Bubblegum Club

Tag: Detroit

  • Detroit’s Marcus Marcus is a poet not a rapper

    Detroit’s Marcus Marcus is a poet not a rapper

    Detroit-based artist Marcus Marcus doesn’t describe himself as a rapper. “I’d describe myself as a poet who has a fairly good ear for music,” he states simplistically. While the earliest Marcus Marcus releases can be traced back about 7 years ago, he struggles to pin down when the artist was born, as Marcus Marcus is a true expression of who he is as a person. “I really think since birth because all of that has to do with how I approach music, what songs I pick, who is producing music.”

    Both the city of his birth and the family that raised him have had a marked impact on his journey as an artist. Musically this includes his older sister exposing him to the likes of Jay-Z and Master P, to him discovering homebred ghettotech from the likes of Blade Icewood & MC Reid, the pioneering work of Detroit techno producers, and the unique flows of Detroit rappers. “If I could name names it’s tough but rapping wise first MF Doom showed me the work it takes to write rap, Lil B showed me you can just be yourself and eventually the right people will catch up”. Marcus Marcus recalls adding that the groundbreaking work of composer and artists Julius Eastman has also had a major influence on him.

    Describing his approach to writing as instinctual, he traces his first encounters with poetry to middle school and an amazing English teacher helped spark his love for the language. “It’s this intuition, this beam of light from, I dunno, the universe, ancestors, and I just start writing. The moment I hit record usually doesn’t have a lot to do with what I’ve written, and what I’ve written may turn into something later or it just may never come up.” This approach is evident on 2012’s “THE NEW Audio Album” which he describes as a lyrically spontaneous album, with everything recorded as a 1-take freestyle rap.

    His latest release is a compilation of tracks created between 2013 – 2015 and is a collage of the music he was listening to at the time, and the words they inspired. “I spend hours really looking for new music or further researching, going into back catalogues of artists that I really admire, so people like Oneohtrix Point Never, there’s a James Blake thing on there, Thom Yorke had dropped this crazy, free album that you could torrent. So I chose to do that because I made it a point to listen to music that didn’t have words. Words come to me when I hear something that’s different and it just kinda connects with me”.

    ‘D I S S U A S I O N’, Marcus Marcus’ May 2017 release is one he views as his most cohesive to date. Rather than just a record, it is an art piece and a reflection of the moment in time in which it was created. “It’s not a comfortable record at all because we’re not living in comfortable times. At that moment when it came out, that’s how chaotic things seemed, that’s how peaceful things seemed, that’s how cohesive things seemed, that’s how disruptive things seemed,” explains Marcus Marcus. Purchase of the piece includes not only the digital release but also context around the piece. “You get all the lyrics, you get how I approached the music, you get my thought process, it’s me literally in the moment, typing, letting you know my thought process the whole time.”

    2018 sees Marcus Marcus focusing on bringing the physical representation of ‘D I S S U A S I O N’ to life with installations and performances planned. “I’m planning on doing installations, I feel like with such a wild record it needs something else to meet it. To make it make more sense. If you listen to it, it just sounds like a crazy guy maybe. Yelling and going crazy but also if you really listen to it, you feel it.”’

    “Self-discovery, self-knowledge & self-love,” says Marcus Marcus of what he is trying to convey with his music. “Those 3 are exactly what it is. A little bit cryptic if you listen to my music, but if you really listen and take your time that’s exactly what it is. Because I think it’s about bettering the world around you but it starts with yourself and just pushing the limits and having fun as well.”

     

  • adidas EQT // cultural parallels between two urban landscapes

    In 1991 adidas turned to its history, providing “everything that is essential and nothing that is not” and so the EQT came to be. From its home in Berlin, the EQT symbolised the best of adidas, focusing on performance, comfort and protection to meet athletic needs. This shift in thinking has been carried over throughout the years at adidas where “premium materials, purposeful construction and the adidas trefoil” have made the EQT one of the iconic Originals.

