Ljubljana Pizza version 2012 tier list

Robo Ky: Depedning on who's making the list, an A or D tier character in Guilty Gear XX Accent Core +. And generally awesome.

.

Believing the pizza place in the small town of Podutik near where I live was called Pizzeria Vezuvij (Pizzerija Vesuvius), I searched for it in vain on the internet. Nothing, not a single hit in Slovenia; there was a hit or two in cyrillic, and that was it. Did it go out of business, I wondered. No, there'd still be a listing or a review somewhere on the web if that were the case. Well, it turns out it's actually called Picerija Etna ("Pizzeria Aetna"), and this was the third or so time I was wrongly convinced it was called Vezuvij. It's the fact that they're both named after mountains in Italy... and probably that there's also a pizzeria called Vulkan ("Volcano") in Ljubljana.

Well, in searching for the elusive Vezuvij I inadvertently ended up reading a handful of articles on the web about the best pizza in Ljubljana. Don't even get me started... let's just say it AIN'T Foculus. And over my delicious margherita s suho salamo at Etna I got to thinking long and hard about how I'd rate the pizza of Ljubljana. Problem is, everything is pretty close together in the rankings, and they're all viable.

Which led me to realize that instead of an enumerated list, the most appropriate way to rate the pizza places of Ljubljana would be a tier list, the likes of which fighting game fans use to rank the playable characters in a game. Tiers are general clusters of characters which are more or less equally good. The highest tier is the S tier, then come A, B, C (D, etc.) and junk (usually reserved for joke or gimmick characters like Dan in Street Fighter IV). + and - tiers may also be used, and usually the order in which characters are listed in each tier is significant.

What makes this system relevant to the case at hand is that 1. tier placements and even the concept of tiers itself are the subject of heated debate, 2. regardless of tier, every character can win any given match - more scientifically grounded tiers are based on match up tables, which show how many games each character would win if two characters (and two equally skilled players) played ten matches, with 7-3 being the highest mark (in our case, this corresponds to how, because of different cooks, number of customers being served, etc. on any given day any one pizza place in Ljubljana can be better than another pizza place). And 3. to be credible, tier lists should roughly follow a standard distribution, with S and junk tier having the fewest members and the tiers in the middle the most.

I think Ljubljana is more like an Arc Systems game than a Capcom game in that the tiers are relatively close, subjective taste is a huge factor and, like I said, they're all pretty much viable contenders:

S tier: Trnovski zvon

S-/A+ tier: Azur

A tier: Vezuvij, Tunel*, Angel, Emonska klet, Dvor

B tier: Foculus, Dobra vila

C tier: Pinki

"Junk" tier**: Mercator pizzas, Parma

* I haven't eaten here in years but back in the day when I ate there all the time it was easily the most consistent pizza place.

** In line with the analogy, these pizzas aren't necessarily bad, they just can't be taken seriously. (When someone says "wanna get some pizza," no Ljubljančan ever replies "sure, where do you wanna go, Mercator?")

Chingy, the black guy at Best Buy

Scary Movie 4: "They're taking everyone... young, old, rich, poor, Chingy."

I've been busy lately and posting has been the last thing on my mind. However, preparing a radio show about the teen movies of 1995 (Hackers, Empire Records, Tank Girl) that ever so subtly builds into a crescendo of "pretty clothes and trinkets aside, Wes Anderson is a caste monger and the point of all his work is that a rigid class system guarantees a quality, pretty consumer aesthetic... and that's the profane reality behind the high-sounding libertarianism that's currently all the rage among my peers in the US." has been exhilarating. Having had to watch a whole lot of 1995 to reach that point was incredibly exhausting, and after the show, on Saturday night, I came home and passed out in bed. But the next morning I was awoken - perhaps for the first time in my life - by the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes with knowing that the world is a better place because of something that I did. Radio waves carrying my solid condemnation of Super Bad, Wes and premium cable ideology are now out there somewhere, floating through space. Who knows, perhaps someone was even listening and paying attention.

I've been riding that high ever since, and it's led me back to Drop Aztek.

After the show, I went and got a drink with Riley, a talented photographer who's in Slovenia to research the Erased, and somehow the conversation went to Chingy (I think I had used the term "chingy" to refer to money, as I'm wont to do). I believe her words were "we bought that album and listened to it like all the time!", which wouldn't have struck me as noteworthy had I not just spent three days cataloging the little differences between a time when you'd "buy albums and listen to them all the time!" and now.

My main memory of Chingy comes from 2003, when, looking at the CDs on the best sellers rack at Best Buy, I suggested, as a joke that I knew would be well received, that my friend Dennis get his sister Chingy for Christmas. We both laughed as the cover, featuring Chingy standing by his ride beneath the St. Louis arch, delivered the punchline.

Why did the joke work? Because this was a Best Buy in the middle of what must be one of the largest suburban retail clusters in the US and consequently the world (the Roosevelt-Butterfield-Oakbrook shopping area cuts through 5 cities). And there, at that moment in time when Best Buy was the place for white people to be on account of where consumer technology (and shady consumer credit to pay for it) was going, was this strategically placed black guy, looking all street, staring down the throngs of suburban holiday shoppers from the cover of his album. There is something inherently funny about that, and the joke would probably have gone over just as well had I merely pointed to the CD and said "Chingy."

