Pop Culture Fixation #1: A Miracle, Some Dance, and Vintage Electronic

By JUICE Malaysia  •  12 Sep 2014 in Features

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Every Friday, the JUICE team scours the recesses of pop culture – both from the archives and the recent zeitgeist – and highlights those that shaped us. Basically just cool shit we dig.

Shmoney Dance

Are you aware of the ‘Shmoney Dance’? It’s a pretty big thing going on in the Vine circles now. What is the ‘Shmoney Dance’, you asked? Brought forth by Brooklyn rapper Bobby Shmurda, the dance steps are somewhat a variation of the classic two-step with a lot of twitching coupled with swaying, but with swag and flow so you don’t end up looking like you have a seizure. Starting out with the release of his single ‘Hot Nigga’ on YouTube as well as ‘Shmoney Dance’ by Rowdy Rebbel and Shmurda, shit came like a storm with numerous parody videos popping up on YouTube and Vine almost everyday. What’s even more amazing is known rappers like Chris Brown, Lil Wayne, Meek Mill and many more have begun to pick up on the dance move. While it hasn’t made a huge of an impact as twerking yet, we’re pretty sure this will fly by like Soulja Boy’s ‘Superman’ dance but for now, when the bass drops (or whatever it is that will get you moving), make sure you do the ‘Shmoney Dance’. SWB

Musique Concrète

While alternative electronic music is all the rage now, it isn’t something that just came about in the recent past. Ever since the reproduction of recorded sound was made possible by advances in acousmatic and electroacoustic technology (thanks to the World Wars in particular), ‘producers’ have had the itch to create something out of this world. That’s exactly what Musique Concrète (literally, concrete music) is. In this EP of sorts by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry (in 1953!) – we get haunting ambient music pieced together with clips of various noises and sonic artifacts, dubbed with operatic vocals and storylike narrations.

This is experimental glitch at its earliest, formative stages. IM

More about Musique Concrete can be found here. 

Nothing Short of a Miracle – Miracleman Reprinted

Despite how adamant the comic industry is about portraying Alan Moore as a reclusive curmudgeon, they can’t and won’t stop from cashing in on his works. While often time this would mean creatively bankrupt adaptations of the Glycon acolyte’s classics (see Watchmen and the much worse The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movies), this is one instance where we’re actually grateful of it.

After a long arduous legal battle, Moore’s lost classic, the reboot of the superhero previously known as Marvelman, has finally been reprinted thanks to Marvel – who was no hero, mind you, they were part of the fuckery that put the title in limbo in the first place (hint: the word ‘marvel’). Regardless, finally having Miracleman in hand, remastered by the original artists (with Moore credited only as ‘The Original Writer’), feels monumental — like reading mythic text that prior to this only existed in legend. As an added bonus, the series won’t stop after Marvel finishes reprinting all the issues — they’re giving Neil Gaiman the chance to end his run!

Miracleman is Alan Moore still in practice; a lot of the same thematic lines are explored in his later works and some even border on repetition. But this is the first deconstruction of the ‘superhero’ archetype, one that is still leagues better than what modern lesser writers such as Mark Millar have churned out recently. Unfortunately, the remastered art has lost some of its appeal — the comic industry is still clueless as to what good comic art is, mistaking the limited colour palette of vintage comics as an actual artistic constraint as opposed to something that was part of its original aesthetic. AOM

The reprint of Miracleman Book One: A Dream of Flying is available at Kinokuniya, KLCC.