sus
Moderator
Just discovered this up and coming artist... Linebaugh helped "turn me" on
I have had many thoughts prompted by this inspiring music... I texted to my friend:
You know I was thinking about contemporary dance music, I know it’s a bit of a meme but I think a couple of those big Labrinth singles are pretty good (Mt Everest/Still Don’t Know My Name). I’ve been really enjoying stuff that’s kind of ritualistic repetitive, trance-like, a single melodic line over and over (e.g. Alice Coltrane’s hari Krishna stuff). And it also manages to pull a kind of clean hype-ecstasy “this is fucking it” vibe of dance music awe that is pretty cool to pull off period
Like I can totally see some kid in 2045 browsing through the archives, comes across Mt Everest and is like, wtf is this shit!!
Kinda like those videos of people hearing Running Up The Hill or In The Air Tonight for the first time
IDK living in the archive (like we all do I think these days) fucks with you because you develop this awareness of long cycles of changing critical opinion, the Pierre Menard effect, the way different lenses and time fuck with your framework, alter works/artists reputations
You’re playing long games. I’ve heard it said Mozart was the first classical composer who realized that he was writing “for the ages”—he’d been around long enough in a culture of preserving sheet music past composers’ deaths, and seen how they lived on and were talked about and imitated and revered, that it radically changed his conception of the game he was playing
There’s also the (as exemplified by eg NFTs) the retroactive time stamp desire—to “have gotten there first” in some publicly recognizable way. Where we live in a media ecology of all these documentaries sucking off whatever unknown 70s folk songwriter who was “unknown” and “overlooked by record labels” and is today beloved and recognized
It’s all wrapped up in that funeral fantasy, imagining people waxing poetic in eulogy of your accomplishments and fine quality of char