![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Dave, did you ever read my recombinant dub piece?
Dave (and anyone else), did you ever happen to run across the recombinant dub piece I did for the Voice back in '02? "Recombinant dub" isn't entirely what the piece is about, it's just the name for one of the concepts in it, one of the poles of attraction in a multi-poles-of-attraction environment. Also, I actually discuss no dub music in the piece, "dub" just being a metaphor and catch-all.
I thought you might be able to make something of my metaphor in relation to what you started working on last year in relation to "cultural center" versus "less of a center." The metaphor might work like this, as a way of posing questions:
What if you're a moviemaker shooting a city scene? You shoot a street scene, dialogue between three main characters, a few other people involved with or taking account of the main characters, though not speaking, the rest of the people there as setting, as are the buildings, cars, etc. So now you reshoot the scene, everything the same, except you've taken out the three leading actors and their dialogue. And you then look at the film to see what you've got: what seems to hold its own, what seems to jump to attention, what seems to appear for the first time, what gets its meaning altered, what seems to continue unchanged.
In the original shoot, the background had been there for the foreground, to give the main characters a location, a setting, a sense of what part of the world they were either living in or passing through and what sort of life might be going on in the world; but a lot of it might just be there 'cause it's there, without being vetted by the location scout or the scenery gal or the costume department; e.g. you shoot a scene in a park with trees 'cause that's the sort of park you want, but you're not particularly noticing or caring whether the trees are eucalyptus or maple or oak or aspen or pine.
And so you look at your shots from the reshoot and then say, "Let's say this is our world, without the main characters: where do we take it, but without necessarily having to fill in a foreground in the way we had a foreground before (though that might be what we do, find a new foreground, but we don't have to)?"
Working the metaphor: in the old fragmented '60s there were more people miles away from the main movie, and the specialty movies off to the side tended to get unnoticed. Nowadays more people from all over are able to find themselves in any old movie, including the main one(s), but the movies themselves have less of a central focus, so the feeling is of more diffusion or diversity or fragmentation, even though the feeling is wrong in regard to the general culture(s), which is more connected not more fragmented. (But is what I just said correct?)
Also see: Over in Popular on The Final Countdown thread there's a relevant discussion between Tom and swanstep on the subject of "umbrella" and "coalition" as metaphors for genre.
(Also, here's an old ilX thread on Dub Metal that mentions my piece and is interesting for the way that, though there was dysfunction from the sixth post or so - from the moment hstencil entered and jess needled him - the thread managed to work around and in a few instances even prosper from the dysfunction.)
I thought you might be able to make something of my metaphor in relation to what you started working on last year in relation to "cultural center" versus "less of a center." The metaphor might work like this, as a way of posing questions:
What if you're a moviemaker shooting a city scene? You shoot a street scene, dialogue between three main characters, a few other people involved with or taking account of the main characters, though not speaking, the rest of the people there as setting, as are the buildings, cars, etc. So now you reshoot the scene, everything the same, except you've taken out the three leading actors and their dialogue. And you then look at the film to see what you've got: what seems to hold its own, what seems to jump to attention, what seems to appear for the first time, what gets its meaning altered, what seems to continue unchanged.
In the original shoot, the background had been there for the foreground, to give the main characters a location, a setting, a sense of what part of the world they were either living in or passing through and what sort of life might be going on in the world; but a lot of it might just be there 'cause it's there, without being vetted by the location scout or the scenery gal or the costume department; e.g. you shoot a scene in a park with trees 'cause that's the sort of park you want, but you're not particularly noticing or caring whether the trees are eucalyptus or maple or oak or aspen or pine.
And so you look at your shots from the reshoot and then say, "Let's say this is our world, without the main characters: where do we take it, but without necessarily having to fill in a foreground in the way we had a foreground before (though that might be what we do, find a new foreground, but we don't have to)?"
Working the metaphor: in the old fragmented '60s there were more people miles away from the main movie, and the specialty movies off to the side tended to get unnoticed. Nowadays more people from all over are able to find themselves in any old movie, including the main one(s), but the movies themselves have less of a central focus, so the feeling is of more diffusion or diversity or fragmentation, even though the feeling is wrong in regard to the general culture(s), which is more connected not more fragmented. (But is what I just said correct?)
Also see: Over in Popular on The Final Countdown thread there's a relevant discussion between Tom and swanstep on the subject of "umbrella" and "coalition" as metaphors for genre.
(Also, here's an old ilX thread on Dub Metal that mentions my piece and is interesting for the way that, though there was dysfunction from the sixth post or so - from the moment hstencil entered and jess needled him - the thread managed to work around and in a few instances even prosper from the dysfunction.)
no subject
So the shifts don't mean much and don't put the band interestingly at odds with itself. If the band had done a Celine Dion torch song followed by growling, darkness-drenched goth metal followed by Trick Daddy thug hip-hop, now those would be changes in identity.
This is maybe the "I like my center" argument, in which easy signifiers of sound and genre may recombine without challenging the underlying social arrangement -- i.e. there's "no meaningful genre distinction," but Person X has nothing to say to Person Y, even as they listen to essentially the same music. They're standing right next to each other but have nothing to say. This is why the Big Problem in internet communication, say, isn't necessarily that no one can agree on anything, but that people don't really know how to talk to one another regardless of what they agree on (what they need to agree on are the terms in which they might agree or disagree, the agreement and disagreement of content not being nearly as important as the agreement and disagreement of how the conversation happens).
One thing that centralization has going for it is an ability to guide a conversation to a particular subject -- when the actors are centered in the frame, it's much harder to talk about the elm tree instead. (Or, to drop the metaphor, if I'm put into contact with X in a generalist publication because I happen to like Y, I am in more conversation with Y in that moment than I would be if I had to look for Y myself to find it, something I would never actively do.) But even if you're guided to a center more forcibly, this doesn't ensure that you'll have anything interesting to say about it. (There's a metaphor in here somewhere for the year-end Slate convos, in which the para-center of pop-friendly thought is just as dry and unenlightening as the para-center of indie thought.)
the Recombinant Dubsters—particularly in hip-hop and techno—have usurped the official role of Conveyors of the Future, this frees rockers to evolve in all sorts of directions without worrying about which way is "forward." The forward spot is already occupied.
And this is probably as true to the then-Conveyors-of-Future categories now as it was for rock then, which means that the wide-open future is wide-open, or at least more so, for everyone. But I'm similarly ambivalent about this -- it's not music I'm worried about, it's people's ability or desire to talk about music in a certain way.
Nowadays more people from all over are able to find themselves in any old movie, including the main one(s), but the movies themselves have less of a central focus, so the feeling is of more diffusion or diversity or fragmentation, even though the feeling is wrong in regard to the general culture(s), which is more connected not more fragmented.
I think this is right, but I also think ultimately it's neither here nor there, merely a field on which we find ourselves. The problem with this feeling of diffusion and diversity is that such diffusion and diversity feels irreconcilable, when in fact it isn't. When there are more perceived "others," there are more people with whom it's not acceptable for you to speak, so you retreat. But though there's nothing inherently wrong with clusters and quasi-tribal formation around a larger number of cultural "centers," there is something wrong with the retreat part, even though it seems to follow naturally.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject