Fountain displaces itself

[koganbot]

Posted this on Brad Nelson's Tumblr (in response to his saying that he's been thinking of dub as the center while being concurrently aware that there is no center and there never was):

I once argued that dub was central, or at least deserved pride of place as a fountain that watered a number of neighboring fields, while saying that sonically what it did was to take out its own center. Here's where I tried to turn this idea into sense (but I then never tried to follow up on the thought).

Someone ought to pick up the thought and carry it somewhere.

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I feel like some of these thoughts came out in the Ke$ha Konvos, too -- the idea that Ke$ha is simultaneously the center of and backdrop of her music. When I think of (e.g.) "Mony Mony," I think mostly of the clatter and party -- its background was the foreground, with Tommy James himself not having any particular force as an individual actor. With Ke$ha, she's both the force and the stand-in. She's one center and the party is another, and they speak to one another in complicated (and in her case interesting) ways. Which is also what sets her apart from Katy Perry, who is the center despite a background that's upstaging her, or Lady GaGa who wants desperately to be the center but usually in her music shoves herself into a supporting role. One thing I like about the "Bad Romance" mash-up between GaGa and Raconteurs (here) is that it centers GaGa herself in a way that she has trouble doing in her own music. (I like a lot of Lady GaGa's music, but it's usually for cumulative effect.)

[koganbot]

Well, there are social centers (in the culture) and sonic centers (e.g., the center(s) of a particular song) and the interplay between the two: what people perceive as the central thing they care about in a song may change as they're influenced by the general conversation about that song or about music in general. But also in e.g. "Mony Mony" Tommy James is in the center (or at least in a center) taking care of the melody whether or not he's really what we care most about. Whereas dub takes out that center even if we were never quite attending to that center in the first place. (And taking it out may result in our attending to its absence.)

What was on my mind when writing the piece was that, in recombinant dub and related endeavors, once you take that center out, anything you refill it with - a rap or whatever - is now felt as a lot more contingent, its hold on this sort of sonic center not as taken for granted as it had been formerly.

So I'm thinking of several centers here:

--a sonic center that is assumed without our necessarily always centering our attention on it - usually a vocalist taking care of the main melody, or a lead chanter, or a soloist.

--the sonics (e.g. in a pop song) that we are consciously focusing on.

--what we center our conversation on when talking about e.g. a particular song (or its singer, or something in the neighborhood of the song).

--music-related cultural centers (e.g., what music we tend to pay attention to and, of the music we attend to, how we distribute our attention, e.g., how much we talk about this favorite as opposed to that other favorite [the one we tend to keep to ourselves]).

--etc. (e.g., whether songs or TV shows or online games etc. get to be cultural centers, and for whom, and for which culture or subculture).

Not-necessarily-irrelevant aside: A folk singer at the arts fair across the street is strumming her guitar and singing "Umbrella"; also, it's raining; also, she's not very good. She now just finished it and got a big cheer.

[koganbot]

Oh help! Now she's singing "Hallelujah."