Language is a liquid that we're all dissolved in great for
solving problems after it creates the problems.
I have to admit that I've never really been a big Modest
Mouse fan. Their stuff is fine, I guess, but on the whole it has never really
spoken to me. I went to that one free show they did in Salt Lake where there
were too many people and people got turned away and it was a big deal and
whatnot. It was a pretty good show, but yeah, they've never really been my jam.
(If I'm being perfectly honest, that night I enjoyed Avi Buffalo a lot more
than I did Modest Mouse. So sue me.)
Anyway, with that disclaimer about my real feelings
regarding Modest Mouse out of the way, their tune "Blame It on the
Tetons," man, it kills me. Ever since the first time I heard the first 10
seconds it was love. I mean, pierced through the gut, felt like I had to
reevaluate my life choices love.
You know that thing where sometimes you're going about your
business and out of heaven there seems to descend a lyric or a line of poetry
or a guitar riff or a sunset or some other perfection that is just so sublime
that the very moment you experience it you think to yourself, "yes."
And that yes is as affirmative a yes as you've ever yessed? It's like you've
been given the chance to look at the actual thing that is casting the shadows
of the wall of the cave that Plato was stuck in. And even though it may be that
that yes is really just a fleeting yes, as it fleets the yes is actually
Yes. You know?
To be honest I'm not sure "Blame It on the Tetons" is quite up to that level of yessitude, but I've listened to it about 30 times today (both the Modest Mouse version and Josh Ritter's cover), and for whatever reason it's been feeling pretty yessy.
So...life happened and I got real behind with the whole recounting of my postmodern music association project. Through it all I've been keeping track of the musics, I just haven't found the time to post them. (When I say I've been keeping track, I seem to have lost my record of one of the paperday weeks. alas.) I was going to create separate posts for each of the days, but then I thought, "meh." So here goes. One big ol' long post filled with two months worth of postmodern musical associations.
For those who've forgotten how this works, I list the song title and artist, and underneath, in italics, the word or phrase that was spoken in class that hit the play button in my head on that particular song.
Also, today I came into class with this song in my head:
So here's a picture of the Bangles to go along with it.
And off we go:
March 2, 2014
"In Time" - Robbie Robb
"The democracy protests in the streets..."
"Self-perpetuating Fun Loop" - Bass Clef
“It skews the number of panels dedicated to
technical and professional writing, which becomes self-perpetuating…”
"They Don't Care About Us" - Michael Jackson "We know you don't care about us."
"You're the Voice" - John Farnham "Everyone can have a voice."
"Were You There?" - as played by Jon Schmidt "Where you there?"
"Good Vibrations" - Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch "The vibrations aid digestion."
"Toxic" - Britney Spears "...incredibly toxic to women."
"Super Mario Bros theme" - um...nintendo?
so...I don't actualy know where this one came from. I just have written "Mario Theme." My guess is it just popped into my head without any rhyme nor reason and I, being the faithful recorder of all the musics that pop into my head during class, had to write it down.
"Both Sides Now" - Joni Mitchell "Both of these things existing."
"How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" - Sound of Music "How does one pin down the unconscious?"
"Don't Know Much" - Aaron Neville & Linda Ronstadt "I don't know anything."
"Be Here Now" - Mason Jennings "This event. Here. Now."
"I've Got the Power" - Snap! "What if I had the power..."
April 20, 2015
"Return to
Innocence" - Enigma
“There’s a lot of return to spirituality”
"Particle Man" -They Might Be Giants
“When a frog’s in the water is he part of the water”
"Ice Ice Baby" – Vanilla Ice
“We would stop…existing”
"Sunrise, Sunset" - Fiddler on the Roof
“It makes for dramatic sunrises and sunsets.”
"Head Over Heels" – Tears for Fears
“That person’s a heel.”
"Hungry like the wolf" - Duran Duran
“One or several wolves.”
"It’s a Great Day to Be Alive" – Travis Tritt
“A lone wolf is so rare because a lone wolf cannot exist.”
April 27, 2015
"We’ve Only Just Begun" - Carpenters
“I feel like we haven’t even started”
"(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" - Rolling Stones
The word satisfaction was said many, many times
"Take My Breathe Away" - Berlin
"Catch my breath a little bit on that one"
"The Golden Age" - The Asteroids Galaxy Tour
"I have a friend going into new age stuff."
