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For me, my greatest Jukebox moment was Ke$ha's "Blah Blah Blah" – it isn't that what I wrote was so good – it was okay, and what I wrote in the comments was genuinely exploratory about the song's clatter making me think of "Mony Mony" – though I did get to work out those thoughts better on my blog – it's that when I started writing my blurb, song playing umpteen times in the background, I was rating her a 6 and putting her and the song and the experience at an I-know-better, ho-hum distance – but then a minute later, halfway through the blurb and the song I was saying, "No, this moves and pushes, something here in the sound" – and a minute later I was at 9. So I hit submit on my blurb and later that day the reviews went up and mine was 2 points higher than anyone else's and 4½ more than the average AND I WAS RIGHT!
The Singles Jukebox, March 2nd, 2010, Ke$ha ft. 3OH!3 – Blah Blah Blah
Anyway, to me it was something, to start a sentence and by the end the world was a little different. And something *I* was comprehending was the force of her music and the force of her wrongheaded challenge – "wrongheaded" 'cause I will stand on my writing and my talking and my blah blah blah – my glorious blah blah blah – but I was right to listen to hear a human being, a human complaint, a desperate boast, to pretend, a demand, to push past the blah blah blah – in that challenge (and how much was that challenge and that image a concoction created with her collaborators or forced on her – the real Kesha Rose Sebert – by her producers and managers? – one of whom she would later accuse of raping and abusing her), a woman – a concoction, maybe – was embodying that complaint and the force of the music, asserting dignity out of vomit.
Anyway, the reviews were up and of course there was a comment thread, people thinking, rethinking, re-wording and revising their rethoughts.
BUT: the comment thread is no longer up on the site. After 50 comments a thread spills over onto another page, and in this instance all of the first 50 were wiped out, and only one measly comment number 51 remains. Fortunately, Edward still has TSJ file with all the comments; he sent them to me last March as I was repairing my old LJ/Dreamwidth posts and taking stock of the big broad Ke$ha conversation elsewhere and bringing the links up-to-date, to The Singles Jukebox, to people's LiveJournals, to Jonathan Bogart's old Tumblr essays, and so forth.
So now, under the cut, here they are, the Jukebox comments. The copies are missing the italics, though, which has a big effect here because people are continually pasting in each other's comments and commenting on the comments, that something's a quotation almost always indicated by italics. So without the italics you have to figure out for yourself what's the quote and what's the response to the quote. This has an almost mesmerizing, poetic effect, the quotes, some repeated several times by different commenters, the same thoughts snaking through the conversation but adorned differently each time, as if everybody's saying them and then arguing with what they themselves are saying, the thought and the counterthought coming out of the same brain and then permutating into the next, the collective brain continually contradicting and rewiring itself.
[EDIT !!! UPDATE !!! HURRAH &%*# !!!: There's a place web.archive.org that calls itself The Wayback Machine that actually archives old posts (I don't know how thorough these are) from Stylus and The Singles Jukebox and I don't know what else. I've rarely used it because I haven't had much luck with its search engine, but if you have the original URL – which we do for the after-Stylus Jukebox, since The Singles Jukebox itself has not been deleted and presumably won't for a long time, even when it stops creating new content in a few days – then you can plug that into the search box and it'll take you there voila, and here we are, "Blah Blah Blah":
web.archive.org/web/20170607125254/http://www.thesinglesjukebox.com/?p=1988
ALSO, it turns out that back in the day I'd downloaded the entire "Blah Blah Blah" post and comment thread to my computer as a Chrome html file, which means I didn't need to get all the comments from Edward 'cause I had 'em already, and I have no excuse now not to add the italics back in, though don't keep your leftovers simmering on the stove while you wait for me to get around to doing so. END EDIT]
Kudos esp. to Kat for setting up the tone, the questioning, "I find it very difficult to pinpoint exactly what it is about Ke$ha that annoys me...," and Tal for hearing a lot of what I'm hearing, and OF COURSE Erika, "Listening to Ke$ha is like trying to have a conversation with a pile of cigarette butts," which I wrote down at the time and which sent me on this mission of retrieval.
