Whopper Virgins and Beat Mining!

I've come across a couple of really interesting things recently which I thought I'd share with you.



The first is something I saw on the brilliant Creative Review blog, a wicked blog which is twined with the expensive but similarly named magazine. Check out the blog here, there's loads of great stuff to check out.
http://www.creativereview.co.uk/crblog/.



On Creative Review I saw this film (below) which made for strangely compelling but also pretty maddening and thought provoking viewing. It's basically about an advertising campaign taking the Burger King Whopper to some of the most obscure communities in the world, its quite interesting to see how these communiteis react to this strange food, especially looking at how they approach it, but it also left me with a srong distaste for how the film describes it, as a "cultural exchange", as if the Whopper burger was a ligitimate piece of western culture we should be inflicting on remote communities around the world or that the burger was the best cultural product America had to offer.

Ultimately why should any inuit from the tundra for example have to, or need to, taste a burger, surely there's a limit to the expansionist ideals of the fast food industry. Why should Burger King ever be allowed to infiltrate such pure and untouched communities as those featured in the film, in such an unabashed attempt to 'educate' people in the culture of fast food as if it was a lrgoitimate natural progression!!! This is cultural imperialsm at its most distasteful and Insidious. Check out the video and see what you think.







Now for something a little bit more heart warming. I heard this show on Radio 4 today and loved it, its basically a look at record collectors and beat mining, which is basically looking for tracks for specific, beats or riffs to use in the creation of new or reinvented music. Its a great documentary with some really interet people and tales from the record collecting world. It mentions Mr Scruff, DJ Shadow - who incedentally I found out has DJ'd with my manager at work - Cut Chemist and even Chas and Dave. If I ever have a life as interesting as these record junkies I'd be more than happy. Here's also a few tips to beat mining http://www.the-breaks.com/beats.php

Listen to the show here (there's only 7 days to listen to it)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hg8dq

Cheers
G x