Collaborative product is, at times, for me a bit of a running joke. So much, and so often with little impact or ingenuity. There are great things that come from collaboration, and I absolutely applaud the positives that build in some circumstances. But, I think we can all agree that there is a hell of a lot of crap out there.

Product is something I will never blog about here… except if it is rather old. For instance, I found this tee shirt (see above) while rooting around in my fathers basement this past weekend. Rawkus x Triple 5 Soul. Or, needles and threads, as the slogan goes.

It got me thinking about collaboration. Not in product, but in how two things converge in life and begin to work as a more singular force. How they, in essence, form culture. This tee shirt is very representative of things that interested me at the time. Triple 5 Soul was a favorite. Rawkus produced many of the records that, if not favorites, rooted my excitement in hip-hop and galvanized a quest to find various and broad interpretations of the genre. No doubt, they are connected, Triple 5 Soul and Rawkus. They ran in the same marketing circles, and are also representatives of a wave of “selling out” in the late ‘90s. Yet, the tee still speaks and reminds of a positive period in my formation. The real anchor to a “street culture” attraction.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 17:31 and is filed under culture, hip-hop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.