Built to Last
Your crotchety old neighbor is right. Music today sucks. The music of the 40s, 50s, and 60s was better. Not just better for old men. Dogs, aliens, even hipsters know this is true, deep down.
Here’s why: The biggest money, shrewdest impresarios, and most talented artists are always attracted to the newest media, where the barriers to entries are lowest and the biggest pots of cash and glory are sitting out there waiting to be won. That frontier used to be radio. Now it’s moved on, to film, to the Internet. The music world has been left to cynical hack producers trying to repackage old licks into new hip-hop. Those disgusting scavengers! Vultures! We would hate them if we weren’t doing the same thing for a living.
Anyhow, new media always draws the biggest heat, and todays DJs are starting to turn the clock back to the days of poodle skirts and transistor radios, going way back before the British Invasion to the days of American Bandstand. This trend started gathering steam with Outcast’s nostalgic “Hey Now” video and is now churning full blast, with such authorities as Mr. Diplo Himself weaving moldy classics like Hey Mister Postman and the Twist into their podcasts. This isn’t the organ-drive soul of the early zeroes. These are old old oldies, Elvis-era tracks that would have been written off as lame eighteen months ago. Now that electro has thoroughly mined the future, the only place for music to go is back, back, back.
Philebrity Hits A Bullseye
All you blog addicts out there already know about the famously long-simmering feud between Vulture Droppings and Philebrity. Philebrity thinks Vulture Droppings is “lame,” by which they mean a rung or two lower in their hierarchy of early adopters. Vulture Droppings thinks he who lives in a glass loft is in no position to be casting the first “lame” stone, particularly when that loft is built and paid for by King Lame himself, mega-capitalist and gentrifier extraordinaire Bart Blatstein.
Let’s just call it a draw, shall we?
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We came today to praise Philebrity, not bury them. We used to think they never browsed anything heavier than Mojo magazine. Turns out the bastards are a little more omnivorous in their reading than we thought. Check out this quote on Philly that the dudes just dug up from Philadelphia: A 300-Year History:
Above all, the Quaker City lacks that discriminating enthusiasm for her own children… which enables more zealous towns to rend the skies with shrill paeans of applause… Philadelphia is… “more than usual calm” when her sons and daughters win distinction in any field. She takes the matter quietly… If mistaking of geese for swans… the mistaking of swans for geese may also be a dangerous error. The birds either languish or fly away to keener air. Yet… the sharp discipline of quiet neglect is healthier for a worker than that loud local praise which wakes no echo from the wider world.
Word. That’s advice we could apply to pretty much any discipline in any old backwater burg: Advertising, music, art, writing, whatever. And it certainly applies to Philadelphia. Funny thing is, this quote was from 1898. Not that much changes in 100 years time. That’s a lesson you’ll never hear from Popcorn, Gladwell, and the other people who get paid to say the opposite.
Nice work, Philebrity. We tip our beak.
The Shake Shack: Have Your Shake & Drink It Too!
Fast food is bad for you. Really bad for you. It’s not just bad for the people who eat it. It’s bad for the people who sell it, bad for the people who live near it, and bad for the people who are generate the raw materials that power it—the meat, potatoes and the labor that are fried up into delicious gray morsels of meat
Yes, these are things that we all already know. But we didn’t know them quite so well until 2001, when Eric Schlosser’s exposé “Fast Food Nation,” locked them into the conventional wisdom. Now, Schlosser’s book is being made into a movie, the fast food industry is gearing up for an all-out public relations counterstrike, and one plucky New York City outlet is cashing in on enlightened fast food junkies who want their burger, fries and shake without the side of guilt.
Located in an open-air Manhattan public park, the Shake Shack offers all the fast food standards with ingredients procured directly from local organic farmers and sold in an open-air public park. Yes. Treats that satisfy the conscience and the palate. Who says you can’t have it both ways?
Howdy, Hipster!
