like listening to rockabilly, driving a harley, polyamory, veganism, white supremacism. and those we don’t, like what socioeconomic class we’re born into, our skin color, our gender, whether we’re good at math, and who we fall in love with.

technically, now more than ever before the once-immutable attributes of identity are becoming a choice. even those options that we did not pick for ourselves, that are dictated by genetics, hormones, or circumstance, are being challenged by the dissolution of outdated conventions and advancements in modern surgery. in a sense it’s almost like if you happen to have been born a straight female, and are still happy to be one, then it’s almost like it was a choice by the sheer act of compliance, if nothing else, when you take into account the varieties of gender and orientational mashups available these days.

i read dana boyd’s essay yesterday on “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace” about the lifestyle segregations that seem to be emerging from the user adoption pattern of the two sites, and what really struck me was the following:

Most teens who exclusively use Facebook are familiar with and have an opinion about MySpace. These teens are very aware of MySpace and they often have a negative opinion about it. They see it as gaudy, immature, and “so middle school.” They prefer the “clean” look of Facebook, noting that it is more mature and that MySpace is “so lame.” What hegemonic teens call gaudy can also be labeled as “glitzy” or “bling” or “fly” (or what my generation would call “phat”) by subaltern teens. Terms like “bling” come out of hip-hop culture where showy, sparkly, brash visual displays are acceptable and valued. The look and feel of MySpace resonates far better with subaltern communities than it does with the upwardly mobile hegemonic teens. This is even clear in the blogosphere where people talk about how gauche MySpace is while commending Facebook on its aesthetics. I’m sure that a visual analyst would be able to explain how classed aesthetics are, but it is pretty clear to me that aesthetics are more than simply the “eye of the beholder” – they are culturally narrated and replicated. That “clean” or “modern” look of Facebook is akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house (that I admit I’m drawn to) while the more flashy look of MySpace resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year. I suspect that lifestyles have aesthetic values and that these are being reproduced on MySpace and Facebook.

i’ve heard sooo many people that fit danah’s demographic description complaining about the “sub-par aesthetics” of myspace, but it never even occurred to me (and certainly not to them) that perhaps these reactions to visual composition were not really their own, but rather determined by the aesthetics of their lifestyle/background.

even if it’s possible to justify conscious identity/lifestyle choices as deliberate, how the hell do you justify the UNCONSCIOUS ones that way? and just how many of the choices we think we’re making for ourselves are actually predetermined in this unconscious way?

i’ve found that an easy way to explain how identity marketing functions is through the example of the clothing styles people choose. there’s so many styles of clothing you COULD be rocking, and yet you choose the kind clothing you choose, and not ALL the other styles. so…why is that? because you feel that this particular style expresseses something about who you are to other people.

so clothing is a tool for expressing our identity, essentially but who we want to sleep with is determined by biology? perhaps neither of these is this cut and dry. my bioanthropology professor used to say, “everything is 100% nature. and 100% nurture.”

so what about our choices about whether or not we like hardcore drum ‘n bass or reggaeton or sex and the city or tofu?

is our “taste” 100% our own, and 100% not our own?

now…. who likes bon jovi?

    



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by jenks

where is everyone?

i moved my blog and everyone disappeared! i’m really missing the three people who used to read this blog. where you at? if you come back, i’ll get you on the list. (bring a friend, and i’ll put you down +1).

in my previous post i wrote about how hip hop culture offered the first really racially desegregated lifestyle choice, and while in the primordial culture ooze of hip hop nightlife this hybridity was the result of a sort of fortunate accident, in the world of hip hop industry this was a very deliberate strategy. wrought, perhaps most famously, by the combined pioneering forces of russell simmons and rick rubin–you may have heard of this little record label the two started together called def jam if you haven’t been deaf for the past two and a half decades.

from Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation:

Russell was a Black executive able to bridge Black and white tastes like no one since Berry Gordy. He hired Adler. Rick was a Jewish music producer who understood how profoundly Herc, Bam, and Flahs’s insights could reshape all of pop music. He hired Bill Stephney. The staff for Def Jam was uniquely suited and highly motivated to pull off a racial crossover of historic proportions.

