Roy Christopher's Blog, page 11
November 21, 2022
Walk This Way
I was in the tenth grade when Run-DMC's "Walk This Way" came out. I remember hearing it and feeling like something truly unique was happening. Raw, raucous, and rocking. It brought together fans of both traditional rock n’ roll and rebellious hip-hop.
Recently, I pitched the song to a book series specifically about individual songs, but they didn't agree on the impact or the import of it. Well, while I was factchecking my memory, I found out there's already a whole book about it! There's no doubt it was a special moment in music, a new node in a burgeoning network of sound.
-- Notebook cover I made from the sleeve of Run-DMC's Raising Hell (1986).
Aerosmith’s original version of "Walk This Way," from their 1975 record Toys in the Attic, starts with a few measures of just the beat. It’s just the kind of clean drum beat hip-hop DJs scour recordings to find. With two copies of the record, one can loop it back and forth, providing a seamless backbeat to rap over. Run-DMC's DJ Jam Master Jay had already been using the record in this manner.
In 1986, Aerosmith was in shambles. Their 1985 reunion record Done With Mirrors had not met the expectations of their fans or their label, and their personal lives were in decline due to persisting drug problems. Starting with singer Steven Tyler, they would all enter rehab over the next couple of years. If not, they knew they were likely over as a band. After rehab and collaborating with Run-DMC on "Walk This Way," Aerosmith followed the song with a string of multi-platinum albums and Top 40 hits, entering the most successful era of their careers and becoming one of the biggest rock bands of the 1990s. It was a miraculous turnaround.
Though they hated the idea at the time, Run-DMC’s version of "Walk This Way" is a testament to the ear of their producer Rick Rubin. His production style, which he’d already used on previous Run-DMC records, as well as records for T La Rock & Jazzy Jay, the Beastie Boys, and LL Cool J, was credited as "reduction" instead of production. He stripped their sound down to its basic elements: boom-bapping 808 drums, classic-rock guitar riffs, the shouted voices of Reverend Run Simmons and Darryl "DMC" McDaniels, and the nimble cuts and scratches of Jam Master Jay.
As a nascent record label mogul and producer, Rubin was only getting started. The iconic sound he developed with early hits like "It's Yours," "Rock the Bells," "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)" and "Walk This Way" keep him in demand to this day. He’s gone on to produce everyone from Public Enemy, Ghetto Boys, Sir Mix-a-Lot, and Kanye West to the Mars Volta, Metallica, Tom Petty, Johnny Cash, Lana Del Rey, and Adele, and he’s redone the reduced style of his early work on everything from Jay-Z’s double-platinum "99 Problems" (2003) to Eminem’s Grammy-nominated "Berzerk" (2013), even appearing in the videos for both songs.
Speaking of, the video for "Walk This Way" was as iconic as the song. It starts as a fight, with Aerosmith practicing loudly in one room, disrupting Run-DMC’s session next door. Run-DMC then turns up the volume on their equipment and launches into their version of "Walk This Way," confusing the aged rockers. By the chorus, the wall is torn down (inviting more than a few interpretations), and the two groups are ripping through the song together. The video was even parodied in 1994 by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion on their song "Flavor" which features Beck in the practice space next door.
For better or worse, "Walk This Way" also sparked the further mixture of rap and riffs, giving birth to collaborations between rap groups and rock groups and a start to acts firmly on the fence in between. Public Enemy and Anthrax covered PE's "Bring the Noise" in 1991. The two groups even toured together that year. I saw them at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in a chocolate-and-peanut-butter package that also included Young Black Teenagers and Primus. In 1993, the infamous Judgement Night soundtrack featured collaborations between Slayer and Ice-T, Sonic Youth and Cypress Hill, and Dinosaur Jr. and Del the Funky Homosapien, among many other embarrassing pairings. And, as if reading "Walk This Way" as a blueprint to success, acts like Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, and Rage Against the Machine also emerged in the 1990s.
"Walk This Way" was an unavoidable song and an undeniable hit, Run-DMC's biggest, peaking at #4 on the Billboard chart. It was bigger even than Aerosmith's original, which just broke the top ten. Run-DMC is one of the core groups of the first recorded era of rap music and hip-hop culture. They were successful and respected before and after this song, but they never saw heights like "Walk This Way." The song was the nexus of several trajectories and the birth of a hybrid new life form that still stomps around today.
The Edible ComplexI did a piece for Lit Reactor about eating and writing (It's three food-based tips for research and editing). Here's the beginning:
The process of writing is one of those things that eludes even those of us who do it everyday. Sometimes sentences just pour out of you. Sometimes you go weeks with nothing. When I'm in the flow of the sentences, I'm always trying to figure out how to make them the best I can. When I'm in the nothing of the nothingness, I'm always trying to figure out ways to recalibrate my approach. Maybe if I do that part first instead... Maybe if I sneak up on it this way... Maybe if I have a snack...
Eating and writing sometimes feel inextricably linked. They are both done sitting at a table after all. There are also so many things done in the service of eating that aren't eating and in the service of writing that aren't writing. I'm thinking of recipes and cooking done before eating and the cleaning up done after; the planning and research done before writing and the editing done after.
I'm writing about writing here of course, but these ideas are applicable to other creative pursuits as well. So, with lunchtime in mind, here are three food-based tips for research and editing... read the rest at Lit Reactor.
And remember...
All of my books (pictured above at Reset Mercantile in Dothan, Alabama) make great gifts! At least two of them (Dead Precedents and Boogie Down Predictions) are about historical hip-hop moments like the one above. If you haven't already, cop your copies.
If you have, please consider rating one or posting a review. It helps more than you know.
Thank you!
As always, thanks for reading,
-royc.
[The "Eating and Writing" wordburger above was made with Put Words Between Buns by Ian Bogost.]
November 16, 2022
What's in my NOW?
This week is all about paper and printed products: namely notebooks, zines (old and new), and books, of course.
Read on!
What's in my NOW?
I participated in this week's edition of the Cool Tools What's in my NOW? newsletter, edited by the magical and multi-talented Claudia Dawson. It's a weekly list of one person's things that are influencing their present: 3 physical, 2 digital, and 1 invisible.
