Encounterculture

The deaf and the dumb

Man, Putzfuck really does suck sometimes (that time most typically taking place over the entire course of a day), but they do serve a purpose by existing. It's always fun to go through their archived reviews and read them hamfistedly trashing albums that you love (example: Few things are more incriminating than Daft Punk's own lyrics, which, while generally deeper than "don't stop the dancing," rarely go beyond sensitive junior high poetry and "could this be love" Whitesnake-isms. FUQ U BUDDY); I think probably everyone does it with every critic (seeing as how a pop-culture critic is only as useful as his congruence to your own personal taste), but since PF hates everything good it's especially fun.

And yet sometimes things go horribly, horribly right. Last night, after a long day of working like the Only Mule in Georgia without having slept the night before, I decided to spend my last few lucid hours watching I Love the 70s and browsing around, and...fuck. I'd forgotten all about "Drinking In LA", which got played like three times on M2 during my sophmore year, only one of which I managed to hear (viz. the Wiseguys). But the PF guy really did nail it: you only have to hear that shape-shifting hook once and you are fucking THERE and you know it.

I guess you can really trace the origins of this blog directly to that moment. Partially, of course, that's because pop culture exists to form communities between consumers, which is probably why the source of the memory-flood is so staggeringly surprising, as generally I would like to run very very far away from anything associated with PF. I have no doubt that if this blog finds an audience, it will be due to any skill I have in translating my reactions to a text object into the English language.

But that's all bullshit; I'll join a support group if I want to meet people like me. I'm more interested in the qualities that made the hook itself so paradoxically instantaneously memorable. Part of me wants to say that it was just the time - remember that I first ran into the song in 2000, right smack in the middle of the renaissance of Limp Bizkitry and Ja Rulisms - and that nothing else out there really had that undulating tapped-snifter sound. But that's got to be nothing but bullshit; someone out there HAD to be doing it better. If there's nothing else that we can take away from postmodernism, we can always run back to that.

So what, then? Is memory just cultural? Do I remember BV3k so fondly because of some shit that happened to me when I was five or whatever? I certainly hope not; if that's true, then Taste exists as a sort of shorthand for art. We have art because individuals want at least SOME part of themselves to live longer than them, of course; it's just the survival instinct elevated to the level of culture. If said culture has progressed to the point where we're interacting directly with the medium of tones and notes itself, then yeah, on the one hand that means that we have a more informed base to work from, but on the other one...can't everyone hear sounds (except deaf people, of course)?

I am not one to polemicize things offhandedly; I am a big believer in self-determination and the day I speak for someone else is the day I jump off a bridge holding a very large rock. But to me, it seems implicitly dangerous to start interacting with culture on THAT basic a level, especially if (like me) you're doing it from a taste-centric, uneducated background (six months of piano lessons, three guitar lessons, and some elementary school recorder booklets are the width and breadth of my musical education). It's a different thing if you really kick your own ask to learn about the medium, of course - generally "more education" seems to be my answer to every problem with society - but nobody seems to want to do that anymore, including myself (at least when it comes to music).

Please understand that I'm also not saying that society is fucked up because everyone is stupid and doesn't do the research in order to Fully Realize their Implicit Burning Love of Bran Van 3000 - far from it. Today's pop culture is more globally informed than at any other point in history, and it's adding new cultural links every day (ALFONSO CUARON is doing the next Harry Potter movie, ferchrissakes). Yet the way we consume it really hasn't changed since the advent of MTV: those who want to encounter it have to go straght to a fixed source of legitimacy, be it MTV, VH1, or one of the ClearChannel stations. (I generally don't count internet radio, if only because the cost of accessing it is so prohibitive and the conditions of access are so much more restrictive. However, when they come out with a portable internet radio tuner not known as a laptop or a Palm Pilot, I will be all up in its shit.)

I think that's probably the root of the problem. The fundamental crisis on the horizon for tomorrow's significant cultural thinkers is going to revolve around consumption more than ever, because we're (hopefully) transforming from a self-serving culture into one forced to think globally AND locally. (I guess that's all we can really hope to learn from the current Bush administration. FOUR BUCKS FOR GAS IN PHOENIX, people.) Yet in the meantime, we still have to go to the one source, and the hydra-head we talk to doesn't really matter all that much. I wonder what would have happened if Nate or David or Brendan or Eric or Rick had told me to download the BV3K album instead, and I'd come across that song by accident rather than by programming. Would I still remember it three years later?

What I want most in the world is to prove that it could.