Best of it’s kind / End of an era.

Cinematic mashup highlight / The beauty-truth thing.

First off:

They have been around for about 4 years, best I can tell, but mashups are one of the after effects of the Electronica era of the late 90’s.

Some of my favorite albums of the late 90’s/Early 00’s were sans guitars. Albums like

You’ve come a long way baby – Fatboy Slim

Mezzanine – Massive Attack (not a huge Blue Lines fan)

Surrender – Chemical Brothers

Analogue Bubble bath – Aphex Twin

Pysence Ficton – U.N.K.L.E

Decksadndrumsandrockandroll – Propellerheads

Homework and Discovery – Daft Punk

Since I left you – The Avalanches.

I tie this in partly because of Thom Yorke’s Eraser (maybe the first major electronica-ish album in 3 years) and I bought the special edition of Endtroducing yesterday.

Post Since I left you, I don’t know if I bought an album of the genre after it. I just didn’t care or didn’t hear anything about a great release since.

It was an essential Napster album, one whose success was due largely due to the mass piracy and file sharing. Fitting, as it’s an album made from 500 or so samples, and nothing else.

Maybe it was the natural evolution, and the next leap forward caused the extinction of the primitive forms, as hearing two or more familiar songs played off each other was, in most cases, instantly gratifying.

Some mashup’s like the Strokes vs. Christina Aguilera “Stoke of genius” are great because they connect two artists who usually don’t belong together. Others like Blvd. of Broken Songs take a base song and fade it others, filling gaps in the original with more inspired harmonies. And then there are the goofy ones, like Wipeout Taffy, which mixes D4L’s Laffy Taffy with The Animals “Wipeout” which are so juvenile it’s hard to switch off.

So then came Brokeback spoofs, Brokeback to the Future etc, Viral videos which were nothing more than the output of bored kids making cheap laughs by tinkering with a format.

Here’s the best I have seen.




In the end, it’s only shallow, funny, a touch of resonance, but nothing more than a cover with no performance.

But you are left with a pleasant memory of what once was.

++++

So I guess I had my heart broken in a totally juvenile way yesterday, as I saw a viral video of a (semi)-famous (to me) teenage internet model.

Sometime around 2003 or so, a new trend came out for teenage girls, to pose on the net, but to still wear clothes, calling themselves Non-nude models. Some would think this a tease, but it worked on the level of catching a flash of panties of a girl in a skirt back in 8th grade. Before Britney lowered the bar for girls giving it up from 17 or on prom night to… 13, 14? This was like 3rd base in my day.

Like all good foreplay it took skill, a sense of fearlessness, and a bit of luck; if you got caught making a bad move, the odds increased 10 fold against it happening for you again.

The girls wanted to feel sexy, and we were happy to obige, but they didn’t want to seem like total sluts, and so they remained some level of dignity. It worked because unlike the voyeuristic nature of most porn, it retained an atmosphere of adolescent adventure, as if this was your first girlfriend, not some easy lay.

The most popular girl was Next Door Nikki, a young giggly, adorable gal with huge tracts of land who liked to pose in front of the camera, and turned the interest into a website.

While others eventually stopped covering up in hopes of making more money, Nikki stayed to her guns. And to this date, there hasn’t been but a blurry shot of her without some form of cover.

Until about a week or two ago, a video of her showed up with here nude. And not nude in the “tasteful” playboy mode, but in the polar opposite: on Jerry Springer.

Clearly she was paid, but I can’t see it being more than a grand.

It’s heartbreaking on so many levels. It was if she was promising to wait until prom, but one night at a jock party, she has too many shots and blows the phys Ed teacher in front of the Hockey Team.

Of course it’s wrong to lump in all women with this one incident, but couldn’t have seemed less doomed, less likely to end in failure like most everything else.

Did she have to break the barrier on such a low forum? Couldn’t there have been a private session, with some romance and buildup? Did she have to have such a mannish, WT voice to boot?

I remember a long conversation I had back in 2003 with the Kris and his girlfriend where I pined that the problem with dating is that too often, women are too easy.

That if they wanted us to really care about them, they should stop sleeping with us.

Followed by Kris’s ex asking “So, do you think I’m a whore for sleeping with you on the first date?”

His perfect response: “Yes!”

“You’re all clear kid now let’s blow this thing and go home.”

It was never the same. It’s the next step forward, leaving us with only the traces of what we grew up on, reformatted, and remade by the onset of adulthood. Beauty is always skin deep, but sometimes, we aren't honest with ourselves to grasp the truth.

Two pic gallery links:

playing the sexy girlfriend in public illusion

the I’m home alone and back from Vickies fantasy

The flameout finish:

Nothing ever ends well, if it didn’t end badly, it’d never end – Road House