    The EQT campaign aims to celebrate Detroit’s current cultural renaissance by drawing parallels between that city and Berlin. Taking cultural and city histories as a point of departure, there are significant similarities between Johannesburg and Detroit which can be identified through dance styles and the histories of life beyond divestment and dilapidated buildings. As adidas recognized in their development of the EQT, going back and highlighting the foundations can breathe life back into once forgotten spaces and cultural contributions, and present the possibility of a re-imagined future.

    Detroit Michigan is a city with a rich history, once functioning as the heartbeat of the U.S. auto industry and the birthplace of Motown records. Detroit, which was once the fourth largest city in America became the largest city ever to file for bankruptcy. The Motor City has closed down its factories, an underclass has formed and the city has been left behind. Many of Detroit’s buildings that once stood beautiful and proud have become urban forests. To get an insider’s perspective on the downfall of the motor city we did an interview with artist Ashley Cook who grew up in Harrison Township, Metro-Detroit.

    “The ‘white flight’ movement began well before I was born, in the early 70s. By the 1990s, Detroit was extremely desolate; there were few job opportunities. It was not until 2008, with the national economic crisis, that I started to see and feel the struggle. The situation is complex and has many facets including racism, xenophobia, class and economic privilege,” Ashley explained.

    For Ashley, what she has seen materialize in Detroit is an indication of the social and racial issues that need to be addressed and resolved before change is possible.“When a community of people are left by their governing force to fend for themselves, they eventually learn to survive and thrive with autonomy.”

    Thinking about Johannesburg’s inner city history of ‘white flight’ and decaying buildings, it echoes the sense of struggle, emptiness and a feeling of being left behind that Ashley highlights.

    Bertrams is one of the oldest areas in Johannesburg and today you can still find landmarks that indicate the wealth that was once in this suburb, these being fragmented and run down mansions.  Another inner city suburb in Johannesburg that has negative connotations connected to it such as being ‘unsafe’ and has become badly rundown is Hillbrow. When Hillbrow was conceptualized as a suburb the initial idea was for it to be a residential area, distinct from early Johannesburg’s industrial bustle, a site for health infrastructure in Johannesburg. Over the years it has been caught up in racial tensions, fear, poverty and chaos.

    While this may seem like doom and gloom, both of these cities have lives that have exist beyond their stories of forgotten spaces. This is signified by the dance styles that have emerged from these cities, namely Detroit Jit and Pantsula. These two styles quite fittingly have similar rhythmic movements and have an emphasis on footwork.

    Starting as a street style in the 70s by three brothers known as The Jitterbugs, Detroit Jit involves intense body movements, with sneakers allowing rapid foot and ankle movements. With the influence of hip hop the dance style has evolved, and jit battles have become part of this culture. Pantsula is a popular dance style in Johannesburg, which follows a similar emphasis on theatrical footwork. Born in the townships, pantsula carries a rhythmic speed which has been translated into a culture and fashion sense.

    The shoot aimed to highlight the life that exists in the city beyond the decay, and to acknowledge the cultural contributions of jit and pantsula, both of which make the foot movements the shining star of the dance.

    Pantsula and music duo Amadando were photographed outside beautiful abandoned buildings in the Johannesburg CBD. The duo moved to Johannesburg and brought with them moves from the Durban dance style, local. They have masterfully combined these with pantsula and 3 step, and have become well embedded in Johannesburg’s dance scene. They were also featured on Okmalumkoolkat’s single ‘Gqi!’ and are pairing their dance with the music they produce.

    Through the technique called Photogrammetry, and as a direct visual representation of the connections between Detroit and Johannesburg, images of Detroit’s abandoned buildings by photographer Tony Katai have been incorporated into the Johannesburg editorial to reflect the beauty, the decay and the possibilities both cities hold.

    Models: Sifiso Bright Dlamini & Andile Siyangaphi

    Post production: Lex Trickett

    Photography & Styling: Jamal Nxedlana

    Makeup: Orli Meiri

     

  • Danny Brown- Detroit Ice Age

    As he moved deeper into his own psychosis, whose onset he had recognized during his year at the hospital, he welcomed this journey into a familiar land, zones of twilight. At dawn, after driving all night, they reached the suburbs of Hell– The Atrocity Exhibition, J.G Ballard, 1970.

    Staring at the devils face but you can’t stop laughing- Atrocity Exhibition, Danny Brown, 2016.

    Danny Brown’s latest album is the work of debauched 2016 Dante, clinically detailing the levels of his personal hell. It’s production is not so much futuristic as beamed in from some parallel universe where the bombs dropped long ago. In Atrocity Exhibition, we hear the diary of a decadent recluse holed up in the suburbs around the decaying city of Detroit-  phone off the hook but still ringing, residue on mirrors. His voice and lyrics range from resigned to hysterical. On the incredible ‘Tell Me What I Don’t Know’, he is a steely witness to the human cost of the drug game.  On other tracks,  he is a high-pitched maniac lost in a horror house of hallucinations and waking nightmares. He delivers the most coldly hilarious line about celebrity life I’ve ever heard- ‘nosebleeds on red carpet, but the colour just blends in’, and sicko life advice like  ‘ the one thing I’ve learnt is don’t nod off with your motherfucking cigarette burning.’  The album would be morbid if it didn’t sound so invigorating. The moment when the beat drops on ‘When it Rain’, the psychedelic guitars which blaze through ‘Dance In The Water.’  The manic creativity on this album is reminiscent of peak Outkast, who Brown explicitly quotes on ‘Today’. But whereas Andre 3000 and Big Boi moved in a universe lit by warmth and spirituality, he speaks from a perspective leached of hope. This is a winter album, which sounds like walking down the wrong alleyway, in the wrong city. Pain and pleasures are indistinguishable in this frigid depressive landscape.

    The phrase ‘cold world’ appears throughout the album. In the past other hip hop artists have used this as a shorthand for the chilling effect of poverty, despair and deprivation. The haunting ‘Cold World’ on GZA’s Liquid Swordz, the entirety of Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein (‘it’s a cold world out there… tell me about it sometimes I feel a little frosty myself’).

    But Brown looks further across the Atlantic to find inspiration for his personal ice age. The title itself links Brown into an unexpected circuit of British eccentrics.  It was first used in a book of the same age by the great writer J.G Ballard. For Ballard, the exhibition was the media landscape created during the Cold War, in which the horrors of nuclear annihilation and the Vietnam War comfortably existed alongside Hollywood stars and advertising billboards. In 1980, it was repurposed as the opening song  of Joy Division’s second and final album Closer. Over drums that sound like a Satanic choir, singer Ian Curtis invites you to a world with ‘mass murder on a scale you’ve never seen.’ Two months before the album was released, Curtis had committed suicide. In the years since this tragic end, the band’s stature has only grown, its music retaining an elemental power transcending the time it was made. As cultural theorist Mark Fisher suggests, the band drew a sense of foreboding from the era it was made (1977-80). A time when politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Regan pioneered the shift towards an increasingly unequal and brutal neoliberal capitalism. We live in the ruins of this counterrevolution, a world where high levels of economic stress incubate chronic rates of depression, substance abuse, alienation and despair. The exact same personal effects which Brown confronts with such raw honesty. And the rabbit hole runs even deeper. The original American edition of Ballard’s book was pulped by its’ publishers because of a section called ‘Why I want to Fuck Ronald Regan.’ Some year’s later pranksters handed this out at the Republican Party convention, presenting it as the work of some deranged think tank. The Reagan administration’s right wing economic doctrines and shady foreign policy both helped to dramatically increase poverty in America while helping to flood cities with hard drugs. Born in 1981, Danny Brown has had a first-hand seat at the intensification of urban poverty. Today’s atrocities exhibitions are captured on live stream and retweeted rather than caught on tape, but the historical thread is there.

    One final overlap- on his last fatal night in Manchester, Curtis was listening to Iggy Pop’s The Idiot, itself a cold electronic album about the twilight life of a trouble Detroit star. As Ballard put it later notes about The Atrocity Exhibition ‘deep assignments run through all our lives. There are no coincidences.’

    This background only adds to the appreciation of Brown’s masterpiece. It’s determination and focus is almost heroic, and makes the one percenter whining of Kayne or Drake sound like grocery lists by comparison.  This is sound of one man laughing into the abyss, a ‘living nightmare which most of us share.’