Monday, 29 February 2016

Friday, 12 February 2016

Mixtape tracklist.

1) Dr. Dre - Still D.R.E Album version (Edited) 0:00 - 0:11. (1999)
2) N.W.A - Straight Outta Compton (1988)
3) Eazy E - Boyz N Tha' Hood (1988)
4) Interlude?
5) The Notorious B.I.G. - Juicy (1994)
6) 2Pac - Ambitionz Az A Ridah (1996)
7) Makaveli - To Live And Die In L.A. 0:00 - 0:20 (1996)
8) 2Pac feat. The Notorious B.I.G. - Runnin' (Dying To Live) (2003)
9) Interlude?
10) Eminem - 313 (1996)
11) Dr. Dre feat. Eminem - Forgot About Dre (1999)
12) Eminem - My Name Is (1999)
13) Snoop Dogg - Drop It Like It's Hot (2004)







Ideas for cover:

Silhouettes with signatures above.
Artists (B&W if deceased).



Thursday, 11 February 2016

Postmodern theory. (Music)

According to Kramer (Kramer 2002, 16–17), postmodern music:
  1. is not simply a repudiation of modernism or its continuation, but has aspects of both a break and an extension
  2. is, on some level and in some way, ironic
  3. does not respect boundaries between sonorities and procedures of the past and of the present
  4. challenges barriers between 'high' and 'low' styles
  5. shows disdain for the often unquestioned value of structural unity
  6. questions the mutual exclusivity of elitist and populist values
  7. avoids totalizing forms (e.g., does not want entire pieces to be tonal or serial or cast in a prescribed formal mold)
  8. considers music not as autonomous but as relevant to cultural, social, and political contexts
  9. includes quotations of or references to music of many traditions and cultures
  10. considers technology not only as a way to preserve and transmit music but also as deeply implicated in the production and essence of music
  11. embraces contradictions
  12. distrusts binary oppositions
  13. includes fragmentations and discontinuities
  14. encompasses pluralism and eclecticism
  15. presents multiple meanings and multiple temporalities
  16. locates meaning and even structure in listeners, more than in scores, performances, or composers

Wednesday, 10 February 2016

Death Of Uncool - Shuffle Mix.

Guilty Conscience - Eminem feat. Dr. Dre // Hip-Hop

Business - Eminem // Hip-Hop

Up Like Trump - Rae Sremmurd // Hip-Hop

Criminal - Eminem // Hip-Hop

Sunny Day - Akon // Contemporary R&B

Objects in the Mirror - Mac Miller // Hip-Hop

Against The Grain - Akon // Contemporary R&B

Rooftops - lostprophets // Nu Metal

Rocket Queen - Guns N' Roses // Hard Rock

Legend - Drake // Hip-Hop

Doggy Dogg World - Snoop Dogg // Hip-Hop

Obviously - McFly // Pop Rock

Jungle - Professor Green feat. Maverick Sabre // Hip-Hop X Grime

Sherane a.k.a Master Splinter's Daughter - Kendrick Lamar // Hip-Hop

So Long, Jimmy - James Blunt // Folk X Pop Rock

She Loves You - McFly // Pop Rock

Rock Bottom - Eminem // Hip-Hop

Mockingbird - Eminem // Hip-Hop

clouds - Kasabian // Indie Rock

Paradise City - Guns N' Roses // Hard Rock





Monday, 8 February 2016

Postmodernism in relation to music - Eminem.

Eminem

Homage:
Does your chosen artist use other artists music in a respectful manner?
Are they bringing a potentially forgotten or overlooked style to a new audience?

My Name Is (1998) directly samples Labi Siffre's 'I Got The...' (1975)
This utilised a sample of music from an original soul/funk song and incorporated it into a parodic hip-hop track.

In response to Eminem using other artists music in a respectful manner I would say he shows a variety depending on what song he uses the samples in. The sample of Labi Siffre is used in a respectful way and shows how one beat can be used in two very different songs, I believe Dr Dre's role as producer should be respected as he saw the potential in a song that is very different to that of his and Eminem's intentions with My Name Is. 

