Dave, did you ever read my recombinant dub piece?

[koganbot]

Dave (and anyone else), did you ever happen to run across the recombinant dub piece I did for the Voice back in '02? "Recombinant dub" isn't entirely what the piece is about, it's just the name for one of the concepts in it, one of the poles of attraction in a multi-poles-of-attraction environment. Also, I actually discuss no dub music in the piece

Comments

[skyecaptain]

Hm, a lot to think about here -- I'm rereading the recombinant dub piece now.

I think one thing I'd maybe shift in the metaphor is that I'm not sure I'd get rid of the actors, with the pieces standing in previously as background for the foreground now without that foreground. Rather, the scope widens to the point that the fore isn't as fore as it once was. We see the three actors, and perhaps recognize them as "the actors," but we might see that elm tree much more prominently, or those other actors, or whatever else.

And to swim back and forth between literal and metaphor, this is to some extent what happens to film in the postclassical period (starting in roughly the 1950s) -- the influence of art house aesthetics starts to create a cinematic language that is not as centered on the actor, but rather creates a general picture that the actor happens to inhabit. We follow the actor (perhaps) because we know he's the actor, but not because he's necessarily been centralized by the surrounding imagery

[koganbot]

If every shot radically decenters the actors, then "decentering the actors" becomes the center of the film.

Hmmm. My complaint about rock criticism and musicwrite is that the critics don't know how or aren't willing to sustain an intellectual conversation - and this seems to be a problem of concentration: a refusal to communicate, a refusal to understand, and a refusal to follow through. But this isn't because in today's de-centered world people are too pulled this way and that to concentrate on the same subject matter (though it is difficult to gather people together to all talk about the same thing). Rather, the problem is that when person B says to person A, "You said X but I did not understand you, and you said Y but you seemed to contradict yourself," and A never gets back to B with a response, or A gives a response that just repeats X and Y in slightly re-worded form, this isn't because in today's culture A has so many interesting things to think about, in a wide variety all over the place, that he just never really got around

[skyecaptain]

Still, reading over the recombinant dub piece again, a few points stick out:

So the shifts don't mean much and don't put the band interestingly at odds with itself. If the band had done a Celine Dion torch song followed by growling, darkness-drenched goth metal followed by Trick Daddy thug hip-hop, now those would be changes in identity.

This is maybe the "I like my center" argument, in which easy signifiers of sound and genre may recombine without challenging the underlying social arrangement -- i.e. there's "no meaningful genre distinction," but Person X has nothing to say to Person Y, even as they listen to essentially the same music. They're standing right next to each other but have nothing to say. This is why the Big Problem in internet communication, say, isn't necessarily that no one can agree on anything, but that people don't really know how to talk to one another regardless of what they agree on (what they need to agree on are the terms in which they might agree or disagree, the agreement and disagreement of content not

[skyecaptain]

Woops, in the "generalist publication" bit, I'm being put more in contact with X, the unknown thing, than Y, the thing I already like.

[skyecaptain]

*rather than Y. Just switch 'em up, y'know.

[koganbot]

Ah, I should have read this comment before commenting on your previous one, since you raise some of the same issues I did when I wandered about in my previous comment. But I think the point we're both making is that the issue isn't that people don't share a common culture or a common subject matter - though sometimes they don't - but whether people are fundamentally willing to engage, and whether they know how to engage.

[skyecaptain]

The persistence of "the old actors," the former foreground, is one reason why my writing about these changes started to fall apart a bit. The fact is that old centers are holding pretty steadfastly even as new ones begin to gain prominence, even if that prominence is relative to lower expectations (lower record sales means you don't need to sell as many to be a "#1," but that designation of #1 selling artist still means something, even if it doesn't mean as much).