SPORTSWEAR

When you’re strapped for inspiration, YouTube is an easy way out for blog entries. Spending 30 minutes there puts you through multiple rabbit holes. Film trailers lead to documentary snippets that lead to lectures, before taking a sharp turn into timeworn VHS uploads of unsettling oddness. I always emerge enlightened but unsettled. Takedowns are so frequent that upping them here is destined to lead to black boxes and dead links, but having spotted the creepiest commercial I’ve ever seen, a manic Japanese commercial for the Goonies II NES game, the bloke from Limp Bizkit hosting a 1991 skate jam and a background reminder that Chicago team coloured Air Jordan 1s hit the sale racks with a vengeance in 1986 due to overproduction in the quest to find something I spotted a few weeks back and wanted to share here, I felt they all warranted a mention too. That video I was hunting was a 1989 commercial for Sports Fanatics, a store in Watertown, Massachusetts that specialised in sporting merchandise. This volume of team jerseys, sweats and hats deserved bars, and Sports Fanatics seemed to get the Saturday boy who owned an Eric B & Rakim tape in to spit half-arsed bars about replica hockey shirts long before Fabolous put out Throw Backs as a bonus track. Erie, Pennsylvania’s Play It Again Sports would try to play the goofy white rapper card five years later with Dr. Jimbo spitting about second-hand athletic equipment (with a Special Ed nod in there too), but it loses points for being too deliberately wacky.

BANTER

My friend Steve Bryden is one of the folks who helped give me my “career” 11 years ago, and he and Ted’s Know Dibi Dibi show is one of my favourites from Know Wave’s UK division. Because they were strapped for guests, they let me appear and talk rap and shoes — in fact, there’s plenty of alienating trainer talk — with lots of points that just trail off in caffeinated streams of consciousness. There’s also loads of Lil Wayne, plus a Bone Thugs and Phil Collins finale. Shouts to Professor Bryden for the invite.

If you’re looking for inspiration, Douglas Gunn and Roy Luckett’s first Vintage Showroom book is a goldmine — all the joys of a combined Lightning, Free & Easy and Mono on a good month, but with the bonus of informative texts in English. This London institution has a spectacular archive, and one volume wasn’t enough, so Vintage Menswear 2 releases this November. Hopefully this will be another trove of eccentric but brilliantly functional attire that’s rarely spotlighted. I’m intrigued by the early 2016 release of a book by Mark McNairy entitled F____ Ivy and Everything Else on the Harper Design imprint too, but I need to see more information on that one.

LOCKED

Whoa. I wasn’t expecting that CT obituary to spread like it did, but I’m glad people are taking an interest in that company’s history. It deserves to be in the spotlight for its contribution to the culture. In the meantime, I’ve been amusing myself by watching archaic Foot Locker ads, like the 1981 one where the mighty John Goodman wanders into the store pre-fame and asks for every single brand possible (this was two years his role as working class Joe eating Egg McMuffin in a 1983 McDonalds ad) and the bizarre brand loyalty spot above from 1983 in all its white-toothed cinematic glory. Then there’s the 1987 depiction of a colourful, dystopian future where some kind of zero-gravity robot-lobster claw game is the #1 spectator sport shown during a Superbowl XX1 ad break. Because of YouTube, the baritone part of 1988’s Come to the Stripes still gets sung by me during any prolonged conversation about FL’s current contents. This 1989 Australian effort merges American style pop rock with an Aussie voiceover talking about bargain aerobic tights, plus a locker full of Nike rarities like the Air Pressure, as well as some classic trainers. In the early 1990s, it gets a little too stylised and Paula Abdul on us — thankfully, no matter how slick your ads get, you can’t stop the back room buffoonery and fotojack72 was on hand to upload videos of him and his buddies acting a fool while working at his local Foot Locker in 1991, complete with this Harmony Korine-esque footage of a man dancing to Check the Technique by Gang Starr while clutching a red shoe.

Huck is a great magazine. That it seems to sell well enough to stay in print is a miracle — after all, most conversations about British magazines dwelling on radical culture, photography and creativity are rooted in past tense, because they have a tendency to disappear one day. The Church of London’s work is always superb and after the What I Love About Movies book via Little White Lies, Huck are dropping some artistic motivation in Paddle Against the Flow — a well priced compilation of quotes to memorise and quote as your own until you get called out for it. If you can’t trust advice from Spike Jonze, Kim Gordon and Dave Eggers, who can you trust? Paddle Against the Flow drops next month.

