Corpsey

bandz ahoy
This is for a different and perhaps uninteresting thread

But i wonder if the mass availability of p0rn has had an effect on music
 

luka

Well-known member
sufi got edmund a card reader which he doesnt let me use so actually my record is worth more like 1000 cos im not allowed to use the card reader
 

luka

Well-known member
This is for a different and perhaps uninteresting thread

But i wonder if the mass availability of p0rn has had an effect on music
r&b got sleazier. fewer love songs. not as earnest not even earnest about fucking.
 

luka

Well-known member
rap always thought sex with ladies was gay anyway so that hasnt changed in the same way
 

version

Well-known member
Kanye would watch porn in the studio. Here's Nicki talking about it:

ā€œI heard through Drake that Kanye wanted me on his album, and I got on the next thing smokinā€™ to Hawaii. I didnā€™t think that he was gonna like me. I always figured that he was one of those conscious rappers, so I thought that he wouldnā€™t want girls to be dressed overtly sexyā€”and I go to the studio and he has nothing but pictures of naked women on his computer that heā€™d invite me to look at. They were really artsy pictures, but you know he loves nudity, so it was a complete shock to me, ā€™cause I thought I had him all figured out, but I didnā€™t. He was watching porn when we were in the studioā€”no shame in his game. Kanye kept askinā€™ me to come and eat breakfast, but I like to record in the morning. So, when they were eating breakfast, I was in the studio listening to music and writing. And he would always be like, ā€˜Yo, why you ainā€™t never come over for breakfast, yo?ā€™ But I never went. I would get to the studio at like 10:30 in the morning and heā€™d be leaving to go home and eat breakfast and Iā€™d be getting to the studio to just write and record. I stayed late sometimes, but I was always getting sleepy. I get up at 6 in the morning, so midnight is late for me. One time he caught me nodding off, and I thought maybe he would kick me out. Iā€™ve never been so embarrassed in my life. You know how youā€™re sitting up and you donā€™t realize that youā€™ve just fallen asleep, but it feels like an eternity? When I picked up my head from sleeping, he was looking at me in the strangest way Iā€™ve ever been looked at by a human being. He pulled his shades down and he looked and said, ā€˜Oh, sheā€™s sleeping?ā€™ I wanted to crawl under a rock and die. [Laughs.]"
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
He did that to his employees too didn't he?

Some sort of power move

Or just a psycho with an addiction
 

version

Well-known member
Some of the terminology in that New Yorker piece... particularly that they refer to scanned trees, rocks, and so on as 'assets'. One of the people interviewed suggests they're honouring God by creating like he does, but digitally collecting the most generic examples you can find in nature then packaging them as 'assets' seems a bit lifeless in comparison.

"To express is always to sing the glory of God. Every stratum is a judgment of God; not only do plants and animals, orchids and wasps, sing or express themselves, but so do rocks and even rivers, every stratified thing on earth."
D&G, A THOUSAND PLATEAUS: PLATEAU 3 - 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS (WHO DOES THE EARTH THINK IT IS?)

Speaking of Deleuze... his emphasis on what a thing does rather than whether it's a good representation really seems like the most productive approach when it comes to something like music. Ome posted that vid a while back explaining this via drum machines. Basically, that a drum machine doesn't sound exactly like a drum kit is less important than its own qualities and what they allow you to do that you couldn't with a kit.

 

william_kent

Well-known member
Byron Crawford's Kanye West Superstar has this ( and more ) to say...
Kanyeā€™s mom, whom he lived with more often than not, kept a collection of 1980s Ron Jeremy-style VHS pr0n. Which seems weird to me. I know, because Pr0nHub keeps detailed statistics about who visits their site (ruh roh), that some girls watch pr0n. But how many women had a pr0n collection on VHS? I think most people just rented pr0n back during the VHS era. To actually buy those tapes cost an arm and a leg ā€” it required a certain level of commitment to pr0nography. So Kanyeā€™s father wasnā€™t the only one with, erm, proclivities. That may have even been how they found each other.

Donda West first discovered her sonā€™s fascination with pr0n when he snuck and watched one of her VHS tapes and accidentally left it in the VCR for her to find. Awkward! The easiest thing to do in a situation like that is just put the tape back where it belongs and let the situation blow over without either of you mentioning it. Imagine how difficult it would be to have a conversation with an eight year-old kid about pr0n, let alone your own pr0n, the shit that you specifically picked out at an off brand video store in a sketchy strip mall, because it best-suited your ā€œneeds.ā€ I shudder to think what kind of pr0n this was.

What does an eight year-old boy even do with pr0n? As a 33 year-old man, Iā€™ve got videos Iā€™ve been watching since I was like 26 that I havenā€™t seen any more than about eight minutes of, becauseā€¦ well, thereā€™s no need to get too graphic here. Kids might want to read this book. Iā€™m hoping my elementary school alma mater will keep it in their library. When I was a kid, back in the mid to late ā€˜80s, they had that book where the guy who played Carlton on the Fresh Prince of Bel Air teaches you how to break dance, and I think putting this book alongside it would provide me with a certain not necessarily pr0n-related sense of completion ā€” an emotional money shot, if you will.

