rhetoric, writing, and technology

Youtube as Archive

Thanks to Shelley on Facebook I got a glimpse of this. Politics aside, I'm just increasingly enamored of Youtube as a cultural archive. From musical subculture to mainstream politics, it's all out there. I would have missed this gem if it weren't archived. What a boon this is for political rhetoricians who study this stuff. You go Claire.

Posted by: bhawk at 21:17 | link | comments (2)
politics, video, rhetoric, new media

Awards

I haven't posted a lot about my book, but since MLA sent me these pics I decided to post them (not sure what else to do with them). A Counter-History of Composition won JAC's W. Ross Winterowd Award for the best book published on composition theory in 2007 at CCCCs back in March. And this past December it received honorable mention for MLA's Mina Shaughnessy Prize for outstanding research publication in the field of teaching English language in 2008. These pics are of me accepting the award at MLA, courtesy of Dave Bush Photography.

Posted by: bhawk at 18:08 | link | comments (6)
whatever, reviews, announcements, vitalism

JXL

I've been a fan of Junkie XL since 1997's Saturday Teenage Kick. Back then, JXL had a unique approach, kind of half-band half-stage producer. He had a full band but would do the mixing for them right on stage. Since then, he's become much more of an electronica artist and producer/remixer for others.

This is a pretty interesting cut from a Dutch TV show where he is demonstrating doing a remix of Madonna's 4 minutes. I suspect there was much more to it than he lets on in this short segment, but you'd still probably never get something like this on US TV. Long live Youtube.

Posted by: bhawk at 00:35 | link | comments
music, video

Year Long Disaster

Wed night Jan 14th, I went to see Year Long Disaster and The Sword at the Rock Hotel in DC. A friend of mine (old bass player from Our Tragic Hours, current guitar player in Orthodox Fuzz) has seen TS a number of times and tells me they're great live. So when a friend of mine up here in NOVA says he wants to go, I'm ready. And when I find out YLD is playing too, I know at least one of them will be worth the trip into DC.

We get there at the end of the opening band Nihilitia's set and YLD comes on pretty quickly. The overall sound in clean and punchy, the vocals are clear, up front, and display real character. The songs show some craft and they are of course as tight if not tighter than when I saw them play in Fredericksburg a couple of years back (thanks to Underdogma). In short, YLD is a clean, tight band.

So, I'm thinking TS is going to sound killer in this place. The PA sounds great. But the whole vib is different. TS seems to take forever to come on. The place starts filling up and gets jam packed and hot. There are some teenagers in front of me acting like, well teenagers, but I don't want to bail and lose my place. TS finally come on, the kids go nuts. The dual guitar sound is muddy, the vocals are buried in the mix, you can't really hear the guitar solos, and the songs sound like a straightforward mix of Sabbath and Metallica (even more so in this context than on record). TS was heavy and had catchy, memorable riffs but the overall impression I get is that TS isn't where they need to be as a band yet, though they'll probably get there after touring with Metallica forever and refining their own sound. In contrast, you can tell YLD has been touring nonstop since I last saw them and has their own niche/sound more worked out (which is somewhere between AC/DC, ZZ Top, The Kinks, and Jet with a dash of Killers and a hint of Queens of the Stone Age--you just have to trust me that they've managed to take a traditional blues style and make it contemporary).

It wasn't that TS was terrible--I'd go see them again and I'll keep them in my iPod rotation. But up against YLD all of their shortcomings seemed to stand out. From what I hear there has been a lot of backlash in Austin about TS and I figured it was just sour grapes. But these guys really are pretty young as a band. I think this is their *first* band and they've only been around a couple of years. Up against the drummer from Third Eye Blind, the bass player from Karma to Burn, and the son of Dave Davies of the Kinks (see bio), TS just seemed like an unseasoned band. The guys in Orthodox Fuzz had almost the opposite review of a TS/YLD show in TX on their myspace blog, so maybe I'm just out of touch. But on this night YLD was the better live experience. They may not be writing Pharrell Williams pop songs, but I've just come to value a certain amount of execusion in a live act as I get older and more cynical. So kudos to YLD.

Posted by: bhawk at 13:14 | link | comments
music, video, texas, f-burg

(Dark Bodies)

One of my favorite songs from one of my favorite albums from one of my favorite bands. No real reason other than that to post it. Sound is pretty decent for a live video too.

Posted by: bhawk at 18:28 | link | comments (1)
music, video

Philosophy and Pop Music

I'm reading the page proofs of Radiohead and Philosophy, preparing to write a book blurb for the jacket. And I came across a riff that is so clear and obvious but so rarely articulated that I had to post it. I think writing, often times, functions exactly like Mark Greif, in his essay "Radiohead, or the Philosophy of Pop," argues that pop functions: it brings to the surface and solidifies something you already know but hadn't necessarily articulated and held on to. That's what this riff does for me. I hope Mark and Open Court don't mind an extended quote:

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The more I try to categorize why Radiohead’s music works as it does, and by extension how pop works, the more it seems clear that the effect of pop on our beliefs and actions is not really to create either one. Pop does, though, I think, allow you to retain certain things you’ve already thought, without your necessarily having been able to articulate them, and to preserve certain feelings you have only intermittent access to, in a different form, music with lyrics, in which the cognitive and emotional are less divided. I think songs allow you to steel yourself or loosen yourself into certain kinds of actions, though they don’t start anything. And the particular songs and bands you like dictate the beliefs you can preserve and reactivate, and the actions you can prepare—and which songs and careers will shape your inchoate private experience, depends on an alchemy of your experience and the art itself. Pop is neither a mirror nor a Rorschach blot, into which you look and see only yourself; nor is it a lecture, an interpretable poem, or an act of simply determinate speech. It teaches something, but only by stimulating and preserving things that you must have had inaugurated elsewhere. Or it prepares the ground for these discoveries elsewhere—often knowledge you might never otherwise have really “known,” except as it could be rehearsed by you, then repeatedly reactivated for you, in this medium.

But is the knowledge that’s preserved a spur to revolution? There is no logical sense in which pop music is revolutionary. That follows from the conclusion that pop does not start beliefs or instill principles or create action ex nihilo. It couldn’t overturn an order. When so much pop declares itself to be revolutionary, however, I think it correctly points to something else that is significant but more limited and complicated. There is indeed an antisocial or countercultural tendency of pop that does follow logically from what it does. That is to say, there is a characteristic affect that follows from a medium that allows you to retain and reactivate forms of knowledge and experience which you are “supposed to” forget or which are “supposed to” disappear by themselves—and “supposed to” here isn’t nefarious, it simply means that social forms, convention, conformity, and just plain intelligent speech don’t allow you to speak of these things, or make them embarrassing when you do. Pop encourages you to hold on to and reactivate hints of personal feeling that society should have extinguished.

Posted by: bhawk at 21:17 | link | comments (1)
music, quotes