I included these great Bienfang Notesketch notebooks. I work on paper as much as I do on screens. I even make my own notebooks. If given the choice, Bienfang Notesketch paper is what I would use for every one. It’s half-ruled—sometimes half the page vertically, sometimes half of it horizontally—and it’s perfect for hashing out ideas of all kinds.
Flashback: wow&flutterIn 1997 I put out a zine called wow&flutter [.pdf]. It was an attempt to merge two of my main musical interests at the time, turntablism and experimental noise. I interviewed DJ QBert, DJ Spooky, John Duncan, and Daniel Menche, and reviewed records from the rapidly expanding releases of ambient, noise, and turntable artists. I lived in Seattle at the time, and there was so much going on in all of these areas. There were regular live events and several specialty stores, and I tried to bring them all together under the banner of sound experimentation.
wow&flutter was intended as the first of a series, but the second issue, attack&decay, featuring interviews with Jack Dangers of Meat Beat Manifesto and Warren Defever of His Name is Alive, among others, never made it to press. I still love the idea of noise and hip-hop coming together, and there are others who’ve merged them in the meantime better than I could have imagined (e.g., dälek, clipping., Ho99o9, Death Grips, Cloaks, Justin Broadrick and Kevin Martin, et al.)
It’s been 25 years since its release, but maybe it’s worth another look. Download this .pdf of the first issue, and you’ll see the seeds of future projects like my recent books Dead Precedents and Boogie Down Predictions.
ICYMI: discontents
This summer I returned to my roots and made a zine with some of my old zine-making friends. The pilot issue features stories on Ceremony, Hsi-Chang Lin a.k.a. Still, and Unwound; interviews with emcee Fatboi Sharif, Coherence director James Ward Byrkit, and Crestone director Marnie Elizabeth Hertzler; pieces by Cynthia Connolly, Spike Jonze, Andy Jenkins, Timothy Baker, Greg Pratt, and Peter Relic; cover art by Tae Won Yu, layouts by Patrick Barber and Craig Gates, and drawings by me, Zak Sally, and Marcellous Lovelace.
It's 50 solid pages of good stuff about good stuff! Get yours: discontents is still available from Impeller Press.
MY BOOKS:
I redid my website, and now there's a page for all of my books (pictured above at Reset Mercantile in Dothan, Alabama) and a page for each of them. All of the information about each one is available there now. If you haven't already, cop your copies. They also make great gifts!
Thank you for reading,
November 3, 2022
The Grand Allusion
Well, I just signed on to write The Grand Allusion for Palgrave Macmillan as a part of their Pivot series! So, I thought I'd repost my early thoughts on the idea.
Here's my mock cover. Like a lot of allusions, I did it for yuks:
And here's the tentative Table of Contents:
1. Booked Up: The Literary Roots of Allusion
2. Vernacular Homicide: Beyond Intertextuality
3. From Jay to Z: Figurative Language Use in Rap Lyrics
4. Use Your Allusion: Sampling, Collage, Remix
5. Nice to Meme You: Online Idea Exchange
6. Flowers for QAnon: Conspiracies and Supremacies
7. The Grand Allusion: The Future of Reference
There are a lot of tenuously connected ideas bouncing around in the bit below, so thank you for enduring my thinking aloud. I'll be sorting these thoughts out further for the book.
Read on!
Use Your AllusionOn his spoken-word album Bomb the Womb (Gang of Seven) from 30 years ago, Hugh Brown Shü does a great bit about it being 1992, and everything seeming familiar. “What has been will be again,” reads Ecclesiastes 1:9. “What has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” That old familiar feeling has been around longer than we’d like to admit, but how do make sense of things that seem familiar but really aren’t?
The first time I heard “The Pursuit of Happiness” by Kid Cudi (2009), I felt like something was a bit off about it. I felt like it had originally be sung by a woman, and he’d just jacked the chorus for the hook. I distinctly remembered the vocals being sung by a woman but also that they were mechanically looped, sampled, or manipulated in some way.
Upon further investigation I found that the song was indeed originally Kid Cudi’s, but that Lissie had done a cover version of it. Her version is featured in the Girl/Chocolate skateboard video Pretty Sweet (2012), which I have watched many times. Even further digging found the true cause of my confusion: A sample of the Lissie version forms the hook of ScHoolboy Q’s song with A$AP Rocky, “Hands on the Wheel.” This last was the version I had in my head and the source of my confusion.
I use this rather tame example to show how easy it is to be unsure about the source of something that we feel like we know. Our memories play tricks, but so do our media. The phenomenon plays out in many other contexts as well.
-- Dave Vanian of The Damned on the cover of Slash #1, May 1977, and Playboi Carti on the cover of his record Whole Lotta Red, 2020.
The cover art for Playboi Carti’s 2020 record, Whole Lotta Red (AWGE/Interscope) knocks off the lo-fi aesthetic of classic punk magazine Slash. This isn’t the first time Carti’s visual aesthetic has paid homage to punk.
-- Playboi Carti Die Lit (2018)
The stage-diving photo on the cover of his 2018 record, Die Lit (AWGE/Interscope), recalls a similar SST promo photo of HR of Bad Brains, who was notorious for doing backflips on stage. It’s closer to Edward Colver’s classic 1981 Wasted Youth live shot, which appeared on the back of their Reagan’s In LP (ICI Productions).
-- Wasted Youth Regan’s In (1981). Photo by Ed Colver.
Such allusions are everywhere in our media. They’re also prevalent in human interpersonal communication. The example I always cite for this comes from Adbusters Magazine founder Kalle Lasn. In his 1999 book Culture Jam, Lasn describes a scene in which two people are embarking on a road trip and speak to each other along the way using only quotations from movies. Based on this idea and the rampant branding and advertising covering any surface upon which an eye may light, Lasn argues that our culture has inducted us into a cult: “By consensus, cult members speak a kind of corporate Esperanto: words and ideas sucked up from TV and advertising.” Indeed, we quote television shows, allude to fictional characters and situations, and repeat song lyrics and slogans in everyday conversations. Lasn argues, “We have been recruited into roles and behavior patterns we did not consciously choose” (emphasis in original).
