READING

Has it really been 20 years since Koon, Powell, Wind, Briseño and Solano were acquitted, LA burned, Perry Farrell masturbated multiple times and then everybody declared war on rap and announced that everything with an f-word was “gangsta”? It led to ‘Get the Fist’ — not a pro-fisting anthem, but a charity record that’s better than Live Aid II and III’s reminder that 1989 and 2004 were dark musical times, but not as good as Springsteen and Run-DMC condemning Sun City. I remember footage of Positive K, Biz and MC Serch’s albums being sent beneath the steamroller during the storm over that crappy ‘Cop Killer’ song too.

Still, it was nice to feel like you weren’t meant to be listening to the music — authorities, parents and even the artists goading me and calling me a cracker made the experience fun. Now it wants to be your friend — it retweets you and collaborates with Katy Perry, then saunters off and reworks an Aston Martin. Hip-hop practically strokes your balls and asks how your day at work was. Things done changed. I still can’t resist the lure of the rap autobiography – DMX, Ice-T, 50 Cent, Jay-Z (a decent read beyond the lyrical deconstructions), Common and J-Zone’s efforts were decent in their own ways, but Prodigy set the standard with ‘My Infamous Life’ by talking smack as if he was never going to be released and not letting too much truth get in the way of a good yarn. That seems to have instigated some impending tomes — Lil’ Kim’s ‘The Price of Loyalty’ drops in June, ‘Bizzy By Choice, Bone By Blood’ by Bizzy Bone, ‘The Dynasty: Sex, Drugs, Murder and Hip Hop’ by Ray Benzino arrive in July, Boots Riley has one set for December and Q-Tip’s ‘Industry Rules: the World According to Q-Tip, From Linden Blvd. to El Sugundo and Beyond’ is a long way off (25th March 2014 according to Amazon). Somewhere among all those releases, RA the Rugged Man’s book might appear too.

Given his notorious inability to hold his tongue, Benzino’s book appeals to me – I want more information on the whole ‘The Source’ deal, the early Boston rap days, label issues as a result of the aforementioned ‘Cop Killer’ fallout, the CGI magic carpets and that strange documentary that was on WSHH recently, which featured an inexplicable Jay Electronica appearance banging on about Satan and the illuminati, years before he took to blasting the shit out of pheasants with Zac Goldsmith of an evening. I imagine it will probably indicate that Made Men made classic albums too, but I’m willing to overlook all that. Every rapper used to have a book, film and beverage in the offing, but many failed to materialise. I never believed ‘Zino’s book would appear, but now there’s even a cover shot as proof of life. On a biographical note, HarperCollins are reported to have obtained UK rights to Mike Tyson’s memoir and it’s apparently set for an October 2013 release — very good news indeed. Getting overeager about these things can prove humiliating though – a lot of us have been waiting for ‘Bowie: Object’ (which sounds like an even fancier version of ‘My Rugged 211’ or that Hiroshi Fujiwara ‘Personal Effects’ book, but this time, it’s a tome showcasing some of Bowie’s favourite archive artefacts), but Bowie Myths showcased a “leak” that looked questionable. It was evidently written by somebody that understands Bowie, yet predictably, it turned out to be fake and even the man himself took to Facebook (“Blinkin’ garden gnomes! Really”) to dismiss it. Between that and a hastily doctored pair of Jordan Is with the Nike SB logo on the tongue (as I understand it, that Jordan I SB for the Bones Brigade film isn’t happening), fast news travel and a hunger for information are optimum conditions for pranks.

Every meeting I’ve gone to lately seems to have talk of “a print project” thrown around in the same way they were banging on about an “online magazine” a year or so ago. Unless you’ve got an oligarch backer the high gloss approach will crash and burn and just trying to be ‘Monocle’s fashion section distilled down like weak Ribena – a sickly pink when it should be a purple, isn’t enough. I can’t say I’ve been awed by a magazine lately (though there’s been some strong content) on visuals alone in the same way that ‘Relax’ used to blow my mind frequently. Sure, it got to a point where on grabbing it from Magma, it was all plants, pastels and Mike Mills again and again (the visual angle was important, because I couldn’t understand a bloody word of that Japanese text) and then it was cancelled in 2006, but before that, it was a perfect, progressive example of magazine design — inserts, posters, stickers and those covers…inspirational in a way that ‘The Face’ once was and very little has been since…at least nothing that would leave you with change from a tenner. The adidas and Dogtown issues were tremendous and there’s still room in my life for something just as powerful. The Being Hunted crew always seemed to worship this magazine too (I’m looking forward to seeing Being Hunted 7.0), because Jorg and co know their stuff. Salutes to the LMCA archive for maintaining the covers and the YouWorkForThem squad for keeping their magazine and book visuals stored, even after they stopped selling them. Why isn’t there a ‘Relax’ retrospective book? I still believe print can change lives, but `also I believe that it’s a format that only a select few can truly succeed in.

Page images taken from YouWorkForThem

If it’s quirky, it’s cult now. I’ve been trying to work out when cult ceased to be an appealing tag – perhaps it was the post Quentin slew of chatty, smart-Alec mob flicks that jarred each and every time. Maybe it was Rob Zombie and co’s attempts to reproduce a moment in time that was originally simply a victim of no means and a lack of professional crew. Either way, the best stuff from back in the day had an earnestness about it and a sense of strange that wasn’t synthesised. All the talk of ninjas last week had me thinking of David Carradine’s work and I still maintain that 1989’s ‘Sonny Boy’ is underrated. Alongside ‘Santa Sangre’ it offers something uncomfortable but intoxicating in a totally unrestrained approach to bloodletting and Carradine’s commitment to the film, from his cross-dressing performance to the work on the soundtrack is admirable. Cheap and memorable is a fair summary (like 1990’s unnerving ‘Luther the Geek’), but that doesn’t necessarily make it a film for all tastes — come to think of it, many will just find ‘Sonny Boy’ deeply offensive, but I guarantee you’ve not seen much like this one before. Brad Dourif has spent much of his career stumbling into curiosities like this and I’m assuming distribution issues mean it won’t ever get a proper DVD release again.

