Video mashup of epic proportions: Kanye West as Tetsuo from Akira featuring Daft Punk=hip hop-Japanimation-Franco-Italo-House-Disco goodness

Kanye West’s new video for “Stronger”

Akira=one of the touchstones of modern sci-fi/animation/Japanimation.

Daft Punk=one of the best modern music groups especially for their Discovery album.

In this video, Kanye West plays the role of Tetsuo from Akira, with Daft Punk playing the role of video surveillance operators, in a hip hop track with a sample from Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.

So that mixes hip hop with 1980s/1990s Japanimation plus French disco/house/italo circa late 1990s/early 2000s. Daft Punk also did their whole animated movie with Leiji Matsumoto of Captain Harlock/Galaxy Express 999/Battleship Yamato/Star Blazers fame.

Mixing a bunch of geek-core stuff–Japanimation, French Italo disco/house–this takes cultural mixing/referencing, sampling to a whole new level–good one, Kanye! Next up: a Just Blaze video featuring Saigon and Transformers???

We need a logo

We’re heading in the right direction. We’ve got some good content -some serious, some frivolous. Good regular posting schedule. A hopefully growing fanbase. Now all we need is a cool logo. I’m getting tired of looking at the boring design at the top of the page.

Mr. Trickle-Down, want to whip something up? Legions of fans, give us some help!

It’s all in the charts

Want to make your dry, academic white paper more sexy?  Add a really sweet chart like the one above (click on the picture to zoom in).

This is taken from an essay called “The Soviet Collapse: Grain and Oil“, and it’s actually pretty damn compelling reading.  I dig the argument, and I’m printing this chart out for my wall.

Link again from the still amazing Marc Andreessen blog.  I know it’s bad etiquette to quote repeatedly from the same source, but he’s probably got the hottest blog going right now.  Jump on the bandwagon! 

“They should have put down the Web 2.0 pipe”

This is a very entertaining story from Business Week about the advantages and dangers of using Web 2.0 marketing techniques.

Link from the new Ogilvy China Digital Watch blog, mostly written by ex-Tang Dynasty guitarist and notable Beijing expat Kaiser Kuo.

Music downloads of the day

For those of you who feel guilty about acquiring new music through dubious channels, there are plenty of very interesting & legal free downloads available these days.  From big names even!

 1-  Since they apparently admire The Dead and and have an ‘open source taping policy’, there are now 20+ Smashing Pumpkins live shows from 1992-2007 available for free download on the Internet Live Music Archive.  The sound quality of the shows I’ve listened to is soso to decent, but definitely raw and energetic.  Despite being a huge MTV band, The Pumpkins put out some amazing, doomy, sludgy rock.

2- The Internet Music Archive is a fantastic resource.  Most of the artists are jam bands, but that’s not always a bad thing.  Check out my favorites:  The Mermen and Acid Mothers Temple.

3-  If you scoff at such commercial crap, get this great hi-fidelity ambient noise album:  Zbigniew Karkowski – Uexkull

Hmm…

“As for the idea that universal education is the way to a meritocratic utopia, that’s pure crap whether it comes from old-style liberals or from neocons like Brooks. It betrays a fallacy of composition. Education may be a great way for an individual to increase his chances of moving up the pyramid, but there are only so many positions at the top of the pyramid. If everybody gets a state-subsidized PhD, guess what? You’ll have the entire population competing for the 15% of jobs at the top of the pyramid (and hence driving down the pay of middle managers and technicians), and the other 85% of the population will include the best-educated burger flippers and bedpan emptiers in the world.”

“There’s a reason the educational differential is so high. The state has been subsidizing the most capital-intensive and skill-intensive forms of production for most of the past century. The purpose has been to deskill labor, reduce blue collar workers’ control over the production process from the shop floor. Such policies have had the additional benefit, from the ruling class POV, of increasing the education “toll” that has to be paid to get into a good job, so that the population will be too busy doing homework and jumping through academic hoops until they’re thirty to focus their anger on the system.

What we really need to be doing is attacking the shape of the pyramid itself.

Posted by: Kevin Carson | February 15, 2007 at 05:36 PM”

http://ehrenreich.blogs.com/barbaras_blog/2006/09/are_you_too_stu.html

Well hopefully the theory and in practice the reality is that with more educated people, the “pie” grows larger–more entrepreneurs and innovators, and more value is added in the workplace in general. But of course, yes, in the short-terms, greater supply of workers in certain fields leads to more competition and can drive down wages…Hmm..

Shellac-Excellent Italian Greyhound

Amazingly, after not caring much at all for any number of the last Shellac albums since At Action Park I find the most recent one to be very worthwhile. Maybe they are refining their more-stripped down-less frenetic sound, or compared to all the other junk out there their current “formula” (or lack of a formula) finally makes more sense to me (and I am getting older). Quite aptly, they have a song entitled “Steady as She Goes”–which could describe any number of aspects of Shellac’s existence.

The Indie-Prog-Analog Synth-Italo-Disco Convergance: The History of Current Underground Music

I was just thinking about this, and haven’t read anything directly addressing it.

Basically, it’s funny because with my interests in music like Lindstrom and Prins Thomas and Todd Terje, I realize it’s sort of like a culmination of several trends that started in the 1990s, in several musical genres–basically, all modern underground music can be traced back to 60s/70s funk, prog rock, and jazz fusion.

Starting out in the 1990s:

Drive Like Jehu, Fucking Champs/Don Caballero=bringing back King Crimson/Mahavishnu Orchestra/Yes/Gentle Giant etc 1970s prog rock with funky drums, exposing indie rockers to the source music with its occasional analog synths and funk-and jazz-derived drums and bass rhythms. Pink Floyd and King Crimson are no longer anathema to your previously anti-70s rock indie kids.

Stereolab & Six Finger Satellite: brining back 1970s jazz fusion and library music with analog synths & disco & prog touches. Pink Floyd and King Crimson are no longer anathema to your previously anti-70s rock indie kids.

Daft Punk & Air: bringing back 1970s Italo disco and jazz fusion and funk and analog synths with prog touches. Pink Floyd and King Crimson are no longer anathema to your previously anti-70s rock indie kids.

Madlib and some Just Blaze: brining back through samples 1970s jazz fusion and library music heavy with analog synths and prog touches. Samples include Supertramp, Styx, Frank Zappa, Jefferson Airplane, and obscure library music, prog, and jazz fusion samples.

Basically it’s turned out that jazz fusion and prog rock summed up everything worthwhile in music; creativity, experimentalism, tempered and purposeful improvisation, willingness to take bits from any musical genres (classical, jazz, funk, disco, metal, etc.)

Lessig to Wage War on Human Nature

Lawrence Lessig is shifting his focus from IP law to…fighting corruption. I too have decided to fight sunlight, gravity, and have declared war on that darned annoyance, the moon. Plus, there’s so much DIRT and DUST in this world…what are we going to do about that!!!???? And then there’s money…and people fighting for money…and politics…and lobbyists…and the charging of interest too–oh what ever shall we do!

Jokes aside, a noble cause of course. How about some Web 2.o applications like Mark Lombardi’s works?

That would be a neat feature for “Government 2.0” sites, Open Congress, etc.

Probably someone is trying that here already; pretty, but somewhat a mess.

Socially useful gambling? Forecasting and futures markets

ECONOMIX; Odds Are, They’ll Know ’08 Winner

You know Google is going to do something like this with all the aggregated information it has from user searches, etc. Think of all the aggregated info they have access to…which is just one reason why some people are worried out at the thought of the DoubleClick purchase etc. The Google cloud…i.e. Skynet!