Every week we send VICE staff out to interview people about the pressing issues of the day. This week, Professor Stephen Hawking told students in China that the earth was about to die and that the only way we could hope to further the human species was to explore space. We asked this gentleman what his views were on this subject and somehow the interview deteriorated into this.
Plus: Click here for Pegah’s fabulous life on the second rung of the London party ladder.
Every week we recommend five videos that can be viewed on the Yahoo! Music website. This week, we’ve done a Tales Of The Jackalope special, where we’ve chosen our favourite videos from five of the artists playing our one-day concert on July 8 in South Derbyshire.
To look at this week’s choices, click here.
China believes in natural selection. They execute more people by lethal injection than any other country per year, getting rid of the unproductive members of their society. To become more efficient at it, they’ve even devised death vans that they drive into different towns to kill people in, complete with video cameras to record the whole thing and probably that “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor” song in jingle form. And you wondered why Chinese kids are better than anybody at school. When jingling trucks pass in America, kids buy ice cream from them, but in China, the kids start doing complex math problems to prove they don’t deserve to die.
Cole from the Black Lips sent us this from Europe, where they’re on tour:
Hey Vice
Last night some Italian soccer hooligans kept chanting football songs in between all our songs. We figured they were just your standard asshole jocks, but then we caught the two of them passed out like this.
Lovingly,
Cole
The Kersal Massive are three kids from Manchester who sent in a video clip to 679 Recordings to enter a competition for a Kano BMX bike. Amazingly they didn’t get it, but over the last few months, their video has spread all over the internet, spawning remixes and various impersonations.
Our new events manager Jack and his mate Will Rankin knocked together a remix featuring Slayer, but needed somebody to do a video to go with it. Luckily, when we were in Belgium last week, we bumped into our pal Dwid from Integrity and Roses Never Fade. He’s been making films and videos for a while so when we said we needed his help to do our own video remixes of the Kersal Massive, he said: “Sure” and delivered these two the next day.
Video: Kersal Massive vs. Slayer
Video: Kersal Massive vs. The Cure
You’ll have noticed that the World Cup is happening in Germany. It’s a spectacular celebration of the world that brings the myriad cultures of our lonely planet together in a wonderful festival of colour and joy. Throw a brick into a fountain in any German city centre and you’ll hit a football tourist. But do me a favour: throw it hard. The World Cup brings out the herding instinct in the human race. People are sheep, and here’s the VICE guide to avoiding them. Thankfully a tonne of them have gone home after their teams were booted out of the tournament. This is our guide to the fans who are still here.
We thought we were already well abreast of Japan’s status as current reigning Huh? culture until this little nugget pushed us past basic panty-machine/tentacle-porn confusion and into a new realm where we were like, “Hold on, this genuinely doesn’t make any sense.” It’s easy enough to follow while you’re watching, but try explaining what happens to someone who hasn’t seen it, or more importantly why what happens happens without coming across autistic. This isn’t to say that foreign language lessons shouldn’t incorporate less run-of-the-mill scenarios, like getting mugged by George Costanza and his chemist bud–in that respect those crazy riceballs have probably got the leg up on all of us. But what kind of mnemonic device is three positive-seeming aerobics girls, and why all the close-ups of shoulders? And Jesus, what is the bald guy’s mask supposed to hide, whether or not he has a thin mustache? Japan, you got some ’splaining to do.
As Eddie Izzard once said, the great thing about Europe is that it consists of 30 different countries, with 30 different languages, where no-one has any idea what each other is saying, but where everyone hates each other’s guts. This is never more accurate than when soccer is involved. We all know that sport is the garden where the flower of nationalism, stereotype, and pan-european hatred blooms free.
Elusive Swedish duo, The Knife release their new single “We Share Our Mother’s Health” on July 24th. Best described as bass-heavy, electro shock-pop, the song is set to a disturbing, sadistic computer game-esque video by acclaimed Japanese animator Motomichi Nakamura. Featuring floating decapitated heads and children marching off the edge of a tall building, the video is one of the best we’ve seen all year. The Knife will be playing major festivals around Europe this summer before returning to the UK for selected appearances over the coming months. They are amazing live and rarely play in the UK, so make sure you catch them while they’re over.
You don’t really see punks in Islington any more. Those you do see on the street usually live with their mums and dye their hair black so they look the guy from Fall Out Boy. This is what it used to be like.
I saw that guy that looks like Erik Lavoie in New York last night. I tried to take his photo and he smiled, and his smile made him not look like Erik anymore.
Unsettled,
Scott Martin
Bamako, capital of Mali, looks like a giant dustbin full of smiling ghosts looking for food. People are so poor there, they have to carry their weight of rice (or wood or plastic bags) all day long under the sun to get less than 20 euros by the end of the month. Meanwhile, Malian crunk (which sounds a bit like reggaeton) artist Don Vetcho and his friends are throwing coupé-décalé parties, drinking champagne and showing their fake Vuittons in whorehouse clubs run by Lebanese mobsters. But where the hell are those 100 Euro bills, that they’re flashing in this video coming from?
This is what you get when you fuck around with crocodiles.
Also, check out this other guy who decides to stick his whole arm into a crocodile’s mouth.
Ouch.
