Frank Ocean Swim Good
The abstract turn in R&B is the most welcome thing to happen to black popular music in years. Frank Ocean. The Weeknd. Drake at his best. This stuff has been my soundtrack for much of the past year and it still sounds thrilling. Future Music now.
Esquire January 2012
In the early Eighties, a breathtakingly original new music genre burst out from the ghettos of the Bronx and captured the world’s imagination. Having achieved an unimaginable success, acclaim and influence, hip-hop’s popularity is now in sharp decline, while its globe-trotting superstars seem ever more removed from their audiences. Is their mid-life crisis nothing more than a blip or is it the beginning of the end for the greatest pop-cultural movement since rock ‘n’ roll?
Thirty years ago two singles were released which marked the end of the beginning for hip-hop. The Message, by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force came out in 1982. Although both only charted modestly, they set a new standard in artistic ambition for hip-hop that proved hugely influential. For the nascent music form that rose out of the block parties and housing projects of the Bronx and Queens during the 1970s it was a signal moment. Critics had dismissed earlier releases, like the Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight and Kurtis Blow’s Christmas Rappin’, as novelties.
Now came the breakthrough, the first significant steps from ghetto subculture to global cultural force. In the decades since then hip-hop has established itself as the most exhilarating music of modern times with its stars a compelling presence in popular culture, commanding ten-times-platinum record sales (Eminem), marquee name movie celebrity (Will Smith) and fallen rock idol status alongside the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain (2 Pac, Notorious BIG). In tandem, hip-hop has become the lingua franca of urban youth across the world, its sounds and styles adopted by legions of followers in virtually every conceivable location on the planet from Johannesburg and Tokyo to Tehran and Jakarta. more
Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape by Barry Lopez
I’ve been doing some research recently on snow and ice recently for a piece I’m writing. These Books About Snow are a really good inspiration. Powerfully lyrical work from writers with relentlessly inquisitive minds.
Financial Times, 16 December 2011
A taste of high-altitude snowboarding three miles up in the Himalayas, with nothing in sight but snow and rock
On my last morning snowboarding in the Himalayas, the Bell 407 helicopter set us down on a narrow mountain ledge at 4,800m. As it departed, huge gusts of snow stirring at its ascent, I was struck by how very far we were from any sign of civilisation. Even on remote off-piste slopes in the Alps you’re never too far away from an abandoned ski pole or chocolate wrappers borne aloft in the wind. But here, at roughly three miles up in the sky – the same height as the summit of Mont Blanc – there was nothing in sight other than snow and rock. Row after row of jagged mountain peaks stretched into the distance, the world below invisible beneath layers of cloud. more
The Telegraph, 15 Oct 2011
With the release of the documentary Black Power Mixtape, interest in the Black Panthers is greater now than at any time since the 60s
Forty years ago, the Black Panther Party was the most reviled and feared political organisation in the United States. Party members took part in dozens of shoot‑outs with the police, leading to injuries and deaths on both sides. Hundreds of Panthers were on trial or in jail for crimes including murder, extortion and drug racketeering. J Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, declared them “without question, the greatest threat to the internal security of the country”.
Riven by internal conflict, the party fell apart in the late Seventies, officially closing in 1982. But in the decades since, a remarkable turnaround has taken place in perceptions of the organisation to the extent that today, cultural and critical interest in their image and beliefs has rarely been higher. more
Port, 16 May 2011
Is 2011 a repeat of 1981? Two weeks ago, Britain celebrated a royal wedding with an enthusiasm and patriotic fervour that almost matched the betrothal of Charles and Diana. And today, as then, we can also see a creeping right-wing retro revivalism – an embrace of conservative style, status symbols and values – spreading across British culture.
That’s not to say that 1981 was an inherently conservative year. Sure Thatcher was in power. But it was a time of bitter division: of 2.5m unemployed, riots in Brixton, IRA hunger strikes and the Militant Tendency as a serious force in the Labour party. But if the country was split socially and politically, then it found some solace in the embrace of fashion trends and brands that espoused a traditionalist, un-modern and anti-urban concept of Britishness. This was the age of Laura Ashley dresses and Tricia Guild wallpaper, the Sloane Ranger and the Young Fogey, the Aga as a symbol of enduring tradition. more
Arthur Russell “World of Echo” (1986)
I fell in love with Arthur Russell years long before I ever knew his name. I’d heard the sparse, hypnotic ‘Wax The Van” by Lola on release in 1987 and been mesmerised by it. I’d adored Loose Joints’ “It Is All Over My Face” and Dinosaur L’s”Go Bang”, to a similar extent. But it was only much later that I realised the same person was behind all those records. And that Russell himself was so much more than the creator of minimal disco. An artist of haunting brilliance.
Alice Coltrane, Journey In Satchidananda (1970)
So many black visionaries have headed into outer space – Sun Ra, Samuel Delany Jr, Parliament. Alice Coltrane’s greatest journey was to inner space.
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