When you work in music journalism you’re flooded with promo albums. Most of them are shitty. But no matter how bad, record labels really don’t want you to leak them to the general public. They try and get around this with (1) watermarking individual albums to specific writers names, (2) asking you nicely, (3) threats of legal action. Which is all very sensible and boring.

The best bit of copy protection ever was the weird promo that Inertia released for J.Dilla’s The Shining. Taking the album title literally, they spliced bits of dialogue from the Jack Nicholson movie throughout the LP. It worked so well it took me several listens to realise that it was a copy protection measure and not included in the final version.

Here are two samples from the promo version… now plz buy the proper album (if you haven’t alread done so). Kthxbye.

Shining Breaks remix by mikolai

Body Shining remix by mikolai

We recenty stumbled across a website full of old car ads. We’ve lost the link. But we still have the images. We’re not very good at this internet thing sometimes…

That title is a little misleading. This isn’t really a guide to failure. It’s about articles that are currently sitting on the Team Evil hard drive because we can’t finish / sell them. If you’re an editor with money to throw around feel free to take some of these off our hands. In the meantime…

People you will meet at art launches
Premise: Art launches are full of scenster assholes. Let’s judge them.
Problem: This was originally going to be a ‘Twitter novel’. Then it became an article. Anyway, it’s half written – but that was all done while stoned so it’s just not very good / funny.
Sample: There’s always some old guy lurking around these art exhibits. He’s either going to be an eccentric, 40-something Japanese millionaire or a homeless man who stumbled in off the street for the complimentary beer. Anyway, the old guys are the only ones with any real money at these things and subsidise the whole event when they buy one $10K piece that no one, including the artist, actually understands.

A retrospective on Aerobiz
Premise: A 1200 word article about an airline strategy game for the Megadrive.
Problem: No one really wants to read 1200 words about obscure strategy games for a 20 year old videogame console.
Sample: When the game appeared on store shelves in 1992 it was met with much confusion and brow furrowing. It was the super-yuppie-nerd of the 16bit console library. It was Ben Stiller in Reality Bites. It was also crazy stupid addictive.

How to pick up men / women
Premise: What are the most cost effective, efficient, dignified ways of getting laid? We get a male and female to compare scenarios like truck stops, massage parlours, public transport, online dating, etc.
Problem: This was supposed to appear in Team Evil 5 – which never happened. Also, some people may not appreciate that it’s all very tongue in cheek.
Samples: You could meet up in the real world and have an awkward coffee. But why do that when you can make sweet love with a muscled up centaur called Aeon Barbosa in the Hanging Gardens of Apollo in Second Life? (taken from the women’s version)

The psychology of kid’s movies
Premise: Let’s look back at classic kids movies (e.g. Dark Crystal) and do a spot of arm chair psychology
Problem: No one wants to buy this article. We’ve pitched it to several publications… Do you want to buy it?
Sample: A mythical crystal cracks, creating two rival factions, the good natured Mystics and evil, vulture like, Skeksis. A young elf named Jen discovers that it’s his destiny to restore the crystal and save the world. Along the way he meets a girl, plays the pane flute and is emo.

Working for a men’s mag
Premise: I once spent a week interning at a men’s magazine. They hated me so bad.
Problem: This one is a hard sell. Other men’s magazines don’t really want to touch it [via camaraderie] while the sort of magazines that would be outraged by the behaviour described don’t want to really profile it either.
Sample: While I figured I could dumb down my writing and liberally pepper articles with references to ‘roots’ ‘V8s ‘ and ‘tinnies’, I quickly released that these were not ‘my people’. My ham fisted attempts to fit in were met with a mix of indifference, derision and passive aggressive mind games. Basically, it was a week of fail.

Sailing with the family
Premise: When we were little kids our father bought a boat and insisted the family go sailing. We nearly died on several occasions because no one actually knew how to handle a catamaran without tipping it over / crashing into stuff.
Problem: This was written specifically for Frankie magazine and their whole ‘back in the day’ bit. Still waiting for Jo to return my emails.
Sample: Over the next few weeks our sailing expeditions lurched from one near miss to another. Shame and failure plagued us like Whitney Houston at an AA meeting as the boat sank, capsized, ran aground and terrorised anyone unlucky enough to sail past. The old fishermen on the pier would simply shake their heads and mutter under their breath. We were basically #failboat long before the term became an internet meme.

Here are some old videogame flyers. They’re from a site called GameGai. I’m a little addicted to Yakuza 4 (on PS3) at the moment so I’m just going to post the images and get back to playing that… Sorry, am drunk / lazy this evening. Besides which, there are already plenty of articles about retro videogame artwork online. You don’t need me rehashing that for you in some half assed blog posts.

Just a fan video someone made…

We’ve been talking about a 90s revival for several years now and it looks like things are finally ‘moving forward’. You don’t have to look far to find a ‘90s themed party’ or some washed up band you LOVED back in the day touring. Seems as good a time as any to do a post about Cross Colours.

First of all, don’t act like you never wore this stuff. If you were a kid /teenager in the early 90s (and not living out of cardboard box) then you would have owned at least a couple of t-shirts. The brand was pretty much inescapable from 1990 to 1992. It also pioneered the idea of ‘urban clothing’. Long before every rapper jumped on the bandwagon, a US designer named Carl Jones decided to make clothing for the black community that also showcased a positive message.