Nor was it an isolated incident. Back then, I'd say up until about 2006, many laughs were to be had as my boys Dennis and Lev would deliberately put on their worst accents and recite Eminem and Chingy lyrics; Lev with his thick Slovene accent "spontaneously" (he may have actually been practicing this at home, which, if you know the guy, makes it all the more funny) working "and when you sleep I hope you dream about it, and when you dream I hope you scream about it"  into a conversation was probably a high point. And for a ladies' perspective, there was Sis singing "I Don't Wanna Be a Player No More" as she donned a faux snakeskin tube top (oh, she was warned) for some suburban clubbing with her Italian friend Monica. That same Sis would make me proud several years later, when a broken jukebox stuck on "My Humps" would lead to what perhaps was the one of the finest bouts of ironic whiteness the world - or at least that townie bar in Villa Park - had ever seen. 

Of course, one would certainly be right to detect a hint of scorn or derision: towards the brashness and perceived silliness of black culture, and in Eminem's case, towards the idea of wiggerism. Add to that college, which makes people, and Americans in particular, incredibly fun and incredibly obnoxious, and it wouldn't be difficult to apply the word "racist" to some of the funnier moments. But it is in fact only once one readily admits to the white self-assuredness underlying some of our reactions that the true significance of the hip hop and RnB of the early 2000 decade, of this black music that, for a good five years, had established itself as a synonym for pop music, reveals itself. Having secured a place in the pre-internet pop pantheon, it brought with it a whole slough of non-white ideas about hyper-consumption, violence and sexuality. Already accepted by the mainstream and heavily promoted, among other things, by an MTV that still played videos, once the music had kicked up all these incongruities, they were just out there. Complementing that was way that the nature and (for perhaps the last time) potentially extreme profitability of the pipeline then in place for distributing and promoting music discouraged the establishment of a uniform discourse, of an agreed upon "neutral" location for our encounters with Chingy & Co., which would have streamlined the process of reacting to the music (this, it should go without saying, was to eventually be provided by the internet, which was then still in its infancy). Without something like that to aid in processing a black guy's boast that while he does have numerous existential problems, some involving possible imprisonment, a [nasty expletive for girlfriend] is not one of them, all we were left with was our pile of preconceived notions, some rooted in the Clinton-era PC movement and the efforts made in our early to mid 20s to explore music, and with it black music in some form or another (be it jazz or indie hip hop or even Kid Rock in the Americans' case, or house music in the Europeans' case), and others in the everyday racism of anecdotes and off-hand observations, inherited ideas about blacks and black culture, and a wide range of media treatments, many of which themselves were reactions to black culture - "And all the girlies say I'm pretty fly... for a white guy".

And I feel that it is in that openness, in the sort of necessity that more or less everybody felt to interact with or react to this music on the one hand, and in the free discretion and circumstantial nature of those reactions on the other, that the true value of not only that era's hip hop and RnB, but of hip hop and RnB in general lies. It explains why Kanye West, for reasons no one can exactly pinpoint, sounds damn good right about now and why the music of, say, Kendrick Lamar, though perfectly fine and well, somehow feels lacking. Look at it this way: in 2004, my dad called me with the express purpose of telling me about this rapper named 50 Cent who was shot like 13 times. Later that year, he insisted I download the Up In Smoke! DVD (which in itself was a veritable laugh factory) and watch it with him. And guess who beat Facebook to the punch in filling me in on the Kanye incident at the Grammys and Kanye's relationship with Kim Kardashian... yup, my dad, the retiree.

Forget my dad, my sister doesn't know who Kendrick Lamar is. And Pitchfork's elusive near-perfect rating for his album only serves to underscore how unimportant Pitchfork is.
  

The Radio Show about "Hipsters" to End all Radio Shows about "Hipsters"

Yesterday I made my solo on-air debut on Radio Student. I prepared a show about the word "hipster", and had the thing down pat... in my head. Nerves got the best of me, and some things didn't come out as clear as I would have liked. So, without further ado, a written summary of what I was trying to say.

