Roy Christopher
As seen in:
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Literary Hub,
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Covers:
music, media, culture, hip-hop, skateboarding
Doesn't Cover:
politics
Articles by Roy Christopher
Reaching Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche, the posthuman, and beyond. To declare something as posthuman is to draw a line between what is human and something that is not. In Nietzsche’s Posthumanism (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), Edgar Landgraf proposes Friedrich Nietzsche’s “overhuman” (Übermensch) as well as the cyborg as shorthands for the posthuman. The cover image of Edgar Landgraf's Nietzsche's Posthumanism designed by Elizabeth Mandel.
A Clockwork Kubrick
My mom, a lifelong artist and crafter, chronically has unfinished projects in various places around her house: a painting on an easel, a pattern pinned to some odd-shaped fabric, quilt squares pieced but apart, a half-repainted hobby horse. Once she can visualize the finished product, she all but loses interest in finishing it. I can relate to that feeling with my writing. I often approach with a question I want to answer or a curiosity that hasn’t found its end.
Reaching Nietzsche
To declare something as posthuman is to draw a line between what is human and something that is not. In Nietzsche’s Posthumanism (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), Edgar Landgraf proposes Nietzsche’s “overhuman” (Übermensch) as well as the cyborg as shorthands for the posthuman.
Drake enlists AI in vegetarian rap beef
Seemingly petty microphone squabbles have been a staple of hip-hop, but it's never quite been like this. J.Cole, Kendrick Lamar, Rick Ross, and Drake are currently engaged in a battle for rap supremacy. I'll spare you the timeline and the minutia to get to the weird part: Drake enlisted AI versions of Tupac and Snoop Dogg to get at K-Dot on his "leaked" "Taylor Made Freestyle." Drake – Taylor Made Freestyle (Kendrick Lamar Diss) (New Official Audio) While Snoop responded, "They did what? When? How?
Ballard from beyond: six of the famed author's redefinitions
J.G. Ballard, whose relevance never waned during his writing career, is perhaps more relevant since his passing in 2009. His latest book, Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007 (The MIT Press, 2023), more than illustrates the claim. The chapter "Lists, Captions, and Glossaries" includes and excerpt called "Project for a Glossary of the Twentieth Century" from the 1992 book, Zone 6: Incorporations.
The whale-wide web of undersea song
Rebecca Giggs' book Fathoms, subtitled "The World in the Whale," is a deep exploration of those largest of Earthlings, from the abject despair of a whalefall to the yawning poetry of whalesong. The whale collects our waste, the victim of both our shores and our metaphors, the giants of an invisible world adjacent to ours.
Punk rocker Jenny Toomey takes stand against AI music
The long-held promise of Artificial Intelligence was that machines would do all the drudge work and we would be left to create. In this AI-enabled utopia, assembly, construction, and hard labor of all kinds, as well as boring sorting and filing and such, would be handled by smart machines while we painted pictures, wrote poems, and sang songs together.
Humans a becoming whales in the Internet's digital ocean
Rebecca Giggs' book Fathoms, subtitled "The World in the Whale," is a deep exploration of those largest of Earthlings, from the abject despair of a whalefall to the yawning poetry of whalesong. The whale collects our waste, the victim of both our shores and our metaphors, the giants of an invisible world adjacent to ours.
"Civil War" - nightmarish exploration of war photographers' experiences
Unlike other war movies, writer/director Alex Garland's Civil War (trailer) is told from the point of view of those behind the cameras. War photographers in search of the elusive moneyshot, Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst's veteran photojournalist) and Jessie Collins (Cailee Spaeny's ambitious newbie) take their quest all the way to the top.
This sci-fi author had a secret life as psychological warfare mastermind
A celebrated science fiction author who spun wild tales of subversive cat women and psychic sex parties led a shocking double life — as the military mastermind behind America's psychological warfare operations for the US Army. In their upcoming book, Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, journalist and author Annalee Newitz's writes of learning that science fiction author Cordwainer Smith was actually Paul Linebarger using a pen name.
Opting out: the freeing philosophy of avoidance and refusal
John Oakes' new book The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without, which analyzes everything from the absence of sound to the (obvious) absence of food, uses the angle of "going without" to bring a compelling perspective to our current technologized state. As he told me recently: The act of withdrawal threatens the system—any system—which depends on participation.
Official Report on the Intransitionalist Chronotopologies of Kenji Siratori
The Official Report on the Intransitionalist Chronotopologies of Kenji Siratori: Appendix 8.2.3 is a 163 page paperback book, with an accompanying soundtrack! It’s a conceptual collaboration between cult Japanese author, Kenji Siratori, the Canadian electro-acoustic duo Wormwood, and a host of well known academics, writers, and other members of the Ministry of Transrational Research into Anastrophic Manifolds, including me! The Official Report on the Intransitionalist Chronotopologies of...