What Jones didn’t realise is just how popular his bold colours and patterns would become, and when rappers started wearing the jeans and shirts on MTV they crossed over into the mainstream in a BIG WAY.

That’s when things went pear-shaped. You couldn’t hang out at your local mall (shouts to the Hyperdome!) without seeing a million kids all rocking mustard coloured jeans and garish button-up shirts. What had once been an underground secret was now being worn by every lamer you knew and its credibility bottomed out quicker than ODB at a crack smoking contest. By the time grunge broke through Cross Colours was dead as dead (see also Fubu, Ecko, Wu Wear).

So yeah, here’s a look back at the label that pioneered urban fashion (and would be totally relevant if you find yourself invited to a 90s party).

Almost two years ago I wrote a guide to ‘Overthrowing a Third World Country’. I shopped it around to a million lots of men’s magazines and none of them were interested. Admitting defeat, I decided to publish the article in the (ill fated) Team Evil #5. Due to a lot of boring reasons to do with $$$ and ‘not wanting to go broke’, the fifth issue never came and the article languished on my hard drive… Until now.

Playboy US / The Smoking Jacket have picked it up for their website. You can read the whole thing here. In the meantime, here are the opening snippets (and the original artwork) that the amazing Noko out together for the Team Evil version.

Sick of the 9-5 grind? Looking for a career change? Maybe the exciting world of Coup D’états is for you? The world is full of tiny, unstable and insignificant countries just begging for some new management. It’s a buyer’s market out there, and with a little bit of money, military backing and chutzpah you can take your CEO game to a whole new level.

Here are five easy steps to taking over a third world country…

1. [PICK A SUITABLE TARGET]

Like choosing the right suit for your inauguration, taking over a country isn’t something you rush into. Not without first trying out a few different options and seeing what works for you. Some basic things to take into consideration are a country’s size, its population, political awareness, geo-political situation and literacy. After all, what’s the good in taking over a country if the people can’t even read the backbreaking new laws you put in place?

As a rough starting point, you want somewhere small and insignificant that nobody in the world community gives a shit about (Cleveland?). The last thing you need is Russia or the US sticking their nose in because you just murdered “their guy” and have taken control of a vital oil pipeline.

Also, try and go for a reasonably small country — it’s much easier to secure and “subdue” any problems. Marxist dictatorships tend to be pretty high up on most governments’ “whatever” list so that might be the way to go. Also, anywhere about to spill over into tribal/religious warfare is usually ripe for the picking. West Africa and the Ivory Coast tend to be good in that regard.

2. [SECURE FINANCING AND FRIENDS]

Unless you have a lazy $20-50 million sitting in your bank account you’re going to need financing. This works much like a share float or a business proposal — you crunch the numbers, figure out what you need, add some on top for good measure, put together a prospectus and shop it round to people in the market to spend obscene amounts of money to watch a nation be taken over by force.

If you have ties to international military or political heavyweights (and we assume you do) they might be willing to give you a leg up in exchange for some future favours. Chinese mining corporations might be willing to play ball if you can promise them favourable conditions, for instance.

Alternatively, you can go straight to the people; if there’s a large expat community who have been forced to flee overseas then they might be willing to throw some money towards your project.

3. [DESTABILISING THE TARGET]

Unless you’re the US government (are you the US government?) you can’t just show up at the borders and announce your plans to invade. That’s big man talk and you don’t have the financing or resources for that kind of caper. What you want to do is destabilise things from the outside to “soften” up the target. Manipulating the financial markets is an excellent way to make a government look incompetent (See: United States) and relatively easy if you have some friends in the International Monetary Fund.

Alternatively, you can try and push for tribal/religious warfare. This isn’t really that difficult in some tin pot backwater. A bit of “he said/she said” nonsense planted in the newspapers can work wonders. Tell Ahmad that opposition forces are banging his wife. Next thing you know, the CIA will be funneling weapon money into your little shit hole country at such a rate that you can’t even spend it all.

Following this up with a staged attack against one group (wearing the other team’s uniform) will set things off nicely.

<<<READ THE REST AT PLAYBOY / THE SMOKING JACKET]

One of the nice things about working as a freelance writer is you can claim pretty much anything back on tax… Like a book on vintage Japanese print ads that you purchased a year ago and then completely forgot about.

Honestly, we don’t have much to add to this post. The ads are old. The colours are nice. The photos were taken with a Canon G10 (rather than scanned).

Does your house have views of the French Riveria? A helicopter pad? Look like it should be featured in Wallpaper magazine? No. Sucks to be you… Still, you can always look at other people’s ridiculously expensive houses online.

Architecture is one of the fastest growing areas of the internet, click on any relevant blog and you’ll find page after page of impossibly angular, impossibly expensive, designer homes. The sort of places you imagine Russian business dudes buying and then never bothering to use.

Kanye’s old website (the one people liked) was one of the first mainstream blogs to showcase luxury homes alongside the latest sneakers, MP3s and fashion shoots. These days everyone is at it.

…including us. Because looking at nice houses is motivation when you’re knee-deep in deadline hell. Which (coincidentally) is what’s been going on around here, and the reason no one has bothered to update this site in a minute.