okay so the skinny jeans didn't work out for me so well …

Watching Vh1 soul and they’re showing some of those old classic videos.  SWV, Musiq Soulchild, Eve’s first video, old Dre videos.  Took you back to simpler times, when just being on television was a big deal and music videos and music in general actually had somewhat of a meaning to it.

For one the Neo-Soul artists are always reminiscent for a different time in life and to tap into the vibe of those records you have to go back to the old soul artists like Gloria Scott, Hank Crawford, Lamont Dozier, Bobby Caldwell and others.  There was this one woman that had a picture of herself holding an ice cream cone, I can’t place her name for anything, but upon searching for Biggie samples I came across P.S.K., one of my favorite records of all time fro Schooly D.

There is something to be said about simple music with simple lyrics absent of audio samples or synthesizers that are passed off as being original but really creative interpretations of someone elses work.  Too often I hear Prince, Michael Jackson, New Wave or some blantant rip off of arabian, persian or french pop music from producers that are supposed to be original.

If you listen to P.S.K. he isn’t saying much, but he is communicating volumes.  While later rappers like Rakim took lyricism to the fringe edges of abstraction, never to be taken quite so far since, Schooly D gave it to you upfront, yet caused you to look inbetween the lines for it’s true genius.  The same is true of Rappin’ Duke, or Audio Two, those were simple, mindless songs that you can listen to millions of times, but you can walk away with something new almost each and every time.

Today rap hides behind complex production from fruity loops or some drum machine yet the artists themselves, with all of the lyrical complexity even the worst artist signed can deliver, will never match the timelessness of those early lyrics.  It isn’t because it was new then, it’s because they understood tried and true fundamental approaches to poetry and songwriting that today’s artists will never quite get.  It wasn’t because those artists were hungry because in those days there was no real payoff for being a great rapper; if you were a commercial artist you might sell 2 million, but no one was reaching the mainstream at that time.

I shouldn’t even be able to appreciate P.S.K. today.  So why am I riding around with all of these records burned to CD?  Because there was an authenticity then to music that you can’t duplicate these days.  Sure I like The Roots, and Chrisette Michelle, Angela Stone, Jennifer Hudson and so on and so forth.  But 15 years from now I won’t be listening to any of those records; it’s a wonder I still listen to The Roots now.

Too much of it is consciousness for consciousness’ sake.  Being conscientious alone doesn’t make a classic record, it just makes a record you’re not ashamed to have your children or your mother listen to.  It just makes a record you can listen to as a Christian with a clear conscious, but it doesn’t make a classic record.  Speaking of Christian music, can you compare anyone’s current material with Tomorrow by The Winans, or even crossover records like Jesus Is Love?

Some songwriters still understand this, and they can deliver the goods.  Most of American Idol’s Kelly Clarkson’s material will stand the test of time, so will Jesus Take The Wheel, Listen by Beyonce, and songs like Hollaback Girl that were pop fluff at the time but had overly simplistic lyrics that meant nothing and everything at the same time.  It wasn’t really the beats, but the pairing of nice lyrics with nice beats that made for a great song.

Gwen Stefani has been trying desperately to duplicate what she did on Hollaback Girl to no avail.  Musically, it was rather easy to accomplish, but the timelessness of those lyrics is something that you can’t force.  That’s what made L.A.M.B. a classic album. 

I love my seventies and eighties music, then again I’m sick of listening to it as a replacement for the void in today’s market.  Purists will tell you that music died sometime in the seventies as the commercialization of music through the music video changed the scene.  I’m apt to agree with them; the older I get, the further back my music is reaching, I couldn’t appreciate a cut like Ribbon In The Sky as a child but it really stands out now; those Earth Wind and Fire records have new meaning.

Why isn’t anyone writing like that, and worse yet, why can’t any of today’s producers actually craft timeless beats from scratch?  You know how aggravating it is when some of your favorite songs, like Alliyah’s More Than A Woman are shown to be directly linked to Arabic pop music; a simple replacement of acoustic strings with synthesizers with little added to it.  You also know how rembarrassing it is to see producers fight with artists and each other over concepts that weren’t that deep to begin with, like ripping off tracks from an old Commodore 64 program.

