“No longer do we share a single centrally-controlled cultural zeitgeist, at least insofar as music is concerned. There is now a different zeitgeist for every iPod.”

Here’s mine.

#40: LCD Soundsystem – The Sound of Silver (2007)
We’ve heard a lot of experiments in genre fusion during the past 10 years of pop culture, some more successful than others. But even in light of this new “mashup” culture, it’s hard to think of two genres of music less likely to find themselves in holy union than electronic and punk—one distant, decadent, and calculated; the other immediate and raw like a fresh-picked scab. LCD Soundsystem really nails this unlikely combo, which is why The Sound of Silver was one of the best electronic albums of the decade. Purchase Now!
#39: AFX (Aphex Twin) – Analord Series (2005)
After 2001’s experimental (and largely unlistenable, with a few notable exceptions) double-LP Drukqs, Aphex Twin’s 11-part Analord series of LP’s was a stylistic return to the deep acid grooves of his earlier work, though still marked by the choppy precision of the multi-layered sound Aphex Twin has been known for since the Richard D. James album. Played back to back, the Analord LP’s sound something like a week-long gothic rave in the mind of a demented genius.
#38: Black Mountain – In the Future (2008)
Some good old-fashioned psychedelic wicca rock. Great sounds and great songwriting, this album has a dark and mythical undertone I’ve rarely heard since Robert Plant stopped singing about hobbits. Purchase Now!
#37: The Black Keys – Attack & Release (2008)
Here’s what I love about the blues: it’s one of the most basic and most stripped-down styles of music in the world, rarely deviating from the standard verse-chorus-verse structure, 4/4 timing, and I-IV-V chord progression. And yet, within these simplest of parameters, all the suffering your heart can possibly contain can be somehow transmuted into something beautiful, intimate, and transcendent. The melodies cut into your heart and pull you out of your pain, releasing you from the trauma of being you by plunging you into a pain infinitely greater than your own, baptizing you in the tears of the world. That’s some powerful shit. Produced by Danger Mouse (you will see that name a few more times throughout this list), 2008’s Attack and Release wraps new noise around the ancient pillars of rock music, and happens to be some of the best white-boy blues I’ve heard since Stevie Ray Vaughan. Purchase Now!
#36: Brother Ali – Us (2008)
The last ten years have been extremely polarizing for hip hop music. On the one hand, we’ve seen a clear erosion of creativity in the mainstream, both musically and lyrically. On the other, the past ten years have also seen an explosion of style, substance, and meaning in the underground, unparalleled since the “golden age” of pre-gangsta hip hop in the late 80’s/early 90’s. Brother Ali is on the front lines of this new era of conscious (dare we say, spiritual) hip hop, spitting verses that are as positive as they are provocative. Purchase Now!
#35: Sonic Youth – The Eternal (2009)
Long hailed as the Godfathers of Grunge, many people consider Sonic Youth to be dinosaurs since they have been around for as long as pretty much anyone can remember, having influenced almost as many bands over the past thirty years as Southern Comfort and Zig Zags. But if 2009’s The Eternal proved anything at all, it’s that these guys are definitely not dinosaurs. They are more like crocodiles—they may have been around since the Jurassic period, but have become so perfectly adapted their teeth are as sharp today as they ever have been. The Eternal is certainly a dinosaur of an album, with huge multi-layered guitars soaked in a sea of distortion, and is one of their most accessible albums in years. Purchase Now!
#26: Tosca – Suzuki (2000)
Smooth, sexy, syrupy electronic beats, Tosca’s 2000 release Suzuki is a downtempo masterpiece. Featuring lush soundscapes by Richard Dorfmeister and Rupert Huber, Suzuki is as perfect for the dance floor as it is for dinner parties or late night work sessions. Purchase Now!
#33: J Dilla – Donuts (2006)
J Dilla (a.k.a. Jay Dee) was one of the most talented producers and beat makers hip hop has seen in a long time. Dilla’s unique style might be described as post-industrial street psychedelia dipped in musique concrete, and was critically lauded as a much-needed break from countless years of lazy hip hop productions. 2006’s Donuts was perhaps J Dilla’s greatest artistic triumph, an exquisite 40-minute journey through jagged hip hop esoteria, which made his untimely death just three days after the album’s release (after battling the incurable blood disease TTP, as well as lupus) all the more heartbreaking. Purchase Now!
#32: The xx- The xx (2009)
Often described as “make out music for cool kids,” the self-titled 2009 debut from British act The xx offers a slinky, sexy blend of rock and roll minimalism. Purchase Now!
#31: DJ Q-Bert – Wave Twisters (2001)
The art of turntablism hit a bit of an apex at the beginning of the 00’s, and DJ Q-bert’s Wave Twisters (along with the 2001 documentary Scratch) was certainly the cultural capstone. Acknowledged by pretty much everyone who matters as the world’s most talented scratch DJ, Wave Twisters was truly epic in that it was composed entirely out of hundreds of samples and arranged in a way that actually told a story (sort of like Star Wars, drenched in hip-hop references, taking place in a bizzare microscopic world). The album was then turned into a feature length animated film, which remains one of the coolest things i’ve ever watched. Purchase Now! (DVD)

