DNQ

Into the future.

[nyc-subway]

Coney Island Subway Station

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DNQ

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Bumpy’s Lament

Isaac Hayes created the score for the Blaxploitation movie SHAFT. There is a tough gangster character named Bumpy Jonas whose daughter was kidnapped, and the organ and strings-heavy “Bumpy’s Lament” shows his somber state of mind. It should be noted that Jonas is based on a real life gangster Bumpy Johnson, so we’re already knee deep in the sample/interpolation/cover version game before we even get started.

The soundtrack wins a Grammy, “Theme from Shaft” wins an Oscar, so it’s a big deal. So big in fact, an American-based record label that distributes music in the UK records an entire low-budget cover album of the soundtrack. The cover version of “Bumpy’s Lament” uses a guitar in place of the organ and replaces the strings with a xylophone and a barely-there organ, giving the arrangement an entirely different feel.

Also notice the bootleg nature of the cover of this, um, cover album. I should note that “Soul Mann” is an alias of Sy Mann, a Jewish-American musical arranger and bandleader whose photo was definitely not used in the artwork.

OK, now let’s get out of the 70s and into 90s Hip-Hop. While Isaac Hayes’ version was first interpolated/replayed on “If We Make Love Tonight” by Phoenix’s own Adina Howard in 1995, it was Mobb Deep’s “Back at You” that features the only direct sample of either 70s song in this entire story.

You may be interested in knowing that this is a soundtrack song as well, from 1996′s SUNSET PARK, and should not be confused with an entirely unrelated song, “Right Back at You”, from the Mobb’s 1995 debut LP.

We have now ended the Isaac Hayes portion of the proceedings. From here forward, all the songs use the “Soul Mann” version as their source, so we are talking interpolations of a cover from here on out.

In the fall of 1999, Dr. Dre released 2001. Wow, this is confusing. The album track “XXXplosive” is probably the most well-known song out of this bunch.

Dre is good for replaying songs instead of using direct samples, and it really works for this song. By isolating the guitar, he was able to move the xylo sound to the hook and sub-hooks throughout the song. The organ and strings of the original songs become high-pitched g-funk sound effects.

The next year, Erykah Badu released “Bag Lady” as a single. The “Cheeba Sac Radio Edit” was the world’s introduction to the song, used both on radio and the video for the song.

Two months after the single dropped, Badu’s album Mama’s Gun was released, and “Bag Lady” was track 12. And of course, it wasn’t the version that had been all over the airwaves. No, that version wasn’t even a bonus track because MP3s hadn’t yet cratered the record industry and the labels could still do that bullshit, and because fuck you, that is why. It’s an interesting take on the song that plays the guitar melody on an organ, but in such a way it sounds just like the guitar line (seriously, watch this live performance, it’s a keyboard). The song also eschews the thunderous kick of the “Cheeba Sac” version, utilizing more organic percussion and focusing on the bass groove which we have haven’t had a chance to talk about yet, but really is delectable.

OK, let’s finish big. So far we have a song on a 70s soundtrack that inspires an entire cover album, then the first song is interpolated and sampled by two 90s songs, with the bootleg cover version being replayed for a gangsta classic and female empowerment anthem at the turn of the millenium.

What if I were to tell you that in 2009, Beyonce’s sister established herself as a serious solo artist by covering an indie rock band’s song, but replaced all the instrumentation with yet another replaying of the “Soul Mann” cover that hews closely to the Badu “Cheeba Sac” single, even re-arranging the indie rock song’s lyrics to emulate Badu’s vocal performance? Yeah, she did that shit.

Oh, I was going to embed the Solange song, but you’ll have to click the link, because apparently tumblr has a 5-video embed limit per post. Which is fine, because I’m exhausted and done anyway. Oh yeah, here’s one last bit of trivia- You may recognize the indie rock band song because Solange’s brother-in-law executive produced the NBA 2k13 soundtrack, featuring “Stillness is the Move”. Everything is connected.

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Future

The future is your personalized algorithm, modeled after your mind. It should be secure, owned by you, and live forever.

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Dude tore down Cobra not too long ago this should be good.

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Google

Got me my first real career-path job, which was also my last. The simple interview question regarded my preferred search method, and while describing my style of cross-referencing Google results against Yahoo and Webcrawler results in a series of searches winnowing down my results, the interview seemed impressed, but told me I could have just stopped at “Google.”

In the years since, Goog’s been my primary WWW search engine, and while it still excels at returning specific results, thanks in no small part to some behind-the scenes algorithmic work to customize results based on my location, history, and possibly a profile of my previous seraches, something;s been troubling me lately.