-- Sometimes it’s not necessarily an homage. Sometimes it’s “inspiration.” Deborah Harry in 1976, and Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn in 2016.
Lasn writes about this scenario as if it is a nightmare, but to many of us, this sounds not only familiar but also fun. Our media is so saturated with allusions to other media that we scarcely think about them. A viewing of any single episode of popular television shows Family Guy, South Park, or Robot Chicken yields allusions to any number of artifacts and cultural detritus past. Their meaning relies in large part on the catching and interpreting of cultural allusions, on their audiences sharing the same mediated memories, the same mediated experiences.
In an article from 2015, Devin Blake uses comedy as an example. Pointing to the well-established fact that we no longer define ourselves by what we produce but by what we consume, he marks the rise of what he calls “consumer comedy.” That is, comedy that references other media in order to pack its punchlines. “A lot of what happens in late night TV, for example,” he writes, “seems to involve things that we consume, namely other media like TV shows, movies, and music.” The added knowledge of an allusion is crucial for comedy in that if the audience doesn’t catch a reference, they won’t get the joke. Blake adds the critical insight: “A world of comedy-for-consumers is different than one filled with comedy-for-producers.” The consumption of information is not tethered to the physical world in the way that the production of material goods is.
Marshall McLuhan would frame these media allusions in Gestalt psychology terms as figure and ground. The figure being the overt reference—visual, verbal, or otherwise—and the ground being the invisible referent—the original image or text. “The figure is what appears and the ground is always subliminal,” he wrote. In the visual allusions above for instance, the figure is what you see, and the ground is the source material, the knowledge you have that you’ve seen the thing before, that old familiar feeling. The figure is the artifact at hand, and the ground is the historical context it’s indexing.
-- Deborah Harry had a Slash cover, too. Issue #5, October 1977.
So widespread is the use of allusion in our media that it has become its own cultural form. Following allusions on a path through media provides a unique way to understand contemporary mediated culture. Because allusion relies on shared media memories, exploring its use and function in media and conversation helps answer questions of how such mediated messages are stored, conceived, retrieved, and received.
Allusive tactics are not limited to television shows, movies, music, and conversations. Users employ them on social media as a form of “social steganography.” That is, hiding encoded messages where no one is likely to be looking for them: right out in the open. In one study, a teen user has problems with her mother commenting on her status updates. She finds it an invasion of her privacy, and her mom's eagerness to intervene squelches the online conversations she has with her friends. When she broke up with her boyfriend, she wanted to express her feelings to her friends but without alarming her mother. Instead of posting her feelings directly, she posted lyrics from “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” Not knowing the allusion, her mom thought she was having a good day. Knowing that the song is from the 1979 Monty Python movie, Life of Brian, and that it is sung while the characters are being crucified, her friends knew that all was not well and texted her to find out what was going on.
-- Howling on hallowed ground: Jake Angeli a.k.a. the QAnon Shaman.
Social steganography is not always so innocuous. Media allusions are arguably more vital on social media where memes are the currency exchanged. Conspiracy theories are spread online through shared texts as their adherents rally around allusions to those texts. The hidden knowledge allows these groups to communicate with each other out in the open without alarming others or stirring up ire or opposition. So-called “dog whistles,” these allusions are shibboleths shared by members and ignored by others. QAnon has largely shared references to their own rumors and accusations, but other texts like William Luther Pierce's The Turner Diaries and the Luther Blissett Project’s novel Q are also touchstones. On the possible connections between the Q of QAnon and the Q novel, Luther Blissett member Wu Ming 1 says, “Once a novel, or a song, or any work of art is in the world out there, you can’t prevent people from citing it, quoting it, or making references to it.”
If we’re all watching broadcast television, we’re all seeing the same shows. If we’re all on the same social network, no two of us are seeing the same thing. The limited access to content via broadcast media used to unite us. Now we're only loosely united via the platform, and the platform itself doesn't matter. What matters is ephemeral and esoteric knowledge, knowing the memes, getting the references, catching the allusions. The references are stronger than their original media vessels. As less and less of us share the ground of each figure, the latter outmodes the former as it shrinks. Whether images from other media or quotations from a text, the allusions themselves outmode the vehicles that carry them.
Get a Spine!
In much less exciting news, I've been updating my website. I added a dedicated page for each of my books so far (spines pictured above) as well as one for all of them. Check 'em out! They make great gifts!
As always, thank you for reading, responding, and sharing!
Power to you,
-royc.
Bibliography for the Essay Above:
Blake, Devin, “The Rise of Consumer Comedy,” Splitsider, 2015 [archived here].
Blissett, Luther, Q: A Novel. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003.
boyd, danah & Marwick, Alice E. Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens’ Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies. Paper presented at Oxford Internet Institute’s A Decade in Internet Time: Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society, Oxford, England, September 22, 2011.
Brown Shü, Hugh, Bomb the Womb, New York: Gang of Seven, 1992.
Brunton, Finn & Nissenbaum, Helen, Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015.
Frankel, Eddie, QAnon: The Italian Artists Who May Have Inspired America’s Most Dangerous Conspiracy Theory, The Art Newspaper, January 19, 2021.
Greaney, Patrick. Quotational Practices: Repeating the Future in Contemporary Art, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Lasn, Kalle, Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America, New York: Eagle Brook, 1999, p. 53.
McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media, New York: Houghton-Mifflin.
Molinaro, Matie, McLuhan, Corinne, & Toye, William (Eds.), Letters of Marshall McLuhan, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Pierce, William Luther (as Andrew Macdonald), The Turner Diaries, Charlottesville, VA: National Vanguard Books, 1978.
October 21, 2022
Raking Leaves
For the last couple of weeks I've been busy with writing and editing The Medium Picture (forthcoming from Zer0 Books) as is usual these days, but also made a public appearance, released a new excerpt, celebrated an anniversary, and kicked off a new project (more on the latter later). All the details follow.
Read on!
Hope for Boats: A Prologue
Last week I read the prologue to my novel-in-progress, Hope for Boats, to the Rotary Club of Elba, Alabama, on which Elbo, the fictional town in the story, is loosely based. Here's the clip. You can read along on the Malarkey Books site.