SPEAKING IN TONGUES

Crooked Tongues is gone in its current form. I’m oddly relieved about the whole situation, but I can’t claim to be entirely nostalgia-free.

14 years ago I was just a Crooked Tongues fan. I relied on CT for news and insight on the subject of shoes — it was pioneering and design-led, run by a bunch of obsessives scrutinising every element and bringing a level of criticism to collecting at a point when brands had realised that old stuff was worth re-releasing. At the time when Crooked Tongues was gathering steam, new technologies and interesting contemporary shoe design had started faltering. Collaborations were few and far between. Hype culture seemed to exist in six degrees of separation. I looked up to what Crooked, Spine and Unorthodox Styles were up to from afar. I attended the launch of CT as a fan at the then Conran co-owned Great Eastern Hotel in January 2001 after a build-up to a store spin-off from Spine Magazine’s 2000 articles on shoes like the Air Max TN (which would be the model with the troublesome tongue that inspired the site’s name) that were pioneering in their English language, Brit-centric nature after I’d spent a couple of years browsing occasional pickups of Japanese publications like Nike Park. It made a huge impact on me.

Before the store launched, CT took a message board format from summer 2000 to the cooler months, with people demanding to know what it would consist of. When it went live, people baulked at some of the wild prices, but an inventory that included the then difficult-to-get Dunk and plenty of Jordans impressed me. In the years that followed, superb ACG (flipped to GAC) and Force tribute tees that included barcode prints inside the them (taking the lead from the U-Dox Co-Lab Recon pieces) and glorious Ziplock packaging with over designed cards to give them shape, plus Mo’ Wax style sticker sheets brought that painstaking approach to digital to the forefront. Contrary to popular belief, the CT Forum was introduced a while into the site’s lifespan around Easter 2003. It boomed. A lot of friendships were formed and the Today I’m Wearing thread was pioneering in its on-the-foot showcase place to brag. What One’s Wearing was far ahead of the street style shoot wave too.

CT’s summer 2004 New Balance 576 project was a difficult project for the team to get off the ground because NB were stepping into new territory with it. In my opinion, there’s never been a better collaboration of its kind. I visited the cramped Ganton Street offices for a job interview to freelance for them (wearing Metro Attitudes and a Stüssy tee) in July 2004 just as the 576s were released and grabbed myself a free pair of the white/greens for my trouble. The idea of even being considered as an affiliate was an honour, and after some articles about Complex Magazine, RWD (and other things that I can’t recall for the site) I was invited to a terrifying shouty, smoky meeting at the Berners hotel in winter of that year regarding the redesign of Crooked Tongues. I stayed freelance.

In late 2005, on the Saturday that the Footpatrol Stab dropped, Russell Williamson offered me a job with Crooked. I visited the plusher new office, saw a sample of a Crooked Tongues adidas Century Lo and a matching track top. I was going to be paid to do some descriptions of deadstock and adidas copywriting, despite no actual experience writing copy. At that time, my father was extremely ill and I was feeling a bit lost to say the least — my dad passed away the following summer but got to see me doing something I loved which I know gave him some comfort, because I’d been drifting up to that point. Sorry to get heavy, but you can’t put a price on that. So to me it will always be bigger than some shoe store.

2006 to 2008 were an incredible work experience, getting to travel, getting to contribute to collaborations with Charlie, C-Law and the team (naming everyone is too difficult because a lot of great talents passed through that door). Oh, and grabbing quite a lot of free shoes too. After a lot of talk regarding external companies buying into the store, which now had official New Balance and adidas accounts, As Seen On Screen got involved. Nick Robertson even visited the office at donuts and talked about what the store could be. They bought into it and those on the CT team had the unusual experience of attempting to run the site, an increasingly professional store (now with Nike and Vans accounts) and working on agency work for adidas Originals at the same time. ASOS eventually decided (in September 2009) that CT should be run from their Greater London House location.

Charlie, Niranjela and I went over to the office to see what the situation would be and while Niranjela wisely opted to stay at U-Dox, Charlie and I acted like complete clichés after we saw a canteen filled with models and, after being surrounded by a staff that was mainly annoyed men for several years, decided to give it a go. We heard murmurs from a few folks claiming that CT was irrelevant then and while I’d concur that its credibility had slipped with the scene’s sense of being a best kept secret giving way to the new norm of owning 10+ pairs, it’s nice to see that most of the moaners are even more irrelevant now.

