Saturday, February 13, 2021
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"
Saturday, February 6, 2021
Synthesizing Modernity: 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.”"
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.
The Sound Begins: Popular Music Readings II
 |
| 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.”"
Sunday, January 24, 2021
Remediation and Attractions
This is Georges Méliès' Le voyage dans la lune/A Trip to the Moon with a soundtrack by the French group AIR. Méliès is already moving towards the prerogatives ofnarrative here, innovating a number of specific cinematic narrative devices (dissolves and linear time) however, the elements of the cinema of attractions are still very much present here.
Below a direct quote of the film by The Smashing Pumpkins in the Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris directed video for "Tonight, Tonight" (1996)
The Cinema of Attractions Films: Playlist
Monopolies of Knowledge and Space/Time Bias + Hot and Cold Media Is the Message in the Global Village of the Guttenberg Galaxy
Harold Innis, "The Bias of Communication" from The Bias of Communication (University of Toronto Press, 2008; orig. 1951)
 |
| 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.
Saturday, January 16, 2021
I Want My MTV!: You'll Have To Wait For It
Sunil Manghani, "The Pleasures of (Music) Video"
from Arnold et al (eds), Music/Video: Histories, Aesthetics, Media (Bloomsbury, 2017)
Mathias Korsgaard, "Defining Music Video"
from Korsgaard, Music Video After MTV: Audiovisual Studies, New Media and Popular Music (Routledge, 2017)
Carol Vernallis, "Avant-Gardists and the Lure of Pop Music"
from Rogers & Barham (eds), The Music and Sound of Experimental Film (Oxford, 2017)
Bonus:
The Idiot Box, the Electronic Babysitter, the Toaster with Pictures, "Drug of the Nation, Breeding Ignorance and Feeding Radiation"...or just a little city
Raymond Williams, "The Technology and the Society"
originally in Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form
Michele Hilmes, "Cable, Satellite and Digital Technologies"
P. David Marshall, "Rejuvenation: Television"
Bjork explains TV:
Enjoy some tunes about TV below:
Communications: Ritual vs. Transmission? Works vs. Acts? Message vs. Text?
from Kenneth Anger's 'Scorpio Rising'
Plato, The Allegory of the Cave
James Carey, "A Cultural Approach to Communication" from Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989)
Art & Folk & The Popular
The virtuoso instrumentalist and composer as superstar: Franz Liszt.
Good interview on WNYC's Soundcheck with Tim Blanning author of The Triumph of Music, a 'social history' of musicians in the west and how they went from being considered merely servants to being 'stars'. This is an excellent example of metacontextual musical knowledge. Required listening.
Download entire interview mp3 here.
Download entire interview mp3 here.
Friday, January 15, 2021
Popular Music: Music Becomes A Thing
Readings Week 1&2:
in Garofalo, Rockin' Out:
-Introduction + Chapter 1: Tin Pan Alley
in Cambridge Companion:
-Introduction + Chronology
-Theberge, "'Plugged In': Technology & Popular Music"
-Frith, "The Popular Music Industry"
-Frith, "Pop Music"
from The Cultural Resistance Reader:
-Stuart Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular'"
from Durham & Kellner (eds), Media & Cultural Studies: Keyworks
-Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
from Frith & Goodwin (eds), On Record
-Adorno, "On Popular Music"
nb. You can find this essay together with "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" co-written with Max Horkheimer --an essay which if you have not read should definitely do so-- here.
from Even Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Music Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa
-Eisenberg, Chapter 2: Music Becomes a Thing
from Durham & Kellner (eds), Media & Cultural Studies: Keyworks
-Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
from Frith & Goodwin (eds), On Record
-Adorno, "On Popular Music"
nb. You can find this essay together with "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" co-written with Max Horkheimer --an essay which if you have not read should definitely do so-- here.
from Even Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Music Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa
-Eisenberg, Chapter 2: Music Becomes a Thing
Grimes, "Genesis" Live Session for KEXP
Tuesday, January 12, 2021
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