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| Ultravox, Vienna 7" (Chrysalis, 1981) |
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| Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Maid of Orleans 7" (Dindisc/Virgin, 1981) |
Paper prompt with links to the videos, here.
For easy access find the videos also linked below.
Friday, February 28, 2020
Vienna/Maid of Orleans Analysis
Wednesday, February 26, 2020
The In-Between Years (or The Empire Strikes Back)
In the playlist below some of the genres that were popular during the so-called 'in-between years': Girl Groups, different kinds of Phil Spector produced records, the uptown RnB of Motown Records, Surf and Hot Rod combos and the different iterations of the folk revival.
As you listen consider the following records by two of the most popular of the Girl Groups:
The Ronettes, "Be My Baby"
The Crystals, "Then He Kissed Me"
The Crystals, "Da Doo Ron Ron"
Then compare these to Lesley Gore's "It's My Party" which is still a Weill/Mann song but was NOT produced by Phil Spector.
Finally consider these records with Spector's wall of sound in full-effect:
Ike & Tina Turner, "River Deep, Mountain High"
The Righteous Brothers, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling"
Be ready to identify the characteristics of Spector's production style.
Readings:
Keightley, "Reconsidering Rock"
nb. You will not be responsible for this reading for the midterm. We will discuss the issues and concepts raised in it after the exam. I do however urge you to read it as it offers a lot of points that would help your review of material that will actually be covered on the midterm.
In Garofalo you should read up to and including Chapter 6.
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| Phil Spector |
Tuesday, February 25, 2020
Advertising and Audiences: Assessment, Interactivity, Heatmaps, Analytics and Chatter
The following are good background readings about network and transition era audience assessment methods and the ways in which the prerogatives of the advertiser-network relations are key in producing an understanding of audiences. For this they also offer a good reflection and analysis of the ways in which audience assessment are used in developing a political and regulatory environment for media systems in general and television in particular.
Meehan, The Blame Game
Meehan, Don't Blame The Viewers
Ang, The Nature of the Audience
Gandy, Tracking the Audience
The Audience Response Heatmap from Bluefin
Andrejevic, The Twenty-First-Century Telescreen
Marshall, Screens: Television's Dispersed 'Broadcast'
McChesney, What is the Elephant in the Digital Room? from Digital Disconnect
Refer to Jon Gertner's epigraph in Chapter 6 of The Television Will Be Revolutionized:
"Finding out whether ''C.S.I.'' beats ''Desperate Housewives'' is just the beginning. Change the way you count, for instance, and you can change where the advertising dollars go, which in turn determines what shows are made and what shows then are renewed. Change the way you count, and potentially you change the comparative value of entire genres (news versus sports, dramas versus comedies) as well as entire demographic segments (young versus old, men versus women, Hispanic versus black). Change the way you count, and you might revalue the worth of sitcom stars, news anchors and -- when a single ratings point can mean millions of dollars -- the revenue of local affiliates and networks alike. Counting differently can even alter the economics of entire industries, should advertisers (thanks to the P.P.M.) discover that radio or the Web is a better way to get people to know their brand or buy their products or even vote for their political candidates. Change the way you measure America's culture consumption, in other words, and you change America's culture business. And maybe even the culture itself."
The complete Jon Gertner (from The New York Times Magazine), "Our Ratings, Ourselves" here.
A recent Toby Miller blogpost, "TV is Dead" chock full of nice links and statistics about TV consumption.
Monday, February 24, 2020
Saturday, February 22, 2020
Of Free Radios and Emancipatory Media - Peppino Impastato and Radio AUT
I Cento Passi / The One Hundred Steps (M.T. Giordana, 2000)
Access the film here. Ideally you can stream it directly from the drive if you don't need subtitles --just click on the 100PSSI mp4 link. Otherwise you need to download both the mp4 file and the one ending in srt. You can then watch in on your computer. You will need something like VLC in order to see it (both on Mac and PC). Please watch this sooner rather than later --and if you are not watching it right away download it. I will not keep it online for long.
Thursday, February 20, 2020
Net Neutrality: Only to be discussed as comedy
The first Net Neutrality video. June 2014
The second Net Neutrality video. May 2017
Wednesday, February 19, 2020
"Beneath the cobblestones, the beach": Theory, Alternative Media, Situationism and Cultural Resistance
How To Talk Like A Situationist
Guy Debord - Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency's Conditions of Organization and Action (1957)
If you are interested in reading more of the Situationist International's documents, manifestos and screeds (they are always fun, engaging and inspiring) you can find an excellent selection in the anthology edited by Tom McDonough and published by MIT Press titled Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents. Modern day situationists have made the book available here. Of course all of the Situationist documents are also available online at the Situationist Online Archive which is a true treasure trove of material. There are many other sources for Situationist materials freely available online, a direct result of the 'proto-free culture' approach the Situationist International always promoted.
Wednesday, February 12, 2020
Whitey's Lindy Hoppers: Something Wild
This is the Lindy Hop, the Jitterbug, the Suzie-Q. The clip is an excerpt from H.C. Potter's Helzapoppin' (1941). The Lindy Hoppers doing "The Big Apple" in 1939 are here. Enjoy.