At ASOS we were told to treat it like a startup, with our own glass walled office (which would become a gradually diminishing space that varied from floor to floor until it ended as some corner desks elsewhere). After starting work there, Charlie got a better offer to join Vans in March 2010, and I was the last of the Kingly Street CT team to remain. Still, it was a pay cheque. One ill-fated relaunch in partnership with our old agency would alienate a lot of the forum users (bearing in mind that Twitter and Facebook were building in popularity by this point). It’s here that my nostalgia for Crooked Tongues comes to an end. A meeting with some guy who was probably called Dan*, who held up a King Apparel t-shirt with a J Dilla logo of some sort and and told us that, “This is by a really cool brand called J Dilla…” made me hyper-aware that CT and ASOS probably weren’t the ideal match.

Still, with friends like Amberley and Mubi on the squad, we still managed to do some amazing stuff, with a tiny team. The assumption that we were some vast conglomerate because we were ASOS affiliated was untrue. By 2011, the sense that CT wasn’t wanted by either ASOS or its old agency** was clear. After ASOS took a majority stake of the site in April 2013, that September the site was relaunched and Crooked Tongues looked worse than ever, ceasing to innovate entirely. The site went downhill fast. Bug-riddled, run by folks who weren’t interested in trainers, it should have been put out of its misery then and there. I feel like I said my goodbyes to it when we had leaving drinks to split CT and U-Dox apart in late 2009, and when key team members exited in subsequent years. This just felt like a formality.

That ASOS’s official statement on CT’s closure called it “Crooked Tongue” was proof that we were probably not top of their priorities at any point in the last few years, but I like ASOS a lot. They just didn’t fit with each other — fast fashion and detail-led obsessions aren’t a marriage made in heaven. The idea, according to their press release, that ASOS could deliver the CT experience themselves from now on is unusual too — maybe if you want a Hype tee to go with your inline AM1s that’s the case, but reports have taken that as CT being absorbed into ASOS. That’s not what happened — at present Crooked is currently closed, but it wasn’t absorbed, moved or anything like that.

Speculation was rife over the last few weeks surrounding Crooked Tongues’ closure. Some blamed the end of the forum (taken away as part of the September 2013 relaunch against Mubi and I’s wishes), but that was wrong. The forum had become barren. That was nostalgic talk for nostalgic people talking about old shoes on an old format. I owe the CT forum and the people on it for my career, but that place had done its job by that point and become the jump-off point for several more British projects. Sales in the store were up significantly year on year. The blame didn’t lie with ASOS — it was with the entire infrastructure of CT.

When a site dedicated to shoes doesn’t actually seem to care much about its subject matter or show signs of wanting to be better, it needs to be put to sleep. It’s a shame, because Crooked Tongues still has a lot of potential. The UK scene is bigger than ever, but there’s lack of quality control, a mass of sycophancy, integrity jettisoned in favour of a 10% commission, bad PR work, reposters who give minimal credit and maximum click bait in the headline, and a whole bunch of screen grabbing, image jacking hashtag shitbags. I’m not much of a fan of what the scene became, but I’m not big on what CT turned into either. Crooked Tongues went through a lot of changes, and I think there’s room for one more redux (minus me this time).

After all, if it wasn’t for the world that Russ, the two Christophers, Steve and the rest of the founding crew created, I would be a far unhappier human being right now.






*A former ASOS employee and not my friend Dan — a man who most certainly does know that Dilla is not a clothing brand — who coincidentally worked for King at the time.

**Russ has pointed out that this wasn’t the case. My perception was that everybody lost interest.

GUCCI SNOOPY

Sometimes an image is so good that it renders any text obsolete. Snoopy in the legendary Gucci Tennis from the book to coincide with 1984’s Japanese Snoopy in Fashion exhibition is a perfect case study. Idea Books Instagrammed it this morning and made my day. Even better than Donald Duck in Timbs. Speaking of wheat workboots, a couple of good promo print projects arrived in the post this week — Oi Polloi’s always excellent Pica~Post is back with some extra metal, an interview with Patagonia Alpine Outerwear Christian Regester and Mr. Gary Aspden (it’s heartening to see the low-key looks of the SPEZIAL Ardwick become an object of desire in a world where the same old Technicolor yawns get eBay bids) who really, really went on the campaign trail for his labour of love after years of not doing too many Q&As — Next’s role in casual culture, a picture of Gary with a spaniel and a Preston b-boy crew called Mystic Force makes this amazing. The increasingly prolific David Hellqvist (aka. the Baron) has done a good job with the Document project on the Timberland topic — there’s fashion talk in there, design talk and a really good conversation between my friends Nick Schonberger and Ronnie Fieg on the topic of the brand and its connection to NYC that I loved (sample quote: “Chris Webber used to buy 15 pairs of Timberland at a time”). That’s the kind of insight I want to read when we’re talking about brands that I’m smitten with.