Music has changed, and with it I have changed as well, but in a different direction than I ever would have imagined …

Clothing is perhaps one of the best indicators of what a person’s true personality is.  But you have to look beyond what they are wearing and take into account how they are wearing, what their body language says they feel about themselves having worn it and a number of other factors. 

Take urban wear for example, for the most part I am not that comfortable in my skin wearing it.  Now I should, because I do have that love/hate relationship with the city and can appreciate a lot of the concepts but my experiences are somewhat different than that of the average street kid.  Many times in wearing urban wear I feel as though the authenticity of what experiences I have had with the city are being put into question.  Notably I can come off as being uncomfortable with wearing that genre of clothing.

Some people can hide their intelligence and others can’t.  I’m not the most street smart person, I mean I get around okay but I like to take my time doing things and like to give everything entirely too much thought, to the point where I’m almost catatonic.  On the other hand being African-American I feel some sort of an obligation to at least try to wear the stuff, but for me it’s more like listening to rap music trying to be chic when I can’t truly relate to what they’re talking about.

So when you see me it says volumes about what my state of mind is at that moment.  Early on I was one of those types which everything had to be a certain designer for me to wear it.  I would follow the trends and was more of a follower than a leader.  That very much defined my approach to fashion in the nineties, as I would wear the same designers as everyone did but could never pull that look off in the right way.

There are obvious examples of what a persons clothing reveals to us.  A man in his late fifties wearing Rocawear and Cooji, or perhaps Abercrombie and Fitch never truly got past his midlife crisis.  In general, someone older wanting to be younger or feeling most comfortable around youth, of which popular culture is often centered around.  These days there is less emphasis being placed on how expensive the clothing is and more of an emphasis on actually what is worn.  The popularity of stores like Old Navy, H&M & Steve and Barry’s suggests that we can look great for less and pull off rather sophisticated looks for as cheap as possible.

Now this isn’t to suggest that everything you get at those stores is necessarily the top shelf either; but it does say a lot about being less pretentious and more practical.  If you’re already upside down living hand to mouth living paycheck to paycheck you don’t really care that much if people know that you shopped at the thrift store, or if the designer substituted polyester and nylon for cotton and wool.  You just want that look.  On the other hand designer clothing sort of puts you in this exclusive “club”; not so much one of privilege, class, and the jet set lifestyle, but one with other devotees that have to that same designer label.

If the people that really were fanboys and enthusiasts of any one particular designer were to ever get together and sit down and chat they would realize that they are from all sorts of different walks of life.  Chances are the majority of them would realize that they aren’t living the lifestyle that the models and photographers suggest that the brand represents in the advertisements.  The common thread between the individuals are their aspirations, as opposed to the actual reality of what those aspirations should reveal about the reality of their situation, once those dreams have been achieved and realized.

For example there are a lot of people wearing urban wear because the ghetto life has a certain chic to it that it didn’t use to have.  It used to be that Americas poor just wore cheaper interpretations of what everyone else wore, and urban wear actually gave someone in the ghetto a voice and a way to express themselves through fashion that was truly theirs.  It has changed a bit though because the movement that it’s devotees shared in common, the hip-hop culture, has changed and expanded over time both as a ways of remaining relevant, and as a testimony of which the musical genre has matured. 

At the same time rock music has devolved and became a little bit more like hip-hop, as listeners of both genre of music realized that they had a lot in common.  Out of this fusion came such brands like Ed Hardy, Black Label and Christian Audigier, sort of an intersection where the two worlds come together in fashion.  Hip-Hop fashion lost it’s street graffiti chic and took on skulls, broken hearts, snakes and a more rough aesthetic that used to be reserved for motorcycle gangs.  This sort of started a while back when Von Dutch was popular. 

It isn’t necessarily my thing, but it does say a lot about the unification of fashion whose roots are in the street life or the music culture.  Basically a lot of us want the same thing and feel the same way, but it took a lot for anyone to realize that.  It makes a lot of sense, because a lot of the differentiation between grunge, urban wear and prep in the nineties were a bit rediculous.  When there was a concerted conservative movement in urban wear and we were wearing Ralph Lauren or the uniforms and gear of laborers it could have been construed as being outright disrespectful or a homage to the ideals those looks represent.