In this clip the dancing starts at the 2:15 mark.
from Jonathan Demme's Something Wild; The Feelies play David Bowies's "Fame" and Jeff Daniels dances with his eye on the 'Other' for cues.
Tin Pan Alley to Records Playlist: For Your Listening Pleasure
The Sound Begins: Popular Music Readings II
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| Rufus Thomas, DJ Extraordinaire |
in Garofalo:
-Chapter 2: Blues and Country Music: Mass Media and the Construction of Race
-Chapter 3: “Good Rockin’ Tonight”: The Rise of Rhythm and Blues
Charlie Gillet from The Sound of the City, "The Sound Begins"
Nelson George from The Death of Rhythm and Blues, "Dark Voices in the Night"
-Chapter 2: Blues and Country Music: Mass Media and the Construction of Race
-Chapter 3: “Good Rockin’ Tonight”: The Rise of Rhythm and Blues
Charlie Gillet from The Sound of the City, "The Sound Begins"
Nelson George from The Death of Rhythm and Blues, "Dark Voices in the Night"
Teddy and Walt in The New Yorker
The Naysayers: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and the Critique of Pop Culture
by Alex Ross
Even the New Yorker catches up:
"One way or another, the Frankfurt School mode of criticism—its skeptical ardor, its relentless scouring of mundane surfaces—has spread far. When online recappers expend thousands of words debating the depiction of rape on “Game of Thrones,” or when writers publish histories of sneakers or of the office cubicle, they show intense awareness of mass culture’s ability to shape society. And in some cases the analysis takes a recognizably dialectical turn, as in Hua Hsu’s 2011 essay, for Grantland, on Kanye West and Jay-Z’s album “Watch the Throne.” A dispassionate hip-hop fan, Hua Hsu ponders the spectacle of two leading rappers making an “album against austerity,” in which they mark their ascension to a world of “MoMA and Rothko, Larry Gagosian, and luxury hotels across three continents,” and at the same time forfeit a hip-hop tradition of fantasy and protest. Citing the Kanye track “Power”—“Grab a camera, shoot a viral / Take the power in your own hands”—Hsu writes, “This version of power is entrancing—it explains an entire generation. But it also confuses ubiquity for importance, the familiarity of a celebrity’s face for true authority.” There is no telling how Adorno and Benjamin might have negotiated such contemporary labyrinths. Perhaps, on a peaceful day, they would have accepted the compromise devised by Fredric Jameson, who has written that the “cultural evolution of late capitalism” can be understood “dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together.”
These implacable voices should stay active in our minds. Their dialectic of doubt prods us to pursue connections between what troubles us and what distracts us, to see the riven world behind the seamless screen. “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”: Benjamin’s great formula, as forceful as a Klieg light, should be fixed as steadily on pop culture, the ritual apparatus of American capitalism, as it has been on the art works of the European bourgeoisie. Adorno asked for only so much. Above all, these figures present a model for thinking differently, and not in the glib sense touted by Steve Jobs. As the homogenization of culture proceeds apace, as the technology of surveillance hovers at the borders of our brains, such spaces are becoming rarer and more confined. I am haunted by a sentence from Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves”: “One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour.”"
Hot and Cold Media Is the Message in the Global Village of the Guttenberg Galaxy
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| Eisenstein Diagram |
+
To get a sense of what a non-deterministic historical account of the changes brought about by the printing press:
Ben Reynolds, "The Printing Press" + "Industrial Production"
from The Coming Revolution (Zero Books, 2018)
You are not responsible for the Reynolds chapters above but they are very useful and helpful.
You are, on the other hand, responsible for this Raymond Williams critique of McLuhan, in order to be done with ol' Marshall. Even though you're never really done with him.
Below is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's 'Conference' program from 1977 where McLuhan discusses and responds to audience questions on his main theoretical ideas.
Tuesday, February 11, 2020
Here's Your MTV: Music Television In Full Effect
David E. James, "The Beatles: Richard Lester and A Hard Day's Night"
Benjamin Olin, "TV Party: A Cocktail Party That Could Also Be A Political Party"
The History: Technological and Industrial Change:
Steve Jones, "MTV: The Medium was the Message"
John Mundy, "I Want My MTV...and my Movies With Music"
Catherine Johnson, "Deregulation, Differentiation and Niche Targeting: The Emergence of Branding in the Cable/Satellite Era"
The Theory: Music Videos and Postmodernism:
Andrew Goodwin, "Fatal Distractions: MTV Meets Postmodern Theory"
Will Straw, "Music Video In Its Contexts: Popular Music and Postmodernism in the 1980s"
E. Ann Kaplan, "A Post-Modern Play of the Signifier? Advertising, Pastiche and Schizophrenia in Music Television"
Andrew Goodwin, "From Anarchy to Chromakey: Developments in Music Television"
Bonus:
Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Culture"
Julie Lobalzo Wright, "The Boy Kept Swinging: David Bowie, Music Video and the Star Image"
Monday, February 3, 2020
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