Pop Culture
Society
Philosophy
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- Written by SW Hammond
Guilty Pleasure? Embarrassed??? Hardly.
As much as I love music, and devoted a significant amount of my life to it, I can still be pretty closed minded. I like what I like and over the last few years I’ve lived deeply in that bubble. Why listen to the radio when I’ve got 20k+ songs in iTunes? I also no longer care about being cool—I’m over having to be the first to hear a new rock band or searching for the meaning of life within lyrics. I think there’s two reasons for this:
One, I’m getting older. Not all music, or even the music I used to like, resonates with me like it used to. There’s nostalgia attached, but I certainly can’t get excited about the new pop punk band singing about getting kicked out of high school—nor should I. I never thought I’d see the day when I didn’t have much of an interest in Warped Tour or picking up an issue of AP—but those days are over, and I’m okay with that.
Secondly, my time at Sony forced me to listen to a lot of music I’d otherwise have no interest in. Leaving that world was like a spiritual backlash to anything Top 40—I could refocus on the music that moved me, rather than it’s commercial viability. New music doesn’t mean good music, and now being a private citizen, I only have to worry about good music.
With that said, Taylor Swift’s 1989 is good music.
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- Written by SW Hammond
People are sheep, and Stanley Milgram scientifically proved it. How could the Holocaust happen? How can there still be institutional racism?
And why it's going to happen again.
Experimenter is available for streaming on Netflix and is a biographical drama of the controversial social psychologist, Stanley Milgram. Staring Peter Sarsgaard as Milgram and Winona Ryder as his wife, along with notable actors making small appearances throughout, the Experimenter flew under the radar and was quietly released in October of 2015.
In the 1950s and 60s, minds were still fresh with what the Nazi’s had done in World War II. Former Nazi leadership that fled after the war were still being hunted down across the globe and being tried for warcrimes. The public was still learning of the atrocities as reports, photographs, and footage were still being released of concentration camps. The war wasn’t a distant memory and a young Jewish psychologist, Milgram—like most of the world—was curious as to how humanity could ever allow this to happen. How could an entire nation support mass killings? What would ever turn normal, decent humans—a baker, a mechanic, a school teacher—into a Nazi extermination force? Why would a rational, casual citizen standby and allow this cruelty to occur? Or worse, willingly participate in it?
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- Written by SW Hammond
So what is Internet Morality? What gives me the right to be the purveyor?
Well, in a not so democratic system, I appointed myself. Why? Well, someone had to. Beyond that, the entirety of my professional life has been spent online in one capacity or another. Sadly, as most millennials, so has much of my person life- though I’ll get into that later.
I started on the internet with free hours from AOL and a 14.4 kbps modem. I collected those damn junk mail CD’s and had a dozen user names in my teens. I eventually convinced my parents that an internet connection and blazing 28.8k dial-up speeds were vital for my success as a high school student. I graduated with honors, so maybe I was right? Or maybe the school system I attended was that bad.
When I joined the professional world in the early 2000s, I knew that the internet was the future. However, management was at least 10 or 15 years older than me, if not 40 years older than me, and didn’t embrace the fad. They hadn’t grown up with it. They didn’t use for anything of value. Some maybe saw the potential, but they didn’t understand how or why it worked.
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- Written by SW Hammond
Welcome to the future of storytelling, or rather, an accurate depiction of the world in which we are all living.
Sense8, the original series on Netflix written by The Wachowskis and J. Michael Straczynski, achieved something significant. It proved to Hollywood that we don’t need affirmative action in media, but rather compelling roles that accurately reflect the world.
From the studios’ producing the small-screen science fiction drama (which I don’t know if science fiction is the proper genre- paranormal, perhaps?), to the web-based medium in which you watch the series, to the globalization of the cast and cinematography, and finally to a story that uses a full brush to paint with all the colors—Sense8 makes a subconscious effort to show us the future of characterization in storytelling. It’s an important series on the footnote of culture because it finally leaves stereotypes behind. Heroes come in all shapes and sizes, from all creeds and cultures, from all genders and orientations, and this series showcases that without feeling like college recruiting brochure spotlighting diversity.
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- Written by SW Hammond
I don’t know much about hip hop, except I know when I like it. And I like Broken Ankles by Girl Talk and Philadelphia Freeway.
The combination of Girl Talk and Freeway is unlike anything you’ll hear in Top 40 radio—mostly because the music industry is way behind modern art. Record labels can’t, or won’t, touch Girl Talk because of copyright laws, but I challenge you to argue that Broken Ankles isn’t original work. When does a sample no longer become a sample? You can’t copyright a drum beat or a guitar note, so it must be the arrangement of the music that holds value. What happens when you deconstruct the original arrangement of a song, then combine it with 5 or 6 other deconstructed songs, and create something entirely new? Well, awesome is what happens, but just as the music industry fought the internet, they’re also trying to silence this new emerging genre.
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