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Showing posts from April, 2020

THE JACKSON 5 "I'll Be There" / "One More Chance" 1971

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In 1971 logos were usually the preserve of  the prog bands.  Angular, heraldic or biomorphic, they spoke to male fixations of sex, power,  superiority and complexity.  Using graphic styles inherited from the 60's  underground and then diluted to be at least readable, they lent themselves to careful analysis and faithful reproduction. Rendered halfway accurately,  they could signal across a crowded comprehensive school playing field  from the back of an army store rucksack. In the world of pop,  logos were rare. The Jackson Five's wasn't always used even by their record company, but the fans picked up on it and drew it into their own vocabulary of intimacy and  emotional investment in the groups joyuous, consoling music. You saw it on smaller, personal items; Pencil Cases, Diaries and School Jotters where it jostled with coded messages and names of friends picked out in a soft-block lettering. This was appropriated from the bubblefonts of post-hippy ad  campaigns and

The Spaces Between Us. Lockdown, FolkLore, Decompression

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https://vimeo.com/40776116 Spaces between us Keep getting deeper   ("Spaces" / One Direction) Negative space , in  art , is the space around and between the subject(s) of an image. Negative space may be most evident when the space around a subject, not the subject itself, forms an interesting or  relevant shape, and such space occasionally is used to artistic effect as the "real" subject of an image .   ( Wikipedia, but you knew that) "Why so negative?"   ( attrib  President Trump, endlessly) What will we make after Covid 19?  The response of the Government will be picked over and  condemned or excused; it'll  be dramatized I imagine, maybe like  David Hare's Stuff Happens which reconstructed the making of a bogus case - of - convenience that led to the Iraq war. Surely the Health Service  and Care Sector will be celebrated in song.   Pop's response to political events is usually to personalize, to express the universal thro