Monday, June 08, 2009

Junior Spesh



Last summer Elijah from the Butterz blog/Rinse FM and I were talking about the lack of imagination in music blogging – oh look, here’s another grime blog which offers embedded YouTube videos and nothing else: great.

So while the whole of the grime scene was on its summer holidays in Napa, I jokingly suggested we use Red Hot Entertainment’s brilliant ‘Junior Spesh’ ode to budget fried chicken shops as a jumping off point to start a blog on the subject. Elijah called my bluff and registered the name , and the Junior Spesh Blog was born. After a flurry of initial activity and a bit of a break, the blog is now back with a vengeance, with a host of contributors from the grime and dubstep scenes – at least half of our writers are leading DJs.

Chicken and chip shops are the pirate radio stations of the culinary world. Their starting point is the mainstream corporate legitimacy of KFC, the chain that has exported a culinary staple of the American south to the whole world – indeed our blog features a review of KFC in Cancun, Mexico, and its peculiar ‘curry sauce’ option. But what we’re really interested in is not KFC but the pirates: HFC, SFC, Dollar Fried Chicken, Alabama Fried Chicken, Kennedy Fried Chicken.

Just like pirate DVD sleeves, mistakes are made in the plagiarism of the original model: so you end up with such abominations as New York Fried Chicken (the very thought would upset southerners a great deal), Chickpizz (which serves pizza too), and New Taxas Fried Chicken (which managed to make up a new American state and spell it wrong too).

The names are silly and the chips are greasy, but in an age of global fast food brands, this pirate fried chicken stands against brand homogeneity and for devious ingenuity – it’s dirty, creative local capitalism at its best.

8 Comments:

Blogger +one said...

big post. i've noticed a similar trend in south with the coffee shops.

coffee is the new chicken in south london. at least 10 indie coffee shops in streatham.

theres one Costa knock-off down streatham high road called 'ROSCA'

im all about funky lattes right abaowt naow

3:19 PM  
Blogger CarsmileSteve said...

INDIE CHICKEN, call it by its name...

see also Low Art, High Calorie...

2:22 PM  
Blogger dj said...

Morleys is where it at.

2:43 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

There's a small chain of 'McTuckys' in and around Manchester, and a Karachi Fried Chicken somewhere in the Curry Mile area. There's also a 'Kirkstall Fried Chicken' on Leeds's Kirkstall Road.

However, my personal favourite is unrelated to chicken - it's 'One for One Pizza', a kind of lost-in-translation bastardisation of the old '2 for 1' pizza chains. I can only presume that you get one pizza for every one pizza you purchase. An eminently fair deal for all.

11:57 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now keep it up!

6:53 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

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11:28 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Interesting post... Looks like flash memory is finally starting to become more popular. Hopefully we'll start seeing decreasing SSD prices in the near future. $5 32 gigabyte SDs for your Nintendo DS flash card... sounds gooooood.

(Posted by BlogServ for R4i Nintendo DS.)

3:28 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

That's waste.

Yeah, what we need is dirty, local capitalism for the youf?

Bad food, because you can't afford anything else, is still bad food.

Junior spesh is a banger though still.

10:39 AM  

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