I do declare I have discovered the most 80s thing in existence. This appears to be the high water mark for eightiesness. The one moment in which every 80s cliché invented is rolled together into one giant, non ironic monstrosity, after which the wave broke and stage was set for grunge and acid house to burn down the party. Essentially what you are about to see looks like a world where a Cyndi Lauper / Madonna clone and Billy Idol spend their time driving a slightly lame car through a dry ice laced cocaine factory. It’s an MTV advert for the Plymouth Duster, a car that was actually pretty cool in the early 70s, but by 1985 couldn’t be saved by a desperate attempt to surround it with every single signifier of youth cool the guys at the ad agency could rustle up. Brace yourself.
I guess from the youtube views this isn’t exactly new, but its a nice inversion of all the normal rap stereotypes!
It’s a well known fact that the music industry is in crisis at the moment. But there have been a number of developments recently that are getting really scary, and are starting to mean that the grassroots artists who make that “new music” we all want to hear, are becoming unable to make and distribute music any more. Read more
Cam and I had an interesting email conversation this week concerning the commercial use of music analysis software to identify potential hits etc. I’d thought I’d post it here as a discussion point. What you YOU think?
— CAMERON WROTE TO HAL
I got signed up to the beta of a service the other day that’s like
Pandora on Steroids ( http://www.uplaya.com/ ). Rather than use
musicologists they’ve got some boffins to devise a set of dynamic
algorhythms which analyse music and put it into all sorts of categories
and find ways of linking stuff together.
Anyhow, as they have some smart artist pages I was wondering about
getting
all our Young Punx tracks into this, and also put them through their “Hit Song
Science” machine (http://www.hitsongscience.com/) to
let us know which songs they think have the highest potential of
being hits, and also analyse which bands we “sound like”.
If you could upload tracks and artwork somewhere, I’ll send him the
link and get them ingested etc.
Obviously the whole idea of a world where computers predict hits is
rather dystopian, but might be interesting to see if there are any
“hidden gems” in our back catalogue / coming up.
— HAL REPLIED TO CAMERON
God, these programs are the work of satan.
They are the one thing that could send the entire music industry to
its grave
A computer can accurately tell you that your song sounds like many
successful songs in the past, i.e. is not original.
Well Nathan and I have just got back from filming 3 hours of TV for dance video channel Flaunt. We got to present 30 of our favorite dance music videos as part of thewhiteisland.com’s takeover TV show, and greatly enjoyed acting like fools on camera. We also found out some interesting stuff about the strange symbol that was drawn on the inside of my bowler hat when it was returned to me by a weird little guy in Privilege Ibiza after being stolen. Apparently is has something to do with the disappearance of archaeologist Elisabeth Perl, but it’s all very confusing.
We took a picture of the symbol on the hat but it didn’t really come out on the camera phone. Check it out on the TV show if you can help us know what it means!
For music, mayhem and Ibiza mystery, check out The Young Punx presenting on Flaunt TV (UK) on Friday 5th September from 9pm to Midnight!
I have decided that Coke Floats are under-rated. Outside of USA diners they are pretty much extinct, a relic of a more innocent age of chrome finned Cadillacs and Wurlitzer Juke Boxes. My Coke Float epiphany came last week sitting in the mid afternoon sun in Kasbah, next to Kanya, Ibiza. Amidst the wanton debauchery of the Ibiza experience, the coke float seemed delightfully apposite and opposite. An echo of the teen experience of a less commercialized, less corrupted time, when rock and roll was new and everything was fresh and exciting. I’m sure that time never really existed, but whatever of that spirit was real, lives on in a Coke Float.
It’s half refreshment, half desert. It keeps you cool in the sun. It makes you feel fresh and new again.
What’s not to like.