Thanks to the members of the Elba Rotary Club, Courtney Pelham for inviting me, and my sister, Cindy, for filming.
[Boat drawing by me.]
Escape Philosophy excerpt on Apocalypse Confidential
Apocalypse Confidential is currently running an excerpt from Escape Philosophy: Journeys Beyond the Human Body (punctum books). Self-described as "Notes From The Underworld, Excavating The Carcosan Aspect; ‘Psyop Sleaze Rag’," Apocalypse Confidential is now running Chapter 2, "Body: The Root of all People." Here's a bit:
All the World's a Grave
It’s not like it looks on TV. You never see the open torso of a body heaving and sucking after a bullet, a piece of shrapnel, or a chunk of flying concrete has ripped right through it. The worst part is the smell: somewhere between bad breath and warm shit. And it’s inescapable. If the blood and guts get to be too much, you can look away. You can’t get way from the smell.
Bodies are gross. Getting out of them remains one of the most pervasive and persistent human fantasies. Fragile and frail, they fail us. They suffer injuries. They decay. From feeling the limits of this sluggish shell to seeing it as a prison cell, everyone is looking for a way out.
The physical body has often been seen as a prison, as something to be escaped by any means necessary: technology, mechanization, drugs, sensory deprivation, alien abduction, Rapture, or even death and extinction. Taking in horror movies from David Cronenberg and UFO encounters, metal bands such as Godflesh, Deafheaven, and Wolves in the Throne Room, as well as ketamine experiments, AI, and cybernetics, Escape Philosophy is an exploration of the ways that human beings have sought to make this escape, to transcend the limits of the human body, to find a way out.
As the physical world continues to crumble at an ever-accelerating rate, and we are faced with a particularly 21st-century kind of dread and dehumanization in the face of climate collapse and a global pandemic, Escape Philosophy asks what this escape from our bodies might look like, and if it is even possible.
“A peculiar hybrid of Thomas Ligotti and Marshall McLuhan.”
— Robert Guffey, author, Operation Mindfuck
With a cover by Matthew Revert as dark as the ideas inside, it will make you look cool reading it on the bus or displaying it on your bookshelf. Escape Philosophy is the perfect read for our current uncertain moment. Now you can get yourself a beautifully menacing paperback or an open-access .pdf from punctum books.
One-Year Anniversary of Follow for Now, Vol. 2
We almost forgot the one-year anniversary of Follow for Now, Vol. 2! This collection picks up and pushes beyond the first volume with a more diverse set of interviewees and interviews. The intent of the first collection was to bring together voices from across disciplines, to cross-pollinate ideas. At the time, social media wasn’t crisscrossing all of the lines and categories held a bit more sway. Volume 2 aims not only to pick up where Follow for Now left off but also to tighten its approach with deeper subjects and more timely interviews. This one is a bit more focused and goes a bit deeper than the last. It includes several firsts, a few lasts, and is fully illustrated with portraits of every interviewee.
“Relentlessly stimulating and insight-packed, Follow for Now is the kind of book I’d like to see published every decade, and devoured every subsequent decade, from now until the end of humanity.”
— Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
Thirty-seven interviews with creative minds of all kinds, including thinkers like Carla Nappi, Rita Raley, Dominic Pettman, Ian Bogost, Jodi Dean, Mark Dery, Douglas Rushkoff, Tricia Rose, and Dave Allen, and musicians like Ish Butler of Shabazz Palaces and Digable Planets, M. Sayyid of Antipop Consortium, Matthew Shipp, Sean Price, Labtekwon, and Sadat X, as well as writers like Ytasha L. Womack, Chris Kraus, Pat Cadigan, Clay Tarver, Bob Stephenson, Simon Critchley, Simon Reynolds, Malcolm Gladwell, and William Gibson. Follow for Now, Vol. 2 is a hefty collection of ideas and inspiration from some of the most important writers, artists, and thinkers of our time! It's available from punctum books. Get yourself a pretty paperback or an open-access .pdf!
And don't forget about Vol. 1, which is available on Bandcamp for $10!
Taken together, these two books embody two decades of discussions, 80 interviews with creative minds of all kinds — what Erik Davis calls "a crisp and substantial remix of the major memes" of the 21st century. Check them out!
Thanks for reading,
-royc.
Raking Leaves: A Prologue, an Excerpt, and an Anniversary
For the last couple of weeks I've been busy with writing and editing The Medium Picture (forthcoming from Zer0 Books) as is usual these days, but also made a public appearance, released a new excerpt, celebrated an anniversary, and kicked off a new project (more on the latter later). All the details follow.
Read on!
Hope for Boats: A Prologue
Last week I read the prologue to my novel-in-progress, Hope for Boats, to the Rotary Club of Elba, Alabama, on which Elbo, the fictional town in the story, is loosely based. Here's the clip. You can read along on the Malarkey Books site.
Thanks to the members of the Elba Rotary Club, Courtney Pelham for inviting me, and my sister, Cindy, for filming.
[Boat drawing by me.]
Escape Philosophy excerpt on Apocalypse Confidential
Apocalypse Confidential is currently running an excerpt from Escape Philosophy: Journeys Beyond the Human Body (punctum books). Self-described as "Notes From The Underworld, Excavating The Carcosan Aspect; ‘Psyop Sleaze Rag’," Apocalypse Confidential is now running Chapter 2, "Body: The Root of all People." Here's a bit:
All the World's a Grave
It’s not like it looks on TV. You never see the open torso of a body heaving and sucking after a bullet, a piece of shrapnel, or a chunk of flying concrete has ripped right through it. The worst part is the smell: somewhere between bad breath and warm shit. And it’s inescapable. If the blood and guts get to be too much, you can look away. You can’t get way from the smell.
Bodies are gross. Getting out of them remains one of the most pervasive and persistent human fantasies. Fragile and frail, they fail us. They suffer injuries. They decay. From feeling the limits of this sluggish shell to seeing it as a prison cell, everyone is looking for a way out.
