Weekend Reads (Aug 5): Hip-Hop History, Slowcore, AI vs. the Bible, TV Remotes, Pee-wee Herman
Recommended weekend reading material for August 5, 2023.
In case you missed it, I recently announced a series of giveaways that I’m doing for Opus subscribers to celebrate the site crossing the 7,000 post milestone. There are giveaways for both paid and free subscribers with some really cool prizes, including some gorgeous artwork and one of my favorite books that I discovered this year.
The winners will be selected on September 1, 2023, so you have all of August to subscribe and enter if you haven’t already.
Now, on to this week’s links…
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Hip-hop turns 50 this year, and its growth and popularity were fueled, in part, by these tools and technology.
Hip-hop’s ascent over the past half-century from the streets of the Bronx to the top of the charts and streaming playlists was made possible in part by new musical tech that bridged the analog and digital worlds of production. From drum machines and digital samplers to modified turntables, hip-hop artists took relatively new musical tools of the time and repurposed them in ways that have come to define not just the legacy of the tech but the entire genre.
While most artists making music in 2023 may start out with nothing more than a laptop brimming with digitized soundscapes, many of the textures that come pre-loaded onto contemporary music software were directly inspired by these chunky, metal, and plastic hunks of equipment artfully crafted by some of the world’s top engineers.
The Guardian’s Stevie Chick surveys the history of the slowcore genre, which encompasses such artists as Codeine, Bedhead, and of course, Low.
[A]s the 90s dawned, a wave of musicians across America recognised limitless potential within that restrictive format. This movement drew power from restraint, from dialling down amps, slowing tempos and paring music back to its elements, recognising Galaxie 500 — alongside kindred contemporaries American Music Club and Red House Painters — as pivotal pioneers.
Journalists dubbed this genre “slowcore”, much to the musicians’ chagrin. “It was an insult,” says Bedhead’s Matt Kadane. “We never saw slowness as the essence of what we were doing.” But the term has endured and while few slowcore bands graduated beyond cult stardom, the likes of Codeine and Duster have attracted considerable new audiences — gen Z-ers who, in an era of such information overload, find these artists’ stark power and sense of space more impactful than ever.
As with movies and artwork, AI threatens to upend the music industry and prevent artists from getting properly recognized and compensated for their music.
Mike Fiorentino of indie publisher Spirit Music Group, however, argued that although we might not always know our sources, the artists we’ve heard in our lives are almost always compensated for their work in some way. “Let’s say I wanted to write a song à la Led Zeppelin,” he told Variety. “My dad bought the LPs and cassettes, I bought the CDs, and I also listen to the radio, where ad dollars are being generated. But if you feed a bot nothing but Led Zeppelin, that bot isn’t influenced by Led Zeppelin — you fed it data. Did that data get paid for and what about those copyrights?” Unlike humans, AI can’t truly be inspired. It only works through pattern finding and some level of imitation and direct reproduction of the sounds that have been directly and purposefully inputted into the system. For many creatives, this distinction is of utmost importance.
John H. Boyles used ChatGPT to interpret Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, and the results are much what you’d expect.
Why does ChatGPT continue to produce figurative and metaphorical interpretations of Jesus’ teachings? Why is it so easy to convince the chatbot to flip its claims on something like Paul’s use of temple imagery? There are at least two possible reasons: First, ChatGPT has no account of its own training and the traditions informing these interpretations, and second, ChatGPT has no connection to lived experience or reality. As it confidently asserted when I first asked it, it has no “personal beliefs or values.”
Despite this, it vigorously pursues an interpretation when asked, privileging certain perspectives and sometimes outlawing or excluding others. It does so because the words are a statistical game, not Scripture to be lived. It is only parroting what it has been trained on — which is a body of texts that it cannot identify because it seemingly no longer knows what they are (if it ever knew, and if know is even the proper term).
The original Zenith “Space Command” TV remote from the ’50s didn’t just have a cool name; it also had an ingenious method for changing channels.
When Zenith first started experimenting with wireless remote controls, it used beams of light that the television could receive to communicate a command, eventually debuting the Flash-Matic in 1955. It only took a year in the market for this idea to be abandoned due to its sensitivity to full-spectrum light from the sun and lightbulbs. So Zenith’s engineers tried an even simpler approach that didn’t require batteries at all, using sound instead of light.
The Space Command is a product of mechanical engineering rather than electrical. By pressing a button on the remote, you set off a spring-loaded hammer that strikes a solid aluminum rod in the device, which then rings out at an ultrasonic frequency. Each button has a different length rod, thus a different high-frequency tone, which triggers a circuit connected to a microphone in the television to finish the command.
