Don Diego on the tediousness of courtship

[koganbot]

"I trust there will be no undue nonsense. Either the lady wants me and will have me, or she will not. Will I change her mind if I play a guitar beneath her window, or hold her hand when I may, or put my hand over my heart and sigh?"

Comments

[koganbot]

Sorry I've been so recalcitrant; reason is that journalism and academia have a genius for systematically missing the point when it comes to popular music. Let's take Girl Talk as an example. OK, here's someone who's supposedly doing something new, changing the ground under our feet as we walk on it and (1) So what? Even if it's true, why should I or anyone listen to it, or for that matter, why does anyone listen to it? In other words, what matters about it? and (2) In fact, it's not particularly different from what's been done scads and scads of times before, starting with disco and hip-hop in the '70s - I don't know if Gillis is even claiming that he's doing anything drastically different from those late '70s disco bootleg mixes or (a few years later) the hip-hop mashups by Steinski et al. Back in the '80s you got posturing leftists quoting Lautréamont and bragging about breaking copyright law, whoopee.* I remember a couple of dreadful singles by Culturcide. Whatever the ultimate impacts of filesharing turn out to be, they're not going to be "Oh, now people can make mixes and mashups." And speaking of mixes etc. I'd say that hip-hop mixtapes as promo tool, keeping your hand in the game, an alternative source of income is far more important than someone like Gillis, but again I'd assume they'd exist file-sharing or no file-sharing. What they do actually is go back to the early rappers, guys who were rapping over the breakbeats from funk records of the time, while DJs were mixing those records into each other. So this'd be a phenomenon that would exist file-sharing or no file-sharing. But the point here would be what was the content of all this, mixtapes now, house parties then, what are the rappers saying, what does the music sound like, what are the dancers doing?

*Found this on YouTube in regard to Girl Talk: "Professor Matthew Soar at Concordia University in Montréal, as a contribution to the Open Source Cinema Project, teamed with his students and spent what he describes as 'three very intensive weeks rotoscoping a concert video' of Girl Talk. They were, he says, inspired by Bob Sabiston's digital rotoscoping (Snack and Drink, Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly), and by Christine Harold's OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture, a textbook used for his communications course." (Sarcastically I'd say that the students all got an A PLUS in subversion, though for all I know the class was quite good. The description sure runs close to what I was calling "PBS" back in the day.)