POST-PUB TV

Despite lasting for over 104 episodes before it was canned, The Word was treated like televisual Super Noodles by critics and establishment figures alike for half a decade. We, the target audience, appreciated it though, and 19 years after its final episode screened in March 1995 (watching Strike’s performance of You Sure Do from that broadcast this evening had me emotional), there seems to be a worthy amount of nostalgia for those 808 State soundtracked opening credits and the lawlessness that followed. As those reviews preempted online coverage, their toxicity has deteriorated, so we’ve forgotten the disorganised outside broadcasts and hopefuls munching on plates of dead skin, emptied colostomy bags and filtered the best bits into those memory banks. What was good was great — like live performances by artists who, in a concerted bid to show no respect to the live format, made classic TV, or George, Zippy and Shaun Ryder getting acquainted — but there was a lot of rubbish in the mix. It was sometimes like the contents of an issue of The Face being bellowed from the stage during a nightclub PA, but that was part of its appeal — sincerity shuffled self-consciously alongside humiliation and irony. We watched that thing religiously as its excesses elbowed it from a tea time slot to the post-pub position. It was there that a generation planning to go harder the following night would exit the pubs, get home, skin up with terrible hash, crack open more beers and watch it alone or in a heavily populated front room. The Word was great group TV every Friday around 11pm.

The two segments that stayed with me weren’t the usual suspects either. One was a late 1993 segment where Mark Lamarr investigated Desert Eagles and chatted to the Franklin Avenue Posse and Steele from Smif-n-Wessun about it, before a return to the studio where Terry quizzed forgotten rapper K7 (of Come Baby Come fame) on the subject of firearms. The second was a February 1994 piece from the same episode where Rod Hull attacked Snoop Dogg (mentioned here a few years back) on Nike founder and chairman Phil Knight’s son Travis back when he rapped as Chilly Tee (he now heads up LAIKA). Where else were you going to see stuff like this? Beyond these clips, it’s worth noting that The Word Appreciation account on Dailymotion has at least 17 full episodes uploaded — there’s all kinds of misses in there, but the gems remain and it’s best streamed late in the day and under the influence. Just like it always was.

THIRTY-SECOND BROADCASTS

Still no proper update right now, but if you’re not suffering from Visible Air fatigue, there’s a shit ton of nerdery over here for your viewing pleasure and it might be more appreciated by the audience here than over there. Nowadays, marketing wants to rise above the shabby glory of the efforts above and below but somehow falls short of these thirty-second masterpieces. I like to watch these things to remind me why I like shoes when I’m suffering from the fatigue of PR people and communication folks taking the easy way out with everything and feigning love for product.That Sneaker Corner commercial from 1991 is tremendous (shouts to the uploader, wtcvidman) in its “Morrie” Kessler from Goodfellas style old-school salesman enthusiasm. It’s good to see that their Brooklyn spot is still standing — places like that are an endangered species. I’m not sure that Cal Stores are still open, but everything’s better when it has Oh Yeah by Yello on the soundtrack. I think Sneakers Plus in New Jersey is still going though. Salutes to the little guys — there are not enough of them or the grey importers around these days. Everyone sells the same stuff in exactly the same way. At least these folks made an effort.

MY WEEK BEATS YOUR YEAR

I completely forgot about this 1996 Nike documentary that braitnicho uploaded. Seeing this late that year (I believe the Branded series also had Heinz and Levi’s episodes) was a key instigator in making me want to work with Nike on something one day. There’s some interesting footage in the mix here and some good insights from Phil Knight. This seemed to be a golden era of business documentaries that wrangled access to some places that no other documentary seems to have gone since.

