Not kidding:
I dunno how I feel about eating a canned cheeseburger on my next backpacking trip, but I’ll bet that when you pull it out, it looks nothing like the example cheeseburger on the product page.
Only 3.95 euros, if you’re interested.
Link via Gizmodo, via William Gibson’s blog, who says, “GOT YOUR FUTURE RIGHT HERE”.
So, lately I’ve been listening to a lot of speed garage. Around the time most of this stuff was coming out I was so deep into other musics that I heard speed garage a couple times, decided it was too “hand-baggy” for my tastes and never really listened to it again. Of course, speed garage would go on to mutate into 2-step garage, introducing breaks into the mix, 2-step would turn into grime as the MCs became more prevalent and the music started to shed the house elements, and finally, evolve into the conventions of what we now call “dubstep”.
I love me some dubstep. However, listening to speed garage, man, speed garage was PARTY MUSIC. Dubstep can be party music too of course, but so much of it these days is so damn serious. Speed garage, on the other hand, rarely took itself too seriously, and if it did, it wasn’t speed garage anymore, it was trancey deep house or something. What I really love about speed garage is how it fucks with your expectations. Most of the tunes would give you those gay hands-in-the-air drumlines and divas wailing about this and that and another, and right when you think OK, fuck this shit, all of sudden here comes this BIG-ASS fucking raw distorted bassline to completely contrast with everything else that came before it and make you fucking move that ass. Of course, like everything else, at some point speed garage died and nobody really noticed because they had moved onto other things.
Flash-forward to last year. Dubstep is abso-fucking-lutely huge in the UK, starting to make some big inroads in the states, and even the locals are starting to make dubstep tracks. Of course, with all the hugeness came the adherence to convention, the taking it’s shit too seriously and, like IDM and minimal techno, it fell in love with itself and started to think it didn’t really need to keep pushing the boundaries and/or didn’t need to please the crowd - it became music for music-makers.
I’m not saying that’s what all dubstep producers are doing, but let’s face it, a lot of it sounds exactly the same. Half-time steppers with wobble basslines and the same snare on the same beat of every measure throughout the song with zero variation. I myself dabbled in production like this and while I can see the draw (it’s not rocket science to wrap your head around the formula) it’s just a dead-end, conceptually.
Enter bassline house. As far as descriptive subgenre names go, it’s not bad, it’s pretty accurate in fact - but really, it’s a speed garage revival, and then some. It’s a revival that acknowledges what’s happened to UK bass music in the last 10 years and incorporates a lot of those changes into it’s conventions. A lot of those production tricks you hear with drum n bass and dubstep, that multi-band compression that just makes the basslines tear and burn, is present. However, it also brings in a lot of the quick vocal stutters and a bit of the glitch from IDM, too. Of course, the Roland analog bass drum kicks, hands-in-the-air handclaps and high-hat patterns from house/garage are what underpins it all.
The way I describe it, it sounds like a mess, musically - and it is, a great big fun-as-hell mess. Stripped-down and minimal are not adjectives you’d use with “bassline”. On top of all I’ve described above, it also includes fun/clever/nasty samples, Grimist MC rapid-fire vocal science and even some nods to Miami bass and acid. I’ll be damned though if it doesn’t work, and no doubt about it, this is not headphone music. This is PARTY music. This is music for slappin that ass, smokin that spleef, waving that bottle of champagne in the air. This ain’t delicate, introspective music for being serious, for the chin-stroking artiste with the turtleneck and the parties that use the Helvetica font all over their “modern”-looking flyers. It’s not gonna get it’s own night or even a DJ slot, at Mutek, EVER. It’s a great big mash-up of convergent styles, it’s kinda st00pid, it’s totally ghetto, and I love it.
Let me quote the “lower end spasm” blog:
“…niche bassline house, is the anti-dubstep. Huge banging blines that buzz and wobble like the best of em, but also no reserve on the drums, no holding back, just euphoric breakneck tempo all the way….Give me huge, “dumb” bangers over ponderous meditation music ANYDAY.”
Who knows, maybe it’ll be gone within the year, but for now, it sure is fun to listen to, and a welcome reprieve from all that “serious” music.
Here’s a couple mixes and links to check out:
http://dot-alt.blogspot.com/2007/08/faggatronix-4x4-birthday.html
http://www.i-dj.co.uk/features/featurespage.php?ID=48
http://www.rwdmag.com/articles/6487/About-To-Blow-Bassline.html
http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/009952.html
and of course, smugpolice, which has a shitload of downloadable mixes.
Personally, alot of it rubs me the wrong way at times. I’ll be grooving to a track and then the producer will ruin it with a completely lame vocal sample.
