A Roomful Of Elephant Calls

[koganbot]

A call to skyecaptain, freakytigger, petronia, and anyone else who inhabits the worlds where Rockwrite and anime-and-videogame and Fanfic worlds overlap. I claimed, while conversing with arbitrary_greay on the wallpaper-music-as-the-elephant-in-the-center-of-the-living-room thread, that:

Geekdom and video games and anime have enough cachet that the music that attaches to them is not going to end up in the category "We So Don't Pay Attention To This Stuff That We're Actually Hearing Quite A Lot Of That We Don't Even Notice That We Don't Write About It" in the way that AC does, but rather'll get written about by critics more and more as time goes on.

I can't say I'm the one to make the argument, though, so I hope you all might care to comment, on this or on what AG says.

And I'm linking Bob Dylan — not as an example of BGM but 'cause I assume "Ballad Of A Thin Man" is what first shot the words "freak" and "geek" into the culture as positives. 1965:

http://vimeo.com/52383325

Comments

[koganbot]

Be careful that the assumption in your last sentence doesn't turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Putting together your comment here and what you said to AG on the older thread, would I be correct in saying that, in your view, the soundtrack stuff that veers towards or gets taken up by dance/electronica is moving towards more social attention from people who write with influence, whereas the stuff that veers towards AC isn't?

"People who write with influence" is a contorted concept; I'm sure in the nowadays of social media every fandom (at least in the industrial etc. world) gets expressed in writing somewhere, that there are Jason Mraz fansites, that there are fansites and vocal YouTube commenters for almost any anime and game. But what I mean by "writes with influence" is the ability to reach the nonfans or to create new fans. And (speaking of prophecy) what I mean by "more and more" and "as time goes on" isn't some long-run manifest destiny but a shorter-run social fact that people like you and me are part of what I called in 1987 back in WMS #1 a "musical marginal intelligentsia" (MMI) (unless it was "marginal musical intelligentsia," I'm too lazy to go look and I kind of enjoy my confusion) that actually, despite our marginality, has social authority. So what we take up tends to then get taken up by a more general and less marginal literary intelligentsia and at the same time percolates through the general collegiate and postcollegiate liberal left, or something. I don't think my MMI has the authority it once had (in days of olde it created the punk rock movement and indie-alternative), and maybe what I'm describing isn't so much influence as mere prescience — that is, we're harbingers and canaries in coal mines more than actual instigators, but I'm sure we're instigators too.

It isn't easy persuading types like myself, who feel marginalized and at best think of themselves as rebels and independent spirits and at worst as the overlooked and discarded, that we actually have and wield collective social power. But it's the truth, and one of my ongoing projects is to explore where that power comes from. Yes, many of us are the progeny of middle-class professionals rather than of the service-industry poor, but that's no explanation, given that most such middle-class progeny don't wield our particular specialized power, despite most of those progeny being more likely than we are (or than I am, anyway, as a chronic outsider*) to earn a reasonable living and become middle-class professionals themselves.

(Or course, we're not the only node of social influence, and we hardly create the only type of respectability.)

*Funniest typo in my book (I've found three, all my doing, two on the same page) was my transcribing "despite our marginality" as "despite out marginality."