It is impossible to define the word "hipster" by looking for a common trait among all phenomena to which the word could be attached, as they are too numerous and diverse and, as the word could shows, no one phenomenon can be unequivocally described with the word "hipster" every single time it appears. It follows that to get to the bottom of this now-common word, it would be a good idea to start by considering literature on the subject.
The relevant literature can be broken down into two groups: satirical or humorous works and negative/academic works. The former - The Hipster Handbook, Stuff White People Like, and the Do's and Don't's column of Vice magazine - are comical in nature. While they provide much interesting information on the subject and, each in its own way, plenty of insight, they are ultimately the product of a rich tradition of self-deprecating humour (they are written by self-proclaimed hipsters/white people), which itself has nothing to do with hipsters as such. They must be understood in this light.
The second group encompasses both lay critiques of hipsterism, such as internet content like Supernews' Hipsters in Space Cartoon and other purely negative outsider depictions, and academic criticism, which, with little exception, is almost entirely negative. Various academic works on the subject of the hipster have focused on: gentrification, class prejudice, the inability of today's youth to produce a real or viable culture, political apathy, a naive view of the past, etc. Most of these claims can be easily refuted.
One work that, in contrast to those listed above, is actually fairly helpful in understanding the hipster is Gavin McInnes' essay for the website Taki's Magazine. I perhaps should have pointed out that while I strongly suggest everyone read said essay, and I generally greatly enjoy the author's insights, I in no way agree with or endorse any of his political beliefs or social prejudices (slovenec, ki bo še naprej raziskoval dela tega avtorja, bo hitro naletel na skrajno desničarske ideje). Mr. McInnes' work is basically a summary of a conference he attended at UCLA on the subject of youth culture. He bases the essay around the assumption, almost universally voiced at the conference, that "today more than ever, youth is wasted on the young," an assumption he completely rejects. The part of the essay which seems key to me in understanding the hipster is where he points out how, thanks to the internet, young people today operate outside the system to create with greater freedom than ever before. In doing so, he claims, they are not "ripping off" the culture or style of underprivileged groups (as several academics had claimed), but are rather themselves constituting a DIY culture of their own similar to that once typical of poor or underprivileged groups, in particular blacks.
The two key points Mr. McInnes is trying to make draw us nearer to an understanding of this phenomenon. First, the almost universal negativity surrounding hipsters and young people which serves as a framework for his essay. This is in fact the one universal trait of all accounts of hipsters. In the satirical works listed above, this can be easily explained, as I have shown, by the fact that these works draw on a tradition of self-deprecating humor, and that it is this, and not any "information" they may provide on "hipsters", that makes them noteworthy. Of course, this hasn't stopped serious criticism from using these works as hard evidence. Although the accounts of serious criticism use a number of very different points of departure, and may ultimately take the form of a Marxist, aesthetic, ethical, etc. critique, the one thing they all have in common is that, in the final instance, they attribute to hipsters, as individuals and not as a group,  general bad manners.
The second point Mr. McInnes makes is the connection between "hipsters" and engagement in non-mainstream, alternative forms of consumerism.
I tie the two together and add a third element that to date has been entirely absent from the discourse on hipsters: the incredible expansion, roughly in the middle of the previous decade, that is at about the same time the hipster took shape, of the media to appeal to include wide range of perspectives and to include a very wide range of groups. I illustrate this using TV, although I believe that this observation applies to the entire world of consumerism. Whereas TV was once considered both an opiate for the masses and an ideological apparatus in the way it excluded certain groups and behaviours, today, TV has both widespread intellectual appeal, largely due to premium cable dramas, and is extremely inclusive, as evidenced by the once invisible groups who today have a significant presence on television: turbofolk culture in Jersey Shore, nerd culture in Big Bang Theory, G4, and "cult movies" based around nerd culture.
This shift has, however, meant that in it's efforts to provide an all-encompassing representation of the cultural sphere, TV specifically and consumer culture in general has had to forfeit its moral imperative; the sphere of mainstream consumerism is no longer a reflection of broader societal norms and morals. Whereas those who were once forced to create a culture on the fringes of the mainstream media that excluded them could be easily labelled morally questionable (all rap or RnB as "gangster rap", heavy metal culture as satanic, mods and rockers as a moral threat to the nation, etc.), today, the diversity of the media and consumerism makes this impossible.
"Hipsters" or, more accurately, young people, still continue to partake in forms of consumerism on the fringes of the mainstream. Even though ideological limitations and the exclusivist nature of the media have disappeared, the limitation created by the fact that "the media" and "consumerism" are in fact publicly traded companies with a commitment to create value for shareholders remains as strong as ever. When they engage in non-mainstream forms of consumerism or non-mainstream media, young people do so for a wide variety of reasons. Although a desire to set oneself apart (which, I also note, is more typical of certain age groups, eg. late high school, college students) by choosing an obscure or uncommon or non-mainstream product could be a factor in this engagement, it is only one of many factors. By choosing to eat organic, one could be exhibiting "snobbish" behaviour; however, it is equally likely that the person in question simply does not want to eat genetically modified slop (and if said person has used the internet to do a little research, this explanation is even more plausible), and the real answer could be a combination of both factors. Another example, which I wish I would have thought of when I was on the air: Ariel Pink, one of the few indie musicians I'd swear by, is often said to pursue a lo-fi, cheap-sounding aesthetic in his music, ostensibly for the sake of distancing himself from a mainstream, polished sound. He counters these claims by saying that this is reading too much into his music, and that for him as a musician, lo-fi elements are merely a tool,  something I feel is clearly borne out in his music. (Again, I borrowed this general observation from Gavin McInnes).
We can therefore conclude that "hipsters" can be broadly compared to past cultural movements in the way that they participate in forms that are not part of mainstream, big money, corporate consumerism. Gavin McInnes is even of the view that today's young people are much better at it than any previous generation of young people. However, as I have pointed out, the way the media now accommodates (as a viable profit-making strategy) a vast spectrum of cultural and moral views makes it considerably more difficult to portray the culture of young people as a moral threat. It follows that the only way that remains to discredit those who, even momentarily, partake in non-mainstream forms, is by attributing to individuals not socially dangerous attitudes, but generally harmless character flaws: egoism, narcissism, bad manners, etc.*

We can therefore conclude that when someone who has been labeled a hipster says "I'm NOT a hipster," nine times out of ten, all the person in question is trying to say is "I'm not an anti-social, narcissistic asshole."

And most people who could be reasonably labelled hipsters are in fact not anti-social, narcissistic assholes.

Regarding the last part of the show, I greatly miscalculated the time I would need to present my thoughts. I now realise that even if I would have had the 20 or 25 minutes I had originally planned instead of the 10 or so minutes I got, it would have been insufficient. I plan on preparing a show dedicated to this topic sometime in the near future. In the meantime, you can find some of my thoughts on it in this short blog post.

