The storied characters of the London grime scene reflect on the mythical genesis of the musical movement in a new film Open Mic, by documentary photographer Ewen Spencer. He reveals iconic footage of early battles and performances and traces the growth of the genre as it blows up – “out of the estates and into Top of the Pops” – with new interview material that looks back on the events with the benefit of retrospect.
And I say, "Why don’t you pick?" And he goes, “What do you mean?” I go, “Look through my phone, here go ahead,” and he goes, “What do you mean?” I go, “Look,” and I show him the pictures, and his eyes were the biggest they’ve ever gotten. I go, “I have hundreds of girlfriends, just pick. You want me to get married so bad, I can’t pick any of them. This one is really good at sucking dick, this one does this for me, this one sucks my dick and then makes me dinner, this one can hold a conversation, this one’s really funny. I don’t know, I can’t pick one, but you really want me to get married.” I’m like, this is crazy, I’m having a real talk with my dad. So he goes, "This is crazy," and I go, “You know what, this feels fucking good.” So since Thanksgiving, I don’t lie to my parents anymore.
“How can you tell what type of cellphone an inmate uses,” he asked, “based on what’s in his cell?” He let me think for about two seconds before cheerily giving me the answer: you examine the bar of soap on the prisoner’s sink. The safest place for an inmate to store anything is in his rectum, and to keep the orifice supple and sized for the (contraband) phone, inmates have been known to whittle their bars of soap and tuck them away as a placeholder while their phones are in use. So a short and stubby bar means a durable old dumbphone; broad and flat means a BlackBerry or an iPhone.
The first album released by Bad Boy Entertainment was the Notorious B.I.G.'s Ready to Die, an instant classic and possibly the most influential rap record ever made. For Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs, the label's founder, it was the first in a remarkable streak of commercial hits: twenty-one straight gold- or platinum-selling albums, including Puff's own Grammy-winning debut, No Way Out, plus home-grown artists like Faith Evans, the Lox, Mase, Total, and 112. By the mid-1990s, Bad Boy was the biggest label in pop music. This is the story of how it all began.
I just went to a Zumiez contest in Nebraska and there were like 30 people there. People think skateboarding is bigger and there’s more money to be made off of it than there actually is. With everybody in the world wearing the Janoski shoe and how it took off… it made people say, “Wow, a pro skater’s shoe can sell like that!!?” because it had a pro skaters name on it. But his shoe just happened to be like a Chuck Taylor or something. Stefan killed it and made a good, timeless design, but it was a once in a lifetime type thing. That and some of the fashion stuff kind of led people to believe skateboarding is something that it’s not.
He admits that if the right offer comes along, the kind of offer that only three or four companies in the world could come up with, he would have to jump. But what is that? Five billion? Seven? Ten? It’s hard to know, because in Silicon Valley today, money has lost all meaning and value. It is an abstract construct that can be exchanged for homes and Teslas and handmade selvedge denim jeans flown in from Japan, but nobody really has any idea what constitutes “a lot” anymore. At some point however, he would be obligated to all those who’ve stuck with him and to all those who have given him money.
Google is a computer software and a web search engine company that has been acquiring, on average, more than one company per week since 2010. The table below is an incomplete list of acquisitions, with each acquisition listed being for the respective company in its entirety, unless otherwise specified.
The scene at his studio back then was a blur of Beavis and Butt-head jokes, Jackass pranks, and goofy porn shoots. There was a penis in a hot-dog bun, a guy lighting his fart on fire. Steve-O, a member of the Jackass cast, recalls in his memoir an afternoon when Johnny Knoxville called and said, “Hey, I’m at Terry Richardson’s studio. He wants to do a bukkake shoot, and we’re just a few cocks short. You game?” Richardson photographed it all. He wanted Steve-O “pulling a girl’s hair while I shot a load on her face and someone else pointed a gun at her head.”
In the beginning, Ryan McGInley was an outsider. He used his band of beautiful friends to create photographs - rarely not naked but never quite sexy - that he now calls "evidence of fun." But in the past decade, McGinley's vision has evolved and expanded into a tidal wave of influence, affecting the look of art, advertising, music videos, film, even Instagram - and making him arguably the most important photographer in America.
