I got my laptop back and I’ve got this to say: DO NOT EVER GO TO GEEKSQUAD. Perhaps this isn’t a company-wide thing… but they’ll perhaps — or, likely — play games with you that would put the most shady of auto-mechanics to shame. Their employees are at best barely competent, some totally unqualified for what they’re doing. Their policies reek of satisfactory indifference. They are, from what I’ve seen and experienced, a large scale scam; the type of thing that makes capitalism not work and funnels money upwards to the big-businesses like Best Buy. I can’t say enough bad things about them.
(Check out the hits you get when you Google “geek squad sucks”. There’s even a website called “Fuck Geek Squad“.)
Fela Anikulapo Kuti is blasting through the place right now. I suppose if I was back working at the record shop he’d be cataloged under “Afrobeat” (such a category never would have existed at my previous job, unfortunately). But that really isn’t fair considering his albums dabble in everything from Funk to Soul to Jazz to Tribal to Psychedelic Rock. The album is 1984′s “Army Arrangement“. When it was originally released, it featured only one self-titled track clocking in at 30 minutes. The reissue, which I’ve got playing, came with a B-side called “Government Chicken Boy”, falling just short of 30 minutes. It’s an interesting way to make an album; I’m finding myself being inspired by it, no doubt. It’d be interesting to release a series of one-track albums… ranging from 20 minutes to 30 minutes. One long piece of music. That isn’t the way to SELL records, but who’s interested in that? Hell, even Odd Future gives all their shit out for free.
I don’t know how I feel about Odd Future. And apparently the rest of the music world doesn’t either… not to say they aren’t paying attention. Here’s a short list of some big time names who’ve released articles on them just recently: Esquire, The Village Voice, and The New York Times. Their lyrical content involves the grotesque, the terrifying, the over-the-top, and couches. The Village Voice article preaches: “artists need to be able to say absolutely anything in order to properly function”. I don’t disagree with that, it’s hard to. Go to a Modern Art exhibit once, stroll the crowd; I guarantee you’ll hear the question uttered from someone: “what is the point of this?”. The easiest way to answer that question is expression. The artist is expressing him/herself. With someone else, it’d be hard to imagine how rape, kidnapping, and murder scenarios could equal artistic expression. I almost see them as the Dada equivalent of the rap world. Their over-the-top, nihilistic nothingness is a reaction to the seriousness of other independent hip-hop; the way Dada reacted to the “artist in the tower” notions of Jackson Pollack and his merry band of Abstract Expressionists. Or maybe they’re just trying to piss-off Christian Conservatives.
-Sonny
