Lola Smalls

Some inspiring visuals from inspiring musicians.

First up, the official video for Cee-Lo's virally popular "Fuck You".  When the song was released on August 19th via a very popular typography-filled YouTube video, it was an instant hit. Now, here's the official version (with people) inspired by 1950s diners and rejected childhood/teenage love.



MGMT's latest video for "Congratulations" takes place in the desert outside of Las Vegas and co-stars an interesting looking creature that may/may not have been in an episode of Star Wars. Maybe.

Every little girl has come across a Disney princess at one point in her life. Whether that little girl knew she was being fed subliminal messages about (skewed perceptions of) womanhood or not is not a concern so long as the little girl desired to be that same princess for Halloween later in the year. Well, Second City breaks it all down for us in their "Advice For Young Girls From A Cartoon Princess" series. If only I knew this as a child. Check out the advice from Beauty and the Beast's Belle after the jump.

The 2010 UK Passport: Every citizen is now a hipster

International travelers from the United Kingdom now have new stylish passports as they jetset across the world. Beginning this October, the new 10-year passport will replace the current ePassport, which holds a special electronic chip with the holder's information, and will also comply with the United States visa waiver program. The new passport pages have a high focus on design central to landmarks and scenery found in the United Kingdom as well as a host of new security features.


New security features include:

• Moving the chip which stores the holder’s details to the inside of the passport cover where it will no longer be visible. 
• A secondary image of the passport holder printed onto the observations page
• A new transparent covering which includes several holograms to protect the holder’s personal details

Could this be the new line-up of U.S. currency?

United States currency hasn't changed much since 1929. It was that year that the $1, $5, $10, $20, $50, and $100 bills became the standard forms of currency in banks and wallets across America. Sure, we saw slight changes to the green paper money throughout the years but those changes were made simply to secure the currency from counterfeits. With the European continent adoption of a modern, universal dollar across all countries and recent economic hurdles the American economy has been through it seems that our dollars could use a little touch up.

That's where the Dollar ReDe$ign Project comes in. The Dollar ReDe$ign Project hopes to bring about change for everyone. It seeks to rebrand the US Dollar, rebuild financial confidence and revive our failing economy. The DRP is an online free contest open to designers all over the world. Currently, the leader in the competition is Dowling Duncan--a graphic design studio with offices in San Francisco, CA and the United Kingdom. In their version of the new American currency, current US President Barack Obama is featured on the $1 dollar bill.



In addition to the cold, hard cash for all your spending pleasures, these new bills also provide both the consumer and the receiver a little American history lesson. You may notice that all of these dollar bills are vertical instead of the current horizontal format. According to Dowling Duncan, people tend to handle and deal with money vertically rather than horizontally. You tend to hold a wallet or purse vertically when searching for notes. The majority of people hand over notes vertically when making purchases. All machines accept notes vertically. Therefore a vertical note makes more sense.

$1- The first African-American President

$5- The five largest Native-American tribes

$10- The Bill of Rights: the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Consitution

$20- 20th Century America

$50- The 50 States of America

$100 – The first 100 days of President Franklin Roosevelt. During this time he led the congress to pass more important legislations than most presidents pass in their entire term. This helped fight the economic crises at the time of the great depression. Ever since, every new president has been judged on how well they have done during the first 100 days of their term.

The Dowling Duncan dollars are just a concept but we're hoping someone over at the United States Treasury is taking notes.

Rakim's "Microphone Fiend" ranks highest (so far as we can see)

If you thought rap was a world of bravado, infectiously catchy hooks, clever rhymes and questionable "lyrics" (see Soulja Boy & Lil' B), think again because Hip-Hop Word Count may or may not prove you wrong. The Hip-Hop Word Count is a searchable ethnographic database built from the lyrics of over 40,000 Hip-Hop songs from 1979 to present day. Songs are dissected for what they are at their essence: words. Words are then judged on a scale of 0 (illiterate) to 20 (post-graduate degree).

While there has yet to be a perfect score of 20 on a song yet (made public at least), there's a range of scores between 7 and 16 from artists like Tupac, Jay-Z, 50 Cent and Da Brat amongst others. Currently there are over 40,000 songs in the HHWC database and the data is all currently available to the masses via private Beta. Searches are conducted using Apache's Lucene.

Tahir, Founder of Hip-Hop Word Count (taken from PSFK)

From the website:

The Hip-Hop Word Count describes the technical details of most of your favorite hip-hop songs. This data can then be used to not only figure out interesting stats about the songs themselves, but also describe the culture behind the music.

How can analyzing lyrics teach us about our culture?

The Hip-Hop Word Count locks in a time and geographic location for every metaphor, simile, cultural reference, phrase, rhyme style, meme and socio-political idea used in the corpus of Hip-Hop.

The Hip-Hop Word Count then converts this data into explorable visualisations which help us to comprehend this vast set of cultural data.

The Hip-Hop Word Count is a project of Tahir Hemphill of Staple Crops, a creative enterprise based in Brooklyn, NY.

This year's EMMYs will rock... Twitter!

Television award show attendees and watchers will truly be in for a surprise at this year's EMMY Awards. Why? Because the producers along with this year's host, Jimmy Fallon, have turned to the popular social networking tool, Twitter, to come up with one-liners for the show. Specifically, the show seeks funny lines to introduce the award show's 38 presenters which includes Tina Fey, Betty White, LL Cool J and Tom Selleck to name a few.  If you're interested in lending your wit in 140 characters or less to the EMMY's and Jimmy Fallon, all you need to do is simply visit the official website for the EMMYs and tweet your heart out about any of the presenters you choose. Alternatively, you can @JimmyFallon on Twitter and hashtag with #imonthemmys. What fun!

Jimmy Fallon doesn't disappoint as a comedian too much so hopefully it turns out that he just uses one to two of the suggested lines; wouldn't want this to turn out to be yet another corny awards show.

The 62nd Primetime EMMY Awards will be broadcast live this Sunday, August 29, 2010 at 8PM ET/5PM PT on NBC.

One day, a blue bird simply came along on the internet and tweeted something witty. Since then people have not been able to escape the bird or it's 140 character limitations on everyday conversations. Naturally, it would only be a matter of time before an artists out there decided to make the bird her own. Meet, Kiersten Essenpries, an illustrator who makes amazing illustrations from tweets.

Comedy: now served in 140 strokes or less.

The site is called Twaggies and there is where you can find more of her interesting takes on tweets. You can keep up with all of the shenanigans via Twitter (of course) by following @twaggies. And if you really, really like the art work (or the wit) you can purchase a Tweetshirt! See more photos after the jump.