The physical body has often been seen as a prison, as something to be escaped by any means necessary: technology, mechanization, drugs, sensory deprivation, alien abduction, Rapture, or even death and extinction. Taking in horror movies from David Cronenberg and UFO encounters, metal bands such as Godflesh, Deafheaven, and Wolves in the Throne Room, as well as ketamine experiments, AI, and cybernetics, Escape Philosophy is an exploration of the ways that human beings have sought to make this escape, to transcend the limits of the human body, to find a way out.
As the physical world continues to crumble at an ever-accelerating rate, and we are faced with a particularly 21st-century kind of dread and dehumanization in the face of climate collapse and a global pandemic, Escape Philosophy asks what this escape from our bodies might look like, and if it is even possible.
“A peculiar hybrid of Thomas Ligotti and Marshall McLuhan.”
— Robert Guffey, author, Operation Mindfuck
With a cover by Matthew Revert as dark as the ideas inside, it will make you look cool reading it on the bus or displaying it on your bookshelf. Escape Philosophy is the perfect read for our current uncertain moment. Now you can get yourself a beautifully menacing paperback or an open-access .pdf from punctum books.
One-Year Anniversary of Follow for Now, Vol. 2
We almost forgot the one-year anniversary of Follow for Now, Vol. 2! This collection picks up and pushes beyond the first volume with a more diverse set of interviewees and interviews. The intent of the first collection was to bring together voices from across disciplines, to cross-pollinate ideas. At the time, social media wasn’t crisscrossing all of the lines and categories held a bit more sway. Volume 2 aims not only to pick up where Follow for Now left off but also to tighten its approach with deeper subjects and more timely interviews. This one is a bit more focused and goes a bit deeper than the last. It includes several firsts, a few lasts, and is fully illustrated with portraits of every interviewee.
“Relentlessly stimulating and insight-packed, Follow for Now is the kind of book I’d like to see published every decade, and devoured every subsequent decade, from now until the end of humanity.”
— Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
Thirty-seven interviews with creative minds of all kinds, including thinkers like Carla Nappi, Rita Raley, Dominic Pettman, Ian Bogost, Jodi Dean, Mark Dery, Douglas Rushkoff, Tricia Rose, and Dave Allen, and musicians like Ish Butler of Shabazz Palaces and Digable Planets, M. Sayyid of Antipop Consortium, Matthew Shipp, Sean Price, Labtekwon, and Sadat X, as well as writers like Ytasha L. Womack, Chris Kraus, Pat Cadigan, Clay Tarver, Bob Stephenson, Simon Critchley, Simon Reynolds, Malcolm Gladwell, and William Gibson. Follow for Now, Vol. 2 is a hefty collection of ideas and inspiration from some of the most important writers, artists, and thinkers of our time! It's available from punctum books. Get yourself a pretty paperback or an open-access .pdf!
And don't forget about Vol. 1, which is available on Bandcamp for $10!
Taken together, these two books embody two decades of discussions, 80 interviews with creative minds of all kinds — what Erik Davis calls "a crisp and substantial remix of the major memes" of the 21st century. Check them out!
Thanks for reading,
-royc.
October 15, 2022
Dashboard Dysfunctional
When we try to draw a line at the limits of our comfort with technology, we make a statement about what we think is too much technology. My favorite example is the bicycle. As much as I love computers and stereos, the analog interface of the bicycle is the perfect amount of technology to me. The difference in realms of these contrivances-- analog/digital, muscular/mental--may have more to do with our comfort than we think.
"Mind didn't actually emerge from matter, but from constraints on matter."
– Charles Mudede, August 2012
"I like simple instruments," Brian Eno told Deirdre O'Donaghue of KCRW in 1985. "I always have. I've always used very simple synthesizers actually, and I prefer them because I don't particularly care to be faced with limitless possibilities. I prefer a slightly more constrained situation."
In a 1999 article for WIRED called "Revenge of the Intuitive," Eno expands the idea, pointing out that a proliferation of options on a new device reduces the intimacy one can have with it. He's writing specifically about recording technology, but the concept applies far more broadly. You can't get facile with a tool if its use keeps changing. You can't have a relationship with something if it keeps becoming something else.
Also insightful is his observation that our devices seem to be shifting our creative practices and activities from one realm to another. "Studios opened up possibilities," he writes. "But now I'm struck by the insidious computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity. This transfer is not paying off." Think about the flat rectangle of your smartphone. Its affordances take little advantage of the dexterity of human hands and fingers. Its interface relies almost solely on our mental abilities. The screen on your smartphone might do anything. Joysticks, keyboards, steering wheels, gearshifts, handlebars, brake levers, even older cellular phones, all take advantage of what hands and fingers can do. They all do fewer things, but they do each of them better.
The consoles above are from the 1961 Apollo program, the 1981 Space Shuttle, and SpaceX's 2021 Dragon2, and the ones below are from a recent car dashboard and a Tesla Model 3. Screens have swallowed up the interactive aspects of almost everything. A lot of the labor of using digital interfaces is cognitive. Sure, you have to remember that turning the wheel to the left causes the car to veer left, but it also physically shows you. The mapping of these functions requires more and more of our brains than our bodies.
“Digital documents… have no edges,” writes Lisa Gitelman in her book, Paper Knowledge. A “document” in digital space is only metaphorically so. Every form of media is the same at the digital level. Digital documents are arranged in recognizable analog forms on the screen. The underlying mechanisms doing the arranging remain largely hidden from us as users, what Alex Galloway calls “the interface effect.” It’s kind of like using genre as a way to parse massive amounts of text, as a different way to organize and understand writing.
The body is the original cite of all of our media. "The body is the most basic of all media," writes John Durham Peters in his book, The Marvelous Clouds, "and the richest with meaning, but its meanings are not principally those of language or signs [...]." It's up to the mind to make meaning of language and signs. So, when the gestural cues of buttons and levers become the symbolic cues of images and touchscreens, interfaces are shifting from the muscular to the mental.
The bicycle is an open system. Unlike the black box of the smartphone or computer, it invites tinkering and wear. Also unlike the flat rectangle of the smartphone, its affordances and limitations are visible. Its interface is attuned to the human body, adjustable to multiple uses and terrains and every rider's size and skills, and the labor involved in operating it is mostly muscular.