As far as hipster fashion goes, this summer is the season of weird. The fellows are dressing like crew captains, wearing topsiders and leather boat shoes without socks. The ladies, as always, are using the weather as an excuse to traipse around in various states of quasi-nudity and carefully arranged disarray.
But strangest of all is the sudden and mysterious rise of the handkerchief, tied around one’s neck and sometimes pulled over the face like a Wild West bandit. Ten years ago, the handkerchiefs were black and wearing them meant you were a member of the Black Block, those barbaric trust-fund anticapitalists from Eugene, Oregon who so famously shattered the windows of Starbucks in the Seattle ‘99 riots.
Back then, it meant something to have a handkerchief knotted ’round your neck. These days there are rainbows upon rainbows of apolitical kerchiefs lining the stools of most every neighborhood dive bar. Ask the wearers what the hell they’re doing with that useless piece of cloth around their necks, and you’ll get some mumbled excuse about how useful the handkerchief is, how it keeps the car exhaust out of the lungs when you’re track biking, how you can use it to wipe the sweat from your raggedly beard.
Yeah. And we’re sooooo sure that your cute little carabiner keychain comes in real handy when you go mountain climbing.
Stephon Marbury Turns Sneaker Logic on Its Head
Cheap is the new expensive.
The winning luxury branding formula hasn’t changed since the time of Caesar: If you want your robes to be worn by the royalty, make them fancy, make them limited edition, and most of all, make them ridiculously expensive. This strategy has been deployed with great success from the Saville Row tailors who trimmed Oscar Wilde’s cuffs to the custom sequined sneaker cobblers of the Lower East Side.
Until Stephon Marbury came along this season with his FIFTEEN DOLLAR STARBURY SNEAKERS. Actually they come in just a hair under $15.00–$14.98 to be exact. Available only at Steve and Barry’s stores in the NYC area, we suspect these puppies will sell faster than their $150 Nigo-designed counterparts. Who even buys that neon ice cream bullshit anyway? Goateed Tokion-reading douchebags who are trying to like like the kids who can only afford to spend $14.98 on their sneakers, that’s who. (We’ll allow that there might be a few prosperous midlevel drug dealers wearing Ice Cream also.) Check out this slogan: “We created Starbury so you can stay fly and still stay on budget. It’s about maximum for minimum expense.” A shoe that tomorrow’s NBA stars might actually be able to afford. This is one of the more sincerely altruistic bits of marketing we’ve seen, not to mention brilliant.
Madden NFL Video Game Hustler Madness
What could be more “now” than a subculture of action-crazed sports fans who gather by night in one another’s basements to play Madden NFL tournaments for hundreds of dollars a game? Why drive all the way to Las Vegas or Atlantic City to play a game of skill for money when you can recline on your Barcalounger with a Heineken and a couple of your bros while working out your frustrations on the gridiron?
Enter the world of “ballers,” a loose online network of Madden players who gather online and drive to one another’s houses to meet and do battle and very frequently gamble on the outcome. They’ve got Podcasts and message boards and league “commissioners.” Ballers are further evidence that the best online consumer communities emerge organically. Electronic Arts has wisely collaborated with the ballers by sponsoring a few tournaments, but wisely stays out of the way most of the time and lets the fellas do their own thing. We advise that you explore and witness the future of male leisure.
The Psychic Soviet
How much do we love Ian Svenonious? The former Nation of Ulysses and Make Up frontman defines what it means to be a seminal unknown, a guy who is completely and utterly notorious to anyone anywhere in the United States who knows anything about anything but hasn’t once appeared in the pages of the official newspapers and magazines of the ruling class.
We remember him in his early, wild years, jumping from the top of amp piles and landing on the back of his neck. We remember how he synthesized the stage moves of James Brown, Mick Jagger, and Iggy Pop into a high-strung jitterbug of primal showmanship. He walked on our shoulders like Jesus on the sea. He stuck the mic in our mouths and had us sing the chorus. There were nights when we were just about ready to follow him into battle. Now, the last showman has got a book out, a small pink bible of theories called “The Psychic Soviet.” Billed as “a collection of essays regarding the use, origin, and meaning of various cultural phenomena,” we can’t wait to get our greedy little beak into this one and rip it to tasty shreds.