My Radical Sabbatical
I’m stoked to announce that next week I’ll be joining the teaching faculty in the School of Communication at the University of North Florida, thus ending three years of unemployment. I’ve been calling this my “Radical Sabbatical,” as I spent a lot of time on my BMX bike and my skateboard, but I also did a lot of writing. I really did a lot of writing.
BOOGIE DOWN PREDICTIONS in Chicago!
Through essays by some of hip-hop’s most interesting thinkers, theorists, journalists, writers, emcees, and DJs, Boogie Down Predictions embarks on a quest to understand the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture and what that means for the culture at large. This book explores these temporalities, possible pasts, and further futures from a diverse, multilayered, interdisciplinary perspective. Ytasha L.
Stumbling into Oblivion
I didn’t even know there was an event going on. I mean, when in Austin, The Live Music Capital of the World, one should always assume there’s an event going on. It’s pretty unavoidable. During SXSW bands play in coffeeshops, grocery stores, street corners… I was already going to Austin to visit my partner. We met there while we were both attending the University of Texas, and she moved back after graduate school. So, I go back as often as I can.
Different Waves, Different Depths
I’ve been dabbling in fiction since I started writing, though it took me a long time to feel confident with it. During a particularly dark period in my adult life, I decided I wanted to learn how to write screenplays. I’d gone through a horrible breakup, moved back home, and was working part-time at a chain record store. I was floundering around, unsure of what to do next. One night I watched Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001) for the second time, but I saw it for the first.
Déjà View
Do you ever think you like something at first, and then later decide that you don’t? A friend of mine had this happen with a popular record years ago. He was really into it, and then he said he realized it was just the same moment over and over. As much as I like several of them, when the newest spate of Star Wars movies came out, I heard my friend’s words echo in my head. I see such repetition mostly in television now. Over and over, there are stakes without consequences.
Mistaken Algorithms
Cinema is our most viable and enduring form of design fiction. More than any other medium, it lets us peer into possible futures projected from the raw materials of the recent past, simulate scenes based on new visions via science and technology, gauge our reactions, and adjust our plans accordingly. These visions are equipment for living in a future heretofore unseen. As the video artist Bill Viola puts it, When we think of the future, the images we conjure end up on the screen.
Mystery Loves Company
Column by Roy Christopher Roy Christopher is an aging BMX and skateboarding zine kid. That’s where he learned to turn events and interviews into pages with staples. He has since written about music, media, and culture for everything from books and blogs to national magazines and academic journals. His books include Dead Precedents (Repeater, 2019), (Strange Attractor, 2022), and (punctum, 2022), among others. He holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.
Mystery Loves Company
A few years ago, as I was on a Blue Line train on my way to the loop in Chicago, I was reading Tade Thompson’s Rosewater (Apex, 2016) and listening to Hole’s Celebrity Skin (DGC, 1998).
Taxonomy Season
Hey, I wrote another piece for Lit Reactor called “Building a Mystery.” Kev Harrison included it in his “5 Must Read Horror Articles 27 March 2023” for This is Horror, writing, “Writer Roy Christopher looks at the moving parts of some well-known stories and explores how writers can use these examples to create their own, in this fascinating writing advice piece for LitReactor.” More on that below. But first… I’m on Talk Your Talk with my man Alaska this week.
Taxonomies for Storytelling
Column by Roy Christopher Roy Christopher is an aging BMX and skateboarding zine kid. That’s where he learned to turn events and interviews into pages with staples. He has since written about music, media, and culture for everything from books and blogs to national magazines and academic journals. His books include Dead Precedents (Repeater, 2019), (Strange Attractor, 2022), and (punctum, 2022), among others. He holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.
Shooting Starlets: Girls Gone Wildin'
As if the transition from adolescence to adulthood weren’t hard enough, fame further complicates coming of age. One is reminded of a young Drew Barrymore, coming out of rehab for the first time at age 13 and the countless stories that didn’t end with her happy present. But there’s nothing quite as cool as youthful nihilism, especially when wielded by young women. Live fast, die young: Bad girls do it well.
How Hip-Hop Defines the Future
In mid-March 2019, Repeater Books published Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future. Its central argument is that the cultural practices of hip-hop are the cultural practices of the 21st century. In what Walter Benjamin would call correspondences, I use evidence from cyberpunk and Afrofuturism to make the book’s many claims. Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop and co-editor of Freedom Moves, says, “Roy Christopher’s dedication to the future is bracing.