Through the fish-eyed lens of tear stained eyes
I can barely define the shape of this moment in time
-Roger Waters – The Final Cut

In an effort to make my pop-culture subject into an observable object, I’ve become obsessed with trying to determine the overall shape and flavor of the past 10 years of pop culture.  We all have an immediate sense of what the phrase “the sixties” means, just like we all know what we mean by “the seventies,” “the eighties”, and “the nineties”—each decade having particular cultural and artistic elements that comprise our overall sense of “zeitgeist” for that era.

But the 00’s have been somewhat different, and our current pop-culture identity considerably more difficult to pin down.

Now, some may say that I can’t yet see the shape of the previous decade because I am still too close to it, like a fish trying to notice the water I’m swimming in.  And to some extent I agree—but at the same time, I’m pretty sure I had a sense of “what the nineties were” as early as 1997, and I’d wager that someone ten years older than me could probably say the same about the eighties back in ‘87.

Others may say that the whole “culture by decade” concept is clunky, contrived, a lazy linguistic convenience that has no real bearing on music, film, fashion, or any other flavor of the nunc fluens. Which is fair, but ignores the fact that we need some way to frame our perceptions of cultural narrative, and the calendar is just as useful as any other.  Plus, it kind of undermines my premise, and shall henceforth be ignored.

There are two techno-economic forces that have made the 00’s radically different than preceding decades, two so-called “disruptive technologies” that have brought the mainstream music industry into the greatest legitimacy crisis it’s ever experienced in its almost century-old existence.

First, the internet. We’ve seen a major decline of the musical mainstream in the 00’s, as the internet has effectively decentralized music distribution as we know it.  In the wake of the internet, MTV has become another “reality TV” station, VH-1 a non-stop nostalgia machine, and FM radio an endless, homogenized rotation of the same 20 songs.  As music was becoming increasingly decoupled from the material world of packaging, retail, and physical location, the circulatory system of the musical mainstream began to breakdown.  Napster may have been the first nail in the coffin, and Pirate Bay the most recent—but the music industry was already digging its own grave when it refused to adapt to the inevitability of life in the 21st century.  The industry wasn’t brought down by piracy, it forced piracy.

Second, the rise of the iPod revolution. Coming of age in the relative vacuum of a declining music industry, the iPod is largely responsible for one of the most significant transitions in the history of pop-culture.  No longer do we share a single centrally-controlled cultural zeitgeist, at least insofar as music is concerned. There is now a different zeitgeist for every iPod.

Taken together, these two forces have had a profound effect upon pop culture.  Long gone are the days of television and radio as the predominant shapers of our shared pop-culture experience.  It is becoming increasingly more organic, more relativized, and more difficult to control—especially as the internet slowly emerges from the perspectival sprawl of technological adolescence into a real self-organizing, pattern-making, pattern-breaking force of cultural connectivity.

But we’re not there yet.  Among many other problems, we still have major issues with quality media becoming so easily lost in the noise of quantity.  (I’m looking at you, YouTube.)  In today’s virtual world, good taste often falls victim to the dramatic (and counter-intuitive) narrowing of information people end up actually experiencing online—one of the consequences of increasing options in infotainment in the midst of the breakdown of conventional mainstream channels.