A young Kanye probably sat there and watched those videos all the way through, while his mom was off working on her dissertation. Pr0n films are always especially long, to justify charging so much for them. Thereā€™s one scene with the chick whoā€™s on the cover, and then they pad the length with a few chicks who arenā€™t attractive enough to carry their own film. In fact, Kanye may have forgotten to put the tape back where he found it because he sat there so long he ended up falling asleep and having a dream about Christy Canyon.

This is all speculation, mind you.

There was also an incident in which Kanye brought some nudie magazines to class and got caught passing them around to other kids so everyone could get a good look. How considerate of him. In retrospect, this was a precursor to his career casting a lot of skanky chicks with ginormous cans in videos like Drakeā€™s ā€œBest I Ever Had,ā€ let alone any number of his own videos.

The teacher asked Kanye where he got those magazines, and he said his motherā€™s closet, which, againā€¦ worrisome. Kanyeā€™s mom was called to the school, where she slapped him and then took him home and forced him to write a paper about why kids shouldnā€™t look at pr0n. This was all discussed in the book Donda wrote about raising Kanye. I didnā€™t read it back when it came out, and the budget I had to write this book wasnā€™t sufficient to buy a copy (the library didnā€™t have it), but I remember reading an article about it in the Daily Mail or somewhere back when it came out. I may have written about it ā€” or at least mentioned it ā€” back when I was with XXL.

Anyway, Freud would have had a field day with that one: The fact that Kanyeā€™s mom wrote an entire book about raising him. The fact that she had all of that pr0n. The fact that she slapped him, which may have later resulted in masochistic tendencies. And the fact that she made him write a research paper about his precocious interest in pr0n, thus forever linking education, punishment, pr0nography and his mother in his not yet fully formed, already depraved mind. Oh, what I wouldnā€™t give to get my hands on a copy of that paper. Is it typed in ALL CAPS?
 

version

Well-known member
Some of the terminology in that New Yorker piece... particularly that they refer to scanned trees, rocks, and so on as 'assets'. One of the people interviewed suggests they're honouring God by creating like he does...

om7b959coc8c1.jpeg
 

version

Well-known member
"The ideal assets are iconic, but not distinctive: in theory, any one of them can be repeated, like a rubber stamp, such that a single redwood could compose an entire forest."

This is cool; 'Texture Archaeology' is a great term.

 

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
The 303 example in my original post: Roland attempt to simulate a bass guitar, fail miserably and inadvertently lay the foundations for something much more interesting.

There are stories throughout musical history of people coming up with something new by misusing the equipment, 'joyriding technology' as Goldie once put it. One of the things I'm asking is whether the potential for that declines as technology improves, whether it getting better and better at doing its intended job leaves less and less room for deviation, or whether new deviations will always arise.
In terms of the creative output the 303 thing is still not an example of a fruitful failure because it succeeds in producing the sounds the artist wanted. Maybe you could call it a temporary structural constraint.
 

dilbert1

Well-known member

ā€œGoing only by her last name, Elaine Sturtevant was a master of appropriation who re-created works by iconic 20th-century artists in order to explore authenticity, artistic celebrity, and the creative process. Calling her approach ā€œrepetition,ā€ she began making deliberately inexact copies of the work of her predecessors and contemporaries in 1964, repeating pieces by the likes of Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Marcel Duchamp. Some artists appreciated her project: Warhol loaned her original screens for her reproduction of his ā€œFlowersā€ series. Others were angered. For example, Claes Oldenburg bristled when she presented a version of Oldenburgā€™s The Store. Sturtevant was variously criticized, dismissed, and celebrated (she was awarded a Golden Lion in 2011) throughout her career.ā€œ

I was recommended this book about her long ago and just remembered it, perhaps it has something to say about all this

 

dilbert1

Well-known member
When I was 12 my dad found the Ready to Die album on my mp3 player and skipped to the weird sex interlude, then yelled at me for having already become a sicko that listens to ā€œaudio pornā€
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
This is a weird thread where you've got two interesting and apparently unrelated threads happening in the same thread, like a nuclear spill (a luka-lear spill) has caused the thread to sprout another head
 

version

Well-known member
In terms of the creative output the 303 thing is still not an example of a fruitful failure because it succeeds in producing the sounds the artist wanted. Maybe you could call it a temporary structural constraint.

Roland's failure led to the success of others. The artists didn't know they wanted those sounds, or that they were even possible, until Roland messed up attempting to simulate a bass guitar. The thing was a commercial flop given a new lease of life by people figuring out how to make use of its failings. It's the textbook example of a fruitful failure. A whole new musical development born from an engineering fuck up.
 
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