This Week in Dulture…

Approx 5 minute read:

📺️ MTV blast from the past

📽️ Documenting Ye

👟 A little Shox-ed, a little impressed

💭 Record your dreams

Dulture weekly mix

This week’s mix slaps for the simple reason that it features a song that has one of my favourite music videos of all time in it - Around The World by Daft Punk. Man, if you haven’t watched that music video go do that, but after you listen to this mix because it’s full of other bangers too.

As DJ Shtoops says in the description, wait til the 17 minute mark and this thing starts to whisk you away to another world. And don’t give me the whole I can’t wait that long nonsense. You could be sitting on the toilet right now reading this - when you get off, go back to your life and put the mix on in the background and do your Friday right!

Six Years of Kanye

There’s the box, there’s Kanye’s rants, in they go. 

Now that that’s out of the way, I’m going to talk freely about this documentary, because it was actually pretty good! 

In Whose Name is a snapshot of Ye’s life, I’d say just as the world learns that he battles some major mental health challenges (2018) all the way to the time he spends in both Europe and Japan for the majority of last year. 

Starting at the age of 18, Nico Ballesteros follows Ye around from 2016 to 2024, originally getting his start volunteering to film events Ye had in his Calabasas compound as a high school art student.

The juxtaposition of the beginning of the film with the present day is so wild. 

The film starts with a montage of Kanye West, the backpack producer, fly dresser, VMA winning artist who skyrockets to stardom, while wowing his peers (Diddy, Rihanna, Pharrell, to name a few) with his music.

And then you fast forward to 2018 where the Kanye years I wish we could have back are seemingly now a moment in time.  And as you start to watch his life in 2018, if you already know what happens, the foreshadowing in a conversation with Pharrell about losing the Adidas deal, losing his wife, and everyone turning their back on him is accidentally mind-blowing.

There’s this normalization of the main character that you’d expect from a documentary, except normal in Ye’s life is the perpetual private flights, business meetings with world renowned designers, and world famous celebrities who just come in and out of the daily events like a revolving door.

You also get a very intimate glimpse into what was basically the end of his marriage to Kim Kardashian - it really seemed like Kim wanted to save their relationship.

Ye continuously references the notion of being controlled throughout the years in the doc which begs the question, what kind of output, art, music, etc. would we have gotten from him if he never felt like he was controlled?

If you followed Ye through the years, as you watch, you start to put together the headlines you see on the outside with the inner workings of his life - from the Adidas deal that turned him into a billionaire to it later crashing/burning to his troubles with the Kardashian family.  

Notable omissions that weren’t covered in the doc:

• Continuous crashing out on social media

• His marriage to his new wife, Bianca Censori

• His obsession with porn

If you have a chance to watch this, I’d recommend it.  Political/social nonsense aside, Ye is a person and a mind our generation hasn’t ever really seen - to be a fly on the wall watching his life is something I don’t think any other documentary will give you.

New Shox Incoming

I was never a fan of Nike Shox except when Vince Carter had his own pair - because when you’re from Toronto you’re a fan of anything VC had/did back in the day…aside from leaving.

When Nike started re-releasing Shox I paid no attention them - I mean c’mon, these are fugly.

However, I might be converting when these come to North America…

These remind me a bit of Flyknit Racers with an updated Shox heel. But I don’t know, man - they’re still Shox and still KINDA say “gimmicky” to me.

But they look so clean.

These are definitely an intoxicated impulse buy.

Nike Shox Z - available in China now, North America sometime later this year.

WATCH Your Dreams Fr Fr 

Think of all the times you were dreaming of flying around and it was the coolest thing ever because the dream was long enough that you realized you could fly and could actually start controlling it!

And then the damn alarm goes off.

All those dreams you could barely remember, you’re going to soon be able to watch them back.

A company called Modemworks has built a device you can speak to right after you wake up so you can tell it your dream. It will then give you imagery back based on what you tell it. The device has seven slots so you can play back your dreams daily/weekly to figure out what it all means.

If you keep losing your teeth in your dreams you’re too stressed out…or something.

I think the cooler part about all of this is that they have open sourced everything so you can build your own device too. From the software, to the hardware, to the 3D print files, you can create your own bedside dream recorder from scratch.

That is if you feel like you’d want to talk to an AI-powered device the second you wake up.

Black Mirror anyone?