Tech in Afghanistan

To many, Immortal Technique is the most dangerous type of rapper. Neither a Bill Cosby poster child for American middle class responsibility nor a dripping ice sculpture of disorganised crime and capital accumulation, Tech is a menacing, cosmopolitan humanist. In a world full of either/ors, Immortal Technique is a complex emergency waiting to happen. Imagine the scandal in both middle America and institutionalised rap if the burgeoning slum classes hung images of Tech in Afghanistan outside their windows instead of the rote Biggie / 2Pac-ino banners.

Immortal Technique

Careerism

Akron/Family Instore

Who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch? While not quite Wesley Willis’ Rock ‘n’ Roll McDonalds or Hare Krishna man’s mobile meals, Thursday’s Rough Trade midday in-store featuring drug-smoking freak folkers Akron/Family is as free as Arthur Lee. If you, like me, need clichés to get you through the day, then think of this as the perfect mixture of work and pleasure. Known for their musical polygamy, Akron/Family have something to offer everyone – from Linda in accounting’s secret Pentangle obsession to Steve in shipping’s unknown Thomas Mapfumo fetish. Bring your boss and just maybe the gig will – like UTFO hosting the office Christmas do – bring the freak out in everyone. / Ryan Mahan

Chucky D's First DJ

Dr Hurum also found Predator X

Marketing Genius

If you like baseball, then you'll love ink cartridges.



Let's hope neither Rekall or the Union of African Totalitarians get wind of this.

Who's Voice Shall I Use Today?

The problem with Slavoj Zizek is that despite, or more properly because of, his schizophrenia - his demonstration of a mind perpetually outrunning itself - he is completely inspiring. Ordinarily, I would spend the last hours of my day with some Freudian grand-father figure such as Robert McNamara, David Attenborough, Carl Sagan, or Gandalf, lulling me away from repetition with fantastical tales of the order of all things. Last night, though, I found myself wading through Uncle Slavoj’s untamed lands, transformed into a child inspired by the possibility of such overwhelming novelty.

Normally too, I would assume some abandonment of fidelity in the staging of Tunnel 228, the Kevin Spacey approved art installation tucked behind Waterloo station wherein an agglomeration of inauthentic hacks and hipsters have gathered to stage another empty, hype-ridden simulation.

Yet today in all my giddy nakedness, I see a clever staging of the game of cat and mouse - the organisers setting the parameters in a way that by the time the predators – the media, the guidebookteers, the Time Outs - arrive, the party has moved on.

Though with the passing of the day into the next, I will surely return to my fatalistic experience, a parasite to someone else’s ideological styles.

Authenticity today, lame performance art tomorrow.

Robespierre in America

"had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment."

John Brown

Dirty Rats

"Hipsters are the infiltrators who spoil the resistance—the coolhunting collaborators and spies - the embodiment of postmodernism as a spent force, revealing what happens when pastiche and irony exhaust themselves as aesthetic."

"The problem with hipsters seems to me the way in which they reduce the particularity of anything you might be curious about or invested in into the same dreary common denominator of how “cool” it is perceived to be. Everything becomes just another signifier of personal identity. Thus hipsterism forces on us a sense of the burden of identity, of constantly having to curate it if only to avoid seeming like a hipster."