The bicycle is not a spacecraft or a smartphone, but its assemblage of grips and levers and pedals is a nice example of the affordances of a body-based, human-centric, analog interface. Its constraints are also its strengths. Like Eno's limited synthesizer interfaces, we love bicycles because we know what to expect from them.
The Medium Picture
The above bit is more from my book-in-progress, The Medium Picture. The analog to digital shift of our media is another of the major transitions we are living through. The Medium Picture documents this shift and its ramifications.
Thanks for reading,
-royc.
Disguise the Limit
When we try to draw a line at the limits of our comfort with technology, we make a statement about what we think is too much technology. My favorite example is the bicycle. As much as I love computers and stereos, the analog interface of the bicycle is the perfect amount of technology to me. The difference in realms of these contrivances-- analog/digital, muscular/mental--may have more to do with our comfort than we think.
"Mind didn't actually emerge from matter, but from constraints on matter."
– Charles Mudede, August 2012
"I like simple instruments," Brian Eno told Deirdre O'Donaghue of KCRW in 1985. "I always have. I've always used very simple synthesizers actually, and I prefer them because I don't particularly care to be faced with limitless possibilities. I prefer a slightly more constrained situation."
In a 1999 article for WIRED called "Revenge of the Intuitive," Eno expands the idea, pointing out that a proliferation of options on a new device reduces the intimacy one can have with it. He's writing specifically about recording technology, but the concept applies far more broadly. You can't get facile with a tool if its use keeps changing. You can't have a relationship with something if it keeps becoming something else.
Also insightful is his observation that our devices seem to be shifting our creative practices and activities from one realm to another. "Studios opened up possibilities," he writes. "But now I'm struck by the insidious computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity. This transfer is not paying off." Think about the flat rectangle of your smartphone. Its affordances take little advantage of the dexterity of human hands and fingers. Its interface relies almost solely on our mental abilities. The screen on your smartphone might do anything. Joysticks, keyboards, steering wheels, gearshifts, handlebars, brake levers, even older cellular phones, all take advantage of what hands and fingers can do. They all do fewer things, but they do each of them better.
The consoles above are from the 1961 Apollo program, the 1981 Space Shuttle, and SpaceX's 2021 Dragon2, and the ones below are from a recent car dashboard and a Tesla Model 3. Screens have swallowed up the interactive aspects of almost everything. A lot of the labor of using digital interfaces is cognitive. Sure, you have to remember that turning the wheel to the left causes the car to veer left, but it also physically shows you. The mapping of these functions requires more and more of our brains than our bodies.
“Digital documents… have no edges,” writes Lisa Gitelman in her book, Paper Knowledge. A “document” in digital space is only metaphorically so. Every form of media is the same at the digital level. Digital documents are arranged in recognizable analog forms on the screen. The underlying mechanisms doing the arranging remain largely hidden from us as users, what Alex Galloway calls “the interface effect.” It’s kind of like using genre as a way to parse massive amounts of text, as a different way to organize and understand writing.
The body is the original cite of all of our media. "The body is the most basic of all media," writes John Durham Peters in his book, The Marvelous Clouds, "and the richest with meaning, but its meanings are not principally those of language or signs [...]." It's up to the mind to make meaning of language and signs. So, when the gestural cues of buttons and levers become the symbolic cues of images and touchscreens, interfaces are shifting from the muscular to the mental.
The bicycle is an open system. Unlike the black box of the smartphone or computer, it invites tinkering and wear. Also unlike the flat rectangle of the smartphone, its affordances and limitations are visible. Its interface is attuned to the human body, adjustable to multiple uses and terrains and every rider's size and skills, and the labor involved in operating it is mostly muscular.
The bicycle is not a spacecraft or a smartphone, but its assemblage of grips and levers and pedals is a nice example of the affordances of a body-based, human-centric, analog interface. Its constraints are also its strengths. Like Eno's limited synthesizer interfaces, we love bicycles because we know what to expect from them.
The Medium Picture
The above bit is more from my book-in-progress, The Medium Picture. The analog to digital shift of our media is another of the major transitions we are living through. The Medium Picture documents this shift and its ramifications.
Thanks for reading,
-royc.
September 27, 2022
The Advent Horizon
I call the line we draw at the edge of our comfort zone with new technologies the advent horizon. It’s a line we draw as individuals as well as a society at large. In his book Human as Media, Andrey Miroshnichenko describes it in terms of eras, writing, "If an era is shorter than a generation, the balance between the speed of technological innovation and the speed of cultural adaptation breaks down." We feel a sense of loss when we cross one of these lines.
At the DMA conference in 2011 in Boston, I described it as follows:
From the Socratic shift from speaking to writing, to the transition from writing to typing, we’re comfortable—differently on an individual and collective level—in one of these eras. As we adopt and assimilate new devices, our horizon of comfort drifts further out while our media vocabulary increases. Any attempt to return to a so-called “Natural State” is a futile attempt to get back across the line we’ve drawn for ourselves.
Evidence that we’ve crossed one of these lines isn’t difficult to find. Think about the resurgence of vinyl record sales since 2010. Fans of vinyl records are either clinging to their youth or celebrating the only true music format that ever mattered. A vinyl record is a true document of a slice of time.
I visited Full Sail University in Winter Park, Florida several years ago, and something about the curriculum struck me. In their animation and game design programs, students take illustration (with pencils and paper), flipbook-style animation (with paper and lightboxes), and 3D modeling (real-world 3D, sculpture with clay and other materials) before they ever sit down at a computer. Though they are natives to the latter, they are forced to learn their skills in the analog world before moving to the digital.
A vinyl record is an analog totem from a previous era. Teaching animation on paper before computers is analog scaffolding for the digital world. Clinging to a previous era and having to back up to learn something new, these are both evidence of a new era, that an advent horizon has been crossed.
Each generation is born during a certain technological era, between these lines we draw. We are imprinted by the media technology with which we grow up. For instance, there has always been a television in my world. When I was born, it was there. In contrast, my parents remember when the first TV arrived in their house. With today's personal media, television shows—along with every other kind of media content—are beamed directly to portable screens via invisible networks.