Contrary to much of the techno-utopianism so prevalent in the late 90’s, the internet has done more to entrench our perspectives than it has to expand them.  We now have different news sources for every different set of values—making more room than ever before for the most most radical extremes, with far fewer “neutral spaces” for mature, responsible debate.  Even Google has begun customizing our experience of the web according to our own past behaviors, exposing us to ads and search results that are most aligned with our browsing history.  The web has become our own personal house of circus mirrors, where it’s hard to see anything but our own grossly distorted reflections staring back at us.

In other words, we’ve seen the internet largely increasing the depth of the information that’s available to us—offering countless hours for us to geek out on pretty much any topic we can imagine—while decreasing the span of the types of information that we are actually exposing ourselves to.  It’s true that the entire world is at our fingertips—but few are willing to type enough keywords to see it all.

(Interestingly, we’ve seen the inverse in terms of our online relationships, increasing the span of our interactions while decreasing the depth—e.g. amassing hundreds or even thousands of Facebook and Twitter friends, then using the “like” button on someone’s Facebook post as a substitute for genuine 2nd-person contact).

As a consequence of the deconstruction of media and simultaneous widening/narrowing of information, the burden of “good taste” is falling more and more upon us, the avid consumers of culture who are most passionate about sharing our own individual tastes, our own personal influences, and our own unique reflections on the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of popular culture.

In his influential book The Tipping Point; Malcolm Gladwell describes two prominent types of cultural shapers—connectors and mavens:

“Connectors” are people who “link us up with the world… people with a special gift for bringing the world together.”  If you have a Twitter or Facebook following of more than a couple hundred people, you are to some degree a connector.

The Yiddish word “maven” is used to describe “people we rely upon to connect us with new information”—those who stand in the convergence of multiple cultural streams and have cultivated enough trust to gather and disseminate new styles, tastes, and trends, as they emerge in real-time.  If you are someone who puts a great deal of effort into trying to stay on the cutting edge of art, culture, and technology, you are most likely a maven.

In the year 2000, when this book was written, connectors and mavens were usually two different types of people.  In 2010, I’d bet my left turntable that they are one and the same—or at the very least, if all connectors aren’t mavens, the majority of mavens have since become connectors.

So consider this a call to all you self-identified, digitally-connected, culturally-plugged-in mavens out there: Speak up!  Share your passions!  Let yourselves be counted among the aesthetic elite who are consciously shaping the twisted, beautiful “We” that we all share!

We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
-Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy

I love pop culture.

Sure, I’m biased.  How could I not be? After all, this is the only culture I’ve ever actually known.

But still, allow me the ethno-centric space to proudly proclaim: pop culture is the most amazing cultural force the world has ever seen.

Never in history have we had such a comprehensive reflection of the human condition—whether you’d like to wade in the bubble-gum shallows or dive into the deepest esoteric waters, pop culture has it all, and it’s all waiting for you.

Pop culture does not seek to transcend the superficial, it revels in it.  It is mysticism wrapped in cellophane, sprouting from seeds planted deep in the heart of the American Tantra, and blossoming in recent decades as the world’s first truly global culture.

The ancients have descended from Olympus and taken up residence in the Hollywood Hills, trading their togas for the new regalia: blue jeans, black leather jackets, and black sunglasses—the perennial vestments of cool.  Make no mistake: these archetypal deities are alive and well in the 21st century, they’re just a little bit harder to see.  The gods of pop continue to shape our world and our thoughts, invisible patterns shining through a perpetual parade of actors, actresses, and musicians, enveloping us in a warm blanket of shared symbolism that ensures that we will always have something to talk about.

I wasn’t always so in love with pop culture.  I used to resent being born into an American mythos that seemed to me to have about as much depth as a thinly stretched sheet of saran wrap.  This was especially true as a younger man, back when it was more difficult to tease my own sense of identity apart from the media I surrounded myself with, afflicted with the same false sense of “hipper-than-thou” elitism that seems to plague so many immature aficionados.  I would stubbornly ignore and condescend pretty much anything that got pulled into the currents of the pop mainstream, turning my attention instead to the sounds of the underground—sounds that I would not only find to be far more interesting (which they were), but would also assist my own desperate struggle to feel cool (which they did), while convincing myself that the underground was somehow separate from the rest of pop culture and safely quarantined from the candy-coated surfaces of the mainstream (which it wasn’t).

