What is Radio Clash?

You know those full body scanners in airports that peek under your clothes? Well they now are in the street too, perving at you and your car/van/truck and indeed passing school bus for those security personnel of a Pedobear persuasion…and the AS&E’s Z Backscatter Van™ (ZBV) are seemingly sold to anyone, not just government, who in the US and foreign government agencies have bought 500 already.

Really next time I go to the airport – and it’s gonna be a big if, or where I choose to fly from, I’m requesting a pat down, and won’t go through one of those machines…and you know Little Brother/TV detector/X-Files style not to trust those big white vans passing by the neighbourhood unmarked with people with laptops at the front…Me paranoid? Well when it comes to any force wanting to see me naked because ‘you iz a terrist’, I get very paranoid. And very worried for the state of the world today…not that I think I will appear in some gay porn full body scan site, no fear of that!

Really although there is a few journeys I want to make that will include flying, over the last year or two I’ve flown far less than I used to (Ethiopia/South Africa in November was the last time, and you can’t get there overland and it takes a month by sea!) this is intentional as every time the security protocols get more and more draconian and puts me off flying entirely. I don’t think I am alone in this – which is strange the airports and carrier companies are putting up with it in this recession. The short hops we and I used to do over to the continent aren’t worth all this hassle and stress. I wish Eurostar wasn’t so hella expensive, otherwise I’d take that route. Far more preferable, although they are starting to go the scanner route too.

Via Jez CMP.

LeeDM101 asked for someone to make a video for his excellent mashup and I jumped at the chance of editing Kraftwerk’s ‘Radioactivity’, Duran Duran’s ‘Girls on Film’, Mike Oldfield’s ‘Tubular Bells’ and Calvin Harris ‘Girls’ together with Attack of the 50ft Woman and Public Service Announcements from the atomic age of the 1950′s. So this video is spanning the 50′s, 70′s, 80′s & 00′s, and prog, techno, house & pop, from the atomic age to the iPod age!

Worth it just to see Kraftwerk dancing along with Duran Duran and Mike Oldfield at least!

Thanks Lee – also on YouTube (strangely the PSA public domain content has been ID’d – it’s from a documentary from Atomic Cafe even though most or all of the footage for that is from the public domain – if get DMCA grief I’ll question it as I dunno how they can content ID and ‘own’ films formed from publicly owned archive.org/Prelinger/LOC footage?)

This documentary looks really interesting, about Jamie Nabozny who after 4 years sued his school and won for not protecting him from anti-gay physical and mental abuse. Suicide amongst gay teens is many times the non-gay average; and the fact that schools tend to do very little about homophobic bullying is part of that.

Good on Jamie for wanting to fight back and help stop it from happening to others – schools are loco in parentis and such should be protecting children from abuse and harm.

If you know anyone teaching in school please forward this link as you can get a free copy and teachers kit for your students. I can’t think of anything better you should teach kids, to respect and tolerate others and that anti-gay abuse is not cool nor is it allowed nor sanctioned. It might not be visible but there WILL be gay students in your class, dealing with many issues – sometimes sadly bullying.

Via Boing Boing – thanks for alerting people to stuff like this.

How many blogs go from early 70′s folk to up-to-date 2010 grime-pop? Not that many, that’s what!

More up to date I’ve been slowly wading through the gigabytes of tunes that Wiley released via Twitter in July – 11 zip files full of new Wiley music, variable (even demos and just beats in there) but The Elusive tracks are brilliant, as are quite a few other – as with Wiley’s career it’s a mix of pop and underground grime, a real mixture. The track below – Could Be featuring Jake Gosling (with a Chew Fu beat) is as good as anything B.o.B. and the like are doing…and has become a bit of an anthem for me.

Wiley – Could Be (Cought Up In Here)

I like Wiley’s more downbeat/serious songs, it’s obvious that he’s got a love/hate relationship with pop, wanting to keep it real, keep that depth but when everyone is bopping up and down to David Guetta’s latest it’s rather hard to do both (it is possible – see Shutterbugg by Big Boi for example). And I like the honesty in this, especially the line ‘No matter what he says I can’t go against Dylan’ – a reference to his former Roll Deep colleague Dizzee Rascal.

Other tracks I like:

Value for Money, a funny song about posh restaurants – only one of the Roll Deep crew could make a club banger about haute cuisine, over a rave-house backing!

Mz Bratt – Lose Your Love (Ft. Wiley) – a pop grime gem, could see this chart like ‘Could Be’ easily.

Wiley – Days Are Long
Wiley – What They Want – something about these two and subject of some of the lyrics suggest to me that Wiley has all this planned out, it’s not the random releasing of 100s of tracks, it’s intentional, and a message to the fans – going direct to them, and involving them in the ups and downs like some grime soap opera. I think he’s going to come back bigger and better…

Wiley – Still Gonna Miss – quite an odd interesting production on this, eastern grime? Maybe it was inspired by Chase & Status’s Eastern Jam.

Wiley – Stickin’ With You (?) – a banger in the same realm as Bonkers, I could see people going mad fer it in the clubs, if not already.

And a song included but from a previous LP is Music I Like – pointing out the eclectic music he listens to isn’t the music he makes.

It sounds like The Elusive would’ve been a good if not great album, and I hope he gets it together as ‘Never Be Your Woman’ was genius – he’s working on yet again a new album. And I think it’s a great tactic – his music is going far and wide, and will be shared…so the next album will have a larger audience I reckon – I’ll certainly check it out.

You can download the Wiley zip files from here.

Here’s a track that could’ve been on the Summerisle podcasts apart from the fact I’ve only just heard it. Keith Christmas played on Space Oddity and was one of those ‘lost’ folk generation, although lost to later disinterest in the early 70′s folk sound rather than a cult or drugs, I’m guessing.

This is very much of a hippie persuasion, slightly embarassingly so – but also unusually political, p-folk? P for paranoid too, but also sums up my current mood, and also an early 1970′s mood of general confusion and political strife, which seems to be making a comeback.