[Thanks to fcrp reader and my buddy Michael Coyle for the link for today’s post.] I’ve come to think of it as a fundamental human characteristic, though perhaps it’s primarily an American trait: we’ve got to believe that we’re unique, different, special. “I wish I was special / You’re so fuckin’ special,” as The Man sez. [...]
A couple of field notes from the last week or so in this Summer of Gaga. First the serious: The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, is now holding anti-Lady Gaga rallies outside her concerts. The “church” (as a Christian myself, how I hate to use that word here!) rose to infamy when it chose to [...]
An embarrassingly “lite” post for today—and what’s more, I’m going to try to make you, Dear Reader, do the work. It’s in the form of one of those analogy tests. Look at these two examples and, having sussed out the pattern, suggest other examples of your own? Talking Heads, “Radio Head” (from True Stories) = Radiohead [...]
So I’ve been doing some background research for my current project, and the book I just finished reading puts into painful relief just what it is I hate about so much academic prose. I don’t want to name the book, because I’m not particularly interested in criticizing it, or its authors in particular (it’s a [...]
So as promised/threatened yesterday, three songs that operate roughly along the lines of the songs suggested by [correction!] faithful fcrp reader Steve: Songs that seem to be moving in one direction, carrying us merrily along, only to dart suddenly in another direction. Or in which a single word or phrase has an undue amount of [...]
FCRP regular Ken suggested a topic some time back that I’ve been musing on, and hope that it might interest—or amuse—you to muse on it to. To wit: “Pivotal lyrical lines where the wording reverses or puts in question the accepted or common meaning or understanding of the balance of the lyrics.” The examples Ken [...]
All of this begs the question, for Kruger as well as for any politically engaged postmodern artist: If we’re all patsies of the simulacrum, how can we choose a political program? How does one slip out from under “remote control” in order to make decisions with any but false consciousness? In U2′s Zoo TV Live [...]
The reason for Kruger’s dyspepsia, it seems to me, is splashed across the cover. For though we (viewers) may think we wield the remote control, in fact, says Kruger, we are the ones controlled: “To those who understand how pictures and words shape consensus, we are unmoving targets waiting to be turned on and off [...]
At its worst, Kruger’s prose sounds like a ditto prepared for Postmodernism 101: “History has been the text of the dead dictated to the living, through a voice which cannot speak for itself. The ventriloquist that balances corpses on its knee, that gives speech to silence, and transforms bones and blood into reminiscences, is none [...]
Mes Chères, Working on my summer research, I was trying to remember something I thought I’d said about U2 in a review essay published back in 1994 in the online journal Postmodern Culture. When I found it and re-read it, I was surprised, actually, that I had written it: it’s been so long since I’ve [...]