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]

Is an implicitly posed question that's addressed implicitly as good as an explicitly posed one that's never answered?

This question jumped out at me because it doesn't say explicitly who is posing questions explicitly that no one is answering and who is posing questions implicitly that are at least getting "addressed" implicitly (if not answered). It also doesn't say, or imply, what the questions are.

My guess is that you meant that rockwriters pose explicit questions that are never answered* while the anime and video game people pose questions implicitly (and accidentally?) that somehow are implicitly (and accidentally?) "addressed." But I don't know. And I have no clue as to what you think the questions are.

To pose another question, one that's not so easy to answer: while I realize that rockwrite covers a wide range of styles and attitudes and concerns, could you give an example of a sorta typical piece of rockwrite and then an example of an especially admirable piece of rockwrite and say what it is about your examples that codes as rockwrite? And could you also give an example of sorta typical writing about anime or video game music and then an example of admirable writing about anime or video game music and say what it is that's different about the anime/VG writing and how it is that it fails to code as rockwrite?

And for extra credit, you could say what it is, if anything, that anime or video game criticism might gain if it were to make some moves that coded as rockwrite, and what it would lose. And you could say what rockwrite might gain, or lose, or both, if it made moves that resembled the writing about video games and anime.

By the way, sampling the writing that AG links, I don't think the various reviews are all that strange or different from reviews one might see in a "regular" music magazine about non-anime or VG music.** The anime/VG stuff has the potential "advantage" of being able to refer to what's happening on a screen or in a plot (there are many more words for this than are available to describe how music sounds), to which it adds some adjectives about the music and a brief explanation of how the music serves what's happening onscreen. Whereas regular non-VG/anime reviews pay more attention to identifying a musical genre and, in trying to describe the music, rely more on cross-referencing other pieces of music. Both types of reviewing (anime/VG and non-anime/VG) are equally reliant on adjectives.

From my brief sample, it seems that the anime/VG stuff sidesteps the basic question of why one is listening to the soundtrack when not playing the game or watching the anime; of how the music might serve someone's life; also, for that matter, of how the games and the anime serve people's lives. And unlike rockwrite*** the question doesn't seem to be always bubbling up from underneath of how one relates to other human beings — other critics and other audiences — and who has the better attitude, and whether someone somewhere is being misogynist or racist. The anime/VG reviews seem more generally positive, and have fewer jokes.

*Does "never answered" mean they're never even responded to, or just that the responses are inadequate?

**Of course, rockwrite these days has moved away from music magazines and is much less beholden to (or trapped by) the record review format.

***Which isn't to say that such questions don't bubble up all over, e.g., YouTube comment threads, not just in rockwrite.