 * This may sound greatly exaggerated. But to take one example that is in line with my observations about organic food as a part of "hipster" culture: The Simpsons episode where Lisa decides to become a vegetarian (The Simpsons played a big part in the shift that occurred in the media, among other things, by poking fun at staid moral attitudes). Lisa appears at a family barbecue with a large bowl of red liquid and says "I've made enough gespacho for all, now you don't have to eat meat!" The guests laugh loudly, and Barney Gumble (the town drunk) tells her to "Go back to Russia!" Which is to say only a Communist would be a vegetarian. I am aware I previously advised against using humor as hard evidence, but one need but read official documents on Satanic ritual abuse to see that, as an expression of a general attitude, this "joke" was not far from the truth.

Facebook "sucks" and will continue to "suck" until it starts charging me

It's obvious that Facebook isn't or won't be able to make money. I should add "for investors". Because unlike what CNBC would have us believe, they're the only ones unhappy about Facebook.
Amid all the "buzz on the Street" or "squawk" or whatever, that's something that nobody is really noticing. It all goes back to what Thorsten Veblen noted a long time ago: the root of any financial turbulence can be traced to an unhappy capitalist(s) (the x-treme paraphrasing is mine). What exactly said capitalist is unhappy about is of little concern, it could be a tooth ache for all we know, but the fact is, he isn't hitting the trading floor until he feels better. Since Thorsten Veblen's time, this monitoring of how rich people are feeling has been extrapolated into countless indices and indicators generally known as "the market", and since about 2000, these have come to be a real time representation of, well, the life pulse of all existence. But they aren't, and what makes the people who use or buy stuff happy isn't necessarily what makes the coloured arrows go up on the Street.

In other words, Facebook is fine, there is nothing wrong with Facebook. Before the failed IPO, I could impress pretty girls I haven't seen in 5 years with my ironic use of 50 Cent lyrics just as well as I can now; before the shares missed their target price, the people I used to work with could post pictures of neglected and abused animals and make me feel bad just as easily and effortlessly as they can now.

That's because Facebook has what I call a "culture of usability". "Usability" implies that for most people, the product or technology in question is and can only be relevant during actual use and interaction. "Culture" implies that when a new product or technology appears, lots of different people converge around a general pattern of use.

To take an example, for many people, owning a car is about getting from point A to point B when they need to get from point A to point B, and owning a drill is about being able to drill a hole if and when they need to drill a hole. At the same time, and in opposition to cultures of usability, there exist cultures of identity: the guys from Top Gear use cars to define who they are even, or especially, when they are not going from point A to point B; Tim "the Toolman" Taylor (yes, I had to go there) needs more power, arrgh arrgh arrgh even, and especially, when there's no particular need to drill a hole. Note that while cars and drills are not free, the person who needs a car only to go to work and back (for simplicity's sake, let's say our worker works at a company where what you drive doesn't impact your chances of promotion or having sex with coworkers) will be less likely to buy a turbo-charged something-or-other (I'm not a car guy), and the person looking to hang up a picture on the wall will in all likelihood not be bothered by the 20 or so seconds of loud noise the drill makes to the point that he or she would shell out an extra fifty dollars for a drill with a noise-muffler. And it's the turbo charged widget, the noise muffler, that create added value, which, if you're a producer of goods, is "where the real money is."

That's the seat of Facebook's financial woes, not the fact that not enough users are clicking ads or the ones that are clicking aren't buying enough stuff. As the market-based discourse enshrouds Facebook in negative hype, what it's really trying to do is break the bad news: we don't really like Facebook as such, we're just "using" it to stay connected. To illustrate, let's take a look at a historical example of how big money has generated and perpetuated the myth of the transition from "dark ages" of usability to the "golden age" of identity with another technology that, once the differences are cancelled out, was in a position similar to the one Facebook now finds itself in.  

The myth I'm referring to is the "North American Video Game Crash of 1983" (note the caps and the quotes). As the adding of the year to the end of the phrase shows,  the whole concept was invented well after 1983. And invented is the right word. Yes, on the level of making tons of money on fads, a severe disruption occurred when Atari, then basically a synonym for video games, got too greedy, overpaying for licenses which it converted into shitty games; also the Atari 2600 had no lock-out mechanism, so anybody could make games, and anybody did, and they were shit. But then the story continues: The result was a glut of unsellable game cartridges. Retailers sent back the games they had already ordered, the video game "fad" was seen as just that, cue the stock footage of the angry early-1980s mob that VH1/CNN uses for half-hour documentaries about Disco Demolition/Ryan White. The whole of North America took a vow never to play video games – not just from Atari, but from any manufacturer – again, which ultimately didn't matter, because, having been pushed to brink of bankruptcy by the shittiest fad ever, retailers were adamant in their refusal to stock them.

Far from being merely the "mainstream" account, this is the only version of the story. The problem is that regardless of whether a particular account is targeted towards the business crowd or towards video game nerds, whether it's being told by CNBC or G4, the protagonist remains the same: profit; profit for Atari and Activision, profit for the countless other companies who had gone from manufacturing kiddie pools to manufacturing consoles in the hope of cashing in on the trend, profit for retailers. Of course, the huge sums of money involved are what make the story of the Crash generally interesting. But at the same time, the money angle is a one-sided account (the rough outline of which I sketched above). A broader account that includes non-official sources, i.e. childhood memories from yours truly, paints a different picture, one that challenges the generally accepted story on several points.

