I think that politics has always been susceptible to conversion so that it’s not actually about living people it’s about signaling membership within a particular community.
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I use my body, as a lot of people do that work in public, as a kind object of commerce, frankly. When I go out and do a gig, somebody has to pay for the presence. And that’s a certain gig. When you’re still pushing a hype like that, you lack cultural weight until you get to the end of that story where everybody knows you really don’t have to anymore except for an interior reason.
I think it’s deeply important that we add a working knowledge of business and business models to what it means to be web-literate. The sites that we use, there’s big money behind them, and there’s even bigger profit motives in front of them. We need to be able to think critically about where we build our communities, about what they’re doing with our data, and about when—not if—they monetize us.
So, why am I doing this? Rip it Up is such a rich resource, especially in the early years. Nothing else was really documenting pop culture, let alone the nascent alternative culture that was starting to boil up. The prevailing attitude in the mainstream media of the day seemed to be that pop music was kid’s stuff.
I think if there are people who are able to take a step backwards, take that proverbial zoom out, and realize that everybody’s kind of doing the same thing in different ways, and be able to step from one perspective to the other and ask different kinds of questions based on where they are at any given moment time, then it just becomes a game. I think it becomes joyful and engaging. I mean, I’m not interested in finding the answer to anything. I don’t think there is the answer to anything.
I’m going to take you through a project that I started back home in Kenya that aims to collect vinyl that people just have chilling around at home. Basically we used to have the only pressing plant in East Africa between 1976 and 1990, and we used to press about a hundred and thirty thousand LPs every year. But right now there are lots of people who have those, but they’re not doing anything with them.
Rammellzee […] considered graffiti as viruses. And what he liked to do was to connect his production to military language. He was saying that the graffiti artists were in a kind of symbolic campaign against the standardization of the alphabet.
I decided to go ahead and apply sound to the workshop. What kind of sounds can the workshop make? What kind of sounds can the workshop edit?