"We Used to Wait" - Arcade Fire
"I would wait."
"Hell" - Squirrel Nut Zippers
"She's talking about mediums and the afterlife."
"Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)" - Journey
"What separates narrative poetry from fictional narrative?"
"Masquerade" - Phantom of the Opera
"At least it's not masquerading as..."
"I Need to Know" - Marc Anthony
"I think I need to know which bits of this project..."
"Octopus's Garden" - The Beatles
"Do you remember the children's show 'The Magic Garden'?"
Sometimes I'll be having a pretty good day where I'm going along working just fine and being more productive than usual, when out of nowhere iTunes makes Whitney Houston start singing "I Will Always Love You." It doesn't totally stop me from working, but now I'm focusing more on listening to the music than I was before.
Then about three minutes in the song just kinda stops for a sec and it's like the world stops with it.
And even though I had been in a groove and in the zone and in that flow state that's so hard to get into, everything I'd been doing comes to a grinding halt.
Because I know what's coming.
And then the drum hits.
And then Whitney storms back in with, "And aaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyeeaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy will always love youuuuuuuuuuuu."
And I'm left wondering if there is a more perfect moment in all of music.
So PoMo on Monday was quite a ride. We talked about all kinds of things and the conversation kept swirling around and I'm not quite sure that I totally have a handle on what happened, and I kinda felt like that was the point? All I know is that I was more vocal and vehement in class than I normally am, and as I left I was rather uncomfortable with that. I dunno. It was a weird day. I feel like it was an important day, and a cool one, but a strange one all the same. Mostly, I just came away feeling like this:
Wide-eyed, a little bewildered, but also having rather enjoyed myself, I think. (Quick note, the baby in that picture has "blepharitis" which is why his right eye is a little swollen. I did not have blepharitis on Monday.)
Music played an extremely important role in class on Monday since one of the articles we read expressly talked about punk music and its relationship to our subject material. As such, there were a whole lot of musics that were expressly referenced in class. I made a big long list of them all, but I decided that rather than include here on this blog all the songs that were listened to, played, or directly discussed in class, I would instead only include the songs that fit the mold of what I've been listing up to now. Which is to say, I'm only listing here the songs that occurred to me because a word or phrase that someone in class said was similar enough to a song lyric to hit the play button on ghetto blaster in my mind.
And with that, on to the musics:
"American Pie" - Don McLean
"The day that grades go live my phone rings."
"The Humans Are Dead" - Flight of the Conchords
"the humans are resilient"
"Agony" from Into the Woods - Stephen Sondheim
"Agonism, he calls it agonism." (This song actually came to mind about a dozen times because the word "agonism" was said at least that many times.)
"My Body" - Young the Giant
"Do I rebel against my body?"
"Communication Breakdown" - Led Zeppelin (I actually started singing this song when it popped in)
"Something communication, communication something"
"Suddenly I See" - KT Tunstall
"Suddenly there is diversity"
"The End" - The Doors
"We are at the end"
Bonus - Free Jazz
Several times in class now this tune has come to my head. Not because of any specific words or phrases, but because the subject material we talk about reminds me of it. I nearly just started playing it in class while John was talking to illustrate a point, but I didn't. Though now I wish I had. It's also a propos because this week Greg Clark, one of my BYU professors and a highly influential figure in getting me to where I am today, published his new book Civic Jazz: American Music and Kenneth Burke on the Art of Getting Along. Anyway, I linked to the tune in an earlier post because I referenced it in my last paper day paper, but it keeps coming to my mind so I've decided to include it again. It's actually an album-length song by Ornette Coleman entitled "Free Jazz."
Man last week was crazy and I didn't get around to posting my postmodern musics from last Monday's class. Since I'm about to go into class in like 20 minutes I wanted to get this posted before another round of musics start swimming their way through my thoughts on postmodern rhetorical thought. Unfortunately time constraints preclude me from giving much context beyond saying we talked about authors. Since we were talking about authors, and since over the weekend I reread parts of one of my favorite books of ever, Old Man and the Sea, here's a picture of Hemingway:
So here's last week's musics. "Acknowledgement" from A Love Supreme - John Coltrane "Do we acknowledge..."
"Beast of Burden" - The Rolling Stones "It can't be the beast that bears their burden..."