Stephney convinced his friends at rock radio to stay on Run DMC’s cover of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way,” even when the call-out research showed racist, “get the niggers off the air” feedback. He then succeeded in propelling the Beastie Boys onto rap radio, a feat no less difficult. By the end of 1986, their strategy had been perfectly executed. The Black group crossed over to white audiences with Raising Hell, then the white group crossed over to Black audiences with Licensed to Ill.

Forget busing, Adler thought. Hip-hop was offering a much more radical, much more successful voluntary integration plan. It was bleeding-edge music with vast social implications. “Rap reintegrated American culture,” Adler declared. Not only was hip-hop not a passing novelty, [he] told journalists, it was culturally monumental.

once upon a time, hiphop represented the next-stage in the evolution of a modern identity (consider that even madonna emerged from the hiphop scene incubated at the roxy), yet the promise of hiphop’s diversity was instead crushed under the genre’s globalization of, essentially, third-world values. hiphop became not the messenger of the polycultural future, but the harbinger of the blinged-out apocalypse.

you know… when MTV first launched, with it slate of rock and new wave programming, black artist were so systematically excluded that it was only after columbia university reportedly threatened to boycott the station that MTV finally relented and started playing michael jackson videos in 1983. at the time, michael jackson was considered the mainstream symbol of what was “black, urban, and dangerous.” 20 years later, michael jackson (the michael jackson of 20 years ago, i mean) is STILL the cross-genre, cross-race, cross-cultural ambassador to “everybody let’s dance.”

what the hell happened?! this was supposed to be hiphop’s birthright!

from the very beginning there were two ways this cultural expression could have gone. one direction was a bridge–like exactly what you’d expect from the first-generation american progeny of bob marley’s music being raised by kool herc and afrika bambaataa; as innate as the drive that propelled grafitti, as human as the beat that compelled people to dance. the other direction was as a flag. the loud proclamation of the marginalized and oppressed experience which had up till then been treated politically and culturally with a policy of “benign neglect,” and it was mad as hell and it wasn’t going to take it anymore. a voice that could speak for all who had had theirs stolen, with the sharpness of chuck d’s tongue or rakim’s rhyme. for both of these directions of hiphop the undercurrent of unification was an inherent component all along.

and then somewhere along the way hiphop exited too fast off the freeway and got itself twisted on a roundabout that sent it hurtling back into the complete opposite direction.

i’m not interested in discussing the polarizations that have gripped hiphop since, the violence, sexism, materialism, the east coast, the west coast, the gangsta rap, the conscious hiphop, the whatever, who cares. there’s a lot of talk about this already, and the bottom line is that the industry of culture is selling people what they want–whether it be kanye or lil john, or lil kim or lauryn hill, akon or talib. to deny consumers of something they’d pay money for would be bad business.

the real mystery at the intersection of culture and commerce is now this: in the age of the long tail of both demand and supply can we ever again expect an emergence of any kind of real, integrated culture? or is our destiny really just an endless assortment of choices that will turn our histories and mythologies into an ever more niche experience? will the accessibility of greater diversity lead to greater desegregation, or will it simply turn us into connoisseurs? content with the second-string substitute of globalization as a consolation prize for the cultural integration that never really arrived?

the spark that lit hiphop’s beginnings has been turned into hi-def dvd of a gas-powered fireplace crackling on a plasma-screen display.

but will the glimmer of hybridity that inspired it, ever be reincarnated in any other form?

– – –

more reaction to can’t stop won’t stop: a history of the hip hop generation:
HERE

    



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by jenks

the art of miscegenation

it’s hard to comprehend this now, but before hiphop there was no such thing as a racially integrated culture. when hiphop came down from the bronx and created the roxy in downtown NYC it brought with it not just a fad, but a complete cultural shift that was ushering with it a racially integrated lifestyle. and the first culture that brought white kids and black kids hanging out together started less than thirty years ago!

if you can fucking believe THAT!

from Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation:

FAB 5 FREDDY recalls the turning point as a July night…. “And everybody kinda bugged out looking at each other. You had these ill b-boys with the poses and shit, checking out these [punk & new wave] kids with the crazy haircuts and that whole vibe. And everybody kinda got into each other, so to speak. That’s when it really kinda took off as the first really major downtown club that had like a legitimately mixed scene.”

