Ever since ruffling the feathers of the music industry a little less than a year ago, hip-hop anti-heros, Odd Future, have defied convention with their sound, smashed business protocol with their approach and burned page after page of music industry constitution with their persistent unorthodoxy. Most notable among these transgressions is their continuous redefining of what it means to be a rap group.
As a talent showcase, Odd Future is every bit as nebulous today as they were a year ago—moving more as a mishmash gang of contributing homies than the traditional, band-member-centric model. Sure there’s definitive front men and media darlings like Tyler, The Creator, Earl Sweatshirt, Frank Ocean and Hodgy Beats, but alongside them is an army of hard-to-quantify, non-musical, but often equally as prolific featured artists like Taco Bennett, Jasper Dolphin and others who continually make the lines between members and non-members a total blur.
On November 16, Odd Future got even blurrier with the release of Golf Wang—a two hundred plus page coffee table photo book chronicling the last year or so of their lives through a shmorgishborg of live photos, raw, point-and-shoot tour mayhem and an assortment of the otherwise gonzo imagery that’s come to define these youngsters’ crude and unrefined aesthetic. Odd Future photo lieutenants Julian Berman, Sagan Lockhart and Brick Stowell along with comrades Vyron Turner, Wolf Haley, Lucas Vercetti and Taco Bennett all have photos featured in the book alongside unofficial OF general, Tyler, The Creator.
Golf Wang contributors Julian Berman and Sagan Lockhart shared some of their photos that didn’t make the cut, gave us their thoughts on the ones that did and revealed the stories behind some of their favorite featured images. Here’s some of what they had to say.
The latest estimates suggest there’s more than 24 million pornography sites on the Internet—that’s about one site for every twelve people in the United States. For today’s adult film directors, porn’s overwhelming abundance on the Internet has raised the creative stakes as production houses strain to develop pay-to-play content more compelling than what’s already available online for free. The main ingredient, of course, is always sex, but for producers like 31-year-old Los Angeles native Stephen Vanasco, who goes by the directorial alias, Van Styles, making the sex both unique and worth purchasing is a delicate balancing act between compressing fantasy and stretching reality.
