"I'll play it first and tell you what it is later." - Miles Davis
Love & Work A notebook about how we work, learn, love and live.
I love Miles' insistence that creativity and discovery are hampered by attempts to name what you are doing. Hip-hop was born without a name fifty years ago today. The genre (practice? philosophy?) took the lid off of music as we knew it. There is no turning back. Now everything is a remix.
Happy Friday.
Culture, Nomenclature “I said a hip, hop, the hippy, the hippy, to the hip-hip-hop and you don’t stop.”
Polaroid Portrait of Dj Kool Herc in the Mid-1970S at Stafford's Place Club, University Avenue, Bronx, NY
"This summer marks a vital anniversary in the history of American music. Fifty years ago, on Aug. 11, 1973, a Jamaican-born DJ named Kool Herc helped his sister throw a back-to-school party in the community room at their apartment building in the South Bronx. There, Herc came up with an innovative approach on the turntables that allowed him to isolate and repeat the musical breaks on records that got people dancing. Over those breaks, he and a friend, Coke La Rock, added another innovation: the rhythmic vocal delivery of rapping. That unique combination of DJ’ing and emceeing is widely credited as the baptismal moment of hip-hop." - Ben Zimmer
Culture, Herstory Recognizing the women who shaped the genre of hip-hop
The Hip-Hop Feminist Syllabus is a comprehensive resource list of sources relating to hip-hop’s impact on gender, race and feminism on the occasion of hip-hop’s 50th anniversary.
Resources are divided into four sections:
interviews with hip-hop feminists
a Spotify playlist of hip-hop feminist anthems spanning all five decades
a world map locating hip-hop in the international scene
Creativity "To copy, transform and combine existing materials to produce something new. Remixing is everywhere you look."
"When you take something old and use it in something new, that’s remixing. It might just seem like just copying, but it's actually something much more. Remixing can empower you be more creative.
"Remixing allows us to make music without playing instruments, to create software without coding, to create bigger and more complex ideas out of smaller and simpler ideas.
"You don’t need expensive tools to remix, you don’t need a distributor, you don’t even need skills or… good judgment. Everybody can remix and everybody does.
"From our songs and games and movies and memes, to how we train computers to create, to the way we sense of reality, to the evolution of life itself, everything is definitely a remix."
How We Live, Culture When art first depicted ordinary people
"For much of the history of art painting was dominated by religious and mythological themes as well as portraiture of monarchs and the ruling elite. This is due to the fact that the church and the aristocracy commissioned the vast majority of the art being made but in the 16th century. That started to change and particularly in the low countries what constitutes modern day Belgium and the Netherlands. A trading Mecca, the low countries saw the rapid emergence of a merchant middle class in this period with enough money to patronize local artists. It makes sense that they wanted to see art that reflected their own lives." - Evan Puschak
This is Rob Hardy's best attempt at articulating the philosophy of non-coercive marketing in one paragraph:
"Non-coercive marketing places full authority and trust in people. It creates the conditions under which they can make empowered decisions for themselves, and do so in their own time. It doesn't seek to persuade, manipulate, or pester people into a decision that's already been made for them. It merely opens new doors, tells the truth about what's behind those doors, then surrenders the outcome, trusting that the right people will step through when they're ready. In that way, non-coercive marketing is a leap of faith, rooted in the idea that if you stop trying to control people, and encourage them to be their own authority, you can build positive sum relationships that lead to organic and mutually-enriching transactions. This relational shift is also at the heart of how we begin healing the emotional wounds lying beneath humanity's many problems."
He acknowledges that this is a bit of a word salad. It must be. It is a distillation of a huge and important idea. As he says "this isn't just a more ethical, feel-good way to sell shit. This isn't just slapping a friendlier coat of paint on traditional marketing. It's a radical rethink from first principles, meant to start the dominoes toppling towards a more beautiful future."
Brendan was once a leader in the US white nationalist movement, but when he took the drug MDMA in a scientific study it radically changed his extremist beliefs – to the surprise of everyone involved.
In a follow-up survey he wrote: "This experience has helped me sort out a debilitating personal issue. I now know what I need to do. Love is the most important thing. Nothing matters without love."
Advice Use the the ‘Holiday Party Tactic’ to imagine success.
"While brainstorming, ask your team to visualize the holiday party for the upcoming year, then ask ‘What are you celebrating?’ It forces your team to work backward under the assumption that you’ve already won." - Darshan Gajara
Like Rock and Roll before it, hip-hop colored outside of the lines. Suddenly DJs were mashing songs of completely different genres together to make something brand new. Here's a case in point. Early this spring a DJ calling himself Dwells answered a request to mix Kendrick Lamar's N95 with Radiohead's Everything in the Right Place. The result is infectious. As one fan said: "Radiohead has been one of those bands that has marked a part of my life, listening to it like this now brings a new feeling."
Weekly Mixtape "I've always loved rock music. I've always loved stuff like The Specials and The Breeders and things like that. But it was hip-hop that really got me into music." - Tricky
The Image of the Week is titled “The Great Synagogue” by Edwin Cabingan. It was shot in Sydney, Australia on an iPhone 11 Pro Max. It won 1st Place in the Architecture category of the 2023 iPhone Photography Awards.
What's Love & Work? Love & Work is the weekly newsletter by me, Mitch Anthony. I help people use their brand - their purpose, values, and stories - as a pedagogy and toolbox for transformation.
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