Scrawled in Wax

Vulture interview with DJ Greg Gillis, more commonly known as Girl Talk. I’ve been listening to the album a lot, and it almost feels like I’ve been doing so against my will. I’ve written on it before, but some more thoughts: 1) to what extent does the combination of expectation and generic convention inflect our appreciation of music? How does the repositioning of music in relation to new textures, tempos etc. change how or whether we enjoy something? 2) there’s a comment on the Vulture piece that makes what I thought was an old argument: that there’s no art to an all-samples album. Even though I hate a lot about the album – the choice of misogynystic lyrics just gets way too fucking much – it’s practically dripping in genius and effort. But whaddya’ think? 3) Just in case you haven’t seen it, here’s the unthinkable: a YouTube video mashup of the album that rivals the disc in terms of sheer density and insanity; 4) does a catchy beat make hearing offensive/discriminatory lyrics more dangerous? The first song contains the insult “You ain’t a pimp / You a fairy”. I think it’s homophobic but I sing along in my head every time. Is there something unconscious going on in that moment in which I’m identifying with a particular ideal of masculinity that I consciously don’t support? Gawn’, go ahead: psychoanalyse me.

First, even you video game skeptics, check out this trailer for Heavy Rain. Then think about this idea: in an interview at Gamasutra, David Cage, the designer behind that trailer, suggests that even quite sophisticated games work like porn: they use narrative as a device to initiate action, but as the action/gameplay proceeds, the narrative disappears. There is an disconnect between the two. So the question being asked is what happens to plot when gameplay is the narrative? When the participation of the player/reader is the aesthetic/narratalogical/ludic experience? It’s an important question, partly because it reveals the limits of textual/mimetic approaches to dealing with interactive narrative. Right now, I’m totally out of answers but, ya’ know, once I finish my dissertation I’ll come up with some great ones…

This has nothing to do with anything, but yesterday I was in a bar, had had a couple of pints, and Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot it in People came on (here’s a beautiful video for Feist’s version of “Lover’s Spit”). My friend and I remarked that this was the last album that felt like it was something shared – that it was more than simply another album in one’s iTunes playlist and instead was closer to art as a communal, social experience. There was a distinct moment in 2003 when, again sitting in a bar, I went round the table and asked people what they were listening to: every time, the answer ended “oh, and Broken Social Scene”. The question that we never got to (there was drinking to be done): is that dead? Is the age of music as shared cultural reference point gone? And should we celebrate or commiserate? The other question – since, for some reason, I’m inviting people to psychoanalyse me in this post – is why I felt compelled to Twitter my thoughts as I sat with a friend. What is it about documenting action, thought and emotion and then placing that idea in the new public space that is so oddly, bafflingly compelling?