Parody:
Marshall Mathers (2000) samples Lyte Funkie One's 'Summer Girls' (1999)
Eminem takes one line from Summer Girls and changes the following lyrics to disrespect boy band New Kids On The Block, he also suggests they are homosexual by saying 'I cant wait til i catch you faggots in public'. 

LFO
New Kids On The block,had a bunch of hits
Chinese food makes me sick.

And I think it's fly when girls stop by for the summer,for the summer
Eminem
New kids on the block sucked a lot of dick
Boy/girl groups make me sick
And I can't wait 'til I catch all you faggots in public
I'ma love it.. (hahaha)


Eminem uses the chorus from Summer Girls and changes the lyrics/context of the words to show a lot of disrespect for boy band New Kids On The Block, he references Lyte Funkie One's to have a dig at the sexuality of the band members. Many believed and still do believe Eminem is a homophobe and therefore releasing lyrics like this didn't help his case that he wasn't.  

Bricolage:
Like Toy Soldiers (2004) directly samples Martika's 'Toy Soldiers' (1988)
Eminem produced this and sampled a rock/pop song into a belligerent yet conscious hip-hop track. 
The sample of Martika's 'Toy Soldiers' used in 'Like Toy Soldiers' is taken from one genre of music and applied to a very different one, the original intentions of the song are changed by Eminem who applies the lyrics to a current affair in his life. 


Intertextual References:

Simulacrum:
Consumption:
Creation:
Performance:
Influence:

Thursday, 4 February 2016

Lesson Eight. (Music)

Brian Eno — 25th November 2009

It’s odd to think back on the time—not so long ago—when there were distinct stylistic trends, such as “this season’s colour” or “abstract expressionism” or “psychedelic music.” It seems we don’t think like that any more. There are just too many styles around, and they keep mutating too fast to assume that kind of dominance.

As an example, go into a record shop and look at the dividers used to separate music into different categories. There used to be about a dozen: rock, jazz, ethnic, and so on. Now there are almost as many dividers as there are records, and they keep proliferating. The category I had a hand in starting—ambient music—has split into a host of subcategories called things like “black ambient,” “ambient dub,” “ambient industrial,” “organic ambient” and 20 others last time I looked. A similar bifurcation has been happening in every other living musical genre (except for “classical” which remains, so far, simply “classical”), and it’s going on in painting, sculpture, cinema and dance.

We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

I think this is good news. As people become increasingly comfortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of sources—cherry-picking whatever makes sense to them—it becomes more natural to do the same thing with their social, political and other cultural ideas. The sharing of art is a precursor to the sharing of other human experiences, for what is pleasurable in art becomes thinkable in life.





Wednesday, 3 February 2016

How can Django Unchained be seen as a postmodern film?

How can Django Unchained be viewed as a postmodern film?

Postmodern texts deliberately play with meaning. They are designed to be read by a literate audience and will exhibit many traits of intertextuality. Postmodernism represents a departure from modernism and is characterised by the self-conscious use of earlier styles and conventions, it mixes different artistic styles and media, and a general distrust of theories. 

Django Unchained is a 2012 film directed by Quentin Tarantino which focuses on a bizarre partnership of a German bounty hunter and an African/American slave. They come together in a pursuit to save Django's slave wife from the sadistic slaver, Calvin Candy.  The film combines the genres 'spaghetti western' (a low budget western which is filmed in Italy, it features an anti-hero and is referred to as 'spaghetti' due to it's Italian filming), 'western' (a film set in the wild west, cowboys are frequent and the 'hero' is a lone white ranger)  and 'Blaxploitation' (a film that casts black actors in stereotypical roles of the black community). This collaboration of genres points towards the idea that it is a 'mash up' of three diverse themes that come together to make a relatively disparate postmodern film.