When they were over in London a couple weeks back, Ratking went off inside a green screen studio for a new episode of Just Jam, a live performance stream on the UK-based, music and culture web channel, Don’t Watch That TV. Watch the noisy NYC trio play songs from their just-released debut album, So It Goes, against a public access-style backdrop of galloping horses and guys in ski masks.
Twenty years after the Wu-Tang Clan invaded and radically altered hip-hop, Shaolin’s finest are struggling to reunite for one more album. Here, a 10-part portrait of how the legendary group lives apart today.
During his trip to Austin for SXSW last week, Lil Wayne sat down with hip-hop journalist Elliott Wilson for his CRWN series. In the hour-long interview, the self-described "triple OG" talks about idolizing Jay Z, his protégés Drake and Nicki Minaj, Kendrick Lamar’s "Control" verse, Kanye West’s "Yeezus Tour", his final solo album, skateboarding, his prison memoir, and sports.
Adam Magyar is a computer geek, a college dropout, a self-taught photographer, a high-tech Rube Goldberg, a world traveler, and a conceptual artist of growing global acclaim. But nobody had ever suggested that he might also be a terrorist until the morning that he descended into the Union Square subway station in New York. At the time, Magyar was immersed in a long-running techno-art project called Stainless, creating high-resolution images of speeding subway trains and their passengers, using sophisticated software he created and hardware that he retrofitted himself. The scanning technique he developed—combining thousands of pixel-wide slices into a single image—allows him to catch passengers unawares as they hurtle through dark subway tunnels, fixing them in haunting images filled with detail no ordinary camera can capture. Magyar set up his standard array of devices—camera, scanner, voltage meters, blue and black cables, battery pack, tripod, laptop—and waited for a train to roll into the station.
A few months into his stay here, the space recalls the kind of adolescent dream scenario in which your parents encourage your artistic endeavors without necessarily requiring that you clean up after you complete them. There is a full ashtray perched precariously on the bed, and the floor is a jumble of fast food takeaway containers, empty cigarette boxes, newspapers, books and assorted music equipment, the most immediately visible of which are a graffiti-tagged MIDI keyboard and a clarinet, which leans dangerously close to a ketchup-stained plate. “I love it here,” says Marshall, grinding up some weed for a joint. “I can make beats in bed. I can make beats naked. I can make beats on the toilet. I can make beats in the tub.”
When America met Leo Fitzpatrick in the 1995 cult classic Kids, he was playing the adolescent prince of downtown, swinging his shoulders across the Lower East Side in oversized clothes and yelling taunting curses through the streets. Today, at 36, the actor who was discovered when photographer and director Larry Clark saw him skateboarding in Washington Square Park — he was the loudest, angriest kid Clark had ever seen — still identifies as a sort of misfit. As a co-owner of the teeny Lower East Side gallery Home Alone 2 with the artist Nate Lowman, he is trying to create a DIY antidote to what he sees as the snooty attitude dominating the New York art scene.
BBSs existed in a world that had yet to be soiled by smartphones and Facebook and Instagram; there was no Google, and indeed no World Wide Web at all. Up until 1992, the Internet was a thing primarily of text, and BBSs in many ways mimicked that. To get "online" was to sit down at your computer, open up an application called a "terminal program", pull up your carefully hoarded list of BBS phone numbers, and start dialing. Inevitably, most would be busy and you'd have to wait, but eventually you'd be treated to the sweet sound of ringing through your modem's speaker, followed by the electronic beeping and scratching of a modem handshake.
Street Fighter 2 is one of the game industry's biggest success stories, but its history is often told secondhand, through official statements and loosely translated interviews. In an effort to remedy that, over the past year we tracked down more than 20 former Capcom employees and business partners and asked them to tell it in their own words. They tell a story of extreme personalities coming together to make a game, and the egos, cultural differences, glitches, rivalries, lawsuits and police raids that followed.