New Releases
BTS' "Black Swan" Is the Song that Keeps On Giving
The new "Black Swan" music video is incredible.
03.04.2020
Big Hit
It's no secret that "Black Swan"—not to mention BTS' entire new album, Map of the Soul: 7—is a genuine masterpiece.
Up until today, most people assumed that the "Black Swan" Art Film performed by MN Dance Company, wherein the professional dance troupe performs a bleak, gripping, interpretive dance to the song in an abandoned mall, served as the song's only official music video. While it didn't feature the BTS boys themselves, it did a wonderful job conveying the conflicted emotion of "Black Swan" through dance.
But in line with the Jungian themes that inspired Map of the Soul: 7, no one can ever be fully understood through a single lens or interpretation. Thus, BTS has surprise-dropped a new "Black Swan" music video, this time featuring their own dancing. Conceptually, releasing multiple music videos for a Jungian-inspired song is a stroke of pure brilliance. And practically...yeah, this new "Black Swan" music video is absolutely incredible.
Throughout the new video, BTS alternates between white suits and black suits as a physical manifestation of the dualities between their public personas vs. their personal artistic passions. At various point, while dancing on the stage of an empty majestic theater, their shadows move separately with a mind of their own. As with all of BTS' best work, the new "Black Swan" music video exists in a space beyond words. By blending jarring visuals with passionate dance, BTS does real justice to the complex psychological concepts behind their music.
Through whatever personal and artistic struggles that led up to Map of the Soul: 7, BTS has come out on the other side stronger than ever.
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Culture Feature
Why "The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy" Is the Book of 2020
Don't Panic.
03.24.2020
In the opening pages of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Earth is destroyed. Now if that doesn't scream 2020 so far, what does?
In Douglas Adams's 1979 novel, which premiered as a radio series on BBC Radio4 in 1978 (42 years ago—but more about the significance of that number later), Earth is suddenly blown up in order to make room for an intergalactic superhighway. Now, in a year that has—after only 3 months, people—given us a contentious, confusing democratic primary, the death of Kobe Bryant, new and worsening facts about our climate and habitat at large, appalling leadership, and of course the rapid spread of and global shutdowns by the coronavirus (COVID-19), it seems impossible to turn to any source for comfort.
Enter The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: a novel that starts with the global annihilation that we might be heading for and then follows the characters as they cope with new realities, with isolation and loss, an endless information source that brings with it endless anxiety, and an egomaniacal, arrogant, selfish, attention-craving president of the galaxy.
<p></p><center><script async="" src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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</script></center><p></p><p>A quick synopsis for those who haven't read the novel (go read it): Arthur Dent is quickly saved by his buddy, Ford Prefect, right before Earth is destroyed. Turns out, Prefect is actually an alien and a researcher for a book called <em>The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</em>, a book that strongly resembles the Internet: an endless source of material for everything you need to know. Under Prefect's guidance, they are able to jump onto the Vogon ship (bureaucratic alien species) that is about to demolish earth.Eventually they are thrown off the ship and catch a ride on the stolen Heart of Gold, which is being piloted by the renegade president of the galaxy named Zaphod Beeblebrox (who very much resembles Donald Trump), a depressed robot named Marvin, and a very bland, devoid of personality half-human named Trillion. They hitchhike with this crew as they embark on a journey towards Deep Thought, a computer system that has the answer to the "ultimate question to life, the universe, and everything."</p><p><div id="ezoic-pub-ad-placeholder-634"> </div>
<!-- End Ezoic - incontent11 - mid_content --></p><p>So how will this book help those struggling with the current madness that is 2020 so far? Let's start with the guide itself, the thing the novel is named after. It's given to the main character–the sheepish, timid, not so confident Arthur Dent–who's stuck alone, with nowhere to go, in a confusing and upsetting time. The only thing Dent has to turn to is a super computer-like device that holds all known information–for better or for worse. Does this sound like being quarantined in your house with only the Internet to keep you company, to confuse and upset you? </p><p><div id="ezoic-pub-ad-placeholder-636"> </div>
<!-- End Ezoic - incontent22 - long_content --></p><p>The way Adams describes the Guide is like this: "The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in." So yeah, it's just the Internet. </p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-youtube">
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="0e5da447e8a653c53c7729aa19d4bbdf"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eLdiWe_HJv4?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span>
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005) Trailer # 1 - Martin Freeman HD</small>
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<a href="https://youtu.be/eLdiWe_HJv4" target="_blank">youtu.be</a>
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</p><p><strong>Next, let's look at maybe the most glaring, unsetting similarity with the novel and today: the president. </strong>In <em>HHGTTG</em>, the president of the galaxy is a two-headed, three-armed, egomaniac who before becoming president was famous just for being famous; he was made president just to distract the citizens of the galaxy. Adams even describes him as an "adventurer, ex-hippie, good-timer, (crook? quite possibly), manic self-publicist, terribly bad at personal relationships, often thought to be completely out to lunch." Later on in the novel, he writes: "[He's] pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn't understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid. He was renowned for being amazingly clever and quite clearly was so—but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence the act. He preferred people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous."</p><p><div id="ezoic-pub-ad-placeholder-637"> </div>
<!-- End Ezoic - incontent3 - longer_content --></p>
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Now that you've flooded Instagram with photos of black squares, it's time to hunker down for some real activism.
If you're a white person, you're sitting on top of about four centuries of institutionalized racism. In the wake of George Floyd's murder by police and countless Black Lives Matter protests across the nation, it's time to show up—with your body, with your voice, and with your brain.
<p>It's no longer OK to just be "not racist." You have to be actively anti-racist, and there's a growing list of <a href="https://www.popdust.com/64-anti-racism-resources-2646142533.html" target="_self">resources available</a> to help you do just that. And what better way to learn than by sticking your nose into a book?</p><h2></h2><p>Below, we've compiled a list of 10 books—many of which are bestsellers—by Black authors that will give you a much more thorough understanding of how deeply racism runs in the United States.</p>
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Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzM2NzY3MC9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYwNzQ5MzkyOH0.2Y3FZpKEbMrnZE49IGlysU2f6GbX7Bbs2kYss-D0HcY/img.png?width=980" id="b07e8" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="9ea5b5920a7d49470cd16386553e7c45" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="patricia hill collins" />
<p>In this 1990 book, author and academic Patricia Hill Collins takes a deeper look at the works of Black feminist thinkers like Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde.</p>
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