High Contrast

For real y'all the world is a sex machine - Pussy Galore, The Roots.

Being an employee of the media, I get to attend various events of all kinds around the city. On Sunday night, I had the thought provoking experience of going to two very different events within a short period of time. One was a short concert by the artist featured below, K'Naan. One was a promotional launch party for a new beer called Molson Kick.

The K'Naan show was an intimate gathering of artsy fartsy hip hoppers and film student types. They were all there to see the documentary that featured Somalian Hip Hop artist K'Naan and also to see him perform live. During his performance, he bonded with the audience and had them singing along to his politically charged, african style hip hop songs. He delivered a message of the importance of love and taught us about the suffering in his home country. I left his show feeling as though we had all shared a beautiful moment and learned something together.

I walked down the street to another venue where a promotional launch party for Molson's new beer, Kick, was being held. The gimmick about Kick is that it has an extra ingredient not present in other beers - caffeine. Great idea. Now all the drunks will be really hyper too!

The party was full of movers and shakers who had probably received invites due to their occupations of influence. It was a total sausage fest. Props to the PR people for drawing the target demo. The entertainment consisted of topless twigs with implants and teased hair posing on the stage. The hyper drunks really got a kick out of them! And there were various go-go dancers jiggling on their platforms around the club.

I left the venue feeling cheap, with the taste of crappy beer in my mouth wondering if there were any intelligent beer drinkers in the world. Personally, I find John Sleeman's approach to advertising refreshing.

Think of Real Hip Hop as The Wife Who Couldn't Bear Children

Jarvis Church and K'Naan
Video for Soobax

gong show pic of the week 

The Unthinkable

I have been told many times "A GOOD WRITER WRITES EVERY DAY". I don't have a very good track record on this thing, so here I go.

I've been thinking about what I want to write about and sometimes I think I worry too much about pleasing my audience. And that in itself is wishful thinking because I don't even have an audience (that I know of) aside from a few friends and relatives. Then I remember what I have heard other successful creatives say. A Canadian hip hop artist who has been enjoying some major success on the home front and will soon take the world by storm, K-OS, had some words of wisdom in a recent interview. He said he only had true success when he let all his inhibitions go and just let his creativity flow. He stopped worrying whether or not the people would dig him, and he didn't hold back. The result was one of the best albums of 2004, in any genre of music. It is an innovative and original piece of artwork and that is truly what people respond to. With all the repetition of pop culture, people crave the new and exciting, and that is what K-OS had to offer. He didn't hit us with a cookie cutter, formulaic, top 40 sure thing, but an artistic expression that gained top 40 status in the most deserving way imaginable.

Extraordinary

John Legend
Maybe his name refers to the fact that he's been compared to the legendary Stevie Wonder. Listen to his latest single - Ordinary People - and you can hear the influence in the piano intro. In interviews he's even said that he gets asked to sing the R&B legend's songs on a regular basis. Sometimes I wonder if artists like being compared so frequently to another artist, or if they prefer to be seen as coming with something original. That seems to be a silly question in this case since John is being compared to a literal legend in the music industry. Certainly can't hurt his PR! And with producers like Kanye West behind him, everything seems to be moving in his favour. But this singer/musician has enough talent to hold his own, even without the superstar production and comparisons. See for yourself and check out his latest single Ordinary People, and the previous release, featuring production from Kanye West, I Used To Love You.

Covered in Slime

Ok so he got slimed at the Kid's Choice awards. And the mainstream media is giving the story the same weight as the pope's funeral. I ask you this...is it the media outlets who jump on the "Johnny got slimed story" or the readers who eat up this crap who are to blame for the trainwreck that is the mainstream media? I hold myself partially responsible. Britney Spears and her husband are going to have a reality show. I think it will probably be the trashiest, most pointless piece of drivel to hit reality TV yet. But will I watch it? HELL YEAH. It's like the Surreal Life. It's a car crash, you can't look away. I want to see if Flavour Flav will make out with the amazon chain smoker nudist. It's like a drug that's good for the first little while, but then when you feel braindead afterwards you sort of regret it. Truth is, maybe most of us don't want to know that the world and its resources are all going to shit. We'd rather be distracted.