Sneakers and Interactive Media Culture

Check out the new book written by Jeff Chang. Here’s the review from Booklist.

Hip-hop aesthetics pervade not just pop music but also pop culture, though many still find their appeal a cipher. Chang details the rise of hip-hop and rap from their origins as cultural expressions of the marginalized underclass in Kingston, Jamaica, where bass-heavy, stripped-down sounds and pointed lyrics predominated. There DJ Kool Herc, the nearly undisputed founder of rap, found inspiration and brought the freewheeling Jamaican styles to the Bronx, where they and he found favor with the locals at mid-1970s street parties. Herc’s “four hip-hop elements”–DJing, B-Boying, MCing, and graffiti–quickly took hold, and hip-hop culture flourished as a youthful underclass’ DIY mode of expression. Hip-hop didn’t grow or operate in a vacuum, however, and Chang shows how political and social events affected and were affected by hip-hop’s progress. For instance, in Loop (i.e., chapter) 1, he strings together Jackie Robinson, Adam Clayton Powell, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Reggie Jackson, Billy Martin, and rampant arson in the Bronx to explain hip-hop’s U.S. emergence. A fascinating, far-reaching must for pop-music and pop-culture collections. Mike Tribby

[from the NYPost]
Talk about sneaker wars. Customers on the Lower East Side were duking it out in the street yesterday over a limited-edition Nike Pigeon (NYC) Dunk skateboarding shoe.

Not even Big ‘Twoine — the 300-pound bouncer hired to keep order — was able to control the dozens of “sneakerheads” who rushed the door at The Reed Space store at 10:30 a.m. yesterday.

When tempers flared, cops were called to restore order. It was all in the name of target marketing and the desire to be the first.

“It was kind of crazy,” said Nico Reyes, a store manager. Reyes said a fight broke out after a bunch of people tried to skip the line that snaked outside the Orchard Street store.

Read more.

I came across this really hot Japanese sneaker site that has a vast archive of old-school and limited edition Nikes.

Check out the site.

Thanks to the guys from Fresh Heir studios for sending over some samples of their work. These cats from Northern New Jersey are working hard to crank out a new line of Spring 2005 t-shirts for their Dinamik Cover clothing line. Stay tuned in the upcoming weeks for further updates.

Check out the Dinamik Cover site.
Check out the Fresh Heir site.