The Shape of Things to Come

Tony Allen is one of the most important drummers on the planet who along with Fela Kuti defined the genre of Afrobeat and inspired a host of musicians including Flea and Damon Albarn who are both featured here.  If you’re unfamiliar with Tony Allen then just take six minutes out of your day to watch this.

One of my biggest pet hates is American’s talking about Football.  That is an incredibly crude generalization however in the considerable amount of time I have spent across the Atlantic very few understand the sport.  Some do but their discussion of the game grates on me.  It’s the vocabulary, the vernacular, the description.  I am pretty sure many feel the same way about how I would describe NFL games or Baseball.  Such is life of the foreigner.  Football is the global language, once you play, all discussion, commentary and talk leaves the pitch and you can proceed to break down all cultural barriers.

This video of Spike Lee showcasing his son’s team evokes so many memories of my childhood.  Playing with the same group of lads from the age of six all the way up until 15 has provided my greatest sporting achievements and some of my fondest memories as a kid.

Football as Spike shows here brings families incredibly close together, It can also divide them for 90 minutes due to tribal allegiances.  I can’t really think of a time when my Dad missed a game and having played in three sides Club, FA Academy and School that’s pretty amazing.  We also travel 300 miles every other week to Manchester and back to watch our side.  My story is the same as millions of other young men across the globe, sport and it’s unifying quality to bond father and son is universal.  The World Cup is tantalizingly close, the greatest sporting spectacle anywhere in the globe will captivate the hearts, minds and imaginations of the youngest of boys and the oldest of men, regardless of nationality we’ll all be watching.

Hadley Wood; the home of Footballers, Jewish Rudeboys and Banksy.

With television now seemingly the best medium to export compelling lengthy narratives, Martin Scorcese joins forces with HBO to create a new period TV piece entitled ‘Boardwalk Empire‘. With The Sopranos and The Wire opening the doors for acceptability on the small screen, numerous talents have made the switch from Hollywood.  Actors and actresses have historically switched to the stages of London’s West End and New York’s Broadway to further artistic integrity and to develop their craft as thespians, but now a new challenge awaits.  Extended television dramas have unleashed an opportunity to take a narrative much further and delve deeper emotionally with plots and characters.

The TV world has always had fantastic writers and some great plots, but increasingly jeopardized by a lack of financial backing.  In the states over the last ten or so years this has changed and with the potential introduction of product placement in the UK we may well see British drama enter an unheralded era of creativity.

With David Simon’s new show Treme airing several weeks back in the States, the void left by the big two HBO dramas has now been filled for now and with Scorcese’s work rapidly approaching, the Youtube trailers certainly wet the appetite for a period drama of the highest merit.  Period dramas have often lacked zest and zeal in the past, and with Mad Men taking period drama to new heights in television, the connotations have now been firmly removed from my own preconceptions where previously costume and period settings have firmly been lodged at the bottom of the pile.

Boardwalk Empire is a 1920s Prohibition epic, written by Emmy award winner Terence Winter one of the driving force behind The Sopranos and with Martin Scorcese at the helm, backed by a 50 million dollar budget, This surely can’t fail.  A recreation of the story of Enoch Johnson a historic political mob figure who ran the Jersey Shore in the 1920s, his story transcends to the screen with Steve Buscemi taking the lead role.  Scorcese is without a doubt the grand wizard of gangster movies and this is set to have as big as an impact on television as HBO’s other critically acclaimed exports.

I have so much respect for the Creative Control project, it’s testament to how free from constraints, with a little budget and a few connections you can create the most captivating content.  If you don’t know about Damon Dash’s latest endeavor you can check my post from back in November last year.  He’s brought together fantastic creative minds, stuck two fingers up at what he has proclaimed “wack world” and has put together an inspirational project and platform for young creatives.

This documentary sponsored by Stella Artois as apart of The Ritual Project gives me a lot of faith in a number of things. Working in an industry that is awash with mediocrity, creativity and branding ripped apart by ROI, buzz-words and a continual dictation by industry commentators, it’s become so contrived. Marketing, advertising, promotion whatever you want to call it, just isn’t what it was, or could be. Everyone now is an online promo expert, referring to themselves as guru’s or evangelists, none of which sit comfortably with me. A marketing genius, isn’t a genius. Einstein, Sartre, Gandhi, Che, these guys were geniuses.

Stella have sponsored and commissioned an incredible piece of work here. It’s poetic, it not only takes us back to a time when craftsmanship was key, talent was essential and perseverance were at the epicenter, but also makes us question what we see and do today within advertisement.

As a child I always wanted to work in the creative industries, knowing very little about what that statement may have entailed, I just had a captivation and obsession with magazines, music, sleeve notes, end credits, the details in everything I saw, somehow joining the dots between fashion, publication, music, art and advertising hoping that some day I would be apart of it. This video inspires me greatly and the agency Mother should be immensely proud and so should Stella for their commitment to the project. For me, working in a digital agency, it isn’t the digital element which excites me, it’s the coming together of offline activity, making that process digital and blurring the distinctions and the boundaries between the two. This has been achieved here with a hark back to the glory days, where delicate, painstaking artworkers, creatives, copywriters and eventually painters put something lasting together, branding a wall by hand. We see the remnants of this work across our towns and cities, shop fronts and stations, warehouses and walls of the last one hundred years. It’s beautiful.

In an increasingly throwaway culture, where content, words and music are strewn across a digital space in search of what’s next, you really should harp back to yesteryear, where 50 year old pieces are still visible, weathered and warn, they tell a narrative of the urban environment, of consumerism, of individuals and of society. Where are we making our mark now, and who is going to see it fifty years from today?