And to Edward, William Bloody Swygart, and all the others who gave us a place to play, and a home for our blah blah blah.
( Comment thread, The Singles Jukebox, Blah Blah Blah )
The Singles Jukebox, March 2nd, 2010, Ke$ha ft. 3OH!3 – Blah Blah Blah
Anyway, to me it was something, to start a sentence and by the end the world was a little different. And something *I* was comprehending was the force of her music and the force of her wrongheaded challenge – "wrongheaded" 'cause I will stand on my writing and my talking and my blah blah blah – my glorious blah blah blah – but I was right to listen to hear a human being, a human complaint, a desperate boast, to pretend, a demand, to push past the blah blah blah – in that challenge (and how much was that challenge and that image a concoction created with her collaborators or forced on her – the real Kesha Rose Sebert – by her producers and managers? – one of whom she would later accuse of raping and abusing her), a woman – a concoction, maybe – was embodying that complaint and the force of the music, asserting dignity out of vomit.
Anyway, the reviews were up and of course there was a comment thread, people thinking, rethinking, re-wording and revising their rethoughts.
BUT: the comment thread is no longer up on the site. After 50 comments a thread spills over onto another page, and in this instance all of the first 50 were wiped out, and only one measly comment number 51 remains. Fortunately, Edward still has TSJ file with all the comments; he sent them to me last March as I was repairing my old LJ/Dreamwidth posts and taking stock of the big broad Ke$ha conversation elsewhere and bringing the links up-to-date, to The Singles Jukebox, to people's LiveJournals, to Jonathan Bogart's old Tumblr essays, and so forth.
So now, under the cut, here they are, the Jukebox comments. The copies are missing the italics, though, which has a big effect here because people are continually pasting in each other's comments and commenting on the comments, that something's a quotation almost always indicated by italics. So without the italics you have to figure out for yourself what's the quote and what's the response to the quote. This has an almost mesmerizing, poetic effect, the quotes, some repeated several times by different commenters, the same thoughts snaking through the conversation but adorned differently each time, as if everybody's saying them and then arguing with what they themselves are saying, the thought and the counterthought coming out of the same brain and then permutating into the next, the collective brain continually contradicting and rewiring itself.
[EDIT !!! UPDATE !!! HURRAH &%*# !!!: There's a place web.archive.org that calls itself The Wayback Machine that actually archives old posts (I don't know how thorough these are) from Stylus and The Singles Jukebox and I don't know what else. I've rarely used it because I haven't had much luck with its search engine, but if you have the original URL – which we do for the after-Stylus Jukebox, since The Singles Jukebox itself has not been deleted and presumably won't for a long time, even when it stops creating new content in a few days – then you can plug that into the search box and it'll take you there voila, and here we are, "Blah Blah Blah":
web.archive.org/web/20170607125254/http://www.thesinglesjukebox.com/?p=1988
ALSO, it turns out that back in the day I'd downloaded the entire "Blah Blah Blah" post and comment thread to my computer as a Chrome html file, which means I didn't need to get all the comments from Edward 'cause I had 'em already, and I have no excuse now not to add the italics back in, though don't keep your leftovers simmering on the stove while you wait for me to get around to doing so. END EDIT]
Kudos esp. to Kat for setting up the tone, the questioning, "I find it very difficult to pinpoint exactly what it is about Ke$ha that annoys me...," and Tal for hearing a lot of what I'm hearing, and OF COURSE Erika, "Listening to Ke$ha is like trying to have a conversation with a pile of cigarette butts," which I wrote down at the time and which sent me on this mission of retrieval.
And to Edward, William Bloody Swygart, and all the others who gave us a place to play, and a home for our blah blah blah.
( Comment thread, The Singles Jukebox, Blah Blah Blah )CROSSPOSTS: HTTPS://KOGANBOT.LIVEJOURNAL.COM/385575.HTML
