This week’s death of Guru (do you know that near the end things were so bad he required a Daily Operation?) made me think about the incredible concentration of quality that hip-hop gave us in the early nineties.

Before that time I wasn’t much of a rap fan, although living with a brother who was meant that I experienced the best of what the eighties had to offer (Grandmaster Flash, Public Enemy, Run DMC, NWA, Erik B and Rakim etc. I remember loving ‘White Lines’ at the age of ten and my mum asking me if I knew what it was about. I had no idea, so she told me. I’ve been addicted to cocaine ever since). But whatever happened around the turn of the decade, there did seem to be a non-stop surge of new and brilliant work that has yet to be matched.

First, I could mention the great artists who produced their best work at that time: Dr Dre’s The Chronic; Nas’s Illmatic; Snoop’s Doggystyle; Death Certificate and Amerikkka’s Most Wanted by Ice Cube; Paul’s Boutique by The Beastie Boys; Don’t Sweat The Technique by Eric B and Rakim; The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders by A Tribe Called Quest; Daily Operation and Step In The Arena by Gang Starr

Then there’s the 80s MCs who brought out excellent new tracks that matched the best of what they had done before: New Jack Hustler by Ice T; What’s It All About and Down With The King by Run DMC; Juice (Know The Ledge) by Eric B and Rakim; Always Into Something by NWA; Mama Said Knock You Out by LL Cool J; Summertime by DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince; Headbanger by EPMD; Duck Down and Sound Of Da Police by KRS 1 and So What ‘Cha Want by The Beastie Boys

We also had the breakthroughs of such artists as Pete Rock and CL Smooth, Redman, The Wu-Tang Clan, A Tribe Called Quest, Digital Underground, 3rd Bass, Main Source, 2Pac, OutKast, Common, The Pharcyde, The Geto Boys, Cypress Hill, Naughty By Nature and Notorious BIG.

And the One-Hit Wonders: Slam by Onyx; Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat) by Digable Planets; Let It All Hang Out by A.D.O.R; Fuck Compton by Tim Dogg; I Gotta Man by Positive K; Gangsta Bitch by Apache; Jump Around by House of Pain; Chief Rocka by Lords of the Underground; 93 Til Infinity by Souls of Mischief; Regulate by Warren G; One To Grow On by UMC’s; Flavor Of The Month by Black Sheep; Mistadobalina by Del The Funkee Homosapien, Sometimes I Rhyme Slow by Nice And Smooth etc.

Obviously there are many others that I haven’t mentioned, but for me this era was to hip-hop as the late sixties/early seventies were to rock.

And I don’t think I’m the only one who believes this. When I went to see Fish Tank last year, the main character was a sixteen-year-old girl who practices dancing in an empty council flat. Oddly enough, the only music she dances to is early nineties hip-hop.

I hope you enjoy some of the above tracks.

I know I did.

(Thanks, S.)

It’s funny because it’s true. Integrated campaign films are so often packed with bullshit that I’ve stopped caring.

In other ‘news’, hats off to D&AD for popping their 2010 pre-pencil results online here.

Also, you’ve probably noticed that the vast majority of people think the Orange Cinema ads should now die. Please let it be so.

Perhaps by the time you’ve read this I will have thought of another poll.

Never mind David Cameron, I just think it’s about time the British public shoved a rolled up copy of The Sun back into the ageing, puckered anus of Rupert Sodding Murdoch.

With that in mind…

Thanks to Naughty Creative for pointing this out (oddly, I got the Twitter alert from Media Guardian and, despite a general propensity to watch any old crap to kill a minute or two, I just thought, ‘Oh, that sounds like rubbish,’ and ignored it).

It can be seen here.

I think my instinct was right. It’s one of those boring old ads where a city of people becomes amazed at something. They start smiling and snapping it with their camera phones – you know the drill. This time they’re watching really large banks of Samsung 3D TVs that show some 3D stuff that’s is, quite frankly, dull. This time, however, it also has the indeterminate gloss of pan-Euro nothingness that makes its (apparently) genuine ‘thrills’ look fake.

NC also pointed out that the credit for ad goes not to any creatives from the agency (CHI), but the Marketing Director:

‘Samsung’s campaign has been masterminded by the electronics manufacturer’s marketing director, Mikah Martin-Cruz, the executive behind the famous “Paint” and “Play-Doh” commercials for Sony’s Bravia TV.

“The campaign really captures the spirit of 3D TV and brings to life the amazing experience the technology can deliver,” said Martin-Cruz.’

I wonder what he did to mastermind it. Perhaps he wrote this piece of shit. Congrats, Mr. Martin-Cruz, you’ve made a vanilla blancmange of an ad. You may be ‘the executive behind the famous “Paint” and “Play-Doh” commercials for Sony’s Bravia TV,’ but that smacks of those movie trailers that say, ‘From the Executive Producer of Bridget Jones’s Diary’. Why would this connection cause you to give a shit? And anyway, weren’t there other clients behind ‘Paint’ and Play-Doh’? And didn’t Juan Cabral chip in with a few suggestions?

