Giant Robot - Superweekend If America is no longer the future of technology, it's also no longer the future of hip-hop. You can dig on your Outkast and your Jay-Z and think you're cool, but the rest of us are listening to Tricky and Roni Size and weird outfits like Helsinki's Giant Robot, who are ten times cooler than anything America has produced in five years or more. Their track "Helsinki Rock City" was a minor hit a couple of years back on MTV Europe; the video is a hilarious parody of American rap videos featuring Giant Robot (who look like a pack of WWI-era Resistance fighters) in track suits playing golf, drinking beer, smoking spliffs and breakdancing with shopping carts on the roof of some Helsinki parking structure. Superweekend is a chilled-out blend of electro, funk, dub and old-school hip-hop, equal parts Kraftwerk and Everlast and Lee "Scratch" Perry. Lyrically, though, it's pure Eurotrash: "Airport City" is a nod to the clean terminus of the Lonely Planet, with joking nods to Guns 'N'Roses and Gundam Warrior. "Modern Man" is about a hip young lad ("SMS/pheremones/sexy looks/testosterone") looking for love in the global village. "Leave Your Man" is adultery dub, smooth and cold, furtive sex in some supermodel's Paris apartment in the blue hour before dawn. And "Eyes On The Price" is half MC brag, half meditation on modern culture: "Flashing LED, red laser beam / This machine fabricates the dream." Giant Robot understands and incorporates the history of electrofunk; in doing so, they are creating the future of urban groove. They're setting the standard. Americans, as in so many things these days, are just gonna have to catch up. by Dr. Joshua Z. Ellis Joshua Ellis, raconteur and deranged futurist, has a doctorate in divinity from the Universal Life Church. He can be contacted at column@zenarchery.com or on the web at groups.yahoo.com/group/paranoid_annex, the discussion group for this column. |