Great XKCD --- News: Art Renegades sill have the stuff for silk screening and if anyone wants to help us, show up to our meetings. Monday nights at 7 in the basement of Merrill hall, room 003. This semester should get interesting - we have a new president (Andrew Thompson) and I'm now a secretary. We had some great people from an artist/activist collective in Machias come to speak at UMF on December 3rd. Check out their website here: www.beehivecollective.org They talked about an old graphic of theirs that explores the issues of Plan Colombia - if you don't know about that, you should. Your tax dollars pay for it.
Has anyone seen this recent viral video that combines a kids' show, Lazytown, with a crass Lil' Jon song (as if there is any other kind)? It's sickeningly catchy, hilarious and wrong all at the same time, which one of my friends pointed out is true of a lot of Jonathan Mortimer Smith's tunes.
Regardless of all this silliness, I really really really like mashups. The first thing that drew me to it was Girl Talk -- Hearing that music for the first time made me feel nostalgic for all the pop music I listened to at age 10. Girl Talk craftily combines some of my favorite hip hop with some of my least favorite pop music, and some of my least favorite hip hop with weezer -- and somehow manages to make it all great dance music. I know I've spoken about dance music before (animal collective is not dancy to everyone I've discovered), but this stuff is really appealing to most people I've encountered at parties. Whether you like mainstream or indie music, you can find an affinity for this stuff in your heart. Though, I have heard some complain that it's layered too much sometimes, to the point of giving you a headache for how fast and complex it is. More often though, I have heard people ask their friends at a party if they have any Girl Talk on their iPod, so we can hook it up to the speakers because they know it's something everyone will approve of.
Mashups have become more and more common, and that makes me ponder our culture in a few different ways. First - What does it say about our generations opinion on copyright? I know most people my age were raised on napster, imesh, and audio galaxy (and now have graduated to torrents) and formed opinions about the nature of intellectual property independent from what the law told us was right and wrong. We see the internet as our playground where things are free to grab, change and redistribute, all in the name of art and community. I don't think anyone ever produces a mashup in a malicious attempt to steal earnings from the original artist, and most artists in the independent community understand that. Some more forward thinking bands are getting on this wagon, such as Radiohead and Saul Williams who both allowed for free download of their last album online. This seems to be the way of the future, and as long as we stay aware and defend this freedom, it could mean a lot for the future of media.
Secondly, I also wonder what the appeal is to the aesthetics of mashup music. It feels like people in my generation have such wider tastes in music, which was made possible also by the internet, and the communities formed online to support different genres. I think many people identify with so many different types of music, and like the idea of sampling combining and creating new categories from the old. That has been evident in the collaborations between artists as well: Peeping Tom, where former Faith No More frontman Mike Patton collaborates with trip/hip hop and ambient music; bands like Gorrillaz where rap and rock converge; NIN producing an album for Saul Williams. I know a lot of hiphop heads that see this as a bastardization, or appropriation of hip hop by other genres, which sometimes it can be (limp bizkit all over again?) but at times really beautiful moments can spawn out of the breaking down of barriers that we have created between musics.
For those of you that are interested, BREAK IT DOWN BITCH:
Thanksgiving was filling and delicious. I ate half of a vegan cheesecake by myself in the past 24 hours. I was just relaxing and reading over some classmate's blogs, and here is my response to Tyler's post on music and culture:
Music is definitely the universal language of humans. Math, I think it's said to be the universe's language, since nature speak in such things as fractals. Humans would rather speak in a funky beat. Or scream and sing.
I feel now more than ever that I can't limit myself to one genre of music. There is so much out there to be explored, that ever day, or at every different activity some different kind of music fits as a sort of life theme song.
I think one of the greatest things that EA has given me is the diverse tastes of my classmates, which has given me a greater appreciation for metal and sound art. I was kind of wary of electric guitars, but have recently seen a new side to shredding on a guitar. Its virtuosity is not fully appreciated. And hopefully more people than myself have opened their ears up to noise this semester and seen the powerful cultural signs that can be conveyed without words. (Merzbow amazed!)