This is the latest in The Verge’s “Button of the Month” series, which highlights “the physical pieces of our phones, tablets, and controllers that we interact with every day.”
It was inevitable: in light of the ongoing Hollywood strikes, movie studios have begun updating their release schedules.
Sony is the first major Hollywood studio to blink and make wholesale changes to its calendar since the SAG-AFTRA strike commenced July 14 (this doesn’t include smaller specialty films that have moved as a result of the dual writers and actors strike). Sony’s announcement confirms cinema owners’ worst fears that the calendar for both this year and next will see major disruptions.
Other studios are still in a wait-and-see mode in terms of their big fall and winter tentpoles, but there’s no telling how quickly that could change now that Sony has rearranged its schedule. The move could be seen as a sign that the unrest gripping Hollywood is not expected to have a resolution soon.
Via io9. The affected movies include Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, which no longer has a release date despite arguably being one of 2024’s most anticipated movies; Gran Turismo, which was pushed back a couple of weeks to August 25; and Kraven the Hunter, which was pushed back from this coming October to August 30, 2024.
I fully support the actors and writers’ strikes, for reasons that I’ve mentioned elsewhere, but I also understand why Sony’s making these changes. In the case of Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, for example, the movie simply can’t be completed because actors currently can’t do voice work.
Paul Reubens, best known as the man who was Pee-wee Herman, died this week after battling cancer. He was 70 years old.
“Last night we said farewell to Paul Reubens, an iconic American actor, comedian, writer and producer whose beloved character Pee-wee Herman delighted generations of children and adults with his positivity, whimsy and belief in the importance of kindness,” wrote Reubens’ estate in the caption. “Paul bravely and privately fought cancer for years with his trademark tenacity and wit. A gifted and prolific talent, he will forever live in the comedy pantheon and in our hearts as a treasured friend and man of remarkable character and generosity of spirit.”
Numerous celebrities, including Jimmy Kimmel, Paul Feig, Carl Weathers, and Guillermo del Toro, have paid their respects to Reubens.
Zack Kotzer celebrates the weirdness of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. “The most curious thing about Playhouse’s success and its menagerie of material was how little it had to be translated for young audiences. Pee-wee’s Playhouse believed that children had the capacity to understand art if given the opportunity.”
Ian Olson digs deep into one of 2015’s best films, George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road.
The entire Mad Max series depicts Max’s reluctant responses to the monsters of the in-between. Max continually finds his heroism and nobility wrenched out of him when others need him, their desperation piercing through the thick knots of his own self-loathing and shame to release the good man he has always wanted to be. What we have been, what we have done, does not have to determine our destiny. The accusing voices of all that has gone so terribly wrong do not have to debilitate us the rest of our lives. These impediments are real, and they do seek our degradation. As difficult and painful as it is, as unfamiliar as it may feel, there is the possibility of taking action: to act on the principles that animated us before the trauma came, before we became accustomed to compromise, to survival, or protecting old privileges.
In response to some recent legislation in Canada, Meta will soon be removing news from Facebook and Instagram for all Canadian users.
It says the move to block news is a response to the bill, which requires tech giants to enter into agreements that compensate Canadian news outlets for content shared or otherwise repurposed on their platforms.
“For many months, we have been transparent about our concerns with the Online News Act. It is based on the incorrect premise that Meta benefits unfairly from news content shared on our platforms, when the reverse is actually true,” Curran said.
“News outlets voluntarily share content on Facebook and Instagram to expand their audiences and help their bottom line. In contrast, we know the people using our platforms don’t come to us for news.”
I’m sympathetic to news organizations that are frustrated with Facebook, especially given how the social media giant has treated them in the past. However, a “link tax” that goes against the entire ethos of the web is not the answer.
Currently taking social media by storm, LK-99 is purportedly the world’s first room-temperature superconductor. If that’s the case, then it could open up incredible new sources of energy and revolutionize entire fields (e.g., quantum computing). But there are reasons to be skeptical.
To start, LK-99 rose to fame after it was described in preprints, research papers that haven’t been subject to peer review. The gold standard, more or less, for new research is to be published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal. Two preprints were published in late July on the server arXiv, and a related study was published in the Journal of the Korean Crystal Growth and Crystal Technology earlier this year.
That makes the efforts we’re seeing now to try to duplicate the findings in those preprints crucial. But that isn’t the only issue that gives experts pause. They raised a range of concerns in interviews with The Verge.
As with all things, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
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