The title of the film makes reference to the 1959 Italian fantasy film 'Hercules Unchained', Tarantino also took the concept of the character from the 1966 western 'Django'. Therefore using these two titles he created the title of the film ' Django Unchained'.  The film is frequently self referential, known as 'meta' in media terms, which is a frequent theme in post modern films. In the 1966 film 'Django', Franco Nero plays the lead role as a white cowboy in the wild west named Django. Tarantino's 'Django Unchained' features Nero in the scene where Candie is watching two slaves fighting to the death (Mandingo fighting), this scene is iconic as it shows the original Django coming face to face with the new. Jamie Foxx is at the bar with Franco Nero and responds to his name being asked by saying "Django, the D's silent" in which Franco Nero replies "I know". This scene shows an example of the film referring to itself as it has the two characters of Django meet, Tarantino was very clever to include Nero in the cast as it gives his film nostalgic value for anyone who watched the original 'Django' when it was released. Throughout the film different styles of acting are portrayed through the different actors, for example Steven (Samuel L. Jackson) acts very differently to the likes of Django (Jamie Foxx) and Schulz (Christoph Waltz) and this not just down to the fact that they are playing different characters. Steven adds to the comedy side of the film and creates humour through his acting whereas Django and Schulz act in a different manner and are never laughed at, the audience laugh with them. When Steven gets shot in the kneecaps at the end of the film the audience laugh due to his excessive swearing and use of the word 'Nigga', this a postmodern element as humans shouldn't laugh at other humans in pain however Tarantino makes it funny through the parodic nature of acting by Samuel L. Jackson. The film features a soundtrack which has no music of the time period that it is set, the soundtrack features hip-hop which is a genre of music that didn't come about until the 1970s, therefore creating another postmodern element to the film.


Frederic Jameson is an American critic and theorist who has a very strong view on postmodernism, he believes postmodernism is vacuous and trapped in circular references, he also believes that postmodern texts are nothing more than self referential jokes which have no deeper meaning or purpose. For Jameson, literary and cultural output is more purposeful than this and he therefore remains a modernist in a world increasingly dominated by postmodern culture. I think postmodernism will continue to do what it has been doing by rejecting grand narratives and making references to films that are related and ones that are not.

Pomo Q Structure.

Structure of Q.

Define Postmodernism.
Introduce your text. What is it? Why is it? - Intertextual references: Homage, Pastiche, Parody and Bricolage.
Criticisms of POMO. (Not a film, historical deafness, high and low culture)
High culture - Opera/Drama (Shakespeare).
Low - Popular culture.
Predict the future of POMO.
Sincere acknowledgement of previous texts. (Imitation of... Makes fun of... Collage/Mash up)

Lesson Seven. (Django Q)

Structure of Q.

Define Postmodernism.
Introduce your text. What is it? Why is it? - Intertextual references: Homage, Pastiche, Parody and Bricolage.
Criticisms of POMO. (Not a film, historical deafness, high and low culture)
High culture - Opera/Drama (Shakespeare).
Low - Popular culture.
Predict the future of POMO.
Sincere acknowledgement of previous texts. (Imitation of... Makes fun of... Collage/Mash up)

How can Django Unchained be viewed as a postmodern film?

Postmodern texts deliberately play with meaning. They are designed to be read by a literate audience and will exhibit many traits of intertextuality. Postmodernism represents a departure from modernism and is characterised by the self-conscious use of earlier styles and conventions, it mixes different artistic styles and media, and a general distrust of theories. 

Django Unchained is a 2012 film directed by Quentin Tarantino which focuses on a bizarre partnership of a German bounty hunter and an African/American slave. They come together in a pursuit to save Django's slave wife from the sadistic slaver, Calvin Candy.  The film combines the genres 'spaghetti western' (a low budget western which is filmed in Italy, it features an anti-hero and is referred to as 'spaghetti' due to it's Italian filming), 'western' (a film set in the wild west, cowboys are frequent and the 'hero' is a lone white ranger)  and 'Blaxploitation' (a film that casts black actors in stereotypical roles of the black community). This collaboration of genres points towards the idea that it is a 'mash up' of three diverse themes that come together to make a relatively disparate postmodern film.

