Friday Linky

From the other moose, I give you seminal West Coast rappers N.W.A. with their debut album, Straight Outta Compton – Explicit Content Only. That’s right, its remixed so it’s only the explicit material. This brings back memories.
The site has loads of other interesting art projects. I like HipHop PopUp, an online player of Kanye West’s Graduation album that pops up the websites of brands as he mentions them. Its a pretty neat critique of the bling culture at work in much of hiphop. Also Satanic Images, which searches online galleries for photos that were the 666th image recorded by that particular digital camera.
Here is World Without Oil, an alternate reality game that ran to a conclusion last year. Depicting a world responding to an oil crisis, it engaged a lot of people with vivid imagined accounts of what life would be like. I’ve only just found this so Im only just getting my head around it. It seems like a neat way to explore this issue, although like Zeb Cook, I wonder if this is so arcane it ends up restricted to an elite – maybe not exactly the elite Zeb is talking about, but a preaching-to-the-converted thing does seem likely. It was promo’d at SXSW, fer pete’s sake. Anyway, I’m just amazed I haven’t heard about it before.
I’ve been dabbling in a new phenomenon on YouTube lately – clips of Iranian women getting into trouble for not wearing the hejab properly. Girls wailing as they’re forced into police cars, or roughly pushing aside old ladies who are trying to restrain them. It’s fascinating and troubling, and best viewed with some kind of contextual knowledge – Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis will do. Beware of the comments, where neo-Nazis, American freedom bigots, Persian Muslims of both traditionalist and reformist stripe, other Persians, Arab Muslims, other Arabs, feminists, and others conduct furious five-directional wars full of invective and lacking much illumination.
And to close, here’s forty-five years of Doctor Who clips played to an Eminem-Benny Hill theme mashup. Probably bewildering to the uninitiated, but fun nonetheless.