N.R.Leonard

Text, colour & pattern.

Hip-Hop Posters, part 2

I hope to be starting a new online shop soon with the help of hip-hop aficionado, Jack Lewis (who I thank for some of these quotes). 

Hippa_to_da_hoppa17

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Hip-Hop Lyrics, part one

I’m not expert when it comes to hip-hop, but I often like the brazen and defiant nature of the lyrics. The sexist, homophobic, bragging about money quality puts me off, but I have selected some favourites that aren’t 50 Cent or Odd Futures, therefore, they fall into the former (cleverer) category. Enjoy part one:

Hippa_to_da_hoppa

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Leo Tolstoy

Some new Leo Tolstoy inspired greeting cards. What every person needs this Christmas.

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Winston Churchill

Ginger from The Wildhearts recently posted some Winston Churchill quotes on his Twitter page ( @Gingernyc ) and I thought they might make interesting posters. You can purchase the results through my Society6 shop, and the Urban Outfitters print shop have picked up one. You can also buy more of my older designs through the wonderful Number 83 in Westbourne, Bournemouth. 

Churchill-smal2

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Waiting is good for the soul

Waiting
An anonymous author wrote a post on a blog recently about waiting. The author spoke about how he used to happily queue through the night for gig tickets and went to record release parties to hear an artist’s new album first. In the past there was a spectacle centered around the release of many types of media, film and music were at the forefront of this.

I feel sorry for people under 30, as they will not have experienced many of these things. The immediacy of the internet is fantastic, and it has helped me a great deal in my career, but I really miss waiting for things.

Last week an artist I am fond of announced their new record; within a two days it was on the internet – it’s not released for another two months. When I first bought albums I went with friends to a local (independent!) record shop and afterwards we listened to our purchases as a group. Now most records leak long before their release date many fans experience new music for the first time alone in their bedrooms. This is sad and isn’t how something as amazing as music should be first encountered.

When Pearl Jam released Vitology I went to a shop at midnight to hear it for the first time and then went home with my brand new vinyl and listened to it again. This is one of the most memorable nights of my life, not least for the fact I saw an ambulance crash into a pedestrian barrier and spill the contents from the back onto the road, including the empty bed.

Waiting for the product does not only enhance expectations, but it also makes you want to like it. I don’t believe albums downloaded from the internet (legitimately or otherwise) are greeted with the same excitement as a record that you have queued for three hours to get your hands on. There was a ritual; the waiting and the expectations, handing over your money to a real person and then placing the new shiny disk on your stereo. After all of the build up the fan was going to listen to the album in its entirety at least twice before making a judgment. There was no listening to 30-second samples, or skipping from track to track.

The excitement of the purchase was in the waiting. There were no spoilers, forums or leaks to influence what I imagined and hoped the record would sound like. Fans spoke about how they wanted the recored to sound face to face. An internet forum can be a great way to communicate with fans of a particular thing form across the globe, but it’s not the same as actually being with your friends talking about something.

The other loss is the sense of ritual and the joy this brings, to quote Armando Iannucci: 

“There are only two things in the world that give us absolute, total happiness. One is unwrapping a newly-bought CD, and the other is seeing other people fail.”

The ability to sample tracks from a record online prior to release means you can avoid purchasing records that aren’t very good. However, this also means most people will not purchase the albums that you have to work at (Radiohead seem to be the exception), or discover the one good track as the end of an otherwise bad album.

I’m not arguing against music being on the internet as many musicians have forged their own careers by cleverly using the mass communication tools available; Bandcamp is great and has introduced me to many acts such as Pickwick and Ben Sollee that I would not have heard otherwise. Radiohead have managed to make internet releases an event by controlling when everyone gets the music rather that having some intern at a record company employee stealing a promo CD and uploading it (I know this was the case with one Spoon album because the intern wrote a blog post about it). 

The only thing more disappointing than the deflation of excitement regarding music is the flat experience most people must feel when they watched cam copies of films. At least when music leaks it resembles the final product (albeit without the experience of opening the packaging for the first time). When most films hit the internet they are a terrible compressed version with inaudible audio and flashes of cinema goers standing up in front of the camera as it’s being covertly filmed. Again, most of these films are first watched by downloaders at home, alone in their bedrooms. New films should be an event shared by a group of people, and perhaps discussed afterwards over a piece of pie like Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette in True Romance. How many people went on first dates to the cinema? 

The fanfare and excitement that music and film once brought now seems to be reserved for games consoles and mobile phones. Being a fan of neither thing I don’t know what to make of this. A programme on BBC 2 recently showed sales assistants from a soon to be opened Apple store whipping the crowd assembled out side into a frenzy. There were high-fives and chants; it looked like religious fervor – all of this for a new phone! A film or song can stay with you for you forever and can bring about memories and feelings that make you feel good about life. Essentially you use a mobile phone to call people and I can’t equate that experience with the time I heard Bob Dylan play Like A Rolling Stone in Bournemouth or waited in the cold to get the first copy of Soundgarden’s last album.

So, what am I trying to say? Waiting won’t improve something, but standing in a queue can be seen a positive part of the experience that will make you value the end product that little bit more.

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