I got my Atari 2600 in 1986. 1986? That's right, three years after the video game crash supposedly made the situation in the US similar to the current situation in China (where consoles are banned). And I loved my 2600. I'd play it all the time. My neighbours and friends to this day, Mike and Greg, would come by to play my 2600, then I'd go to their place to play Donkey Kong Jr. on their Colecovision. Again, in 1986. And our enthusiasm had surprisingly little to do with the actual games: for us, those consoles meant the giant leap from not being able to play games on a TV to being able to play games on a TV. Firing up an emulator today, it's easy to concur that there were terrible games... but to an 8 year old in 1986, the world of difference separating E.T. or Pac Man for the 2600 and not being able to play games on a TV was incomparably greater than the relatively minor (the Atari 2600 was very primitive) differences in quality between Chase the Chuckwagon (A game about dog food published by Purina) and Frogger (a decent port of a good game). And that's usability. I didn't know the pixelized adventurer in Pitfall was named "Pitfall Harry", or even that Mike and Greg's Colecovision was much more powerful than my Atari 2600. It was all just video games, a fun, novel way to spend the tons of free time we had.

And this state of indifference, of playing video games because they were something new and because as such, they had an immediate appeal to our young minds, continued well through the era of the NES, that is, the system that supposedly brought the "dark ages" of the crash to an end and sent video games on the path to the glorious, multi-trillion dollar future that awaited them. James Rolfe, the Angry Video Game Nerd, is the author of a series of videos that presents a fascinating, game-by-game analysis of the terrible games we played throughout the NES era. And by "played", as James makes abundantly clear, I certainly do not mean – as in many generic tales cited in accounts of the Crash – that we played these games for five minutes, realised they were junk, and threw them in the trash. No, we actually sat down and tried to play through these horrible abominations of mankind: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Ghostbusters, Fester's Quest...

Instead of a climactic arc with a dramatic crash ending in miraculous rebirth, therefore, the actual, lived history of the "Crash" is one of continuity for many people my age. So why is this angle, which for many people is the only one that actually affected their relationship towards video games (kids don't know what share prices are, or at least they didn't in 1986) systematically ignored? Watch any E3 press conference, go on any gamer forum and the answer soon becomes clear. When the NES ended the "Crash", that is, when it made video games attractive to capital, what it did that mattered was take the first step towards molding the loose, ad hoc cultures of usability that had taken shape around video games since the time of Pong into profitable cultures of identity closely managed from corporate HQ. Already with the 16-bit era, supporting a console meant, ipso facto, supporting and identifying with, from bottom to top, the organisation that made it: its supply chain, its board, its advertising and PR departments (hence the cult following that's sprung up around Sega's advertising)... and of course its business results. Today, it's not uncommon for arguments among gamers about a particular console or game manufacturer to feature Q4 data from said manufacturer; similarly, it's CEOs (as opposed to people actually involved in making the games) that take center stage at E3, to the uproarious applause of legions of fanboys. It's a situation that, I can imagine, works out well for game manufacturers (and their shareholders), who are constantly thinking of new, legally questionable ways to "lock in" players' wallets. (It is interesting to note that the next generation Xbox and Playstation consoles will be designed so as to prevent used games from being played, thus shutting down another culture of usability, that of the exchange and rental of used video games).

Twenty years from now, we'll probably be telling the same tale about Facebook. The purely fiduciary slump Facebook is now in will be retrospectively reworded to imply that we the users were in fact dissatisfied with Facebook before it started charging us. Once a new pay-to-play version comes out (probably as a "free" feature of a pay-to-play service like Xbox live or Apple TV), it will be outwardly recognized as superior from the perspective of the user and, less outwardly, as assuring for the investor in its focus on brand identification as a basis for added value.

So there you go, Mark. If you aspire to be a trillionaire, convince me I love Facebook more than I love my friends.

"Look at my hat!" Hip hop and the snapback threshold

The point of both of these videos seems to be "look at my hat!".

I call this the "snapback threshold". It marks the point at which hip hop seems to have begun dangerously indulging in the whitey myth of limitless choice and, ipso facto, pulling away from the centrifugal force that should be keeping hip hop real: Nobody really cares about that obscure hat that's getting more camera time than you, just like nobody asked what you personally think about gold chains and grillz (they're garish as fuck) and nobody throws down in front of the House of Hoops on Christmas Eve because the Jordan XIs are superlatively beautiful sneakers (even though they are).

And to this white person who discovered hip hop in his 20s, the most important thing, the real draw, was the way it institutionalizes one way of doing things, sets in stone a standard, if you will, for speaking, dressing and living, and does so in real time, never pausing to formally set down its guidelines or ask the community for its input.

With its implicitly set rules, hip hop must not be understood - as it often is by people who derive their "knowledge" of "culture" from 19th century Germany - as a correlate of consumerism through its superficial parallels with the herd mentality behind things like Tickle-Me-Elmo mania, but, quite the opposite, as a way of hermetically sealing off a movement from the intrusion of an intricately constructed marketing discourse of bullshit notions of defining oneself through a limitless freedom of choice and opinions. With hip hop you still have options: think of a saying you really like and have your jeweler blingify it. Don't like the Jordan XIs? No problem, get the Half Cents or the Griffeys. And that's about as much choice as you, or anybody, needs; any rational goals of the idea having choices as a consumer in the first place have been fulfilled: a system for acknowledging and awarding those who make an effort is in place (something that for all its bitchiness about clothes, hipsterdom sorely lacks), and there's just enough room to set yourself apart from everybody else. Consumerism is engaged, applied, and then promptly cut off before the idea of self-reflection can really set in, leaving the self free, indeed even forcing it, to seek definition through doing, i.e. glorifying one's name through violence, partying like a rock star, and having tons of casual sex.