"Dem Bones" - Delta River Boys "I guess they're in the business of printing houses now...and bones."
"Here Comes My Baby" - Cat Stevens "Does a baby actually exist?"
"What's Up" - 4 Non Blondes "What's going on?
"I've Heard It Both Ways" - James Roday and Timothy Omundson (from Psych: The Musical) "I wanna have it both ways?"
"Pure Energy" - Information Society "I wanna know if...?
Bonus - Postmodern movie clip:
Some in class said something about a mechanism, and my connection-drawing mind immediately jumped to this scene from For Love of the Game. I've always thought this was a pretty corny way of talking about pitchers and their "stuff" (man I love that the pitcher's craft is referred to as "stuff"), but there you go.
This week in PoMo we all wrote and read and discussed "papers" about various thoughts and themes and ideas that have arisen from our readings and musings and conversings thus far in the semester. It was a highly enjoyable couple of hours made only slightly less enjoyable by the fact that my cold really picked up steam as the class progressed.
At this point I want to discuss briefly something that I've noticed as I've gone about this project for about a month now. My goal at the outset was not to actively look for connections between the things people say and musical associations, but I've found that the more I make note of these associations, the more readily they come to mind. And not just in PoMo. I'm drawing connections between music and the world around me so often that it's almost like my life has a soundtrack, but the DJ who's controlling it can't listen to more than a few bars of a given song before it switches to something else. My life has become an expansive play of musical intertextuality and I rather enjoy it. As I go about my life I feel rather like this:
and it's great. Anyway, on to the musics.
First, let me say that because I've been tracking music in this class I decided it was fitting that I talk about music in the paper that I wrote. The 2 songs I used were:
"Come Together" - The Beatles
and "Free Jazz" - Ornette Coleman
As I wrote the paper I listened to "Free Jazz" a couple of times and I feel like I gained a greater appreciation for that subgenre of jazz music that I ever have before.
And the musical associations from the day's discussion:
"Let It Go" - Idina Menzel, from the Frozen soundtrack
"like a fractal"
"Disturbia" - Rihanna
"Utopias that are actually disturbias" (Jenny actually said "dystopias" not "disturbias," but my cold-addled brain heard "disturbias" so, yep.)
"(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" - The Rolling Stones
"And yet the satisfaction..."
"I Wanna Talk About Me" - Toby Keith
"I like that you talk about...time"
"So What" - Miles Davis
"So what."
"Cotton Eye Joe" - Rednex
"Where it was going was..."
"The Impression That I Get" - The Might Mighty Bosstones
"like the feeling that I get when I'm reading poetry"
"Wannabe" - Spice Girls
"Tell me what you want"
Additional musics mentioned or brought up by others in the class:
"Heavy Metal Drummer" - Wilco
Michael mentioned that this song popped into his head during a part of our discussion. I wasn't familiar with it myself, but I'm glad he brought it up because me gusta.
"All the Small Things" - Blink 182
This was the title of Jenny's paper.
So this week we were talking about social construction and we read some Judith Butler and some Richard Rorty and some Kenneth Bruffee. We talked about a lot of things like taxonomies and the need to ask the question "why is what you just said persuasive to you" and heteronormativity and the social construction of gender and the body and warring factions of librarians, and so on. And we had chili and rice pudding and banana bread to boot. It was all very exciting.
Before class started something happened, I wasn't paying close attention to that side of the room so I missed it, and Beth's mug ended up on the ground in shattered bits. Immediately everyone jumped up and starting running about getting paper towels and a broom to soak up the spilled liquids and I just sat in my chair doing nothing. The reason for my inaction was twofold: 1) everyone was doing already everything I might have thought to do, 2) the sound of the glass shattering was beautiful and it kept replaying in my mind. So that was the first "music" to come to mind yesterday. I didn't think to take a picture at the time, so here's an artsy picture of shattered glass that I found on the internet:
This leads us to our musics, with the inciting contexts in italics/quotation marks:
"Walking on Broken Glass" - Annie Lennox the context was, well, the broken glass on the floor of the classroom
"Meat is Murder" – The Smiths
"Meat is murder"
"Be Still My Heart" – Postal Service
"Richard
Powers?!?" - Amelia, as she clutched her hands over her heart
"From Russia with Love" - Matt Monro
"from Russia"
"My Body is a Cage" – Arcade Fire
“What about my body?”