It’s not perfect.

Taken to a paranoid extreme, I can envision big G holding back its ability to list out not only relevant results, but to order them in a sensical manner, even more custom-made to my needs, dumbed-down in order to stave off intimidation over its capabilities.

In reality, or the level of reality I can function in, I have to cede that as powerful as their tech is, they are simply unable to deliver a robust set of results at this time based on the information they have about me in my user profile.

I really and truly believe the next step in this process is the creation of a user-side solution that gives me full reign and access over the data being generated by my actions across multiple digital platforms. This would create a superuser profile of increasingly granular replication of my actual interests and thoughts. They key would be the balance between individual ownership and corporate access to this information.

It would be overly optimistic to believe that this information could be entirely secure, or that individual firms would have the impetus to allow me full access to their services simply in exchange for parceled out user data and demographics for use in their own ad-serving work.

The end goal, however, would be an independent exchange of data, especially in the form of commercial content, financed by microtransactions. Commercial content could be paid for directly from an online wallet and traditional funds, but also alternative bitcoin-type and credit-based currency obtained via the release of valuable user information.

This would need to be controlled quite exactly by the user’s desire for certain types of information to be released, with that amount increased or decreased at their will.

We envision a secure, explorable database of information that eventually the user can use to know their own actions, want, and needs better than any corporate or governmental agency, eventually to be AI-assisted with the goal of serving as an ethical digital extension of the self. The goal would be to streamline information distribution and revolutionize the P2P exchange of commercial content in both directions, a major shift to the world of advertising and marketing.

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It’s Mathematics.

ZEROONE.

01

Zero is nothing, it is off, but it is infinite. One is on, it is limited.

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It’s clear that the broken system is ad-driven media on the internet,” Williams wrote. “It simply doesn’t serve people. In fact, it’s not designed to.

Ev Williams

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Storytelling

I’m no good at math, so I have to rely on language and story to make sense of this world. I also like to think that most people do, whether consciously or unconsciously, so 🔗 will focus on that.

I’m also a westerner, my entire thought process heavily influenced by the stories in film, music, and written literature that slavishly follow the monomyth as identified by Joseph Campbell. While Campbell was making a concerted effort to find commonalities between the world’s mythologies, he was doing so through a Western and very human lens. 

It’s my contention that that cyclical structure of birth, life, and death has been interrupted by a new kind of thought, that of corporate entities and non-human intelligences. Of course, we’ll tend to program these entities with our own thought patterns, but the likelihood that an intelligence without fear of its own mortality and a better way of thinking about death or avoiding it entirely will have a distinct advantage over organisms in very short order.

Our first and final feature-length effort, YANKI, will explore the power of western imagination and push its limitations. Our secondary efforts, 24 Hours 2 Live will make an effort to lay bare the common and soon to be outdated monomyth, while Dead HomieZ will be an ode to the infinite non-existence that counters our material lives.

It’s our hope to be part of a dialogue about the nature of humanity itself, hell-bent on destroying itself at a point in our existence that bears all the markings of mythological end-times and the possibility of a better beginning for those who will inherit the Earth.

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My Story

Mystery.

[utopiaville]

The Blockchain is the new Google

At its core, the blockchain is a technology that permanently records transactions in a way that cannot be later erased but can only be sequentially updated, in essence keeping a never-ending historical trail. This seemingly simple functional description has gargantuan implications. It is making us rethink the old ways of creating transactions, storing data, and moving assets, and that’s only the beginning.

Read More: https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/11/the-blockchain-is-the-new-google/

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Hyperstition

🔗 is definitely in the realm of hyperstition. Any business that is not weaving narrative fiction that hews close enough to today’s reality to survive, while building a future for itself, is already dead.

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Reminder

Snapchat's pre-IPO valuation is hovering around $25B. Their browser doesn't allow users to enter URLs, only to navigate via links. 🤔

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Seriously

We’ve been on this planet as sentient creatures for how many years, and the best stories we can come up with are nothing more than reflections of the external world, processed through the yet-to-be deciphered workings of the unconscious mind? 

And we put our smartest, sharpest minds to work on manipulating, in super broad strokes, the parts we do understand about the way the mind works? That is unacceptable to me as a person and by extension to my company, which is definitely a media and marketing concern. It is just going to be the best one this fucking planet has ever seen. Yeah, I am talking to you. If you can even fucking read.

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Why I Fuck with Star Trek

17 years later...

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There's a customer born every minute.

E.P. Barnum