Sound familiar? If you're white, it shouldn't, and to this white person who had his fair share of "OMG, what the fuck was I thinking!" moments indulging in the wonderful world of consumer choice (Diesel flip-flops and, ahem, Levi's engineered jeans) before he finally learned, that's the whole point of hip hop. So please, Big Sean & Co., respect the "no hats" policy.


 

 

That Whole Digital vs. Vinyl Thing: A wholly uneducated opinion from the ground floor

I got dragged to a club on Friday. I say "dragged" because I made it clear to everyone that I had no intention of going to a club when I left the house. And I promptly ended up being dragged out of the club the second I started enjoying myself, after about fifteen minutes, because the person who dragged me there was too drunk to stand up.

But that's okay, if you're not drunk, fifteen minutes is long enough. After that I turn into a complaining bitch -  it's filthy (all clubs are); it's a meat market (all clubs are). But before I reach that point I can manage to get in some useful observations. Actually, it was enough time for me to write the post that follows in my head:

The debate about whether vinyl is better than digital seems to be going in circles. It can afford to just repeat itself ad infinitum, because the battle has long since played itself out... and vinyl lost. Thousands of hours of music that's free to steal or cheap to buy on a computer less than half the size of a turntable vs. a couple of hours of music that's difficult and relatively expensive to acquire as well as heavy as shit and consequently expensive to transport. So say a number of DJs. That's the deal breaker for most people who live in the real world or a city with no record shops like Ljubljana, and who am I to argue. It's a win-win situation, actually, because it enables vinyl heads like Theo Parrish to carve out a nice little niche for themselves.

I know nothing about the technical aspects of sound reproduction. I've read the Wikipedia article about a hundred times, and I'm none the better for it. I tried to equate the things I read there with what I've observed listening to music in clubs, but what the fuck do I know. On the other hand, my initial observations, which go back oh say to about 2006ish, are turning out to be have been more accurate than my complete and total amateurishness would have ever led me to hope. Which is somewhat of a surprise because, all things being equal, while I have no qualms about the advance of technology, I am allergic to imaginary glorifications of the past; I'm also poor, so if digital media could compete on an equal footing with vinyl, I'd be more than happy to take up DJing on the cheap.

But I just don't think it can. Current pro-vinyl arguments (to my knowledge) highlight the "mellow" sound of vinyl and, if I'm not mistaken, its wider range in certain frequencies; pace the pro-vinyl camp, the latter is apparently inaudible to the human ear. Then there's that argument universal to the digital vs. the-old-way-of-doing-things debate which states that whatever the current situation may be, digital technology has been continuously getting better at a very rapid pace and this trend shows no signs of slowing down. So even if the current digital standard is in fact inferior, a number of people are working on it and this can be expected to change very soon. Hence something called 32-bit audio, the superiority of which, I'm led to believe, is readily appreciated by people with perfect pitch, a doctorate in Musicology and a residency at Robert Johnson.

I digress. But... What I've observed from the start is that vinyl is very good at doing one teeny tiny thing which digital media (in my experience) can't. It makes sounds (and forgive me, I'm going to have to get a bit poetic here) "heavier". Not more "mellow" or "brown" (that sounds like a bullshit, faux-nostalgia argument to me, like someone describing the way they imagine the 1970s looked), but more, hmmm, "plastic". Listening to a good record on a good system, the sounds sound the way a physical object feels when you envision a physical object in your mind. You can actually hear the idea of "roundness" in the bass or the idea of "geometric rigidity" in the high pitched stabs. The same sounds on the same system played on digital media, on the other hand, sound the way you imagine sounds in your mind; bass sounds like the idea of "bass" and high pitched staccato stabs sound like the idea of  "high pitched staccato stabs".

I'm getting downright Anaxagorean, which I knew was going to happen. This is why I never thought I'd bother to spell out my unqualified observations. But being dragged to a club when what I really wanted to do was stay home and play around with my Sega Saturn led me to a train of thought about the development of technology which, at least for me, helps to clarify my argument:

A Playstation 2, a sixth-generation console, blows a Sega Saturn, a fifth-generation console, out of the water. An Xbox 360, a seventh-generation console, blows a Sega Saturn out of the water, shoots it into tiny pieces in the air, and then shoots the tiny pieces into even smaller pieces before they hit the surface. This is all beyond debate. This is a fact. Again, I've read the Wikipedia articles for all the systems in question about a hundred times, and again, knowing nothing about frame buffers or polygon rendering, I'm none the better for it. It doesn't matter. Every generation of consoles easily trumps the previous one and is capable of delivering incomparably prettier games, and no one would argue otherwise.

But... Sega was known for developing the circuitry of its home consoles and its arcade machines in tandem: developments in the design of the chip set for the Model 1 arcade board influenced the development of the Saturn, which in turn led to new developments that influenced the design of the ST-V or Titan arcade board. The end result is that the Sega Saturn can perfectly replicate the experience of many 2D arcade games originally released in arcades from 1990 to about 1998. Although many of the same games were released for next generation consoles, i.e. the Playstation 2 and Xbox, and manage to preserve the gameplay and pretty much everything else more or less intact, thanks to its uniquely arcane architecture, only the Saturn versions succeed in preserving the "plastic" or "weighty" feel of the sprites (onscreen characters) of the arcade originals: the sprites, and in particular flat, 2D colored planes, feel "heavy"; the individual objects moving on screen look, or more accurately, have the feel of separate physical objects; since we're dealing with 2D games, it would perhaps be apt to say that they feel like separate shapes cut out of paper being shuffled across a colored background. 

Cotton 2, probably the most impressive Saturn port. (Yes, I spent

three continues trying to get just the right shot of the leaf bomb.)

