Tom Insam’s Neighborhood

Since last week I was wittering on about Pharcyde and how they paved the way for 'alternative' hip hop bands and how the success of the Wu Tang Clan and RZA's spinoff project Gravediggaz tinged their second album in a darker, more mellow way.

Which gives me a couple of thematic outs - I could go with either Wu Tang Clan or Gravediggaz but, since I don't really have time to delve into the entire mythos of The 'Clan and the only video of my favourite Gravediggaz track on You Tube is a static video with a the Album art I'm going to skew slightly left field and go with an old Holiday standard

When "Bizarre Ride II the Phardcyde" came out in '92 it was during the height of the East Coast vs West Coast Gangsta rap era so the lusher jazz stylings were a palate cleansing sorbet in the middle of a rich meal of guns, bitches and bling.

Along with artists like Oakland's own Del Tha Funkee Homosapien it paved the way for other "alternative" rap groups like Jurassic 5.

The second album "Labcabincalifornia" was generally a more mellow and sombre affair with themes of dealing with fame, drugs and failed relationships. Released 3 years after "Bizarre Ride ..." the interim period had seen the rise of the darker tinged Wu Tang Clan and RZA's spin off project, the horrorcore Gravediggaz.

The first single off "Labcabin..." was the chopped, ethereal "Drop" which looped a sample of Ad Rock from the Beastie Boy's "The New Style" and  gives the Spike Jonze directed reverse-filmed  video (featuring a cameo from the Beastie Boys) a oddly surrealistic quality.

Inspired by this feature at Pictory ...

The first place I ever really got culture shock was Australia.

The odd thing was that I, even at that age, I'd travelled a fair amount before - going all over Europe, Morocco, Cuba, swathes of South East Asia. Not only that but it wasn't the first time I'd I'd been there either - I'd worked and travelled there for several months a few years before.

However I'd just spent 2 months in Palo Alto working probably 80 hour weeks and then flown into London on Monday and then left bound for Oz with my then girlfriend on the Wednesday at 5am.

About 3 days later I was still nauseous with jet lag and still utterly exhausted. We went into Brisbane and kept bumping into people she knew and suddenly, standing in the town center I felt a weird almost vertigo-like sensation and it dawned on me that I was experiencing acute and pronounced culture shock.

Looking back I think it's because everything was nearly the same as the UK but just very slightly different - like a weird, real life application of The Uncanny Valley. In the William GIbson novel "Pattern Recognition" the protagonist continuously refers to this phenomenon as 'The Mirror World'

"The plugs on appliances are huge, triple-pronged, for a species of current that only powers electric chairs, in America. Cars are reversed, left to right, inside; telephone handsets have a different weight, a different balance; the covers of paperbacks look like Australian money."

For a while I kind of had a slight feeling of how people with Capgras Syndrome - the bizarre condition in which a sufferer holds a delusional belief that a friend, spouse, parent or other close family member, has been replaced by an identical-looking impostor - might feel. That uneasy feeling of certainty that, even though everything looks normal, something is terribly, terribly wrong.

It passed and, since then, I've had only the faintest echoes of that sensation. Occasionally I miss it - it wasn't entirely unpleasant and, without it, I fret that I'm somehow taking it all for granted.

So I keep travelling to prove myself wrong.   

I really don't get the content industry sometimes. I mean, I do - insomuch that occasionally I can flip my perspective and sort of see things from their world view in which they live in a world in which they don't really understand why the things that work for them actually work and thus they fear change no matter how illogical some of their arguments are.

As a case in point - music videos on YouTube. Music videos are adverts. Sure, ever since "Thriller" there's been the chance that you can monetise these adverts in non standard ways but still, they're adverts. The raison d'etre of adverts is to be seen by as many people as possible yet the idea that people might virally pass around music videos appears to scare the living bejesus out of the Recording Industry who, perversely, also spend millions trying to promote viral content.

Despite these self evident contradictions - and in the face of persistent and compelling evidence that new technology that aids distribution only helps content producers and that, perversely, those who "pirate" more music are also overwhelmingly more likely to both spend more money on legitimate content and eulogise, proselytize and generally act like authentic but unpaid brand ambassdors - there seems to be this gnawing pain amongst these people that someone, somewhere might be not be paying them money.

This manifests itself in the archives of the 100+ 90s Music Monday posts I've done being littered with "This content is no longer available" and "Embedding is disabled by request". Let's face it - these incoherent ramblings, as sad and nerdy as they are, basically represent one long unrequited love letter to an industry which appears to hate me. It's a sonnet composed to an abusive relationship.

I was pleasantly surprised  recently to find that "Night Swimming" by REM had a video. It seemed like a somewhat unlikely choice for a single and, despite it being my favourite song off "Automatic for the People" I don't remember seeing the video in my youth. Sure it's the drowsiest of all the songs on a well crafted yet somewhat morbidly soporific album - made in the period where REM had soaked up all their angst and anger using copious wads of thousand dollar bills. By all accounts it was supposed to be a much harder rocking album but the direction was changed early on - perhaps the mega success of the acoustic influenced "Out Of Time" made boat rocking an unappealing prospect.

Anyway - the video is available here on 'remhq' on You Tube. You'll have to click through because apparently the thought that the consumer might not be able to be corralled into a tightly controlled media 'experience' is an anathema.

Instead you get "Everybody Hurts" - a song which I felt like I ought to like but which for some reason rubbed me up the wrong way, like it had been genetically engineered in lab and focussed grouped to death in order to be just emo enough. One more pinch of soaring strings, the video of cinematically compelling 'ordinary people' all with their own little burden in life, the crescendo of everyone getting out of their cars to be free of ... something, that slightly too pat fake Newscast at the end for just the right sprinkling of verité ...

I struggled getting started writing this week's 90MM because I don't actually have the vocabulary to describe The KLF.

I started off trying to write something comparing them to that scene in [insert name of practically any teen movie here] in which the cool kids are pretending to agree with the uncool kid but actually they're just taking the piss out of them - but that didn't quite work.

Then, worrying that I was revealing a bit too much of my not-so-secret enjoyment of trashy teen movies, I thought about Marcel Duchamps and his dubbing of a urinal 'art'  and what it meant when one of the leading lights of art starts, if not rejecting the concepts but at least examining the more self-evident absurdities.

Then I started off on a tract about style-vs-fashion and how some people are able to make whatever they do look good no matter what.

What it comes down to though is that Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty in their incarnations as The KLF, The Kopyright Liberation Front/Kings of the Low Frequencies, The Jams, the Justified Ancients of Mummu, The Timelords, The K Foundation, One World Orchestra, 2K etc etc managed to simultaneously mock the whole music and art industry whilst also changing the entire face of the industry and putting out storming, anthemic tracks like this