Ian MacKaye: Epic Problem
Ian MacKaye is a lot of things, but he’s best known as the co-founder of Dischord Records and the bands Minor Threat and Fugazi. One of the ways he came to punk practices was through skateboarding, which he describes as a discipline, a way to reinterpret the world. Punk, as he explains below, is also a way to reinterpret the world. If languages are our lenses, then these are his native tongues. I found Minor Threat in high school, after they’d already broken up.
The Bitten Word
For anyone who’s tried it, writing is challenging in many different ways and at many different stages. The writing process itself is long and full of its own inherent challenges, but getting editors or agents to read and publish your work presents another course of obstacles. Once you’ve written something and gotten it published, the last challenge is getting people to read it.
The Bitten Word: A Writing Exercise
Header image by Roy Christopher Quoting and paraphrasing are common in writing disciplines such as journalism and academia, but plagiarism is anathema, punishable by excommunication. While endemic to the creative practices of hip-hop, the practice of interpolation is also hotly debated. The orthodox rule there was no biting, but if you can take what someone else wrote and make it better, that’s worthy of respect.
Shoegazing at Stars
In his new memoir, Spaceships Over Glasgow, Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite describes his teen years in terms eerily similar to my own: waiting eagerly for The Cure’s Disintegration to come out, whiling away the summer skateboarding, waiting to see them on “The Prayer Tour” in 1989. I did all of those things. Our paths diverged when he started making music and I started making zines. When he picked up a guitar, I picked up a copy-machine. We still revere the power of music in the same manner though.
It Might Blow Up, but It Won't Go Pop
I was planning to revisit my interview with Posdnous of De La Soul next month when their catalog can finally be streamed online. I’m not a user of those services, but the absence of their work is a major hole that will be filled on March 3rd. If you’re not familiar, you should get that way. With the loss of Trugoy the Dove this week, there’s a new, more significant hole. With his delivery, somehow both soft and strong, he was my favorite member of the group.
Boombox Apocalypse
The turntable is easily the most iconic cultural artifact associated with hip-hop culture, but the advent and adoption of the boombox had as much to do with its spread and tenacity. Before raps were on the radio, they were on the tapes. Think of the turntable and the microphone as the senders and the boombox and the cassette as the receivers: without recording and playback, hip-hop wouldn’t have lasted long.
Answering Machines
“Welcome to the world of Pinecone Computers,” Miles Harding (played by Lenny Von Dohlen) reads from a computer manual in Electric Dreams (1984). “This model will learn with you, so type your name and press Enter key to begin.” Since the big-screen tales of the 1980s PC-era, the idea of machines merging with humans has been a tenacious trope in popular culture. In Tron (1982) Kevin Flynn (played by Jeff Bridges) was sucked through a laser into the digital realm.
The Wiregrass Local Podcast
This week I was a guest on The Wiregrass Local podcast with my dude Justin April. We talked about making zines, working on magazines, drawing logos, writing books, and other things we both learned growing up in skateboarding culture. As mentioned in the podcast, for the month of January, I have a small collection of drawings and designs hanging at Reset Mercantile in Dothan, Alabama. The opening is this Friday, January 6th, from 5-8pm, during Dothan’s First Friday Art Crawl.
discontents zine
Some of my old zine-making friends (Patrick Barber and Craig Gates) and I recently decided to return to our roots and make a new zine. The pilot issue is available from Impeller Press. Cover art by Tae Won Yu. Cover printed by Patrick Barber.
HEADTUBE zine -
In the early 00s, I was trying to pull together a lot of influences.HEADTUBEwas my attempt to return to BMX zine-making while maintaining my other, newfound interests. The original idea drivingwas to unify the bicycle-riding attitude across styles. Cyclists, mountain bikers, fixed-gear heads, and BMX all have different styles and terrains, but there’s still a view they all share. That shared space was wherewas going to live.
The Edible Complex: Food-based tips for research and editing
Header image made with Put Words Between Buns by Ian Bogost. Drawings by Roy Christopher. The process of writing is one of those things that eludes even those of us who do it every day. Sometimes sentences just pour out of you. Sometimes you go weeks with nothing. When I'm in the flow of the sentences, I'm always trying to figure out how to make them the best I can. When I'm in the nothing of the nothingness, I'm always trying to figure out ways to recalibrate my approach.
Walk This Way -
I was in the tenth grade when Run-DMC’s “Walk This Way” came out. I remember hearing it and feeling like something truly unique was happening. Raw, raucous, and rocking. It brought together fans of both traditional rock n’ roll and rebellious hip-hop. Recently, I pitched the song to a book series specifically about individual songs, but they didn’t agree on the impact or the import of it.
wow&flutter -
In 1997, I put out a zine called wow&flutter [.pdf]. It was an attempt to merge two of my main musical interests at the time, turntablism and experimental noise. I interviewed DJ QBert, DJ Spooky, John Duncan, and Daniel Menche, and reviewed records from the rapidly expanding releases of ambient, noise, and turntable artists. I lived in Seattle at the time, and there was so much going on in all of these areas.
