“My ma used to give me a box of sterilised safety pins to put through my ear, bless her; this Bengali woman in her late fifties in her sari helping me out with my punk homage.”
Ronojoy Dam, Another Magazine
If you buy one book this year, make it WHAT WE WORE, Nina Manandhar’s brilliant visual compilation of youth culture through the years with first class first-person storytelling throughout.
“What we were doing back then, was rewriting the rules of being white and working class. We knew exactly what it meant to dance to black music in the era of the National Front and the racist standup comedian. Ours was a rebellion against pub culture, shit music and leery sexist nightclubs. Our weapon was obscure vinyl, made by black kids nobody had ever heard of.”
Paul Mason’s recollections of the Northern Soul scene are a must-read on Vice.com
Coming to East London this Thursday for one night only is the exhibition, ‘Fabulousity: A night you’ll never forget…or remember!’. Showcasing the previously unseen photos of the 1990s New York Club Kids by Alexis Dibiasio (think Michael Alig et al), the exhibition will travel to Milan in late September for Fashion Week, followed by the US & Japan. (more…)
The Pet Shop Boys have made a bangin’ house track for the millennial generation (I think we’re calling this EDM now, yeah?) and it’s brilliant. And they’ve used amateur footage from the raves themselves for the video.
According to the press release, the song and video (by filmmaker and photographer Joost Vandeburg) are a tribute to the way British youth in the late ’80s ‘found its own freedom with a new culture epitomised by dance music and raves’. It seems we can’t stop looking back at past times of freedom and innovation which prevents us innovating in the now. Part of the problem is that we can’t get enough of the vast mine of original material being shared online, some of it never seen before. I’m guilty as charged, I love discovering and sharing ancient pictures and footage, but I think that’s OK, I’ve done my bit of innovating. But for younger people, it’s time to step away from the nostalgic nineties, get out there, get physical and create, without endlessly looking to the past.