I Want a Free House!
The world keeps on getting crazier and crazier. Sometimes the bullshit gets so intense that even us hyper-jaded post-everything Vulture staffers have to shake our heads and laugh.
Here’s today’s insanity:
A Toronto scenester who makes a perfectly good living as an alt-weekly art director is getting ready to settle down and buy a house. Problem: She’d rather keep the money she makes and get the house for free. Solution: Get all of her cool indie friends to donate work, which she will proceed to auction online. And this girl knows some coooooool people. So contribute to this girl’s down payment and you can get Peaches’ panties. Yeah, PEACHES. Or a song about you by Broken Social Scene. Or some Canadian alt-weekly editor will write an entire book about you. All so this girl can get a free house. She is, however, contributing something of her own to the cause. Give her $41.00 and she’ll play a game of Scrabble with you.
Seriously! We can’t make this stuff up!
Hypocritical, you say? No! Twenty cents on the dollar go to Habitat for Humanity. The other eighty cents … well … they will be duly renumerated in the form of … exposure. Good will. Thank you so much my dear famous indie artist friends. The fact that you’ve all agreed to do this pretty much proves that I’m someone worth knowing.
Check out the site, which makes the hustle look like some kind of art project…
Can I Pay For My House In Cool Points Please?
Take a Ride on the Indie Mobile!
We thought hipster autofellatio reached its all time low in 2004. That was when Faith Popcorn deployed the powers of graffiti and breakdancing to propose Tylenol as the solution to aging extreme athletes and headachey mousepushers.
We were wrong. Compact cars are the new Tylenol, cartoons are the new graffiti, and Toyota’s Yaris is the latest and most flagrantly ridiculous attempt to dress up a dowdy product in all the trappings of cool. The strategy was the same, too: Pay off a few urban tribal leaders at pennies on the dollar and hope that their slightly lamer peers–the ones who attend their gallery openings and fill up their Saturday night tip jars–will follow. How else do you get those famously “elusive” and “coveted” urban twentysomethings to drop two years of rent on a rolling cage?
Absurd copy like this can’t hurt:
Find out what happens when Yaris asks leaders of the indie arts and music communities to create rad hands-on workshops, interactive nighttime parties with DJs and bands and weekend celebrations of all things D.I.Y.
D.I.Y. stands for “drive it yourself,” naturally. The idea of actually DOING something yourself is lame like chain wallets and Burning Man.
Why Hipsters Love Unicorns
In the past we’ve reported on the appeal of the innocent animal to the prematurely world-weary hipster. We’ve told you about owls and birds and cute rainbows, all the juvenile paraphernalia of dreaming about a vague world somehow different from the drab grey realities of cubicles and headlines. This is the reason that today’s $50 t-shirts look like a bowl of Lucky Charms cereal.
But the animals chosen to be the vessels of the New Cool Lost Innocence continue to get sillier and sillier. The latest one is–get this–the unicorn, that mythical one-horned albino beast that seems to symbolize everything pure … and non-existent. We’ve seen the unicorn appear on record covers, magazine layouts, even in this “hipster haiku,” part of Random House’s semi-ironic namedropping compilation of creative class clichés:
Unicorn tote bag
holds metal LPs and—shhh—
LSAT study sheets
See? The unicorn absolves the budding hipster of her careerist ambitions. The sad thing is that the only people who will buy this retarded book and understand its references are themselves “hipsters” of one stripe or another. And thus we get to the ultimate meaning of the word “hipster,” anyone who’s so much like you that you can’t stand them. And that’s the kind of reflexive self loathing that will make anyone long for their distant unicorn days.
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