As Alan Kay once said, "Technology is anything that was invented after you were born." I have never known a world without television, and my students have never known or don’t remember a world without television, computers, the web, or cellular phones. Perhaps they will cross a line of comfort when something new becomes the norm for their children, but a world before personal media means nothing to them.
The Medium Picture
The above bit is more from my book-in-progress, The Medium Picture. We're all living through a novel overlap of generations and technological eras, and The Medium Picture explicates some of the fallout.
Thank you for your continued interest and support,
-royc.
September 20, 2022
When Everyone's a Winner
"It’s all become marketing and we want to win because we’re lonely and empty and scared and we’re led to believe winning will change all that. But there is no winning." — Charlie Kaufman, BAFTA, 2011 [1]
The dictum, "In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes," for which several sources have claimed credit, is widely attributed to Andy Warhol. [2] Regardless of who first said it, those 15 minutes of the future are the popular origins of the long tail of fame. Though the phrase has been around since the late 1960s, its proposed future is here.
In his 1991 essay, "Pop Stars? Nein Danke!" Scottish recording artist Momus updates Warhol’s supposed phrase to say that in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 people, writing about the computer, "We now have a democratic technology, a technology which can help us all to produce and consume the new, 'unpopular' pop musics, each perfectly customized to our elective cults." [3] In Small Pieces Loosely Joined, David Weinberger’s 2002 book, he notes about bloggers, content creators, comment posters, and podcasters: “They are famous. They are celebrities. But only within a circle of a few hundred people.” He goes on to say that in the ever-splintering future, they will be famous to ever-fewer people, and—echoing Momus—that in the future provided by the internet, everyone will be famous for 15 people. [4] Democratizing the medium means a dwindling of the fame that medium can support.
Around the turn of the millennium, the long tail, [5] the internet-enabled power law that allows for millions of products to be sold regardless of shelf space, reconfigured not only how culture is consumed but also how it is created. It's since gotten so long and so thick that there’s not much left in the big head. As the online market supports a wider and wider variety of cultural artifacts with less and less depth of interest, they each serve ever-smaller audiences. Even when a hit garners widespread attention, there are still more and more of us farther down the tail, each in our own little worlds.
In his 1996 memoir, A Year with Swollen Appendices, Brian Eno proposes the idea of edge culture, which is based on the premise that "If you abandon the idea that culture has a single center, and imagine that there is instead a network of active nodes, which may or may not be included in a particular journey across the field, you also abandon the idea that those nodes have absolute value. Their value changes according to which story they’re included in, and how prominently." [6] Eno’s edge culture is based on Joel Garreau’s idea of edge cities, which describes the center of urban life drifting out of the square and to the edges of town. [7] The lengthening and thickening of the long tail plot our media culture as it moves from the shared center to the individuals on the edges, from one big story to infinite smaller ones.
Now, what does such splintering do to the economics of creating culture?
"The lottery sucks! I only won 17 bucks!" — Rioter in Bruce Almighty (2003).
Bruce Nolan, played by Jim Carrey in the 2003 movie, Bruce Almighty, is a man unimpressed with the way God is handling human affairs. In response, God lets him have a shot at it. One of the many aspects of the job that Bruce quickly mishandles is answering prayers. His head is flooded with so many, he can't even think. He sets up an email system to handle the flow, but the influx overwhelms his inbox. As a solution to that, he implements an autoresponder to send back a message that simply reads, “Yes” to every request.
Many of the incoming prayers are pleas to win the lottery. His wife's sister Debbie hits it. "There were like 433 thousand other winners," his wife Grace explains, "so it only paid out 17 dollars. Can you believe the odds of that?" [8] Subject to Bruce’s automated email system, everyone who asked for a winning ticket got one. Out of the millions on offer, everyone who prayed to God to win the lottery won 17 dollars.
That's what you get when you're famous for 15 people for 15 minutes. That's what you get when everyone's a winner.
The mainstream isn't the monolith it once was. It's a relatively small slice of the total culture now, markedly smaller than it was at the end of last century. For better or worse, the internet has democratized the culture-creating and distributing processes we used to privilege (e.g., writing, music, comedy, filmmaking, etc.), and it's brought along new forms in its image. Since the long tail took hold around the turn of the millennium, the edge culture of the internet has splintered even further via social media and mobile devices. Anyone can now create content and be famous for 15 people for 15 minutes—and earn 17 dollars for their efforts.
The Medium Picture
This piece above is another excerpt from my thinking-aloud about my book-in-progress, The Medium Picture. Here's the brief overview:
The ever-evolving ways that we interact with each other, our world, and our selves through technology is a topic as worn as the devices we clutch and carry everyday. How did we get here? Drawing from the disciplines of media ecology and media archaeology, as well as bringing fresh perspectives from subcultures of music and skateboarding, the book illuminates aspects of technological mediation that have been overlooked along the way. With a Foreword by Andrew McLuhan, The Medium Picture shows how immersion in unmoored technologies of connectivity finds us in a world of pure media and redefines who we are, how we are, and what we will be.
One day you'll get to read it all in one place in a much more organized form (a book!).
ICYMI:
Speaking of, in case you missed them, I have a few new books out! Get 'em however you can, and if you want to review something, let me know.
As always, thank you for reading and responding.
Hope you're well,
-royc.
Notes for the essay above:
1. Charlie Kaufman, Screenwriters' Lecture, BAFTA, September 30, 2011.
2. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Andy Warhol's One-Dimensional Art: 1956–1966," In Michelson, Annette (ed.), Andy Warhol, Cambridge, MA:The MIT Press, 2001, 28.
3. The 1991 Momus essay was published by the Swedish fanzine Grimsby Fishmarket in 1992 and in the daily paper Svenske Dagblatt in 1994.
4. David Weinberger, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, New York: Perseus Books, 2002, 103-104.
5. Chris Anderson, The Long Tail, New York: Hyperion, 2006.
6. Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices, London: faber & faber, 1996, 328.
7. Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, New York: Doubleday, 1991.
8. Tom Shadyac [dir.], Bruce Almighty, Los Angeles: Universal Pictures, 2003.
September 13, 2022
Boogie Down Predictions is Out Today!