Those were fun times; conservative African-Americans who were already into Polo felt even more comfortable wearing it because they had a look that wasn’t that different from what the street kids were doing.  It was one of those rare times when a lot of us were on the same page, though clearly it wasn’t going to last forever.  By the time the new millennium came around the conservative crowd tried on the metrosexual look, while the more adventurous types develed into couture and street kids went back to what they were doing ten years ago when urban wear was a newly coined term, baggy Calvin Klein jeans and Helly Hanson.

Those who like to consider themselves as being seriously devoted to fashion share a lot of things in common, and often find themselves doing the same looks as the other person that thinks they’re serious about fashion more often than they would like to admit.  Being unique and being an individual is fine and all but you have to go with how you feel instead of trying to make a calculated play at being different and standing out.  It can be rather exhausting, and you’ll also pass up a lot of great stuff on the way out of concern to what someone else is thinking about you.

When teenagers all look the same, with indistingushable looks from one town to the next it’s because they want to fit in; often they’ll continue dressing to be part of the crowd well into their twenties.  They have their individuality all along, particularly by their mid twenties, but letting go of it on the outside is typically the last thing to happen.  It is one thing to feel so assured of yourself but another thing entirely different to let that show; so you’ll hide behind that fashion long after until your subconsious is thoroughly convinced of it.  If you see something but then you start thinking about it a lot, getting doubleminded, and so on and so forth your subconscious isn’t entirely convinced.

You’re ready but then again you’re not really ready.  It shows, and people will often suggest that you wear this or that, and you won’t wear it because they’re seeing a different side to you that you can’t see or aren’t ready to see because you’re stuck on the side that you are comfortable with.  That’s what’s so great about fashion, you can find yourself a look that expresses how you feel at that moment a lot better than you could ever do with words; that’s when you know that you’re really hooked …

Ok I have to be totally honest.  These days when you say that you are an eighties child it’s hard to tell whether or not someone is suggesting that they were coming of age in the eighties or born in the eighties.  This much I do know, for me the eighties were a great time to be a teenager.  These days everything is about teenagers, there is a huge business in selling the youth culture to adolescents.  But in the eighties there wasn’t that much and you were forced to be more creative as there wasn’t much else being marketed your way.  There were no cookie cutter looks, few stores if anything as fashion was something of an afterthought and it was a weird place between being a tween or a twenty something.

In the eighties you didn’t have a whole lot to work with and you figured out the best way to make due with what you little you had.  Back then computers didn’t have fancy graphics and there weren’t many choices of video games to choose from.  Computing has advanced since then of course, but on the backs of Apple and Microsoft which made computing a lot more accessible than it otherwise would have been.  These days you hear a lot from Linux enthusiasts and fanboys about how much cleaner their OS runs than Windows.  Yet without Microsoft or Apple I often wonder if Linux would have ever existed quite as it does today. 

Of course the GUI and WYSIWYG are natural extensions of the computing interface and quite honestly, wherever both Windows and Mac OS have derived from, some other company would have done it otherwise.  But back to the eighties, back then you actually learned how to write a computer program, delved into assembly language a bit, and learned how computers connected to each other through BBS.  Computers played games, but it wasn’t about buying a graphics card as expensive as the computer was.  Programmers had a lot more imagination, and the gameplay back then was entirely different than the scripted variety that often exists now on high-end next generation systems.

Musicians had a lot more imagination then as well.  Synthesizers were an evolution of the natural song writing process, not a replacement for it.  It was very competitive; the downside is that the eighties had perhaps more one hit wonders than any other decade as these days even the worst of acts can manage to release a few records.  Clothing sort of sucked though; the color scheme was cool but the actual designs of the clothes themselves weren’t anything to loose sleep over.

Of course today teenagers and now even tweens are wearing those same bright colors, which is pretty cool.  The designs themselves are a whole lot better and more sophisticated than anything anyone was doing back then.  On the other hand couture was a lot more interesting in the eighties, if you had the money to spend for that type of thing. 

