The powerful thing about STYLE is that when it’s approached consciously by the style leaders — i.e. with the understanding that it can and will be co-opted by corporatism at any opporunity — it can become a powerful tool for subversion. (In fact that’s how corporations do it, but I’m not going into that specifically.)

Style is not just SEEMING; it is also DOING. Humans have this interesting capacity for deciphering fakes and phonies from doers and believers. Something “feels wrong”, and it’s in that moment — a micromoment that happens all over the world a hundred times a second — that a choice is made: is part of this style an irony that encompasses NOT-doing (and so is fair-game for collection into the vast consumptive morass), or is this style one that must necessarily contain DOING?

The answer to this question comes from exemplars.

Why do we exhort our teenagers to be better examples for their younger siblings? Why do we chide fathers for not practicing what they preach? Why do we consider it the ultimate punk rock betrayal to “sell out” — i.e. to apparently give in to the commercialism that punk-ism alleged to intend to short-circuit?

Because the way you protect a style that incorporates a sort of DOING that you want to encourage is to make sure there are enough enviable persons being visible in that style and incorporating that DOING.

To bring it back to ground level, the point I’m making here is that Punk’s Not Dead, not fully dead, unless you proclaim that it’s dead and there’s no way you can be an exemplar of true punk.

So if punkness is to embody a certain DOING and not simply an ironic sort of SEEMING: take back the style.

In other words: I want to see librarians wearing spikes and sporting mohawks.

…Or flannel and ripped jeans. Or cat-eye glasses and leopard print dresses.

…Or none of the above. Because just saying “fuck off I’m a librarian” is pretty punk too.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, corporatism, culture, libraries, philosophy, punk rock, style, theory

I’m well aware I need a haircut, a kick in the pants, and a stern talking to. And yeah, there’s some glare on my glasses from the screen. TOO BAD!

Nthmost Twitter Manifesto

What’s great about Twitter is that it’s like a party, and the type of party you’re at is defined by who you’re following, who’s following you, and how you choose to use this platform.

Maybe you’re at a sports party and you’re trading stats, betting on performance, and ordering pizza with weird toppings.  Maybe it’s a family reuniun.  Maybe it’s like a total cafe scene where you’re surrounded by underground art and obscure music.

Mine is a cocktail party. I want to be at a party where I’m engaging in conversations with wicked smart people and learning a lot, sharing ideas, and sometimes just being clever for the sake of witty banter. That’s me.

I share links and post pictures either to start conversations or to contribute to the conversations that are happening around me.  I have strong opinions and I want to encourage other people to have strong [well-reasoned and interesting] opinions and to participate in a discussion through them.

I’m not the type who’s documenting the minutiae of her life. Nothing wrong with that, I’m just not doing that.

I can be noisy sometimes, so you might wanna turn off the mobile notifications for me. I very rarely twitter about where I am, and if I want your attention specifically, I’ll send you a Direct Message.

Finally, I do not automatically Follow people back. I do check out every single one of your profiles, though, to see if you’re having the kind of conversations I want to get into. If you just have 1 message posted and it’s a link to something I’ve seen a billion times… nuh-uh. nope.  Just sayin’.

–Naomi Most, March 14, 2009

Technorati Tags: manifesto, nthmost, theory, twitter, video

I didn’t say so in my response, but I absolutely agree.  I dislike the way I myself sound, and I try to protect my housemates from it as best I can.  It begs the question of why I play it at all, which turns out to be perfectly apropos to this topic. 

Simply put, it’s a challenge!  Can I get a great score and sound cool?  Some songs work great for me, and some songs are horribly unforgiving, score-wise, when I attempt to inject some style and tone.  I’ve started recording myself when singing a wide variety of songs both in- and out-of-game, and in many cases I’m amazed at the dull flat drowning-cat noises that have won me perfect scores in certain songs.

But WHY is it a challenge to sound good AND score good?  From this point on I have pasted what I posted in the Rock Band forum.

This topic is essentially all about what makes a “good singer”. As intuitive creatures we have a sense of what’s attractive and beautiful (“good singing”) versus what is robotic and off-putting (“monotone singing”).

So, what makes someone a “good singer” as opposed to someone who simply sings the pitches required to get good scores in a karaoke game but somehow manages to sound like a dying cat? 

Here are my thoughts on this, in a somewhat-but-not-completely organized fashion.

I actually don’t think this is a hard problem. Obviously songs consist of logically arranged melodies (and that’s a huge topic, so I won’t get into it). But they also consist of “challenges” to what we expect to happen — twists in the plot, so to speak.

In terms of singing, those challenges come in the form of unexpected tiny delays, choosing thirds instead of fifths for the second time through a melody, using slides to get from one note to the next, and injecting spots of emotion into words that may affect the pitch slightly (even throw it “off”). Some of these things are captured in the Rock Band charting, but if they don’t “come from” the person singing them, they sound just as robotic as any other parts. (Sorry to be so imprecise, but we’re talking Aesthetics here.)

Good singing is pretty much characterized by flaws, because humans are flawed beings, and hearing someone perform “perfectly on-pitch” throughout an entire song feels alien to us. We call that singer robotic and monotone, whereas we call someone like Eddie Vedder an amazing vocalist even though he never sings his songs the same way twice (and arguably he cannot). And why should he? He should challenge our expectations and inject slightly different emotions to stay interesting (which he does) — not recite the melody like a playback machine.

My other main observation is that when you’re singing for the joy of singing and/or to produce something aesthetically pleasing, you are necessarily producing sounds that sound completely different from the vocalizations that occur when you are staring a screen with your thoughts bound up in the effort of getting that little arrow to match with that line. Just an attitudinal thing.
In other words, my opinion is that singing for the purposes of FCing songs in this game produces vocalization that is the antithesis of what our brains want to process as aesthetically pleasing.

Tangentially, I would love to see more original singers of songs in Rock Band playing their songs in the game.

Just to wrap up, clearly it’s possible to sound really good AND appease the game algorithms enough to get 100%. I’m just providing explanations as to why (it seems) these conditions only rarely coincide.

–Naomi

* platinum RB2 vocals
* trained choral singer
* real-life rock band vocalist

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, brain, rock band, singing, theory