On the subject of YouTube, this footage from a CBGBs showcase of unsigned acts from summer 1992, with Bobbito as the host via CharlieChopoff (salutes to Unkut for the heads up) is worth your time — Artifacts clad in Polo, Fatal in a Timberland sweat, 8-Off showing you why he got a deal, plus Hard 2 Obtain and a few acts that never made their splash post Unsigned Hype (like Legion of D.U.M.E) are all present in this rare video.

Another toy I wish had existed when I was a kid is Sideshow’s Snake Plissken figure. The McFarlane toy doesn’t count because it was based on Escape From LA, which we all like to pretend never happened, but this super detailed creation is taken from the 1981 original, complete with the strange cam on the trousers, his weaponry, everything allotted to him by Lee Van Cleef, and, if you pre-order it from the source, you get a tiny repro of the tape which may or may not contain Dixieland jazz to set off WWIII. Now, where’s that Frank Doubleday as Romero toy, reeling off a list of kidnap demands when you pull a string? Carpenter’s classic has always warranted a full toy line.

By now the internet will be at least 25% Lou Reed, but the planet has lost at least 2% of its angry stares in his absence. Contrary to Sickboy’s assessment, Lou never really lost it. I also think his period of musical excellence (though it wavered in the mid 1980s around the time of this Honda ad) up to 1990 tops Bowie’s tenure of brilliance too in terms of longevity (and Lou’s early novelty record, The Ostrich is better than David’s The Laughing Gnome). Those live performances from the last decade and the courtside seats at Knicks games with Richard Lewis meant he was a functioning cool guy up to the very end, regardless of any perceived missteps. For decades, Lou was the final level boss for many an aspiring music journalist to tackle — a lone wolf participant in a jihad against mediocre questioning. Now he’s gone there’s not really a replacement with the intellect to match the bad attitude, is there?

Street Hassle is my favourite Lou Reed song at this moment at this moment in time for that blend of romance and pitch blackness, with that uncredited Springsteen appearance. Even in a spoken word verse from a scumbag junk dealer’s perspective regarding dead body disposal ends in pure poetry. That’s why something might owe a debt to Lou and the Velvet Underground, but it’ll rarely match the dead-eyed beauty of its reference points.

Hey, that cunt’s not breathing
I think she had too much of something or other
Hey, man, you know what I mean
I don’t mean to scare you
But you’re the one who came here
And you’re the one who’s gotta take her when you leave
I’m not being smart or trying to be pulling my part
And I’m not gonna wear my heart on my sleeve
But you know people get emotional
And sometimes they just don’t act rational
They think they’re just on TV — sha la la la, man
Why don’t you just slip her away
You know. I’m glad that we met man
It was really nice talking
And I really wish there was a little more time to speak
But you know it could be a hassle
Trying to explain myself to a police officer
About how it was that your old lady got herself stiffed
And it’s not like we could help
But there’s nothing no one could do
And if there was, man, you know I would have been the first
Only, someone turns that blue
Well, it’s a universal truth
And you just know: That bitch will never fuck again
By the way, that’s really some bad shit
That you came to our place with
But you ought be more careful round the little girls
It’s either the best or it’s the worst
Since I don’t have to choose, I guess I won’t
And I know, This is no way to treat a guest
But why don’t you grab your old lady by the feet
And just lay her out in the darkest street
And by morning, she’s just another hit and run
You know, some people got no choice
And they can never even find a voice
To talk with that they can even call their own
So the first thing that they see
That allows them the right to be
Why, they follow it
You know, it’s called bad luck

CLUBS & PEAKS

Ahead of the release of Take None, Fear None and some current Sons of Anarchy binges, I’ve been obsessing over the predominantly black motorcycle club, The Chosen Few and the imagery that defines their crew. Naturally, any appropriation of a club’s imagery is a foolhardy move (as brands have learnt over the years), but it always makes for arresting photographs. Ebony ran a feature on west coast black biker gangs in 1966 that included shots of Chosen Few and Fresco Rattlers members, plus a breakdown of the 1%er name and an explanation of sorts regarding the use of the swastika as a tool of offense rather than a statement of racism (complete with a shot of black club members alongside Pagans beneath the offending logo on a flag). The Chosen Few’s website includes some superb shots that seem to be from around the time of this shoot (many of which manage to be both heartwarming in their multi-racial unity, but deeply intimidating at the same time), but the whole aura seems significantly cuddlier in the Ebony piece when compared to recent news reports on Chosen Few-related arrests. Over 50 years after the club’s inception, that outlaw status seems to have escalated.