The title of the film makes reference to the 1959 Italian fantasy film 'Hercules Unchained', Tarantino also took the concept of the character from the 1966 western 'Django'. Therefore using these two titles he created the title of the film ' Django Unchained'.  The film is frequently self referential, known as 'meta' in media terms, which is a frequent theme in post modern films. In the 1966 film 'Django', Franco Nero plays the lead role as a white cowboy in the wild west named Django. Tarantino's 'Django Unchained' features Nero in the scene where Candie is watching two slaves fighting to the death (Mandingo fighting), this scene is iconic as it shows the original Django coming face to face with the new. Jamie Foxx is at the bar with Franco Nero and responds to his name being asked by saying "Django, the D's silent" in which Franco Nero replies "I know". This scene shows an example of the film referring to itself as it has the two characters of Django meet, Tarantino was very clever to include Nero in the cast as it gives his film nostalgic value for anyone who watched the original 'Django' when it was released. Throughout the film different styles of acting are portrayed through the different actors, for example Steven (Samuel L. Jackson) acts very differently to the likes of Django (Jamie Foxx) and Schulz (Christoph Waltz) and this not just down to the fact that they are playing different characters. Steven adds to the comedy side of the film and creates humour through his acting whereas Django and Schulz act in a different manner and are never laughed at, the audience laugh with them. When Steven gets shot in the kneecaps at the end of the film the audience laugh due to his excessive swearing and use of the word 'Nigga', this a postmodern element as humans shouldn't laugh at other humans in pain however Tarantino makes it funny through the parodic nature of acting by Samuel L. Jackson. The film features a soundtrack which has no music of the time period that it is set, the soundtrack features hip-hop which is a genre of music that didn't come about until the 1970s, therefore creating another postmodern element to the film.


Frederic Jameson is an American critic and theorist who has a very strong view on postmodernism, he believes postmodernism is vacuous and trapped in circular references, he also believes that postmodern texts are nothing more than self referential jokes which have no deeper meaning or purpose. For Jameson, literary and cultural output is more purposeful than this and he therefore remains a modernist in a world increasingly dominated by postmodern culture. I think postmodernism will continue to do what it has been doing by rejecting grand narratives and making references to films that are related and ones that are not.

















Monday, 1 February 2016

Lesson Six. (Django)

POMO

Jameson sees postmodernism as vacuous and trapped in circular references.
Nothing more than a series of self referential 'jokes' which have no deeper meaning or purpose. (Ironically postmodernists don't disagree but use his criticism as their purpose).
For Jameson, literary and cultural output is more purposeful than this and he therefore remains a modernist in a world increasingly dominated by postmodern culture.



Django Unchained

This film is postmodern because...
- Costume
The blue suit that Django wears (The blue boy by Gainsborough) 
Django's green jacket and cowboy hat (Little Joe from Bonanza)
- Setting
Western film, not actually set in the west.
Scenes set in snow, western's are associated with desert.
No Cowboys.
- Spaghetti Western
Italian made (International cast)
-Hero's
African-American man (Unusual)
German man (Unusual)
Together they make a very strange collaboration of friends who become hero's.
-References to the other films
The big silence
The Searchers
Birth of a nation
Django
-Soundtrack/Music
The music doesn't fit, no music of the era (1859).
Mash up of different music makes the whole soundtrack.
-Parodies
Race element.
Acting (Stephen and other black characters)
Acting is purposely OTT and exaggerated. 
Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz act 'normally.'

Jamie Foxx is at the bar with Franco Nero, he says "Django, the D's silent" and Nero says "I know" because he is the original Django.

The whole film is a mash up 
- Western
- Southern melodrama
- Revenge movie
- References other Quentin Tarantino films.

The N word is used a lot as well as 'Motherfucker'. 
Spike Lee tweeted about the film being racially insensitive, slavery isn't taken seriously. 

Who's the hero?

Criticism 
Vacuous
Circular references (Keeps referring to itself)
Self referential jokes.