For a while there I was obsessed with the eighties, what I’ve found is that if you want material of television, video and cinema from that time you won’t get that far on the Internet.  I don’t want to stockpile footage from that time I want to download it and enjoy it for a short period of time and then return it, sort of like books from a library.  But you won’t find a whole lot on YouTube or Google video.

Is it just me, or did thousands of individuals just leave their VCRs running back then, becuase that is where the overwhelming majority of the television footage seems to come from, particularly commercials.  What is missing is high-quality content from that time; granted there isn’t anything from that time that could benefit from high-defitinion but at least DVD or SDV would do the trick. 

During the eighties I was between the ages of 8 and 18, but I tend to think about it in terms of actually having been all-grown up by then.  What is cool about that time is that there was little progression in anything during that time.  Clothing wasn’t that much different by the end of the eighties than they were at the beginning, computers hadn’t evolved a whole lot, automobile technology brought very little, except anti-lock brakes.  Music had changed very little as well; at that time I was obsessed with rap, but by the end of the eighties people were still sampling rather simple beats, as they were at the beginning of the decade.  Rock may have evolved from it’s art stage towards heavy metal; grunge existed but it wasn’t really that well known until about 91 or 92 when it was more mainstream.

It seems like it was a simpler time.  The worst you had to worry about was nuclear war and HIV, the latter of which wasn’t really on people’s radar until the later half of the decade.  People still think that AIDS was created by the American government, but I’m hard pressed to think that it wasn’t a natural evolution of what had been occuring with STDs for quite some time.  Could be that we actually know what it is now, and hadn’t up until then.

There were a lot of deaths in the eighties; disco was by far one of the biggest and most dramatic declines into obscurity, but there were others.  The blaxploitation film, which resurfaced in the nineties a lot more intelligent and sophisticated than it had ever been.  The Philadelphia Sound, as synthesizers sort of killed of strings, though violins and other strings did make a return in the nineties, though rather short lived.  Soul was decimated, though it returned strong in the late nineties as Neo-Soul.  Rap and Hip-Hop buried Funk, which at the time was about the most controversial way that Blacks could express themselves in music. 

The eighties destoyed that earthy, utilitarian look in fashion; a plaid shirt, khakis and brown shoes.  That look resurfaced in the nineties as well, though with a lot better fabrics and a looser cut.  One thing that didn’t change much was denim; jeans were of an awful quality then and still were until the 21st century.  Innocence, for what it was worth, was expressed in interesting ways, but it went out slowly.  About the only thing that did survive was the supremacy of the United States culturally, something that wasn’t really challenged until the 21st century, when British and Japanese culture took a serious root in America artistically.

It’s hard to remember a time when you didn’t look outside of America for something cool.  Only anime there was back then was Robotech and perhaps Speed Racer, some of the more memorable shows.  Both fit well into the context of America animation because the heavy themes suggested in anime now do not seem to have existed at that time. 

You could do movies like Ghostbusters, 10, Mommie I Shrinked the Kids, 9 to 5, Tootsie, Aliens and a host of other films in the eighties because they fit in well with the absurd nature of pop culture in the eighties at that time.  You could also do television shows like Quantum Leap and Night Rider then as well.  These days we’re talking about the latest Indiana Jones movie, or Rambo or any other movie from that time that has been dreged up for lack of creativity.

I’m still holding my breath until a remake of Robocop comes along, and it will probably suck if anyone was to actually take that own.  Other remakes, like Transformers (there was an animated movie) or Halloween, stand on their own artistically but are easily forgotten.  Halloween benefits from having taken a different approach; I have to watch both Transformers movies to get a feel for how, if anything, has changed. 

Our admiration from the eighties is nothing of the way that it could have been, or even should be.  The eighties will never get the respect that the seventies had, which is odd because looking back on it the seventies just seems to have been a dead and spiritually and emotionally bankrupt time in American society.  I would have had to be there to really know; it looks good in some movies though but it just doesn’t seem as if there was that much going on though.   The nineties may get even less love than the eighties did; for one it took until 2005 to really get into the spirit of the eighties, I wonder if the nineties won’t die a short death in about a short time span of a year or so.  The days of remembering the past are truly behind us.