DISSENT

The last few days have had a faintly apocalyptic feel — not so much in the acts of a few kids liberating some adidas PTs, but in what it’s going to unleash in terms of a crackdown on day-to-day life. One minute you’re in the park eating a Taste the Difference sandwich with three colleagues and the next you’ll be sent sprawling by a hose blast for your unlawful gathering. Banging on the door to wake your housemates at 3am? Rubber bullet to the chest. You can thank the youth posing solemnly for phonecam glory with the bumper bag of Tesco’s Value Basmati rice for that when you’re spluttering on the floor, being booted in the ribs. There’s dissent elsewhere too.

My buddy Philip at Madbury Club (a site that makes most other sites out there look weak) stood calm in the face of being hacked and losing a wealth of excellent content a few months back and just started again. Already, Madbury’s better than the rest and he let me write some stream-of-consciousness nonsense about ‘Watch the Throne’ during a third listen. I liked that album a lot — not as much as I loved ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ (which at the halfway point turns into a monkey prison flick) in the hype that delivers stakes, so I don’t understand the backlash.

But then I also don’t understand how people could be so moved by it that they Tweeted about it for 24 hours, will probably return to babbling on about it at the end of the week, collating reactions to it like the craze of filming yourself reacting to some women eating each other’s shit (an apt metaphor for something or other), then gather tearfully every August the 8th to commemorate the day that two men rapping about fancy slacks and art galleries changed their lives. If the media’s looking to point the finger at rap for Britain’s troubles, ‘Watch the Throne’ would be a shoddy scapegoat. If the youth were corrupted by this, they’d have been grabbing unpronounceable brands and priceless paintings. Anyway, ‘Ye and Jay had that scapegoat skinned a long time ago to make some luxurious driving shoes.

My favourite discovery online today was that whiny-voiced-yet-prolific mixtape maker (whose ultra-zooted ‘Ride Around Slow’ I’ve had on rotation for a while) Rich Hil has been dissing Supreme in the New York Observer. Dan Duray’s profile of the rapper ends with,

“Later in the night everyone ordered Indian food and after the five chicken tikka masalas arrived, Rich began to rail against the clothing label Supreme, which he used to wear regularly, until they started “fucking with Odd Future,” a West Coast rap group.

Now he wants to kidnap Odd Future frontman Tyler the Creator and make a music video where an attractive woman takes a duffel bag of Supreme out to the middle of the desert and burns it. He didn’t say for which song.”

That’s doubly amusing in the knowledge that Rich Hil is Tommy Hilfiger’s son. Two of my favourite clothing empires collide in those closing quotes. His output isn’t Chilly Tee level, but some of the drug dealer boasts (despite that documented bust) seem a little unnecessary given the options available. On the Hilfiger subject, I loved Diamond D’s revelation that, “Tommy Hilfiger or his brother Andy came over to the video shoot in person in a big body 600…and opened up the trunk and said ‘Back up, this is all for Puba” during the ‘Watch the Sound’ shoot in the Complex piece recently.

Rich was merrily Tweeting about Supreme until a couple of months ago too. I thought it was just kids who got into Supreme in 2008 sitting on message boards moaning that it’s “mainstream now” but it appears even the Rapidshare rappers out there are getting restless. I tried to calculate as to whether there’s a direct trajectory between how annoying a white rapper is and how many tattoos they’ve got, but Lil Wyte, Paul Wall and Yelawolf all disproved my theory with an abundance of ink. Machine Gun Kelly and Mac Miller are prone to pulling some annoying expressions, but at least white rappers have stopped trying to out psycho each other by rapping about bumming their own mums and stuff – they seem to have substituted that with game of who can amass full sleeves and a neck piece the fastest. Oh, and media coverage claiming that Rich is the best ever rapper from Connecticut are forgetting that Stezo, and — on the melanin-deficient front — Apathy, are a lot better.

This is my ‘Save the Elephant’ appeal. I’m a Nikehead. If you read this blog regularly you’ll know that. But just as that guy from GoDaddy caused trouble by shooting an elephant dead a while back, my beloved elephant print’s appeal has been slaughtered. On the Air Jordan III, it was amazing. I saw glimpses of it on Windrunners, some Airliner Cortez, Pegasus and an Air Trainer 1 from around the same time. The Air Force IV/STS worked it in nicely in 1989. Seven years later it showed up on the Air Jordan XI IE Lows in style — a nice throwback to the previous decade on a Jordan that still maintains a certain mystique.

When Supreme dropped their Dunk Low SB in October 2002, the resurrection of that pattern and reference to a 1988 aesthetic was indicative of Supreme’s knack for nailing a theme, and it seemed like a coup to fuse a Jordan aesthetic with a Dunk. How naive we were, but that duo of makeups is still classic. It’s quaint to think that seeing it on a Parisian b-boy’s custom Doublegoose seemed so unfeasibly fresh a few years back.

Chris Hall’s one-off Air Force 1 Hi makeup from 2005 and those unreleased Courir Air Flight 89 from 2003 aside, the magic’s been eroded during the last decade. Nine silhouettes (including the AJIII) carried it superbly. The last five years of abuses are proof that this classic pattern needs to be kept in a vault for outings that justify such a prestigious application. This mistreatment of a noble animal (print) must stop.