Procrast-Nation

Having finished a particularly fruitful rereading of Marshall McLuhan’s first published work, The Mechanical Bride, I felt compelled to test out some of the ideas he put forward in this work. For those unfamiliar, the book is a compendium of short one or two page essays based on print advertisements and comic strips from the early 1950s. The essays are acidic, caustic commentaries, and reading even one of them would dispell the absurd notion that McLuhan was heralding some electronic utopia; his notion of the “global village” wasn’t one of utopian togetherness but of the rolling back of individual identity and critical thought/sophistication in the era of mass communications. In order to ‘retribalize’ as McLuhan frequently called it, a certain amount of civilization must be rolled back and diminished. In an age of absolute media saturation such as the one in which we are currently entrenched, full sober awareness of the implications and roots of all cultural products we’re confronted with is simply an impossibility, and isn’t especially appealing-the most comfortable position in the retribalized culture is one of a shared and simplified opinions. We go from cliche to archetype. Art vacillates between two extremes; the art of the extremely personal and almost confessional in nature, which gives us a portrait of the artist, and the art of the purposely depersonalized which instead gives an abstract portrait of its intended audience. It is this latter type of art which I hope to explore here.

So in the spirit of Mechanical Bride, I’m going to try to do a critical dissection of a different piece of mass produced culture from recent times each day for the next month, in hopes of eventually coming to some more full understanding of what America consists of.

For my first mass media art object I chose to observe the music video for the song “OMG” by Usher, video directed by Anthony Mandler. (more…)

In 2003 a rap sensation like none other burst onto the scene, a one man hip hop revolution to eclipse all others, a messiah of rhyme. Y’all might think I’m talkin’ bout when Kanye West dropped The College Dropout, or when 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ hit the streets, but all the insiders knew the real score. There was only one MC with a flow so fresh the opposition wilted in its presence, a persona so big it could eclipse Biggie, and swagger nobody was dumb enough to fuck wit. I’m of course talking about Jin. (more…)

In the heavily trend based and superficial world of pop music, be it ‘indie’ or ‘mainstream’, occasional gems either never rise to the surface, or are quickly buried and forgotten about. Spending the amount of time that I have ambling about in the wasteland of American popular culture like some kind of third world child extracting silicon from imported garbage, you run into a number of these. Here are my top five, with songs embedded where possible. (more…)

Since Patrick Swayze passed on today, I suppose I should give some sort of toast before going into this rant.

So here’s to you, Patrick Swayze, it’s so rare a person is taken from us so young, yet so far past his time. May you rest in peace.

Now onto the issue of the day. Some of you may think you’ve seen the worst music videos ever made. Jan Terri struck terror. You remember Mark Gormley warmly. But you’ve never seen anything quite so specifically and intricately lame as this: (more…)