Aquemini. OutKast. 1998. LaFace.

 In the process of desentimentalizing the theme of home for an astute pop audience, Outkast distills the dynamics of Atlanta’s black market economy into era-defining, self-mythologizing lyric rock, similar in tone to Let It Bleed and 1999. Like those masterworks, Aquemini cuts through basic assumptions of the limitations of the western pop experience. Without any formal innovations, the Georgia duo explicate their local reality in a vividly blunt language that broadens your understanding of humor, empathy, and violence, redefining their place in the pop vernacular in the age of the Contract With America and active mass shootings. Inasmuch as both language and economy are models of expression, twin variants within cultures—in this case, hip hop and late stage capitalism—whose rules are in constant flux and, increasingly, beyond the reach of the average man, Aquemini is terminal prophecy, looking forward critically to who we’ve become in the new century, when a person’s worth is measured not by a priceless, intrinsic human value but by an arbitrary dollars metric of their social and creative output. Some of us even refer to ourselves as easy-to-recognize consumer branding. Aquemini charts the progress of the culture that had amassed itself around the entrepreneurial hustle, the culture that was quickly supplanting rock and roll as our country’s sustained commentary on quotidian life both here and abroad, the motto of which wasn’t any longer “You get what you need,” but, according to the Aquarius and the Gemini, “Nothin’ is for certain and nothin’ lasts forever.”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

City Slang. Sonic’s Rendezvous Band. 1978. Orchidé.

  Near the start of Sonic’s Rendezvous Band—The One That Got Away, Ken Shimamoto’s authoritative online account from 2002     of that band’s searing yet short lived history, which can be found with a Google search, you come across an anecdote told by SRB bassist Gary Rasmussen about a backstage encounter between Fred Sonic Smith and Eric Clapton, following a Cream show at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom, which the MC5 opened. What is remarkable about the recollection of this exchange isn’t so much what it’s about—the absence of a Cream rhythm guitarist—as its setting. Shimamoto, a practicing guitarist with stage and studio experience, whose influences span Hendrix to Pete Cosey, arranges his interviews with band members Rasmussen and Scott Morgan—along with Radio Birdman founder Deniz Tek, MC-5’s Wayne Kramer, Michael Davis, and Dennis Thompson, Stooges’ guitarist Ron Asheton, and Detroit bassist Ron Cooke—along traditional narrative/oral history structures, and features a recu...
Read more

Ça Plane Pour Moi. Plastic Bertrand. 1978. Sire.

  According to internet data, the Lollapalooza tour, 1995, reached Dallas, Texas, on August 10, a Thursday. Five of us rode in one car that I drove from Fort Worth to the Starplex Amphitheater; my fellow passengers were Jo, Pat, Trina, and that woman who lived in Azle, whose name I no longer remember, and who used to come into the record store often, along with her boyfriend. Her musical tastes tended toward the abrasive, commercial metal so popular with the white suburban kids of privilege: Nine Inch Nails, Iron Maiden, Alice In Chains. Her personal style was not that of a typical metal fan, more like Ally Sheedy after her character’s disastrous Breakfast Club makeover. I admired her bright and casual style, her propensity to good humor and cheer, and for not succumbing to conformity and becoming a metal clone like so many of our peers. She rolled joints during the entire car trip to Lollapalooza with the hurried precision of an efficient professional working against a deadline, a...
Read more

Circles. The Fleur de Lys. Immediate. 1966.

Is there any more durable a symbol of middle class consumer excess than an outdoor neighborhood shopping mall with manicured grounds and vigilantly maintained water fountains, and a semi-detached General Cinema twin screen, first run movie theater, featuring nationwide major distribution titles? My childhood enchantment with Seminary South Cinemas I & II began in an edifice erected as an environmental correlative to the late century American personality; non-descript and functional. The lobby, a vast and empty square room with two glass half walls near the entrance, and beyond that, crimson red upholstered walls, is where the intrigue began. From the ticket dispenser machine, a dull silver contraption that functioned at the ticket seller’s wrist level, elegantly spitting out a stamp sized ticket when one of two buttons on a register was pressed, to the mysterious relationship between the concessionaires and their wide variety of candied snacks and sodas, which inventory never seeme...
Read more