BRICKS & HEATED WORDS

You may have noticed a predilection towards rap magazines here before, and finding a stack of 20-year old publications a few weeks back I thought I’d lost had me feeling a little nostalgic for the days when WH Smiths had at least a few homegrown publications of worth on the shelf. Mainly because, with my Medusa touch, I managed to make every single UK rap magazine I’ve ever written for fold within a few months of publishing my work. Hip-hop magazines are a hard sell when you can log on and get something more up to date or catch something long form on Unkut or Complex.com, but there’s room for something created with care that captures the current state of the industry. Those with a long memory will recall an underrated British ‘zine called The Downlow that ran for four or so years (1992-1996) with an over designed, occasionally unintelligible layout with a ton of electronic typefaces that recalled David Carson’s work on Ray Gun around the same time or Neville Brody and Jon Wozencroft’s FUSE. It favoured words over pictures. 1992’s BLAG (which is, admirably, still standing) and 1995’s shortly-lived True (which switched to Trace after True folded) united hip-hop culture with style well, bringing some spirit seen in America’s Vibe and The Fader. I’m interested to see BRICK, a new British hip-hop publication, in the flesh — especially after enjoying the second issue of another London-based project, Viper. Founded and creatively directed by photographer Hayley Louisa Brown, designed by POST — and edited by RWD’s Grant Brydon, the careful approach to the all important look — complete with custom typefaces — is both evocative of the more sincere locally created mags of old and hip-hop’s current aesthetic (despite, bar honourable exceptions, a dip in the quality of album cover art during the last decade). Neil Bedford’s shots of Supreme-hating, Cobain swag jacking stoner Wiz Khalifa for one of BRICK’s cover stories made the Daily Mail (we’ve come a long way since that Snoop “KICK THIS EVIL BASTARD OUT” Daily Star cover) and hopefully that attention will turn into sales. Shouts to the team for making it happen. Go check out this fine It’s Nice That feature on the making of issue #1 and visit the official site here.

On the subject of rap and typography, the Heated Words crew are studiously examining the history and legacy of the mysterious but influential b-boy font seen on Dynamic Rockers, RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ, Mick Jones, Biz Markie, Malcolm McLaren and Joe Strummer that defined 1982-era hip-hop style. Supreme have used a replica of this classic heat pressed typeface several times and Alex Olsen’s Bianca Chandon recently homaged a Paradise Garage tee with it on from back in the day. It’s integral to UK street style too — imported by intrepid tourists who hit up the Albee Square Mall to get a custom creation and the Heated Words: Initial Research exhibition to set off the project opens on the 27th of this month for a couple of weeks at London’s House of Vans. Videos, photographs by Martha Cooper, Mike Laye, Michael Markos and several others, old ads and some of the clothing in question. If you like some of the nonsense I link to here, you’re liable to really enjoy this one.

While we’re talking old magazines and Neville Brody, this Gilded Words piece is great: Jamie Morgan talking about a contact sheet from a classic Buffalo shoot for with Felix Howard for the March 1985 issue of The Face and the moment when every person started calling themselves a stylist.

HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN FOAMPOSITES

This is a blog entry for the sake of it. Google Patents is pretty useful, even if you’ve only got traces of geek tendencies, and the selection of shoe-related stuff on offer is pretty impressive. The downside is that everything’s got a lofty, literal title rather than the consumer-friendly name it went to market with, making it tricky to isolate a specific product. Then there’s the hefty gap between the filing and issue date to make searching trickier — but once you’re there, nerd Valhalla awaits. Via the Overview section you can trace the original reference points too and it’s here that a lazy blogger like me can dig up enough material to pretend I’m creating content. As an example of how the creativity trail can unearth the background of some of my favourite designs, I was hunting the original Nike Air Footscape design by Toren “Tory” Orzeck for another project and it eventually sprang up as just “Shoe upper” (submitted Dec 6th 1994).

From there, I noticed that it references the side-lacing Converse Odessa (submitted April 24 1985) and Padmore & Barnes’ Lugger silhouette (submitted January 28 1983), which also led me to the patent art for the legendary Padmore & Barnes Weaver (submitted October 25 1977).

But what really impressed me was Mr. Orzeck’s involvement in the development of the Foamposite project (alongside several others, including John Tawney who also worked on elements of the Footscape project and Eric Avar who actually designed the shoe) as part of Nike’s Advanced Product Engineering team. With Orzeck’s background at GE Plastics and an ex-Ford man on the team too, there was a strange mix of Nike’s early hints at hippy idealism fused with absolute function in pieces like the Air Moc and Footscape, but even if you’re a Foamposite hater, you’ve got to concede that the production process was one that broke new ground. Looking at the “Method of making footwear with a pourable foam” patent (filed on August 21 1996) you get a strange step-by-step into the creation of a shoe that became a performance phenomenon years before it went global and became the line in the dirt that split fanboys and girls.

It’s as bizarre, difficult and intelligent a design as the Footscape and Rift from those APE days, but contemporary basketball never quite slipped into the Japanese selvedge and Subware uniform of a tribe pretending to like vocal-free hip-hop like the division’s running output did. DC, Baltimore and New York kids were on it from the off, but were more liable to be enjoying NORE, DMX, Pun and the LOX than DJ Krush. What would get you laughed at outside the Tunnel might be accepted outside Bar Rumba, and on the flipside, strutting into ‘That’s How It Is’ in big basketball shoes might not be considered cool.

So if you’ve got some tensile air bladders, a foam material in a viscous state at around 80-55 degrees centigrade, a mould with specific measurements for each size, inner bootie, outer and sole unit pieces, plus a series of “super gases,” and thermoplastic urethanes, you’re good to go. I recommend following these simple instructions to make a pair at home. It’s good to see that a bizarre shoe has an equally odd production process.

On a loft clearance mission, I found a stack of magazines I believed to be long-gone. Was ‘The Downlow’ magazine the most stylish rap fanzine ever? At a point when Brit-rap’s aesthetic was particularly unappetising (and it took Trevor Jackson getting Donald Christie and Dave McKean involved to make it look slick again), Mat-C and the team made things so stylish, they took the Neville Brody spirit and got busy on Quark. In fact, the magazine won a Design Week Award in 1995, beating ‘The Face’ after its 1993 relaunch in a gloriously difficult mass of alternate fonts and horizontal and vertical paragraphs converging. I remember ‘The Downlow’ being involved in releasing ‘Tried by 12’ in the UK before those dull remixes dropped a couple of years later and a compilation CD that was pretty good that may or may not have been Streetsounds or Profile affiliated. After doing the ‘Blues & Soul’ rap column, he launched ‘Fat Boss’ was on a BBC reality show for a minute then went on to perform as Jaguar Skills and get BBC radio and Jade Jagger co-signs. Who said UK-based rap journalism always ended in a return to the call centre?