random thoughts to oil the mind

Category: Music

[:en]Rubber-eared commentary on the world of music.[:de]Kommentare über Musik von einem Halbtauben

Popnographie

This post is also available in English.

Wir befinden uns in einem Zeitalter, in dem es fast als eine Tugend gilt, unserer Ungeduld und unserer mickrigen Aufmerksamkeitspanne verfallen sind, in dem das Fernsehen durch Zappen verdrängt wurde, in dem wir unserer Musik nicht mehr zuhören, sondern zu den Refrains vorspulen und zwischen den Liedern springen, in dem unsere Aufmerksamkeit gleichzeitig in Tausend Richtungen von unserer vernetzten Welt gezogen wird.

Daher sollte es uns nicht überraschen, wenn der Erfolgsweg genau diese Rastlosigkeit ausnutzt. Man nehme eine Jahresprise der erfolgreichsten Lieder, entsaftet sie, seziert sie, destilliert deren Einprägsamkeit ab. Die rohen Zutaten werden verschmolzen, verdichtet, miteinander geschickt neu kombiniert, und man erschafft durch diese Veredlung eine völlig neue Spezies, einen Überohrwurm, der die reinste Verkörperung von alldem, was man aus der Popmusik hören will, darstellt.

Dies ist keine Danthologie. Es ist die reinste Popnographie.

Popnography

Dieser Eintrag ist auch auf Deutsch verfügbar.

We live in an age where being a slave to our impatience and short attention spans is almost a virtue, where watching television has made room for channel hopping, where listening to music involves skipping to choruses and jumping between tracks, where our attentions are constantly being pulled in a thousand different directions by our internetworked world.

It comes then as little surprise that one road to success is to cash in on our restlessness. Take a year’s worth of successful tunes, juice them, dissect them, distil their catchiness, then splice, blend and sew together a Frankenstein of audial goodies. That’s what you get with Daniel Kim’s Pop Danthologies: a highly concentrated concoction of successful pop anthems, a luxurious blend of first flush leaves, condensed and refined, the scion of sonic addiction grafted onto the stock of all that is pop.

This isn’t a danthology. This is hardcore popnography.

Daily Links

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 “Eroica” – A wonderful website devoted to one of the most important pieces in Beethoven’s career, and the history of the symphony. Courtesy of Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, the website also features works by Copland, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky.

Flash Earth – View the Earth using Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Yahoo! Maps and more, and switch between them. The site claims to be experimental and works without official consent, so will not necessarily be around for long.

Tenth Dimension – Confused by string theory? Watch this simple and fascinating video explaining the ten dimensions—but be prepared to have forgotten it all inside of two minutes!

Zamzar – Convert between a good variety of audio, video, image, document and storage file types online for free. This includes videos available on a number of popular websites (e.g. YouTube, Metacafe and the like). The paid for version offers a number of improved features, but even the basic free version allows files of up to 100Mb to be converted, plenty adequate for most file types, though the result is emailed to an address of your choice, which could prove problematic for certain inboxes.

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