But eventually, my tireless search for the ever-elusive “cool” began to flip itself inside-out, beginning in my late twenties when I discovered my new obsession with hip hop and the art of the DJ.

When I acquired my first set of turntables, I was almost immediately confronted with my own naive elitism: “I’m only going to play integral music,” I told myself. Well, it only took a day or two to find the five-or-so albums that could even come close to meeting this nobly closed-minded standard, and it didn’t take much longer before I realized that there was something fundamentally flawed in my own aesthetic sensibilities.

I eventually began to realize that it’s not so much the depth of the actual artistic expression that matters, but the depth of authenticity behind the expression that ultimately makes me shake my ass into oblivion.  This was the opening I needed, through which my own palette of artistic influences and inspirations would expand until it covered all space and all time.  The relentless quest for the sort of exclusivity I needed to prop up my own sense of separateness finally began to quiet, and a deep yearning for inclusivity began to trickle through.  I no longer wanted to play integral music; I wanted to play music integrally.

Pop culture—this unholy union of capitalism, mass production, and artistic passion—suddenly revealed her true form to me, whispered her secrets into my ear, and showed me how to find limitless beauty in even the most superficial drips of gloss.

I often say that if understanding the depths and patterns of growth explored by integral theory doesn’t help you love more of the world, you’re obviously doing it wrong.

And it is as true for art as it is for human psychology.

If your own elite sense of aesthetics doesn’t help you see more beauty in the world, you’re doing it wrong. After all, the superficial is not the enemy of the beautiful—it is beauty in its most accessible form.

But God knows that doesn’t make it any prettier….

Related:

dj rekluse Music Page
(tons of free dj mixes)


The Church of Rock

Well, my post-ISE high has spilled over into a bit of a creative obsession for the past week, the fruits of which i am so happy to share with you all!

Empty Spaces: an 80-minute musical meditation on silence, featuring Sally Kempton, Alan Watts, Alex Grey, and Ken Wilber.

This is what my Dark Night of the Soul sounds like.  I hope you enjoy.

Right click to download audio

Duration: 80 minutes (192 MB)

TRACK LIST

IMPORTANT: By offering these songs for free in my dj mix, i am in no way suggesting that this be a replacement for purchasing these tracks yourself and adding to your own personal music libraries.  PLEASE SUPPORT THESE ARTISTS by purchasing any of the songs that you have enjoyed in the Empty Spaces mix.  For your convenience, most of these songs can be bought in iTunes by clicking the links below.

Thunupa – Bill Laswell
Experience the Nature of Thoughts – Sally Kempton
Mantra – Material
Within You Without You/Tomorrow Never Knows – The Beatles
To Know That You Are God – Alan Watts
Raghupati – Bhagavan Das and Mike D.
Ghost Dance – Tomahawk
Roads – Portishead
Weathered Stone – Aphex Twin
Integral Spiritual Experience Meditation – Sally Kempton
Who Am I? – Peace Orchestra
Locomotion – Plastikman
Dark Night of the Soul – David Lynch and Danger Mouse
Empty Spaces – Pink Floyd
Farewell Ferengistan – Banco De Gaia
Best Mamgu Ever – Underworld
Everpresent – Ken Wilber (TSO)
Cat People – Cujo (Amon Tobin)
The Vast Expanse – Alex Grey
Final Home (Piano Mix) – DJ Krush & Esthero
DLZ – TV on the Radio
National Anthem – Radiohead
Lonely Soul – U.N.K.L.E.
Complications of the Flesh – Nine Inch Nails
10 Ghosts II – Nine Inch Nails
Sala – Tosca
The Ultimate Experiment – Ken Wilber
Splitting the Atom – Massive Attack
Banged and Blown Through – Saul Williams
Get Innocuous! – LCD Soundsystem
Blood on the Motorway – DJ Shadow
Good Vibrations – Brian Wilson

