Crayon Pop (artist of the year, 2013): bohemia from nowhere near bohemia

[koganbot]

Crayon Pop seem to be occupying a social space that doesn't exist in America: not of the mainstream but with no apparent estrangement from the mainstream either, not even to the extent that the mainstream itself is estranged from the mainstream (being estranged from the mainstream is a mainstream attitude). And while Crayon Pop gathered a fanatic core audience before they hit big — people who traveled miles to the Crayon Pop appearances and chanted along with the guerrilla street performances — that audience seemed to be doting-uncle types, not connoisseur types. But then, what counts as "connoisseur" isn't set in stone. For instance, Sunday evenings are an unofficial car show in the parking lots along Federal Blvd. on Denver's Hispanic west side, people hopping into their vehicles and finding spots to show off. There are many venues for discerning eyes.

In any event, Crayon Pop seem to be into music more for the art of it and the process than for fame and fortune or even a career.* Going "trot" this year with "Uh-ee" (and dressing like aunties) fits this: the attitude is "What can we try next?" Makes me think of the otherwise very different "Gentleman," by Psy: not a followup to "Gangnam Style" so much as "What can I do to shift around and fake you out?" But Psy is coming from a well-trod social territory, the outsider hip-hop guy who breaks big but still wants to set the terms of discussion. Whereas with Crayon Pop it's more like, "What color should we paint our house now?" At least that's how Crayon Pop come across. So even if they are secret bohemians (Way did got to art school, for instance), that's not where they live in the public landscape.

Whether or not you think I'm right about Crayon Pop, and even if you don't pay attention to K-pop, I have this question:

Who else — anywhere, present or past — seems to be occupying a social space similar to the one I describe for Crayon Pop?

I'm thinking that certain potential stuff wouldn't count, the reason being it has too much of a chip on its shoulder and too much outsider status: early hip-hop dj's in the Seventies, for instance, or the custom car shows and stock-car races and demolition derbies of the early Sixties that Tom Wolfe analyzed and celebrated in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. Or maybe I'm wrong, and we should count these things.

Anyway, bohemia from nowhere near bohemia.

Also, we need a new term. "Bohemia" is played out. Care to coin one?

As delinquent lollipop girls in "Bing Bing," five months before fame [EDIT: Had embedded the Feb. 15 show at Music Bank but it's no longer on YouTube, so substituting Music Core from a couple weeks earlier, Crayon Pop dismayingly without lollipops; RE-EDIT but here's a link to Show Champion on Feb. 27 where they've got the lollipop, though the presentation is not quite as slinky and delinquent as I remember Feb. 15's being]:

Watch on YouTube

Recent disco-trot ("Hey Mister"):

Watch on YouTube

Opening for Gaga four days ago in Milwaukee (tonight they play Boston):

Watch on YouTube

One of the places I've tried to talk about this previously:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/345281.html

*Not that you can't do it for art and fun and for fame, fortune, and a paycheck; Crayon Pop's guerrilla performances and home-made posted-on-YouTube "TV" show certainly helped garner the audience and attention that eventually led to fame and the paycheck. And of course I may totally be misreading them.

Comments

[petronia.livejournal.com]

If I understand Matthew McConaughey's explanation in the show (using a dissected beer can as prop), the idea is not only eternal recurrence (circle) but that in the eye of God all of it is simultaneous (flat). But there is movement and there is differentiation at ground level, or else you'd have a point and not a circle. Progress is perhaps illusory, is all, or more precisely irrelevant.

I guess? It's become a bit of a Tumblr catchphrase. I think we agree it's more about the claim than the reality, but what charms/relieves me with acts like Crayon Pop is that the claim isn't part of their consideration.

Oddly enough several key plot points in the TV show involve houses being painted, and schools, and schoolyards.

[koganbot]

St. Augustine may have been the one who first had the idea of God being outside time; if I'm remembering right, this was, among other things, Augustine's way of preserving the idea of God as transcendent (so to my mind was one way for Augustine to protect the idea of God from his (Augustine's) own brain).

If you're a Laplace's demon you also can see all of time at once, and you don't need to be God to do so — though this may require a Newtonian rather than a quantum world; I don't know, not knowing enough physics. But the idea is that if you know the momentum and location of everything in the universe, you can know all past and future momentums and locations as well. I read somewhere, though, that to know or calculate all this you'd need a brain bigger than several galaxies. Also, isn't there something unintentionally circular in Laplace's reasoning? To know the momentum, which is mass multiplied by velocity, you have to know every object's location at a minimum of two moments. So you have to already know something — the location at one other time — that you're supposed to be able to derive from the knowledge you already have. (Yeah, I know that Laplace is positing that you do already know the momentum of every atom at one particular time, but I don't think he gets to do this: momentum implies at least two moments, not one. But I may well be misunderstanding something. Laplace was very smart, after all.)