♫♪  Dunk Fever - “Mall”

A spatial structure, a self-contained sphere of geopolitical biopower, the mall is a right of passage in late capitalist adolescence. Age, race, sexual preferences and gender identity are in many ways dramatized and gesticulated through consumption patterns mediated by the space. A flattened frontier of limitless cultural mileus, the mall gives you back yourself, politicized in hair twists and cargo shorts, in sequins and sneakers now in pursuit of the actualized, reified inner self.

If all interaction can be reduced to a simple “production of consumptions,” then the mall is a reflecting pool for the “production of self,” an estrangement of a certain sort of cultural production that for generations has gone unnoticed, or at least undervalued. Like the “lavender halter top and chopped-up acid wash” of Rihanna’s video for the mall-wave single “Work,” the mall serves a dull function, both the forum and reflecting pool, the communal grounds and the individual, the village and the child as one.

This ideology of the mall lives on in Dunk Fever. With soft speech-to-text lyrics over sullen deep house, the producer works the looped phrase “take me to mall” as the beat builds. The track layers tight one-shot, Casio-sounding samples of barks and breaks over a thumping 909 kick and fanned, diatonic seventh chords. Like a softer, MIDI take on Hardrive’s house hit “Deep Inside”, “mall” flips identity politics into a dance-driven gesture, the barraging return of politicized dance and desire to the club once again.

Chocolate Grinder

CHOCOLATE GRINDER is our audio/visual section, with an emphasis on the lesser heard and lesser known. We aim to dig deep, but we’ll post any song or video we find interesting, big or small.

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