I had the honor of playing the Dharmapalooza 2009 afterparty this past weekend (11.14.09), taking the stage after a gorgeous music and spoken-word performance by Stuart Davis.  After driving through a nerve-racking snow storm from Denver to Boulder, and then realizing that there were only about 25-30 people at the studio, it initially did not seem like the night would go very well and i wondered if i should even bother setting up my equipment.  But it turned out to be one of the strongest sets i’ve ever played (mixing five decades’ worth of music into a tight 2.5 hour performance) and probably the most fun i’ve ever had playing (thanks to the beautiful hearts and minds shaking their beautiful asses to my noise.) 

Hell, i even got Jun Po Roshi and Stuart Davis to dance, which has to be one of my all-time greatest personal victories.

Here’s a few highlights from the evening.

(Thanks to Nomali Perera and Robert MacNaughton for the videos, and to Jason Digges for the photos.)

It’s not easy being an artist—especially if you are trying to make a living.  It can seem at times as if the entire world is stacked against you, forcing you to compromise your vision or surrender it altogether in order to put food on the table.  And while the internet has proven to be wonderful for consumers of art, it can be a bit of a double-edged sword for artists themselves.  On the one hand, they can find new audiences from around the world that they may never have found otherwise.  On the other hand, it seems that today it takes something truly extraordinary to cut through all the digital noise—and even when you do break through, you run an even greater risk of your work being copied, pasted, and distributed across the web.  All the blood, sweat, and tears that go into a work of art can instantly evaporate into a fine mist of 0’s and 1’s.

In today’s entertainment-dominated culture, more artists have an opportunity to eek out a living than ever before.  A role that was once fit only for misunderstood iconoclasts is now open to just about anybody.  As a result we have witnessed an unprecedented explosion of creativity online, as it becomes easier and easier for people to explore and express their own artistic proclivities.  At the same time we have witnessed an equally-unprecedented explosion of mediocrity, as any college student with Photoshop installed on their laptop can fancy themselves an “artist”, making it that much more difficult for genuine talent to shine through the dreck.

A lot has changed over the years for artists.  But one thing has remained true since time immemorial: in order to be a truly great artist, you must live your entire life as your ultimate work, your friends and family as your grand masterpiece, your every breath as your finest creative denouement.  Now more than ever, an artist must strike just the right balance between inspiration and occupation, between creativity and commodity, between the idealism of form and the pragmatism of function.  It is a dance which, when we see it danced well, lifts us all out of the mundanity of daily life, offering us new eyes and new perspectives through which we can see the world in an entirely new way.

Bryce Widom is an artist facing exactly these sorts of challenges.  Already an accomplished painter, designer, and illustrator in his own right (as well as a beloved part of the Boulder/Denver integral community), Bryce is now beginning a new phase of his artistic career, which is already culminating in his beautiful new art gallery 1000 Views of God (featured here at Integral Life.)  In this dialogue he and Stuart Davis discuss his own story of cultivating his identity as an artist—an often painful, often exhilarating process of surrendering again and again to his deepest purpose and vision.

A monster mashup for all you trick or treaters: Things That Go BUMP In The Night

Things That Go BUMP In The Night
right-click here to download

Running Time: 66 minutes, 6 seconds

Complete tracklist below the fold….

Enjoy!

*UPDATE* I just uploaded a new version, having thrown out a mix i wasn’t particularly happy with and adding a better closing song—all while keeping the entire mix to a diabolical 66 minute 6 second running time.  If you’ve already downloaded the first version, go ahead and replace it with this one.
Read the rest of this entry

I have been looking forward to this week’s launch for a long time, eagerly awaiting the opportunity to invite you to check out a new monthly installment here on Integral Life: the debut of the Integral Life Art Gallery.  As many of you already know, art, creativity, and aesthetics have always been an essential part of an integrally-lived life. In fact, the very existence of a genuinely transformative Integral Art scene is one of the greatest indicators that we are indeed part of a bonafide cultural movement, as we have often looked to our greatest artists to scout out the unfamiliar territory ahead of us, blazing new paths through the wilderness of consciousness.

