History's Dumpster = GLORIOUS trash! Kitsch, music, fashion, food, history, ephemera, and other memorable and forgotten, famous and infamous pop culture junk and oddities of yesterday and today. Saved from the landfill of time...
There isn't a more perfect instant food in the world than Cup Noodles.
Formerly
known in the USA as Cup O' Noodles, this tasty noodle soup has kept
everyone from latch key kids to college students to bachelor guys from
starving for nearly 40 years. As easy to make as tea and unlike it's pot
made counterpart, Top Ramen. Cup Noodles requires only one utensil, a
fork (and even that's solved by picking up plastic forks in the salad
bar of the supermarket.) In Japan, plastic utensils are often provided
For me, somehow Cup Noodles even TASTE better than Top Ramen.
And
speaking of taste, Cup Noodles around the world have some pretty exotic
flavours with Singapore having the most variety, including Spicy Black
Pepper, Chicken Satay. However, Germany has it's own flavours, such as
Broccoli and even Mashed Potato. The Phillipines have Batchoy and Mexico
has Tapatio (hot sauce) flavour. In Indonesia, they have a flavour
called Tominapple. Not quite sure what that is.
Back in the '60s and
early '70s, in a tiny kingdom in Southeast Asia very few Americans had
ever known of and rarely even heard the name of up to then, a
rock 'n roll revolution was happening.
Cambodia was a pretty
Westernized nation at the time and it's capitol, Phnom Penh was
surprisingly modern and trendsetting compared to most of Asia during
those years. Many rock and roll bands were formed during the Vietnam
war, taking rock and roll music that was brought to Cambodia by American
soldiers stationed there and blending it with traditional Cambodian
music to create probably one of the most unique sub-genres of '60s rock
ever heard, one that could have easily held it's own along with the
American and British rock that influenced it, even in if it was sung
mostly in Cambodian.
But the kingdom became destabilized with
the Vietnam war raging at it's border. The Khmer Rouge and it's leader
Pol Pot had taken over Cambodia in 1975 and began the most bloody
genocide and torture the world had ever seen since Hitler's Germany.
Over two million Cambodians, one third of it's ENTIRE population were
slaughtered in what became infamously known as The Killing Fields.
Virtually
all musicians, artists and intellectuals were sent to work in forced
labor camps, many were worked, starved or in the case of many women, also
beaten and raped to death. Many people merely in possession of these
Cambodian artist's records or tapes were killed or sent to camps to
suffer the same fates and the records/tapes were destroyed. Very few original studio master tapes survived. However, a handful of songs have survived
on 2nd or 3rd generation cassette tapes and vinyl discs that were smuggled out of
Cambodia or hidden, from which came a few compilations released in the
'90s, one which I found in 1998 and my own interest in this lost music
began.
There is a forthcoming movie that chronicles this lost era just before
the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia called Don't Think I've Forgotten:
Cambodia's Lost Rock & Roll.
Here is the trailer for it:
Here's one of the biggest Cambodian rock hits. "I'm 16" Ros Sereysothea
The movie has been in production for nearly seven years, but it is due in 2013. Check it out....It's an eye opener into rock n' roll's most tragic mystery.... Website: http://www.dtifcambodia.com
UPDATE: 1/11/14 - Don't Think I've Forgotten premiered in Phnom Penh. It's US release is still unknown. But here's a recent article about the film and some of the artists:
Check out the female voice over on them.....she sounds like your North Korean fairy godmother......
This one is for ginseng:
Here's one for a quail restaurant in Pyongyang (the fairy godmother
female voice over sounds orgasmic on this one.) And a
quail restaurant? In a nation where 2/3rds of it's citizens
starve.....Hmmmmm......:
Here's a North Korean beer commercial (you mean they actually HAVE beer in North Korea?):
At History's Dumpster, it doesn't have to be old to get tossed in. Pop fads are being created all the time. There's no reason to make it purely nostalgia. If it were, it would get boring for me as the blogger here. Quickly.
Today, we look at the craze known as "Gangnam Style", an internet meme gone berserk lately. What is it?