 

In my lucid sobriety, watching the DJ scratch one of those laser records while staring at his laptop, it hit me: technology doesn't universally evolve in the direction of "better" or "more powerful". It can also evolve in the direction of being able to do one thing very well. And that one thing, more often than not, is embedded in the general culture of an era. Once the era in question has passed, and technology continues to develop, that "one thing" gets lost among many other things in the discourse of technology. Conversely, once one restores the perspective of the culture for which it was developed, that one things shines through in its singular importance.

Considered alongside video games that can faithfully incorporate the laws of physics and produce battle simulations that are the envy of Ministers of Defence, a powerful 2D engine (the thing that makes pretty arcade games) seems like an afterthought. Throughout the arcade era, however, video games faced fierce competition from other companies looking to market to the segment of teen and adolescent males. In a pre-CGI era when decent special effects were prohibitively expensive, the way to teenage boys' wallets was through bright, eye-catching design (see above). The airbrushed images that graced the covers of Iron Maiden and Def Leppard albums and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons manuals, MTV's early graphical image, or, across the pond, the powerful colors and scale effects of anime like Gundam and Robotech... all this led to a path of technological development that saw arcade games, then the vanguard of video game technology, aim to impress through effects of vivid, colorful plasticity. And anybody who waited in line to play TMNT: The Arcade Game in 1990 will recall being thoroughly impressed. That's the experience that the Saturn was designed to flawlessly recreate.

A parallel argument can be made for dance music. Until Friday, my observation that sounds played on vinyl sound "heavier" didn't seem to be of decisive importance. The ability to endow sounds with a physical quality is, after all, just one consideration among many. But when one examines accounts of the beginnings of dance music, it is precisely the ability to overwhelm the senses of listeners, to deliver a transcendental experience, to produce a psychedelic effect, that forms the foundation of both its artistic and technological developments. Telling a story through a series of records, extending records to produce an effect, the two-channel mixer, the twitter array, the modern club sound system, and, perhaps most importantly, the 33-RPM maxi single (which is what we mean when we say "vinyl") - all this was developed by a small group of closely connected DJs and technicians. And it was developed to address the needs of a scene undercut with notions of brotherly love, sexual and personal liberation and transcendentalism rooted in a culture of drug-taking. Those fortunate enough to have partied at the Loft or the Paradise Garage describe it as being an other-worldly, semi-religious experience, and what we know about the people behind those clubs leads us to believe that the technological aspects (all of which were to become mainstays throughout the vinyl era) were carefully constructed with the express aim of producing such an experience.

But we don't have to go so far back in time to figure all this out. We can listen to a track like Sandstorm or pick up a copy of Mixmag from around 1999, when it was essentially a magazine about E with a record review section, to realize that dance music's vinyl era was also its drug era. Without drugs, it is impossible to understand how dance music could have grown the way it did in the pre-internet age: it was the promise of a drug-induced transcendental experience that provided dance music with its popular base, enabling it to extend its influence to all corners of the globe at a rapid pace (again, mostly before the advent of the internet as we know it today), and, at the same time, keeping it from becoming too big on account of the taboos surrounding drugs. The fact that a sizable portion of most scenes was probably about just getting high, without any kind of spiritual connotations, changes nothing. Personally, I recall all those nights I spent high off my ass on the little ledge beneath the speaker in my beloved K4. It'd be pointless to try to describe what listening to the Martin Landsky or Justus Köhncke spin vinyl felt like, so here goes nothing: if getting high and listening to good house music at home is like getting high and watching a kung-fu movie on TV, getting high and listening to those sets was like getting high and having that same kung-fu movie broadcast directly to your head, with the colors re-mastered by Hype Williams and the entire thing reworked into a cosmic allegory about your childhood directed by you in real time (that really is the best way to describe it). The fact that, despite the glaring discrepancies, my personal experience is largely congruent with that of teenagers in Buffalo boots and candy necklaces doing piles of E as Adam Beyer spins hard Scandinavian techno is testament to just how firmly the technical foundations of dance music in the vinyl era were laid in a culture of drug-based escapism.

And in this regard, vinyl vs. digital debates centered on superior technical specifications get it all wrong. Superior at doing what? Today, dance music operates in a different world. Once a tiny minority in the scene, DJs and producers now make up an ever growing number of its most active participants; theirs is an erudite culture centered around sharing tracks, entire 6+ hour sets, opinions and tastes made possible by the internet. Hence the phenomenon, relatively concurrent with the start of digital media's hegemony in clubs (this is especially true of Slovenia), of guys who go to clubs to listen to sets as if they were at a poetry reading (of which I am one). At the same time, an international culture of cool has taken dance music under its mantle: even the most underground clubs are becoming a central place for neatly-dressed hipster boys to pursue the very secular task of attempting to enter into a Sex-in-the-City type relationship with neatly-dressed hipster girls. I'm neither complaining nor innocent on either count, and these are but a couple examples taken from my own experience of what has become a much more general trend.

The point is simply that this is the world into which digital DJ technology was born. It's not a question of whether a MacBook running Traktor can do what vinyl does. I'm told it can do a lot of things better than vinyl, and I have no grounds or reason (no pun intended) to refute these claims. But it can't deliver a spiritual experience, or capture the bright, powerful colors of the naive visions of youth... because nobody's developing it to do that.

And that's sad in a way the mundane progress of technology, with its inevitable losers, can never be.

