Showing posts with label Film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Film. Show all posts

Thursday, December 3, 2015

Give it up for the DJ!

"the impact DJs have within the music industry and how their recognition is overdue, especially in regards to the many intricate roles that come with standing behind two turntables.

“To see where the DJ is at now is remarkable,” DJ Kid Capri said at the event. “For so many years the DJ had the door shut in their face, so this is a celebration of sorts.”

From being the pulse of the party to helping dictate the direction of popular music, some of the business’s most respected and recognized DJs, music executives and historians are featured in the film, including Kid Capri, Afrika Bambaataa, DJ Jazzy Jeff, DJ Jazzy Joyce, The World Famous Brucie B, DJ SNS and DJ Irie.

Conversations surrounding DJ culture, within Hip-Hop and the multifaceted music industry, are ones that can continue for days on end. Pridgen pieced together the documentary exceptionally, with many diverse topics being explored within the 90-minute film.

“Music helps you do a lot of things,” says Jazzy Joyce. “When you listen to a certain song, you remember certain things. The first song we all learn is the ABC’s, so you tell me how important music is.”





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Monday, November 23, 2015

Sunday, August 23, 2015

Dismaland - Banksy




What is this thing?
In essence it’s a festival of art, amusements and entry-level anarchism. A place where you can get your counterculture easily available over the counter. A theme park for the disenfranchised, with franchises available. I guess you’d say its a theme park whose big theme is – theme parks should have bigger themes.
Where is this thing?
It’s situated in a former lido that stretches across two-and-a-half acres of heavily fortified beachfront compound, comprising a pool, sun terrace and small amphitheatre. I asked myself: what do people like most about going to look at art? The coffee. So I made an art show that has a cafe, a cocktail bar, a restaurant and another bar. And some art.
Why is this thing?
If you’re the kind of person who feels jaded by the over-corporate blandness that passes for family light entertainment, then this is the bespoke leisure opportunity that will connect with your core brand dynamic. It doesn’t so much ask the question, “What is the point in art now?” as ask, “What is the point in asking, ‘What is the point in art now?’”
You’ve described low-income families as “the perfect art audience”. Why?
“Low-income holidaymakers” are the perfect art audience. There’s something very evocative about the British seaside experience. This show is modelled on the failed winter wonderlands they build every December that get shut down by trading standards – where they charge £20 to look at some alsatians with antlers taped to their heads towing a sleigh made from a skip. Essentially this is a theme park that Lawrence Llewelyn Bowen would endorse. The advantage of putting art in a small seaside town is you’re only competing with donkeys.I think a museum is a bad place to look at art; the worst context for art is other art.
Do you think that the art market poisons creativity?
The art market certainly doesn’t encourage creativity. Like most markets it rewards being able to reliably deliver recognisable product on a regular basis. Which isn’t necessarily a recipe for exciting art. I heard someone on the radio, it might even have been Richard Ashcroft, say: “It’s not art unless it has the potential to be a disaster.” Which is why I’ve spent months making distorted fibreglass fairground sculptures to install in a dirty lido miles from anywhere.
more here


 Banksy interviews Run the Jewels:

"BANKSY: Thanks for agreeing to play my theme park. Have you ever played in a theme park before?

EL-P I have not yet had the pleasure of playing in a theme park, or enjoying one for that matter.

KILLER MIKE I have not played a theme park. My dream is to play [US theme park] Six Flags Over Georgia before I check out of life. Mostly because they used to have a teen nightclub called Graffiti’s; I was there when I was a kid and that’s where I heard dope music and danced with girls from the suburbs after we snuck in."

read the rest here
 

Monday, August 17, 2015

Compton Commodified




"Although the group often claimed they were simply “street reporters,” the violent gang- and drug-filled world of their music ignored more prosaic aspects of Compton, such as its single-family homes and history as a black, middle-class enclave.

But in segregated Los Angeles, whites often avoided predominantly black communities and viewed black youth suspiciously. Straight Outta Compton played to their shrill, pervasive fears about gang violence, offering outsiders a vicarious look into a neighborhood most had only heard about on the nightly news.

Music fans ate it up: the album went double platinum and encouraged music industry executives to focus on developing more hardcore acts.

...

Nonetheless, the larger-than-life personas populating NWA’s recordings spoke to complicated realities.

On tracks like Gangsta Gangsta Ice Cube might have sounded invincible – “I’m the type of nigga that’s built to last / Fuck with me, I’ll put my foot in your ass” – but all of that bravado masked real social insecurity.

NWA’s core members grew up in Compton and South Central neighborhoods that had been devastated by massive deindustrialization. The resulting poverty and unemployment proved fertile ground for the influx of cocaine in the early 1980s. They witnessed the dramatic rise in gang violence connected to it and felt the LAPD’s heavy-handed response.

With draconian names like C.R.A.S.H. (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) and Operation Hammer, the LAPD criminalized entire neighborhoods, conducting destructive search and seizure missions with the dual purpose of finding contraband and intimidating residents.

By embracing the role of the “bad guys,” NWA found a profitable way to capture public attention and strike back at the system – a musical strategy I explore in my recent book Sounding Race in Rap Songs."

read full article here

Monday, July 20, 2015

Exarchia Street Art (Greece)




For a form of art so misunderstood as street art, it is only natural to find roof within a neighborhood equally – for many people- misunderstood. A lively area, constantly alerted and restless, mysterious and colorful. Exarchia, located in the centre of Athens.

 In this film we collect moments of the urban scenery of Exarchia and the culture behind it. Exarchia’s walls and streets, interviews with art specialists, residents of Exarchia and of course street artists who talk with us about this subculture and controversial subject.

reference

Friday, July 17, 2015

Watching my name go by (1976)

"In 1974 Norman Mailer wrote an essay for Esquire called “The Faith of Graffiti”—a gripping and sympathetic investigation on the defacement of public and private property as an urban art movement of complex and fascinating depth. Mailer’s work eventually produced two collaborative pictorial books—The Faith of Graffiti and Watching My Name Go By. The beauty of tagging and graffiti art is almost taken for granted today, especially since artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat legitimized the genre to the art world in both its unlawful execution and its distinctive aesthetic, but Mailer was doing something new by recording the phenomenon as an organic outpouring of artistic expression, and this short 1976 documentary—also named “Watching My Name Go By”—is equally open-minded in its portrayal of graffiti artists and their critics. "

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