Tyler's used an interesting technique by using the sounds that created power at one time period in order to break them down now. The repetitiveness, the epic classical music, the stern speeches of Stalin juxtaposed with the killing and oppression that was actually going on in that time gave me a sickening feeling about the corruption of power. It also forced me to reflect on the power structures of present day. In what ways is our world just a modernized USSR? What elements have we eliminated, and what still remains? Like Einstein said, nationalism is dangerous.
I'm going to play guitar hero.
Playlist: BeForU, Bad Religion, Gangstarr*, Das EFX, Babbletron*
Hey hey - So today was a day of experimenting in the EA Lab. Vincent, Thompson and I were messing around with loop pedals, tap shoes, whistles and dinosaur noises. It was a spectacular time, and I learned enough to help me with my performance. I've decided that I'm going to perform with jet fighter, and do a little solo stuff on the night of the 11th(?) up in the Piazza. If you enjoy experimental stuff, you should check us out, and hopefully it will be interactive. I was really amazed at how organically the songs grew when Vincent, Thompson and I were just experimenting. We would pass the microphone, which went through the loop pedal, around in a circle to build up a base for the song, and then whoever had an idea would take the mic next and add on to the loops. I went up there only intending to use tap noises, but it proved much better to make a background loop with found sounds and then live tapdance over it. This is what I intend to do for my performance in the Piazza. Thompson and I recorded the last song we made, which was made up of cellphone midi-like samples, with Garage band. Honestly that was the first time I'd used garage band --before I was just going with soundtrack pro. someone comment! UPLOADED!!: http://www.box.net/shared/o7abzyb1st
So the US elections are just 2 days away, and all the blogs and podcasts i'm frequenting are super political. Normally a lot of my music is also political, but I feel like I need a break. So what can take your mind off the political mudslinging and barrage of propaganda? Pop music! The Animal Collective has been called anything from pop to indie folk to avant-garde experimental noise, and in fact one album of theirs can encompass all of these things. Recently I've had both Water Curses (2008) and Strawberry Jam (2007) on my headphones. Strawberry Jam starts out with one amazingly epic track, For Reverend Green, with reverberating guitars and high pitched vocals. I strongly believe this song, Fireworks and Derek are the beginning of the dance music for the new millenium. Instead of that repetitive bass beat in most dance music, the "woo woo"s and synths in Animal Collectives style are trance inducing but highly energetic. Their lyrics are out there in a way that seems like its reaching for something spiritual, and the delivery is cathartic. And even though I call it the new dance music, it's also great on headphones. Both personal and uniting. How can you not smile when at 3:11 on Fireworks, the vocals kick in? Water Curses was actually the first album I listened to by the collective. The shorter of the two, it starts off with a fast paced song (the album title track), then winds down with the echoes and emptiness of Street Flash. This is probably the most lyrically comprehensible track, reflecting on the feeling of cabin fever, loss of motivation and modern apathy (does anyone in here get hit with inside fever?/so bad sometimes it's hard to move around). This and the final song on the album show a sedated side of Animal Collective, that I think might be the influences of Panda Bear shining through. So if you enjoy experimental music that might give you artistic orgasms, check out this band. And dont forget to vote on Tuesday.
Playlist: Animal Collective, Kings of Leon*, Beck*, Coco Rosie*
"Hip hop, as is, is mainly concerned with depicting a rough street life devoid of hope or an upscale designer life devoid of reflection and in doing so dictates its own outcome." - Saul Williams
Historically people believed that sounds and vibrations could connect us with the sacred. Egyptians believed certain sounds couldn't be transcribed because of their sacredness – Plato also wrote about the forms, and how copying a form was a perversion of a thing's true essence. The common idea is that once we put a label on something, or capture it with technology (or media) it is no longer the sacred, because the sacred always escapes our grasp. It's intangible and eternal. “Language usage is a reflection of consciousness. Thus, the future of language is connected to the ever-evolving state of human awareness.” (Williams, 23) In the study of semiotics it is asked: Are words the reflection of the hidden meaning behind objects, or is that meaning a completely human creation? Saul suggests that once we have awareness of our reality, we have the power to define and determine our future. How far does this power go? How much are we controlled by the language that surround us everyday (visual, linguistic, musical)? Imagination and creativity are the powerful human tools that allows us to create new futures for ourselves, to transform what we dislike about the present. What can we recognize about our own society that limits the development of our creativity? Williams demands that we change our use of language by first being aware of its history and consequences.
Great XKCD ---