What I really dig about it though, is the promise that it holds. Listening to these mixes, I think, what if, instead of all this wailing diva crap, what if they turned it all darkside and shit? What if somebody started coming out with some serious rootsy dubbed-out productions? It seems like adding those 2 beats back somehow gives you another great big landscape to explore, and like with everything else, all this ghetto/party bassline stuff is just the protoplasmic form from which other, more evolved musical lifeforms will emerge (“dubline house”, “bassline techno” maybe even, yes, “minimal bassline”)
Of course, if that happens, it’s likely to follow in the footsteps of everything else, and evolve so much that it becomes “oedipal” - it takes a moment to pause for self-reflection, falls in love with itself, and never looks back from whence it came. Or maybe it doesn’t happen, who knows. In the meantime, it’s fun party music, its’ fresh, and it’s totally recommended.
(originally posted to the mtn-raves mailing list and edited slightly for clarity)
Nothing really ground-breaking here if you’ve been following this sort of thing for a while, but the presentation packs a punch in it’s succinctness. As with any distillations, some things are kinda brushed over, for instance, the part about the computer’s motherboard only needing to have it’s chip replaced when the rest of it is just fine is a gross oversimplification. It ignores all the supporting technologies needed to realize the speed gains of that newer chip. Also, she might like that she’s still using that ole cathode-ray tube monitor but the fact is, LCDs consume way less power and are healthier for one to use than the old CRTs. Those things aside, she makes a good point. We have a linear production-to-consumption process on a planet with finite resources and an ever-increasing demand for consumer goods. It’s not sustainable.
Personally, rather than throw out those old shoes, broken lamps, broken monitors, old computers and crap into a landfill, I’ve been taking them to CHARM, and while it’s not exactly cheap, it’s way of voluntarily reclaiming the externalization of the price of those things.
Also, when I was growing up I learned to never take anything for granted, and never throw out something useful. I’ve still got an 9-year-old Dell XPS T600+ workstation, running Ubuntu Linux. Despite the fact that it tends to hang when the room temperature gets too high, or when it’s asked to perform a particularly CPU-heavy compile, it still gets the job done. I am a huge advocate of squeezing every last bit of life out of a computer as possible. Before we got the T600+ in 01 (it was originally my work computer when I worked at Active.com, purchased in 99), we were using Missy’s old computer, which she got from her dad, and he had purchased it in 1993, I believe. I had replaced the motherboard and put in an AMD K6+ of course, but the PSU, case, etc. were still all the same.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/01/25/bushplanforiraqwouldbea_first/
“President Bush’s plan to forge a long-term agreement with the Iraqi government that could commit the US military to defending Iraq’s security would be the first time such a sweeping mutual defense compact has been enacted without congressional approval, according to legal specialists.
…
At a House hearing on the pact on Wednesday, Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California and a former Reagan administration official, accused the Bush administration of “arrogance” for not consulting with Congress about the pact. If it includes any guarantees to Iraq, he said, Congress must sign off.
“We are here to fulfill the constitutional role established by the founding fathers,” Rohrabacher said, adding, “It is not all in the hands of the president and his appointees. We play a major role.”
…
“A commitment that the United States will act to assist Iraq, potentially through the use of our armed forces in the event of an attack on Iraq, could effectively commit the nation to engage in hostilities,” Biden wrote. “Such a commitment cannot be made by the executive branch alone under our Constitution.”“
It’s just one thing after another with these guys. It’s not enough to do all the damage they can in the 8 years they hold office. They’re gonna try to force their insane policies on the next (likely Democratic) administration as well.
Ultimately it will go to the courts, and how it ultimately winds up will depend on whether Justice Kennedy sides with the Roberts/Alito/Scalia/Thomas unitary executive theorists or with the Souter/Ginsburg/Stevens/Breyer separation of powers adherents.
Hopefully by the time that the Supreme Court hears this case, Clinton or Obama will be in office and the current unitary executive proponents will be having second thoughts about advancing that power to a Democratic administration.
There’s this article in Time Magazine entitled “Where Are The White House Emails?”
The answer is pretty obvious. They were intentionally destroyed. They were destroyed because they contained information that’s either damaging or embarrassing to the White House. This should be plainly obvious to everyone. For all that talk back in the 90s from the Republicans about the “missing Rose Law Firm billing records”, their silence on this issue is deafening.
I am so sick of being outraged by this administration. It’s just one thing after another. “Ignore it” some might say. If my children’s future wasn’t being so damaged by the decisions that are being made there, maybe I could - but all I see is the most evil, corrupt and incompetent administration in American history. It’s difficult for me to see how people can still justify their votes for Bush.