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]

I've noticed that, when trawling YouTube for good quality song-streams, I'll frequently run across fanmade vids where slides or clips from anime are used to illustrate beloved songs, which we can also conceive the other way around: songs are used to illustrate scenes from beloved anime.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArxvJJZrSQA

Happens with clips from general TV dramas too, but seems more frequent with anime.

[EDIT: Er, that clip; didn't review it before embedding. Better make it a link. Guess I don't know what I'm getting into with anime.Is it typical?]

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

I have plans to create a more formal space of discussion. The grand goal is to have a panel at a con wherein I teach and have the attendees play Apop Trope Bingo. (Precursors being me getting a keyboard and learning to analyze a song on the fly, including recognizing chord progressions and pop composition techniques.)

AMVs are a thing. Most conventions have a FanVid panel that doubles as a competition, as they showcase the best of submitted entries, or well known AMV producers show off their latest productions, such as the AMV Hell project.

Of course, the original first fanvid seems to come from Star Trek fandom.

As for the content of the AMV you linked...um, yeah, the content of anime can be, um, yeah. It can take some getting used to, and due to the rise of otaku money controlling demand, that kind of thing is a lot harder to avoid than in video games, which also benefits from there being a lot of western-based game companies. (Or, at least, in the official content of video games. Promotional materials for games can get about as bad.) That show looks like it's a low-budget C-level anime meant to put the focus on fetish humor. So, it's typical within its own niche within anime?

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, AMVs are a huge thing and -- ironically -- actually front and centre of the "respectable" cult-crit conversation surrounding remix/mashup culture. You'll find AMVs curated into museum shows, for instance.

I would say for the most part that it's not clips used to illustrate the songs, but the songs used to illustrate the scenes. In fact the focus in AMVs is typically retelling/subverting/pasting disparate sources together to tell an alternate story from the media canon. So neither the interest of the original person doing it or the person curating it into the museum show resides in "what is this saying about the song."