To be honest, all this article does is make Mr. Martin-Cruz look like a bit of a desperate twat, a little toddler jumping around with his hands in the air because he’s done a really smashing poo.

Well, congrats, Mr. M-C, a poo has been done and now we all know who’s responsible.

(Via The Grumpy Brit.)

Why do people make these things? Really? I have no idea why people would willingly, enthusiastically want to look like giant, grade-A, 24-carat, nailed on fuckwits. Isn’t life hard enough without going out of your way to make people across the word look at you and think, ‘What a humongous bell-end. I’d sooner eat a crack baby than spend a millisecond in the company of that utter prat’?

If any of you are gearing up to make one of these for the summer, or perhaps you’re thinking ahead to Christmas, just remember that you are exactly what Bill Hicks had in mind:

By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising…kill yourself. Thank you. Just planting seeds, planting seeds is all I’m doing. No joke here, really. Seriously, kill yourself, you have no rationalisation for what you do, you are Satan’s little helpers. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show. Seriously, I know the marketing people: ‘There’s gonna be a joke comin’ up.’ There’s no fuckin’ joke. Suck a tail pipe, hang yourself…borrow a pistol from an NRA buddy, do something…rid the world of your evil fuckin’ presence.

Such rare qualities these days…

Here’s one.

But whoever you are going to vote for, today is the last day to register.

Go on. Emmeline Pankhurst didn’t chain herself to that horse (or whatever she did) just so that you could play GTA 4 instead of deciding who’s going to run the country.

Or maybe she did.

She was, after all, a very strange girl.

Here is a selection of the posters I saw on a journey from Belsize Park to South Kensington on Saturday:

Questions: have the agency concerned seen the incredibly, incredibly, incredibly fucking famous campaign known as ‘Got Milk?‘, that has been pumping out of Goodby’s for years? If so, why have they so blatantly stolen such a well known campaign? If not, do they not check out any advertising from around the world? Did they perhaps do it in conjunction with ‘Got Milk?’? If so, why not use the endline and art direction? And is there nothing Ramsay won’t plug? Tampax? Paedophilia websites? AIDS blood in a can?

Next:

By that they mean, ‘Go and see something with your grandkids BEFORE YOU DIE, YOU OLD FUCKER.’

Last, but not least:

‘The new busy’? What the fuck is that? To me it looks like the new busy is a colossal ringpiece. By the way, these ads are everywhere on the tube, but I have very little idea what they are on about. And as for how they relate to Microsoft/Hotmail – dear reader, I am stumped. However, I could not give the first shit. To me, Microsoft is not a company I choose to make part of my life. They make Word, don’t they? Or do they? Who cares? Fuck off you boring bunch of dweebs.

Last Saturday I went to see the play Enron, which, surprisingly enough, was about the Enron scandal.

It was good, but some parts were great.

The section that impressed me most was at the end where the disgraced Enron CEO, who got 24 years in jail for being a giant shitwhistle, tried to justify his actions.

He showed a graph that demonstrated how the bubbles, ie, the foolish overreachings of the human race had ultimately paved the way for its greatest successes. One example was the first dotcom boom, where we all rushed headlong into an explosion of interest and investment that couldn’t possibly be sustained. After the inevitable crash we got web 2.0, a much safer and more sensible development of t’internet which Enron’s author argues would not have been possible without the first, overly aggressive kick up the jacksie.

Of course, this is just another iteration of the concept of groundbreakers; men and women who show us the way by pushing the envelope too far. They didn’t know how far to push it because the parameters had yet to be set, but without the pioneers there can be no progress.

Which brings me, with a weary sense of inevitability, to advertising.

To progress in any way, the industry must be prepared for failure. It must be ready for things to go wrong so that we might learn by them and move forward with the knowledge we have gained.

But in more straitened times no fucker wants to do that. For the sake of the fee everyone wants to stay tucked very nicely within the envelope thank you very much. The aversion to risk, which leads to the truncation of progress, is currently all-pervasive, and it would be interesting to see where the next boom of anything will occur.

I find it interesting that this fallow period has followed directly the all-conquering Gorilla.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I get the impression that all over the world clients are currently asking for their own Gorilla, yet would never approve one in a million years (legend has it that a client didn’t really approve Gorilla. They had to wait for Fallon to make it off their own backs and get a positive response from YouTube to be convinced that it would work).

And there’s the problem: we all need to be complicit in moving things forward or the best intentions of one part of the process will be met with a brick wall from another.

Will we see another ‘boom’ that forces progress anytime soon? Well, since Martin Sorrell is so fond of making absolutely fucking cock-eyed predictions that never come within a barge pole of reality, I might as well do the same: the next truly great ad will happen in 2012, and it will be for Brain’s Faggots.

Mark my words.

Properly laugh-out-loud funny 5 second films:

Best promo since Windowlicker:

LOOSEWORLD x Waverly Films: Reggie Watts in F_CK SH_T STACK from LOOSEWORLD on Vimeo.

3-D fun (thanks, P).

Will iPads be really cool? Of course they will.

And my favourite Tiger Woods spoof (thanks, L).