We have been working very hard to find a way to present the extraordinary talent shared by the Integral Art community here on Integral Life, and I believe we have achieved exactly this. I am very proud and excited to invite you all to check it out.

Our debut gallery features the work of Bryce Widom, an accomplished painter, designer, and illustrator as well as a beloved part of the Boulder/Denver integral community. His gallery is titled 1000 Views of God, and I am sure you will find it as breathtaking as I did.

“By painting 1000 Views of God, I’m consciously marrying my work as an artist with my spiritual path. Each painting becomes a meditation, a prayer, a moment of turning all my attention toward the divine with an open body, mind, and heart.

In this exploration, no subject is off-limits, for there is no limit to the domain of the divine. This includes both the “shadow” terrain of my inner landscape, as well as the brightest aspects of Spirit.” -Bryce Widom

And be sure to check out Bryce’s exclusive interview with Stuart Davis, The Life of an Artist: Fantasies, Realities, and a Thousand Views of God, in which you can find insight into his creative process and some of his own personal struggles eking out a living as an artist.

Of course, there is much more to the Integral Art experience than just sitting back and taking it all in. We are more than just idle consumers of art—we are also the enactors of art, co-conspirators in Beauty’s unveiling. Our interpretations of beauty are therefore at least as important as our actual perception of beauty, and certainly indivisible from the whole of our experience. As such, we want to give you the tools needed to help you more deeply perceive and interpret the beauty that surrounds you.

Which is why we are also excited to introduce you to our new Aesthetics Editor, Dr. Michael Schwartz, Professor of the Philosophy of Art at Augusta State University. Michael will offer some very special commentary for each of our monthly art galleries, as you will see in 1000 Views of God.

So you can get to know Michael a little better, we have also included an interview between he and Stuart Davis, The Complementary Dance of Art and Economics, originally recorded in 2005. Whether you’re an artist or not, we invite you to listen in on the ways we can all bring a more comprehensive, integral, balanced approach to life as a human being. And balanced doesn’t mean boring—you can rock the boat all the more wildly, because you’re aware of all the things keeping you afloat.

We have also included Ken Wilber’s masterful essay Integral Art and Literary Theory—a pièce de résistance in its own right—in which he walks us through his integral process of art interpretation and takes an in-depth look at a famous painting by Van Gogh of a pair of worn shoes.

Download PDF      Read online

I titled this letter “The Rebirth of Cool” because that is exactly what this week’s offerings strive for. This is Integral Cool. These are the perspectives at the forefront of the new avant-garde, pushing deeper into new possibilities and new expressions of creative novelty, forging the sounds and visions of the Integral movement with every brushstroke, every melody, and every written word.

After all, an evolution without dancing (or painting, or acting, or writing, or performing) is an evolution not worth having.

Special thanks to Angie Hinickle for her exquisite work creating the new Integral Life Art Gallery.

Call For Submissions: If you would like your own art to be considered for a future Integral Life Art Gallery, please submit samples of your work as well as a brief description of how the Integral vision has informed your process to Angie at art@integrallife.com

Every now and again, pop culture is forced to reinvent itself. Like an epic drama among Hindu deities, our collective tastes are born, destroyed, and reborn again, swinging like a massive pendulum from one aesthetic extreme to the other. As a new cultural niche becomes more and more popularized, what typically begins as fierce artistic independence eventually devolves into reckless overindulgence, and creative novelty slowly bleeds away until all that is left is a formulaic husk used to manufacture tomorrow’s next fads. It is usually at this point, when a particular scene becomes so over-saturated that it can no longer support the weight of its own excess, that the entire scene will die an often-humiliating death, bloated and alone on an unflushed toilet.

In the 1980’s, the music scene in America was dominated by the glut and theatrics of “glam metal.” For nearly 10 years, most of popular music was defined by sex, drugs, and machismo-in-drag, and an entire generation of youth nearly lost themselves within a cloud of hairspray. There was a void in the cultural heart of the musical mainstream that was dying to be filled—an utter lack of artistic interiority, emotional depth, and authenticity. Untold millions were craving artistic substance, and were only offered artificial decadence. Read the rest of this entry