 Gone too soon: Larry Levan and Sega Saturn

366 days of yacht rock

Fellow internetarian, recording artist and friend of mine, Patrick Felsenthal, aka Apoc, set up a blog dedicated to one of his passions, yacht rock (the music).

What exactly is yacht rock? Apparently, the term took off thanks to an online video series from 2006. I did not know that. As the term itself has somewhat of a pejorative tinge, you can probably imagine what the show is like. Mallrat's star Jason Lee makes a guest appearance, if that gives you any idea. Chris Rea isn't mentioned, and Giorgio Moroder... well, let's just say that when I read the description of the episode in which he appears on Wikipedia, I shot my best from-not-getting-it-to-being-so-offended-it-that-it-just-got-reeeeally-awkward-in-0.006-milliseconds expression at the monitor. That's a move I learned from Simon, this German exchange student I was friends with in high school... 18 years in the US has forever etched an appreciation for irony in my DNA, so I can't do it right and I'd never actually use it on another human being, but in the hands of a master like Simon it's perhaps the most potent weapon in the fight to keep the Continent irony free.
Although Pat's an American, he's knows the handshake. He's met countless "whoah, are you fucking serious!?!?!"s head on preaching the Gospel of George Michael in that heathen nation. He's so post-irony that if he were a Mortal Kombat character, he'd finish you off with production values. It wouldn't be one of those cutesy friendship finishes either; it'd be bloody as hell and there wouldn't be anything funny or cute or unexpected about it: unslinging the studio reel of "Everything She Wants" from the back of his skull-plated armor, he'd cut your head off with the bass line of the 12" extended mix and you'd be like fuuuuuck, that shit's bad ass. Without even the slightest hint of irony.
The term "yacht rock" started as an internet meme, and it looks like they just kind of ran with it. But now that it's out there, there's a lot of questions that need answering. Judging by the posts to date, Pat looks ready to get down and dirty and tackle the question of what yacht rock and its adjacent genres are. And I can't wait to read it... Drop Aztek is, after all, about pointlessly minute categorization. And if ever there were a musical genre begging to be broken down and classified, it's yacht rock.
According to the Wikipedia article for the abovementioned show, "'yacht rock' is a name used to retrospectively describe the soft rock format that peaked in popularity between the years of 1975 and 1984. In part, the term relates to the stereotype of the yuppie yacht owner, enjoying smooth music while out for a sail." Examples include [it would be pointless for me to list names because you'll be like "I never heard of that song." No, you have, and you probably know large parts of it by heart, you just don't know who sang it or what it's called, so check out the 366 days of yacht rock, where you'll find plenty of videos]. Audiophiles and record collectors in Europe (Germany's Michael Ruetten and Jazzanova, for example) and comments on relevant videos on YouTube refer to something that seems to overlap with yacht rock to a large degree by the acronym AOR, which can either mean Album Oriented Rock or Adult Oriented Rock. Now the first links to the English wikipedia article for Album oriented rock, and the second to the Swedish article of the same name. The definitions differ enormously, with the Swedish entry (which I ran through Google translate, obviously) treating the two AORs as identical and providing a definition of the genre that is almost identical to the definition of yacht rock, except that it allots AOR a slightly broader spectrum that includes hard rock. The English article, on the other hand, defines AOR (here meaning only Album Oriented Rock) as what anyone my age would instinctively call "classic rock", an aspect that plays only a minor part in the Swedish definition (even though the two articles link to each other and are supposed to be about the same thing). Fans on YouTube also refer to AOR as "west coast" (used as a noun), a feature which the Swedish article mentions but which the yacht rock article ignores. Then there's also "marina rock", a cheeky extension of the the term "yacht rock" which would seem to indicate a more working-class version of yacht rock, and would therefore at least partially bridge the gap between the English Wikipedia's definition of AOR and yacht rock. Are yacht rock, the two AORs and "west coast" one and the same thing, or is it like one of those overlapping circle diagrams, the name of which I can't remember right now, with a certain degree of overlap between yacht rock, AOR and "west coast"? If so, how much and which artists get left out of the mix?
I'll definitely follow the 366 days with the aim of being able to answer some of these questions. Oh, and for the music... which is AWESOME!!!!! Frat boy high five!!!! Toto fucking rulez!!!!! [certain content has been removed from this post. Please consult Drop Aztek's irony guidelines for additional information]

Pioneer LaserDisc Turtle wishes you a Happy 2012!!!!!

LaserDisc Turtle, a Pioneer exclusive. Awwww, he's so obscure !!!!!

Pioneer LaserDisc Turtle wishes Drop Aztek readers a Happy 2012!!!!!

He would also like to remind you, in a cute, non-intrusive way, that "that's not how LaserDiscs work". (Note that LaserDisc Turtle was exclusive to Pioneer LaserVision players, as was the brand name "LaserDisc". If you owned a non-Pioneer player, you were watching "LaserVideo discs" and would only get a bland text warning.) You put it in upside down, so it's about as helpless as a turtle (or Bender) on its back. If you're seeing this it's 1980 and the CD has yet to be invented, so it's all good, you're not expected to know that a laser can't read the other side.
In life as well, sometimes the program material is on the other side of the disc. May the warning that you need to get up and change things around be kindly and benign like LaserDisc Turtle (who, considering that LaserDiscs were about as big as 33s, would actually be quite freakish, but that's besides the point), not harsh and condemning like the loud, bucking noise a CD-ROM makes when you put two CDs in at the same time. Which actually happened to a friend. I was there. It was hilarious.

But anyways, Happy 2012!!!!