If you've been living under a rock (and with things as crazy as they are in the world, I can't really blame you.) "Gangnam Style" is a video and funny dance by pudgy Korean rap star Psy and currently the fastest rising song on today's Top 40 charts:
Flash mobs doing the Gangnam Style dance pop up everywhere regularly and the dance had been a regular feature of morning talk shows. People everywhere seem to love it, as videos of them dancing to it keep popping up everywhere on YouTube.
You could call it The Macarena of 2012.
And in a way, "Gangnam Style" has finally opened up the door for one of the richest known sources of sometimes excellent undiscovered pop music, known as K-Pop (Korean Pop). But I also worry if K-Pop will be pigeonholed by "Gangnam Style" There's far more to it than just this song. MUCH more. But knowing how the record and radio industry work, they always look for copycats of The New Big Thing and never really dig deeper for the hidden gems, which K-Pop has no shortage of
On the other hand, it could usher in a K-Pop music revolution, Having been a fan for years, it's about time.
Here's one of my favourites from Loveholic, a 2004 K-Pop classic, titled - what else? "Loveholic". It's a pop song sung entirely in Korean, but I like the melody. And the lead singer's hair in lights.....Nice touch.
And while for some people, the bowlegged side to side stepping with arms folded looks stupid. But so does every other dance really. And you have to admit, the song is fun relief in a sea of Justin Bieber, OneRepublic and Carly Rae Jepsen tunes that flood the Top 40 airwaves today.
For now.
There will come a time when we'll all get sick of it (some folks already are.) But for now, enjoy it while it's here.
Just don't make any YouTube videos. Please. You don't look as cool as Psy. Please......
.......and meanwhile, somewhere in rural China.......
Someone turns on a shortwave radio and looks for the BBC, Radio Free Asia or the Voice of America. But instead hears this
Meet the Firedrake.
The Firedrake is a long and complex (you could call it intentionally annoying and you wouldn't be too far off the mark) piece of music used by the Chinese government to jam foreign radio broadcasts critical of Beijing.
What makes Firedrake so effective is how thoroughly the cacophony of noise in the piece covers up the foreign broadcasts. It renders everything unintelligible. Even if the foreign broadcaster were to turn up their transmitter wattage to override the Firedrake jamming, it's still no match for the Firedrake's wall of noise.
Not that turning up their transmitter power would have worked anyway. The Firedrake jamming signals are so powerful, they can not only be heard in every nook and cranny in China, but heard CLEARLY around the world, using transmitter powers of several million watts each.
You might be wondering why the Chinese would even deal with shortwave radio in the internet age. But again, there's really TWO Chinas. And two Great Firewalls. There's the big modern, upscale and urban China in massive cities like Shanghai and Beijing. They have the internet and cell phones. And the Great Digital Firewall. But the vast majority of people live in the still very rural areas and are considered "peasant class". They have old radios. And Firedrake. They also are fairly uneducated and provide the vast majority of the farming labour. If you were running a totalitarian government, you don't want to have them hear anything that would make them QUESTION the life you have prescribed for them now would you?
And that's the purpose of Firedrake. It keeps the airwaves status quo. And the Chinese people (and everyone else around the world) safe from any bad thoughts about Beijing.......
I can't remember how I found it, but it looked like a little radio, but
with no tuning dial. You turned it on and it played a simple Buddhist
chant over and over and over again, using a microchip in the unit. That
was all it did. On it's side, it had a receptor for an AC adapter and an
external speaker (I plugged this into my stereo using a patch cord, but
the output was monaural and sound only came from the left speaker of my
stereo.) It ran on 4 "AA" batteries. It's model number was #K-747....
Nobody
I showed this to knew what it was either. The writing on the unit was
definitely Chinese. But although I can tell the differences between
Asian characters, I'm not very good at reading them individually. But
one character did say "Buddha". So that was my only real clue.
Well, I had a breakthrough a few years ago whilst searching Google. It looks like this was a chant player for Amitabha Buddhists. The chant itself repeated "Ahhhh-Mit-Abha....Ahhhh-Mit-Abha....Ahhhh-Mit-Abha.....Ahhhh-Mit-Abha" over and over.
Here's what it sounds like (though the chant my player sounds a little different....)
More on Amitabha Buddhism and electronic players.....
http://www.amtbweb.org/tchet420.htm This
little thing was a mystery to me for the longest time. But the back
story is just as fascinating as the player itself.......
