Just kiddin'.

After an unfortunate accident, a new scanner had to be found. It's a monster.

SCANNER BROKEN (BEING REPLACED), & NO MORE CLASSES

Part 1:
As Guy Debord details in didactics through 221 theses, the Spectacle is an all encompassing and consuming power structure of mediated images, and consequently mediated relationships, imposed on today’s society where the artificial is favored over the real. In his book, The Society of the Spectacular, Debord describes that everything that was once “directly lived,” is now a desensitized collection of manipulative images, a multitude of half-truths, that is constantly bombarding us through every TV show and billboard advertisement we see. Written in 1967, it is alarmingly prophetic in anticipating how mass media still continues to influence us more and more, and has led to some very interesting cultural developments.
Modern day sampling and postmodern pastiche, specifically in pop and hip-hop music today seems to embody a strange permutation of the spectacle, simultaneously an adverse reaction and full acceptance of the spectacle. Subtly encouraging copyright theft through sampling and available technology, yet at the same time serving as a full example of this disconnecting “false consciousness” pastiche the spectacle represents, modern and contemporary pop and hip-hop is at a strange crossroads. With the future of digital music still in question, with DRM restrictions and p2p networks still thriving, modern pop, through its similar schizophrenic and cut’n’paste aesthetic (for example, Jessica Simpson’s newest single “These Boots are Made for Walkin’”), seems to be encouraging its own death. With music growing less and less controlled by big business and more liberated through individual means, the most popular music now is the most schizophrenic, cutting and pasting across genres with a click of the mouse. When music becomes less of a commodity and object of commerce through mixtapes and mashups, hijacked and disseminated through filesharing and DJing, is the music further perpetuating the spectacle or finally breaking it? By breaking away from big studio control and using digital technology to spread and bypass capitalism, does it break away from the spectacle or become a further refracted reflection of artifce?
The interesting aspect about today’s means and mediums through which music is consumed and made is that now, more than ever, music has a certain whispered type of liberation, ushered and broken free by the mp3. The standard rock ‘n’ roll Holy Grail of a record contract is slowly becoming a relic of a long gone past, the once imposing and looming capital border for the music dream. For a savvy googler who’s convinced piracy doesn’t fund terrorism, or for the rich suburban kid with some cash to burn, making and experiencing music is now an easy and incredibly affordable venture; who needs to spend hundreds of dollars a day in a studio for weeks when musicians can now create “bedroom masterpieces?”
Thus, the border between artistic ambition and commercial capital is suddenly disrupted. The proletariat no longer needs to plead to the bourgeoisie to fulfill their dream… the musician in question can skip the whole mechanized bureaucratic assembly style process of today’s music studios and can truly create something of their own, for themselves. The satisfaction of a work done completely and not mechanized into spare parts, like calling in a session drummer, is something wildly tangible. Not even in musical powerhouses like Motown did the possibility of creating a complete individual product exist. In addition to the fact that Motown employed a regular in house session music group to fill in any pop song where it was needed (the earliest example being the “Swinging Tigers”), a popular myth concerning one of their earliest hits, “Money”, by Barrett Strong, goes as such: Berry Gordy, tired and frustrated at the end of the day, started humming a little ditty, and along with his secretary, made up the song at the spot. Immediately, they grabbed Barrett Strong from the studio and two random kids passing by on the street; Strong sang, and the two random kids played bass and drums and left shortly thereafter, leaving an anonymous contribution to one of the biggest pop songs of all time.

Tomorrow: more talking about what I have no idea about.

Just a little something to keep things at least semi-alive around here! Summer is, of course, flying by way too quickly, but what can you do. Big decisions to make as well; I might be moving to Nicaragua right after graduation for about a year or so for a documentary. But I dunno, it's all tentative, and I have to thinkthinkthink, and depending on where that gets me, I'll have to get busybusybusy. But no future talk, as long as the present's so pressing. With the end of basic painting, this baby's gonna pick up full steam, no, really, seriously, like, you should get out of its way, 'cause, like, this force, this force, has a lotta power, make me feel like... make me feel like...