After a global pandemic, all the supply-chain delays, and a printing backlog, Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism is available! You can get yours directly from Strange Attractor, the MIT Press, or the source of your choice (yes, including that one)! It's also in fine bookstores everywhere today. It is well worth the wait, but the wait is over!
Below is a bit about how it came together, a look at the cover, the blurbs, the table of contents, and an early review from The Wire magazine.
Read on!
Over the past several years, I gathered up some friends, and we’ve been working on an edited collection, sort of a companion to my book, Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future (Repeater Books, 2019). Time was one of the aspects of both hip-hop and cyberpunk that I didn’t get to talk about much in that book, so I started asking around. I found many other writers, scholars, theorists, DJs, and emcees, as interested in the intersections of hip-hop, time, and Afrofuturism as I was. As I continued contacting people and collecting essays, I got more and more excited about the book.
Well, it's now available from Strange Attractor Press! Check out the cover above by Edwin Pouncey a.k.a. Savage Pencil!
Check out the jacket copy, the blurbs, and the table of contents!Through essays by some of hip-hop’s most interesting thinkers, theorists, journalists, writers, emcees, and DJs, Boogie Down Predictions is a quest to understand the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture, as well as what that means for the culture at large. Introduced by Ytasha L. Womack, author of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (Lawrence Hill Books, 2013), this collection explores these temporalities, possible pasts, and further futures from a diverse, multi-layered, interdisciplinary perspective.
“This book, edited by Roy Christopher, is a moment. It is the deconstructed sample, the researched lyrical metaphors, the aha moment on the way to hip-hop enlightenment. Hip-hop permeates our world, and yet it is continually misunderstood. Hip-hop’s intersections with Afrofuturism and science fiction provide fascinating touchpoints that enable us to see our todays and tomorrows. This book can be, for the curious, a window into a hip-hop-infused Alter Destiny—a journey whose spaceship you embarked on some time ago. Are you engaging this work from the gaze of the future? Are you the data thief sailing into the past to U-turn to the now? Or are you the unborn child prepping to build the next universe? No, you’re the superhero. Enjoy the journey.”
— Ytasha L. Womack, from her Introduction
“Boogie Down Predictions offers new ways of listening to, looking at, and thinking about hip-hop culture. It teaches us that hip-hop bends time, blending past, present, and future in sound and sense. Roy Christopher has given us more than a book; it’s a cypher and everyone involved brought bars.”
— Adam Bradley, author, Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip-Hop
“The study of hip-hop requires more than a procession of protagonists, events, and innovations. Boogie Down Predictions stops the clock—each essay within it a frozen moment, an opportunity to look sub-atomically at the forces that drive this culture.”
— Dan Charnas, author, Dilla Time: How A Hip-Hop Producer Reinvented Rhythm and Changed the Way Musicians Play
“How does hip-hop fold, spindle, or mutilate time? In what ways does it treat technology as, merely, a foil? Are its notions of the future tensed…or are they tenseless? For Boogie Down Predictions, Roy Christopher’s trenchant anthology, he’s assembled a cluster of curious interlocutors. Here, in their hands, the culture has been intently examined, as though studying for microfractures in a fusion reactor. The result may not only be one of the most unique collections on hip-hop yet produced, but, even more, and of maximum value, a novel set of questions.”
— Harry Allen, Hip-Hop Activist & Media Assassin
Preface – Roy Christopher
Introduction – Ytasha L. Womack
I. TIME
1. Take Me Back: Ghostface’s Ghosts – Steven Shaviro
2. Two Dope Boyz (In a Visual World) – Tiffany E. Barber
3. Close to the Edge: “This Is America” and the Extended Take in Hip-Hop Music Video – Jeff M. Heinzl
4. Glitched: Spacetime, Repetition, and the Cut – Nettrice R. Gaskins
5. “The Theology of Timing” Black Consciousness and the Origin of Hip-hop Culture – Omar Akbar
6. Breakbeat Poems – Kevin Coval
7. The Free Space/Time Style of Black Wholes – Juice Aleem
8. Chopping Neoliberalism, Screwing the Record Labels: DJ Screw, Atavistic Hipsters and Temporal Politics – Aram Sinnreich & Samantha Dols
II. TECHNOLOGY
9. Scratch Cyborgs: The Hip-Hop DJ as Technology – André Sirois
10. Public Enemy and How Copyright Changed Hip-Hop – Kembrew McLeod
11. Done by the Trickle Trickle: Jbeez With the Ley Liners – Dave Tompkins
12. Preprogramming the Present: The Musical Time Machines of Gabriel Teodros – Erik Steinskog
13. The Cult of RAMM:∑LL:Z∑∑: A Hagiography into Chaos – Joël Vacheron
14. Hip-Hop’s Modes of Production are Futuristic – Chuck Galli
15. #ThisIsAmerica: Rappers, Racism, and Twitter – Tia C. M. Tyree
III. THE FUTURE
16. Further Considerations on Afrofuturism – Kodwo Eshun
17. Afrofuturism and the Intersectionality of Civil Rights, the Space Race, Hip-Hop, and Black Femininity – K. Ceres Wright
18. Afrofuturism in clipping.’s Splendor & Misery – Jonathan Hay
19. Black Star Lines: Ontopolitics of Exodus, Afrofuturist Hip-Hop, and the RZA-rrection of Bobby Digital – tobias c. van Veen
20. Constructing a Theory and Practice of Black Quantum Futurism – Rasheedah Phillips
Many thanks to Jamie Sutcliffe and Mark Pilkington at Strange Attractor Press for their support and enthusiasm, Dominic Rafferty for the stellar layouts, and Savage Pencil for the dopest cover. Thanks to those who contributed words, images, and direction, those who wished us well, and those who didn't.
And thank you for checking it out!
A Review in The Wire:Hank Shocklee by Netrice Gaskins.
Also, there's a nice review of the book in the September issue of The Wire:
Boogie Down Predictions is available directly from Strange Attractor, the MIT Press, or the source of your choice (yes, including that one)! It's also in fine bookstores everywhere today. I cannot wait for you to see this thing!
Spread the word and the love!
Thank you!
As always, thank you for your continued interest and support! It is appreciated.
So stoked on this one!
Looking forward,
-royc.