Raking Leaves
For the last couple of weeks I've been busy with writing and editing The Medium Picture (forthcoming from Zer0 Books) as is usual these days, but also made a public appearance, released a new excerpt, celebrated an anniversary, and kicked off a new project (more on the latter later). All the details follow. Read on! Last week I read the prologue to my novel-in-progress, Hope for Boats, to the Rotary Club of Elba, Alabama, on which Elbo, the fictional town in the story, is loosely based.
Dashboard Dysfunctional
When we try to draw a line at the limits of our comfort with technology, we make a statement about what we think is too much technology. My favorite example is the bicycle. As much as I love computers and stereos, the analog interface of the bicycle is the perfect amount of technology to me. The difference in realms of these contrivances-- analog/digital, muscular/mental--may have more to do with our comfort than we think.
“Hope for Boats”: A Prologue Reading
On October 11, 2022, I read the Prologue of my story “Hope for Boats” to the Rotary Club of Elba, Alabama, on which the fictional town in the story is loosely based. You can read the excerpt along with me at Malarkey Books. VIDEO Many thanks to Courtney Pelham for setting this up, the Rotary Club for their time and interest, and Cindy Bayer for filming. The story remains in-progress.
Gaming the Change
Though he said the above in 1980, Buckminster Fuller had been predicting that technology would solve the world’s poverty problem for decades before, and in 1977 the National Academy of Sciences confirmed that it would happen within one generation in their World Food and Nutrition Study.
When Everyone’s a Winner
Around the turn of the millennium, the long tail, [5] the internet-enabled power law that allows for millions of products to be sold regardless of shelf space, reconfigured not only how culture is consumed but also how it is created. It’s since gotten so long and so thick that there’s not much left in the big head. As the online market supports a wider and wider variety of cultural artifacts with less and less depth of interest, they each serve ever-smaller audiences.
Roy Christopher - Boogie Down Predictions
Join us we welcome educator, author, poet, and editor Roy Christopher to discuss his book Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism. Roy will be joined by contributor, poet, and author Ytasha Womack. Essays that explore the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture. "This book, edited by Roy Christopher, is a moment. It is the deconstructed sample, the researched lyrical metaphors, the aha moment on the way to hip-hop enlightenment.
Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism (Paperback)
$21.95 On Our Shelves Now On hand as of Oct 29 10:07am (MUSIC:GENERAL) Description Essays that explore the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture. "This book, edited by Roy Christopher, is a moment. It is the deconstructed sample, the researched lyrical metaphors, the aha moment on the way to hip-hop enlightenment. Hip-hop permeates our world, and yet it is continually misunderstood.
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Through Being Cool
When I was growing up, my family moved every two years. We did stints all around the South, in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama again... My dad is an air traffic controller and to move up in that career, you have to move on. Apparently, out of consideration for me and my kid sister, we made all of these moves during the summers between school years, except one.
A Bad Miracle
While Jordon Peele's Nope (2022) is many things--a modern take on the classic monster movie, a study of spectacle, a comment on our relationship with nature, a reminder of the erasure of the Black presence in cinema--it's also a critique of our media-saturated society. My interest in media drew me in to that aspect of the film over any of the others. If you've seen the trailer, you know that the main characters are Hollywood horse wranglers, descendants of Alistair E.
A Now Worth Knowing
“How did you get here?” asks Peter Morville on the first page of his book Ambient Findability (O’Reilly, 2005). It’s not a metaphysical question, but a practical and direct one. Ambience indirectly calls attention to the here we’re in and the now we’re experiencing. It is all around us at all times, yet only visible when we stop to notice. In Tim Morton’s The Ecological Thought (Harvard University Press, 2010), he explains it this way: “Ambience” is a loaded, little word at best.
UNRELATED
Having grown up with a kid sister, I have often been fascinated with our similarities and differences. There are many examples of both, but our ways in the world and the way we see them are very different. When siblings emerge from the same nature and nurture to much different ends, the multifinality of their paths begs investigation. When they go on to excel in completely different fields, questions abound. The Baldwins, Cusacks, Gyllenhaals, and Arquettes are less interesting.
Flowers for QAnon
In the three weeks between January 6 and January 20, 2021, I followed the white rabbit, as early Q followers would say. I read QAnon blogs and watched Q-commentators (QTubers). I even signed up for a Parler account. Even in that brief span, I found an alternate reality where the pope was arrested amid blackouts in several countries, and the US presidential election was to be overturned at any moment. The Storm was supposedly upon us. Again.
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