The beauty of 6876 is that product simply makes sense. There’s nothing superfluous — no mystery to why you want anything. They’re open to stocking some exceptions though. Coinciding with the release of their Chapman bag, they’ve got a product in stock that I want for no good reason — a scale model of Mount McKinley in a perspex case from Reliorama. Why does a transparent plastic case make an object so appealing? I never knew I needed a tiny replica of North America’s highest peak until I saw this. Then I realised that it’s an object that was missing from my life.

CONCORDS & R&B

That Boyz II Men Concord and tux Grammy footage and imagery keeps on eluding me. Can somebody send me it and put me out of my misery. Does it even exist? The closest I ever found was the shot of Jodeci standing with Tempest Bledsoe from The Cosby Show wearing the white outfits and Jordan XIs from the March ’96 ‘Coast 2 Coast’ section of The Source. This was a time before Jojo was fainting onstage and Dalvin was plummeting off them.

Back in the day, my dad and I were pretty obsessed with Alien — ever since he described a Chestburster to me as a toddler, I was transfixed. If I’d had access to Alien action figures (and I’m not talking about those crappy 1990s Aliens things with the flying Alien Queens and other such foolishness) from Kenner, it would have been game over — crappy Star Wars figures like Lobot and Snaggletooth would have perished with the quickness. But I never even knew plans had ever been afoot for Alien toys back in 1979 until I got talking to geeks who knew more than me and saw them in a 1995 magazine, by which time I was too old for such things. The closest I’ve come to the 12″ Kenner Alien action figure (which, according to legend was created with the license holders under the impression that it was going to be more of a science fiction extravaganza than a claustrophobic horror film) was the Medicom mini-replica, but I’ve always wanted the scrapped series of smaller Star Wars size action figures that never left prototype stage, because, quite understandably, the 12″ Alien terrified kids and sold poorly.

In one of the most nerd-friendly resurrections ever, the ReAction brand — a subsidiary of Super7 (who I know little about, other than they always seem to have monster figures in every Juxtapoz ever) — have obtained the Alien license and obtained either the prototypes or good quality photographs (apart from one figure which only seems to exist in the same shot I saw in 1995) and finally made those unreleased figures of Ripley, Ash, Dallas, Kane in that strange spacesuit and the “Big Chap” alien. If you want more geekery, they even recruited the lady who designed the original packaging for Kenner and this project back in the day to create the packaging for this release and created fake prototype figures in the blue of the fabled Boba Fett missile firing prototype (cancelled after a child choked to death on a Battlestar Galactica toy), created backdrops, bags and boxes that homage Kenner’s Star Wars Early Bird package from 1977 and even made a fake press release that deliberately plays on the misconception that all the figures will be the best of friends. It’s one of the greatest parts of my childhood that never was and you can read more about the ReAction releases right here. Is their resurrections of shelved toys a work-in-progress? I’m interested to see what comes next. This is a superior lesson in absurd attention-to-detail.

PhoneShop is a patchy show in terms of plotting, but Ashley and Jerwayne’s dialogue is a dead-on snapshot of the inadvertent strangeness of Croydon and Sutton’s slang-speaking denizens. The shoulder bags alone are more amusing than anything Simon Brodkin has conjured up in his appalling Lee Nelson character — a performance by a man who seems to have only ever seen a young person in EastEnders once, four years ago during a plot where Fatboy steals a parrot from a magician or some such shit. After a weak third series, PhoneShop redeemed itself with the ultimate parody of UK road rap, with its sloppy metaphors, shushing backgrounders and slo-mo delivery.

It might even be the best rap parody I’ve ever seen — from that obligatory Taliban mention to the threats to sleep with your missus, it captures a subculture that’s doomed never to crossover without heavy compromise and it’s actually better than all UK rap, because our take on rap in 2013 is either JD Sports garms and bandana waving in the hood, Boxpark fodder that’s all murals, shitty streetwear brands and beatboxing, chart stuff that’s just a novelty record that won’t fuck off (because careers seem to be sustained by imbeciles and social media) or it’s practiced by people who look like they steal lead off of church roofs and like to engage in terrible rap battles that are mostly AIDS jokes in front of a crowd of excitable people in Supreme Being sweatshirts. Westwood was always right to ditch our own produce in favour of DMX and Diplomats and I hope that this sketch stops people making UK rap forever.