David Hershkovits, a music journalist who would go on to publish PAPER magazine: “The crowds were very diverse. That was why I was so excited to be there. Suddenly this racially mixed group was having a good time partying in a room together, which was a very rare thing. On the level of music and art, people were able to bridge all these boundaries.”

Dante Ross, who would become a key hip-hop A&R exec during the late ’80s, remembers: “The word ‘alternative’ didn’t exist. It was this great moment man, the ‘Grafffiti Rock’ moment. Everything was all mixed up, it was cool to be eclectic.”

this was not just some studio-54 remix, however. in 1982 afrika bambaataa had released “planet rock.” arguably just as influential as “rapper’s delight“–whose lasting testimony is as the first hip-hop shout that was hear round the world–planet rock defined a “grand statement” for what afrika was calling the hip-hop movement.

Planet Rock was hip hop’s universal invitation, a hypnotic vision of one world under a groove, beyond race, poverty, sociology and geography. [The lyrics] shouted, “No work or play, our world is free. Be what you be, just be!”

Bambaataa says, “I really made it for the Blacks, Latinos, and the punk rockers, but I didn’t know the next day that everybody was all into it and dancing. I said, ‘Whoa! This is interesting.'”

That was the move that proclaimed that this wasn’t just an “urban” thing, it made it inclusive, it took hiphop global.

which is making me wonder: what’s next?

all throughout history the art of miscegenation has been the art of creating cultural change itself. it seems like it’s an essential component for the achievement of a significant cultural shift that it empower inclusivity and integration. on a much smaller scale, i’ve already touched upon the ways in which i see the inclusivity trend playing out in the world of social network app sites, but really, in the grand scheme of large-scale global culture shifts… what’s next?

what sort of social divisions still apply so universally that the act of demolishing them becomes universal?

culture is like the water temperature of a pool: you don’t even notice it once you’re really acclimated. bursting a ubiquitous cultural taboo is like saying, ‘hey, i want a pool with a totally different temperature,’ climbing out, going to get a hose, and pumping new water in. so who’s going to climb out of the pool and usher in the next great cultural revolution?

and what’s the water going to be like once they do?

– – –

more reaction to can’t stop won’t stop: a history of the hip hop generation:
HERE

    



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by jenks

when it’s not new media no more

 

i just saw this great post, don’t hire an internet person, that touches upon the (mindnumbingly frustrating) misconception that an internet strategy could be considered so separate from the rest of the whole campaign concept that delegating it to an isolated individual–“the internet person,” who will inevitably end up getting shoved in a closet–is actually deemed appropraite.

i wrote a response that, unlike with any other medium, there isn’t really a good understanding of where the distinctions between the internet’s functions are drawn. you wouldn’t get a telephone technician to develop a telemarketing strategy, you wouldn’t get a tv commercial director to develop the whole campaign concept, yet with the internet there’s not the same understanding of the separation between where the technical or design-related ends and the strategy begins. i mean, in some places whole thing is still just called “the new media” dept. really.

and just after i was done, i got the picture at the top of this post sent to me by a friend who was joking that he’s in the market for a new computer; maybe he should get the one pictured in the photo, and i realized something.

while we’re spending so much time being frustrated by the lethargic pace at which the general understanding of the use and value of this “new media” is catching up with its potential, this is but a little blip on the radar. an awkward adolescent phase where everything looked all gangly and weird, and everyone felt hopelessly misunderstood by the parents. but internet puberty is not a permanent state, and eventually–maybe by the time everyone making decisions can no longer say they were alive before the internet–will become maturity.

at that point everyone will understand. they will even understand more than we do. more than we could. and will we look back then, on all this, like on old high school pictures, and reminisce?

    



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