Skip to main content

Pop music

Image
By
I go through art forms in binges.  Authors, musicians, genres, whatever.  I'm totally unsystematic, but tend to obsess foolishly over complete back catalogs.  Longtime readers might have noticed the seven or eight Philip K. Dick books I went through some time ago.  It's the same with music, though I tend to stick more to genres there.  Some examples: rock (Tool, Queens of the Stone Age), trance (ATB, Tiesto, Blank and Jones), metal (Strapping Young Lad, Opeth), progressive rock (Porcupine Tree, King Crimson), psychedelic trance (Infected Mushroom, Juno Reactor), etc.

Lately I've been on a dance bender.  Back in the States I scorned most pop music.  Though there was the occasional breakthrough, I was too concerned with the political implications of whoever was on the TV to really give the songs a fair shake.  Part of it is music as signaling as well—who can name the most obscure indie bands, totally unconcerned with profit?  (Of course, I've always been a huge Daft Punk fan, but that is hip enough to let slide.)  But here in South Africa, I've missed a whole new crop of pop stars (who the hell is Justin Beiber?), and I have lost some of the righteous fury I had about brainless pop.

Perhaps I've just grown up a little bit, or just become slightly more cynical.  Take Ke$ha, for example.  I only learned of her existence a few weeks ago.  Do I care who she is?  Not in the slightest, save for a vague pity that the media machine is likely chewing her to bits as we speak.  I half suspect she doesn't exist at all, and her entire catalog and image has been meticulously constructed by music and media professionals and performed by several lip-synching lookalikes simultaneously throughout the world.  It's not great art, but I've gained enough distance to appreciate a well-constructed songs without worrying about its sociopolitical implications—or maybe I've just thoroughly given up on the American people.  Here's what's on my playlist right now.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

By
So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b
Post a Comment
Read more

Varanus albigularis albigularis

By
That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that
4 comments
Read more

The Conversational Downsides of Twitter's Structure

By
Over the past couple years, as I've had a steady writing job and ascended from "utter nobody" to "D-list pundit," I find it harder and harder to have discussions online. Twitter is the only social network I like and where I talk to people the most, but as your number of followers increases, the user experience becomes steadily more hostile to conversation. Here's my theory as to why this happens. First is Twitter's powerful tendency to create cliques and groupthink. Back in forum and blog comment section days, people would more often hang out in places where a certain interest or baseline understanding could be assumed. (Now, there were often epic fights, cliques, and gratuitous cruelty on forums too, particularly the joke or insult variety, but in my experience it was also much easier to just have a reasonable conversation.) On Twitter, people rather naturally form those same communities of like interest, but are trapped in the same space with differe
2 comments
Read more