A meditation
On this:
For reference:
The Bee Gees (authors and performers of "Stayin' Alive") were active beginning in roughly 1958 (i.e., nearly sixty years ago). They wrote "Stayin' Alive" as part of Saturday Night Fever's soundtrack. That film came out in 1977 (i.e., nearly forty years ago). The dancer in the video is John Travolta, who was 23 at the time (so he's sixty now). Two members of the Bee Gees are now dead. The surviving member (Barry Gibb) is now sixty-eight years old. Nelly released "Hot in Herre" in 2002, over twelve years ago. He was twenty-eight then; Nelly is now forty. DJ Lobsterdust, the composer of this mash-up, has been doing mash-ups since at least 2006, with this particular video being done in 2011. I don't know how old Lobsterdust is.
One of the reasons I like to read Aristotle and, in conjunction with my reading of Aristotle, Aquinas's gloss on Aristotle and then modern neo-Aristotelians on Aristotle, is that I feel like it connects me with eons of human intellectual activity. I feel like I'm participating in something larger and more significant than myself. But there's a continuity in a video like this, as well, between generations and musical styles. Disco is distinct from rap, and rap is distinct from the DJ's craft, but what this video brings together is three different takes on youthful self-discovery, that moment that every generation and every individual seems to have, when they say, "Yes, this is our moment."
I like to watch Travolta shimmy across the dance floor and imagine his performance somehow inscribed upon an enduring record of humanity's history, something that will survive our brief reign on this planet, as a kind of expression of our silly, monkey confidence. It's so easy to see that none of us matter, that our journeys of self-discovery are individually meaningless. Yet we never try very hard to escape that solipsism, do we? It is so incredibly valuable to us.
Click to viewFor reference:
The Bee Gees (authors and performers of "Stayin' Alive") were active beginning in roughly 1958 (i.e., nearly sixty years ago). They wrote "Stayin' Alive" as part of Saturday Night Fever's soundtrack. That film came out in 1977 (i.e., nearly forty years ago). The dancer in the video is John Travolta, who was 23 at the time (so he's sixty now). Two members of the Bee Gees are now dead. The surviving member (Barry Gibb) is now sixty-eight years old. Nelly released "Hot in Herre" in 2002, over twelve years ago. He was twenty-eight then; Nelly is now forty. DJ Lobsterdust, the composer of this mash-up, has been doing mash-ups since at least 2006, with this particular video being done in 2011. I don't know how old Lobsterdust is.
One of the reasons I like to read Aristotle and, in conjunction with my reading of Aristotle, Aquinas's gloss on Aristotle and then modern neo-Aristotelians on Aristotle, is that I feel like it connects me with eons of human intellectual activity. I feel like I'm participating in something larger and more significant than myself. But there's a continuity in a video like this, as well, between generations and musical styles. Disco is distinct from rap, and rap is distinct from the DJ's craft, but what this video brings together is three different takes on youthful self-discovery, that moment that every generation and every individual seems to have, when they say, "Yes, this is our moment."
I like to watch Travolta shimmy across the dance floor and imagine his performance somehow inscribed upon an enduring record of humanity's history, something that will survive our brief reign on this planet, as a kind of expression of our silly, monkey confidence. It's so easy to see that none of us matter, that our journeys of self-discovery are individually meaningless. Yet we never try very hard to escape that solipsism, do we? It is so incredibly valuable to us.