"Because We Can" - Fatboy Slim
"Because we can"
Collide – Howie Day (This one was surprising. I haven't thought of this song in a long time.)
...I don't remember the context. Someone must've said the word collide.
"Peace Like a River" – Paul Simon
“why can’t your identity be like a
cloud or a river?”
That title should probably say "sous rature" rather than erasure, since that's the word/phrase that Heidegger and Derrida used in the original. But we read an English translation which translated sous rature as "erasure" (and used it often). I bet you can't guess what musics are going to be leading us off today.
But first, it snowed last night. I try to keep an upbeat attitude about the snow, especially considering this winter hasn't been anywhere near as awful as the Arctic Death Freeze of 2014. All the same, I felt a little like this going into PoMo today:
In fact, the social significance of snow and ice was mentioned today in class, if only in passing, so my attempt to insert Gilmore Girls into my post turned out to be relevant after all.
So in case it wasn't already clear, for PoMo today we read some Derrida. We also read about intertextuality and a brief(ish) introduction to what postmodernism is. We talked about a lot of different things in class today like nihilism and meaning and language and whether social context and history and more that I don't want to get into right. But that's not why I'm writing this post. I'm writing to talk about the music that popped into my head throughout our three hour long discussion. Be warned, there were more this time than there were last week.
I know I said with my last post that I wouldn't provide lengthy explanations of why these songs came to mind, but I've decided that I'll at least provide the word or phrase that provided the trigger.
So, in order of occurrence, here goes:
Erasure - A Little Respect
Okay, I know I said that I won't be providing much explanation for why these songs came to my head, but I have to say that this song was a recurring theme throughout class because every time someone said the word "erasure", my brainPod hit repeat. So really this song should be on today's list 6 or 8 times.
Power - Kanye West
"schizoid"
Grand Illusion - Styx
"complete confusion"
It's Not Unusual - Tom Jones
"It's not unusual..."
Take My Breath Away - Berlin
"You just took her breath away."
Hazy Shade of Winter - The Bangles
"Time, time..."
Don't Know Much - Linda Ronstadt and Aaron Neville
"I don't know much..."
Just You Wait - Audrey Hepburn & Marni Nixon
"Oh just wait until..."
Bonus Track: Brick House - The Commodores
This song didn't pop into my head during class, but as I was doing the reading the word bricolage brought it to the fore time and again.
No this isn't a post about postmodern music, but rather a post (and likely a series of posts) about the musics that pop into my head while I'm sitting, thinking, conversating, and otherwise engaging in my postmodern theory class.
I feel I need to clarify that this isn't something that is necessarily unique to PoMo (as it is affectionately called). In pretty much every class I take moment of my life, things happen (people say things, birds suddenly appear, etc.) that trigger musics to start playing in my head. In the past I've made half-hearted efforts to take note of the songs that pop into my head so that I can see which arise most frequently, but as it happened several times throughout PoMo today, I decided to make a concerted effort to pay attention to it whilst in this class throughout the semester.
So here's how this is going to go:
1) I'm just gonna list the songs. Without direct context. It's more fun that way, see. (Also I figure I can afford to check out of the class discussion for the few seconds it takes to jot down a song title, but not for the length of time it would take to note the exact context.)
2) I'm going to try and not force musical associations, but rather just let them happen naturally. (At least as naturally as is possible.)
3) I anticipate there will be times when I won't want to admit which songs popped into my head (coughcoughphysicalolivianewtonjohncough) but I'll not censor myself, no matter how shameful.
While I'll not be providing the direct context from the conversation that triggers the songs, I will try to give some sort of context from the class that day. For example, today we talked about Magritte and Foucault's reading thereof. Thus:
So, without further gilding the lily, here are the PoMo musics from the first day of school:
Physical - Olivia Newton John
I Am A Rock - Simon and Garfunkel
Changes - David Bowie
The Space Between - Dave Matthews Band
I should probably note that at one point we were talking about Zen koans and the phrase "the sound of silence" was explicitly said, but Simon and Garfunkel's classic of that name didn't come to mind until someone else in class said something about it. You'd think that since Art and Pauly had already made a foray into my mind earlier in class that an encore performance would be inevitable in such a situation. But it wasn't. So while the song did eventually find its way into my head, its presence wasn't organic so I don't list it here.
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