Boombox clubber: “attempting to look like their MySpace profile”
➢ So, Vice Future Week – what is it? – Alex Miller, Editor-In-Chief, Vice UK, writes: “Well it’s a series of blogs (or essays – that’s how I’ve explained it to people who I’m intimidated by) about THE FUTURE.” Right ºOº. Fortunately, the essays mostly prove compelling, so here are a few online soundbites from Alex’s more focused commentators…
➢ In The Year 2022: Looking Back at the Decade – “The Islamic Republic of Catalonia seemed new and scary to a lot of people, but Islamic city-states are hardly an innovation in Spain. Prime Minister Boris Johnson was such a laughline ten years ago, like Mayor Boris Johnson before, that I think most people were prepared for it…”
Soft fashion: weighing us down
➢ Things That Need to Die Before British Culture Can Move Forwards – “British culture is in a weird place right now. Teenagers are buying their drugs on the internet, but getting their clothes from Hollister. Hardbody MCs are beefing with each other about the merits of Ed Sheeran, and Mail Online’s Sidebar of Shame is a cultural staple on which careers are born and killed… There are many facets of our culture that are really weighing us down. The albatrosses slowly breaking our necks, the clips on our cultural wings. So let’s name those things: gentrified fun… cocaine… bedroom vanity… consensus cool… soft fashion…”
➢ The Future of Fashion – “I’d like to think I’d be braced for the following bombs to drop in the next decade: China is set to rise from consuming only ten per cent of the world’s international luxury goods, to 44 per cent… The internet means that very specific city-based subcultures are catching on globally… Shops “will become more like showrooms”… The effect new browser systems will have on fashion will be similar to how East London venue Boombox was “a nightclub full of people attempting to look like their pictures on MySpace”. People will “try to look 3D, or like a computer”…”
Inevitable: Prime Minister Boris Johnson and consensus cool. (Illustration by Julia Scheele)
➢ The Future of Guitar Music – “Guitar music, despite my best efforts, isn’t dead… Somehow, according to industry insiders at Radio One, NME and (that most respected and time honoured bastion of rock’n’roll) Kiss FM; without it ever having gone anywhere, the guitar is on its way BACK… Last year, Jack White, Linkin Park, Bruce Springsteen and Matchbox Twenty all scored Billboard number one albums in the US, while The xx, The Vaccines, The Killers and Muse all enjoyed number one records over here…”
➢ Other topics at Vice include Future of Football… Africa’s rise… Drugs… Architecture… Crime…
➢➢ Shapers of the 80s ➣➣ 